Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

Episode SummaryWilliam Faulkner’s line that “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” is certainly true in regards to today’s Republican Party, which, quite literally, is an outgrowth of a conspiracy revolution that began in the 1940s and fifties, and never really stopped.A key figure in the through-line of American reaction is Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, a conspiracy group that he founded in 1958, which still exists today.The John Birch Society has many interesting stories of its own. And we’ll discuss that in this episode, but Welch and his group  are also important in their placement relative to other Republicans. And also how people outside the GOP responded to them,  particularly Democratic and progressive elites.There’s a tendency among elite Democrats to think that the radicalization loop that the Republican Party has been stuck in is just somehow irrelevant, that people will automatically know that right-wing extremists are foolish and crazy, and so therefore, they don’t need to be countered. But as we’ve seen, this is a terrible error.Joining me for an in-depth discussion about all this is Edward H. Miller.  He is a teaching professor at Northeastern University and the author of A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society and the Revolution of American Conservatism, which just recently came out. He’s also the author of Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy, which he published in 2015.(This episode of Theory of Change aired previously on December 10, 2021. The video of the conversation is also available.)TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, Ted.EDWARD H. MILLER: Oh, it’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me on your show.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, all right. So I guess before we get details of what we’re talking about here, tell us a little bit, how did you become interested in this material about right-wing extremism in 20th century America?MILLER: I attended Boston College for my PhD and I took a seminar with professor Seth Jacobs at Boston College. And it was a graduate seminar on from 1865 to the present, and I read Lisa McGirr’s book Suburban Warriors. It’s a classic, came out in 2001 and it explored the rise of the conservative movement and the suburban warriors of Southern California, looking at the grassroots and how they got involved initially in the early 1960s, and how they came to California and how they helped elect the Governor Reagan in 1966 and then pursued social issues throughout the seventies. And then finally supporting Reagan in 1980.They also were very much active in the (1964) Barry Goldwater campaign and having read, having read Suburban Warriors, I became interested in other epicenters of American conservatism. And I wondered if there were more. And she mentioned in her book that there were more in Atlanta which Kevin Kruse had explored in White Flight.And I came upon Dallas, Texas, and I looked at Dallas, Texas, and in very much the same way. I explored, I did a study of Dallas, Texas called Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy that took a look at the individuals, the grassroots figures, as well as the elites, who led a movement for conservatism, getting involved in the Goldwater campaign, getting involved in the Reagan campaign in the 1980s, as well as 1976 when he ran against Gerald Ford for the nomination.So it was a great moment in my career to discover a topic that I became really fascinated with. And then the rest is history.I started to pursue that topic. And I had an advisor at the time who mentioned, instead of Dallas, instead of heading all the way down to Dallas to do your dissertation, why don’t you study the John Birch Society?And I said well, I’m not really, I’m not really sure I know enough about the John Birch Society. I looked at the archives at Brown University where they’re located. And at the time, I thought it was an organization that was not as important as it is. And I thought it would be an outlier and it would not help my professional career, to be honest, to study that.But I continued to heed his wisdom and pursued that as my next book. I’m looking at Robert Welch and I became interested in biography.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. So the John Birch Society, I think you’re right that a lot of people haven’t heard about them. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. One of them being that sort of Republican elites tried to take attention away from them. And we’ll get into that. But it also kind of fits within this larger tendency among sort of centrist pundits, or, liberal, conventional, liberal professors to think that, right-wing extremism is just the fringe of the fringe. It’s not relevant to anything. And nobody cares about what they think. And this is a tendency that’s, unfortunately, very consistent in American history. And we keep seeing that over and over again.Even in terms of the history of American conservatism, writing it, for a long time, the only people who wrote about this movement that came along and literally took over a political party were the people who agreed with it. And there were no academics just writing a neutral history. There were a handful of progressive historians that were writing about it. Otherwise, it was just not something that historians were interested.They wanted to have the 50,000th book about Adolf Hitler and World War II. Because of course we need more of those, right? But something that happened in your own country, a party getting taken over by crazy people, ‘well, that’s not interesting.’ Would you agree that people kind of did that in historian academic world?MILLER: No, I think it’s absolutely true. The conservative movement, the narrative of the conservative movement was shaped significantly by one of its most important inventors, William F. Buckley, who was a prolific writer and there’s the phrase, “If you write the history, that’s how it’s remembered.” And he, that’s what he did.He continued to write a lot about the history, not in a monograph form, but in essays and articles. And he was very much a gatekeeper of American conservatism. And him and other folks like George Nash who explored the intellectual history of American conservatism, determined that there were three strands of American conservatism. An anticommunist strand, a traditionalist strand, as well as a libertarian strand.And both of those folks were very instrumental in determining what historians looked at. And so, a famous historian said in, I think it was the early 1990s, he said, ‘Well, how come we don’t have any books on American conservatism?’And there it began. And we started to see a plethora of historians exploring American conservatism, starting of course, with the McGirr book, which is probably the most famous.