Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityIntroductionDonald Trump’s rise to power within the Republican party set off an explosion of reactionary extremism within the right-wing ecosystem, but it’s important to realize that Trump did not create the present-day authoritarianism that dominates Republican politics, he only encouraged it and empowered it.As president, Trump welcomed in some of the most extreme Republican members of congress, including former representatives Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows, both of whom went from throwing bombs as members of the so-called Freedom Caucus to setting policy for the entire government as White House chiefs of staff.Trump’s ascent to the top of Republican politics also discombobulated the lavish world of right-wing media, which went from calling him a traitorous liberal before he became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 to slavishly defending his every action and policy. The ascent of Trump also supercharged the reactionary media environment by bringing in new figures like Joe Rogan or Clay Travis with more pop-culture brand identities and much larger audiences. Trump’s willingness to elevate and fraternize with extremists also elevated figures like Alex Jones into the heights of Republican influence.Terry Krepel, the guest in today’s episode, had a front-row seat to all of this as the founder and editor of ConWebWatch. He’s been running his site since 2000, reporting on all the major developments in right-wing media, including several publications I once worked with during my former time as a conservative activist.The video version of our December 12, 2023 conversation is available. The audio transcript is available for paid subscribers.Related EpisodesJulie Millican and Olivia Little of Media Matters on how right-wing media are integrating Christian religious conspiracy beliefs into political contentSlate writer Molly Olmstead on how Catholic television channel has refashioned itself into a Fox News mini-meHistorian Nicole Hemmer on how right-wing media holds the Republican electorate together(Cover image: President Donald J. Trump participates in a town hall interview taping with Sean Hannity of Fox News Thursday, June 25, 2020, at Green Bay-Austin Struble International Airport in Green Bay, Wis. Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)Audio Chapters0:00 — Introduction09:32 — Donald Trump’s emergence incentivized right-wing media to become more extreme18:25 — Why right-wing media outlets went from despising Trump to slavishly defending him34:37 — Conspiracy theories have always circulated in right-wing media but now they completely permeate it40:57 — Racist conspiracy theories about immigration went from a fringe belief to common Republican viewpoint in less than 5 years44:50 — The line between delusion and deception seems to be incredibly blurry for many reactionary activists55:31 — How Newsmax went from a conspiracy newsletter to Fox News Channel’s top rival58:08 — How WorldNetDaily founder’s daughter morphed into a prominent anti-Trump Republican01:07:36 — Newer right-wing media figures like Joe Rogan have enormous audiences, but left-wing elites haven’t realized the changeMembership BenefitsIn order to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the audio transcript for this episode is available to paid subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube. About the ShowTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChange Matthew Sheffield on Social MediaMastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldTwitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffieldBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/matthew.flux.communityThreads: https://www.threads.net/@realmattsheffield  

IntroductionAs the American right has become dangerously radicalized, there is a small number of people who insist that Democrats are the real extremists. These arguments are absurd on their face given that disgraced ex-president Donald Trump openly talks about “suspending the Constitution” and becoming a dictator three years after an armed mob of his supporters tried for the first time in American history to stop the peaceful transition of presidential power. But it isn’t just 90-year-old Fox addicts who are saying things like this. There are also more than a few self-described progressive commentators who claim this as well, people like Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, or Matt Taibbi. These fake leftists who never criticize Republicans are unserious people who refuse to debate the things they claim to believe with serious progressive commentators. One thing they are, however, is rich. There’s a lot of money to be made telling right-wingers that they are the real liberals, and claiming reactionary policies are actually pro-worker.Were these people even on the left to begin with? Is there any truth to “horsehoe theory,” the idea that far-right and far-left ideologies converge? Is it possible or even desirable to find common ground with people who have extreme religious viewpoints but who are somewhat skeptical of capitalism?These are questions worth asking and they are explored at length in a report co-written by my guest in this episode, Kathryn Joyce. She is the investigations editor at In These Times and also the author of “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.”Scroll down to view the audio transcript of this episode. The video of the conversation is available as well. It was recorded December 21, 2023.Related Episodes* ‘Fan fiction leftism’ and how the right manipulates the left* Libertarianism, neoliberalism and the ‘Californian Ideology’* As libertarianism has radicalized, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names are turning toward fascism(Cover image: Former U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard speaking with attendees at the AmericaFest conference sponsored by the Christian nationalist group Turning Point USA. December 18, 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore)Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction03:11 — Compact Magazine and right-wing market skepticism07:32 — Catholic Integralism, another form of Christian nationalism10:41 — The political spectrum isn't just about left and right12:14 — Why Compact's token leftist joined and then quit19:12 — Why “finding common ground” with right-wing elites is almost impossible28:28 — The impact of conversion stories in politics34:33 — Left-of-center people patronize the right instead of making them confront their own ideas41:19 — How the covid pandemic caused some libertarians embrace their right-wing views47:05 — Final thoughtsTranscriptThe transcript of the audio is below. It is automatically generated and is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Kathryn Joyce. Welcome to Theory of Change, Kathryn.KATHRYN JOYCE: Thank you so much for having me, Matthew.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So this article that you and Jeff Sharlet published over in In These Times, it's a very important one. And it's important because as the Republican party has become so much more radical, a lot of people who are kind of not really paying attention, and are vaguely apolitical or vaguely centrist have been sort of drifting over to the right, not really understanding that they have been doing that. It's an interesting thing [00:03:00] that does seem to kind of happen in kind of politically uncertain times that not just right now, but we've seen this in other moments where there's been some sort of cross pollination between the sides.But I want to start off with the you guys talked about a publication that was started called Compact. For people who don't know about Compact, what is it and how did it get started? Who's running it?JOYCE: Sure. Sure. So Compact Magazine, it's one of a number of publications that I think generally group themselves under the heading of heterodox or kind of pushing for what they would call a Republican realignment or a political realignment. These are publications, Compact is probably the most prominent of them, that are making the argument that both Republicans and Democrats have failed, some new sort of fusion is needed. And in particular drawing together somewhat more [00:04:00] liberal economic policies, somewhat more concern for the working class with substantially conservative social policies I've been reporting on.Some of the people in these orbits for the last couple of years some of them have been associated with right wing movements like National Conservatism or the Catholic Integralist movement, and they're coming from a place of critiquing liberalism, not as in progressivism, but classical liberalism, the political philosophy that united both the Republican and Democratic parties generally for the past many decades, with a shared emphasis on free markets, pluralism, generally support for individual rights, and making a critique that liberalism has failed people on all of these different levels that it has immiserated the middle class and the working class. And also that on the [00:05:00] social side having social free expression, social liberalism, and individual rights has really undercut the traditions that hold up society, and so that this should be abandoned, something new should come in its place.And so these magazines or these publications, online only mostly, I should say, they are part of this larger project to, you to sort of peel people away from the left with this promise of softer forms of capitalism. Not as kind of hard, libertarian laissez faire. 'We're just not going to talk about the social issues.' That's sort of the compromise they offer is, if we focus on the material issues, maybe all of these social issues can kind of go to the wayside.But that's really frankly, disingenuous the people at the helm of this publication and these movements are, are very far right socially they have made their names [00:06:00] calling--SHEFFIELD: Or like specifically, can you talk about,JOYCE: Sohrab Amari is one of the founding editors of Compact and he is, he's himself somebody who's kind of been politically all over the map, but he really became a national figure in 2019 when he wrote this absolute broadside against this conservative writer and lawyer, David French saying that, David French was basically a sellout to the conservative cause because he defended the existence of things like drag queen story hour on the grounds of free expression and Sohrab Amari wrote this piece called "Against David Frenchism" that went wildly viral and it became this kind of rallying cry for the new, new right. The people who are really kind of rejecting this, this idea of classical liberalism and looking for new ways to formulate their politics. By saying we have to prosecute the culture wars with the idea of winning and enjoying the [00:07:00] spoils. And it's, it's this movement that believes in, transforming government power to be used to enforce their own culture war positions.So for them to now kind of turn around and argue for this political realignment, and can we just put all the social issues to the side it really kind of, It's, it's disingenuous.SHEFFIELD: It's a subterfuge, yeah.JOYCE: It's, it's ignoring the fact that they have that platform for having made that argument.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it's also, yeah, and just as a historical matter, it's important, I think, for Americans, who are used to kind of this more market fundamentalist dominated right to understand that, outside of the United States, this type of, of conservatism and reactionism is very common, and nobody has any illusions that it's on the left or is centrist of any kind.But can you talk about the idea, and, and, and certainly [00:08:00] Sohrab Amari is an example of this, this, this idea of integralism. What is that for people who don't know what that is?JOYCE: Sure. Yeah. Integralism is well, it's a very small movement it's a Catholic right movement that, that basically believes that society should be reordered along the lines of the doctrine of the Catholic Church or the conservative interpretation of Catholic Church doctrines.And it, it, it matches up with a lot of what we were just talking about. I mean, it would include policies that are, somewhat. more, friendly to the middle class or, or the working class than current Republican parties. It certainly would be following kind of all of the social positions conservatively interpreted of, of the Catholic church.It, it. It started in, in a way as, or it's gained kind of a lot of [00:09:00] prominence through the writing of a Harvard law professor named Adrian Vermeule, who has made an argument that, The conservative legal movement should, should go beyond originalism which is kind of famous, the, the, the, the philosophy of a lot of most conservative members of the Supreme Court now and they should move towards an idea of, the law being reordered.Toward the common good or they would say sometimes the highest good and so it's it's this argument basically for a Catholic version of theocracy It is again a very small movement, you know overwhelmingly most Catholics in the United States, if they've even heard of it would almost certainly be opposed to it.But it's, it's nonetheless been very influential because a lot of the people talking about these ideas are professors from prominent [00:10:00] universities Harvard or Notre Dame.SHEFFIELD: And they're lavishly funded.JOYCE: Lavishly funded as well, well-represented in Christian right and Catholic right media. First Things magazine is a very right wing, I guess pan-Christian magazine but very Catholic in orientation.And, it has been making and advancing some of these arguments and the people who are reading it are pretty influential people. So it's, it's sort of got this outsized footprint.SHEFFIELD: And the other thing about this idea of a market-skeptical religious right wing viewpoint, it's unfamiliar to a lot of Americans and but it's still very real.And I want to put up on the screen a chart that, that I made a little while ago that kind of talks about that politics shouldn't, in my view, be thought of as a left and right thing. It should be thought of as a X and Y graph kind of thing. And one of the things to notice when you do that is that [00:11:00] ideologies overlap pretty significantly.If we think of politics as a matter of epistemology, that we have believing that everything you think is pure reason, that's Marxism by its own self description. And then all tradition, of course, being the furthest right viewpoint as well.And of course, whether they're correct in any of that is their opinion, not ours, we don't have to get into that. But then also in terms of who do you trust, and whether you should trust society, or institutions, or you should trust the individual. Then the thing about a religious market skeptic viewpoint is that if you look in the, in the middle of the chart and for those who are listening, you'll definitely have to click the link for the chart to see this, so sorry about that. But in the, in the middle of the chart, we have religious democracy, which can be kind of a centrist philosophy in many ways, and certainly is outside of the United States. And it exists that way for many, Christian [00:12:00] Americans as well, but it also has some significant overlaps with conservatism, with libertarianism and some with reactionism and fascism.And that I think is the real concern about this viewpoint and you talked about how with Compact, they did initially manage to recruit somebody who had a more left wing background and they've paid, paid off a bunch of socialist writers to write content for them. But that at what the editor that was a co founding editor, he's left the publication.Can you talk about him and why why he did that?JOYCE: Yeah. Yeah. That was really interesting. This was a guy named Edwin Aponte, who described himself as a Marxist or a labor Marxist, and he had joined Compact pretty early on, when it was, first in its kind of idea stage in early 2022, I guess it is.[00:13:00] And, just a few months in roadblocks started to appear. He described that he had joined it because, he was very disillusioned after the, the loss of Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. He began feeling he was a member of this kind of very small group of people called the post left who believed, there is no left anymore. The left has failed.And in order to achieve, some of our goals in, in terms of materialist politics we might want to make some different sorts of alliances. And so they were open to working with people on the right who were expressing the same sort of economic policies. And this was kind of the other side of that proposed realignment.I think, if there's one hand reaching out from the right, these were some of the people they were reaching out to people who were disillusioned, maybe even a stronger word for, for some [00:14:00] of them in, in despair about kind of the, the prospects of what they believed in ever coming to pass.And they, they responded to these sorts of overtures. In Aponte's case, he ended up joining Compact as it was launching. In his telling of the story, there was an agreement that they weren't really going to be relitigating settled issues like abortion. That this was not going to be a publication where that was going to play a huge role. I ended up speaking to Compaq's other co founders while I was reporting on this this year and last year and, they had a different interpretation of that. They said, we never said we weren't going to talk about social issues, but that we would talk about them through this material lens.But this, things really kind of came to a head when the early draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked in in the spring of 2022, and Compact published a piece that Aponte felt was triumphalist in his [00:15:00] words that wasn't anymore talking about, What are we going to do about abortion?Because now they thought, okay, this is settled. What do we do next? And the answer in that piece that was published in Compact was we should look to Hungary. I, which I was thinking of looking at your graph just now in terms of. Religious democracy. I like that, in, in those various Venn diagrams, you can see that overlapping with all of these different sorts of tendencies.But I think when we are talking about Hungary we're definitely seeing the strong overlap with conservatism and, I think a lot of people would argue strongly there in terms of reaction and, fascism or on the way to that anyway. So Aponte told me that he started to have this realization after, after that Dobbs leak and after the piece that Compact published, thinking that, we're coming at this from from really different directions. We might all sincerely [00:16:00] have a desire to have better economic policies that are more supportive of of working people that are less kind of rah rah rapacious capitalism, but that they were coming at it from really different motivations.And what he came to believe was that his fellow editors at Compact were coming at it from a position where they saw this sort of as a means to an ends.That they saw ultimately this is going to inform the sort of moral governance system, moral kind of order in the country that they wanted to create, and that that was the primary goal. Everything else was really secondary or was a part of getting there.And so he realized this is a really the the strongly different position to be coming at this from, to be aiming at these shared economic objectives [00:17:00] from.And it really does matter. Those social issues can't just be put entirely to the side. They can't really be put to the side at all, because if, you're talking about better economic policies so that they can support the formation of more traditional families and the enforcement of that as the moral order of a society. That, that's suddenly not secondary at all. And, and, they ended up parting ways within a couple of months.SHEFFIELD: And one of the other, just to go back to the chart again, and I'm sorry to keep doing that, but one of the other aspects to understand with the, with the chart idea is that that everything wraps around as well.And that's, I think. What Compact kind of is an example of that. With a sort of traditional Marxist viewpoint, everything is about economics. Everything is reduced to that. And so, the idea being that if you have somebody, if you see [00:18:00] somebody who is anti capitalist, for somebody who has a more traditional Marxist viewpoint, that's going to be a very attractive to them on a certain level.And in this piece that you wrote, it's not just about Compact. So I want to make that clear for people. But that seems to be the motivation that of, of a lot of the people that you talk about, that they kind of believe that there is a, that they can somehow collaborate with these far right people because they're anti capitalist, not understanding that injustice is like the, the elephant in the Indian fable of, that it has many different parts of it and that if you only can see one part of it, then you're not, you're not understanding the totality of the situation.And that does seem like that's what what the lesson that he ended up learning, Aponte.JOYCE: Yeah, I, I think that's, that, that's, that's a, a very accurate [00:19:00] summary. He said, for them, these material politics were just a means to an end, not the end in itself, and the end that they have in mind was not something that he thought was just or good.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. So there is something there that's legitimate, I think, in the desire to, because a lot of, and this is a pretty common thing that progressives have talked about and written about for many years that a lot of Republican voters do not share the economic policy agenda of welfare for billionaires, basically that the Republican Party that's their primary objective. So there's a lot of frustration on the left of saying, well, how can we save these people from being taken advantage of, or supporting ideas that are harmful to them.I think that's, that's also where some of this originates, but the reality that I think a lot of people have to understand is that [00:20:00] the leaders of the right wing, you will never come out in a beneficial manner by working with them. You can save individuals, but you cannot save the right, because they're not in it for the same thing that you are, despite having some occasional agreements. What's your take?JOYCE: Yeah, I, I think that's true. I mean, and I think, what we're talking about with Compact and Aponte is, it's, It's one, one entry point of, of a larger phenomenon. I, I don't think it is just one thing happening. But for the people from, the so called post left who ended up making these alliances whether because, they really felt that they were going to have an effective partner to achieve, the, the sort of, economic policy advocacy that they wanted or, or for other reasons some of them both in the post left or, or kind [00:21:00] of from, from other political factions drawn there because they were frustrated about what, so called identity politics or so called cancel culture sorry to keep saying so, so called, but I mean, they, these are politics, such manipulative phrases that I kind of just want to highlight that.But I think for the people who were drawn there for, quasi idealistic reasons yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a really hard lesson to learn that. In a lot of cases, you've, gotten in bed with some people who are coming at things from an extremely different perspective and also that are, are open to or allied with in very real ways, people who are pushing some really scary politics.The, the same broad new right that the conservative co founders of Compact are from is, also the place where Peter Thiel has [00:22:00] been kind of dumping all of his money to prop up very far right candidates like Blake Masters who wasn't successful, or Julie Vance who was successful.They have been in the same universe, even as they sometimes bicker and fight with the people in the national conservatism movement, which is doing its very best to rehabilitate the term nationalism, I think they've been pretty successful at that within conservative circles by now, to the point actually where, what I started hearing at NatCon conferences last year that we as conservatives should just reclaim the, the title Christian Nationalism with pride.I think that is now more or less a mainstream Republican position. These aren't people who are eschewing the culture war. These aren't people who are putting social issues to one side. They're coming down, very hard on one side of them. And they are kind of as, as a separate side project, [00:23:00] they are making this outreach to disaffected people on the left for a variety of reasons.I mean, I think including that the presence of people on the left gives them the ability to, to claim that they are a different sort of thing, that they are a new thing, that, this is as they like to say the transformation of the Republican party into the new party of the multiracial working class.No matter how little that has to do with reality, I think the presence of leftists helps them make that claim.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And this is something that historically the right has always sought to do. And then it's important to note also that, reactionism and fascism there, they are very closely related, but they're not necessarily the same.And I think maybe some of the difficulty that people have had in using fascism as a word is that they don't know that they think of it as just, uniquely something affiliated with Mussolini or Hitler [00:24:00] and, and don't understand that. And that's why actually I, I generally encourage people to use the word reactionism rather than fascism because the F word gets stuck in people's head too much. And they don't understand that this is a tradition that's much, much older than Nazism or Italian fascism.But the thing is though, reactionism as an idea set, it doesn't really have policies. It's about will to power rather than anything else, that's what it is primarily. And I think that that fact can be confusing to, to leftists who don't understand the history of reactionism and fascism. What do you think?JOYCE: Yeah, I, I think that's all true. Yeah, I, I use the F word these days myself. Um, I, I recognize that there's a long debate that, you know. It goes well beyond me [00:25:00] about when it's appropriate to use that. And that a lot of smart people have come down on different sides. Um, you know, just not to say that everybody I'm talking about certainly I would refer to as a fascist, but rather that I do think that we are seeing strong elements of that today. I think it certainly applies to a number of the political candidates and the movements behind them. Today on the right.And also, I just think it's important to point out that we are seeing this slide in, in so many different ways. Jeff and I wrote this article about the slide of individual people towards the right and then often towards the far right. But I think just also on a societal level, we are sliding, it feels like daily sometimes, towards the normalization of a lot of things that are, are really very frightening. So I, I use the word, but I, I respect where you're coming from. And I think--SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, well, I'm only saying in a limited, [00:26:00] in a limited context, there, there's some contexts where I think it's, it's definitely okay to use the word fascism. But just to describe the larger historical phenomenon, that's what I'm saying is different. But let's talk about some of these other people that you guys wrote about.So, I think, one of the other problems, and this is a real huge problem in the American left is that I think a lot of the, both the audience and the leaders, they're very rightfully worried about being propagandized and sort of a mob mentality the way that, I mean, you could, you turn on Fox News and all the shows say the same thing, have the exact same line on the same story of the day.And that's how it is on Newsmax. They're all talking about the same thing and they're all saying the same thing. And that's how it is on these innumerable channels that exist now on the right. And, but then when you look, there are no competitors to MSNBC that have [00:27:00] been launched recently, not one.And so it's created this political economy where a lot of people who are journalists who would like to make a living as a political commentator or pundit on the left, they can't because no one wants to pay for it. The audience doesn't want to pay, and the founders and the funders don't want to pay.And so some of them seem to have gravitated over to the right just as a matter of maybe not even deliberately financial calculation, but they saw that there is so much more money and support on the right. And let's talk about that. I mean, the, some of the people that you guys looked at that have seen seemingly had some of those concerns.JOYCE: Yeah, I mean, preface this by saying nobody knows what is in anybody's hearts, nobody knows the truth of anybody's specific motivations. And I certainly think that there aren't many people who would acknowledge [00:28:00] I, I moved right. Because I could just get a much bigger paycheck there.We, we do talk about that in general terms. As we note in the piece there, there is money to be made in saying I was blind, but now I see, I see how terrible the left is. And, and let me tell you that. And I think there's always, this isn't even really that new of a phenomenon, I think everybody loves a conversion story.I, I know, as somebody who's been reporting on the right for a long time pretty much every movement that, that I've ever reported on had people who liked to hype up what they presented as their former left or liberal or democratic or feminist credentials in order to explain how they had the inside story on how bad they are over there and what they made them leave and how right everybody, all of their new friends on the right are.So I think that [00:29:00] that is that that's just kind of an old media story and an old, probably human story is, is that we, we gravitate towards converts who promise to give us an inside look into the other side. What we talk about in the piece is that, yeah, I think it is undeniable that there is for some people that kind of element of what people call grift or I think Ryan Cooper is who I heard in a report that he did about Matt Taibbi talking about the term like hop on the wingnut welfare train that there is money to be made by, by going over to the other side.Our position was there's, there is likely always some of that, but it's not just that it's, it's that, yes, that, and also something else, because even if it starts out that way, by making this transformation something transforms within you as well, it might be transactional at first, but it ends [00:30:00] up being transformative.SHEFFIELD: So you mentioned Matt Taibbi and there's something that is interesting with a lot of People that, that you, you guys talk about in your article that is different from people like me who, went from right to left people like me, we actually said that we changed our ideas and we have different ideas. And we realized the left was correct. Whereas people like Matt Taibbi and, let's say, Tulsi Gabbard or, any of these other people that you guys discuss, they actually still insist that they're on the left and that their ideas have not changed and I, and I think that that's, it's an important distinction in that, I sometimes gets lost in, in talking about these people.And, it's, oh, go ahead.JOYCE: Oh, no, please.SHEFFIELD: Okay, yeah, and I was going to say that, it's, When you look at the way that both left and right are kind of viewed in a generic sense, that the left is viewed [00:31:00] as kind of having a broadly speaking, having more moral authority, and then the right is viewed as having more sort of that you should feel sorry for them in some sense, that you should understand them. And it's given rise to this dynamic that of what I call right privilege that while people might agree that left wingers are more compassionate or whatever, no one really tries to understand that position, and understand, well, where are these viewpoints coming from in the mass media, mainstream press.Whereas on the right, you constantly see this right privilege which is, it's, it kind of flows that the further right you are, the more we should try to understand you, and the more we should allow you to say your viewpoints and not really question them and not really debate them because there's this subtle implication that you can't.And I think it's true that they can't. And, but people who have more of a, center [00:32:00] to left, center left perspective, they don't understand that that's, you really need to, to, to make them do that. And, and, and so as a result, we've got this media ecosystem now where, you turn on CNN or any of these Sunday morning shows and they will have, or, read the New York times opinion page and they've got these people who they are presented as sort of speaking for conservatives.But they have no credibility in the right wing world. Everyone in the right hates them, as a matter of fact. But, but there's just this, total affirmative action for them. That people with no constituency are just allowed to, to talk about things as if their views represent anyone. And they don't.JOYCE: That's, yeah, that's really interesting, I feel. Like that. I have so many thoughts in response to that. But first I, I just, I really appreciate your anecdote and your perspective about, your own kind of [00:33:00] political transformation moving left. Because I've spoken, in my reporting over the years to a lot of particularly young people, but not only young adults who have left evangelical or fundamentalist Christian upbringings and overwhelmingly have moved left.I mean, for many of them, the only direction to move would have been left for the most part. But you know, many of them moved really substantially to the left. And yeah, I, I. I think that I could safely say that that seems like their experiences, as they described it to me, is similar to what you were saying, that they changed their ideas that, that they had a realization.It wasn't like, oh, the right left me. It wasn't, it wasn't kind of the inverse of what we're seeing today in terms of, of people on the left who have moved right in terms of the wonderful way to put it, the affirmative action for, for right wing [00:34:00] people in, in the mainstream press. Yeah, I think I, I agree with what you're saying.I, I also I feel like. It, it comes and I guess this is kind of what you were saying as well, or at least how I heard it, it comes from a place of, lack of familiarity and ultimately I, I think lack of respect that kind of disguises itself as, this over solicitousness.Of the right wing viewpoint.SHEFFIELD: It's like a patronizing respect is what it is.JOYCE: It is, yeah. It's it's kind of not Not grappling with the ideas on their face. It is looking for The same sort of stock characters In diners all over the heartland. to say something folksy. It's It's kind of not giving [00:35:00] people the, the respect to, to hold them accountable for the movements that they are supporting and, holding them accountable for the, the sort of order that would result from, the election of their candidates or kind of the realization of the movement that they are pushing for.And I, I tend to think that a lot of times with the really mainstream media, it comes from a place of being so unfamiliar and so removed from, people with these viewpoints. That, yeah, I guess that patronizing approach feels respectful. I actually think it's, it's the opposite of it. I think it's more respectful to kind of take people and their arguments and, and grapple with them sincerely, even if that means being extremely critical.Because yeah, there's serious movementsSHEFFIELD: there. Yeah. And as a result, yeah. And as a result of this kind [00:36:00] of patronizing disengagement, there are the, the average Republican voter really doesn't even know what their party stands for and what their leaders want. And so, they, they think that.Donald Trump, his policies are better for the middle class or, and, or they think that he helped them out with tax cuts or, like, and, and they, and they, and they really have no idea because nobody actually is going out there and telling them, no, this is how it really is. And your people have lied to you.And, and some of that, a large part of that is the fault of Democrats, I feel like. Because, there was this after the Barry Goldwater people came in and took over the Republican party and turned it from being a conservative party to a reactionary party a lot of people left the Republican party, particularly in the the Eastern seaboard, the Acela corridor, as it's sometimes referred to, and they kind of, you know, and they were welcomed into the Democratic party.[00:37:00]As sort of refugees in a sense and, but they never were required to change any of their viewpoints. Or to even consider them. And, and, and we're seeing that I think to some degree with, some of the people who have come, who were kind of thrown out of the Republican party under Trump, some of these political consultants and writers that they come over and, and they, and they basically, and.I mean, it's a bit odd for me to be talking about this, I suppose, given my own movement, but it's maybe I can say that I can see it because, I made this movement, now the Democratic Party is filled with people who are saying, Oh, be careful, don't go too far to the left. Be careful. Don't.And the people who are saying that are Republicans. So it's like, it's just this very weird situation and nothing like that exists over, with these. Migrants from left to right, the, the Taibes of the world. And the uh, [00:38:00] uh, the various, other people like sorry, I just forgot her name.Oh, Naomi Wolf and, various people like Max Blumenthal. They don't, they don't tell the Republicans who are their new friends. You guys should be careful about going too far to the right. They never say that to them. And again, it's just this whole right privilege that no one ever really takes, the Republicans are assumed not to have any agency.That they're assumed to have this, deranged base that's crazy and full of, lunatic Christian supremacists and they just have to manage them and, I'm sorry. That's they, they just, that's just the way it is. We can't do anything about it. And so as a result, there's no center right media.And no one ever stands up for themselves on the right or at the center right. And, and then, the, the So called liberal media is filled with people like Atlantic magazine editors or New York times op ed editors who, are [00:39:00] conservative, but they don't have a dialogue with the Republican party.And they're not engaging with them in any way. And so as a result, the Republican party just becomes more and more right wing. And then, also is having some gravitational effect to, sort of get people to flip over from the far left as well. That's a lot. I'm sorry.JOYCE: No it's, it's all really interesting.I mean, you know, all of this of course follows decades of kind of just the increasingly constricted. News ecosystem that so much of the Republican base finds itself in where while maybe Fox for some of them is becoming, the liberal fake news media, but, where something like Fox or Newsmax or one American news or epoch times, like become the only sources of information they get.And, that. Going back decades there has been this simultaneous message [00:40:00] alongside all of the, propaganda or disinformation that is frequently appearing on those channels or outlets along with that is this message that you can't trust anything you hear that's not from us, everything outside, as Rush Limbaugh said, is a universe of lies and we're the universe of truth.So basically don't look outside, don't get any information from outside. It's, it's really, it's really hard to deal with the fact that there is such an effectively propagandized population in this country that is a third of the country almost, that is really getting their news from a place that is so radically divorced from the rest of the news media ecosystem and if the alternative to that, I mean, in, in the kind of the, the regular media ecosystem, if you have places like the Atlantic that are functioning as [00:41:00] conservative media, but are still perceived as liberal media not just by the right, but often also from people, kind of within the center broadly, that's really, it's kind of a confounding problem. I think, yeah, there's a lot of good points there.SHEFFIELD: We've talked about the idea of the American right, sort of the, the leadership class being heavily libertarian or, or market oriented, but at the same time, one of the other things that a lot of these people that we're talking about here, they have themselves also a libertarian bent. Many of them in the case of like Glenn Greenwald, he worked for the Cato Institute earlier in his career and some of them, became kind of outraged at institutions and the government during the COVID pandemic from a, a libertarian kind of framework. And I'm going to put it, this is the last time I'm going to put the chart on, guys but libertarianism, if you look [00:42:00] in the chart here, it's underneath, but it has a lot of overlap. And there is some, there is some framework under which you can be a libertarian and be on the left in some sense.And, but the problem is of course, libertarianism can also be connected to many other things, including reactionism and fascism and conspiracism, which is the belief that no institutions are telling you the truth, that everything is a lie. And that seems to have also played a role for some of these people that you guys talked about.Do you want to talk about some specific examples here, if you could?JOYCE: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Naomi Wolf certainly seems to fit in that category of conspiracism playing a strong role. And, of course Naomi Klein's recent book, Doppelganger goes into this in, in great depth. It's not a book explicitly about Wolf but is looking at kind of the political transformation of Wolf from being, not really on the left, but being, [00:43:00] just a, a sort of, Steady centrist liberal and, a pop feminist icon who wrote these sort of big ideas books to somebody who is now like Steve Bannon's favorite guest going on all the time, first to talk about COVID and then just increasingly to talk about all kinds of things that Bannon wants her perspective on.But Klein talks a lot about how the, just the explosion of conspiracism around the first couple of years of the COVID 19 pandemic kind of served as this vehicle for a lot of people to, in her words, end up falling down the rabbit hole and a rabbit hole that seems to just go kind of in one direction towards the right.And Klein's book also popularized this, this competing theory To the idea of horseshoe theory, which we haven't talked about, but you know, it's, it is this sort of pop [00:44:00] explanation of what happens that some people who are on the left end up going to the right. And it's, I mean, I remember a middle school social studies teacher kind of first outlining this to to my class as though it was a fact that if you go too far left, you're going to fall off the other side that the political extremes meet when they bend around to touch each other.A lot of people have argued, very convincingly against that as not being a really good explanation for this and this, I, and just to kind of put a nail in that coffin, some of the people that we spoke to said, it's, it's not horseshoe theory because these people, they are not going so far left that they turn right it's often aside from any other cases of kind of resentment or Perhaps grifting or anything like that.It can be just selecting one element of leftist politics and dropping everything else, saying I'm only going to focus on economics [00:45:00] and everything else. Every other kind of justice movement is just extraneous. I'm dropping them. And that is how you end up making common cause with people on the right who are making those same arguments.Anyway, sorry, tangent but diagonalism, which is this sort of counter theory that Naomi Klein popularized in, in her book this past year it's an alternate explanation and it's It came out of observations of some sort of COVID era protests in Germany, actually, where there was this weird kind of eclectic group that was coming together that didn't have, very clearly defined politics except that they, they were conspiratorial.They were suspicious of kind of all institutional power in general. They drew together people who were sort of lifestyle liberals with people who, were kind of hardcore ideologues and, and that again, it just seemed to go in one [00:46:00] direction. seems to go rightward, even though it's it's drawing together people from a lot of different political perspectives, but also people who weren't particularly political to begin with and then pulls them in this one direction.And I, I mean, I think a lot of us saw this in 2020, 2021. I mean, I know I, saw people in New York City that I knew suddenly talking a lot about 5G and COVID or kind of, how they would never get a vaccine because all of the things that might be in it, from microchips to sterilization agents, so that Bill Gates himself can control the population of the world.I just think, this was, you said at the beginning of the show one of those radical moments of change, this period of really intense radical change when a lot of people end up kind of falling into or jumping into these really different ideologies or onto these bandwagons [00:47:00] that are, whether they know it or not, taking them in the direction of, of a really specific ideology.SHEFFIELD: so let's maybe wrap up here with you, you guys. You, you, after talking about all these different people many of them, podcasters that, you get to the end and I have to say, like, I'm not sure what was the takeaway that you wanted people to have from it.Let's talk about that. And like, what is. Because the it comes down to the question, well, what is to be done? Understanding that you guys provided a great, documentation that this thing is happening, but can anything be done about it or should it?JOYCE: Yeah. I mean, I think part of, part of the motivation for writing the piece was In These Times is a. not a liberal magazine but a left magazine and kind of doing this entire issue about the special, the special issue about the far right, the first time that [00:48:00] in these times in its nearly 50 year history has done a special issue about the right. I think the idea was speaking to An audience of really committed people on the left and, and arguing that this is something that you need to take very seriously.Um, so, to that end, part of what we were trying to do with the piece is show where a lot of this stuff leads and some of the people that we spoke to who had kind of made this journey a little bit like Bilbo Baggins says, there and back again and then, went left to post left to dissident right and then kind of came back to just being maybe, maybe on the left, maybe being a squishy Democrat.But their arguments that, this is really dangerous. You end up going down this path, for various reasons including that, the democratic party has really let [00:49:00] you down. That you feel like it's never going to take some of these issues seriously. And then finding themselves in the company of people Who were making, increasingly alarming arguments who were making alliances with, kind of increasingly dangerous movements.One of the sort of scenes that we talked about a little bit in the piece as kind of an IRL in real life scene of Dimes Square in New York City, where, you know, a number of people who, would have once considered themselves on the left or even socialist, ended up joining this movement that within a couple of years went from just being sort of contrarian about, what they would call wokeness or about COVID precautions to talking about eugenics in a positive way to, praising kind of the ideas of white nationalists and ultra reactionaries or [00:50:00] neo reactionaries who believe that, we should have some sort of patriarchal Aryan warrior state or a monarchy, like really extreme ideas.And then watching these people who maybe at first were just dabbling in this and then start to espouse real racism, real misogyny really extreme homophobia lots of other bigotry along the way. And I think, it is their point that people, who dipped their toe in this or went, part way down this path, and then realized they, they felt like they were getting into, some really dark areas of, of the political landscape and retreated from it. I think part of it, our intention was to show that, that as one of our sources said, this is a train that only goes in one direction.And a lot of these people don't have any idea what that map looks like. And it is, people being ironic. about, George Wallace, and you could only do that for so [00:51:00] long before you start thinking these are good ideas. So I think part of our intention was to show that this is happening to show that this is serious, and like, people who once where fellow travelers are not just defecting from a political party, but defecting from kind of an entire shared, view of what is just and kind of what is equality and for.Us to kind of, as, as the left generally, to, to think about that means and, what to do about it. And I don't think we have any silver bullet answers. Um, you know, I think we did want to grapple with it a little more than just saying good riddance. They were never ours they were never really with us but to look at what it means for these people to have left.And what that means for the movement, what that means, kind of, as, everybody [00:52:00] from the left to a lot of places on the center and even some conservatives who are not on board the MAGA train. What does it mean? When we're facing that in 2024 and the really, really explicit plans that are being laid out by the far right for what they would do if, if they win power.So I don't think a really concrete answer trying to raise this as an issue that I think we all need to think about and, and grapple with. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And it should be noted that these people who are making these authoritarian plans for Trump are overwhelmingly the National Conservatives, the very people who are doing this outreach to the further left.JOYCE: Yeah, the new new right, going very far right and at the same time, kind of extending a hand to people on the left, we should be aware. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: [00:53:00] Yeah. And I think, maybe that's at least one takeaway is that for me is that and it's part of why I started this podcast is to get people to understand that political ideologies and political philosophy, it might seem boring and dry, to have to understand, or to think about, Kierkegaard or Kant or, Nietzsche or whatever.But this stuff matters, even if you can't see that it matters. Ideas matter, and they influence you whether you realize it or not. And I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, I believe it was him who said that most people are animated by the ideas of some dead economist or philosopher and don't even realize it.And so that's why it's important to know about them and important to know how they permeate the world that we live in and our political system. So, yeah. Oh, okay. I was gonna waiting to see if [00:54:00] you had any response to that orJOYCE: No, I, I think that that is, that's, that's very true. I think, um.There's, there's a lot of intentionality behind, these efforts to make this, this outreach. Behind the sort of organizations and outlets that are presenting themselves as, as heterodox as some new political formulation. And, they are part of this broader new right that is doing really alarming things.And people, I think a lot of times aren't aware of it. I think for some people there's like a little bit of a contrarian cachet to dabbling in this stuff. But maybe. They don't know everything else that's behind it or they don't understand kind of what it would mean to to get, to get in bed with this, this movement and all of the people who are associated with it.Yeah. [00:55:00]SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, yeah, it's been a great discussion. So people who want to keep up with your work. What's the your recommendations for them?JOYCE: Well, I'm an investigative editor at In These Times, so I'm editing there and sometimes writing there. I am a disappointing Twitter follow, but you can follow me there at kathrynajoyce. And I'm on Bluesky as well.SHEFFIELD: Okay, cool. All right. Well, we'll have links to those in the show notes for everyone who wants to do that. And I'm glad you were able to join us today.Thanks for being here.JOYCE: Thank you so much for having me. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe 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

IntroductionThe 2024 presidential election continues to be perilously close between Donald Trump, the fascist ex-president who's been found guilty of numerous crimes and is indicted for many other ones, and Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential incumbent. But the close race that is happening right now is actually a function of a much larger problem that has existed for many years in which neither party has been able to gain the advantage over the other one. While Democrats are closer to the political views of most Americans, the party has been dominated by centrist and conservative leaders who are unwilling to elevate labor unions and focus their attacks on Republicans' far-right ideology. Instead of educating voters about the extreme policy agenda of Republicans as a whole, they have focused their attacks on Donald Trump, a fundamentally weak candidate. They have also failed to advance an alternative to the powerful religious-racial identity politics that reactionary leaders have crafted.For this discussion, we're joined by Mike Podhorzer. He is the former political director for the AFL-CIO union, and he's also the author of a newsletter called Weekend Reading, which we'll discuss later. Scroll down to view the transcript of this episode. The video of the conversation is available as well.Audio Chapters0:00 — How Trump's weaknesses as a candidate masked Democratic weakness08:56 — America's political divisions are primarily geographic more than income or education16:03 — The influence of white Christian nationalism on the Republican Party20:22 — The declining role of labor in the Democratic Party30:48 — Neoliberalism broke "linked fate," the left's biggest advantage36:13 — How Republicans tapped white Christian identity to win elections45:04 — The challenges of creating left-wing media are about both funding and audience habits53:37 — “Mad poll disease” and how to get over it01:00:59 — Right-wing media and a “vibes recession”01:05:16 — What can Biden and Democrats do?TranscriptThe transcript of the audio is below. It is automatically generated and is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here, Mike.MIKE PODHORZER: Sure, glad to be here.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, before we get too far into discussing some of your work with Weekend Reading, let's maybe talk about briefly what it is for those who have not seen it yet.PODHORZER: Sure. So the idea of it really started in the wake of Donald Trump's victory as a way for those of us who are, were political practitioners to try to understand what had happened and [00:02:00] how to prevent how to make sure that he lost in 2020.And over the course of several years, it grew among the sort of the political practitioners. And when I retired from the AFL-CIO at the end of last year, I decided to make it available to all and what I try to do there is bring a very different perspective than I've seen elsewhere of understanding how politics works the moment we're in.But most importantly, the, the proper way to understand threat of fascism in this country and what we have to do to push back against that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and the moment that you chose to start writing it, I think there were a lot of [00:03:00] people that were extremely surprised that Donald Trump was able to win in 2016 on the Democratic side of the aisle or the, the center to left, generally speaking. And I guess from your perspective, they ought to have seen this coming better.PODHORZER: Well, I think those of us who were really very involved understood how close the election really what that all of the sort of models that forecasting models that were out there saying that it was, between 2 to 1 for Clinton to 90-10 for Clinton really had no idea what was going on in the country and reflected really just not having a handle on what was going on in the Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and those of us who are really very involved understood. There's going to be [00:04:00] razor thin and I think for the sort of broader public and this is something that has sort of stuck in the sort of narrative about Trump winning that's got to be really upside down is that if the Republicans had nominated anyone Trump, then they would have won easily.They would have won the popular vote, the Electoral College, and probably would be finishing up their second term. Right.Trump is probably the most successful intra party presidential politician we've had, and the worst inter party politician we've ever had. And he came as close to blowing a sure-fire Republican victory as you can without blowing it.But what [00:05:00] was still the case was that he could have been beaten in terms, just in a political practitioner level. And that's really what we have to get our head around and figure out how to win in 2020.SHEFFIELD: Okay. And so just to be clear, you're you were you disputing or agreeing with the idea that another Republican would have won.PODHORZER: No, I'm saying they would have easily that, that, that Trump was like such a unpopular candidate for them that he almost lost an election they should have won going away. And, and that there's a way in which the, to your beginning 50 yard line, I think Trump has created kind of illusion that.Democrats have more support than they actually do.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Okay. Oh, okay. Well, one of the I guess [00:06:00] some of some of the ideas behind that. Let's maybe explore some of your ideas behind that. So with. With, with regard to Trump being kind of a weaker Republican candidate so, one of those obviously for Republicans generally in 2016 is just simply the fact that the Democrats had the White House for eight years and there's always a strong appetite for or motivation for the out party to come out and vote after eight years of the other people in the in charge and some dissatisfaction by the occupant party. So that's part of it, but what else was it from your viewpoint that they were well positioned in 2016?PODHORZER: Well, in the context of the Electoral College being decisive I think, and I think this is still something that's not really understood. Remember when Obama won in 2008, which was [00:07:00] obviously a victory that was driven by Bush's unpopularity, the collapse of the financial system and so forth. It was still the case that places like Ohio were competitive, right?The way in which Obama's policies address a breakdown of the financial system, which was essentially leaving it to Federal Reserve to supply liquidity through quantitative easing essentially meant that there was no new investment in rural America for that entire time and a lot of the sort of popular commentary talks about Democrats losing it with By extreme margins in rural areas, simply because they're too woke or something, but in fact, these are places that many of those places were devastated while Obama was president, and we're not really getting any kind of [00:08:00] attention.And so there's nothing unusual about people in that circumstance, even putting aside social issues, not wanting more of the same. In 2016 when Clinton was running in e there's, there are various ways of classifying geographic areas. And if you a common one that divides it into six from most rural to most urban in all, but the most rural employment had recovered from the Great recession mostly by 20 12, 20 13.And there was still less employment in the most rural areas of the country in 2016 and yeah, and that just changed the Electoral College math in a way that are barely able to get out from under right now.SHEFFIELD: Speaking of sort of regional classifications, that's [00:09:00] something you've been writing about recently talking about how there's this very common myth that has settled in in both media and among political practitioners that the Donald Trump has somehow made the Republican party a populist party. And that they are sort of the, the, the party for the less economically Prosperous people, and you've kind of tried to puncture that in a number of different ways.Let's talk about what you're you wrote a long piece about trying to basically making the contention that. The different, yeah, the, the idea that the congressional districts have been sort of flipped but it's maybe not completely false this idea, but you, you really unpacked it quite a bit.So let's can you briefly summarize what your, your.PODHORZER: Sure, right and I think there's [00:10:00] 1 of the things that makes but this kind of unpacking a little challenging is because there's a difference between describing a set of people and saying that that description represents causality. What has happened since 2008 is that mostly because of the sort of the MAGA, first tea party, the MAGA reaction that really returned the country into its sectional alignment between sort of the red states in the South, the blue states in the North and West.Consequentially means that Democrats now represent more prosperous people because they represent a more prosperous region of the country. Right? And so it's not [00:11:00] because prosperous people are going to Democrats and not prosperous people are going to Republicans. It's that the preponderance of Prosperity is in one region and press ponderance of sort of lower socioeconomic achievement is in a different region.And so the challenge is, though, that if the only way you can that the media generally tries to understand what's going on in the country is through the prism of national polls, which may no geographic distinctions. Right. You have an effect being treated as a cause. Right. But to go back, the 1 of the places, this sort of, I think, maps to what you're saying where people look at.Republicans being the party of non college [00:12:00] Americans and Democrats being the party of college, right? In blue states, white non college voters supported Biden at a higher level than white college voters did. In red states, right? It really have to get around the idea that the 1st important division in the country is sort of where you live right now.It's true in both places. Non college voters are more Republican than college, but--SHEFFIELD: We're talking about whites werePODHORZER: Yeah, that but that that that doesn't explain what's happening in the country. Right? Because. You, and as I was saying, even with the rural area, Biden almost won rural blue America, which no one would think because of [00:13:00] the way we just generalize from national numbers when, in fact, national numbers are just sort of tallying up what happened all over the country.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's true. And in that such that the core differences really are more about the approach that the voters in these regions have their epistemologies, if you will. And, and you can really see that with, when you look at the, the, and, and you note this in, in, in your pieces about this, that, when you look at the Republican, Operative class, the people who run the Republican party, they are from all the same, expensive elite schools the Josh Hollies of the world, JD Vances and Peter Thiels and, even Donald Trump himself.And so it isn't about education itself in education of itself is not dispositive. And I think that, a lot of that oversimplification [00:14:00] has really made a lot of people on the left not understand how to respond to MAGA and sort of the rise of neo fascism.Would you agree with that?PODHORZER: Yeah, I think I think that's part of that. I also think that the thatI think that. When you, this is a thing, something through in sort of how you were talking about Republican operatives and what operatives, I think it's really important to understand to not to anthropomorphize the parties like. They are making a decision. There's a, like, a person making a decision. We're going to do this instead of that, right?The way politics works in America, because we only have 2 ballot lines, is that all of the organized interest in the [00:15:00] country on the big ones understand that the way to have access to the enormous resources the federal government has to the enormous power it has is to advance candidates that will carry their agenda.And when people say, well, the Republicans took this turn here as if there was a Republican who changed their mind about the best tactic, they miss the fact that what happened was that a different faction of the Republican Party gained the upper hand and it's new people. Right, like, all the, the Ryan's and everyone, like, they leave, they either lose outright or decide they can't stay.Right? It's not like someone sitting in a DC headquarters saying, aha, we're going to look at this poll and say, well, we really need to be more fascist. Right? It's the fascist taking over the [00:16:00] party and in the, in terms of the house, right?It's really the white Christian nationalist faction that has. That is hacked Congress.Basically 1 of the pieces I have shows how, our Byzantine 18th century way of figuring stuff out really enables any sort of big interest. That is. Sufficiently geographically clustered right now, because of how gerrymandered and partisan sort, the districts are that you can basically ladder from, 18 percent of the population nationally so Control the house and, the Republicans in the house because in red districts in the South event, white evangelicals make up, between 30 and 50 plus percent of all primary Republican [00:17:00] primary voters and to win a Republican primary on average, if you didn't come in over the last dozen years, only has taken 50, 000 votes.And the national media doesn't see it because he's They treat sort of the Congress as a kind of national constituent assembly, because they're looking at polling.Well, the Republicans are this percent this and this right, but they don't get votes places, get votes and the right cred by Christian nationalism is extremely strong in enough places that they get to control the Republican caucus.SHEFFIELD: And they spent, the better part of Donald Trump's entire presidency. Kind of saying, Oh, he's not that extreme. He doesn't really believe this.He's not really a fascist. You guys are overreacting. There's no, this isn't racism. This isn't, whatever the, I mean, he would come out with all these horrible statements and they would just excuse them and pretend that it was overreacting.So yeah, [00:18:00] so, but that said. It's also that I think to your regional point and with regard to the white evangelicals, I think a lot of people also haven't realized that southern white evangelicalism sort of colonized white Protestantism outside of the South just through its sheer business prowess, whether it was Christian bookstores like Lifeway Christian Resources, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention and they've got stores in every state and they, they just, their, their sheer power of organizing and entrepreneurship.They just overwhelmed all the other Baptist factions and, kind of, ate the lunch of, of mainline Protestantism to a large degree. And so, yeah, go ahead.PODHORZER: No, I was just saying, and it's like, really not recognized part two is that And sort of Southern Ohio, Southern Indiana there's been significant [00:19:00] migration.So, which is another element in why those states went from kind of purplish to red.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, the Southern parts of rural generally speaking and that's, that is true of Illinois as well outside of the Chicago area. So, yeah, but, but I guess to a large degree though, I do think that, when you look at the responses of, of let's say left of center operatives to this stuff.It, yeah, it's, it's, it's about generally kind of have wanting to have the same narrative in every place. And, this idea that we can, we can create the perfect message. And, and the reality is there is no perfect message. What there are is, is many messages. And you have to, you have to tell, you have to relate what you want.To what the people want and, to your, your point [00:20:00] about and we were talking about before we were recording this, that, the, the two parties really haven't tried, they're not trying to create Oh, hold on. I hear an echo the, the, the two parties are not trying to create. Policy platform and even a message or a coalition that that includes a majority of Americans seems like.PODHORZER: Yeah, I think that I think that, somewhere around the mid 70s and something that was happening in other countries to business interests, which had. Really been centered in the Republican Party basically expanded and won the battle for the Democratic Party and forced labor out in the way it's been in a lot of other countries.And so there's no party that actually is advocating for working people, right? There's no question that, that Democrats have been [00:21:00] better for working people economically than Republicans. But neither has actually, especially relatively recently been at all concerned with their working lines and that's a like, complete change.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and now to what degree though, is that. Does labor have responsibility for that situation?PODHORZER: Well, I think that, that, that, and it's a really important question. I think that to, to get at it, I think that many people talk, you talk about it, people who often, Are very much feel as allies of the labor movement that sentences like, quote, the decline in membership. And I think that [00:22:00] when we do that, we miss the that it's sort of.It makes it sound like it's something that labor to itself when, in fact, right since the 1940s, the business corporate community has been relentlessly attacking the ability of. People working people to act collectively in unions, and they've been very successful in because there's been essentially a bipartisan consensus that has prevented.Union organizing in each new part, each part of the economy as it expands. Right? So there but in 1940s, General Motors was fully unionized. It's fully in nice today. But through a set of policies, right? [00:23:00] With right to work in the South, you create a context to have auto plants that aren't, or you do NAFTA so that you make it easier for foreign companies to take union market share when we started having the service sector exploding there were new barriers erected to make it more difficult to organize service worker right now it's very difficult to organize gig workers, even though they want it because. Laws, regs, whatever are trying to make them independent contractor.And so I think yeah, labor that's labor's job, but we shouldn't be blind to the billions of dollars that have been spent empower exercise to prevent people from joining unions.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's true. I mean, [00:24:00] but this has been a thing that's been going on for a long time. I mean, I guess you could maybe say it kind of started with the so called Atari Democrats of the 1970s.And this is not my place to say any of these things, but, I mean, the reality is that I don't know, I mean, it's, it's tricky because I guess to some degree, the Democratic party kind of welcomed these new people to come in and especially after the Nixon resignation and 70 and the 74 election in 76, those it so they liked it, they wanted these new members in, but fundamentally they kind of changed the Democratic Party from what it was and, it's been kind of the same to a large degree since then. What do you think? [00:25:00]PODHORZER: Well, I think that Biden has really been a break with that neoliberal Democratic tradition so far thing.We don't know what's going to happen in the longer run, but I think. It was really significant that he went to the UAW picket line, right? That's something that Obama never would have come close to, that Clinton never would have come close to, that Carter never would have been come close to. And I think it, it stems from the fact that there was this period and there's still a lot of it of, and this is what really galls me about people who should talk about appealing to working class voters is that.That these are the same people who are have tried and been pretty successful at trying to tell a story of America in which there are no class divisions. Right that weirdly, the only [00:26:00] class division is over sort of gendered bathrooms and a sort of social vibe that has nothing to do with people's economic lives, and that that kind of that's kind of the problem.SHEFFIELD: Let's can you clarify what you mean? Yeah.PODHORZER: So here's a clear way of thinking about it, right? Before the mid 70s, right? You had through the consensus worldview was that unconstrained capitalism brings you the depression horrible outcomes, but that what was called us for pluralism that That working for this for democracy to function for an economy to function.Well, you have to create institutions like unions that allowed people to act collectively to have at least some relative balance in power [00:27:00] with the corporations and the most wealthy. Right and that's an idea that goes back to Jefferson everything you can't how can you have like democracy when people aren't political equals and the sort of fix that came in the new deal was that while each working person wouldn't have the power of a Carnegie to if you put them all together, you're sort of starting to get a balance and you have some.Guardrails on capitalism, right? And, but it was very much understood that there were two classes. There's like an ownership class and a working class. And their interests were not the same and that the role of government was to make sure that that contest happened in a balanced fair way. You get what you call the Atari Democrats, get the neoliberal, whatever you're going to call them, right?They decide [00:28:00] that that's like, that's so yesterday. And that in fact, all we have to do is rely on the market and everybody's going to have better, more prosperous lives and, and all of that. Right. And so now there are not 2 sides anymore. There's just private public partnerships and, the era of big government is over and so forth.And so at that point, right, you have what Piketty and others sort of call, a, a, an elite. Yeah. Duopoly of parties, right? Both are parties of different factions of the, of the powerful, you have the Republicans putting aside the white Christian nationalists, they're the party of the extractive industries of a set of industries that have worked to keep the regional low wage economy.Democrats are captured [00:29:00] by, the tech and finance and knowledge economy, right? And they've created. That's why the 2 pit areas are so different, right? There's a different theory of everything, but they're both believe that the market is the best way to do things and like, and really want to avoid the idea of class war.SHEFFIELD: Okay, and then now you mentioned the idea of so where does gender and race fit into that? This framework that is the divisions you're talking aboutPODHORZER: That there are, I think, in a fundamental way, I think that the, the, the through line for. What's red America, from the founding was an idea of a kind of theocratic state that the purpose of the government is to make sure [00:30:00] that people follow an already revealed law, right?And that and that that law has a very clear cut. Social hierarchySHEFFIELD: That they know their place, yeah.PODHORZER: Right. And then you have a more like classically sort of liberal blue states where people don't think there's a reveal truth already and are willing to try to have. Systems to get to the best place by working it out together, and so that's obviously going to be much more conducive to gender equality, racial equality and so on.SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, and I think 1 of the other things, though, that the neoliberals did is that they. That they de linked the struggle for justice such that [00:31:00] that basically they wanted to remove. what Martin Luther King and, and, a bunch of other people, Bayard Rustin and others like him understood, which was that this is all, this is a collective struggle here that, things may not impact one set of people the same way.But if you don't support their struggle, then you're, then you won't win the thing that you want. And the neoliberals kind of broke that and basically tried to, and, and, tried to get people to focus only on whatever in particular one day we're interested in and, and, and that's, and that's kind of how the, the, the, the Democratic Party became broken and non majoritarian, I would say,PODHORZER: Right. No, I think that it was a switch from parties that were fairly about advancing their bases, aspirations and.[00:32:00]Uh, to sort of to sort of consumer parties where each sort of saying, well, here are the reasons to vote for me. And here are the reasons to vote for me, but not actually, which is antithetical in a way to real democracy, because. You only have real democracy when people are engaged in a practical functional way more than every two years when they get to choose between the same two choices.And then really have no handle on it in between and--SHEFFIELD: Well, and also, and sorry, also take that. They get something that is more than just semiotic. In other words, that, that having the symbology of your preferred group. As sort of in people's faces that actually doesn't really do very much for you.So, like, the white Christian nationalism doesn't actually help the lives of the [00:33:00] Republican voters who, who want it. And then, but, but by the same token, it also doesn't really help it doesn't really help black Americans to have the CEOs be black of these corporations and then they exploit the workers just the same.PODHORZER: Yeah. No, that's a really important point is, and that's, I think, sort of the sort of genius of neoliberalism is by really insisting that everybody only has their individual interest, rather than that. There's any kind of collective interest or responsibility to a collective. Right, you essentially split within racial groups or gender groups, or you're, you're basically what you just said, it's like the 4 people who don't have the access to pre K.Or decent education, knowing [00:34:00] that that there are black CEOs is of limited value.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it also, the other thing about that, the, the neoliberal bargain, if you will, was that, yes, it did bring some more educated, higher income Workers into the Democratic coalition, but what it also did is that it made it easier for the much larger group of, blue collar workers of all races to leave because, that for them for, for many of these people, like they were motivated by, like they were Christian fundamentalists and, and you see that and you first saw that with, with white blue collar workers, but now you're starting to see that with, yeah.Evangelical Hispanics, and you're starting to see that with black, evangelicals as well that they're not, and they say this, when, when people, and I think focus groups are a very limited value, but nonetheless. The idea, some of, some, you do hear people [00:35:00] say, I don't see a difference between the parties for me.And some of that is a failure of democratics people letting people know that Biden's very pro union and he, did all these things that's, that isn't a democratic sort of. infrastructure of communication problem. But it's also that, that again, that they, the fact that people would even think this at all, it shows that the, the Republican party has identified what for them, these individuals is their, they view as their primary identity and, and, and, and basically they've, that's why they constantly are, talking about.Social controversies and whatnot. Like there's this myth that the democratic party only talks about, racism or gender equality or, transgender participation in society. None of that's true. But the Republicans want you to believe that. And Democrats, I don't feel like they understand that, [00:36:00] they think that people will just figure it out.That they don't have to be told what's actually happening, that they'll just, the marketplace of ideas, the good ideas will win. And it just, it seems kind of naive.PODHORZER: Yeah, I mean, I think it's 1st of all, I think, but 1 thing that I want to pull out is it's going to go there anyway, but I think it's really important is that is when you talk about identity.And I think that almost all the discussion about the appeal of the parties and politics and messages and everything miss the fact that the most powerful way to realign the electorate to win elections is when people. Feel that their identity is fundamental and core to 1 of the other parties or candidates, right?That people aren't out [00:37:00] there sort of looking at sort of side by side of where the. Candidates or parties who are on issues, whatever, when they think that this is the party. If you're a white, you're evangelical, right? The reason they're 80 plus percent for Republicans is because Republicans tap into their white Christian nationalist identity.And so for people like who, for whom identity is dry is politically salient. Right, they're not going to say, but maybe Democrats are good on this issue or what they don't you don't think past that and what and so identity when people like you people you feel are like you are all one party or the other.That's alignment. Right? And the. Right now, the very odd thing in terms of the way people talk about working class voters, [00:38:00] whatever, is that most of the electorate actually is voting on one or other identity, either their identity is MAGA or it's anti and, and that that's really got its grip on, over 85 percent of the electorate.Which is just never going to switch sides, because it's not about either side's issue suite. It's people like me are or are not. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I had when I was I'll go ahead.PODHORZER: No, I was going to say, I think 1 thing that, like, gets, like, left out of this kind of conversation is, let's not forget that in the 17 blue states, yeah that Biden Clinton and Obama 12 won by 2 dozen points and that in those states.You have functioning democratic governors that [00:39:00] have actually been making life better for people over a period of time. The characterization of a dysfunctional party that can't do anything right really has to do with this national contest. Right, and the National Party, and one of the reasons why it is so dysfunctional is that in those 17 states, blue wins by two dozen points.In the 27 red states, Trump won by more than a dozen points twice. And so did Romney, right? And they're two different types of politics. And there's like, no, not a middle ground that you could be smart in.SHEFFIELD: Well, okay. So, but so then how can people who want to have more a politics that are, is for working people, [00:40:00] how can they succeed in that type of environment?What do you, what do you think?PODHORZER: Well, I think that it's going to depend on what working people rising again, like we did in the 30s and did before. And I think what we're seeing this summer and fall with for CPS, WGA, UAW is at least finally a stirring uh, You know, I was looking this morning for something I was writing that in 1974, there were more strikes than there were in the last 25 years that that, like, the world was just very different and working.People had a very different sense of agency and were more engaged in getting a better life for themselves than. They have been in quite a while.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:41:00] Well, and I, and I, and it's something that is tricky though, because, I, the other reason why Republicans have, created kind of a, I mean, the, the Republican party is a.Identity politics party. And it was built that way, by the, the, the Goldwater ites and, the Reaganites they, they, they rebuilt the party into being that based on, on white Christian rural identity. And it was effective not just at getting the South, but it's also effective as a way of.Preventing, worker uprisings and things like that, because essentially what it is, it's a, it's a divide and conquerPODHORZER: 100 percent, right. It's like, right in this period, right? Where the, and this is essential. I have a lot of respect for Michael case and who you had on, but I think there's. Like a really, we have to take a hard look [00:42:00] that that the Democratic Party from Jackson on could be called the party of white working people, but throughout that period in the Confederate States in the southern states, those the people so named. saw themselves just as white, right? Now, when it push came to shove, their white identity was more important to them than their working class identity. And that the quote loss of white working class for the Democratic Party really happened in the 40s in the, in the South. And most people who like, try to tell that story are don't understand that Democrats continue to have.Majorities of the members of Congress for those states for quite a bit [00:43:00] longer, because those Democrats in the House and Senate, they were electing were fighting against all the working unions and working class policies that would allow there to be multiracial unions in the South.SHEFFIELD: Well, so then it, I mean, because that is ultimately, I mean, you could argue that those are the two issues that the, a more, let's say, left leaning Democratic Party faced is that one, trying to include black Americans in the party, and then also, Trying to cleave off allow, the creation of a, of white Christian nationalism and not do anything in response to that.I mean, and even now, like, I, I, the, when you look at the Democratic Party leadership, they don't really talk about it. White Christian nationalism at all and, and, and say that it's [00:44:00] bad and say that it's a manipulation and, and, and, and so because of that, because there is literally no countervailing message to say that, if you're a if you believe the Bible is literally true, you're not going to be imprisoned.If, if Joe Biden gets reelected, you're not going to be imprisoned. If Bernie Sanders somehow became the president, nothing bad is going to happen to you. And, and it's what you'll, you'll, you'll get, better healthcare, you'll get more worker protections and things like that. Like they just, it's just like they, I feel like they pretend that they don't have to, if we don't talk about it, then it will go away.And they've just had this, this naive approach to the Christian nationalism. And now because they've ignored it for so long and not tried to talk about, just how manipulative it is now it's starting to ensnare Hispanic evangelicals and some evangelicals as well.PODHORZER: Yeah. I mean, I think [00:45:00] the, it's, it's interesting. It's just part of that. I really agree with part of that, man.I think as long as you have a information ecosystem. Like Fox and all the other right wing media that has already that that really it's commerce. You should probably under were there like commercial model. They're making money selling sort of white grievance stories.That is the white Christian nationalist worldview, and it's not like there's a billionaire or something that's like creating this propaganda thing. It, it, it makes money. Right? And so they're doing it. And I frankly, don't think that there's a way for Democrats to show people that, no, we're really not going to take your Christmas away.I think that, like, that, that, that was gone. Right. And because of what you're saying is, [00:46:00] it's just really a powerful way to divide people. Right. And, and it's working by default, much more the mainstream media. For pretending that white Christian nationalism is in the threat to the country for such a long time.And even now it has a tough time saying the words white Christian nationalism. That's really what's problematic and I think that's what makes. The presidential election as close as it is, or the country as close as it appears to be over Trump is the equivocation about how much of a fascist, how much he's really going to do the things he says he's going to do.I mean, you know, the media is just about sort of telling people not to take what he says seriously. [00:47:00]SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they certainly do that. But at the same time, they've always been this way. So yeah, it seems like the left should be investing a lot more in media than they do. I mean, like, to me, as somebody who created multiple media organizations on the right, I can tell you, it is So easy to get people on the right to be interested in starting up some new media business.Whereas on the left, there is this idea that, ah, well, we can put a we got an interview on NPR the other day. We got to start ABC news to do a profile of us or 16 minutes did a story about it and it's, it's, it's incredibly naive and they don't, and they don't understand most people.Especially, in this internet age, most people don't see those stories. They, they don't know about them. So you have to take the message to the people, but they don't want to, they don't seem to want to do it because it's beneath them.PODHORZER: Well, I'm not quite sure that's completely fair because I know a [00:48:00] lot of people who have tried to do it and failed, I think from, and there are some really good rigorous sort of studies of.Like, what happens and I think that 1 of the handicaps that those who tried to do what you're saying on the not on the right is that the mainstream media, the times, the journal, Washington post, whatever right basically have the most lucrative audiences locked up. Which means that there is, like, no one's really found the equivalent of a 3rd of America.That's a untapped commercially available market for the left wants to like. Spend their time [00:49:00] in the car listening to people brag on own the conservatives or something, right? It's very asymmetric, right? And, and so, yeah, I think it is, it is both are true. There are many people on the left who are too condescending and self disqualifying for the job.I know a lot of people who are really serious. Invested money a lot of time and just can't find a market for it. It's really just a symmetric.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I mean, well, I, I, I don't disagree with that. But, I mean, I would say even, to the extent that the, like, the web has built. It has enabled some people to build pretty large audiences and on the left and they don't share their audiences.They do not engage in cross promotions. They don't invite other people on their podcasts or, invite them to write articles. It simply does not happen. Like they invite their personal [00:50:00] friends. To come on their show, a hundred times or whatever. And then unless you're their personal friend, you don't get invited.And so as a result, the ecosystem doesn't like here's, here's the paradox is, and I can say this, having been, how things work on both sides, that the left. is actually, the left media ecosystem is far more capitalistic and far more dog eat dog than on the right. The right does not practice capitalism in its own affairs, and the left does.So like, almost all the largest center to left media operations are owned by corporations,PODHORZER: right, yeah, of course, yeah.SHEFFIELD: And, and, whereas on the, on the right, they will go and sink millions or tens of millions of dollars, year after year into, into these organizations that they know will not ever be profitable, but they serve a valuable purpose.And so they continue to do that, but in some cases, like the daily wire or [00:51:00] talk radio, these things that were unprofitable. For a number of years eventually they, they can, they get to the point where they are profitable and, and extremely. So in Fox news is another example of that. I mean, it was an enormous money loser for Rupert Murdoch for a long time.And then eventually it, the, the audience finally found it. And has been printing money ever since. Whereas, so I think there are people who want this stuff. It's just that everybody on the left gives up too soon. And I would say Air America is an example of that, that, it was created if they had just stuck to it longer and not been so wasteful in their expenditures.They, and you can see that with the host, like a number of the hosts who were there have been able to continue making a living and, and make do quite well for themselves because they kept going.PODHORZER: Right. But remember that there's the, in terms of the, the, the financing of all of that, right?Is that the other [00:52:00] asymmetry is that for the cokes for murder for all of those people? There's a corporate bottom line that creating a movement to lower taxes and reduce regulation has an ROI, right? And there isn't that on the other side, right? There's no sort of what the Left media, like, I don't even know how to say the sentence.Right. A left media, that's a Trojan horse for pro billionaire policies. Right. Right. It's, that's the problem. And I'm, I feel awkward to defend. I'm not trying not to defend any particular people in this. It's trying to say that what I think is important is that to understand that the problem isn't like, finding people to do it better.It's that we're in a system that kind of that is that that that's [00:53:00] here. Right? I mean, these are decisions that mostly Democratic presidents made to not renew the fairness doctrine to do the communications deregulation bill that, has allowed the test. Yeah. That loud cross ownership and all those things I didn't used to be the case are the case and that's a ditch Democrats built it dug for themselves.But it doesn't mean, like, we're just looking for somebody to come in and transcend that. I mean, it's a pretty deep ditch.SHEFFIELD: Well, okay. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think that's all true. And yet, you're, you, in your writing, you have talked quite a bit about how things are not inevitable and Trump's not going to, to, he's not inevitable in terms of coming back.And you've been particularly notable in [00:54:00] pushing back against people panicking about, Joe Biden's polling numbers you, you, you call it “Mad Poll Disease.” What, what does, what does that term mean for people who--PODHORZER: What, what I mean is that I can't imagine there's much, very many people who are listening to this podcast and don't know about all the horse race polling that's been out there and the big splash at the New York times.Created a couple of months ago now with poll showing Trump ahead in a number of battleground states. The point that I think Mad Poll Disease is that there are two things that we know about the presidential election: one is that it's going to come down to as it has in 2020 and 2016, less than a percentage point difference in 5 to 6 states that we know [00:55:00] which states they are.We know it's going to be that close. And we know that polling can't really tell us. Anything valuable beyond that, but the, but when you think that polling can, you panic about it in an unconstructive way, because you're basically thinking, oh, my God, there is a noble outcome there and we're screwed, right?When in a democracy without polling right now, we wouldn't be talking about how old Biden is. We'd be talking about Trump's fascist agenda. And getting everybody we know to make sure they should go out and vote against him, right? It's the wrong conversation to be having. And in the last couple of elections, right in the midterms, the 5, 538, which does a better job of [00:56:00] something, which really can't be done perfectly.And if you've been following it, when they started their Senate in June, they said Republicans had a 60, 40 chance of taking Senate. But after the J6 hearings and dubs, they said Democrats had a 60, 40 chance of holding the Senate on election day. They said Republicans again had a 60, 40 chance of holding, flipping the Senate of the five races that mattered most, they got three wrong.You literally would have been smarter not ever going to look at any of the forecasting and just knowing what everyone knew is it was going to come down to those states, right? And just go out and try to win. That any, all of these races are within the margin of error, and when they're there, they're in the margin of error.And that's what Mad Poll Disease is. It's paralyzing. It keeps you away from being a small d [00:57:00] democratic citizen.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, it is interesting that the, the Republican Party and the right wing media ecosystem, they became completely disregarding of polls beginning in 2012 or so, and they've been that way ever since that they really say, well, it doesn't, it shows us behind, but that's fake and that's, that's not true, but they basically have said, we don't believe that.We're just going to continue to, push forward.PODHORZER: Right. And then we've had like, 200 years plus of successful elections without having polling a year out. Right? I mean, like, democracies do, actually can function without the media putting its central attention on trying to be the first to sort of say something smart about who's going to win.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, now, is this kind of do you think this is an [00:58:00] example of what, what decision theorists call analysis paralysis on the part of people on the left of center? Is that what this is?PODHORZER: Um, I mean, maybe for some, but it's more that as a saying that the problem is that anybody who wants to think about, like, the basic, is America going to continue as a non fascist country in terms of, like, someone, a media organization talking to 1500 people to tell you something, like, that's just crazy, right?The right, right. Like, if you believe That it's like that horrible for Trump to win again. That's all that matters. But the thing to be clear is, in what I'm saying [00:59:00] is not for the same reason Republicans say that, right? Republicans were saying that because they didn't like the poll number, right? And they were getting in the way of the story they wanted to tell.In 2020, if you remember, the polling and media had Biden headed to a really big victory, and in October I was writing, and we can read it, the polls are wrong, right? It's going to be as close as it was. Right and right. It's like the polling. We are such a divided country and those states are so on the 50 yard line that to just keep going back over and over again and take, taking their temperature again and again, right?Makes it seem more fluid than it actually is. [01:00:00]SHEFFIELD: Well, okay, so for. There's no, as you, as you said, there's no magic wand for all these things. But I mean, so what are, what are the things you think Biden should be? Doing because the polls are right that that he has, the potential to lose.PODHORZER: Oh, yeah. That's what I'm saying. We all know that, right? That's, that's the challenge of our life, right?SHEFFIELD: Yeah.PODHORZER: Right. We don't need to know what I'm saying.SHEFFIELD: What would you say that he should do to not lose?PODHORZER: I don't know what he should do. I know that what we should do is in whatever roles we have, make sure that We understand what the threat is and that that's our central charge as citizens of this country to make sure that Trump isn't reelected, isn't elected again.SHEFFIELD: Well, and what if people feel like that I mean, like, and you, and maybe we can end here with--PODHORZER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: [01:01:00] There's been a lot of discussion with in, in the world of economics about what some people call a vibes recession in, in regards to polling that when people. Are asked about the state of the economy.They think that it's, almost depression level bad, for many people and the response and you know and the economic indicators do not really show that and you know to a certain extent I think or to pretty large extent I think this is the product of right wing media having completely sort of Uh, removed Republicans from all rationality when it comes to questions about the economy.So in other words, when a Democrat is the president, the Republican respondents are now seemingly for the past several years maybe perhaps for the long term trend, they're going to say it's a depression. Just because a Democrat is the president and, and then when Trump was the president, they, even during the worst parts of the pandemic, they said the economy was great and [01:02:00] the prospects were amazing.And it was like 70 percent of them, even, even at the very worst shutdowns and, and, and whatnot, they said it was fantastic. So I mean, what's your take on if the on this whole vibes session? Yeah.PODHORZER: So I think that the, what, first, what you're describing about Republicans and Trump and no matter how about the economy as he's doing great is what I was saying before about identity.Right. Once you see yourself as being on team Trump or team red, right? That's the power of, of identity and identification, right? And it, but that, that's the way human beings work, right? The on the other side, though, I think that there's that the, that the indicator economic indicators that everyone deals, That people are not [01:03:00] like, delusional for not realizing what of an economy.It is just don't actually indicate that don't really reflect how people experience. Their lives, there was a time when something like GDP growth was a pretty good heuristic for how people were feeling because, as the economy grew with prosperity was fairly shared. Right? But when it goes from, rising tide, lifting old boats, GDP indicator.Yep. That's a good thing when it's mostly if lifting yachts, yeah. Right. Why should people feel any better? And I think there's a way in which the people in the sort of media class really don't understand what rising prices due to people and the idea that someone who is. Like daily stressed by [01:04:00] wondering the uncertainty of whether in this season, they can avoid the afford the toy.Their kid wants because they don't know whether they're going to have, rent's going to go up in January or something like that. Like, they're not. Like, whoopie, inflation isn't going up by as much as it was before, right? We're sort of in the media class. It's, oh, well, he's getting inflation under control.Prices are still going up. They're not, and it's that disconnect. I think it's a real disconnect about how people really are experiencing the economy and what the indicators economists say should matter. And I think to the sort of larger point since 2000, in almost every institution, people just have less confidence.People feel the society's broken [01:05:00] and then, which everybody sees in polling and then everyone's surprised about why this or that leader is in popular. People are not happy and that's being reflected in these polls.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I guess what can, what can Biden or other people on the left do in response to that, or what should they do?PODHORZER: I don't know that I think that. The, in terms of our conversation about Trump and MAGA, white Christian nationalism, all of that, that just has to be the thing that unifies people and I don't have any particular advice for what Democrats should do to make themselves more popular. I think that's really, they've kind of put themselves in a position that makes it really hard for that to ever sort of succeed.[01:06:00]SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, so then it sounds like they need to change their policies in your view, then to be more responsive. Okay. All right.Well, appreciate you joining today, Mike. So if people what's the what are the best ways for people to keep up with,PODHORZER: But basically my sub stack weekend reading.SHEFFIELD: Okay, so we can reading dot net.Yeah, everybody to check that out. And are you on any of the social media places? Yeah, I am.PODHORZER: But mostly post that. So if you're getting the Substack, you're getting that.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you for being here today. Thank you for having me. Take care.All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where you can get the video, audio and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much. And you have complete unlimited access. Some of the episodes in order to keep the show sustainable are [01:07:00] not available to the general public. So I appreciate everybody who is supporting the show in that way. And please do tell your friends or family about. This program as well. I appreciate that as well. All right, that'll do it for this one and we'll see everybody 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