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then of course we got Rick Pearlstein who has done a number of interesting books. But even once he got started, I still think there was this tendency of, you could just kind of ignore and only I would say, really in the the 2000s did things really get started in the academic world to try to look at this stuff.And there’s just so much material that really hasn’t been written about. And in your case with Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. And that ignorance, despite all these many great volumes that have come out, you still have David Brooks– the New York Times columnist, who now says he’s a moderate Democrat– he wrote a column this week that came out in which he lumped Dwight Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater and said that they were in the same tradition. Even though the entire point of the Barry Goldwater political career was that Dwight Eisenhower was, if not a commie, a sympathizer and a liberal.MILLER: Yeah, just to give you a rundown about their ideological background, Dwight Eisenhower expanded Social Security, he expanded education, he passed a scientific bill that would add more engineers in the United States. He built the interstate highway system.Goldwater, he wanted to take all those things apart. He he wanted to decrease the size of the government and introduce less regulation. He spoke of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.And there were five times in 1954 that Dwight Eisenhower refused to use nuclear weapons, despite the fact that his Joint Chiefs of Staff and his vice-president were encouraging it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yep.MILLER: So there’s a dramatic difference.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. There’s this tendency, I think for a lot of elite centrists or liberals that the only Republicans that they know are well-groomed articulate people like David Brooks or like William F. Buckley and so, to their minds, they don’t think that these people could have any radical ideas because: ‘Well, look, they know how to use a salad fork. They eat soup with a spoon.’They keep doing it. Like they did this with David Duke when he was a young activist, ‘I’m against the KKK. I’m a former KKK member, but then look, I can wear a suit and I look nice on TV.” And they were putting him out there all the time.And then they did this with successive far-right figures over the decades. And more recently with some of these alt-right people. I remember there was this Mother Jones story, which I think will live in infamy in which the lead of the story was about how this white nationalist, he knew how to use chopsticks to eat togarashi tuna. And that was the lead of the story!MILLER: Their culinary habits may have been different, but their statements weren’t obviously different. William F. Buckley said that the white race was the advanced race in a National Review article. And that would be something that would be abhorrent today. He argued that he was for paving over voting rights rather than opening them up. So he was very open to this idea of limiting democracy. There was also other statements he said that the 14th and 15th amendment were inorganic accretions to the Constitution. Those are important amendments that provided voting rights for African-Americans as well as equal rights to African-Americans, at least in theory.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then his first book, God and Man at Yale, was quite literally him urging Christian conservatives to cancel professors at Yale University. It was just this long litany of: ‘Professor So-and-So doesn’t believe in the resurrection, Professor So-and-So said this thing about John the Baptist , Professor So-and-So might be an atheist, Professor So-and-So is a communist.’Just this endless attempt to cancel people. And then at the same time, going around and saying that they are the oppressed ones. That’s just this consistent behavior, and Donald Trump, for all the terrible things he did, one thing he did was that he showed people that there is this tradition in Republican far right politics to, try to oppress everyone else, while saying that you are the victim.MILLER: Yeah, no, I agree. I think that it is at least given us an opportunity and we’re seeing that today, there are a number of studies that are coming out. John Huntington’s work, my work on Robert Welch, there are other historians who are exploring the far right, that are going to be on the shelves very soon.And also the global far right. We’re starting to combine what was going on around the world to what was going on in the United States. We’re starting to see it as a global movement. So I think that’s an important step we’re starting to see figures embrace what Kim Phillips-Fein called the “baroque strangeness” of American conservatism and the charlatans. And the quote losers, the people who we thought lost, ultimately have turned out to be the winners in politics.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That’s a great segue into talking about your book here. So, Robert Welch. Who was Robert Welch? The John Birch Society still exists today. So what is the John Birch Society and who was Robert Welch?MILLER: Robert Welch was born in North Carolina in 1899 was first a candy manufacturer and a very precocious individual. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at the age of 16. He actually started to attend there at age 12. And before a brief career in the news business, he decided to attend Harvard Law School, dropped out of Harvard Law School because he was unhappy with Felix Frankfurt’s political philosophy. And then became a very successful candy manufacturer. He created such childhood favorites is the Sugar Daddy, Junior Mints, the Sugar Babies. And there were other types of candies and he did very well in his own career. After that, his business failed due to the crash in 1929.And then he went to work for his brother. After many successful years, his brother was even better at business in the booming 1950s as he was in the 1920s, Welch decided to get involved in politics.He had, he always had a an interest in politics. He ran for lieutenant governor and lost, came in second for the Republican nomination in 1950. But what he did was, he started an organization called the John Birch Society, which was a far right organization that pursued free markets and single issue goals such as ending the career of Earl Warren, impeaching Earl Warren, prohibiting fluoride, getting the United States out of the UN.SHEFFIELD: So his first book, let’s talk about that, tell the audience about his first book is I think that’s another key to understanding him.MILLER: Yeah he was always interested in, he was an intellectual. He was very upset by the the firing of (Gen. Douglas) MacArthur by Truman. And he wrote a book called May God Forgive Us.And this book posited that it was Stalin, not Truman, who fired MacArthur. It was a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy of the State Department to lose the Korean War. And it was a conspiracy among the State Department to lose China. This is really a book about China. He is a member of a group that is fascinated with China and Formosa [Taiwan].SHEFFIELD: And that idea, sort of has come back again, this obsession with China now.MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And that’s one thing I do want to emphasize to people in this episode is that so many of the ideas of Robert Welch, of his conspiracy theories, his targets of his theories, just the general ideas of them, like the fluoride, that was the precursor to being concerned about vaccines that we see today. And the obsession with communists and now we’re seeing that with critical race theory and antifa obsessions.Basically, I think the easy way to understand the career of Robert Welch is that he was a proto-Alex Jones in a lot of ways, but a smarter version of him. Would you say that’s an accurate summation of him ?MILLER: I think that, if you take a look at the styles that Alex Jones has, Robert Welch is not, does not have that animated, pumped up style. Robert Welch would drone on about that the fluoride is going to get into your system and it’s going to enervate the vigor of the American public. And we’re going to turn to communism and that we’re on a slippery slope to losing the sovereignty of the United States, but he would do so in a way that was not that is not as histrionic. That’s not as dramatic. If you look at his films, they are a lot more calm, and he would present himself in a way that– it was just a different style than Alex Jones. He wouldn’t be dressed up in a frog suit.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess I should clarify, not in terms of their personal style, but in terms of their entrepreneurship, their conspiracy factories. Alex Jones has made multiple films, so did Robert Welch. They both made multiple films. They both had multiple publications. And they both were actively, constantly trying to get into Republican politics and align themselves with candidates. Alex Jones was Ron Paul, he was endlessly flacking for him for decades before he started working for Donald TrumpMILLER: I’ll use a line from The Wire. ‘Everything has to fit together in the mind of Robert Welch, everything kind of connects.’ And this connects to that. He has a worldview in which there are elites who make the decisions, first it’s the communists, and then it’s the insiders who are establishment folks who live on the East Coast and are financiers. And then it’s the Illuminati because it changes from being communist conspiracy and it turns into something bigger than a communist conspiracy. It turns into a very much like the Bilderbergers, as Alex Jones would say.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I think, and there’s another parallel besides in the QAnon movement also, it has this fantastic, gigantic conspiracies that no one ever can really see. And the reason that they’re real is that you can’t see them.MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: So yeah. All right. So Welch was obsessed with Dwight Eisenhower and so his first book, it was attacking him and then he kept doing that throughout his career. And that was the topic of his next book. Can you talk to you about that one?MILLER: What happens is Welch gets involved in the Taft campaign in 1952–SHEFFIELD: Tell everybody who that was.MILLER: Robert Taft was an Ohio senator, very very conservative. He was called Mr. Republican. Just a little bit to the left of Joseph McCarthy. And a little bit more logical than Joseph McCarthy, although Taft sort of embodies the same attitudes of Joseph McCarthy without the ridiculousness of Joseph McCarthy. And certainly without the alcohol that Joseph McCarthy imbibed every day.But Welch gets involved in the 1952 election for Republican president, the nomination for the Republican presidency. And he notices something about what’s going on, because he’s always thinking in sort of conspiratorial terms. And he’s always thinking about: It’s not right, he says the folks who are associating with the Eisenhower people. He comes to the conclusion that Eisenhower is a– Welch comes to the conclusion and he writes a letter about this. It’s just a personal letter to a friend and then it grows into a larger letter and he basically says that it’s my opinion, it’s my belief that if you take all these things together, it’s beyond a reasonable doubt that Eisenhower is a communist. And he backs it up with all this evidence that ‘where did they find this individual in the Army? Where did they where did this individual come out of all of a sudden to win a nomination that was very clearly in the hands of Robert Taft before Eisenhower pulled it away from him. And then what happened in Texas with the switch of the delegates — I explain it more in the book, but there’s a switch in among delegates in Texas.Welch says that basically that the election was stolen from Robert Taft by Eisenhower, with the assistance.