SummaryMoms for Liberty, the dishonestly named far-right Christian group, is in the news after Bridget Ziegler, one of the group's co-founders, has been reported to have been in a relationship with another woman and her husband,. Christian Ziegler, her husband, has been accused of raping the woman in Sarasota, Florida.As shocking as that allegation is, it's important to note that Christian Ziegler says he is innocent. There are no criminal charges that have been filed.But nonetheless, it is still worth looking at Moms for Liberty in the larger context of astroturf right wing organizations, especially in the discussion that we're having on Theory of Change about how the Democratic left is less able and willing to promote grassroots organizations.And as we'll see in today's episode, this is not how things were for Moms for Liberty.Joining the program to talk about all this is Kelly Weill, she is the creator of a new website called MomLeft, which focuses on reporting about the activities of far right parent organizations. And she's also the author of a book called Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything, which is about flat earthers.The video of the conversation is available. A computer-generated transcript of the edited audio follows. The recording was made on December 6, 2023.Membership BenefitsThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.About the ShowTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Social MediaMastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldTwitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffieldBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/matthew.flux.communityThreads: https://www.threads.net/@realmattsheffieldGuest LinksKelly Weill on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/KELLYWEILLMomLefthttps://www.momleft.com/Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anythinghttps://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kelly-weill/off-the-edge/9781643753379/Related EpisodesDemocrats have a failure to communicateIt’s only a matter of weeks until the presidential election year of 2024 begins, and many Democrats across the country are starting to panic as more than a few public opinion surveys have shown that President Joe Biden trails the criminal ex-president Donald Trump. Even more concerningly, there have been polls showing that even though Trump sent armed m…Biden trails Trump a year out from the election, does it matter?In January, things finally start getting serious in the political realm as many states begin holding their presidential primaries. But at this point, things are not looking so good for Joe Biden in comparison to Donald Trump. Less than a year removed from the election of 2024, Biden trails Trump in a number of public opinion surveys that have…Republicans are horribly unpopular, why haven't Democrats been able to win big?Introduction The Republican party is completely and utterly dominated by a small faction of political and religious extremists with policies that are incredibly unpopular, such as privatizing social security or criminalizing birth control. And yet, in spite of this fact, Republicans are still able to win many elections, even outside of their stronghold of…Audio TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, thanks for being here.KELLY WEILL: Thanks so much for having me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right, so let's start our discussion here by talking about the current news story that is, seems to be a ever growing scandal concerning Christian Ziegler, who is the chair of the Florida Republican Party, but also the husband of a woman who is a [00:02:00] co-founder of the Moms for Liberty group, Bridget Ziegler.At this point in time, and things might change during the time that we're recording this versus when it airs, but as things stand right now, what is the deal with this whole scandal concerning Christian Ziegler?WEILL: It's a mess, in a word. Christian Ziegler, he's the chair of the Florida GOP. He's been really close with Ron DeSantis and he and his wife Bridget are real power players in both Florida politics and specifically Florida educational politics. Bridget is a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which is a group that has been instrumental in pushing anti LGBTQ legislation related to students in Florida.Now, Moms for Liberty will say that Bridgette Ziegler is no longer with the group, but she's very much a model for the kind of school board warrior that Moms for Liberty wants to promote. So, earlier this month it came out that a woman who had been sexually involved with both [00:03:00] Christian and Bridgette Ziegler in some capacity had filed a police report against Christian Ziegler.She said that the couple had planned some kind of three-way and then that Bridget said, Oh, I can't make it that day, that the woman had canceled because Bridget wasn't going to be there. And she alleges that Christian Ziegler attacked her in her home and raped her on that day. The woman went to a hospital, got treated with a rape kit, right after this.They have a good number of text messages from Christian Ziegler and members of the Florida GOP are calling on him to step down. He is not doing that, claiming that the incident was consensual on both parties.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And basically saying that we've got a country to save. And he's just too important to everything. Now, it's my understanding, though, that there were two different boards with Moms for Liberty, and she had been involved with an [00:04:00] advisory board. Is that correct?WEILL: The exact details of her Not the board of directors. Yeah. Right. The exact details of her involvement are I'm sure you could drill down. I don't have them committed to memory. She was a co-founder, and she is involved in a lot of groups that are also involved with Moms for Liberty.These are groups like I believe the Liberty Institute, just a number of right wing organizations that are adjacent to this sphere and that are very, invested in getting moms like her involved in school board politics, running for these school board roles and really mobilizing around educational issues.SHEFFIELD: The other thing about the Zieglers with regard to Moms for Liberty is that their connection to the group is actually really what helped them get a pipeline directly into the Republican party elite. Christian Ziegler was not in, he wasn't the chair of the Florida Republican party, but he was the assistant chair [00:05:00] and seems to have gotten them, heavily involved with this very wealthy group called the Leadership Institute.Do you want to talk about that at all? Who they are, the Leadership Institute and what they do.WEILL: Sure. They're an organization that, helps to sort of groom up-and-coming Republican voices. They're quite hard right. And they have been plugging in with Moms for Liberty.They have been offering training for promising moms in that space who might want to become the next school board rabble rouser. And so. You are right that this is a very well-funded sphere Moms for Liberty has received significant payments from, say, the heiress of the, Publix fortune, the Florida supermarket chain.So there's a lot of money and specifically a lot of Florida Republican money sloshing around here.SHEFFIELD: And where did they, like what was their original impetus? It wasn't about getting angry at books [00:06:00] originally, right?WEILL: Right. Bridget Ziegler is actually a really interesting figure to follow in the origin story here because she's tried this a couple times getting right wing mom organizations up and running.She had a conservative school board. member group that she tried starting a couple of years back, didn't really go anywhere, but I think where Moms for Liberty really got its initial momentum was in debates over mask mandates at school. Masks obviously became this intensely polarized issue with a lot of, I think, performative politics on the right.And. I think Moms for Liberty in its very early stages was able to tap into that anger and tell parents that we're a group with which you can mobilize. You can take back your school board. You can reclaim your child's education. And of course, a lot of these things are euphemisms for other grievances that they're already pushing.And so that's why when the mask fight died down. Moms [00:07:00] for Liberty didn't die down. It pivoted into those harder right grievances like banning books related to LGBTQ issues restricting education about race, gender, sexuality. So that's, that's how it got its foothold and how it's moved forward since then.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. their transition in that regard is actually pretty common in, in the history of Republican social movements, such as they are. Like the Tea Party, for instance. I mean, I used to be a Republican activist before I had my own little transition as, my audience knows it, but you may not.And I did speak at some tea party events, local tea party events in Virginia a couple of times. And I was always shocked at when I was invited to speak how, almost invariably. With the people who were there, the attendees would try to turn every conversation over to, God created America and that sort of stuff.And I was not [00:08:00] religious at the time. So I was like well, can't we just focus on the topic here? Why are we talking about this? But they did just kept pivoting toward that. And so I'm curious. What do you think? Were they responding to demand or were they responding to what they actually wanted to do? The co-founders, the leadership.WEILL: I think they always wanted to do this. I think they always wanted to get some kind of right wing moms group off the ground. And I think that's pretty savvy for Republicans. We're a few years out now from the election cycle where it seems like mobilizing conservative parents for age was really a good way to win office.And I think that's the message that a lot of people took from Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin's election was that he was able to tap into anger that. Some parents had about say LGBTQ issues in schools. And that's not to say that those in many cases, bigotries are valid, but it does mobilize some people [00:09:00] does get some people to the polls.And I think groups like Moms for Liberty were able to see this maybe underplayed political block and. Identify them as a group that they could really mobilize that could really get going in a concerted direction. All they had to do was dangle a few hot button issues. And suddenly people are in a group and can vote and mass.And I, do think, you hate to give credit, but it has been effective to a certain degree in certain swing districts.How reactionary groups use low-turnout elections to impose their extreme agendasSHEFFIELD: Who are the other key leadership figures with moms for the, for people who don't, aren't too familiar with the group?WEILL: Right. The other the other main leaders right now are a woman named Tiffany Justice and a woman named Tina Descovich, I believe.And they're the ones that you see these days on stage at say, Moms for Liberty convention. But. After the 2022 cycle, 2021 and 22 election cycles, Moms for Liberty was able to sweep a lot [00:10:00] of elections. I think a combination of novelty and rage. They weren't a really known quantity, but because they were so organized in these school board races that are usually pretty passive or certainly don't have the--SHEFFIELD: And they're low turnout. Yeah, they're low turnout.WEILL: Exactly. Exactly. And so they were able to, I think, hijack these elections in ways that Were unexpected. And so I think a lot of Republican leadership saw that they saw these Republican wins, they saw this new mobilization and they really did key into groups like Moms for Liberty being a good vector electorally for them.So that's why the summer at Moms for Liberty's convention, yes, you had the the founders, the leaders like Descovich and justice, but you also had pretty much every prominent. Republican was speaking there. You had Donald Trump spoke, Ron DeSantis spoke. This is a group that was only getting started.I think like two, three years ago.Many journalists seem unaware of Moms for Liberty's extremismSHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's true. And [00:11:00] well, one of the other things about the coverage of a lot of the media out of that convention in Philadelphia is. I feel like that a lot of, and because I read a lot of it and a lot of the coverage was really, and not just of the convention, I will say, but even a lot of their local chapters, a lot of the news media coverage, it seems like they don't know how to cover this group.And they don't understand how radical that the leadership and the membership are. And it was only after that a Indiana chapter that had used a quote from Hitler and if Hitler in one of their newsletters which and you can remind me of what the phrasing was.It was something about. If those who control children's minds control the future or something like that and they put that on their newsletter and got some flack for it. And then Tiffany Justice basically mentioned that she supported the mom who did that. And at the mention of Adolf Hitler, people in the crowd started cheering, [00:12:00] for apparently Hitler, or quoting Hitler. And that caused them a lot of problems and actually she and I guess I should say I had a small role in that in that I posted that video clip on Twitter and they started attacking me for doing that. But like that was, but before that moment regarding this Hitler quote, a lot of news organizations, and I'm interested in your thoughts on that, but a lot of news organizations, especially local ones, when they would find these, astro turf, fake grassroots groups showing up at school boards, they would take it at face value. And they would just say, Oh, these are just regular parents showing up here.When in fact, these were people in many cases, especially in Virginia, who were you know, hardcore professional political consultants paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They're not just regular, parents showing up.[00:13:00] And you didn't, and you didn't say anything about, people talking about their agenda or anything like that.It was just, they, limited it only to that surface- value analysis. Would you agree with that?WEILL: Yeah. And I think you're totally right to call them astroturf to a degree, because this is a tightly managed nationally run organization. I mean, Media Matters this summer, I think, ran their like national playbook, which is so anti gay. Like, it's just it's homophobia.And yeah, Because it's, it's run on local chapters and also, I think, because the face of it is moms, we have, I think, a very paternalistic, very infantilizing view of motherhood where we say: 'Oh, she's just a mom. This isn't a savvy political organizer. She's a mom.SHEFFIELD: Operative, yeah.WEILL: Exactly. And that's not the case. These are people who have political training. These are people who are very organized, who are very networked, who are well funded. [00:14:00] And so I, I think when a local news outlet covers maybe a, bit of a debate at a school board meeting. They're missing the broader context, which is how is this being replicated across the country? What messaging are they following? What message are they often copy pasting? And most importantly, how is this affecting the children in their district?Because what really grates at me and, if I might also spotlight myself as a mother here, there's so much discussion here about parental rights. We, the parents, some candidates in my town recently had signs, lawn signs, the year of the parent. Where are the kids in this?Because it's this centrality of parents and their rights, and I think it overlooks the oppression and the control of children that they're suggesting, especially when it comes to queer kids, especially when it comes to kids who need extra support in any capacity.I think that's where they're really doing students dirty. [00:15:00]Normal people are now asserting their own parental rightsSHEFFIELD: Mhm. Well, and it's also, they never specify that they only want some parents to have rights. They don't want other parents to have rights. And or to have input into the curriculum. So, if they're a, if they want their child to learn about slavery or they want their child to realize that not being heterosexual is okay.Like those parents don't get any rights. And I think that's also something that's missing often, I feel like.WEILL: Absolutely. And I mean, this group has been part of a real broadside on some of those parents. I mean, bringing it back to the Zieglers on a school board where Bridget Ziegler sits, there's a gay member, there's one gay board member. He has been attacked and smeared in these meetings completely baselessly as a groomer. They use the slur against queer adults, and it's completely to undermine the support network that kids get.It's completely to tell young people that it's not okay to be gay. And it's to, I think, really put [00:16:00] terrifying legal pressures on gay adults for existing.And so, yeah, when they talk about parental rights, they're talking about a very, small subset of the parental base. One thing I broke down in a recent newsletter is the overwhelming unpopularity of book bans and the overwhelming popularity of certain basic liberal programs like free school lunches, that sort of thing.That is the majority of parents who support that. Moms for Liberty is a small minority in that. And so to cast themselves as the voice of parents, the parents crusaders. I mean, even factually, that's not right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's true. And and yet, despite all the machinations and local level achievements in, when people weren't paying attention to them that they, Moms for Liberty was able to achieve.it Seems to me that, the people in the Democratic Party or people in the broader center to left still haven't fully [00:17:00] understood, how they were able to do things and what they were able to achieve and there isn't any real analog to it that's emerged on the, I mean, there, there are some people are trying, but they're not getting so like that, that, that's kind of the, one of the core differences, I think, between the Democrats and the Republicans is that, When, people are trying to do something on the right, and I can say this having been on both sides of the fence now, that when people are trying to do something on the left, no one supports them in the leadership.Whereas when people are trying to do something on the right, money is thrown at them. And people are constantly saying, how can I help you? What can I do for you? Who can I introduce you to? How can I help you achieve the cause and help what we're doing? No one does that on the left. And you had, I guess, must have some sense of that because you started your own website called Mom [00:18:00] Left. You want to talk about that in this context here?WEILL: Yeah. So a couple months ago, I got a newsletter blog up and running called Mom Left. It's a new newsletter for moms on the left. Title's little tongue in cheek, but it emerged out of, being a relatively new mother looking for progressive voices in this space, seeing that there's a huge demand for it, seeing that it's quite popular, but also hearing that the loudest voices in the room are these well funded, very fringe right wing voices.I think there's a few reasons for that to your point, all the funding really gets thrown at the right. And I think maybe that's to counteract the real popularity of left leaning programs when it comes to parenthood, people support public education, people support freedom to read, lack of censorship, that sort of thing.So, I think a Moms for Liberty type group can really be the tip of the spear for a lot of more insidious mainstream [00:19:00] Republican activitiesSHEFFIELD: And Christian right, especially.WEILL: They are hugely networked through the Christian right, absolutely. And that was very evident in their conference this summer. This is very evident in the legal groups that they network with when they are called into any kind of legal jeopardy.So when I was thinking about launching this newsletter, I was looking for the alternatives. I was looking for the voices for moms who are acting in opposition to that. And what I did find was that overwhelmingly moms are opposed to this sort of thing, but that. There's no central organization because I think to organize a group like, Moms for Liberty is a kind of weird thing to do.People aren't really drawn to the antagonistic school war politics that they represent. People don't really want to get into those battles. And so I thought that, there's a void on the left born out of, weirdly, its popularity with parents.SHEFFIELD: [00:20:00] Yeah, no, it's true. And so what's been the response so far that you've been getting from since you've launched it,WEILL: It's been really cool. It's been really affirming. Some of the best messages I've received are from parents of queer kids who are saying, that that there is.An attack on their Children and that they do feel under supported that they do feel like there has been an under investment of resources where they're desperately needed. There's been just a good amount of camaraderie in response to these pieces. I think a lot of. Parents feel similarly or a lot of parents are frankly just appalled at what they're seeing in school board meetings.They're appalled at the right wing takeovers of their school districts, and they want some mechanism for fighting back. And I think some of my writing is certainly spoken to that, and I would love to see other voices in the field. There are others, and I'm just hoping that the discussion around this may be surfaces a few more.[00:21:00]SHEFFIELD: Okay, well, that's great. Good to hear. And, to your point about what parents actually want versus what Moms for Liberty pretends that they want, in the 2023 elections, the Moms for Liberty candidates did very terribly, almost like 100%. I mean, there were, there were some pockets here and there, but overwhelmingly in their big high profile efforts, they failed except for in, the most right wing areas and that we're probably going to do that anyway.And, so it's been interesting to see because, as you were saying, I think people misread the Glen Youngkin victory last in 2022. And actually on, on this podcast, I'm proud to say that we called it that that would not work, that people could not replicate Youngkin's victory because, in Virginia, the party that has control of the presidency and almost never wins the Virginia governorship the [00:22:00] following year historically speaking.And of course, that doesn't mean it's going to always be that the case, but overwhelmingly, like, I believe that in the past 30 or 40 years, only two candidates from the president's party have won the Virginia governor's race in that lineup.And so people, they, seem to misunderstand why he won. And the reality is he probably was going to win just by running a not completely disastrous campaign. And that's what happened. He won and, and, so the Republican party, and unfortunately a lot of the media had also fallen for that narrative as well.But yeah, it, it just didn't work for him in 2023 because people were actually paying attention. It seems like.WEILL: Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's this weird tendency to kind of use Children to argue one's existing priors. And so I think kids really became like this load bearing argument for a much larger discussion [00:23:00] about, gay rights about transgender existence.And so, these, were going to be debates that folks were having anyway, but people on the right found it much easier than to argue. The trans person face to face saying, are you allowed to get medical treatment that you need or not? They found it much easier to say, what about this hypothetical kid who might say that they're trans?Should we allow them to use the preferred pronouns in school? And I think that became just a, very loaded argument that bears a lot of emotional weight for parents. And so was it something that really played a critical role in Virginia? I think to your point, maybe not, maybe it was already a lost cause for Democrats there, but for people who wanted to extract that message from a yunk and when it was very easy for them to do so.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it was. And we'll see, of course, going forward, but it seems like that the Republican party nationally is kind of [00:24:00] trying to edge away from this organization. But of course I'm sure they're not going to be going anywhere because they do, they, the right wing has, wanted for a long time to be able to try to mobilize the minority of women who have reactionary viewpoints.And so they perform a useful function if, it's only that for, for the Republican party and, I'm curious what your sense is, but, in the research that I've done and, the, in my own observation, it does seem like overwhelmingly women who lean right word.Are, extremely religious and there are almost none who are either not religious we're not religious or as best for particularly non Christian. Is that what's your sense on that?WEILL: Yeah, Moms for Liberty is an extremely Christian organization. They'll say that they're not, they'll say that they're [00:25:00] open to everyone.You go to a conference. It is, it's Bible flipping. And. A lot of the justification is offered for their policies is couched in a language like, oh, we're teaching Judeo Christian values. And 1st of all, as a Jewish person, I'm not sure I necessarily feel so comfortable in those circles, but that's a different story.But, yeah, it's an intensely religious. Movements and 1 other thing that I would highlight is that a lot of activists involved for mom with Moms for Liberty are not necessarily people with children in public schools. We have people who are religious homeschoolers who are going to school board meetings and arguing against the right of those children to receive a public education.Often on, grounds of their own religious objections, these are not far removed from people who have argued against evolution being taught in schools. It's just the latest [00:26:00] permutation and they're arguing a very religiously right program in these schools, but sometimes under more updated language.SHEFFIELD: And I think it does, it does also make sense that the to the extent that they would have success in mobilization, it would be of women that it would be through motherhood rather than any other. Organizational paradigm what do you think?WEILL: Absolutely. And, I think to some degree they're onto something because the U. S. does not treat mothers well, we're a country without maternity leave. Our social safety net is paper thin. There's a lot of sense of neglect for mothers, a lot of sense that we've been done dirty. I think a lot of women will take that feeling and look for new outlets for it. Some women are able to find that in reaction.Some of them will lean into this paradigm that's [00:27:00] very common on the Christian right that says that if you want to be truly valued, if you want to be a really good mother and wife and, fulfill your job as a woman, you need to be the subservient figure who doesn't work. Maybe she homeschools her children.She's very cloistered away from society, from solidarity, from power. And for some women, that's, it's a comforting message. It says that at least somebody is going to care for them and look after them. And it affirms their womanhood in a way that I think is appealing for some people. And so it doesn't surprise me at all that.Groups like Moms for Liberty and, zooming out, I think a lot of maybe the like trad wife influencers on TikTok, they're all speaking to that message that you know, dissatisfaction. But the difference is that I don't think most of the women who join up with those movements are ultimately.Going to get the rights and the dignity that they're looking for.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, [00:28:00] no, I, that's a, it's a good point.Why many right-wing women don't live the lifestyle they preach to othersSHEFFIELD: And there's also even attention with these, we'll say traditionally feminine or anti feminist women that, they don't actually fully believe the things that they say, even though they claim to so like, and you can see that.So, like, there's there's this woman named Alex Clark, who is kind of big in that space for anti feminist women and she also is. Has never been married and she's like 29 or 30 or something like that. And yeah, I guess actually in her 30s, I believe, and is constantly lamenting how she can't get dates.(Begin video clip)ALEX CLARK: Every time I tell a guy at the bar, when he asks me, you work in politics, what does that mean? You're conservative? Oh. And they will say, does that mean that you're pro life? And I say, yes. Their eyes light up. Their eyes light up. They grab their friends and like, dude, get a load of this. This girl says she's pro [00:29:00] life.And they're like, so wait, what does that mean? Do you ever agree in abortion in any circumstance? Is there any, circumstances where you think abortion is okay? And I will say, no. I am pro life. No exceptions, no matter what. And then, they're always fascinated by this and floored by this, and they're like, Dude, I've never heard a girl say this.Like, I'm so curious. Like, I always hear the other side, like, a woman's right to choose, her body or her choice. Like, I, like, what do you say to people when they say that? Guys love this! Guys love a conservative woman. At least at the bar. And then, you know, they don't really, they're like, into it, and then they don't text me back.But, hey, you know, tomato tomatoes! Semantics!(End video clip)SHEFFIELD: There are a lot of these anti feminist commentators, women. And they are in this situation, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, those are the ones that come to mind, but a lot of these women, they want something that can't exist, it seems like.They want to be able to have their own agency. But they also think that women should not have power, and it's like, those [00:30:00] things don't work.WEILL: Right. I think a lot of these women have made a very cynical deal where they know that they need the agency that they have. They need the agency that's provided by their careers, by their rights by their independence from men.They've also bought into, and sometimes I mean literally, bought into, they make their money from espousing this paradigm in which, women's worth is derived from their relationships with men. Women's worth is derived by having a man who's like, who she's subservient to and who is her provider and that, her currency is her attractiveness or.Something like that. And I think it's, I think it's extremely, I think it's morally bankrupt to be selling that to young girls as Alex Clark tries to do. We see this in a lot of, I think, TPUSA videos. I mean, it's, untrue. It's, she would be, I think, tremendously dissatisfied in the [00:31:00] life that she is pitching other women on.And she is, outside of this clip, pitching women against going to college, she's saying that your value is, again, it's, contingent on your getting a man. And I don't know how many young women you have listening to your podcast, but I'm telling you that if you're normal and you want a normal partner, you can just do that.And that also does not determine your value, but you do not have to be Alex Clark. That just sets my teeth on edge.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the other thing, it's like, I'm sure that there had been plenty of men that, who agree with her, far right Christian viewpoints that she has found one way or the other over the years, but she hasn't chosen to marry any of them. So in the clip, she bemoans that, we'll say regular men are not interested in someone with her extreme viewpoints.But I'm sure there are guys out there that have those same viewpoints. But she hasn't chosen to marry them. And I think a lot of that [00:32:00] just simply is that, if you're a man who has those views and wants to, quote, unquote, provide for a woman, it's also usually a code for you want to control her. And Alex Clark doesn't want to be controlled. So, that's probably why she hasn't gotten married to somebody who has her viewpoints.It's like they live in a bubble of cognitive dissonance, their entire existence is wrapped in it. And it's tough to say, I mean, ultimately, whether this is just purely cynical or it's cognitive dissonance or whatever it is, but it's not, it's clearly is not a good way to live for her, based on what she said.WEILL: It's not, and, I've seen this born out another right wing women's influences, all of them quite far. Right. White Christian women. And they're unhappy. I'm thinking about figures like Lauren Southern, who made this, who was fielding all these questions about why she wasn't married.Finally, I think did get married, [00:33:00] husband left had some kind of breakdown where she lived in a trailer park for a bit. You're not pitching yourself in a world that values your dignity. I, can go on. There are other figures. There's a like radical Mormon figure who was huge on having as many kids as possible and was blogging about it.And I was reading her blog and it's all the comments are men saying, if you're really this good wife, why are you online? Why are we hearing from you at all? So again, this is not a paradigm in which these women can exist in as influencers. So I think maybe to a degree, they know that the life that they're pitching for themselves, that they're pitching for their followers would make them unhappy.And so they are getting, The freedom afforded to them, ironically, by a culture that provides at least some abortion rights, that provides no fault divorce, that has some [00:34:00] value for women's independence and dignity. And they are, actively campaigning against that while also profiting from it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, it is a really it's, just, it's sad in a number of ways, but it's also, upsetting as well. And for those who haven't seen it, the TV series The Handmaid's Tale actually does deal with this dynamic very well, with one of the characters who was definitely doing that. So if you haven't seen that, I definitely would encourage you if you're interested in that, this sort of exploration of this type of subject.Have you seen it?WEILL: I saw the first couple seasons of it. And yeah, I agree. I mean, ultimately, if you're a woman cheering on this sort of thing, you're cheering for the wrong team. I think some women on the far right do understand either explicitly or tacitly that they are arguing for their own ends to the extent that they [00:35:00] are arguing against queer parents that they're arguing against women of color.So they are trying to get some measure of edge over people who are, not straight white women. But, if their preferred program ever did come into existence, it would place them wildly inferior to men. And I think, yes, they do dress that up with this romantic talk about having a provider and being a real woman and that clearly, and as is evidenced in their personal choices, would not make them happy.SHEFFIELD: And of course there's nothing wrong if that's what somebody wants to do. But what's wrong is forcing everybody else. To make that so it's actually not a choice, that it's mandatory. That's ultimately what the problem is here.All right. So, just going back to the Moms for Liberty and the Christian Ziegler scandal, that's to what you were saying about some of this there, there's also a lot of hypocrisy involved [00:36:00] as well, because, in the case of Bridget Ziegler, this is a woman who very clearly is bisexual, and having a relationship with a woman, but at the same time, actively going and trying to not allow other people to be something other than heterosexual in public as a matter of public policy. It's, just really, it's really disgusting, frankly.WEILL: It is. It's upsetting. And, we don't know the full extent of this relationship. We only know from a police report that Bridget did say, I have been in a relationship with this woman before.Clearly, they planned on doing it again. And, that's completely her business. And those are absolutely her right to do.The trouble is, though, where she is part of a movement that teaches children that it's degenerate to do exactly what she's accused of doing. It's the trouble is that she sits on a school board where she has enabled the harassment of a gay colleague, not just, [00:37:00] the harassment, but smearing him as a quote groomer for, being gay.She didn't say that, but she allowed those comments to continue while she was chairing the board.I think the hypocrisy there is it's stunning, but it also reminds me that for a lot of folks on the right. It's not so much about internal ideological consistency as it is about power. They can, you can be gay on the right and still advance an argument that ultimately does not work in your favor, but is working to crush people who don't have who are much more vulnerable to anti gay legislation.So, if. It were punishable to be by in Florida. Well, I don't think someone like Bridget Ziegler would really be the the first person in line to be harmed by these kinds of policies. So, they are exacting this very like Christian hegemony while also,[00:38:00] doing a lot of the same things that they're, that they denigrate in their enemies.It's just, it's wildly hypocritical. And yet there are. March toward power advances.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No. And that's a good point because, ultimately their main motivation is will to power rather than a policy agenda. Like there, there, are some policies that they want, but ultimately, they could in their ideal world basically all be passed in one week, and they wouldn't really have any other policies left to put forward-- in the sense that, they don't have fully formed policy viewpoints. And you see this with the Trump administration that ended in 2021 that, they, had no idea how to manage the bureaucracy.They had no idea who to hire. They had no idea how to execute anything that they wanted. Because they, or like what they said they wanted, they, once they had the power, they [00:39:00] couldn't really do anything with it. Other than engage in retribution against disfavored groups. But in terms of actually helping the people that they voted for them, they really had no idea or apparent interest.WEILL: Right. I think a lot of these people run and govern on grievance politics, right? Trump, I think his, True dream would be someone who calls into Fox News and gets called, sir, all the time. Well, in vain against immigrants and that sort of thing with a lot of these folks, it's not so much about having a fully realized ideology or program so much as it is about domineering and aggression about being at the top of a hierarchy.And certainly you can advance that while also holding some attributes that. Your ideology, if implemented consistently, would hammer down. And so that's why I, I think it's so interesting that Trump won [00:40:00] so much of the evangelical vote, even though he is, on his face should be repugnant to them, right?He's a womanizer, he's been divorced. Bunch of times he's been accused of sexual assault a bunch of times, but if you drill down into it, and I'm very grateful actually for the work that some Christian scholars on the left have done, they said, it looks like theologically he is misaligned with evangelicals, but in the actual political underpinnings, this will to power, this will to domination, he represents a lot of this aggressive, masculine Christianity that they're lining up behind.And so, I think there's a real disparity between what they preach, what they say their political program is and what they really want to enact.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, exactly.Republicans show they will throw away lower-level politicians but they fear dumping TrumpSHEFFIELD: But it is interesting that with regard to Christian Ziegler it seems like he's getting thrown under the bus by the Republican party in Florida and, and, we kind of saw that recently [00:41:00] with George Santos getting expelled and.Just under half of the Republican caucus in the house voting to expel him. But at the same time, they refuse to take any action against Donald Trump that is meaningful. What do you think is the dynamic? Why is there a, why are they willing to not defend certain people, but, are willing to do anything seemingly for Trump?WEILL: I think Trump is just too useful for them to discard. He represents this huge base that is, not necessarily aligned with the orthodoxy of the Republican party. He speaks to so much latent bigoted rage that I don't think any previous candidate was able to tap that he has this cult of personality around him.And for the GOP to discard him would be certainly, it would be earth shaking for them. It would be very I think maybe politically unwise. He's certainly far and away the. [00:42:00] runner for the 2024 election. But when you get to a figure like Christian Ziegler, I think a lot of people say who, or you get to a George Santos, who, I mean, a man, he's just criming left and right.He has like some scam with stolen puppies from an Amish puppy mill. Like you just can't make it up with this guy. There's nobody really lining up to say, Hey, I'm behind the puppy mill guy. It's so I think occasionally someone will have to take the fall. Occasionally someone is a combination of too toxic and not valuable enough for them to defend.And so you can swap out the Florida Republican chair quite easily. It's not a big deal. You can, you can get somebody else to run in a hard right district in Long Island. It's not a huge deal. So I think they understand that, not everything is not every scandal needs to be fought to the death.Flat Earthers are more of a thing than you might think, and almost all are far-right ChristiansSHEFFIELD: And so your interest in sort of, far right groups and organizations, you've had that for a while and you came out with a book on that topic. Let's talk about that book called Off the Edge. What was tell us about what, did you cover in that book?WEILL: Sure. So off the, yeah. Off the Edge is the product of my years long fascination and involvement with the Flat Earth Movement. I have, for ages, been so fascinated with conspiracy theories, what they say about how we believe, what we allow ourselves to believe, and increasingly their role in politics.And that also, overlaps with some of my interest in weird and, Dark internet spaces. So while working as a reporter at the daily beast covering the far right, I started seeing a lot of neo Nazis who seem to believe in flat earth. And I said, they must be kidding. This [00:44:00] must be a joke. And I dug into it and it was not a joke.So I spent years going to flat earth conferences, hanging out with these folks, meeting some really interesting characters, some characters who I think are a lot smarter than people would. Imagine of flat earthers, a guy who built his own rocket ship to blast up and see how, if he could see any curvature really I'll say unique thinkers.Some of that is not necessarily praise, but some of it was certainly challenging to me and interesting in the way that I interrogate how people think and believe. And so off the edge is the culmination of that.SHEFFIELD: Okay. And then. No, it's, and it's interesting you you touched on something that I think that does, it bedevils a lot of, public reaction to conspiracy movements is that, I think a lot of people, they, find it hard to believe [00:45:00] that these things are real.Even with Donald Trump, a lot of these extreme policies he's talked about doing, like building concentration camps for unauthorized immigrants, rounding them up and putting them into a concentration camp with, millions of people in it and, and these are things that he's, is people actively say, and, person, imprisoning people who don't do what he says who are government employees or firing them or even executing them in the case of of general Millie, he had said yeah.there is this, I don't know, it's, to some degree, people, these ideas are so out there. They're so crazy. They're so awful that do people who disagree with them, like. Is there, is that, a challenge in your viewpoint of getting people to accept these things are real and they're coming for you?WEILL: It is challenging. And I think part of the reason I took [00:46:00] up flat earth as an example, when I was looking to write a book about conspiracy beliefs is that flat earth is almost the hardest to believe that anybody believes is it's so out there that I think it really served as a stand in for, look, people can believe.Anything. And so in writing that book, not only did I speak to a lot of folks who believe in flat earth, I talked to a lot of psychologists. I read a lot of studies. And, what I learned was that conspiracy belief. It's not necessarily it's not a logical. Brain process, but what it is doing is it's it's serving as a coping mechanism for a lot of folks.It's providing stability for people who don't want to believe the available answers or who think that there's not a satisfactory answer for the world that they're presented with conspiracy theories. And I think this is especially important in politics are also, I found a form of identity formation when [00:47:00] you don't want to believe some reality in front of you, say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, conspiracy theories allow you to link with other like minded people to form this sense of self and the sense of community, really, with other people who agree with you.Flat earthers are almost like building their own reality, a very small one, but this circle of people who say it's us against literally the rest of the world. And I think for people of the community who do feel very isolated, who do feel very lost or maybe confused or antagonistic against the rest of the world, having a flat earth community for them is huge.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. So if you were to make some generalizations though, is this religious reasons or other reasons predominantly that the flat earthers are into it?WEILL: Religion is the biggest one. One way that a lot of people I've spoke to have gotten into it is [00:48:00] by extreme biblical literalism, also very cherry picked biblical literalism. So they'll go looking for some, in the case of one guy I spoke to looking for some answer about, say, the floods of the Bible, and they'll find a YouTube video that says, actually, if you read it the way that the Bible was meant to be read, you'll see that there are all these references to circles and to the plane. And that, the only way to be a real Christian is to accept the reality of God's perfect, flat earth.So for a lot of them, it is religious. And I also, to go back to the point I made earlier about this, not necessarily being logical. I think having a conspiracy to that degree, a conspiracy that's so out there and invalidating of every other fact is that once you accept it on extremely tenuous, like religious grounds, It allows you to throw away all the other facts that you don't want to contemplate either.[00:49:00]So you could say that you know, Bible says flat earth. Oh, wow. Everybody else is wrong. Let's see what else is wrong about. And you get into all kinds of anti Semitic conspiracy theories. You get into a bizarre health hoaxes, anti vax belief, things that are more immediately dangerous for you than flatter.So I think a lot of it is religiously, it has a religious hook, but then it has a real ideological selling point for people who believe,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's, a way of constructing an alternative reality for yourself to live in and and like, that's, that is ultimately the, larger sort of meta crisis of this moment in human history is that, we, for, most of humanity's history, our people who.Who didn't believe in reality or who had false beliefs, they couldn't organize themselves, but now they can. [00:50:00] and they're, trying to go against everybody else. And, that's, I think is, the challenge. But anyway it's, been a great discussion. I'm glad you can join me today.WEILL: So thanks so much for having me. Yeah, it's been wonderful.SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today. 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SummaryIt’s only a matter of weeks until the presidential election year of 2024 begins, and many Democrats across the country are starting to panic as more than a few public opinion surveys have shown that President Joe Biden trails the criminal ex-president Donald Trump. Even more concerningly, there have been polls showing that even though Trump sent armed militia members to invade the Capitol and attempt to kill then-vice president Mike Pence, many Americans think that Democrats are more extreme than Republicans.Many of the more centrist or conservative Democrats are telling Biden to stop supporting transgender rights or to explicitly disown racial justice advocates in the hopes that doing so will make Americans think he is acceptably moderate. Other people are telling Biden to use public opinion surveys to come up with the “perfect message” that will somehow be able to resonate with everyone.One thing that pretty much all of them miss is that in the social media age, quantity matters more than quality. You can have a perfect message, but if it’s shouted down by right-wing lies and bluster, it won’t matter because no one will ever hear it.In this episode, Matthew is joined by Parker Molloy to discuss. She’s the creator of the blog The Present Age, and is a former editor-at-large for Media Matters of America.The video of the conversation will be available beginning at 10am PT on December 18. The transcript of the edited audio follows.Membership BenefitsThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.About the ShowTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Social MediaMastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldTwitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffieldBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/matthew.flux.communityThreads: https://www.threads.net/@realmattsheffieldGuest Info https://www.readtpa.comhttps://bsky.app/profile/parkermolloy.comhttps://twitter.com/parkermolloyAudio TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Joining me today to talk about this scenario is the first-ever repeat guest on Theory of Change, Parker Malloy. She is the proprietor and author behind The Present Age, which is a blog you should definitely subscribe to. Thanks for being here.PARKER MOLLOY: Thanks so much for having me. It’s good to be the first repeat guest.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so the Democratic Party, right now, it’s in a bit of a crisis as the polling has been not so great for Joe Biden relative to Donald Trump. And I wanted to talk about it in that context. Lately we’ve been hearing from a bunch of people saying that the public thinks that the Democratic Party is extreme on, especially on social issues. Whether that be something like racial injustice or trans rights or teaching about alternative family structures in schools and things like that.And I have to say it’s kind of baffling to hear. Because [00:04:00] it’s not supported by the data at all, especially given the 2023 elections where so many of these far-right Christian supremacist people went down hard. I guess it’s not a surprise to you though. You’ve been around the block a few times.MOLLOY: Right. One thing about this, that the reason behind that in my opinion, is that on social issues, on these sorts of culture war issues — like trans issues especially I think part of the issue is that Republicans go on offense on that a lot, where they, go out there and they say: ‘Look at the Democrats who have this this crazy over the top view. Here’s what the Democrats believe. They want to put boys in your bathrooms. They want men to win women’s sports.’They say all of these things, and they tell you what Democrats believe, even though that is not at all how Democrats would frame their [00:05:00] beliefs or talk about their beliefs. But because (Democrats) are so afraid of sounding extreme, they just kind of cede the ground to Republicans to set the public opinion themselves.So in a lot of cases, Democrats seem to think that they can just not talk about trans issues. Or that they can not talk about abortion and that will be good enough. Because it will get, people will focus on the important things or the financial issues, the kitchen table issues, but these are all important things.These are all important policies. And when you don’t go on offense, which, with the exception of the 2022 election, Democrats tend to not go on offense when it comes to abortion. When you won’t go on offense, you let them set the terms of the debate.So Republicans will go out there. And they will say Democrats want you to be able to murder babies up until 30 days after they’re born. Democrats want these partial birth [00:06:00] abortions and all of these things, over and over.And the same kind of stuff happens with trans issues. And because Democrats aren’t out there saying what they believe in and making a proactive case, which in on both abortion and LGBT issues, it comes down to the same exact thing where people should be able to make their own decisions about their own lives. Whether it’s their healthcare, whether it’s who they want to get married to, whether it’s who they are. People need to have the freedom to choose the right path for them and to take whatever action they believe they need to take.And that’s a reasonable point of view. But if instead of doing that, you let Republicans frame it as look at these baby killers and they want LeBron to dominate the WNBA. It makes no sense to allow your views, which are reasonable and [00:07:00] actually fairly conservative in a small government kind of way, if you do that. Like, why would you allow them to set the terms there?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and the other thing about this approach is that they suppose that the right wing will ease off if you just stop talking about this stuff.Like you look at the ideas about reforming police systems or training like that. So that was branded by a handful of far left people as "defund the police." Completely eliminate police departments and reconstitute them. That was never a policy that was embraced by the Democratic Party.And in fact, they explicitly, Joe Biden in speeches, explicitly said he wants to fund the police. And so, here you have a scenario where the party itself from the top explicitly went in the strategy that they’re saying they want to do with regard to trans people or [00:08:00] race or abortion and it didn’t work.The right is still saying that every Democrat wants to defund the police. So it’s not about how you frame stuff. And I guess maybe this is something that people who have always been on the left, it’s harder for them to understand. So maybe you can tell me, but as somebody who was on the right, what I realize is that there’s a fixation in the establishment Democratic party to find the perfect message. And if we can just make a thousand polls, we’ll come up with just the right phrasing and issues. And it’s like, that doesn’t actually matter. The message matters less than how often people hear it. Quantity matters more than quality. And they don’t understand that I feel like.MOLLOY: Yeah, I mean, obviously, you want to have something that sounds good, that sounds uncontroversial, but, yeah, you have a great point. I mean, the advantage the right [00:09:00] has is in its approach to media generally.I mean, Fox News can —SHEFFIELD: And advocacy, yeah.MOLLOY: Yeah, media and advocacy. Back when I worked at Media Matters, it was right after the Green New Deal was announced, right after it was introduced. It was just a seven-page promise to take climate change seriously. It was non-binding. There was nothing really to it, but Republicans and specifically Republicans on Fox News were talking about how, oh, if this passes, it would ban train travel. There, there would need to be trains that go to Hawaii and it would ban airplanes. And cows would, you would be forced to become a vegetarian and eat bugs. And all of this stuff where it was just so much nonsense.It’s hard to beat, but months later, polling on the Green New Deal was horrible, especially for people who got their news from Fox or Breitbart or other right wing out outlets.And [00:10:00] there’s just nothing on the left that can really compete with that. And I think that there are a lot of people in denial about the importance of being able to compete in the media world. Fox is there. There is no left wing Fox. Mehdi Hassan just got his show canceled on NBC. And Michael Steele, the former Republican party chair, he’s going to host his show now. He’s getting his own, like he and three other people are now going to host a round table type show. There is no left wing Fox News, as much as people like to pretend that there is.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, not only is there no left wing Fox, but there’s also like five other right wing networks on top of Fox. So you’ve got Newsmax, you’ve got News Nation, you’ve got OAN, you’ve got Real America’s Voice, and apparently there’s some new one that started up whose name I don’t recall right now. But yeah, they just keep coming because they understand that you have [00:11:00] to get the message out, and you have to talk to people where they are.There is something to polling analysis about how the Democratic party has to some degree become sort of out of touch with maybe, less educated or nonpolitical obsessives. I think there is something to that, but it’s more about how do they understand how to talk about things, not about what their ideas are.So like if you look at Joe Biden’s actual policy programs, he has, he literally has been, check the box on almost every economically progressive idea short of, universal healthcare. He expanded Obamacare, he had, for a long time until Joe Manchin made him get rid of it, expanded the child tax credit, he forgave lots of student loan debt, he pushed forward an immense amount of infrastructure spending and environmental, boosting electric cars and things like that.Like from an economic standpoint, he did everything that they told him to [00:12:00] do. And it hasn’t worked. And they don’t want to accept that and realize that that impact has happened.MOLLOY: Yeah. And I think that part of that has to do with not wanting to accept that people aren’t as plugged in to politics as, as people who are super plugged into politics seem to think everyone is as plugged in.Because most people don’t keep up with the individual things that pass, that get implemented, the small policies here and there, most people don’t know that stuff.Every once in a while, I’ll see some interview where someone will say — there was a woman I think was interviewed by the New York Times recently, who said that she was thinking of voting for Trump because she supports abortion. And it was something where the interviewer had to be like, well, Trump’s actually on the opposite side of this, but her take was that Roe was overturned and Biden was president. That’s what she knew. That’s what people know.And it’s really difficult to just hope that people notice that you’re doing good work, [00:13:00] especially when your opponents are going to be out there with a massive media and advocacy apparatus telling people that you’re evil and that every problem in the country is because of your policies.They never specify, no one ever says why they think Biden’s policies cause gas to go up or inflation. It’s just Joe Biden is president, inflation is bad. You should punish him for that.It’s not about policy. There’s no way to just magically fix the problem by changing his stance on anything. It’s never been about policy.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and especially it isn’t for a lot of people because they just don’t understand what the policy is. And you constantly see Democrats on any available platform saying that: ‘Oh, people don’t give Joe Biden the credit for doing X, Y, or Z.’ And they don’t, because guess what? It is not the responsibility of the mainstream media to do that. Whose responsibility [00:14:00] is that? It’s the Democrats’ responsibility.MOLLOY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: It is the left wing’s responsibility. And until you understand that — they just keep getting frustrated over and over. It is what I call the myopia of intelligence.Because you have mapped out something and the reason for something being, five or six levels deep, and this is why something happened and why, what in my response to it is this and that, and you’ve got it all mapped out. And then you ask somebody else, well, why did this thing happen? Oh, because I didn’t like it.And that’s how politics works as well. People, they don’t operate at the same level, and you should stop assuming that they do. And this is a paradigm that repeats over and over, especially with Donald Trump, who really does understand this sort of more basic level of communication so much better than Democrats or even other Republicans do.MOLLOY: Yeah, I mean, he’s, he’s able to connect with people who are receptive to his message. [00:15:00] I mean, I feel like he understands it and that it’s just kind of his natural, his natural place with that. But you know, people are really bad with cause and effect generally. Especially when we’re talking about things like gas prices or inflation. I mean do people know, oh, well the Fed raised interest rates and that affects like.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, or do they know about inflation in other countries and how it’s higher than here?MOLLOY: Yeah, and that’s something that, I know that this gets talked about on social media, on Twitter a lot, oh, is the economy good? Is the economy bad? And really, it’s a question of is the economy good compared to other countries. It’s kind of good relative to the rest of the world because the pandemic was going to cause some chaos, going to wreak some havoc. And it did. And trying to recover from that is, is a challenge that every single country on the planet had to deal with and has to deal with.And it seems like the U S is doing [00:16:00] relatively well compared to other countries when it comes to employment or inflation, but people just, people see prices go up on something, and they think ‘This is bad. I don’t like this. That’s too expensive. It shouldn’t be that expensive.’And there’s no consideration about whether it’s worse than other countries or not, because it affects them personally. They don’t know about that. And they don’t know about it. And even if they did, you wouldn’t blame them for going: ‘So what, it’s still too expensive for me. This is still making me feel bad about how things are. This is limiting what I can purchase. You can tell me it’s a good economy, but it’s still costing me more to get less and that’s frustrating.’And I can, I understand people who have that.SHEFFIELD: And that’s the reality that they live in.MOLLOY: Yeah. Right. And I understand people getting frustrated about that sort of messaging because really, it’s not a question of should Joe Biden be praised for inflation only being [00:17:00] whatever, and it’s less that and more.SHEFFIELD: That’s a terrible message.MOLLOY: Yeah. Do you think that there are policy changes that could be made that would have resulted in a better outcome? And that I don’t know that the answer is yes. I’m not there’s nothing obvious. It’s not like —SHEFFIELD: Well, actually, I think there are a few things he could do, but it’s interesting that they refuse to even entertain it. So gas prices, fundamentally, are kind of the core vulnerability here that Biden is facing.And it is true that they’ve been going down. But Biden could actually lower the federal gas tax. And that actually would drastically lower people’s costs if he did that. So that’s one thing he could do. And another thing that he could do also, but this is heresy.It’s interesting what’s heresy to Democratic elites. Throwing trans people or black people under the bus, that’s okay. But saying, [00:18:00] hey, you know what, maybe we should have more American oil production in wells that already exist. It already exists instead of outsourcing our oil to Russia and Saudi Arabia, maybe we should have some more ethical oil in this country to take the pressure off of our foreign reliance.No one even talks about that. And yet that would be something that would be a dramatic improvement for people if they had done that.MOLLOY: Well, and also, I mean, energy production under Biden has been up, it’s just, those are the things that Democrats, when they do them, when they make those accomplishments, those are not typically the things they brag about, because when they do, you do have Democratic voters going, well, wait, why is more oil better? Why is more natural gas better than the alternative? So like, I think that there’s a real reluctance to hype up those sorts of [00:19:00] accomplishments. Because it can backfire with a certain portion of the base.SHEFFIELD: That is why they do that, but it is interesting what they choose to not do so. And Biden, to his credit, has not done what a lot of these people have told him to do with regard to social controversies by the right wing. Not by and large, but it’s interesting that there isn’t anybody out there saying: ‘Look, when you look at polls, the gas prices are what people care about. And that they drive inflation and so therefore you should do this.’Like this is something that would directly impact his vulnerability. And the right wing is not going to shut up about racial justice advocates. They’re not going to shut up about trans people. They’re not going to shut up about any of these things regardless of what you say about them. ‘You’re a communist, radical Marxist trying to make everyone into a lesbian, transgender person.’ That’s [00:20:00] what they’re going to say, regardless of what you do.So you should take advantage of something that people could see themselves and actually that you had done it. They would know that you did.MOLLOY: Oh yeah. Well, absolutely. And one benefit that, or one huge advantage that Republicans have on this sort of stuff is the ability to, as you mentioned with defund the police where it’s like, make that the Democrats’ view on everything, to take the words of a few individuals, a few activists, a small handful of people, and to say, ‘this is what Democrats believe,’ even though they were all saying, I do not believe this.Democrats still got labeled as the defund the police party, and that happens so often, where Republicans are able to successfully weaponize the voices of, they’ll find someone saying something ridiculous and they’ll make that, they’ll point to that person and say, that is the [00:21:00] left, that is the left. And that is what they all believe. And you should let that, that, that taint how you view them from here on out.And that is, it’s frustrating because there’s not something similar on the left when it comes to the right. And there’s not the kind of overflow of, if someone on the right.If somebody has an event at a school canceled because of protests, they’re going to get on Fox and Friends the next day. And then they’re going to get invited back for Hannity. And then they’re going to become a big figure in right wing media.That is just something that happens. If someone on the left has a speech of theirs canceled, has an event of theirs shut down, they’re not getting invited on Morning Joe the next day.And even if they were somehow, there wouldn’t be the same kind of: ‘Oh, you poor victim’ kind of approach to it.There’s just no springboard into this broader [00:22:00] public consciousness that the left can use the way the right does. And I think that it’s really helpful for them.Because people judge Democrats for things that activists say. People seem not to judge Republicans for the things that elected Republicans themselves say. There’s this perception that there was an activist who said, "defund the police" and therefore that’s the Democratic Party’s view. But then you have a bunch of Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene saying all sorts of wild nonsense, and no one goes, well, that’s what all Republicans believe.It’s just not, it just doesn’t happen that way. And it’s got to be frustrating.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it is, I have to say it is, as somebody who moved from the right to the left, it is astonishing to me how little that people in the left have learned from the explosion of right wing media.There are a few halting attempts at creating advocacy [00:23:00] center left media, but the donors seem to think: ‘Well, we only want to have one of each of these things, one. And everybody will read that one website.’And it’s like, no, they will not number one. And they have this idea, with regard to pushing some interesting talking point or message or something, they’ll say, oh, well, I got a, an op-ed in the New York Times, so my job’s done. Or I helped inject messages into an Atlantic cover story, the job’s done. Most people, even people who read those publications, most of them didn’t see that story. The readers of those publications did not see that story, let alone everybody else. And it is incredible to me that they don’t understand that. The paradox is that the right and the left seem to have about the same amount of money. It’s just that the right spends it so much more efficiently and so [00:24:00] much more in a sustainable way. They’ve created an ecosystem that is self-perpetuating from top to bottom.In software development, we call it this idea of the "full stack" that you’re building an application one upon another upon another, and they all function together as a really complex system that doesn’t really exist on the left.So like on the right, they’ve got talent development and student outreach organizations like Turning Point USA and Leadership Institute and a whole bunch of these things. Then they’ve got organizations dedicated solely to being jobs, banks and career development organizations where you can go to them and say, hey, I need a job and I know how to do these things. Can you help me? And they say, yes, let me send your resume out to people and help you get a job.And then on top of that, they’ve got multiple PR firms that are constantly trolling the organic right wing media ecosystem [00:25:00] for stories and people and personalities and pulling them up from obscurity, like Joe the Plumber. I mean, just a variety of these people that are just random individuals and they have been elevated by this structure that deliberately seeks to do that.Candace Owens was just a random YouTuber who was posting racist videos of people at construction sites. That’s what she was doing. And she was plucked from obscurity by somebody who said: ‘Hey, this is somebody who has potential as an advocate for us.’And then on top of that, they’ve got multiple layers of advocacy media who all interact with each other and are constantly stealing stories from each other.And then on top of that, they’ve got the pollsters and the consultants who are always listening through this full stack to what are messages that people like and how can we get our base excited about stuff.And that’s why they so quickly, like this Moms for Liberty group just came out of f*****g nowhere and [00:26:00] became a massive multimillion dollar organization with tons of institutional support. Because they understand that you have to work together. And when you do, not only do you, are you able to get what you want, but you’re also able to grow the ecosystem.So having multiple, propaganda channels for them is helpful. It’s not hurtful to them because all of these people get money from each other and share their audiences, cross pollinate. I mean, it’s just incredible what they’ve done, and how no one with money on the left has said: ‘Hey, maybe these people actually know some stuff. Maybe we should look at what they’ve done. They don’t.’It’s incredible.MOLLOY: Yeah. I mean, no argument from me on that.SHEFFIELD: Okay. I guess I did go on at extended length there a bit.MOLLOY: No, I mean, you made the point perfectly though. They really have all of these built-in advantages and [00:27:00] I wish I knew more of what the left could do, because obviously, I find the ideas pushed on the right horrible, especially when it’s stuff about trans people that affects me personally. So it is frustrating.It’s very frustrating from the outside as someone who’s kind of worked on the periphery of this, a little bit when it comes to working at Media Matters, for instance.When I was there, it’s like that is kind of a small little example of what could be if you had a bunch of organizations like that. If you had investments into these like the right has investments into. You’ve got Ben Shapiro’s show Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire going out there and making full-on movies and cartoons now. And there’s no one on the left with that much money to play with and make their own content like that, that is just so nakedly propagandistic.Because it’s not like the [00:28:00] Daily Wire made Lady Ballers as a genuine ‘let’s try to make a big profit’ kind of thing. No, they made it because it’s propaganda.And most of the time when people make movies where it’s like: ‘Oh yeah, we’re making a joke out of a certain group of people,’ they’ll kind of be like, ‘well, I don’t mean it that way. It’s obviously it’s all in good fun.’But no, after they announced that movie and after that movie came out, you had every Daily Wire person being like, yes, trans people are evil and shouldn’t exist, they’re like, that was the point of our movie to convince people of this, to make you think that they’re ridiculous.And it’s the exact kind of stuff that they claim that Disney is doing. They claim that all these other places are doing, and that’s how they justify it too.They go: ‘No, no, no, we’re not trying to indoctrinate people. We’re not trying to brainwash them. We’re just taking what the left is doing and we’re giving them a taste of their own medicine.’But the whole idea that this is something that the left is already doing is nonsense. [00:29:00] And there’s also this idea that trans people on college campuses never get harassed or given a hard time. People are like, oh, you, people care more about getting the wrong, getting the pronouns of people right rather than making sure that some students can feel safe or whatever like that.Like all these things come up. And no, the truth is that colleges and employers and institutions generally don’t care about anti trans discrimination. They’re more than happy to throw trans people under the bus whenever.I mean, you had Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer, Bud Light sent her one can of beer with her face on it to do one ad on her Instagram channel to her own audience, not a wider audience, and conservatives still will yell about that and be like, Bud Light went woke because they decided to advertise to one influencer’s fans, existing fans, and it’s not [00:30:00] like she wasSHEFFIELD: Which they do with like a hundred other people.MOLLOY: Yeah, exactly. It’s not like she was the only one. They do all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds with all sorts of followings. That’s the whole point of advertising. But no, they made it seem like, oh, well, Bud Light did a big national campaign, and they were putting her face on all the beer. And it became this big story.And that really frustrates me is this idea that trans people have it super good right now. ‘Oh, trans people, we can’t even say anything about you. We have to tell you that you’re stunning and brave.’ Which stunning and brave is a line from South Park, the episode where they made fun of Caitlyn Jenner. And they’ve just been repeating it ever since.And Caitlyn Jenner’s a terrible person, horrible person, total monster. But it’s so annoying that that gets brought up, where it’s like, no, trans people always get dumped on by society as a whole.SHEFFIELD: And without repercussion either.MOLLOY: Yeah. Well, exactly.SHEFFIELD: Like Dave Chappelle. That seems to [00:31:00] be the centerpiece of his act now. And now he’s posing for pictures with Lauren Boebert.MOLLOY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Like this guy is as far from canceled as you could possibly be.MOLLOY: Yeah. Well, and that’s, what’s kind of been really shocking to watch happen. There are things that if you say them that they will get you more or less pushed out of public life.Some of these things, absolutely, you can definitely see that, I mean, you had Kanye West going out there and praising Hitler. And people pretty fully were like, no, you have to go away now. You are not going to be part of everything happening here. And he tries to do his comeback and all that stuff.I think it’s good that there are some things that if you say people will go: ‘That’s not cool. That’s not okay.’ And what Kanye did is a great example of it, [00:32:00] but there was that congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. And it’s so bizarre to watch people who’ve spent the past decade making arguments against snowflakes and safe spaces and words are violence, like all of these things just nonstop ‘there should be open debate, there needs to be free speech and open debate’ and all of this stuff.And then this hearing happens where they’re debating slogans and chants for students who are supporting Palestine against Israel. It’s weird to see the same people who justified anti trans bullying and white supremacist bullying of people of color just now being like, no, you can’t, people have a right to feel safe on campus, to not be bothered by others around them for their views, to be protected, to have a safe space [00:33:00] essentially.The people pushing that most, lots of Republicans in Congress, they don’t care about this. And they don’t mean to extend all of this stuff wider.When the president of the University of Pennsylvania responded to the backlash, she said something along the lines of how maybe the school needs to have a more restrictive speech culture, and the people who were mad at her for not categorically saying that calls of Intifada were genocidal, for not saying that the mentions of that would get someone banned from campus — just flip right back to, no, you, you can’t have a more restrictive part on campus. We just want you to treat, all instances of hate the same.And the truth is that they have a very, very warped view of what actually happens on campus. They believe that trans people are [00:34:00] protected, that trans people never get bothered. They believe that black students never get harassed. That they don’t have to deal with racism. But the truth is that both of those things happen. Especially, I mean, at the University of Pennsylvania. You there’s a professor there who is notorious for saying super racist things who for years has been protected by the right as some free speech martyr. And she has not lost her job for that.And it seemed odd watching the other day as people were mad that Harvard and Penn and MIT or whatever, that they didn’t do a complete 180 on that, on speech.They’re doing what the right has been pushing them to do for years. And now the right is saying no, do the opposite. We would like safe spaces, just not for them, not for trans people, not for people of color, just for Republicans.SHEFFIELD: It’s not even about stopping anti Semitism at large, [00:35:00] because you can see that. I mean, Elon Musk has made very clear like what his priorities are.MOLLOY: Yeah. I mean, Elise Stefanik, she had promoted the "great replacement" conspiracy theory. But she’s the big champion against antisemitism? No, it’s hard to take people seriously where they’re constantly flip flopping on what they say in public.And I found a lot of that — this is maybe just a tiny bit off subject — but I saw a lot of that in the way that people responded to the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer coming out. You had people going — people who had for years been railing against censorship and complaining about not having free speech to say everything they want and to being shamed into self-censorship, criticizing any form of criticism as stifling their expression- then seeing the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer and going: ‘Oh, this needs to be banned. This needs to be banned.’SHEFFIELD: For those who don’t [00:36:00] know about it yet. What was that?MOLLOY: Oh yeah. So, Grand Theft Auto famously has violence and sex and in the early 2000s, efforts to ban and crack down on violent video games were, massive. There was a huge one.And so the latest iteration of this game is going to come out in 2025 and the trailer for it dropped, and you can see in the trailer that it’s going to have a lot of the same, it’s going to have sexual content, it’s going to have violence. The game is marketed to adults. It’s rated M, which is their mature rating, meaning that they can only be sold to people over 18.And so you’ve got that, but then the response from a weird number of people on social media was: ‘Oh, this needs to be banned.’Elon Musk was jumping in there being like, I don’t like, I tried to play Grand Theft Auto V, and I didn’t like it because it made you shoot at the police. Now [00:37:00] he’s like, I had to shut it off.And that’s the very first scene in that game that he’s describing.And someone else was like, oh yeah, I don’t like committing crimes in games. And he’s talking, he’s like, no, I, oh, I don’t, violence, no but it’s so strange to watch people just flip back and forth on things.Oh, things are too restrictive. Oh, things are, this, this goes too far, it needs to be restricted.That sort of argument that goes back and forth and it plays out on college campuses, and it plays out on Twitter all the time. You get guys like Andrew Tate, for instance, who is a big influencer when it comes to influencing teenage boys and talking about getting all the women and treating women terrible and all that stuff.But then he’ll post something that’s all very nationalist, the [00:38:00] traditional return kind of content, where it’s like: ‘Oh, you, should have a wife that is modest.’ All of that stuff. You see that happen all the time online and people just don’t seem to get that these things are kind of incompatible with each other, and it makes me believe a lot of people don’t believe anything at all.SHEFFIELD: And you’re right about that because the core difficulty that I think the center left has in responding to the right is that there is a difference between conservatism and reactionism. They’re not the same thing.And in American politics, for 50 years, reactionism has stolen the identity of conservatism. And people treat them as if they’re the same thing, but they’re not.And reactionism is an ideology entirely of identity and power. It has no consistency. It has no long term goals. The only thing that it wants is the groups [00:39:00] that we like need to rule. And that’s it. Everything else is fungible.So who the groups are is fungible. What type of political structure you can have, where they’re democratic or monarchical or anything in between is fungible. The specific politicians are fungible. Even the policy positions, like whether you’re pro-environment or you’re pro-choice or, or even, pro allowing non heteronormative sexual identities is also even fungible.And like you see that especially with the early alt right, which was welcoming of homosexuality, and many of the leaders were gay or bisexual.But it’s only about identity. And I think a lot of people on the left, they don’t quite understand that. And that’s why none of this makes sense. But then also, it is a politics of nihilism. It’s a politics in which nothing matters, and just doing what you want or [00:40:00] believing what you want, that’s all that really matters.So if I believe that God created the earth in seven days, 6,000 years ago, then it’s true. Or if I believe that science shows that whatever racist belief I have is true, then it’s true. And it doesn’t matter.And that’s the thing, to go back to the myopia of intelligence that a lot of people who have had a sound education or have a good epistemology on the world, they think everybody else does and they don’t get that that most people aren’t paying attention, number one. And so you have to actually talk to them a lot and repeat yourself a lot, even though it’s annoying, you still have to do it.And then number two, you actually have to go to where they are. And to what you were saying about Andrew Tate and whatnot, the right wing completely dominates YouTube. And nobody on the left, there are people on the left that are on YouTube, but they all are kind of dog eat dog with each other. They [00:41:00] don’t help each other. They don’t support each other. They don’t respond to each other. None of that.Whereas on the right, they’re constantly having each other on their shows. They’re constantly promoting each other. And maybe some of it is just simply that people on the left rightfully understand that the public agrees with them, and it makes them lazy.I don’t know. What do you think?MOLLOY: It could be. I think that’s a good point. They don’t feel a threat in other words. Yeah, there’s not a sense of urgency. There’s not a sense of needing to coordinate. And to understand the need to build out, I think there, on the right, you have, yes, the dominance of right wing figures on YouTube and you have the Joe Rogan podcast, and then people go on there, become big, then they have their own shows and then people go on those shows and get big, and they build up. That’s how you have Tim Pool gets gigantic. Rogan ties all into these guys.But yeah, one thing that worries me about the idea that where it’s just like, yes, if I believe something it’s true, [00:42:00] there’s, a real risk, I think, with that.Because these are things – matters of fact, not opinions. You’ll have things like who won the 2020 election. And almost everyone who started spreading the election conspiracy theories absolutely knew that Trump lost, but they kept pushing it, and they kept saying it and they kept insisting that there was something wrong with that election and more people start saying they believe it and more people probably do start to believe it.Because that’s what they stand for and that’s what they believe in their identity. They’re being told by people who are part of their in-group to believe something. And so they do. And I kind of wonder how that’s going to play out when it comes to history books in the future, not just on the election, but just generally, because it doesn’t seem like we inhabit the same reality anymore.There’s a group of people on the right [00:43:00] who know very well that they can contest literally the most basic facts about anything by just repeating it non-stop and insisting that it’s correct. They can’t be shamed into not being like that. Even after the Dominion lawsuit with Fox, people just — Fox didn’t change. Fox is still lying about things. Fox just isn’t defaming a company.SHEFFIELD: One company, yeah.MOLLOY: Yeah, exactly. And really, it’s worrying because I think that a lot of people of this mindset that ‘Oh, well, all that matters is the truth. If they believe Trump won, that doesn’t affect me.’ it absolutely does.SHEFFIELD: It does, yeah.MOLLOY: If you can convince, if you can convince people to believe in complete nonsense, which is the exact thing that they accuse trans people of doing, they’re like, oh, you want people to pretend to see you as — no, no.The idea that trans people are out there like, ‘you must [00:44:00] say that you see me a certain way.’ No. Trans people understand, like, no one’s denying biological sex. No one’s doing any of these things that the right says. Trans people are just like: ‘Hey, here’s who I am. Here’s how I’d like you to refer to me if you can. And yeah, let’s have everyone go about their days,’ but instead the right paints the left as employing the same tactics they use when it comes to things like saying the election was stolen or saying that they were right about COVID all along.Guys like Elon Musk have statements saying that COVID wasn’t going to be as big of a deal as it ended up being and those people who have said that will look back on the pandemic that has killed millions of people and insist that they were right and insist that the vaccines were actually dangerous and have killed people. We’re just living in a world of nonsense.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And what you’re saying about that it affects other people. It is a really important [00:45:00] point, because you can see how this works with regard to the economy and what people think about it.So Republicans came up with this idea that people on the left are NPCs, non-playable characters. And that they don’t have any real authentic thoughts and whatnot — that in fact, they just believe whatever people tell them.But in fact, that is actually how Republicans work. And you can see it when you look at polling about the state of the economy. When people ask them, when pollsters ask people, how do you think the economy is right now? Or for the future, how’s it going? And when Donald Trump became the president, Republicans went from extremely low confidence in the economy to extremely high confidence in the economy.And then it kept at record 90 percent positivity in the economy for his entire administration. It dipped slightly to like 70 percent in the height of the worst part of the pandemic. 70 percent of Republicans said it was great. The economy was fantastic. And then when Biden became the [00:46:00] president, their sentiment went from 70 percent positive and Biden hadn’t done literally anything, passed a goddamn thing, it went down to like 10 percent or 5 percent in the state of the economy, and it has hovered there regardless of what’s happened. People can make fun of that, and it is absurd, but here’s the problem and why this is much more serious than that, is that when you have Republicans who are totally brainwashed NPCs about the state of the economy, their pessimism infects other people. So that people who don’t know much about stuff, they’re sort of apolitical or vaguely centrist or whatever they are, they’re not paying attention and their Republican friends and neighbors are like: ‘Oh my God, the economy’s horrible. We’re all going to die from the illegal immigrant transsexuals.’ They may not believe it entirely. But they believe some of it.And so that’s why, despite the fact that we do have record low unemployment, [00:47:00] despite the fact that there are so many economic indicators that are positive, so many Americans, not just Republicans, they have been sort of brainwashed by osmosis, by right wing propaganda, and that is why this matters.Even if you think Ben Shapiro is a ridiculous loser and Steven Crowder is a hypocritical in the closet gay guy, that’s all true. I’ll agree with you that that’s all true. But what they say still matters, even though they’re absurd.MOLLOY: Yeah, God. I 100 percent agree.SHEFFIELD: And I guess since we’re recording this in the middle of December, can we wrap on you, you recently revised or revisited one of your posts about the "War on Christmas," and that’s a good way to go out, and illustrative of — again that saying of Voltaire’s, ‘people who can make you believe absurdities can make you [00:48:00] commit atrocities.’MOLLOY: Yes. Yes. I revisited my, my history of the "War on Christmas" piece that I wrote a couple of years back. I love reading through that sort of history because it does — there is such a clear line between the propaganda of the World War I, World War II era, kind of going straight through to today, when it comes to, when it comes to Fox. I mean, Fox or any number of other outlets on the right.The War on Christmas, so it’s always been the same. You had Henry Ford’s newspaper back in the 1920s publishing things saying: ‘Well, I couldn’t find a Christmas card that said anything about baby Jesus’s birth last time I went to the store.’ And it’s the same complaints. It’s the same, ‘someone said happy holidays to me, and that made me feel sad because it didn’t recognize my personal religious holiday.’That’s that sort of thing that just kind of pops up. And it’s all a distraction from [00:49:00] bigger real issues. Donald Trump promised during his campaign that if he became president in 2016, if he became president, that every store was going to be saying, Merry Christmas again. And that was a nonsense promise. Somehow for some reason, PolitiFact gave him a “promise kept” on that because he never personally said happy holidays. And it’s like, no, you’re supposed to be super literal here, PolitiFact.But yeah, the war on Christmas piece is one of my favorites that I’ve done. And it’s because I love doing deep dives into old history. So I don’t have to feel like now is as terrible as it maybe is. I can look back and be like, ah, things have always been awful.SHEFFIELD: But it’s also that, it’s important in the sense that this is a nonpartisan, non-policy issue — or issue, quote unquote, or controversy — and hopefully people are able to see that propaganda actually, it matters. And [00:50:00] it’s absurd and it’s stupid, but people believe it. And you need to act accordingly.MOLLOY: Yes. Absolutely.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MOLLOY: Thanks so much.SHEFFIELD: Alright, well we’ll leave it there. And so if people want to keep up with you, should they just go to your website or —MOLLOY: Yeah, yeah. So go subscribe to my newsletter people, www.readtpa.com.SHEFFIELD: All righty. Yes, please do that. All right.MOLLOY: All right.SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here, Parker.MOLLOY: All right. Thank you. Bye.SHEFFIELD: So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show. You can get the archives with video, audio, and transcript of every episode, and if you’re a paid subscribing member, thank you very much for that.Couldn’t do it without you and you have complete access to all the archives and all the episodes if you go there. And then you can go to the flux.community website. Theory of [00:51:00] Change is part of the Flux media network, and you can get more podcasts about politics, media, religion, and society and how they all intersect. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe 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