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And as a theory, it’s totally absurd. The idea that the chief general of the United States, the Supreme Commander of the entire armed forces who won World War II isn’t going to be a popular guy. It is an asinine idea that he would have to steal an election.MILLER: Or again, that he’s a communist at all. Eisenhower is a patriot. Is a devoted patriot, probably the most, one of the most devoted patriots in the history of the country. It’s Dwight Eisenhower.SHEFFIELD: And this is another parallel with today though, with the idea that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump, even though Donald Trump was literally the most unpopular American president in modern history, since the invention of opinion polls, he is the most unpopular president ever.And so the fact that he lost an election, is not a conspiracy . You can’t really challenge that on any credible grounds, but they did.MILLER: And Taft was an aloof politician. He was a very good politician. He was elected. He did well in Ohio. He was from Ohio, but he certainly was not a popular general with a with a national backing. He didn’t have the support ofSHEFFIELD: And universal name recognition.MILLER: He didn’t have the name recognition. He had the support of the McCormick newspapers in Chicago. He had the backing of folks in the Midwest, but Eisenhower had the East the Northeast, which was very important at the time. He had the newspapers in the East. He had the backing of the rank and file. And he was this smiling gregarious– anybody who came near him, saw that he had a innate ability to lead. And Taft was not like that Taft was dour. And he looked like a professor, and he didn’t have the the charisma of an Eisenhower.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. But this was such an explosive thesis, that Welch actually kind of tried to circulate the book in secret, to a large degree initially. But eventually, it got out and he kept trying to whip people up against Eisenhower, Republicans, and it never worked.But at the same time, it kind of laid a groundwork of resentment against Eisenhower among a certain set of Republicans. And so that led, I would say, not directly, but it kind of that metastasized to some degree, into the founding of National Review, which came out a couple of years later, I think it was 1955. And the point of National Review was that Dwight Eisenhower is a liberal and he’s a RINO [Republican in Name Only], and he needs to be drummed out of the Republican party. That was the point of National Review in the beginning, right? Buckley hated Eisenhower, he just didn’t think he was a communist.MILLER: Oh yes. He was concerned with– the masthead of National Review said: ‘Stop, we’re trying to get history to stop. We don’t want any more Social Security legislation. We don’t need anything else. No more New Deal legislation. We don’t need any more countries taken over by Stalin.SHEFFIELD: Roll back. We have to rollMILLER: It back. Yes. Liberation. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And so, but, and that’s why he (Buckley) got the letter, I would say that–MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Eisenhower was because he was seen as somebody who had hated him. Even though initially, Buckley and Welch were kind of going for the same goals to oppose Eisenhower and roll back the welfare state and engage in nuclear war with the Soviet Union, they eventually came to hate each other. Can you talk about that relationship? Because its very complicated, and this is probably the biggest area where the media bias of conservative historians has incorrectly described in a lot of people’s minds about how that, that transpired the events between the two of them.MILLER: Yeah, well, as I said before, Buckley was a gatekeeper and he supported Nixon. Wasn’t probably his first choice in 1960, but Buckley was with Nixon. As time passed, Buckley, his goal became to elect a conservative Republican in 1964. There was a a moment in 1960 at the Republican National Convention in which Goldwater got up on stage and said if we want to take this party back, and I believe we can, we’ve got to work together, but Nixon’s your man.So Buckley, in roughly 1961 comes to the conclusion that Welch is a problem. This idea of conspiracy encroaching into the conservative movement is problematic. So he suggests, initially rather gently that, that Welch step aside to the editing room not– he doesn’t condemn the Society or anything like that.SHEFFIELD: And that’s a critical point, I think to note, because there is this false narrative that right-wing historians have put out there to claim that he was against the whole Society. But he wasn’t.MILLER: No.SHEFFIELD: He was specifically, and this was something that Barry Goldwater also was working with him to try to, they wanted the Bircher votes and they wanted their loyalty, but they wanted to control them.MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And to be the ones that controlled the conspiracy theories. And so–MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: That’s what the attacks against Welch personally were about, but I’m sorry, go ahead.MILLER: Barry Goldwater said, these are pretty good guys. I know these guys. I have some guys on my staff, they’re on my staff. They’re part of the the John Birch Society. This is not a bad group of people. It’s their leader that’s the problem. It’s Welch who is ultimately, the person who should be. The smoking typewriter as Buckley puts it, has to be extinguished.And he doesn’t succeed with that despite the fact that there is a myth, I would say, that Welch is drummed out of the conservative movement. And that’s the argument. That’s essentially the argument of my book. That’s the argument of A Conspiratorial Life, that despite the fact that there’s an effort to move him aside, it didn’t happen.He (Buckley) tried to make that case, but as time has passed, we’ve realized that, hey, well, they didn’t go away.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the John Birch Society still exists.MILLER: It still exists.SHEFFIELD: Continuously. Yeah, and in fact, Glen Youngkin, who just won the gubernatorial election in Virginia, he campaigned at an event that was held by the John Birch Society. So that just gives you an idea of the influence that they have.MILLER: I make an argument in the book that the Reagan revolution was in part created by the John Birch Society. Now you say: ‘Whoa, that’s a provocative statement.’ But I took a look at the evidence. It was the most surprising aspect of all my research. When I went back and I took a look at the issues that Reagan ran on: abortion, against the ERA, tax cuts. These were all driven by the John Birch Society prior to these organizations being driven by the Republican Party. People like the Moral Majority. These cultural, and these social issues, and these economic issues that really, that put Reagan over the top in 1980.SHEFFIELD: One thing about Welch, I think that he has in common with a lot of these other early conservative movement figures is that he was a southerner. If you look at almost all of these organizations that popped up in the forties and the fifties, they were headed by southerners.And that’s an aspect of the history, and of the personal history of American conservatism that I think hasn’t really been picked up a lot.MILLER: Yeah. Excuse me. So I think my voice is I’ve lost my voice a little bit, but yeah. He’s from North Carolina growing up in a section of North Carolina and he almost has a Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer life growing up. He cavorts on this old Southern mansion with his brothers and sisters, and he’s the favorite child because he’s the brilliant, studious one who doesn’t have to do the chores.But at the same time, he’s encouraged to pursue his studies, and his parents give him a great opportunity to see the South. At the age of 10, he’s sent off to Elizabeth City in North Carolina– on his own, by the way– which is a fascinating town of hobos and vagabonds and all these. It was a bustling community and he gets to see this at a young age.And he experiences all this via himself in this hotel. His parents pick them up for the weekend, bring him back to his home. So he really is a child of the South. He is a child of the South, but he becomes a Northern transplant in his late teens, 19, moves to Boston. But his family, his ancestors owned slaves and they were highly successful farmers. He is very much in the Southern tradition.SHEFFIELD: And not just him, though. So Buckley was from Texas–MILLER: That’s right.SHEFFIELD: And Mexico. And a lot of these other, like Clarence Manion, where was he from? Tell us a little bit about him.MILLER: Well, Clarence Manion was the Dean of Notre Dame and his great influence on– this is sort of an interesting this is an interesting thing. He has a tremendous influence on Welch. He opposes the war.SHEFFIELD: Well, he wasn’t just an academic. He was a talk radio host.MILLER: That’s right. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And that’s important because, again, most people’s understanding of early American conservatism is filtered through this idea that National Review was the only right-wing media outlet that existed.MILLER: Oh yeah.SHEFFIELD: And that wasn’t true at all.MILLER: No, no.SHEFFIELD: Clarence Manion was just massively popular–MILLER: Oh yeah.SHEFFIELD: — as a radio host. He was in a lot of ways, kind of a mixture, he would mix in religious stuff with political stuff and was very integral. And then it’s an aspect of things– like there’s an attempt now, people like David Brooks that are trying to claim that these early, far right figures were not Christian nationalists or were not interested in Christian supremacy and things like that, opposing, atheists or feminism. But the reality is they were, they hated those things. But I’m sorry, you were telling a story about Clarence Manion there.MILLER: It got me thinking about the importance of Clarence Manion to the movement. Welch was a member of the America First Committee.And Trump of course, ran on this concept of America First, a nationalism. And what Manion says is that he’s against the war. Primarily because if we go to war in Europe–SHEFFIELD: World War II, you’re talking about.MILLER: –we will be influenced by Europe. We don’t want to be influenced by Germany. We don’t want to be influenced by France. Because we are different. We are in the British tradition, we are in a tradition before the French Revolution, he says is critical because in the French Revolution, it was a key moment in the history of civilization, because they’re basically saying that rights come from man, not from God. And in the American Revolution, rights come from God, which the conservatives argue is still the case in the United States and in England.So it’s a key point that Manion convinces Welch to be true. And Welch embraces this concept. I think it’s the key point that Manion brings to the conservative movement.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, that’s an interesting observation, and it definitely is relevant to today. Because if you listen to pretty much any Republican speech, they almost all say that line.MILLER: We don’t want to be part of old Europe. That was kind of part of the attitudes of 20th century Republicanism. And these folks are also Asia firsters. They believe that as we had talked about before that China is critical to the future of the world. They see the American mission as a continuation of that westward expansion, starting in the 13 Colonies, and moving westward. Moving into the Pacific. In the Spanish American War, we acquired Guam in 1898. We acquired Hawaii, the Philippines from the Spanish American war. Then in 1946, we gave back the Philippines.But this idea of Formosa or Taiwan is critical. And many of the people of Welch’s ilk, including William Knowland, who was known as the Senator from Formosa, are fascinated with– they think the future of the 21st century is the East. And that’s part of the themes that we see today.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That’s true.So Barry Goldwater and his activists were able to sort of foist him onto the Republican party in 1964. And what was the role that the John Birch Society played during that campaign and the general election?MILLER: The John Birch Society was critical. They were the grassroots leaders. It was kind of a unspoken rule, among the Goldwater folks, that you don’t want to advertise too much that you’re a member of the John Birch Society. You don’t want to advertise that you’re a member of the John Birch Society, but they are the folks who really get the Goldwater campaign moving. They’re the folks who really are pushing the campaign against Lyndon Johnson. And even before President Kennedy was assassinated, they thought that they were running, they were going to be running against President Kennedy in 1964. They are very much involved in the efforts to support Barry Goldwater.And interesting ly enough, Robert Welch was not an individual who particularly supported candidates. The John Birch Society was primarily an educational organization. And I can’t remember a letter in which Robert Welch says that he wants a particular president to be president, but he does so when it comes to Barry Goldwater, he says that, ‘I like Barry Goldwater. I hope he becomes president someday.’ And his word carries a lot of weight. So a lot of his supporters are going to go wild about Barry because of that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. And then what was the reaction that they had after Goldwater got crushed so badly?MILLER: They’re disappointed. And there’s this sense that, there’s a narrative that that’s it for the John Birch Society, that they’re a thing of the past. But Welch is savvy. That was actually his nickname in college because it was, he was so great at math.And what he does is, he comes up with all these– he re-invigorates the John Birch Society. He says, all right, we’ve got to refashion this, he’s a salesman. And he says, what we’re going to do is we’re going to develop these ad hoc committees.The John Birch Society, he says, has a bad reputation. He’s not that hopeful to get more members joining, but he establishes these ad hoc committees, like MOTOREDE (Movement to Restore Decency) or Support Your Local Police, SYLP, which is kind of a “Blue Lives Matter” organization. There are other acronyms that he comes up with, TRIM, Tax Relief Immediately. And what these ad hoc groups are, they’re led by members of the John Birch Society, but you don’t have to become a member of the John Birch Society to join it.So, if you’re interested in tax reform, sure. You’re going to sign up with TRIM. If you don’t like what’s going on as far as the teaching of sex education in your kids’ schools, you’re going to sign up with MOTOREDE.SHEFFIELD: And it was an antecedent of this anti critical race theory stuff, where they were encouraging–MILLER: Yes.SHEFFIELD: –people to show up at their school boardsMILLER: And that’s exactly one of the first things he says, you have to get involved in your PTA. It’s critical. You have to become a member of the school board. Actually, Welch is an elected member of the Belmont school board. It’s the only elected position he ever holds. He’s elected in Belmont.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Where is Belmont?MILLER: Oh, well, Belmont is, Belmont is close to Arlington. It is in Massachusetts. It is right outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts, kind of the greater Boston area, very affluent community.SHEFFIELD: Okay. And he was also very big in Southern California. The biggest area for the John Birch Society was in particular Orange County, California.MILLER: Yep.SHEFFIELD: What was the reason do you think that they got so big in Orange County, California?MILLER: Oh, that’s a good question. It’s a complicated answer. Because there’s so many different things that are going on in Southern California at the time. You have, first of all, aerospace is growing. You have a significant military presence. You also have some liberal elite that conservatives are not happy with. A lot of these folks who are coming into California are from Texas and the South.SHEFFIELD: And the Republican Party that was here in California was a more moderate organization.MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Than they were used to, and that they preferred. They were kind of the locus of Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial victory as well.MILLER: Yeah. Yeah. Welch doesn’t support Reagan because interestingly Reagan supports the most liberal abortion bill in the country in 1967 now Welch says he’s not a conservative after that. This shows how far ahead the John Birch Society was, as far as these issues, think about it today. That Ronald Reagan was not conservative enough for them. They were ahead on the abortion issue. They were ahead of the the Moral Majority. Folks like W.A. Criswell, who is the pastor of the largest Baptist church, was pro-choice in the late sixties.Now the John Birch Society is comprised about 50% Catholic. What happens is, Bill Buckley’s brother, James Buckley, is elected senator from New York. Buckley wins in ’70, Nixon sees this and says: ‘I can win in 72 by being pro-life.’All of a sudden the switch begins in 72. And along with that switch among Nixon, is the switch among the Protestant evangelicals. They become pro-life, along with the conservative Catholics, but conservative Catholics, like John McManus, who was Robert Welch’s right-hand man, was a strong supporter of pro-life policies as early as the sixties, mid sixties.SHEFFIELD: And by that time Welch was, he was starting to get up there in age. And he didn’t really there was a question within the organization of who was going to take it over from him. But he kind of– like a lot of authoritarian personalities or leaders– was against having anybody that was too close to him in the minds of the membership.So he didn’t really push a lot of that. What, what happened after he basically passed away what happened after he passed away? Was there a power struggle within the John Birch Society or,MILLER: Yeah, there’s a significant power struggle. That’s the advantage of doing a biography, I didn’t follow the continuation really of the John Birch Society, but there is a significant power struggle.Larry McDonald becomes the president of the John Birch Society for a brief period after Welch is no longer president. But there continues to be a power struggle. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, and one of the other crucial figures that was in the same group with Welch was Billy James Hargus. Tell us a little bit about him.MILLER: Well, Billy James Hargis was interesting figure of the Christian Crusade, and he was one of the first, one of the first Southern Baptists who really gets involved in politics. And Welch and Billy James Hargis kind of back each other together, Welch reprints some of his material, and especially his material concerning sex education, and the other issues concerning morality.It’s kind of a precursor to the Moral Majority.