IntroductionNext month, things finally start getting serious in the political realm as many states begin holding their presidential primaries. But at this point, things are not looking so good for Joe Biden in comparison to Donald Trump.Less than a year removed from the election of 2024, Biden trails Trump in a number of public opinion surveys that have been released by reputable organizations. So what's going on here? Is this just the way things work in American politics or are there mistakes that Biden has made? What is the status of public opinion on Joe Biden?And would it do any good for the forces of democracy for Joe Biden to be replaced on the Democratic ticket or Kamala Harris, the vice president?  We'll talk about some of these questions in this episode, and continuing with our series about what is going on with the Democrats.Joining me to discuss is David Atkins, he is a contributor to Washington Monthly magazine, and he is also a member of the Democratic National Committee, although he is not speaking for their behalf in today's conversation.The video of this conversation is available. The transcript of the audio follows.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, David.DAVID ATKINS: Happy to be here. Thank you.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, as I mentioned in the introduction, there [00:02:00] is a lot of concern among people of the, let's say center to left perspective about a passel of polls showing that Donald Trump is doing better when they ask people about who would you vote for next year?And it's causing a lot of panic and making people try to dust off their priors, it seems like usually. Are people responding to these polls in the right way?ATKINS: This is a challenging and complex question because I think it depends on, on who you're talking to.I think there are changes that need to be made to more forcefully communicate the message about what the Biden administration has accomplished. And there's a lot of discussion that's happening around what the best way to, to message and communicate that so that it actually gets through to persuadable voters, right?There is, I think a lot of deer in the headlights, and everything is going to be okay-ism that happens from folks who are more [00:03:00] sort of in the establishment and think, you know what? Everything's going to be okay. We just have to get through to the next year. We've been here before in the polling and we're just going to keep sort of doing what we're going, what we're doing.And I think both sides are making a mistake. I think panicking too much based on polling a year out from the election is unwarranted. There's been multiple times in American history where the incumbent president was not polling so well a year before the election, and things ended up being fine, because ultimately, the incumbent, if there are issues in the economy or whatever, the incumbent doesn't do so well, but then when there becomes a real choice with the opponent, then that changes things. On the other hand, I think the issues are serious enough that strategic adjustments are absolutely necessary.SHEFFIELD: One of the proposals that a lot of people are really, some are putting forward is the idea that Joe Biden needs to resign and not run for reelection. And he's just too old and people don't like him. [00:04:00]And if he did, then everything would be magically perfect somehow and Trump would lose. This seems to be rather naive. There's this idea that, that it would have no impact on the Democratic coalition if the currently serving president abruptly abandoned his campaign right before the primaries start.ATKINS: I mean, so full disclosure here, I'm not a big Biden stan. I was for Bernie in the 2016 primary. I was for Warren in the 2020 primary. So, you're not hearing this from like, Oh, a Democratic establishment Biden guy. That having been said, I think you're absolutely right. And I have said this in, in my updates in, on my DNC page and elsewise.There is talk from some progressives about, wanting to replace Biden because he's not far enough to the left. There's also a lot of talk among more sort of establishment voices this worry about him being perceived to be too old in the media or whatever, [00:05:00] but I think you're right. All of this talk is a mistake.Because while there are challenges for any incumbent, but the perception of any incumbent and Biden's perceptions among the public certainly have their challenges as we've seen from the approval ratings, I think anything that, if he were to step aside, the battle that would take place to replace him would create massive rifts in the Democratic coalition.And it would be less healthy for the party than to continue forward with Joe Biden, absent some obvious, serious health concerns, serious scandal, but based on current information.I think that going in a different direction would do more harm than good. And even talking about it doesn't serve us. We need, regardless of the person at the top of the ticket, I think the most important thing is for us to be concentrating on the [00:06:00] real massive legislative victories that have been achieved for the American people under the Biden administration, which, whether from a moderate perspective or a progressive perspective have been truly enormous.Biden has been a much more progressive president than I would have given him credit for. I have some disappointments, but mostly the administration has done very well with serious challenges, having a razor-thin Congress and all the rest. So, I, I don't think there's a lot of gain to be had from having those kinds of conversations at this point.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it is interesting because, this discontent, it's coming from both wings of the Democratic Party. So, the centrists say that Biden is too far to the left, and then the progressives say that he's too far to the right. And of course, there's the logical fallacy of the excluded middle. That doesn't mean of course that he's doing everything perfectly, but it does mean that perhaps people making these criticisms are not entirely able to see things, that [00:07:00] they're seeing things from a biased perspective, perhaps.ATKINS: Right. I mean, part of the problem, too, is that every strategic move comes at potentially at a coalition cost.There is no question, but what younger and more progressive voters are not very enthusiastic right now, but some centrist voters also have a perception that you know, that if things shift too far to the left, it may not be to their liking for various reasons.So, if you look at the Israel Palestine issue, for instance just from an electoral coalition every politician sort of gets it coming and going, no matter which side of it they take.So, speaking not in terms of absolute moral terms, but in just purely strategic electoral terms, it's not entirely clear what the best path forward always is. That having been said, I think that progressive policies, most of which the Biden administration has absolutely embraced, that are popular and overwhelmingly popular for the American people, for instance, this [00:08:00] recent push to get rid of lead pipes, which should be universal. I think that's a positive thing that we can carry forward.And with inflation drawing down, I think the economic policies have been fairly successful, and that what we see at the macro level will begin increasingly to be felt in people's pocketbooks at the micro level. And that's sort of the path forward to try and repair the polling damage. And that says nothing about the damage that Trump is going to be experiencing over the next year going forward with his trials.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and actually, and that is actually the next topic, Trump, I would, that I wanted to talk about, because I do think that, especially a year before the election, whoever is the president is automatically, there's a, there's always inevitably a buyer's remorse on the part of the supporters.And we did see that with Trump. I was running polling operations for the Hill and doing a show about public opinion surveys, and we ran [00:09:00] surveys asking Republicans, would you want somebody else to run for president in the Republican party? And most of them said yes. But that didn't mean that they weren't going to vote for him when he eventually got the nomination. So that's a factor, but then there's also, I think that the, the way that the Republican primaries have been operating, these candidates essentially have been telling the Republican people who tune in, you should vote for Trump. The message of every single one of these debates is, we're just here as a backup but we still support Donald Trump. And that's the message that just keeps getting reinforced, especially by people like Nikki Haley, who basically never say anything bad about Trump. And DeSantis barely says anything bad, and certainly Ramaswamy says nothing bad about Trump. Like that's basically the, Chris Christie is the only one who says anything, significantly critical of Trump in these debates. And then of course, he's not there to take the slings and arrows himself because he's too afraid.So [00:10:00] ultimately this has been more of a prolonged coronation for Trump rather than a real primary, I would say. What do you think?ATKINS: No, I agree. These candidates are all sort of waiting in the wings. They know that if they say anything negative against Trump, that it will actually hurt them. Chris Christie is the only one, as you mentioned with the courage to do that, but it's obviously not redounding to his benefit in the polls and the among the Republican electorate.So, it is sort of a show primary. Donald Trump is easily going to be the nominee, unless of course he has some massive health problem. You would normally say massive scandal or health problem, but of course that's not going to affect anything at all.So, it would, it would require a health issue for him to not be there. He is going to be the nominee and everyone else is an also-ran. And these debates are functionally pointless, no matter how much the media and many Republican donor sets try to advance either Ramaswamy, or, or now, Nikki Haley is the flavor of the month. But [00:11:00] no, it's going to be Trump.SHEFFIELD: And I would say that these debates, to the extent that that legitimate news organizations are putting them on now, they are actively helping Trump by doing these things. Because they're not, there's, they're not filled with any substantive criticism or discussion about it, even discussion about any of his ideas.There will be perfunctory things about, various comments that Trump says, such as his, oh, well, I'll be a dictator only for one day vow, which was cheered by the audience of Fox News when he was there with Hannity, that's important to note. They didn't think it was a joke. They thought it was great when he said that.But nonetheless, it's just continually reinforcing this meme that Republicans have created for themselves, that the only thing people don't like about Trump is mean tweets. They, and they really have, they've said this so many times that they really believe it.And it's an incredibly insidious but powerful argument because [00:12:00] it's very simple. It's easy for people to understand that you think he's mean and that's why you don't like him. And the mainstream media is actively helping advance that, I think.ATKINS: No, I absolutely agree. And, when you look at persuadable voters, from having done polling, persuadable voters often are not the best-informed voters. And so, there's a lack of awareness generally of the danger that Donald Trump represents to democracy itself. There's a lack of awareness of just how extreme his policies are. There is this perception that Donald Trump is this social liberal, all over the map, he just wants to, to do the right thing from a business standpoint-- businessman good for the economy kind of perception that's sort of vague in a lot of people's minds who don't pay very close attention.But of course, the man is a wannabe fascist tyrant, with terrible policies across the board that would be devastating to the American economy and [00:13:00] devastating to our standing in the world on foreign policy. He wants to ally with dictators around the world to basically put the United States on the wrong side of global democracy.So, but people just don't know. And you've started to see traditional mainstream sort of media like New York Times, Washington Post come out more forcefully and talk about this recently and talk about this actual statement that Trump has been making. It's a little bit late though, because I think people's perceptions are, are a little bit baked-in on that front, but the more people can be talking about it, the better, because his statements about what he intends to do have grown much, much, much more extreme just in the last year compared to even all the statements he used to make in the past.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I do think while these prosecutions that he's, he's facing are certainly well deserved and are, are substantive and, they continue to be [00:14:00] generally victorious in, in court rulings they should have happened immediately after he left office.And that was perhaps the biggest mistake that people who were concerned about him coming back. Because if we go back to the second impeachment that Trump faced, which Mitch McConnell deliberately stalled to be conducted after Trump had left office. (There was plenty of time that this could have happened while he was the president. And then he deliberately chose not to make that happen.) But nonetheless, the argument that the Trump defenders made at that time was, we're not going to impeach him because he's going to be held legally accountable in the courts for his behavior, but then nothing happened for two years.ATKINS: Right. No, I've had many arguments with people including Marcy Wheeler and others about this topic. Because the two sides of the argument are: Well, if you prosecuted too quickly, you wouldn't have all the facts in hand. It takes a long time to roll up these sorts of [00:15:00] prosecutions. Mafia prosecutions, for instance, take place over the span of years.You don't want to have a prosecution that goes bad, because you didn't have your ducks lined up in a row. And I hear all of that. On the other hand, some of these crimes were very obvious. Some of the evidence was right there. I, I don't understand why it should have taken so long. And I think there was a significant amount of political reticence to go after Trump.I think that a lot of people felt for a little while, like that threat was passed. We'd move on; re-opening all of this would only inflame tensions further. Trump was going to take an exit on the stage. What's the point? And I think there was you don't want to make it look Like the Biden administration is influencing the Justice Department to go after its political enemies, even though that's, of course, not what's happening, the man Trump committed massive crimes and any other person in the entire [00:16:00] United States who had committed those crimes would be immediately hit by the Justice Department from either party,SHEFFIELD: Which and yeah, and I'm sorry, just to inject we saw this happen in Brazil, a similar thing was done by Jair Bolsonaro, that his supporters invaded their capital and rioted and tried to, to stop him from, from being forced out of office after the voters had kicked him out. And after he had instigated that invasion of the Capitol, he was permanently banned, or at least, I'm sorry, he was banned from at least like 10 years for running for office or something like that, by the, the Brazilian government and that's what should have happened to Donald Trump.I think it's the biggest mistake in dealing with him, because Donald Trump, he's, he's not going to go away, as you said, that unless he is physically unable to, he has to run for president in order to avoid being jailed. That is ultimately why he will do this.And his megalomania and whatnot, [00:17:00] aside from that, combined with that. But yeah, something should have been done faster. And, and it's later than it should have been for, for sure, I would say.ATKINS: Yeah. I think one of the most challenging things looking at this is the American system has not shown itself resilient enough as it should be in dealing with this sort of potential totalitarian threat. Presidential systems generally, which we're as opposed to parliamentary systems tend to have challenges with these sorts of threats and our system is, is no exception and the fact that the Justice Department did not immediately come down with a hammer on Trump for obviously January 6th, but his other crimes shows that we have this sort of sense that all of these problems will sort of be taken care of at the ballot box and that you don't have to step in with actual administrative or legislative ways of dealing with a potential fascist threat.SHEFFIELD: Remedies.ATKINS: Remedies, exactly. These sorts of remedies. And the problem is you [00:18:00] cannot, in fact, count on these problems always being resolved at the ballot box. You're in a losing battle because all it takes for a fascist is to win once. We've seen that over and over again in history and the world over. And the vagaries of elections, how the economy is doing, whether your incumbent has, a scandal or an image problem, whether, things that happen in October surprises, the vagaries of what happens in elections are not witnesses Amenable to keeping fascists out of power permanently if they intend to be fascists.So, this is a challenge and the system needs to do a better job of being resilient. And one of those would have been the Justice Department should have come down much faster on this stuff.Right privilege, why Republicans never have to reveal their full agendaSHEFFIELD: Yeah, so I, I am, as my audience probably knows, a former Republican activist, and, um, one of the things that I've been thinking about in this context is that the American political system since the Goldwater-ites took [00:19:00] over the Republican party has, has been premised on a fiction that the Republican party is a normal political operation. When in fact it has not been the case. It is a party that was taken over by a reactionary extremist movement that has been subverting the constitutional order, whether it's disenfranchising people in various ways, or to seize power through a unitary executive theory or seek to enshrine various Christian theocratic principles in the, in the legal system and call that religious freedom. In other words, call religious oppression "religious freedom."None of those things are really talked about when you tune into any of the cable news channels or the Sunday morning shows. The Republican guests who are on these programs, not only do they not have to admit that Trump legitimately lost in 2020, they don't even have to present their full [00:20:00] opinions about anything.So, like on abortion, for instance, the people who are leading the anti-abortion movement overwhelmingly have a theocratic christofascist agenda in which they want women to have no rights. They want to take away birth control. They want to take away a woman's right to have a job or own property. This is their agenda. And yet, the public never is being told that fact about them, and that's why I call it right privilege.ATKINS: Yeah, I, I agree. And don't forget no fault divorce, which they're coming for as well.SHEFFIELD: Oh yes, that, too.ATKINS: And they don't want to allow that anymore. I think it's becoming clear. I think the end of Roe v. Wade did energize a lot of people, and we have seen Democrats doing much better in special elections, every single special election, basically in-between. So, you have this weird dichotomy, before I get back to your question, of Democrats doing very well in special elections, but the polling not favoring Joe Biden, which [00:21:00] brings us back to this conversation about people freaking out about Biden at the top of the ticket.But if you look at the general mood of the public, a lot of the Christofascist groups like, Moms for Liberty and all the rest of that have done very, very poorly. People are starting to wake up to this sort of social, this extremely socially repressive agenda that not just the far-right conservative base, but now the Republican party itself is wholly embracing.But there does, there does seem to be a problem with the perception of Donald Trump, because of his libertine past and his overall image, that he's not like that personally. The problem being that it doesn't matter what he's like personally. The problem is that if he's leading a coalition, a Republican party coalition that is being dominated by these sorts of extremely socially retrograde, repressive, [00:22:00] Christo fascist forces. The judges he nominates to the Supreme Court and on down the bench and all the other legislators that take action, you're going to see the end of no-fault divorce. You're going to see abortion bans all across the country, potentially a national abortion ban. You're going to see book bannings all across the country.You're going to see all of these, these problems-- anti LGBT legislation, basically the elimination of gender affirming care to say nothing, I mean, that doesn't even get into immigration and his planned deportation camps and all the rest of it. So yeah, no, it's, it's a really big problem and then not enough persuadable voters are really fully conscious of the threat that Donald Trump individually poses, not just the Republican party generally.Right-wing media holds up the entire Republican coalitionSHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I think that's true. And some of that is the fault of the Democratic leadership class and progressive philanthropy [00:23:00] because over the past, let's say, let's say over the past 50 years or so, the reactionary right has built up a gigantic propaganda apparatus. And it's so large now that it has, many of these individuals in it, have larger audiences than mainstream media outlets. So, like Andrew Tate has more people who follow him on one social network than read The Atlantic. Or The Daily Wire website, which is owned by two brothers who literally want to overthrow American democracy and replace it with Christian dominionist, monarchist system, has more, more viewers and, and readers and whatnot on Facebook than almost anyone else. Than the New York Times and more than NBC or any of these other platforms.And the reaction for a lot of Democratic leaders, number one, I don't think they know this [00:24:00] fact, this information. I don't think they realize how gigantic right-wing media is now and the reach that it has. And then number two, to the extent that they're aware of these individuals, they just think they're a bunch of clowns that no one cares about, they look at somebody like Steven Crowder, they look at somebody like Michael Knowles and, and these people are indeed, buffoonish extremists, that's true that they are, but nonetheless, they have millions of people who hang on their every word and will do what they say right up to the edge of saying it's okay to kill transgender people. It's okay to hit Black Lives Matter people, protesters, with your car. There's nothing wrong with that. And that's the, that is the media environment.And generally, the reaction to, on the part of progressive philanthropy has been to say, ah, whatever. No one cares about them. They're just clowns. They're irrelevant. Am I wrong to say that?ATKINS: No, no, you're not wrong at all. I've been shouting about this for, well, decades now, [00:25:00] which is that there is, you talk about, liberal philanthropy. It is very focused on winning the next election typically, and it's very focused on, on trying to, to appear to be morally forthright on the latest causes and all of that, which I am sympathetic to a lot of that.I'm not, I don't take the Matt Yglesias side of this, of this argument that progressive philanthropy should not be on the forefront of the social issues of the day. I think the culture needs to advance regardless of what's happening in the electoral sphere. That having been said, uh, the fact that there has not-- the right wing has invested very heavily in creating an alternative media apparatus that is separate from the serious media that you see in sort of the main magazines, the Economist, The Atlantic, or the major newspapers, the New York Times or Washington Post, which no matter what you want to say about what their [00:26:00] bias may or may not be, they work very, very hard to at least give the appearance of non-bias, which means that they are bending over backwards in, in many ways not to tell the direct truth.We saw this with climate change where it took them forever to just not take two sides of climate change, but to just say this is a thing that's happening, it's harmful and, and the science deniers are, are lying. The fact that liberal philanthropy and the major billionaire donors have not invested in progressive, reality-based media that that take a very specific side and are unafraid to champion that side; and that side is, is has the truth behind it, but just to be as partisan and as sharp as it needs to be in the same way that the right wing has done. This is a serious, serious problem because there are a large number of people who are yearning for a tone [00:27:00] in their media that they get from folks like Joe Rogan or Steven Crowder or whatever, and it doesn't have to be far-right, young disassociated male self empowerment stuff that they get from these sources that radicalizes these mostly young white men. It can just be the sort of direct talk that you see from, say, Gen Z on TikTok, for instance that you're not getting from the New York Times or from the Atlantic.And there's a massive vacuum there that is not, that doesn't exist within either the center-left or for the most part, the progressive left. And what the progressive left does have is pathetically ill funded. So it's a huge problem. It's a huge problem that's gone back for decades and you can't fix it overnight.But, there's the old Chinese saying that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is now. And I think progressive funders have to begin [00:28:00] looking, as I've been saying for a long time, more seriously at also creating these sorts of communication networks.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, absolutely they do. And I think what is probably the root of their inaction and refusal to act, not just not acting is that they have a myopia of, of, intelligence.That's basically what this comes down to that when they see people out there pushing things like "let's take away women's rights," "let's ban homosexuality," when they see that, they think no one would go for that. It just seems so ludicrous to them and that they, they don't even bother trying to counter it.And, and they don't understand that in the information age, quantity matters more than quality. And so if I hear a hundred, if I'm a 13 year old, kid looking at politics stuff on the [00:29:00] internet for the first time, and I see a hundred YouTube videos telling me that women should be property, should have no rights. And, you see some, some girls getting sucked into some of these perspectives as well, like, through this trad wife content. But you know, if you see a hundred videos telling you women should have no rights, they should stay at home and do nothing.And, we need to lock up gay people and you see one video telling you that that's not right. How is that going to work for a 13 year old mind when they see that?ATKINS: Right. I mean, we it's a known truism of advertising that repetition is everything, right? You have to have a message that repeats and repeats and repeats. And it has to be delivered through credible messengers, and has to be delivered in a direct way that doesn't, that sort of jives with the, with the tone of the other messaging that the audience is, is typically getting.So if you're at an elevated New York Times level and you're trying to talk to a teenager, [00:30:00] then that is not going to really work.And you're absolutely right. Most of the messaging that they're getting from a direct political level is coming from these sort of far-right sources with these massive audiences. Now, the right wing would counter that the general culture, right, the general messages that you're getting from major corporations which, which is very frustrating, I think, to many sort of anti-corporate progressives, but the general messaging that you get from, say, a Disney or a Nike, tends to be in the more sort of center-left, generally acceptance, well, pro broad acceptance kind of thing.But that is-- and of course, you then you do see that Gen Z is a very, very, very progressive generation across the board, especially in terms of social issues. So the penetration of this sort of right wing messaging that you get from the Steven Crowders of the world only goes so far to certain kinds of audiences. That having been said, those [00:31:00] audiences are very, very, very motivated because they're hearing these messages over and over again. And you're absolutely right about that.And the other thing that I would mention in this context is the social media algorithms are not doing, uh, the forces of democracy and, and acceptance any favors because the, as you see, if you go down any sort of YouTube rabbit hole, or you look at at, well now obviously Twitter, but you look at most social media, Facebook, you start to look at the top pages on Facebook, right? The social media algorithms are prioritizing extremist content that generates eyeballs.SHEFFIELD: And it keeps people on the site longer.ATKINS: That's right. And anger keeps people on the site and controversy keeps people on the site. And it's not just this direct political stuff. Flat eartherism came up through this sort of way because it got, it got prioritized on the algorithms.So that's not doing anyone any favors either. So [00:32:00] there has to be much, much, much more effort made to sort of combat that at a social media level, bringing social media companies to the table to stop doing harmful things with their algorithms. And it also has to come to being much more direct in terms of repetition and political influencers who are willing to talk in a more direct way with progressive messaging to younger audiences and especially to a lot of these disaffected white men who are being radicalized into dangerous positions to say, look, there are alternate models for masculinity. You don't have to do what Ben Shapiro or Steven Crowder or Joe Rogan are telling you to do in order to be the sort of man you want to be. That that's also a very important place to be going.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. Because I mean, ultimately we're, it took a long time for the feminist [00:33:00] revolution of the 1970s to actually completely redound such that you have generations that have never known anything different. That, that women could have any job that they were able to do or get hired for and not have restrictions on their access to birth control or divorce or abortion. It really hasn't, been the case except for maybe like the past 15 years or so where you had a complete generational change with that. Because Gen X wasn't that, and the millennials were a little bit left over with some of their parents, they knew the former way of doing things.And so, like, the latter end of the millennial generation is really when a lot of this stuff happened when women had full equality. And the right, they did see this coming in terms of their, especially the more theocratic ones. That was why they were so pushing against abortion and things like that.But [00:34:00] nonetheless, it, it did finally happen. There's still problems, of course, we'll say, but, there's not nearly the oppression that did formerly exist. And so now you do, as you said, that there are a lot of men and, and, Gen Z is a much less white so in fact, there are a lot of Asian and black and Hispanic young men who are also being, especially as the right has put forward people who are not white, like Andrew Tate or like these other-- there's a dating podcast called Fresh and Fit hosted by two black brothers that is just constantly spouting white nationalist and misogynistic content to these young boys.Is religious proselytizing the root of the right's bigger interest in advocacy media?SHEFFIELD: I think that the right, because they're so heavily tied to religious organizing and proselytizing, they do feel an innate urgency and need to proselytize their ideas more than the sort of academic-derived, reality based community of the left, because I think people on the [00:35:00] left, a lot of them, especially, sort of nonpolitical people who will just vote for Democrats because they know they're not insane. But they don't understand the stakes and they don't, and they don't feel the need to evangelize just in the same way that the "New Atheist" movement of the 2000s, it was the first time that there was any real advocacy by atheists. Because no atheist felt the need to make advocacy because they thought it didn't, it wasn't necessary.ATKINS: Yeah, no, I, I agree. And this is we're all facing the same problem here that there was this perception that advocacy is not necessary that, and this is maybe one of my biggest frustrations with what I will call sort of the center left Democratic establishment political point of view, is that for decades, there's been this idea that if you just do the right things and you're very careful with your messaging to not say anything that would offend anyone, and you perform [00:36:00] legislative victories, or the very least seem like the adult in the room. That then, journalists and traditional media will cover you appropriately as the adult in the room or will cover your legislative accomplishments and that will filter down to the voters in a virtuous circle in such a way that direct advocacy is not really necessary outside of doing ads during campaign season, right? The advocacy happens during campaign season. You run some ads. Other than that, you do your thing and it filters out through the press.And that's just not the way things work. It's certainly not the way things work in the modern age. And it wasn't really the way things work even going back. FDR did his fireside chats. He did his fireside chats for a reason, because you need to be able to communicate directly to people without what the right wing calls the filter. And the filter does exist. It isn't as biased against the right wing as they like to believe it is, but it is a [00:37:00] filter. And you, you actually do need a significant communication advocacy apparatus to bypass that and communicate directly to your audiences. And we have seen that, uh, that, that not putting that in place has had harmful effects across the board, not just for partisan politics, but as you mentioned, for religion, for lots of other things.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, you have to, you have to tell people what you've done for them and what you want to do for them and then what the other guys are going to do to them. If you're not able to get those out and get everybody to understand that, then you're going to have this discontent that you see, because, you constantly see laments from various people saying, oh, well, Biden did all these things here and nobody knows that he did. And even though they like the ideas.And, and then, of course, the obvious rejoinder to that is whose fault is that, that they don't know that? Is the [00:38:00] mainstream press, is it their responsibility to flack for you as a Democratic advocate or a progressive activist? It's not their, and it's not even their business model. Their business model is simply to get people to read their stuff or watch their stuff. That's it. That's what they're in it for. And so, of course, they're not going to go back to where you're saying about Roosevelt, the NBC's or the CBS's, radio of the time, they weren't going to take apart their newscast and dedicate it to this is what the president has saying, and let's listen to him for 30 minutes here.They were never going to do that. And they never did. And you can't expect them to do that. Like, that's that is actually the paradox is that the right, they understood that. Because I mean, the American right has always been, dominated by Christian fundamentalist reactionaries and from the very beginning, and they understood that the mainstream press wasn't going to promote that perspective.And so they [00:39:00] realized we have to build our own things to do it. Whereas I think, a lot of people in the institutional left. They just think it will happen automatically and, we'll have the marketplace of ideas and we'll, and we'll come out on top because our ideas are better. And that's not how real markets work either.The technology industry is just rife with so many technologies that were superior but failed because of bad marketing or bad strategy, and that's the same. There's politics is no different, right?ATKINS: And one of the most frustrating parts about this is that progressive policies are genuinely popular.And when I say progressive, I'm not getting into the whole center-left versus progressive debate, single payer health care, all that. I just mean leftish policies generally are very popular, both on the social front and on the economic front. And young voters as you go down the generations toward, toward younger voters are increasingly progressive.So it's not that there isn't. [00:40:00] It's not that there is this massive disconnect where the Democratic Party has to or the institutional left has to do a better job of convincing people that socially liberal values are good or that or that progressive economic values are good. They're sort of already there.The disconnect is at the electoral level. Do they believe that--SHEFFIELD: That change is possible.ATKINS: Right. That, that voting, that, that, that donating, that, that, that all the things that go into being involved in electoral politics will actually achieve outcomes toward those things that they want. And do they believe toward what you said that, what the bad guys are going to do? Do they actually believe that Republicans and conservatives more generally are as big a threat to everything that they hold dear as they actually truly are. And that's where the, the, the communication problem lies. And, and the blame for that lays, [00:41:00] I think, squarely on the shoulders of as, as you said, a lot of the left donor class. And also the institutional Democratic Party and its consultants have a lot of work to do on this front, and it's one of the reasons that I'm involved to try to help make that better.Why David decided to run to be a Democratic National Committee memberSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, actually, and let's, let's do talk about that. So you haven't, haven't been involved with the DNC for too long. What was the, what was your motive for, for running for it as to be a member? And, and when did that happen and, and how's it, how's it been for you since then?ATKINS: I, I've been an activist for a long time at the in the party level at the local and county and, and state party level. But I saw a need to, to help reform the, the national party uh, in order to give grassroots activists, but also state parties, more of a voice in the national process. And this isn't, [00:42:00] part of it is just, having more progressive voices in the Democratic Party. But part of it too is that functionally speaking, most of the party's policy is run directly out of the White House when the, when the party has an incumbent in the White House, right?And that can be good if the decisions are good, but it also means that not all the decisions are made and in the best way, potentially. And it also means that not enough attention gets perhaps paid to building up some of these communications apparatuses or some of these voter outreach apparatuses in the areas where they may do the most long term good.One of the things we saw in the past was this argument between, say, Howard Dean and Rahm Emanuel in the past over a 50 state strategy versus dumping all the money into the into the most contested [00:43:00] elections of, of the day and of the cycle. And the challenge is that lots of money is going into these-- like the biggest Senate races are already tens and tens of millions of dollars. They're super, super, super expensive.Whereas there are a lot of legislative battles, state legislature battles or congressional races that could have been won that, that weren't. Because people, because the national party and the forces that could have invested did not invest enough in the operations that could have been invested in at the ground level to help build the coalition.And I think that the DNC could do more work on that front by having more voices from around the country able to have an influence. And I think that's one of the important things to be focusing on. And that's one of the reasons that I ran.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so now, when did you run and when did you start serving?ATKINS: Oh, yeah, that was four years ago. So I'm actually running for reelection currently. But [00:44:00] yeah--SHEFFIELD: In what state, I guess we should say.ATKINS: Oh, I'm sorry. California. Yes, California. So the way California does it is there are 20 elected members of the DNC. There are also a variety of appointed members, but the executive board of the California Democratic Party elects 20 members from among, well, from among Democratic Party delegates to serve on the DNC.SHEFFIELD: Okay. And people who do want to, keep tabs on you actually are filing occasional reports on how things go for you on your website.ATKINS: After every meeting. Yeah, I file it at DavidAtkinsDNC.Com. So you can see my reports from the various meetings and my perspectives on itSHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah. Okay, and so one of the, you know, you had mentioned political advertising, it is a an interesting topic to me because it's almost like the, the Democratic establishment has two completely differing or [00:45:00] contradictory ideas, which they believe are not contradictory, which is that political media if it's advertising is effective, but political media, if it's editorial is not effective. These are contradictory ideas.But they also don't understand that the other thing about right wing media, besides being sort of a permanent communication vehicle to reachable voters for them, beyond being that, a permanent in a permanent campaign state, it is also a way of it is also self sustaining economically for them. So, Fox News makes a billion dollars in profit every year and talk radio hosts, are exceptionally profitable. And, of course, not everything they do is profitable, but a lot of their larger media properties, such as Daily Wire are profitable and, you just go down through the list.So, so these, these entities, which were [00:46:00] initially funded at a loss, eventually no longer need any money from the donor class on the Republican side. So, and yet that success has been totally lost and missed by the center-left philanthropy class. It's just incredible and horrible from my standpoint.Does the Democratic base think it's too smart to support advocacy media?ATKINS: No, I, I absolutely agree. And we've been talking about this a lot over the last hour here. I think to defend them and how they got into this position, I think there is a difference between the Democratic, between the general center-left sort of coalition and the right-wing coalition, and one of the issues with the, with the center-left coalitions that likes to think of itself as more serious and more objective and not susceptible to that sort of partisan propaganda that the, that the right wingers are, are, suffering from.And so there's a reticence to, to, [00:47:00] to engage as much with the sort of messaging that, that would function well. And that can be a problem. This is not just coming from the top down, that the donor class or whatever refuses to fund it, it's also partly that the, that the main audience, the sort of people who go to book fairs, think of themselves as too, as too elevated , right?The problem comes from multiple sides. That have been said, I think you're absolutely right. A lot more effort, a lot more funding needs to be going into direct sort of advocacy at the messaging side that happens outside of political campaign advertising season.Joe Biden's former image as a bipartisan dealmaker isn't helping him nowSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess let's maybe end with just talking about, so you had mentioned at the top that you think there are some other things that Biden should be doing that he's not doing, and that might also help redound to his benefit beyond, expending more on [00:48:00] advocacy media. What else do you think he should be doing?ATKINS: He's obviously talking a lot about the economy and talking about the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act and all of that. So I’m not sure there's much more to be done on that level. I think he's starting more to talk about the threat that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are to American democracy. That is to the positive.The challenge is that Joe Biden has always been sort of, the bipartisan guy who's trying to get everything, trying to get things done. Like he's not the guy who's going to throw haymakers and, and toss, partisan bombs out there. He's going to bring everyone together to try to pass legislation that is good for the American people.And I think that image sort of served him well in the last election. But it's not as combative an approach as I think is required for the moment. And to be fair, I think that he and his advisors are starting to recognize [00:49:00] that and they're starting to come out more forcefully about this as we approach campaign season, but it's going to require seeing a, a different kind of Joe Biden than we have been accustomed to seeing in the past.And that's going to be interesting to watch.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess kind of related to that, that there are other people saying he should replace Kamala Harris on his ticket or, whatnot. And, and it's. I, I do find it very strange that when people say all these things about her and her polling or her favorability ratings, they don't note that her ratings are really not that different from Joe Biden's.And it's relevant because I do think that if his numbers came up, then hers probably would come up too. People are trying to come up with all these special cases about whatever it is. That people might or might not like about her. I just, I just, I think people don't really care about the vice president. And if this is all a much ado about nothing in many ways.ATKINS: [00:50:00] Correct. Yeah, people don't care. I think her numbers would come up as his numbers come up. But regardless of all of that, the damage that any move on that front would do to the Democratic coalition would be not worth what-- even if there were any juice to be squeezed out of going that direction, it's not worth it. And it would do way more damage.So, that's just a non-starter. There's no point in even looking in that direction. And I think that a lot of the people who are suggesting that sort of thing may have suspect motives on, on, on the race and gender front. And I, there's just no reason to be going that direction; 2028, there's a different conversation. There should be a robust primary in 2028, but talking about replacing her or him on the ticket in 2024, I think is just foolish.SHEFFIELD: Especially at this late in the game, if you really were serious about that, you should have said it in, 2022 at the [00:51:00] latest.ATKINS: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Well, so for people who want to keep up with your stuff, what's your recommendation in that regard?ATKINS: Oh Washington Monthly slash David Atkins. You can find me, Google David Atkins Washington Monthly. You can see my writings there. Otherwise, and in terms of the Democratic Party activism, my website at DavidAtkinsDNC.com is there as well.And yeah, that's basically it. Oh, and obviously social media. I have not been tweeting as much. I refuse to call it X. It's still Twitter now that Elon Musk has done his thing, but also social media.SHEFFIELD: Okay. And what other ones are you at?ATKINS: Oh, “DavidOatkins.” I'm on a variety, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon.SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. Excellent. All right. Well, I encourage everybody to check those out. And thanks for being here.ATKINS: All right. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation.And if you want to get more, you can always go to theoryofchange.show [00:52:00] to get the past episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to all the video, audio, and transcripts. So, thank you very much for that. And this show is part of the Flux Media network, flux.community. And we have lots of articles and podcasts about politics, philosophy, media, and technology, and religion and how they all intersect. And also, you can subscribe to some of the other shows that we've got. I appreciate everybody for doing that. So that's it for now. I will see you next time. Thanks for watching or listening. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe 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

IntroductionThe Republican party is completely and utterly dominated by a small faction of political and religious extremists with policies that are incredibly unpopular, such as privatizing social security or criminalizing birth control.And yet, in spite of this fact, Republicans are still able to win many elections, even outside of their stronghold of the old confederacy. Sometimes, as in the case of Donald Trump, they can even win the presidency.Some of this reality is due to the extraordinary professionalism of the Republican political class, which has been consistently spinning straw into gold for decades through gerrymandering and voter restriction laws.The Democrats are the cause of many of their own problems as well, as we'll be discussing in the next several episodes here at Theory of Change. Our guest in the first episode of this series is Michael Kazin. He is a professor of history at Georgetown University and the author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party, it’s a look at the party from its very beginning up until the 2020 presidential election.TranscriptThis episode is available in video as well as audio. The transcript of the audio follows. It is automatically generated and is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, Michael. Welcome to Theory of Change.MICHAEL KAZIN: Thanks for asking me, Matthew.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, there's your book is a very long one with a very meaty subject, obviously. Why did you decide to focus on this topic?KAZIN: Well, I've been a Democrat, capital D, small d, for a long, long time since I stopped being a self-proclaimed revolutionary about 50 years ago or so. And I also, I thought that there's really no serious study of the Democrats as an [00:02:00] institution throughout their history, looking at the kind of coalitions that were built, looking at continuities and discontinuities in the ideology of the of the party.And as a Democrat with a capital D, I also wanted to figure out, what has done wrong, what has done right and how it can do better. Also I should say that my son is a Democratic party operative, has been for a long time since he was in college 15 years ago 16 years ago, and so I've learned a lot from him about how the party works internally and that kind of inspired me to learn more about that. So I think, as a historian, I'm always trying to answer questions about the present by using the past and question about the present is, sort of, piggybacking you off your introduction. What have the Democrats done, right?What have they done wrong? And what are the roots of that? How do we understand that evolution?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's, it is interesting that a lot of people have begun considering this question, very recently.A spate of new books advising DemocratsSHEFFIELD: Your book is one of several that have come out in the past year or two that kind of looking at well, what's what [00:03:00] is the left need to be doing? How are they doing things wrong or right?Which is interesting because there weren't a lot of those books for a number of years, as you were saying. And now one of the, the sort of Intentions of a lot of these books that have come out and we'll be talking to some of the other authors, so I don't, I won't make you have to respond to them unless you want to,KAZIN: But one of the, I just, I just reviewed a book by, two friends of mine called where have all the Democrats gone, which is one of the books you might be talking about by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's well, and the thesis of a number of these books has been that the Democratic party needs to focus more on economic issues and, and go away from social issues and yours, your approach is, is different than that. And I think that's why I actually wanted to start this series on the [00:04:00] show here with your book because I think you understand that because you're yours is a more historical focus one than some of these other ones that are more poll-driven or data-driven.I think you realize that that's not necessarily going to work this idea. So why? In brief, why, why do you say that wouldn't work?KAZIN: Well, yes and no. I mean, on the one hand, I do think Democrats, in order to become a majority party again, do need sort of economic populist message. They need to, uh, make very clear what they want to do for people and link up with, Movements like labor unions and other movements, which want to, help people across lines of identity, and of course lines of race and gender preference.I think that's really important. So I do agree with, with some of the popularists, if you can call them that, about that. On the other hand I don't think you can escape what the party already is which is a coalition of. Young leftists[00:05:00] who care very deeply about, about cultural issues and unions, which are struggling to revive and they haven't really revived very much yet.So, one can't just say, aha, this is what Democrats should do and why don't they do it? One of the, one of the things about being a historian that's useful, I think to this, uh, argument, to this discussion is. Is that you can't like leap beyond what the party is. You have to figure out how to convince people in the party to do things differently to stop attacking one another for what are, basically very small differences.And you also have to do that within a context of what might be declining empire context where of course Americans more and more are they might be strong partisans, but they don't like parties. And so if you're going to be in the, you're going to be one of the two major parties, you'd have to understand how to deal with that fact, how to get people engaged with a party as a party again.If you can't do that, then you end up competing with the likes of Donald Trump for media time. And for attention and [00:06:00] for, for glitz, so to speak. So, I mean, that's a, a long answer to your question, but that's sort of more my, my impulses than my answers, if you will.How the Democratic party got startedSHEFFIELD: Your point about people not being interested in, in the Democratic party as a party or parties generally is, is an important one and. That's why I, I thought it was I think it's, it's relevant the first part of the book where you talk about, the, the origins of the Democratic party as a party because you rightfully note that the Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the world. And those days in the early days of the Democratic Party are, I think, really relevant. Especially now when people are so interested or disinterested in political parties. Can you tell us a little bit about those early days and how the Democratic Party came to be?KAZIN: Well, it really arose at a time when for the first time in world history the United States was a nation which enfranchised [00:07:00] all, all white men.Who were, of course, white people, the majority of the population at the time. And that was unusual, because that wasn't true in any other nation, even nations that were somewhat democratic, like Great Britain at the time. We had a very small, number of men actually be able to vote.And on the, on the heels of that Martin Van Buren who is doesn't get enough respect, I think from, from historians began to put together a party based on working class men in the North and planters in the South slaveholders for the most part in the South behind the candidacy of Andrew Jackson, who they saw as this and was this sort of charismatic figure, military hero And originally the party was called the Jackson party, not the Democratic party because it was put together in order to boost the candidacy of, of Andrew Jackson in the 1820 election.As, as Tocqueville wrote, in his great book, Democracy in America, this was the golden age of, of, of associational life in America, of [00:08:00] community organizations of various kinds, fraternity groups drinking societies immigrant, immigrant groups as well. Tammany Hall gets going at that point which was, the most powerful democratic machine in 19th century, early 20th century in America, in New York City.And so, the party originally was really an association of, of white men across regions who wanted who agreed on opposition to what they considered to be the most powerful elite in the country at the time. Which were bankers in Philadelphia and New York which were Wall Street investors, Wall Street just beginning to be organized as a powerful institution at the time.And in some ways, this goes back to the, the famous debate between Jefferson and Hamilton about how much power the central government should have. Democrats originally actually believed very different from now that the central government was run by an elite and the less government power, federal government power that is, the better because they thought that the federal government would always be in the hands of an economic elite.And so the less power it had, [00:09:00] the better. But I think when you have universal white manhood suffrage you have the environment that's really ready for a mass party to, to form. And we can talk about how that happened. The Democrats did not create a universal white manhood suffrage, but they actually obviously supported it.And they were very active in signing up immigrants who came to the, to the country almost as soon as they got off the boat from, from Europe, even before they were citizens, they found ways to sign them up. So. Democrats really were responsible, you might argue, not just for building the first mass party in American history, but for really for creating popular American politics the way people understood that in the 19th century.And really the, the opposition party was formed in opposition to the Democrats specifically called the Whig Party. It's called the Whig Party because the Whigs were the anti-monarchy party in, in England. And the rigs opposed King Jackson the power of so called monarchical tyrannical president Andrew Jackson.So in that sense Democrats were really created their [00:10:00] own opposition.Media was integral to early Democratic party organizingSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, one of the other things that they did the early Democrats did that you document very well, is that they created the idea of partisan newspapers as a way of spreading awareness of the party's message and awareness of the candidates.Can you talk a little bit more about that?KAZIN: Yeah. Well, most newspapers were partisan. In the 19th century, really up until the early 20th century, believe it or not. I mean, there's still papers around the country with Republican and Democrat in their names, even though they try to show at least that they're not partisan anymore.And yeah, I mean, one of the things that Van Buren understood very early on when he was actually a power in. A sort of what was called the Republican Party in New York State, which is the biggest state in the country, was, he said, in order to convince people to support our party and to support our policies, we have to start our own newspaper.It's called the Albany Argus in the capital of New York and Albany. And that became the, the model for Jacksonian slash Democratic [00:11:00] newspapers in every major city in the country. And those newspapers were often supported unofficially by money from the Democratic Party. And some of the editors of those papers went on to be in the Jackson administration and then in the Van Buren administration as well.So, of course, these newspapers were the media of the day. There was nothing else that would spread it. And, and because congressmen had the right the franking. Privilege to, to send out materials from their office for free some Jacksonian Democrats would send out these newspapers around the country.So it was really a national machine in that sense.SHEFFIELD: It was. Yeah. And you mentioned it briefly just a minute ago about the idea of the Democratic party was anti-national government, anti-federal government, um, for a long time or from the very beginning of it. But it's, it's also that, there was this kind of the, the, what has emerged in the present day is kind of the ideological [00:12:00] divisions between the, the parties.It didn't really exist in the early, in, the first 150 years or so roughly of the United States, you could perhaps say. Roughly. And so there was this, this constant. Interplay between people who had what might be now termed as more, right wing beliefs and more left wing beliefs, but they were always in both of the parties and, and, and that's something that those tensions, especially within the Democratic Party, they kind of, really kind of, I mean, you talk extensively about that, how various factions within the party, we're kind of, we're pushing for really in many ways opposite ideas.Do you want to expound on that a little bit more?KAZIN: Certainly there are many factions. I think to be a successful party in a two-party system, you have to have a diverse group at least demographically, if not ideologically. Otherwise you're not going to win the electoral college, [00:13:00] and not going to take over them.Not going to win the Senate, especially. And of course the house as well. Or control state governments to any great extent. But the Democrats did have an ethos, if not an ideology, which, which bound them together for a long time. And again, it was, opposition to what they saw as governing elites, financial elites especially in the Northeast.And later on also industrially and so, in some ways they're united by their enemies, I think, it's fair to say, and that's one of the things which, which kept them together until, until the Civil War, and then, of course, slavery made it impossible for Southern Democrats and Northern Democrats to get together, because Northern Democrats were very concerned with the rights of white workers in the North and the working class was growing with immigrants from England excuse me, from Ireland and from Germany, especially in the 1830s, 40s and 50s.And so the Democrats, of course, even, even those who didn't have slaves didn't own people, nevertheless, often wanted to be able to own people. And rising in, in the world if you're a Southern Democrat meant, be able to have in order to own, own, [00:14:00] own slaves at a certain point.So. That was, that difference was too great in the party to compromise. And so 1860 you have two Democratic tickets. One the vice president of the United States named Breckenridge, running as a Southern Democrat. And Stephen Douglas Senator from Illinois, who famously campaigned against Lincoln earlier for Senate.As a Northern Democrat and but then it's quite remarkable. If you think about it, that the party stayed together, uh, after that it stayed together. Of course the Northern Democrats stayed in in Congress and we're able to elect governors in places like New York state during the civil war.They opposed the draft, for example, they wanted the north to win militarily, but they, they opposed the emancipation of slavery. They opposed giving black people the vote. And then they stayed together as also in the late 19th century opposing tariffs helping the big industries for example that was a big, a big issue for, for Democrats.So, so in some ways the, the Democrats began as the party for the ordinary white man. They expanded [00:15:00] as the party for. The not so ordinary white man, white men who had, who had a lot of property in the South. But then they, they, they kept calling themselves the democracy, in fact, capital T, capital D, because they really believed, I think all Democrats did, that they were the representatives of, the people and the Whigs first and then the Republicans were the party of elitists.In fact, down till the 18 60s and 70s, some Democrats are still calling the Republicans Federalists. The party of Alexander Hamilton, which was a self consciously elitist party back in 1800. Yeah. So I think Democrats did have these differences, of course, and they continue to have them.Another time of, just mention another big split in the Democratic Party, the second split after the 1850s happened in the 1890s during the Great Depression when Grover Cleveland was president, Democratic president, very conservative Democratic president. And the depression happened under his watch and he, he crushed a national railroad strike which did make him popular among a lot of working class Democrats.Of course [00:16:00] he, he had to go to JP Morgan to bail, try to bail the treasury out from the depression cause it wasn't enough money in the federal treasuries to pay off salaries and get the economy out of the depression. And then William James Bryan, the guy who wrote a biography about several years ago runs as this insurgent democratic candidate in 1896.And he really remakes the party and tries to pull it away from the more conservative influences of people like Grover Cleveland and Richard, Richard Southerners in general.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Although even he had that. Multifaceted aspect himself because he was a Christian fundamentalist as well.KAZIN: Yeah, yeah. But then, he was, of course, most American Christians really up until the middle of the, of the well, but thank you theories are so we're really evangelical Protestants, that was the default religion of most of most Americans and Catholics and Jews and, and sort of mainline Protestants were, We're seeing it as someone on the margins, even though the mainline process had a lot of power, of course but they didn't have as many people.So, so [00:17:00] Brian, but he did have a problem again, getting to the divisions of the party. Brian did have a real problem attracting Catholics Eastern Orthodox Jews, some degree, especially those in cities, because he was perceived. It wanted to be perceived in some ways as the candidate of rural America, of small farmers and of course in 1896 he got the support of the Populist Party, the People's Party which was the insurgency of small farmers.So, again in some ways it's, it's perhaps inevitable that When a party begins to gain power that it grows in its appeal, but that appeal ends up also leading to divisions in the party because people want to take it in different directions to, from their point of view, keep it winning. But those, that, those divisions often end up hurting the party and, and leading to it dividing and losing.Who is the Democratic party for is never settledSHEFFIELD: Yeah. One of the persistent themes is in the book is about, who is the party for? And it's a question that is, there is never a, a defined answer to that. Because [00:18:00] that's the nature of political parties is that. I mean, it's for whoever is going to vote for it, basically.But, but it's more serious than that, of course, because, especially now in the present moment, uh, that the, the, the opposition party to the Democrats is, I mean, Donald Trump is pretty much running as I'm going to literally lock up. My political opponents. I'm going to prosecute people who I think are mean people who did not obey me while I was the president.I want to execute them, which is what he said about it.KAZIN: He's called Democrats. He's called Democrats or communists, radical leftists. Anarchists, I forget all the terms he uses to describe, poor Joe Biden is not everyone's idea, not, not many people's idea of an anarchistSHEFFIELD: yeah,or a communist for that matter.Yeah but, but, but it's a it's an interesting dilemma though, that the Democrats are facing, as I, as I mentioned in the introduction is that they, the, the, the Republican party has policies that. [00:19:00] The things that it wants to do, most people disagree with and, and this is a very common lament that I hear from people, especially who have maybe who support things like single payer healthcare or, some sort of universal healthcare system, they're constantly saying, well, if we just talk about our ideas more than we would win but The history of the Democratic Party shows that that's not necessarily the case, and it never has been.KAZIN: That's true, and as, we were discussing before, having, having large, powerful intelligent social movements has always been important, important to the Democrats. I mean, arguably, there was sort of a Jackson movement before there was a Democratic Party. Jackson felt he was cheated out of winning the 18 24 election, so called corrupt bargain.Between Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams. But then, the People's Party, really does, help to change the Democratic Party Brian doesn't win. [00:20:00] Democratic Party of Wilson and later on of Franklin Roosevelt too is in many ways, a party which is. Trying to institute a lot of the ideas and policies and use a lot of the rhetoric that the populists had helped to infuse in the Democratic Party.And of course the labor movement, as I write about in the book is so essential to not just helping Democrats win in the thirties, but really changing them from being a party where the white South was really their base into a more of a, a national party and also getting the process of finally getting the Democrats to leave their racist heritage behind.Because the unions of the CIO in the late 1930s are interracial unions and they, and they're very strong in the Midwestern states, those swing states. There was swing states then, there's swing states still. And they were essential to the Democrats winning in those states.SHEFFIELD: And yet in the intervening decades the, the power of unions generally has shrunk and we're, we're seeing somewhat of a resurgence of [00:21:00] that current, the present moment with people beginning to do strikes and things like that is that do you, do you see things reversing in that degree and I feel like to some degree, I feel like Democrats.People on the left may not appreciate how important that unions are for.KAZIN: I think, I think they are more and more, the problem is. It's been so long since least private sector unions were powerful in this country that most people don't, especially most Democrats, especially most educated Democrats don't know anybody in the union except maybe now in graduate student unions, places like where I teach where they're very strong.But that's sort of the exception proves the rule, yeah. But look, I think. I do argue and I've also this that I'm also a labor historian. I mean, I think, I think working class institutions are essential to having a more egalitarian America. People have to organize themselves. They can't just look for help from on high, they have to organize themselves.That's the essence of democracy. But I [00:22:00] think there unions are stirring, certainly and as the UAW won this big victory over the big three automakers the Teamsters won a big victory recently over, over UPS there's a lot of Starbucks workers who are organizing, though they're being stopped from getting a contract, and, and Biden, for all his problems, is the most pro union president in American history.Even Franklin Roosevelt did not have union leaders to the White House embrace them and said, in effect, Uh, workers should join unions. So it's quite astonishing that, that, Americans would like unions, 70 percent of them in a recent Gallup poll favorable unions don't realize that their president is, is, is really favorable to unions cause he understands how important they are to breaking through Democrats to break through to win more working class votes.So the problem is, you use are not easy to organize under the labor relations act that have now it's much easier for employers to scare workers to saying, well, if you vote for the union, fine, but then I'm not going [00:23:00] to close down your factory, close down your workshop, whatever. And also.And the penalties for breaking the labor law for employers are very, very slight, really and can take years to adjudicate violations of the law. So, it's a real problem. The only time unions in American history really grow, they grow in surges. They grow from 3 million members in 1933 to 15 million members in 1945.From 500, 000 members in late 90s to Two million members by 1920, for example, so I'm sorry, five million members by 1920. So, and that's not happening yet. And if it doesn't happen, Democrats will have to find some other way to appeal to working class voters, I'm afraid.The left can only win when people demand betterSHEFFIELD: Well, and I mean, and I would say. You're right that they, people have to organize themselves, but I think that unions have not done as good of a job in giving people the tools to do that and helping them understand what they can get out of it. I mean, cause I, I, that to me is kind of the,[00:24:00] the, the fundamentally reactionary position is your life sucks.And you can't do anything about it. This world is terrible. So just sit back and embrace the s**t. That's basically the position. And so getting people to realize, look, I deserve better than what I have. That ultimately is the dilemma, I think, that the left is facing in any country that people have, more equality based viewpoints.And I don't, I don't know that that's something that is kind of common in the discourse, in the center to left media. I don't think it's talked about very much.KAZIN: I think you're right. And I mean, young activists, I wish Most young activists wanted to be union organizers instead of, organizing to do things that are fine, but you know, like, trying to take down, Confederate statues or, [00:25:00] or, change the curriculum.Being an organizer is tough because you have to talk to people who are not like you, very often. I'm looking at your organizers have always been more educated. than the workers that they're organizing. I'm writing a biography now of Samuel Gompers, actually who was a poor kid, really, an immigrant from London, but he educated himself, he read lots of Marx, um, and he learned reading Marx that, that, only unions can emancipate the, the working class. He stopped being a Marxist when he got to become a national labor leader, but you know, that, that wisdom is still, is still important, I think. So, I mean, I think it is, I don't want, I don't mean to be, down a downer here.I mean, I think there are, there is a lot of union organizing, DSA, which I have some problems with as an organization, nevertheless, a lot of people in there are very supportive of unions. Bernie Sanders, obviously supportive of unions, the AOC. So progressive Democrats especially are very supportive of unions.And, and that, and they're pretty vocal about it too, that that has not always been true, but I think they are. But being, but being vocal enough, being vocal is [00:26:00] not enough. And you got to have mass, mass, actions and to make, to make it seem, as you said, that it's possible to change your life with your brothers and sisters, that it's not, it's not dismal.And there's just not enough of that. It's happening in spots. But in the 1930s, it happened pretty much everywhere. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I, one of the other, sort of tensions with regard to labor organizing is, is that there are some different imperatives between public sector unions and private sector unions.And that's, uh, that's something that. Has, I think, that has had an impact in terms of how the Democratic Party operates and what policies that it prioritizes as, as private sector unions have become less powerful and less.KAZIN: That's definitely right. I think a large proportion of the delegates to the 2020 convention, for example were members of the public safety unions, especially AFSCME and the American Federation of Teachers.And [00:27:00] some for the SEIU as well, which has some public members. And that, I mean, it is indicative, as you say, that, that the American Federation of Teachers is one of the strongest groups in the Democratic Party. I mean, I'm very supportive of teacher unionism, but the fact that people with college educations, which most teachers have are such an important group in the Democratic Party does send a signal to a lot of folks who don't have college educations.Tensions between Democratic activists and Democratic votersSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that's you allude to that in the, in the last chapter of the book which you have called Cosmopolitans in Search of a New Majority. What do you, what do you mean by that, that term when you, when you say it?KAZIN: Well, I mean that, the, this, the core activists of the Democratic Party are people like me.Mostly younger than me, thank God, but people like me who have college educations, who, who grew up using the big city or suburbs who are not very religious who are, read the New York Times and listen to NPR and, who get their information from places like that and[00:28:00] they realize, if they're democratic operatives like my son is and, and like a lot of people he works with in the party that they need to, of course, win over a majority.That's what it means to have a democratic country. Or should mean anyway, but there was a gap between them and a lot of the people that they're trying to reach. And so they're always looking for candidates who will be like John Tester in Montana, for example, has a farm, it's not, or, or some, or people serve in the, in the military.There's a guy running for the Senate against Josh Hawley in Missouri, for example, now I can't remember his name, but he's, he's, he's, he's in the Marine Corps for 15 years. He was a lawyer in the Marine Corps, but still he was in the Marine Corps. And so connecting with average Americans on the part of Democrats who are not, really representative of average Americans is, is, is a problem, especially without, without a strong, without a strong labor movement you've got, you've got folks who are to a certain extent be missionaries.You could argue, or at least are trying not to appear that way. And so that, that's a problem. I [00:29:00] mean, look, Nancy Pelosi, who I think was very successful in many ways as a politician is, is symbolic of that, I mean, she comes she's originally grew up in a working class machine in Baltimore, where her father was mayor of Baltimore.So it was a brother for a short period of time. But then of course she. Married a rich guy and moved out to San Francisco. And San Francisco, of course, as became the, the very emblem of elitist Democrats still is unfortunately. So, so that's a good example of, of cosmopolitans even those who did not grow up cosmopolitan the way the way,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and it's also that, the idea that the Republican party, has explicitly oligarchical policies, in terms of trying to give money to rich people through tax cuts or subsidies. But they're able to push a populist narrative and they, and they do it. They refashion it every few years. So for people are claiming Trump is this new kind of Republican, which is.Literally the [00:30:00] same thing that they said about Newt Gingrich in the nineties. He's a different kind of Republican, a populist Republican. Ronald Reagan, especially. And Ronald Reagan. Yeah. Like they, they recycled this every few years and it's, and it's nonsense, but the, the thing that it does have that's powerful is that.It's refashioning the word populist to be a term about your intellectual approach, your epistemology. And so, by overtly embracing, anti intellectualism and religious fundamentalism, they're able to not only motivate a lot of people for whom that's very important, but they're also able to You know, sort of depressed Democrats who may be more, religiously fundamentalist like many African Americans, like, many, many white Americans in the Midwest and, Hispanic Americans in various areas where they live.Like that's, that's why you see them pushing for [00:31:00] that so much. Even for Republicans who might be more, Ayn Rand. Militant atheists they see it as a useful way of dividing and conquering.KAZIN: There aren't many of those Randians left, I don't think, in the party, but at least not publicly.SHEFFIELD: Well, Elon Musk seems to be one.KAZIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, rather powerful youngness. Like I wrote a whole book about, called The Populist Persuasion, which is about the use of populist language and symbol and imagery in American history. And this goes way back to McCarthyism, really. Talking about, people with one with silver spoons in their mouths and selling the country out Alger Hiss, Dean Acheson, people like that.And it was very successful. I mean, father Coughlin back in the thirties was first a Democrat and then becomes basically a fascist was talking like that as well. And luckily, as religion is, is always been very important in American politics. Ever since really the beginnings of the country.And, and so if you can make the Democrats sound like the anti religious party then you can have a lot of success, even at a time when fewer and fewer [00:32:00] Americans really are very religious that's one thing Democrats probably have on their side, actually in the abortion debate and debate about LGBTQ rights as well as that, more and more people, especially young people just.Religion is a nice idea, but it's not, it's not a serious faith in their lives, I think. And so it's no longer possible to say it's no longer possible to use, that, that kind of populist religiosity against Democrats as much as it used to be.How Republicans use religion to divide and depress Democratic votersSHEFFIELD: Well, but it's still, I mean, if you look at the I mean, the surveys have shown that, the fastest growing demographic group in America, which is Hispanic Protestants were overwhelmingly evangelical.KAZIN: Pentecostals, yeah, yeah,SHEFFIELD: yeah. Yeah. And they're, they're majority Republican now.KAZIN: No, it's true. It's true.SHEFFIELD: So, and, and, and, and, and that is, it's eating, starting to eat away also. And also in some of the Democratic Party's efforts with black men in particular, but and, and getting people disinterested in the Democratic Party and, that's why you do see so much [00:33:00] of the focus on, especially recently on, on, transgender people and, these manufactured grooming allegations and, and I think a lot of people, they see that the right is doing this flagrant work flagrant manipulation on the left and, and their response is to say, well, we need to just walk away from those issues and those people that they're attacking. I don't think they realize that the right wing is going to seize upon anything like just the fact that you oppose them as a political party means that you're a communist, regardless of what you say.Like that's the, that's the part I feel like a lot of the more, popularistic, I guess you would, you'd call them and they don't seem to get, it's the, you, you can run away from these issues all you want. It's still not going to make them stop.KAZIN: Also, as I said, in this review of as I mentioned before of a book by Tashira and Judas I mean, young people are [00:34:00] obviously.Given the ways, the future of the democratic party, if it has a future I think it does, but as they are the Republican party and you can't run away from issues they care about. You can't just say, oh, well, you shouldn't talk about that. Talk about this. You can say strategically, we should talk about differently.But you can't tell people they should not care about transgender rights. You can't tell people they should not care about, about policing. You can't tell people they should not care about obviously abortion. That's of course a winner right now for Democrats. And, and so.You have to find ways, again, it's a coalition, you have to find ways to make everyone in the party happy enough so that they will support the same candidates and work really hard for them. But there's no, you can't escape it. You can't find the perfect agenda. As you said, it's not, it's not about making sure that you get the polling majority for every race.It's about keeping the party together, which can, which can, become an organization which actually can elect people. And then once elects people can actually govern and change the society in good ways. That's your theory of change there. [00:35:00] So, I think that's, and look, people on the left.Are, are guilty themselves of, of just being moralist and pure and purist. And how come you didn't call that, that person? They, they want to be called. They, how could you have done that? You have to call people, you have to use the term Latin X. You can't call people Latinos or Hispanics, even though 97 percent of Hispanics and Latinos want to be called Latinos and Hispanics, so, each side of this division has its problems keeping, keeping their minds on what will produce a successful party. Yeah.How 'fusionism' built the Republican coalition and a version of it could help DemocratsSHEFFIELD: Well, and one model for moving forward, I think, is to look at the way that the right built their movement as well. So. Not only did they, so they didn't really have much of a social movement.What they started from was an activist movement. Yeah. And they did it through developing a concept which they called fusionism. And do you, do you want to talk about that? What that was for people who don't know that term? Sure.[00:36:00] And what it meant for them.KAZIN: Yeah. In the mid 1950s, William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review Magazine, a very small magazine at first, but then it became the most influential magazine on the right. And Actually an ex communist named Frank Meyer put forth the idea that the different parts, the different kinds of conservatives in America needed to unite.They needed to fuse their energies against liberalism, basically. Against liberalism and pro communism, as they saw it. The three parts were economic libertarians some of whom were, reading and trying to proselytize in favor of the ideas of Ayn Rand some of whom were just sort of Chamber of Commerce, national association of manufacturers entrepreneurs who didn't like unions, didn't like regulation, didn't like corporate taxation.The other, the other one were religious conservatives from, all religions, really, but especially Christian Protestant conservatives and Catholic conservatives. The other one were people who were primarily interested in the Cold War, who wanted a stronger military, wanted to, not just to contain the Soviet [00:37:00] Union which was the official liberal document official liberal doctrine at the time, but to overthrow the captive nations run by communist parties. So, Meijer and National Review became a Meijer helped National Review to become a place where these three groups came together. They wrote for the, they wrote for National Review, they wrote for other magazines as well, and they, they got behind the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1960 when he didn't decide to run for president, and then in 1964 when he did.And that was the, the coming out party, so to speak, of the of the conservative movement as a, political force in the country. Hope that's, hope that's accurate. As a former conservative, you would be able to correct me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and it's, and it's, it's, it's also that they, that the concept is to tell them, if you're a member of any of these three different factions, You need to understand that overall, you're headed in the same direction as the other two.And so you should, you should support them and at least, close your mouth and [00:38:00] don't complain about it.KAZIN: You've got a common enemy. You've got a common enemy. That's, that's the key. United by a common enemy. Communism abroad, liberalism at home.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and, and I think that that's, that ultimately is, is the, the Something like that has to be, be done on the American left in the 21st century that people need to understand that, when the overall, the, the, the thing that you're trying to do is, get rid of injustice. And injustice has many different facets. And you need to understand that there, they are linked.Like there's that there's that fable of the, and out of ancient India of the blind men and the elephant. Each man thinks that when they discover the elephant, and they can't see it, of course, so they each think that the essence of the elephant is the leg or the ear or, the trunk or whatever, and it's only by understanding that these things are all actually part of the same thing.And so if you are [00:39:00] interested in, whether it's worker organizing or women's rights or, regulation of businesses or, any, any of these, or, police reform or racial injustice, that that's, you need to get sight of the larger. The larger picture because it's, it's, it's too easy to focus on just one thing and think that that's the answer because it's not,KAZIN: Of course, Democrats do have a common enemy now it's Donald Trump. But that's Democratic activists. That's so far, according to the polls, not enough to get Biden reelected or to. Keep control of the Senate and we control the House, so.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, and also there is the idea of, having a vision of the future. Like, you don't, like that, when you, when you look at, particularly large democratic victories in American history, it's always been, that's been one of the biggest components is.There is a, a, a [00:40:00] vision of something that we're moving toward that's bigger than just the oneperson.KAZIN: No, I agree. The only, the only thing Democrats have now is, is a green economy, I think which is a common vision. Everything else, there's nothing, there's no substance to anything else. But as we know, a green economy is not easy.Because there's a lot of entrenched interests who oppose it and it's very expensive. so. Well, I mean, I think, look not to be nostalgic here, but the four freedom speech that FDR gave in 1944 is still, a good common vision, I, I should remember all everyone has freedom from religion of religion, of course, at a time when there was a lot of world war two, of course the Holocaust was taking place though.Most Americans didn't know that. That's freedom from fear. Freedom to have, healthcare be able to pay for it, freedom of housing, freedom to have the job, basically he called it, he called it the economic bill of rights. And building on the Bill of Rights, which is about, of course, individual freedom to a kind of collective idea of freedom, which, of course, every individual can benefit from.I mean, it's [00:41:00] really an American version of social democracy, which is, my politics. And a politics which I think, Most, Democrats, whether they know the term or not, do support actually but they, but they don't, they aren't capable for all kinds of reasons. We're putting that together into a coherent package.And in the book, I call this moral capitalism but at least more recent iterations of it. And that's not a good term either. No, they're not going to use that term. But the term itself matters, but, but not as much as people who hang on the substance. And agreeing to, agreeing to commit themselves to whatever their other ideas to, to agree on that substance.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. And Oh, yeah. I would say also, I mean, one of the other challenges faced by the American left Is, is the fact that, because the American right is not really conservative, it's more reactionary that means that it has really no there are almost no especially in the social sciences or humanities, there [00:42:00] are almost no conservatives just simply because they can't hack it their ideas, like, like if your, if your idea of science is that humans, were created by God, Like, if that's your idea of science, well, you're not going to have, you're never going to have a job in, in, in a biology faculty.And if your idea, of history is, God created Adam and Eve and, and the world is 7, 000 years old, and I, and the Bible is literally true. Like, if that's your idea of history, then obviously, You're not going to make it in in the history department. And, and like, there are people that I've known who were, when I was Mormon, that they were explicitly discouraged from getting into the academic fields of, ancient history or biblical archeology or things like that, because, and they were told that if you go into these fields, your testimony will not survive.They never back that up to, to wonder, well, maybe [00:43:00] the testimony is not true. They never,KAZIN: we just, we just, we disagree a little bit about this, but I'm not sure how much we want to go down this road. But I think there are, serious conservative thinkers political theorists not scientists, maybe, but political theorists and even historians.But the problem is they tend to want to celebrate the past. They tend to want to lionize figures in the past rather than as most historians do liberals and leftists just examine them, try to understand the past empathetically, but, but not act as if mm-hmm, , things, things were, were much better back then.I mean, make America great again is not Mm-Hmm, , a coherent. Historical approach.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.Because America or like that David Barton guy. my point being though, thatHow the left's dominance in academia harms its ability to reach the massesSHEFFIELD: because these are more reactionary rather than conservative views they're not in academia. And so the right in the American right thinks it's very envious of not having, academic.Outposts, if you will, but you know, in a lot of ways, it's disadvantageous to the left in the United [00:44:00] States being so closely linked to colleges and universities,KAZIN: I would say, look, only something like 35 percent of Americans, 30 year old Americans have college degrees and despite so much attention to what's going on in colleges, in the media and everywhere else.And,SHEFFIELD: well, and then the colleges themselves, are inherently anti progressive in like they're inherently conservative and how they're run like they are. Yeah, they're constantly, begging billionaires for money. They are constantly oppressing their, their employee employees. They're constantly ripping off their students.And I'm, I don't want to hear a professor, so I can say this,KAZIN: but I'm not, I'm not defending it. I mean, it used to be, it used to be, you could go to. You could go to University of California, Berkeley, basically for free. And now it's expensive. And because, because state, state universities are not really state universities anymore.They're, they're private universities which get, 20 percent or less of their funding from the state government. [00:45:00]SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so, and, and so, I mean, irrespective of, of the people that are involved with it, it's just simply. There are different incentives for being a professor to become a professor.You have to do things that in some ways are, I mean, like, writing a dissertation obviously is about the least populous thing you could do. It's not something that, I think anybody who's written a dissertation, when they're in the middle of writing it, you tell people that you're writing it, a lot of people's reaction unless they come are in that environment themselves is to be like, okay, well, let's talk about something else.They don't, and so, it's, it, it does, it's made the, the democratic party become more overly reliant on polling because they don't have touch with. The, the regular average person whether it's, just in terms of who runs the place or where they live, I mean, there's this extreme, mid Atlantic bias in left wing [00:46:00] institutions in the country.I mean, there, there's a lot of issues and I, and I don't, I don't know that a lot of the leadership seems to be aware of these things as far as I know.KAZIN: I think, I mean, they, they understand they need to win national elections and so.SHEFFIELD: No, they understand that, but they don't understand why it's hard for them, I think.KAZIN: Yeah, maybe not. Maybe not.SHEFFIELD: And anyway, so,Are progressive third parties capable of making change?SHEFFIELD: one of the other things that you talk about toward the end of the book, is that, you do talk about the temptation of third parties in the United States, and that's become especially more tempting, I think, to a lot of people who have more self described socialist viewpoints, whether they actually are a socialist or not, that's another question.But you know, a lot of people have come to say that, well, the democratic party is not for me. I want to be a socialist, or I want to be independent or green or whatever what would you say to somebody who has that perspective?KAZIN: I'd say one of the two parties is going to win. And. If you really would [00:47:00] rather support a reactionary party that is going to nominate Donald Trump, again, who doesn't believe in democracy, then fine. Vote for a third party.Otherwise, um, lesser evil is much less evil than the Republicans. And, Joe Biden is an old guy. I wish he were younger. I wish he were more dynamic. But he has some good policies and he's going to be the nominee. So, as in the famous line of the Rolling Stones song, which Donald Trump likes to play at his rallies you can't always get what you want, but you sometimes get what you need.And we don't need another term for Donald Trump. That's for damn sure. So, third parties can float ideas sometimes. The People's Party did that, the Progressive Party of Theodore Roosevelt did that in 1912. I can mention other, other third parties, which have been interesting, but they But they don't win.And they're not going to win given our political system and the way it's organized. And, and so, if you if there is a difference between the two parties, which I think there's a huge difference between the two [00:48:00] parties there's not always been, but there is now then, if you're on the left.You don't vote for Democrats. You are sabotaging what you really care about in American life.SHEFFIELD: Well, and yeah, I think that's, that's a good point. And a lot of people also need to understand that the right wing is also pushing you to go and vote for these other parties. Like they are explicitly going and fund a lot of these third party, hopeless ventures with that in mind.KAZIN: Yep. Yep. It's true.SHEFFIELD: All right. So we've been talking today with Michael Kazin.He's the author of What It Took to Win, A History of the Democratic Party. And then you are on at least for now on Twitter over at M Kazin, K A Z I N for those who are listening. So thanks for being here, Michael.KAZIN: Appreciate it. Great conversation.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us. All right. So that's the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation. And if you want to get more [00:49:00] episodes, just go to theoryofchange.show, and you can get the full video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.Some of the content is available only for paid subscribers, but most of it is available in its entirety. And then if you go to flux. community, you can also check out some of the other podcasts that I am involved in. I've got two other ones, one called Doom Scroll, and another one called So this just happened Doomscroll is a look at the news from a comedic and Doomscroll is a satirical look at the news hosted by my comedian friend, Lisa Curry and I, and our one guest every week.And then I've also got, so this just happened, which is a. look at the news, news and culture that I am hosting with my friend Kelly Holloway, who is a writer at The Nation. So I hope you guys can check those out as well. Thank you very much. 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The best ideas are timeless: Treat others how you want to be treated. Help people less fortunate than yourself.Unfortunately, many of the worst ideas are also timeless as well. And antisemitism is certainly one such idea.While many different people have been targeted by antisemitic conspiracy theories, the Rothschild family of Germany has a particular favorite among the world’s lunatics for centuries and more recently by the QAnon cult which has managed to recycle many old conspiracies for the internet age and invented some new ones as well.There are so many conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds that you could fill a book with them all, and my guest on this episode has done just that.Mike Rothschild isn’t related to the family that’s been the focus of so many bad ideas, but he does have a lot of experience focusing on conspiracy theories, having previously written a book about QAnon. His most recent book, which we’ll be discussing, is called Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.The video of this episode is available. The transcript of the audio follows. It is automatically generated and is provided for convenience only.Membership BenefitsThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.About the ShowTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Mike. Thanks for being here.MIKE ROTHSCHILD: Thank you for having me.SHEFFIELD: Okay, well, so, I have to imagine that you have two reasons why you became interested in this book as a topic. One being your last name, and then the other being that before this, you wrote a book about QAnon, right?ROTHSCHILD: Yes, so I've been writing about conspiracy theories now for probably about 10 years, and right as soon as I started, the first comments I would get were a Rothschild debunking [00:02:00] conspiracy theories, how stupid do they think we are the matrix must be broken, somebody unplugged the simulation.As this, stuff started to seep into mainstream culture. I started seeing all of these memes and conspiracy theories and accusations about the Rothschilds, and I knew I wasn't related to them. I've always known that, but. It felt like a really fertile ground to really do some myth busting and really kind of figure out what is this family? Who are they? What have they done? And I think much more importantly, what have they not done?And a lot of that came out of QAnon. Rothschilds are mentioned a lot in QAnon. They own all the central banks and they control everything and they have these occult human hunting parties and their vast Austrian lodges and things like that.So it really made sense for me as a next step after the Q book to really delve into the Rothschild myth.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. And it is, I mean, it's a myth that's been around for a long time and, you do [00:03:00] note and I think correctly that, people have written a lot of books about the Rothschilds over the years, like the family itself but not about all the conspiracies about them, which is kind of interesting in and of itself that nobody's actually done that too much before in an extended length the way that you did here.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah. Some of the biographies of the family touch on it a little bit. The, two volume Neil Ferguson books talk about it somewhat, but of course those were published in the late nineties.So there's a whole swath of. Internet nonsense that they miss out on. One of the big biographies of the family that came out in the early 70s talks about some of the stuff about Waterloo and the myths around that, but nobody had ever really put it together and certainly nobody had applied it to the current spike in antisemitism that we're seeing right now.SHEFFIELD: Oh, and yeah, absolutely. And so I guess, but before we get into all that maybe let's just do a quick overview of like I, some people want to, they actually don't even [00:04:00] believe that there are people that are Rothschild, that they even exist. I have heard people like, oh, that's just a made up thing on the internet have said that to me.ROTHSCHILD: That, I have not heard that one. Wow, that'd be a very elaborate made up myth.SHEFFIELD: Well, no, they just meant it as in that's just like Q, like as true as QAnon that there are Rothschilds. So, but yeah, okay.So, but who is this family line that kind of let's maybe start there. I don't want to get too detailed in the, into the weeds here, but like what, country did they get started in? And what are they known for as a thing?ROTHSCHILD: Sure. So the Rothschild dynasty that we know of really emerged out of the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto in the late 1700s.And at that point, Frankfurt was a free city in the Holy Roman Empire. It was the seat of the Emperor. So it was a very prosperous town for trade, for commerce. A lot of merchants came out in and out of there. There was a lot of shipping and there was a constant need for money. So there was a very thriving Jewish [00:05:00] community that made loans, sold and dealt in rare coins and metals, worked in textiles and exporting.They also lived in a ghetto, in a literal walled city that they were not allowed to leave except at certain times of the year. So out of that came it. The family patriarch mayor on shell Rothschild, and he very quickly became essentially the court banker to the crown Prince of Hess. 1 of the royalty of the Holy Roman Empire, essentially.And he he worked his way up to essentially becoming kind of his. Go-to for loans, for coins. And eventually mayor got his son Oshe involved in the business. And this is the early 18 hundreds when of course, the Napoleonic Wars are raging. And as the French invade Frankfurt, the elector of Hess, who's now risen up to become essentially one of the, one of the conclave who elects the Holy Roman emperor has to go into hiding.And has to hide the vast fortune that he has gathered and it's mayor and his son Amshel who are [00:06:00] essentially responsible for hiding this and a lot of what they do is they take this money and they essentially fund the opposition to Napoleon with it. So, they're, funneling gold and coins and things back and forth across the English channel.The family becomes incredibly rich very quickly to the point where. Mayer dies in 1812, and he's still a very prosperous merchant. His son Nathan, who became kind of the leader of the family after Mayer's death, died in 1836, and he's one of the richest men in the world. So this family built up a huge amount of wealth very quickly.And of course, wherever you see that, you find myths. And wherever you find myths attached to wealthy Jews, it eventually turns into conspiracy theories and anti Semitism.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess the other thing about it is and I guess I noticed you didn't mention this, but like the reason that the Jews historically had been in the Western world associated with banking is that Christians in the New Testament were prohibited basically from engaging [00:07:00] in usury or the charges, which was interpreted essentially to mean the charging of any sort of interest.ROTHSCHILD: Right.SHEFFIELD: And so by definition, then you could not operate a bank and be considered a good Christian, right?ROTHSCHILD: It was a canon law heresy on par with murder to lend at interest. At the same time these nobles and these churches they needed money. They needed money for palaces for great, houses of worship They certainly needed money to equip armies. So when they needed it, they went to the Jewish community because the Jewish community was allowed to lend it. So the Jews of really, up until the 1800s in Europe had a very precarious position of a lot of them had access to money, a lot of nobility needed it.So they had to go to these people who were outsiders and it were sort of hated for their wealth. That was also needed for their societies to prosper. So it was a very paradoxical position. And Jews still find themselves in positions like that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and, it is an [00:08:00] example of that, this these types of cross religious meeting needs-- they exist across the world in many different contexts.So for instance, in Israel, on the Sabbath there are plenty of people who do basically have to do work for ultra Orthodox Jews who live there because they can't do their, work on the Sabbath on Saturday.And then the Islamic world sent by the same token, during certain festivals, they can't do certain things. So they have to hire non Muslims to come in and do various things as well.And so that's the, how all of this got started of Jews and banking in the European world. And the Rothschilds they basically sort of became the proxy in a lot of people's minds for this. And then of course, we have to say, that a lot of the, it isn't just that people were angry that there were people with money. It was also that they had a different religious viewpoint. And that they, were not [00:09:00] Christian and, and I'm like, I mean, that historically, obviously was a huge thing.Now how did that over the years, was that something that people. I mean with the, Rothschilds specifically as a family, did you want to talk about that a little bit?ROTHSCHILD: Sure. They were often held up as, I mean, certainly in Judaism, the Rothschilds were really an aspirational figure. They were the family that one day you could be like, or you could meet them if, you worked hard enough.There was a mystique and an aura to what they had accomplished. But for many Christians and many antisemites and even now. They were considered to be one of the more visible Jewish families. They never really assimilated. You had a lot of these German Jewish banking families that left Judaism behind.They converted. A lot of them changed their names. But the Rothschilds were always very visibly Jewish. They visibly donated to Jewish causes. There were Rothschild hospitals, Rothschild museums, Rothschild synagogues. And so because of their visibility, and because of their, [00:10:00] Philanthropy, they became these kinds of outsized targets.And of course, there, there were aspects of the Rothschild mystique that were true. They absolutely played peacemakers to the royalty of Europe. They had enough money that if a prime minister. Or King said, I need 8 million whatevers to buy this, bridge or equip my army. The Rothschilds could do it.There's a story I write about in the book where the, where Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister of England, needed a lot of money really quickly to buy the Egyptian share of the Suez Canal. He went to Rothschild. Rothschild made the loan. The Disraeli paid them back with interest. And the British took control of a big part of the Suez Canal.For a century after that. So some of these things were true and did happen. It's just they're wrapped up in layers and layers of nonsense and conspiracy theory. Yeah,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's true. The other thing about it, as you said, it would kind of [00:11:00] merged over time with, that they, with existing other conspiracies about Jewish people.So, like that they're killing, Christian children et cetera, and, trying to or churches I mean, that, that's in it one interesting little aspect I think that maybe is not as Common nowadays, I feel like, with the Rothschild conspiracies about, that they secretly were controlling the Christian churches as well.Right. You, let's talk about that one. that's kind of a, it's like a conspiracy gone by, if you will.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah. You don't get quite so much of that anymore. The the idea of the Rothschild. The sort of global string pullers, I think it's much more connected to kind of finance and politics, but you get all kinds of different rabbit holes.When you go into some of this material about things that the Rothschilds are secretly doing to all of us, they, are polluting our bloodline and they're sapping our resources. It's very kind of classic almost [00:12:00] eugenicist conspiracy theory in a number of ways. And that the Rothschilds fund both sides of every war.So it really is that sort of whatever you're. Thank you. pet issue is, whatever thing is bothering you that day, you can blame the Rothschilds for it. You can find some book or pamphlet that blames the Rothschilds for it. It's a lot like how we view Soros these days. The guy who's just sort of behind everything, whether it is global wars or your own business failing, you can blame Soros for it and nobody in your community bats an eye.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he's going to fact check it. Right. Yeah. And, so I mean, these, ideas about them circulated in Europe for a number of years, but they also came to the United States as well in the beginning people I guess now is it, you, write about this idea of by a guy named, I don't even know how you pronounce it, Xavient Hayes.ROTHSCHILD: Oh, yeah, yes, one of the, Xavient, I think. I don't know, I can't remember.SHEFFIELD: Okay, yeah.ROTHSCHILD: I can't remember anything about his book, except it's really [00:13:00] stupid.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's basically, according to him, the Rothschilds were behind the American Revolution as well, which is interesting.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, you can basically find somebody who is touting the Rothschilds as being behind anything. It's a big aspect of David Icke's books. Alexander Hamilton was secretly a Rothschild agent. I mean, it's ridiculous. There's no, the Rothschilds didn't have agents when Alexander Hamilton was alive. It just makes no sense.But you find it, that sort of grain of truth to it. And of course, one of the truths is that the During the American Revolution, the British relied on these bought and paid for German mercenaries, many of whom came from Hetz. They were called Hessians. The Declaration of Independence in one of the 27 grievances singles out foreign mercenaries on American soil.Many of them were sold by the elector of Hetz, who, of course, his court banker was Mayor Amschel Rothschild. [00:14:00] Now, that doesn't mean that the Rothschilds were funding both sides of the war. It's just one of those kind of. Little historical bits of trivia, but you can take it and run with it in any way that you want to, especially if you're just making it up.There are conspiracy theories that the house painter who tried to kill Andrew Jackson was a Rothschild agent. John Wilkes Booth was a Rothschild agent. I mean, it's just anything that you want to apply to this family, you can do it and find some justification in some crank's pamphlet or book.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well it is, it's like the conspiracist form of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, essentially.ROTHSCHILD: Totally, yeah. Six degrees of the Rothschilds.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, Well, alright, so, maybe let's fast forward a little bit further to our more contemporary time here. That, I guess they... Had kind of, to some degree, like waxed and wane these, ideas about the raw sounds. But they kind of got new energy during the Cold War [00:15:00] in particular.And it was through basically the idea that the, Soviet Union was stood up by the Rothschilds and and, then also I think the fact that they were overtly and, atheistic. Anti Christian, the leadership of the Soviet Union. So of course, in a very shallow and way makes people think, aha, so these people don't like Christians, so therefore they must be in league with the Jews and the Rothschilds.And so this whole literature started kind of sprouting up about anti semitic and stuff about anti semitic anti communist literature. Let's maybe get into that for a little bit.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, this whole concept of Judeo Bolshevism, that the Rothschilds were secretly giving orders to Moscow on what to do and which proxy wars to fight, and that the, every, aspect of American life is infested by communists, all taking orders from the Jewish Illuminati.Again, it's [00:16:00] completely ridiculous, but at a time when there was a great deal of fear of what the Soviets were doing, what kind of weapons do they have? How have they infiltrated our society? That kind of stuff almost always eventually comes back to Jews because before the Soviets were scapegoats, before communists were scapegoats.Jews were scapegoats. So it's very easy to link them together. And then to take some of these very, minor bits of history and build essentially entire conspiracies around them. The idea that Karl Marx was the secret Jew. Well, his father had been Jewish, but had converted, I think before Karl was born.So it doesn't really matter. But at the same time you go, Oh, Karl Marx. And then you give him a fake name and you give him a, put him in the elders of Zion. Of course, the protocols of the elders of Zion are hugely important right around this time. You have all of these anti communist Christian nationalist groups springing up.You've got the John Birch Society. You've got white citizens councils. Yes. They have their own particular battles to fight, but [00:17:00] eventually it always comes back around to what the Jews are doing to us and how we're going to get back at them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And they also, and it was done through several different books, which even now are continuing to be circulated among the far right. and you talk about several of them. Let's maybe get into some of those, if you could.ROTHSCHILD: Sure, You've got one of the biggest touchstones of the post war conspiracy world, which is Secrets of the Federal Reserve.Which was published for the first time in the late fifties, I believe, written by a conspiracy theorist named Eustace Mullins, who was a protege of Ezra Pound. And it was actually Pound who commissioned the writing of this book. As Mullins tells the story, he went to go visit Pound in his mental hospital in Washington, D. C., and Pound takes out a 10 bill and says, do some research on the Federal Reserve. And Mullins comes back with this book, can't get anybody to publish it, a couple of Pound acolytes. Put it out on their own press and it's a huge hit. It's hugely influential. It's, [00:18:00] still widely in circulation.Mullen's kept republishing it with new information. It's very influential for people like Alex Jones for people like David Ike. A little while after that, you get the. Another hugely influential book for Jones, which is None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which is written by a speechwriter for the John Birch Society.This book sold millions of copies. A little bit after that, you get The Creature from Jekyll Island, another anti federal reserve book. You get Pat Robertson's book, The New World Order in 1992. These are really big books. These, were Robertson's book was a New York Times bestseller. And it is openly laundering the protocols of the elders of Zion.Putting the Rothschilds in this conspiracy with the Illuminati and the Freemasons and the occult to take control of global banking. That's straight out of interpretations of the protocols. And it was all of this stuff was hugely influential in these movements, and these books are still passed around.I personally get people telling me, oh, you got to read Creature from Jekyll Island to understand what's going on. Well, it was written [00:19:00] by an avowed anti Semite, so maybe not.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's, it is and I, and it's still circulated and None Dare Call It Treason, which was the first one, like the anti Semitism and anti communism we re very closely linked in, a lot of these far-right ideologies, but, and of course, it, it is, I think we have to also note that there were some various, people who bought into some of these ideas as well.And you note that, polling does show that the belief that the Rothschilds are the secret people behind everything is one that was, pretty commonly, it was like, what was like pretty evenly split down the middle,ROTHSCHILD: Right down the middle, really surprised, like the Soros belief is way far on the right, but the belief that the Rothschilds run the world is split entirely down the middle between conservatives and liberals.It is, antisemitism is not just a thing on the right is not just a thing of conservatives. A lot of the earliest anti Rothschild books [00:20:00] were written by communities that we would now consider far left the socialist community, particularly in France in the 1840s, there's a great deal of, anti wealth fervor.People believing that these banking families had too much wealth, too much power. The Rothschilds in particular were really hated by a lot of socialist France because of their building of the railroads. And the, they was seen as the destruction of France's beautiful forests. the naturalist community at that time was also extremely antisemitic.So it, you kind of never know where these alliances are going to come from and how they're going to affect history down the line.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly and you also saw some of these things in the Soviet Union as well which I mean there's a lot of anti semitism in the Soviet Union particularly under Stalin But I mean, I mean hell you could even like Karl Marx himself actually said a number of anti semitic thingsROTHSCHILD: Oh sure, Marx's writing is extremely anti semiticSHEFFIELD: Yeah, which is ironic considering all the [00:21:00] people saying this stuff about him.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, it's funny how, how these strange bedfellows always seem to find each other.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.Well, at the same time, as you note with, George Soros, he has kind of displaced, at least in the United States on the far right, has displaced the Rothschild as sort of the bête noire of the far right.And you do talk at length about kind of how that happened and, how, so let's maybe get into that if we could.ROTHSCHILD: Sure. So, Soros was not particularly well known outside of the financial world, probably up until the early nineties when he made a huge amount of money shorting the British pound.He became known as the man who broke the bank of England because he made a huge bet that the pound would be delisted from some European financial commission after it dropped below the value of the Deutsche mark. And he did, he made a huge amount of money. Now he did not break the bank of England.But he kind of got saddled [00:22:00] with that moniker, and I think a lot of far right movements started to take notice of him, and it took a few more years, but Soros really started to get targeted by the Lyndon LaRouche movement, the sort of economic cult around the conspiracy theorist and perennial candidate.For President Lyndon LaRouche, and he was, Soros was attacked as a, essentially as a court Jew of the Rothschilds that the Rothschilds had funded his hedge fund and were the secret power behind him. Soros never worked for the Rothschilds at all. there's no truth to it, but it was a very appealing idea among very, far fringes of crank world.And that's really kind of where it stayed. Up until 2004 and in 2004, George Soros, who was a Republican at that point, and actually was, a big fan of Ronald Reagan started to get into American politics funding or helping to fund the campaign of John Kerry, because Soros really bitterly opposed the Iraq war.And that was this time [00:23:00] when. The sort of toxic patriotism of post 9 11 conservative America was still very much in effect. This wasn't long after the time of Freedom Fries and all that other nonsense. And so Soros very quickly became a top tier enemy of the American right. And within a few years, you've got Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.Attacking him relentlessly as this puppet master who is funding all of these progressive causes, things like, free drugs for kids and sex changes in prison and all this other stuff that sounds crazy, but in a lot of ways, it really was the forerunner for the culture war that we're fighting right now with these, issues that are really blown out of proportion by conservative media.A lot of that stuff started with Soros post 2004.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it did. And one of the other things about and I can say, because I have direct knowledge of this, that the main reason that these Soros conspiracies were pushed, they were pushed [00:24:00] actually from the very top by the, by right wing messaging people because this was around the time when the Koch brothers started getting a lot of media coverage. And several other big right wing donors like Richard Mellon Scaife, just in particular.And, I know because somebody had said to me, we have to do something, people are concerned about, what was the phrase they use, it was like they're, the left wing is going after our entrepreneurial people who are preserving freedom in America. So we need to call attention to who is destroying America with lots of money.And so they settled on Soros. This was told to, I saw it happen inside one of the organizations that I worked with at the time when I was on the right, , like they were intimately involved with the creation of Soros as a, as the sort of puppet master of everything.And even, but they were not. For them, and it wasn't anti Semitic for themselves explicitly at that, but of course that [00:25:00] automatically just fed into a lot of this stuff.ROTHSCHILD: Right. Soros, I think made a really, good scapegoat. He's old, he's foreign. He speaks with a thick accent. He's Jewish. He funds a lot of progressive causes and a lot of things that were seen as contributing to the downfall of American morality. It really makes sense why he was singled out with the ferocity. And the speed that he was attacked with.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so, and, you do see that like over and over in the American contemporary right wing that, you know, like things which seem to be just lunatic beliefs of the base, in fact, actually have a close connection with the party elites.And, and, you see that with QAnon, for instance, I mean, let's, talk about that because like it, it, I mean, nobody knows for sure who was running the thing but it seems like they did seem to have some sort of connection into the Trump [00:26:00] White House over time. Yeah, as things progress with that, let's, discuss that if you will.ROTHSCHILD: Sure. And I don't happen to think, and I've, never really seen any compelling evidence that Q that the Q posts had anything to do with the Trump administration, but I think he, there were people in that orbit who knew exactly how to manipulate the people who did believe it. This was a very savvy administration when it came to social media, when it came to trolling and when it came to understanding human psychology.To understanding why people would gravitate towards something like Q, which is offering, this, secret war between good and evil. And Donald Trump is on the side of Jesus and they're gonna they're gonna destroy the evil Democratic Party and the Hollywood elite and the banking elite. Of course, we know what we're really talking about when we start talking about globalists and banking elite. We know who that, who they're really talking about.But I think that the Trump administration really understood there was a real need for a reason to [00:27:00] explain why things weren't going well. You know why Trump just kept failing over and over why the wall never got built. Why there was so much corruption. Why Hillary never got arrested. Obama never got arrested.Well, it's part of a plan there. There's a, there's, a scheme at work here and you've just got to trust that everything's going to be okay. Trump is thinking 12 steps ahead of everybody else. And he's letting, that through Q, through these codes, through these riddles, these puzzles that you can solve, and then you can have the secret knowledge and you can know what's going on.So I think they knew how to manipulate it. I think a lot of these, major content creators really knew how to monetize it. It didn't need to have any official involvement with the administration because everything was so enmeshed together.SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, I guess, and I should have stated that better that they, that over time, the Trump people were watching the Q posts and they would modify what they were doing according to them.[00:28:00]So beginning to use certain music or beginning to use certain phrasing and, and, and, it is, and it's, it is actually a really important point that you're making here though, that that for, because Trump had promised to be a different kind of Republican, right?And a lot of people voted for him because he had said that, and that he was, not the guy that laid off your father when you were a kid, right? That's not who he was. And so this was a way to and, you do see that, this has been a pervasive sort of re, there are these cycles of rebranding of populism by various right wing groups over the decades irrespective of conspiracy theories and.So with, Trump, this was basically a way of saying, look, he is on the side of the people. And you just have to take it, you just have to, trust, well, trust the plan and realize he's on your side.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah. That, meme [00:29:00] of him saying they're not after me, they're after you, I'm just in the way.I mean, it's completely ridiculous. If you know anything about Trump or, watched anything that happened during his administration. But if you're looking for somebody who's going to fight back, it sounds great. It sounds like, Oh, finally you have a champion. You have somebody who's in your corner who understands your problems.This blue collar billionaire shtick that he developed, people believed it without any evidence of it because they wanted it to be true. And I think so much of that kind of wanting things to be true, powers so much of conspiracy theories in general and really always has.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah, definitely does. And I think the other thing that you do see is that, the QAnon initially and you can, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but it was not, it became more anti Semitic over time, and it became more, talking Rothschilds over time. And, [00:30:00] from what it seems like, like the, people who were writing the post and again, nobody's, been able to officially confirm who was doing it or because it's, it seems like more than one person was involved with them.But. They began sort of grabbing all these different pieces of other right wing conspiracies and sticking them into QAnon. Sure. In this sort of farrago b******t if you will.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, QAnon really functioned as almost a buffet of conspiracy theories. You can take some of what you like, you can leave behind some of what you don't like.So if you think Jewish families, in a bunker somewhere run the world, well, there's QDrops for that. But if you think, oh, that JFK Jr. stuff, I think that's stupid. I don't want to do that. Then you don't need to believe that. So QAnon essentially became like, everybody, every believer's personal conspiracy theory.Every believer had a slightly different version of it. And that's really what made it so hard to combat. Because you weren't combating [00:31:00] one theory. You're not combating just... Rothschild's rule the world. You're combating the personal pet theories of every single person who believes this stuff. And that's really, tricky.SHEFFIELD: It is and, the ultimately you're not combating an idea. You're combating a way of thinking.ROTHSCHILD: You're, combating a belief system and you're combating something that offers people hope in a very twisted kind of way. And people, a lot of the writing about Q and on kind of misunderstood what it was all about, that it was just like, that it was like the Boogaloo Boys or something.They just want to watch the world burn. That's not really what Q was about. Q really was about the people who were causing all of the problems being eliminated. That's what made it so scary to me at the beginning, is that it wasn't a financial windfall and it wasn't just the nihilism of accelerationism.It was once we, kill all the Democrats, and all the bankers, and [00:32:00] all the Hollywood executives, then we will live in peace and freedom, and we will have the secret cures for cancer, and we'll have the water engines, then we'll never need oil again, all of that they kept from us, yeah. Right, that they kept from us, that they've been hiding it, and now we'll have it, and life will be great.And that is a kind of utopianism that, of course, really lends itself quite well to fascism.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it does. And these things have just continued to, cycle and recycle and, until we get to the point. of The title of your book Jewish Space Lasers. So for those who may not remember the, that particular story why don't you remind us of that, please?ROTHSCHILD: Yes, so this is 2018. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a member of Congress. She's just a CrossFit mama in Georgia who has some questions about those wildfires in California. And, oh, isn't it weird that PG& E is working at Pacific Gas and Electric, is working with the solar space [00:33:00] generator company, and Diane Feinstein's husband, and Jerry Brown, and they want to build this high speed railway, and, oh, look at that, a PG& E board member is a vice president at Rothschild Inc. Ooh, I have some questions about that.Now, her Facebook post, which is... Totally unfollowable. I mean, I try to sort of piece together how all of this theory is supposed to work and it's totally incomprehensible. It does not make any sense and it doesn't have to because it's all made up. That post never says Jewish, never uses the term Jewish space lasers.That came much later. But of course, by saying Rothschild Inc, she knows who she's talking about. And she, and the people who will be reading that post, they know what it means. They know Rothschild Inc means, the Rothschilds, means global domination and funding all the wars and all this other stuff. So this post because she's a private citizen, it kind of disappears.I think it was deleted at some point. And [00:34:00] in January 21, just a couple of weeks after she's sworn in, Media Matters finds the post. And they publish it and everybody goes crazy and the next day New York magazine has a headline. Marjorie Taylor green blames California wildfire on a Jewish space laser.So that's where that comes from. It is not exactly what she said, but the meaning is absolutely clear. And of course, she goes on this sort of long term defensive. Oh, I didn't know anything about the Roth child. I didn't even know they were Jewish. I just have some questions about the fire. Nobody really believes her, but it doesn't matter because it's already out there and she's already got her fan base and she's on Fox News every single day.And she made herself a new media superstar off the backs of conspiracy theories, like PG& E worked with Jerry Brown and a startup company to use a laser to start the forest fires. So the Rothschilds are just 1 part of this ridiculous theory, but they are the part that everybody [00:35:00] focused on because that name is so well known.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And then there was another and I feel like this story is not known as much. So I'm glad you started the book off with it. In your introduction about this woman who got into Mar a Lago claiming to be Anna de Rothschild who was a Russian. And she was none of those things, but I, feel like that story There, I mean, there are so many strange and weird characters in the Trump orbit and the Trump presidency that it's hard to keep them all straight but that one, I like, that, maybe tell, the audience that one in case they, they forgot that one.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah. So last. Last summer I think it was the Pittsburgh Post Gazette broke this story about this woman calling herself Anna de Rothschild. Says she was a member of the Russian branch of the Rothschild family, that she was raised in a 13 million mansion in Miami Beach, and she owned real estate in Monaco, [00:36:00] and she was a great golfer, and she had a private jet, and charities for children, and she was at Mar a Lago, and at one point she gets a picture taken with her, and Trump, and Lindsey Graham, and...Somebody offers her a million dollars for the picture and says, Oh, or wants to charge her a million dollars the picture and says, Oh, you're a Rothschild. You can afford it. Well, she wasn't. She was a Ukrainian grifter with connections to the Russian mafia. How this person gets near the former president of the United States, it's just such a colossal failure and so indicative of the ridiculousness that has surrounded Trump since day one of his political career.But this idea of a fake Rothschild getting into Mar a Lago, simply because of that name, people just believed her. She looked the part, she acted the part, and she had the name of the part. And of course it was all fake.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it was. And and I have to say, that was the kind of story that I, was surprised we did not see a lot [00:37:00] more of those yet, and I, think we will, of these people showing up at Mar a Lago.Because, I mean, there was, I guess there was one other one where there was a woman who was a spy for China that was, had, was it had gotten into Mar a Lago as a member.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah there are the early stories about Trump looking at highly classified war plans just outside. And there's like people from the pool, just like walking by taking a look.I mean, it's crazy for, especially for the Republican party, which was so staked to national defense and, putting America 1st and our safety and our security. The fact that they just sort of threw the doors open and now they're okay with Trump having stored like some ungodly amount of classified documents in the bathroom.It is golf resort. It's just it's really indicative. Certainly of the other laxity of the Trump orbit, but also just kind of what. Yeah. These people will let him get away with that. They'll let him get away with things that no American [00:38:00] politicians really gotten away with maybe in a hundred years, since things like Teapot Dome.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. Well, so, what has, have people have any of these conspiracy theorists been angry at you for writing this book? You had any fun reactions from people?ROTHSCHILD: I, Not so much for the book. I think because I've been doing this a while, the big conspiracy gurus, they kind of know that there's not much left they can say to me that I'm going to react to.So, I, I'll check every so often to see if anybody on the, some of the far right Telegram channels, they follow the far right Twitter, they're really not talking about it at all. And they didn't really talk much about the Q book either. Where they have gone after me is when I went on CNN, I guess this was now a couple months ago, to talk about Sound of Freedom.And to talk about how the the guy behind Operation Underground Railroad, Tim Ballard kind of falsified his background a little bit. And a lot of these statistics about human [00:39:00] trafficking are kind of fake and actual organizations that combat human trafficking want this guy to stop.That, and that was like a four minute CNN appearance and I got deluged with insane messages for weeks. Tim Ballard was actually on Fox News yelling about me and like accusing me of stuff. Alex Jones talked about me for an hour on his show. That was crazy. That was like, a deluge of, just inanity coming at me.A lot of it's sent by people. Using their personal email addresses or their LinkedIn accounts or their like work email addresses, uh, people, a Yahoo account, a Yahoo burner email is free. If you're going to harass somebody, you send somebody death threats, don't do it on LinkedIn.SHEFFIELD: Don't use your employee email.ROTHSCHILD: Don't use your, dot yeah, don't use your, small business address. [00:40:00] Yeah. Very little poor thought put into this.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, so now one of the other, uh, and I, did want to talk about this, that, one of the other kind of weird, inflections of, conspiracy theories, and I guess maybe not as much about the Rothschild in particular, but there has been kind of a weird intersection of, belief in anti Semitic conspiracy theories among some Jews.iS that that's, something I, it's always strange to see it. And I keep meaning to write an article about it, but I haven't done it yet. Yeah. But cause and I guess the biggest example of, what I, of that, what I'm thinking of is Benjamin Netanyahu's son I think his name's Yale, or something like that.lIke he, he posted one of these Pepe memes that was like having a. It was like, one of those bait [00:41:00] memes where they were, like the Jew is holding something. And then there's somebody behind me. And, then there was, I think it was the Rothschilds actually.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah. There is a lot of talk in, both Jewish circles and non Jewish circles, but who's a real Jew. You get a lot of oh, the Rothschilds are not real Jews. Soros is not a real Jew. There's, people who think Soros was in the SS. He, wasn't, he was a child at the end of the second world war. And he was a, Hungarian refugee which is basically in, in fear for his life.But a lot of these books will make these sort of assertions that even real Jews, like actual Jews, whatever that is, should hate families like the Rothschilds and some of these other rich German Jewish banking families for the, shame they've brought on the Jewish people through their greed and their, plotting and their lies.So there's a lot of arguing, especially in more Orthodox Jewish circles, that more reformed Jews, more secular Jews aren't really Jewish. [00:42:00] They're, they're loyal, maybe more to America or something else. So, Jews have never been a monolithic block. I mean, if you think all Jews agree with each other spend some time at a dinner table with some Jews and you're immediately going to get some pretty nasty arguments going.But that kind of thing of one of us, not one of us kind of self hatred, that's very common in a lot of different outgroups. You'll have Black white supremacists, uh, I mean, it's just stuff that kind of makes no sense. And a lot of the ideology doesn't really matter. There's a lot of scholarly work that's being done now about young people, young men who will jump back and forth between neo Nazi movements and then like the black Hebrew Israelites or jihadist groups, because they're just looking for somebody to connect with and to.Figure out who the real enemy is. And of course, so often the real enemy are these very rich, non Jewish Jews at the very top of the pyramid. So the [00:43:00] ideology doesn't make any sense. It's just about the group and it's just about togetherness and finding other people who are looking for the same enemies that you are.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it is. And yeah, and it's unfortunate to see though, in, in these particular instances.ROTHSCHILD: Yes, it is. It's very, unfortunate because it really does feel like these people are being used. And you, the, sort of Blacks for Trump and Latinos for Trump and Jewish people for Trump, like you, you are being used for, to give cover for this movement to make it seem more cosmopolitan and less exclusively white and wealthy, but people just don't see it that way.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and certainly that also is the case with, QAnon as well, that I mean, that the community at large, is, I think, pretty fair to say, traffics in anti Semitic conspiracy theories, but nonetheless, [00:44:00] they also at the same time will elevate Jewish proponents of their beliefs.ROTHSCHILD: Oh, sure. There are Jewish QAnon believers. And you're like, how is that possible? But they don't trust Soros. They don't, they certainly don't trust the Clintons. They don't trust Obama. So you go, you run with the parts that make sense to you, and you discard the parts that don't make sense to you.SHEFFIELD: Well, so what, I mean, have you thought about what people can do to if they see somebody they know kind of getting sucked into some of these ideas at all?ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, it's I think it's really the only solution. I mean, the idea that the government is, going to save us from these things. I think that is misguided.And I certainly think the idea that the tech companies are going to save us from this stuff. Good luck. You're gonna be waiting a while for, especially Twitter, the way it is now to do anything about any of this, but we can't, we can do it in our own lives. If, you see people that, spreading this stuff, using these terms, falling into conspiracy theories, you [00:45:00] can say to them, maybe in private, say, hey, I saw that thing you posted.That's actually a really racist conspiracy theory, or that's actually QAnon. Those people think Jews eat babies. I think a lot of people who are not sort of hardcore believers in this stuff, who just will share things that sound right to them, they don't want to be seen as anti Semitic. They don't want to be seen as racist.So if you kind of catch them and maybe just have a conversation. Offline, so there's no social media dog pile. I think you can get through to people that way, but you know, the real true believers, the ones who are really spreading this stuff, who are creating this stuff, those people are gone. You cannot reason with them.You can't debunk your way out of it. You can't debate your way out of it. I think you just kind of have to walk away from those people.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I, think you're right that trying to help people early on when they're starting to get sucked into this stuff is, key because yeah, because they don't have, they haven't invested anything in it yet.Right. [00:46:00] Because, I mean, that's, I think that's a lot of what with, these beliefs is that, if, it's if you bought one thing from me, I'll, I've got another to sell you.ROTHSCHILD: Right. Yep.SHEFFIELD: And like in business, yeah, like your best future customer is your current customer.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And, that's true with conspiracy theories as well in, in such that, that eventually it isn't even the ideas themselves that matter. It's, it's the mode of thinking that matters.ROTHSCHILD: It's the mode of thinking. It's the community. It's the idea that someone is trying to get one over on you and by following these gurus or buying these books, you can get back at them.Now, of course, what you can do with these people is really point out that a lot of the material that gets spread around in these communities is just plagiarized. It's just taken from earlier iterations of this stuff and is so lazy and low effort that it's like, Well, no, it's not the establishment that thinks you're [00:47:00] stupid.It's actually the conspiracy guru who thinks you're stupid, who thinks you won't notice. And I think, a lot of people don't want to be thought of as stupid and gullible. And I think there's a kind of inoculation aspect to debunking that is being explored a little bit more that involves a lot of that, of look, these people think you're stupid and they think you're an idiot and they think you're racist, so don't play into that.And you can get people sometimes that way.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, I think that's a, I think that's a great point. All right, well, are there any other parts of the book here you want to make sure that we cover as we wrap up here? Anything? No, I think particularly amusing or anything like that, or,ROTHSCHILD: I don't want to give anything away. Just, there's a lot of. There's a lot of outlandish characters. There's a lot of really bizarre historical events that happen. A lot of things that really surprised me in writing the book. And I felt like I kind of knew a lot about this family and a lot about this world. And I was constantly finding new things that made me go, wow, I cannot believe this exists.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, maybe let's maybe wrap [00:48:00] kind of the, there, there's some World War II variations on Rothschild conspiracies. What was the, one of the weirdest ones? What was your favorite weird one?ROTHSCHILD: Well, it's definitely, there's this 1934 film called The House of Rothschild. It attempts to tell the story of the Rothschilds in a way that would not inflame the German film market, but would give dignity to the Jewish people. And the film was actually a success. It was an Oscar nominee. It did got good reviews. That was kind of forgotten after that. And the Nazis actually took that film, the house of Rothschild and made their own version of it called the Rothschild shares and Waterloo.And I, in the book, I liken it to telling the story of the Titanic and making the iceberg the hero. It really is like taking all of the positives that the Rothchilds did and the perseverance in their business acumen and just turning them evil. And the, film [00:49:00] ends with one, some count or something like making a speech and showing where the Rothchilds had sent their sons and stringing all of these cities together with a star of David and then the star of David bursts into flames.And it's just this is so incredibly uns subtle. But if you are a Nazi in 1940, and you're going, well, we're, we're at war with England and who's funding England kind of makes a little bit of sense for you. And so that was really 1 of the more interesting things was finding this just photo negative version of this story of Jewish dignity and achievement. And then one of the turns it into Jewish depravity. It was just really strange.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and, actually, I forgot one of the other ones I did want to talk about, which is the Stanley Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut that has kind of recently become, very influential in QAnon but people may not know that is there is a Rothschild connection to that as well.ROTHSCHILD: [00:50:00] There is a slight Rothschild connection. So, the Rothschilds would have this these balls and they had one in 1972 called the, I think it was called like the Rothschild ball. I mean, it's a very plain name and it's like people in costumes and there's like servants and cat gear pawing each other.It's very weird. It's very like rich people amusing each other kind of stuff. And those, photos came out in the early aughts, just a few years after Eyes Wide Shut had come out. And of course, Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick's final film, and he died before it came out. Well, there's an orgy scene in the film that was shot using the the exteriors were shot.And a Rothschild mansion called Mentmore Towers. Now, the Rothschilds don't own it anymore. They haven't in quite some time. But the idea of, Kubrick dies before this film comes out. And it was shot at a Rothschild mansion. And there's these Illuminati ball pictures that came out. And oh, did the Rothschilds knock [00:51:00] off Kubrick?Because he was about to tell the truth about the family. And. All of this stuff was just made up by the film's screenwriter, and he would talk about it. He'd say, yeah, I made this all up. All of these, occult stuff that, that this, secret, rich organization is doing, yeah, I'm a writer.I, I invented it. But the idea that the Rothschilds had Stanley Kubrick killed to prevent Eyes Wide Shut from coming out, and of course it came out anyway. It's well, you didn't accomplish much. But yeah, it's a very popular theory on the right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I mean. I, that particular one, it reminds me of the idea that, that Bill and Hillary Clinton kill people. And it's if they did that, Anthony Weiner would have been assassinated like five or six times.ROTHSCHILD: Donald Trump would have been assassinated. Ken Starr would have been assassinated. It wouldn't have been like some woman who was a White House intern for a month. Or Secret Service agents who 20 years after Clinton's presidency flew on an old [00:52:00] Clinton helicopter one time, like, why are you wasting your time on these people? go after the real people, Ken Starr is still, I mean, he's not anymore, but, go after him, go after the people who actually did something. it's just yeah,SHEFFIELD: it is All right. Well, so I it's been a good discussion here Mike And let's so people who want to follow you on Twitter you are at rothschildmd. And I guess D is your middle initial.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, so those are my initials I'm not a doctor. The name Rothschild is Jewish. I could have put some more thought into that too, but you can get the book on hardcover, you can get an e-book, you can get an audio book you can get autographed copies from some of the bookstores I've done events at. You can reach out to me to get more information about that. And yeah, it's, out there.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Cool. All right. Well, thanks for being here, Mike.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah. Thank you.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the discussion for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us for the program. Thank you very much. [00:53:00] And if you want to get more episodes, just go to theoryofchange.show, where you can get all of the video, audio, and transcript of the previous episodes. And you can sign up on Patreon or on Substack at theoryofchange.show. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe This is a public episode. 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Mormonism occupies an important place in the conservative religious realm and its adherents exercise significant voting power in the Republican political coalition in states like Utah, Arizona, Idaho, and even California. In today’s political media environment, Mormons are influential both as content producers like Glenn Beck and as content consumers, where they share many similar tastes with White Evangelical Protestants.But the comparative closeness the two fundamentalist traditions have today is a departure from the past. While Mormonism and Evangelical Protestantism were born in roughly the same time period of the mid-19th century, they almost immediately grew apart for political reasons, eventually leading to the largest Mormon sect, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), moving to Utah, which was part of Mexico at the time.The shared dynamic began changing for the two faiths during the mid-20th century as Evangelicalism adopted many of Mormonism’s “end times” concerns and LDS Mormons became increasingly absorbed into right-wing political media.One person who saw this happening in real time is Pat Bagley, a veteran editorial cartoonist who has worked at the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper for more than 40 years. Once a devout illustrator of Mormon media, he now follows his own set of rules with regard to both religion and politics. Along the way, he’s become a fixture in Utah and LDS culture, whether they like it or not.This episode was previously released July 29, 2021. The video of the conversation is available. An automated transcript of the audio follows.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Please join me in welcoming Pat Bagley.PAT BAGLEY: Hi Matthew.SHEFFIELD: So Pat, why don't we get started with you telling us a bit about how you got interested in cartooning.?BAGLEY: So I was attending BYU [Brigham Young University] and it was in this class that was personal finance and it was, just boring. It, was as do dirt. And I used to kind of scribble in my class notes and, do [00:01:00] caricatures and things like that.And so all of a sudden I had this idea about a talk that was current at BYU at the time. The Department of Justice was going to sue BYU because of its housing policy. And so all of a sudden I did this cartoon in the middle of my class notes, and I thought, that's not bad. So I took it to the Daily Universe, the BYU newspaper, and I thought that they were going to have their cartoonists take my idea and, draw it.But I showed it to the publisher, Nelson Wadsworth, and he said, do a finished copy and bring it back. So I did a finished copy of that cartoon, and I brought it back, and it ran next day in the Daily Universe. And when you see your stuff in print, it's pretty heady stuff, and I was kind of addicted after that.But a few weeks later, this is even better. A few weeks later, I was going to work at, I was working at a little graphics shop at BYU and I walk in and the secretary [00:02:00] says, congratulations on getting published in time magazine that what, and she described the cartoon. And as soon as I was off work, I went down and grabbed time magazine.Sure enough. The very first cartoon I ever did made it into Time Magazine, and since then it's been kind of downhill. But it's been pretty, pretty heady stuff.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, okay, and so, and that was what, the 1960s roughly was that?BAGLEY: So I've been doing this for 42 years, so 79?SHEFFIELD: 79. Okay. Oh, interesting. Okay. So I guess that was around the time when the church was, embroiled, the LDS Mormon church was embroiled in controversy, I guess they had just come out of it though, with regard to their treatment of people of African descent.BAGLEY: Blacks and the priesthood.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.BAGLEY: I was working at the Daily Universe. They actually hired me after I did that [00:03:00] cartoon, and I was working at the Daily Universe when they came out with their announcement. So, 79-80.I was born in Utah. And when I was 3 years old, family moved to California, so I grew up in Oceanside, California, went to school there, went to high school.SHEFFIELD: And Oceanside, just for those who are not familiar with Southern California, where is that?BAGLEY: It's just a little bit north of San Diego. But we'd always come back during Easter to visit family, and we had... lots of family here in Utah, and I thought Utah was kind of exotic. If you grew up in Southern California, the temperature is always the same. nothing ever changes. You don't have snowfall. You don't have leaves changing. And I've come to Utah and I've seen the leaves change and all this kind of stuff.And I thought that's pretty awesome. And so I was, I love the beach, but I also love, Utah.SHEFFIELD: And you've lived there since when did you move to Utah to go to BYU?BAGLEY: Yeah, so I went to BYU, went on a mission to Bolivia, got back, went straight back to [00:04:00] BYU, graduated, and worked a couple of graphics jobs before I got the job at the Salt Lake Tribune.SHEFFIELD: And you worked, and how long have you worked at the Tribune? When did you get hired on there?BAGLEY: So it's been, oh, geez, coming up at 42 years. I just, it was before the pandemic that we had this 40th celebration of me being at the Tribune. and it was kind of a big deal, and we had this thing at Rose Wagner, and, but that was 40 years, and that was almost two years ago.So it's been 42, 42 years I've been at the Salt Lake Tribune.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and in addition to doing editorial cartoons, you also in the 90s, in early 2000s, you were a bit of a Mormon publishing entrepreneur yourself. You're, why don't you hold up one of your books there for us so everybody can see it.BAGLEY: Okay, so, I wish I had.SHEFFIELD: But I've got what's and read the title for our [00:05:00] audio listeners here. Where have all the Nephites gone?BAGLEY: But the first book was Norman the Nephite.SHEFFIELD: And that's that little guy with the orange hair there.BAGLEY: Yeah, it's one of those search and find books where you have all these. It was like Waldo, Where's Waldo? Waldo was a big hit. And so this book came to me and they said, we want to do something kind of like Waldo. And we want to call it find the bishop. I said, nobody wants to find the Bishop, but it came up with this idea of Norman the Nephite, which is kind of a magical character because, nobody really knows what a Nephite looks like and I could go anywhere I wanted with it.And so they actually took me up on it and he came up with three books. There was Norman the Nephite, Where Have All the Nephites Gone? And the last one was A Nephite in the Works. So I did those books for Deseret Book in the early to mid nineties.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so for people who aren't familiar with Mormon culture, tell us a little bit about the [00:06:00] whole Mormon industry.Like, it's pretty huge. Wouldn't you say?BAGLEY: You mean the Mormon industrial complex?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, what, is it? What is it involved? Tell us, about it. What is it in there? You mentioned Deseret Book and some of the other companies? Who owns Deseret Book, how about that?BAGLEY: Deseret Book has got a captive audience, and I'm sure that you as a former Mormon heard that the only books that you should ever buy come from Deseret Book. If you can't get it at Deseret Book, then it's probably not okay. So it, they, practice a lot of control, through Deseret Book.SHEFFIELD: And the church owns the Deseret Book, isn't that right?BAGLEY: Oh, yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and that's something that's kind of interesting about Mormonism, although but not really though, because one thing a lot of people don't know is that a lot of the more, conservative or fundamentalist religions, they actually have these [00:07:00] publishing empires, lots of them do. So the Mormon church, so they've got the Deseret News newspaper. Then they've also got Deseret Book, but then they, and then they also have a whole host of publishing things affiliated with Brigham Young University. And do they have any others that, have or is that pretty much it?BAGLEY: Well, the KSL, you know, which--SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah, they own that too. Yeah. Which is a local television affiliate in Utah for those who don't know. And they, oh yeah. And they own Bonneville Communications.BAGLEY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: How can I forget that? Bonneville Communications is a, radio and television station ownership group and it owns a bunch of stations around the world. Isn't it? Or is it just in the United States?BAGLEY: I mean, there's the Liahona, which goes out to South America and Mexico. And here's the thing though, you can be Mormon and never have to be exposed to anything that's not Mormon. they've got you covered, from being a kid.They've got books [00:08:00] introducing you to the Book of Mormon, when you're two years old and you don't have to be exposed to anything that's not LDS.SHEFFIELD: The LDS Mormons are not really exceptional in that regard, because there are like the Seventh-day Adventists, they have their newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor, and even more modern publications like the Falun Gong cult in China, they own the Epoch Times, which has become one of the most popular right wing Websites in America, and they've got one in Germany too, apparently.And it's all designed to promote the religion. But, I guess there are some lighter aspects to that. So, besides the Norman, the Nephite stuff, what else? What were some of the other books you've got? You've got a couple of the other ones there that you made.BAGLEY: Well, I was kind of on a roll. So, I recommended they do a Book of Mormon timeline. Because you read the Book of Mormon and you have different groups going off in different areas, and then they pop back up and you kind of wonder, well, [00:09:00] wait a minute, do I remember where they came from? And, so the Book of Mormon timeline actually kind of pulls it all together.We were talking earlier and you said that you can still refer to it because it's accurate because this book is actually pretty good.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it was a guy on Amazon that he was like, wow, this is the most accurate Book of Mormon timeline I've ever read. And I still buy it. he was, giving you a plug there and you didn't know. And then you had another one, another timeline book too.BAGLEY: Church History Timeline. and I grew up in a family where, history is important and we like reading a lot of history. And my brother is the leading western trail historian in America. Yeah, he's in lots of books. There was one that was actually, that was reviewed in the Atlantic magazine and it's great stuff.He did a book called Blood of the Prophets, which was about Mountain Meadows. It is the best book about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But the narrative, it's just compelling. It's great stuff. [00:10:00] So I'd recommend Blood of the Prophets if you're interested in Utah history.SHEFFIELD: Tell us about the, for people who are not familiar with Mormon history, what was the Mountain Meadows massacre? What was that?BAGLEY: So it was the largest white on white massacre in American history. There was a group of 120 to 130 Immigrants coming from Missouri, going through Utah to get to California. And there's a place outside of Cedar City that's called Mountain ,Meadows where they were camping and the Mormon militia in Southern Utah ambushed them.There was three days where they were shooting at each other. And then the Fanchers, which is the immigrant group decided they would surrender and they surrendered as they were being marched to Cedar city. The Mormon militia, murdered them. Just killed them all, men, women, children.SHEFFIELD: And what was the reason for that?BAGLEY: Well, this was when Mormons were [00:11:00] sure that the American government was coming out to, wage war on the Mormons. There was Johnson's army that was, marching to come to Utah to impose order. And so they thought they were... Under threat, and so they, they did the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and it was, they realized almost immediately it was really bad they had done that, and they covered it up.But at the same time, Mormons have been persecuted. They were run out of Illinois. They were run out of Missouri. They've had a history of persecution. So. If you have a persecute, persecution complex because you've been persecuted, that's understandable.SHEFFIELD: I think there is an interesting parallel perhaps now with the way that Mormons were feeling at that [00:12:00] time and how white evangelical Christian fundamentalists are feeling now.Do you think there's a parallel there at all? There seems to be a lot of persecution feelings, on, in that subgroup.BAGLEY: Oh, yeah. I mean, there's, no question that they feel under threat. They feel persecuted and, but it's just, crazy stuff. I mean, they're comparing wearing a mask to a genocide.They're comparing getting vaccinated to slavery. And it's just nonsense. But, you ask them about it and they feel it in their bones, they are under threat. This is existential.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And actually, that reminds me of a cartoon that you did recently. I'm going to put it up on the screen. So, can you describe it for the listeners, just so they can understand what you've written here?BAGLEY: Yeah. I mean, there's the grim reaper. And instead of having, the thing that, what is it called [00:13:00] the scythe? Yeah. Instead of a scythe, he's got a golf club and it says 99 percent of COVID deaths are among the unvaccinated. And they're set up on a tee is this golf ball and a red hat, which, automatically identifies them as a Trumper.And he's saying, no one's going to jab me. Well, he's going to be more than jabbed by COVID because COVID doesn't care what you believe. Believe crazy stuff and then, screw around and find out.SHEFFIELD: It is such a unfortunate and terrible mentality. I mean, as somebody who's been making cartoon commentary for 42 years. Is that something that you've seen develop over time in the American right? or some people seem to think that this just happened with Trump, but I don't think that's right.BAGLEY: No, I mean, this has been going on for quite a while and actually you can draw a bright line between the establishment [00:14:00] of Fox News in 1996 and the erosion of trust in the institutions that make us a nation. They came out and said, we are fair and balanced. Everybody else is not. They're telling you lies. and they undercut trust in, government. they say the government lies to you. They say the only people you can trust are us, Fox News. So you look at the erosion of what's happened, of where we got here, how we got here.It started earlier, with Gingrich and, all that, but it was amplified by Fox News. And over the years, they've just gotten crazier and crazier. They got us into a war in Iraq for no good reason. they, were saying in 2008 during the financial collapse, everything was fine. there was no collapse.It was just okay. they [00:15:00] got us, Donald Trump. And they amplified this whole lie about Obama being a Muslim.SHEFFIELD: Now, in regards to, I guess your own career trajectory, it is, have, so you're, now, on pre, on the progressive side of the aisle. is that where you started off initially or, have, And if so, we, what was that experience like being a progressive in, in, in Mormondom?BAGLEY: So I grew up a Republican and this is back in the day where you could be liberal and be a Republican. I mean, there was Rockefeller, there was Percy, there was Hatfield, I think, who wereSHEFFIELD: Eisenhower. Certainly.BAGLEY: Yeah. George Romney was pretty progressive. He was anti war. He was pro choice. He marched with Martin Luther King. That was back in the day [00:16:00] when both Republican and Democratic parties had left and right wings. People migrated so that the Republican party is completely right wing, reactionary right wing. The Republican party didn't, I didn't leave the Republican party. It left me, and, like, people like you, they ask, well, what was your politics?My politics is. Eisenhower republicanism, I believe in expanding education, I believe in infrastructure. there are a lot of good things that, oh, Eisenhower also expanded the social security net. So, I'm an Eisenhower republican.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and in that case, you deserve to be canceled, by conservatives. Which, isn't that, there, there isn't that just so hypocritical and ironic that they're constantly complaining that everyone wants to cancel them. But they cancel people like you guys decades and have continuously done it. [00:17:00]BAGLEY: Well, they came up with the term Rhino, Republican in name only. And that means that if you're identified as that, then you're kicked out. You're expunged. it sounds a lot like the communist party, where, you see, see who's on the top of Lenin's tomb and see who's been erased recently. So yeah, they're really into that whole cancel culture stuff. It's projection. It's just pure projection.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. now I guess within, I think, the same thing also is kind of happened in Mormonism as well. So in Utah in the 70s, and early 80s, it was not uncommon to have statewide officials who were Democrats. The governors were Democrats, for a bunch of years in the 60s and 70s. But so what do you think happened to Mormonism, over time? Something similar?BAGLEY: Oh, it was probably Ezra Taft Benson, who said,SHEFFIELD: And who was [00:18:00] Ezra Taft Benson?BAGLEY: Ezra Taft Benson eventually became the president of the LDS church, but he was famous for saying, I don't see, I don't see how you can be, how you can be a good Mormon and a Democrat.And the LDS church didn't used to be so in line with evangelicals, evangelicals hate Mormons, but they used to be kind of their own things. And now Republican ideology, Mormon political ideology follows in line with evangelical political ideology. They're, bedfellows right now. And I think it's bad for Christianity,by mixing politics and religion, they've done a disservice to both. It's, just debased both. the Christianity that it espouses is pretty awful. it used to be you would keep your politics and your religion [00:19:00] separate. I remember going to see Goldwater when I was a kid. My dad took me to see him on one of these train stops when he was campaigning.And... I remember thinking, wow, this is kind of cool. This guy could be president. And he was one of those people who said, you've got to maintain this. Division between religion and politics, and he said, if these TV pastors ever get ahold of the Republican Party, like they're trying to do, that's going to be really bad. And here we are.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he was right. Although I guess you could argue that he kind of encouraged that and maybe that's why he said that later. He kind of regretted what happened.BAGLEY: Yeah, I mean, he was for his time. He's pretty far, right? But, you look back on him and he wasn't that bad. I mean, he was.Fine with gays in the military. He was fine with, choice, abortion choice. compared to the people we have now. He was kind of moderate.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's interesting, you had mentioned [00:20:00] in Mormonism about abortion and positions on that, being more kind of up in the air or, on one side or the other that also happened within white evangelism as well.So, like, the Southern Baptist convention used to be pro choice and used to not think that abortion was a sin. And so, yeah, so a lot that's kind of become the story of the Republican party is how religion was used to get people to vote for them. Because, when you look at polls of Americans and even Republican voters, they don't agree with Republican economic.viewpoints, they don't want to cut social security. They don't want to privatize Medicare or things like that. And so they got to have a reason to vote for them. Seems like.BAGLEY: Well, the Republican party is really good at riling people up with the cultural wars so that they don't have to give people, anything, [00:21:00] I mean, I sometimes put this out there, what have the Republicans done for ordinary Americans over the last 40 years? And people really strained to find anything that the Republican Party is actually material, materially done to benefit ordinary Americans, over the past decades.Because they haven't, but they have given them this red meat culture war stuff, about abortion, about cancel culture, about, I mean, it's led to QAnon, complete crazy nonsense. But if you, like you're saying, if you do look at the policies that people like, it's actually pretty in line with today's Democratic Party.SHEFFIELD: And, this whole cancel culture stuff is so ridiculous. Somebody who I'm sure you probably know, Steve Benson, who worked for a long time for the Arizona Republic as a cartoonist and was also a member of the LDS faith, can you tell the audience a little bit about what happened with him and [00:22:00] why he eventually separated from Mormonism?BAGLEY: I've known him since BYU. When I was hired at the Daily Universe, he was the other cartoonist. They actually had two cartoonists. There's me and Steve Benson. And I got to know his family pretty well. I actually met Ezra Taft Benson once. He took me up to his apartment.SHEFFIELD: And he was Steve's grandfather.BAGLEY: Steve's grandfather. And he was the president of the LDS Church. He was very gracious, when he met me. And I could tell he was working on something. He, I said, what are you working on? And he said, I'm working on blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, I just read this article by Alexander Schultz Nissen about that very same thing.And he goes, I read that too, but I'm kind of worried that he's a plant. My mind went to the green leafy kind of plant, but he was actually talking about Alexander Solzhenitsyn being a Soviet agent. So Ezra Taft Benson was, what's the name of that [00:23:00] group? The Birch Society. he was definitely part of that.So Steve grew up in this family that was a very interesting family. he was the oldest son of the oldest son and was kind of the crown prince. They were looking to him to kind of, go into church leadership at some point, Steve had other ideas. He liked cartooning. And so he started cartooning and he got the job at the Daily Universe.but he was very right wing and he actually ratted out one of his political science professors because of political science professor bought, brought people in with different. And he actually brought a communist in to explain to the class about communism, which is what you do in college, you get exposed to different ideas.And I watched Steve's progression, from being very right wing to, questioning, to, wondering about things, to [00:24:00] coming out against the church and against what they did to his grandfather. The story that he tells is there was a general conference where Ezra Taft Benson was presiding, but he wasn't all there.He had dementia and was kind of losing it, but there was, they propped him up, in front of the masses. And there was somebody who actually behind the scenes took his arm. It did this so that it looked like he was waving to the, and Steve was behind the scenes and he saw that, he goes, that's it, I'm done.And so Steve, his journey has been from being very right wing to being pretty progressive and, it's hard on his family because family is very LDS and very, I don't know, but, it was brave of Steve to do what he did. It was courageous.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there's that movie [00:25:00] Weekend at Bernie's that's basically what they were doing where they were propping up a person who could not You know do anything in function and pretending that he could and telling people that he was in charge. It was pretty-- and they never apologized or even admitted that they did it even though it's obvious Yeah, so at the same time, so, I mean, I mean, you've talked about the LDS church having become a lot more right wing because of and people in his orbit.But more recently, they've been going through a lot of changes as well, and I don't know fully what's going on. Why don't you tell us about some of these changes and whether you think they mean anything?BAGLEY: A couple of things that I've noticed that are kind of worrisome, because the LDS Church is kind of a moderating influence on the membership.They came out and they said it's okay to be a Democrat, you can be a Democrat or a Republican. You don't campaign in churches. They've said get vaccinated, [00:26:00] definitely get vaccinated, get, the vaccination. And so they've been pretty moderate. In fact, they're more moderate than the, Utah legislature.But the thing that I've seen recently that is worrisome is there are a lot of Mormons who watch Fox News every single day and they go to church once a week. And the influence that they are following is the Fox News stuff, and the counseling that they get from church leaders, they're starting to ignore it.it's pretty clear that the LDS church has told the membership to get vaccinated. But it's also clear that Mormons are the most vaccine hesitant group in the country. Even more than evangelicals. I think if I, recall right, they're 50% of Mormons who say, Nope, not going to get the vaccination, just won't do it.And that's [00:27:00] flying in the face of what they've been told from the pulpit. And I, like I say that, that's kind of troubling.SHEFFIELD: I've seen a lot of articles and TV segments recently about, oh, if Donald Trump will come out and say, to tell people to get vaccinated, then people will do it. And it's like.You don't know these people. Well, there's a reason that's the reason that Trump doesn't do it. because he thinks it would harm his brand if he were to do that.BAGLEY: I said earlier that you could be LDS and not have to be exposed to anything outside of LDS culture, you can watch your LDS news and get your LDS newspaper, you can get your LDS books and you're never exposed to anything outside of that.That's the same thing that's going on with evangelicalism. So even if. Trump came out and said, get vaccinated. And I think he has, yeah, People are living in these shells that are impermeable. You just can't get through to them. And, even though you [00:28:00] tell them something that's absolutely true, the vaccine is safe and it's effective.99 percent of people that were dying are unvaccinated facts. You can tell them that, and it makes no difference. That to me is kind of worrisome.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So as somebody who is stating inconvenient truths like this to the public, I mean, how does the Utah audience respond to you? Do you have a lot? You have a lot of fans who love you desperately and probably a lot of people who hate you as well, right?BAGLEY: Yeah. Yeah. it used to be that. I was tolerated because Mormons believe that, people have their callings and, my calling was to be, the bird in the saddle. and they were kind of okay with that. But the, sense I get of people out there now is that it's becoming incredibly radicalized and it is worrisome to me.I went to a [00:29:00] cartoon festival in France, I don't know, five years ago. Six years ago, and I met the, creators of this magazine, humor magazine, and this little humor magazine that was not doing very well, it's called Charlie Hebdo. And so I met these people and they're nice people and inoffensive.And then three months later, somebody breaks into their offices and murders five of them cartoonists and I used to go into work and not have to worry about any of that. Now I do worry for my personal safety that things are getting that bad. I mean, look what happened on January 6th. People attacked the Capitol.And had they got a hold of a Congress person, who knows what they would have done. they were out for blood.SHEFFIELD: In regards to Utah and the Intermountain West, there, and there definitely is a metastasizing radicalism or growing radicalism. [00:30:00] The Bundy family, who attracted national attention for, invading federal property and trying to occupy it, they're Mormons.And. They are some of the, as I understand it, I guess Ammon Bundy, who is named after a Book of Mormon character, is, says he wants to run for governor of Idaho. And, he's very anti vaccine and tells people not, and anti mask and. Are there any Mormons out there that you know, who have privately said to you, Pat, I used to think you were all, you were crazy, but now I'm wondering if maybe you were right.Has anybody ever said that to you?BAGLEY: No. Oh, wow. Congressional delegation said that, and I think we have some fairly good people. I think that Governor Cox is doing a fairly good job. But even he came out against right wing [00:31:00] media as far as vaccination goes. He says that, the reason people aren't getting vaccinated is because of the stuff they hear on.Fox News and OANN and, because you got to stop listening to that stuff, but he, no, he called me an idiot. So, no, he's not going to.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so now your, I guess, personal perspective on Mormonism has changed over the years. Can you talk about that a little bit as well?BAGLEY: Yeah, so my Odyssey out of the church quite a while and it was one thing after another until I realized I just don't believe these precepts anymore.But if you grow up LDS, it's in your blood, it's tribal. And when people ask if I'm a Mormon, depending on the circumstances, I'll say, yeah, because I was born Mormon. I was raised Mormon. Still know all this stuff from the Book of Mormon. I read the [00:32:00] Book of Mormon 25 times. I can say Mohenroi Moriankomer, then I have to trip over my tongue saying it.And the stuff that you learn young kind of stays with you. It's in my DNA, even though I don't practice the religion anymore, it certainly had a lot to do with how I turned out with, what a way with what it made me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and to go back to something you said earlier, I think that, because it is an institution that actually does have to function around the globe and outside of.The pulpit with all their massive investments, they actually have to be more grounded in reality compared to, let's say the, Pentecostals or something like that.BAGLEY: They're just fairly good about the immigration and immigrants. they've put out statements saying that we should welcome these brothers and sisters and, the [00:33:00] fleeing.bad situations and, let's welcome them, let's be Christ like and welcome them. But that flies in the face of what you're getting from Fox News and right wing media, which is, these people are, what did Trump say, they're murderers and rapists and they're coming to take your jobs.So there are two messages there. One is fairly accepting from the church, and again, they have to be because they are an international church.SHEFFIELD: I guess it's, been kind of interesting. So I lived in Missouri for a number of years and the Mormon branch that, or the Mormon sect that is the biggest out there is the former reorganized church, or reorganized church of Latter day Saints.And now they call themselves the community of Christ. and they, it seems to some degree that the LDS are kind of making a slower version of. Of what happened with the humanity of Christ. Do you think that's true? [00:34:00]BAGLEY: Oh, the LDS church has been incredibly successful and the church is this big and this powerful with that much money, you usually have scandals like the Catholic church and the pedophile priests.And there've been minor scandals with the LDS church, but it's been able to avoid scandals and schism for a long time.SHEFFIELD: I mean in the sense that the Community of Christ, when we're gradually backing away from the Book of Mormon for a number of decades, and then finally formally came out and said, all right, yeah, our church historians don't believe that this was a real.Thing that, the Nephites didn't exist, sorry, Norman, and, they were, and they never existed in the Lamanites are not out there somewhere. and we think it was an inspired book, but it's not, a work of history and they formally said that.BAGLEY: Yeah, I don't, see the LDS church going that route. They're pretty committed to the Book of [00:35:00] Mormon and to Joseph Smith as a divine prophet although they have been a little more forthcoming about things like the peep stone and Joseph Smith being involved with women as young as 14 years old. But I don't see them really saying, Yeah, we're just going to do the New Testament because I think they're committed.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I mean, I think that's very possible. I think, yeah, organizationally, they probably never will, but they, the BYU actually just recently published a paper that noted how Joseph Smith had, basically plagiarized a lot from, this, Bible commentary by a guy named Adam Clark. And this was published in a BYU paper.They were saying that this is something that was done in the, In his Joseph Smith version of the Bible, and I don't think that's something that would have happened, like even, let's say, 20 years ago.BAGLEY: The church is kind of surprising. I [00:36:00] learned evolution at BYU, and the teacher was not having any of the stuff about, the earth being six thousand years old.He said, nope, you do that, you're going to fail this class. I remember going through the BYU bookstore and there was No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brody, the history of Joseph Smith, and it was being sold in the bookstore. So you do have these flashes of intellectual freedom that they still allow people to have in the church.But as far as-- I don't know what's going to happen to the church. I really don't. I think it's kind of interesting. I think these changes about how the membership views the leadership, is kind of big. And I don't know where that goes, though.SHEFFIELD: My thought is that they're headed for a schism in some sense. It seems that way because, although on the other hand, I mean, you look at the Roman Catholic Church, they've essentially managed to create parallel worlds within their realm [00:37:00] where if you're like a lot of people in the Jesuit orbit don't really believe a lot that's in the Bible.And they still identify as Catholic and nobody is able to do anything. The more rabid, traditionalist kind of Catholics are, they, they hate that. And they're constantly trying to go after them, but they can't do it. So I wonder if, to some extent, that It seems like something like that is happening within Mormonism, with some of their newer apologetic writers coming out and saying, yeah, Joseph Smith.Yeah, he wasn't a translator. There's this guy named, I think his name is, Terrell Givens came out and said, Joseph Smith was engaging in bricolage. which for those, not familiar with the R term, that's taking a bunch of stuff from places and gluing them all together. And that's what the Book of Mormon was. It wasn't really a translation. And this guy, he literally works for the church and he's saying that. Yeah.BAGLEY: But, the one [00:38:00] thing that Mormons can't ever get away with is questioning the leadership. I mean, the last thing that kind of fell away, for me, where I made the final break was deciding that I didn't want to be part of Bruce R. McConkie's militia. I wasn't going to be a follower.SHEFFIELD: And who was Bruce R. McConkie for those who don't know?BAGLEY: Bruce R. McConkie was an apostle who wrote some books that were-- it's called Mormon Doctrine, and he proposed to lay out the whole Mormon doctrine, and it's pretty toxic stuff.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's incredibly racist, among other things.BAGLEY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it's, and his faction did, they're, they took over the church, with Ezra Taft Benson, and, um, it's, yeah, it is, it, Mormonism is definitely in a very strange place right now.BAGLEY: Yeah, yeah, but it, it's the same authoritarianism, because you never question the prophet, follow the prophet, [00:39:00] kids sing songs about following the prophet.And that's the one thing that, that, I think is unchanging with the LDS church. And if they start to lose members who are listening to Glenn Beck rather than the prophet, that's, that, that's bad for the future of the church. I don't know where that goes.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I guess maybe Glenn Beck can have a vision and see Jesus.that one's coming, Pat. All right. Well, so, some of the, over the years, let's talk about your cartoons a little bit more. what kind of, what are some of the cartoons you've done that have had the biggest responses nationally that you can think of, or that are memorable in that regard?BAGLEY: So I should have sent you this cartoon. There's a cartoon of Malala, the girl who the Taliban tried to assassinate in Pakistan. they shot her, but she recovered and she, the reason they wanted to kill her in the first place is because she was a proponent of education for [00:40:00] women and the Taliban doesn't believe that women should be educated and she was, I think, 14 at the time.And so they shot her, she recovered, it seemed to make her even more resolved to, promote education among women. She won the. Nobel Prize a couple of years ago for her activism, and I did this cartoon that shows her with a book and it says, see if I can remember the thing that religious fundamentalists hate more or fear more than American bombs and bullets and tanks is a girl with a book, and on the book, it says knowledge, and that got tremendous response.All of a sudden, it's showing up, they're sending me emails, and it's been translated into Italian, into Russian, into Arabic, and it went [00:41:00] all the way around the world. It went viral, as they say, and it probably was shown tens of millions of times. so that's been my biggest hit, was that one, cartoon.And when you do a cartoon, you have no idea. I had no idea that it was going to, people are going to respond to it like they did. but it took off. Other times you think, oh boy, this is really going to get so and so, or some, people are going to get upset about this, and you cricket, so you hear nothing.SHEFFIELD: So, you never know. the editorial cartooning industry itself has really been under a lot of negative pressure. talk about that.BAGLEY: You spoke to a couple of my colleagues. And I'm sure they've said the same thing. When I started doing this, one time ago, there were probably a couple hundred newspapers that had their own cartoonist.And now there are probably less than 20. So I'm kind of a dying breed. And it's not because, I get, [00:42:00] this from people all the time. So you guys are so left wing, that's why, newspapers are failing. That's absolutely not the reason. The reason newspapers are having a hard time is because it's advertising.Back in the day, the Salt Lake Tribune would come out seven days a week, and there'd be two, sometimes three sections of nothing but classifieds, and classifieds weren't cheap, but that was if we were printing money in it, and it was a good business model, but then along came the internet and things like ksl.com and Craigslist, and it's infinitely easier and better because it's free, reaches more people. And it undercut our entire business model. And so we started to lose it, we lost that overnight. And then we've slowly been losing advertisers. And so a lot of newspapers have folded, which is really bad for democracy.And it's bad for politics. there have been studies that show that communities that have lost their newspapers actually pay more because of [00:43:00] corruption. And if they had kept the newspaper, people have paid a subscription to keep it going in the solid. Tribune recently went to a nonprofit status that were the first paper in the country to do that.And they talked to the publisher. Paul has been a couple of weeks ago about it. And he seemed pretty upbeat. He seemed to think that things were going pretty well for us. So maybe that's a model. That will help other communities keep their newspapers.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I, yeah, I think that is the model of, it's the model that we pursue at Flux, the website that I just recently launched that, Theory of Change is part of the, podcast network.And the advertising as a, It is cancerous, on, quality journalism, in my opinion, because you constantly are having people being compromised by it, trying to get advertising or trying to pander to advertisers and, [00:44:00] it's, not good. And, I mean, you can see the ultimate. And for that type of thing, when you know, look at people like Steve Bannon, like on his pocket, this guy is constantly going around the world, desperately trying to find people dumb enough to give him money and, and he keeps embarrassing them and humiliating himself and, but he's always got to find finding another more ridiculous mark one after the other.But people, yeah, people need to understand that quality information, quality analysis has to be paid for because stuff that you pull out of your ass, well, that's free and it doesn't, and it belongs in the toilet.BAGLEY: Yeah, I mean, it's been pointed out that places like Fox News and OANN and, Breitbart and these other right wing sites, it's all free.It's all out there free, but if you want to read really good journalism, like the New York Times, Washington Post, Salt Lake Tribune, [00:45:00] there's a paywall. You have to pay to get good journalism and crap is free. And that's part of the problem with America right now, is that the disinformation and the lies. Oh, somebody said, maybe Mark Twain, the truth is barely putting on his pants.Well, a lie goes halfway around the world. that's, why lies are getting such press these days because it's exciting stuff.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's--BAGLEY: It's going to be reinstated back in, in that. August. That's wow if true.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it's, it is comforting to believe lies. The QAnon movement got started, not related to elections or anything like that. It got started as a way of convincing gullible people that Donald Trump is secretly working with Jeff Sessions and Bob Mueller to take down pedophiles. He's actually in league with Mueller and the real point of this is not to [00:46:00] investigate Russia. No, it's to have a massive arrest of child abusers.BAGLEY: And, you, hit that button. You hit that button with people that, children are at risk. Children are being abused. Children are being sexually abused and sacrificed and eaten. And who wants that? Geez, nobody. And that's how they, draw these people in because they're trying to save the children.SHEFFIELD: I don't know if you remember, but in the 80s in Mormon culture, there was this obsession with satanic cults in the 80s. Do you remember that?BAGLEY: Yeah, there was some episode in, I think it was Lehigh or down in Utah Valley, where it was a preschool. And there were accusations of satanic, weird sexual stuff going on.And it's straight out of the Salem Witch Trial, where, stories start to get told, and they get embellished, and the community gets, upset, and worried, and frightened, and they do crazy stuff. [00:47:00] Yeah, I do remember that. I think it was Lehigh. I'll have to check on that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it was northern Utah County, because I remember, I, I was living in Pleasant Grove, and I was in, I think, third grade or something, and my parent, my, my mom was always telling me to be careful of the devil worshippers that were out there, and supposedly they had, they were kidnapping people. area cats and sacrificing them. Although we had a cat and nobody ever kidnapped our cat.BAGLEY: Yeah the satanists always get the cat!SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right. Well, so I, yeah, this has been a treat for me, Pat. I, when I was a kid, I read your Norman, the Nephite books, and my mom bought those for us to look at during our church services instead of paying attention. Thanks. But, yeah, so you're, you are on Twitter at Pat Bagley. That's B A G L E Y and you are on the Salt Lake Tribune, [00:48:00] which is sltrib.com. Do you have any other online platforms that you're using nowadays? Or is that it?BAGLEY: So there's. Facebook, Twitter, that's most of it, so.SHEFFIELD: Okay, cool. Alright, well thanks so much for joining us today, Pat. And we'll look forward to continuing to see you producing work for the Tribune as long as you want to.BAGLEY: Well thanks for this, Matthew. This was a lot of fun.SHEFFIELD: Just as a bit of housekeeping for the audience here, Theory of Change is part, as I mentioned during the show, of the Flux. Community Network. And Flux is a website that is a non profit. We're working to bring deep coverage to the larger trends in politics and religion and technology and getting people to understand how they all intersect.So if you can be sure to visit the site, it's flux.community. And we also have a Patreon. If you like what we're doing here with Theory of Change, just go to patreon.com/discoverflux. I'm Matthew Sheffield, and I will see you guys next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe 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

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