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and he was one of the first televangelists.MILLER: Televangelist, yeah. Now Welch, he writes a really important letter. It’s called the Roemer letter, and he basically said I’m not a fundamentalist. I grew up as a fundament. But I don’t adhere to a fundamentalist philosophy. And this is important, because this is able to attract people like Tim LaHaye, and you can see Tim LaHaye in some John Birch Society videos, a young Tim LaHaye in the 1960s.SHEFFIELD: Although but Tim LaHaye was a fundamentalist.MILLER: Yeah, he is. Yes but what happens is Welch, even though he’s not a fundamentalist, Tim LaHaye says: ‘I usually don’t go into ecumenical organizations, but I will make an exception because of this Roemer letter. Welch is saying that I’m not a fundamentalist, but he’s coming clean. He says, he believes in Jesus, he believes in as long as people live a life of morality, that’s all it matters. And LeHaye is very interested in this.And that’s why about 50% of the John Birch Society members wind up being Protestant. So LaHaye is able to join this and signs up as well as Billy James Hargis.SHEFFIELD: And Hargis specifically, he was also working with, he was also involved with a lot of these traveling revival things which the John Birch Society integrated itself into them in different ways. One of the things they would do is that they would have a core of national speakers and then they would bring in local pastors and clergy. And they kind of eventually tried to sort of use that as a recruiting base for political candidates to also try to bring them in as well.MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And one of the people that they were pushing heavily, which is kind of interesting in retrospect, was Ezra Taft Benson who was Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of agriculture.MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Welch, a number of times tried to get him to run for president. And actually he did one time very early on. It was an abortive campaign.MILLER: He was Mormon.SHEFFIELD: And he was Mormon. Yeah. And they kept pushing around the margins with other different candidates. What was the relationship with Welch and the American Independent Party? Have you looked at that at all?MILLER: I haven’t really looked at that. I didn’t explore that enough to comment on that.SHEFFIELD: Oh, okay. All right.Well, what about in terms of race where was Robert Welch in terms of segregation and civil rights?MILLER: That’s a great question. He believed that the civil rights movement was driven by the communists. And for instance, during the Birmingham in 1963 when those terrible pictures of where the policemen are hitting the children, and the African-Americans who are in the streets, and there are dogs. Welch comes up with this rather preposterous theory that what occurred was, there was a agitator who hit a dog, and that this caused the whole melee.And then, the photo was taken. I think most people have seen the photo, the terrible photo of a German shepherd one of Bull Connor’s German Shepherd’s attacking an individual. But Welch comes to this preposterous conclusion.Now it really disappoints me. He could have been so much more human, on the issue of race. Because he grew up in a majority African-American community. And it was one of the things that it’s very clear on. There were also some instances where he would he would use a dialect in front of African-American individuals. He would try to mimic African-Americans in front of their presence.But there were members of the John Birch Society who were African-American, they were like Manning Johnson wrote Color, Communism, and Common Sense . And Manning Johnson basically said, he said that he was a former communist. He was trained and learned in his training that there was going to be an all-black part of the South. And Welch believed this.And he promoted Manning Johnson’s work. Manning Johnson was killed in a car accident, which led to, as you can imagine, more conspiracy theories about what happened to Manning Johnson. But it’s highly likely that there was no wrongdoing, but it’s one of those situations where, in my book and how I interpret it, I think he could have been better. And certainly he was more like Eisenhower when it came to those issues.SHEFFIELD: But I guess that’s not what the people who were in his movement wanted. Even before his famous vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater.MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: That the American right was against civil rights.MILLER: Mm-hmm. And remember he’s also, Welch attends the 1956 state’s rights convention and speaks at it, where T. Coleman Andrews is the nominee. T Coleman Andrews only got a small percentage of the vote. But to be honest, the statements that I have seen that Welch made are less vicious than anything that William F. Buckley said. Buckley said decolonization should be something that we should pursue when Africans stopped eating each other. That’s terrible. I’ve never heard that. I’ve never seen that in, in something that Robert Welch said. Not that I’m justifying anything where he stands, but, in the comparative lens of these things, also, when it came to, he had a lot of Jewish friends.So it’s complicated, very complicated. But then there are some statements that are problematic, but it’s very complicated to make judgments on these as an historian. Because you hear things from people in a comparative light that are worse, it’s still disappointing to hear.And it’s one of the, one of the hard parts about writing a book about somebody who lived throughout the 20th century. It’s it’s it’s heavy, that’s a heavy, that’s a heavy load. And I had there was, there were some moments where it is difficult. History can be hard to write.I think that’s something that It has to be considered cause it’s, it’s wrong, it’s morally, it’s against my values and that’s something that’s hard to see.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, that’s true.So let’s maybe end with one of your last chapters, I guess it’s the last one I think, is about.MILLER: And actually I wanted to say, this came, I just, one other thing that a lot of these issues with race and the antisemitism came late because I discovered it in another archives later on in the process. And it was tough to find these things after you’ve got a book and you don’t see– I’ll tell you that the archivist that has the greatest material of far right. It’s Ernie Lazar in his archives. It’s just incredible what he has. But this came late in the process of this discovery, so I just wanted to point that out.SHEFFIELD: Okay. So, and we touched on this a little bit, toward the end of his life, Welch, your last chapter on it is “Making Morning in America,” so the relationship between the Birch Society, Welch, and Ronald Reagan. Maybe just walk us through a short summary of that chapter a bit, if you don’t mind.MILLER: Take the issues of tax cuts. Welch had the TRIM committees. He was active in the propositions in California to lower the property tax. Birchers were heavily involved in that. Take the ERA. Much ink has been written about Phyllis Schlafly and her role in the ERA, but I would argue that Welch and the Birch Society were equally involved in stopping ERA. These are the issues. Take abortion, as I explained before. That was a big part of getting the Moral Majority. Of getting the folks like James Robison on the stage there in Dallas, when Reagan was invited to Dallas at the end of his campaign, when he said, ‘I know you can’t endorse me, but I, I can endorse you.’ All those issues are pursued by the John Birch Society in the 1970s, a time when the John Birch Society was the traditional narrative, is it was moribund. So it completely changes the perspective of this organization as ineffective by late 1960s, as I, saw it.SHEFFIELD: So did he change, Welch, change his perspective on Reagan ever?MILLER: I think it was just the issues. He wasn’t active in electing candidates, he was just pushing the issues. It was tax reform through TRIM. It was ERA. He was just creating the infrastructure for these issues that Reagan latched upon and the individuals of the Birch Society, and these ad hoc committees naturally gravitated towards the candidate who embraced them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right, how were, what were in his final years, Welch’s? What was that like for him? The Society itself, he had created multiple different organizations but the JBS kind of started hitting some financial hard times because of the way he had structured things. And that was kind of a preoccupation of his latter part of his life, right?MILLER: Yeah. It’s also some of the most interesting, I think it’s probably the most interesting part of the book, because in comes a, kind of a, this big burly, Texas billionaire by the name of Bunker Hunt, H.L. Hunt’s son, who is a fascinating character who deserves a book by himself. He’s, he tries to corner the silver market and it’s, there’s, I devote a whole chapter to it.And basically, he provides the money for the John Birch Society to survive into the 1970s. And as Welch dies in 1985. He has a stroke 83, and he’s kind of– by the end, he’s in decline, but the organization is like a conglomerate. They have a magazine. They have the bulletin. They have the speakers bureau. They have the other organizations, many corporations. And he’s, he is, he’s still the president of the organization, and he speaks at the organizations, and it’s his job to kind of go down and talk to Bunker who is, he’s all into the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers, and he’s got all these theories about– He’s ultimately bailed out by the federal government after his problem with trying to take over the silver market, which American taxpayers pay for.SHEFFIELD: So much for being against socialism, right? (laughs)MILLER: No No. And by 1984, everybody’s meeting at Bunker’s house in Dallas, because that’s where the convention is. So there’s this big barbecue at Bunker’s palatial mansion in Dallas in 1984 for the renomination of the president.SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. And JBS is still around today. Have you, did you, I know you didn’t write about it, but they seem to have increased their influence in recent years. Would you say that?MILLER: I, I haven’t really followed the present. I’ve always been interested in the past and I’m interested in the the history of how things develop, but, it’s, I always say that it takes about 50 years to figure out how organizations influence. And I think, whether it’s the JBS, or another organization, we talked about Alex Jones. We talked about QAnon. We talked about other organizations.SHEFFIELD: And actually, speaking of Jones specifically, he has actually said that his worldview was formed directly by Birch and–MILLER: Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: –material, but he said that,MILLER: Or people involved in Taiwan, people who are fascinated with Taiwan, they might’ve read Robert Welch’s book on John Birch. And, I think that there’s a lot of different roads from it. It’s not just the John Birch Society. Today it can be some level of Republican politics and that, that sparked an interest.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, so just a last question here. And I’ve mentioned this earlier, at the top of the show I think that there is a tendency among establishment centrist, or liberals to kind of just ignore this stuff. And did you see that in materials about Robert Welch and the John Birch Society during his lifetime, when in your research, did you see that at all that tendency?MILLER: There, there are a number of new works that are coming out that are on the far right. It’s kind of the, it’s going to be a cottage industry.SHEFFIELD: Oh, no, I’m saying just specifically, why do you think it didn’t wasn’tMILLER: Why did it not? Well, that’s a good question. I think that the Well, there have been some. But I think it goes back to the gatekeepers.This is William F. Buckley is the primary gatekeeper and he is the person who determines how things shape out. And generally, I think there’s been a movement, maybe not culturally, but economically, but politically, if we take a look at the courts today where there’s been a significant shift to the right. And the right has been more successful in making sure that their version, it gets out there.Look at the Dinesh D’Souza books. They sell much more, much better than my books will sell. The books of Bill O’Reilly. These are history books that he’s writing. I wouldn’t consider them the greatest history books, but these are a lot more popular. And these are the books that people are buying, and this is the perception that people have.Historians, maybe we have to do a better job in getting the word out there and getting these books more accessible, and getting the, in getting the truth out there to more people to a greater audience.I try in my research to reach a general audience, not just academia. This is a book that can be read by historians, but maybe we have to do a better job in presenting our past to a broader audience. Some people have tried, but we’ve got our work cut out for us, I think in explaining it.SHEFFIELD: Well, I, yeah, I think that’s a good remark to end on there. We could probably go on all day.MILLER: Absolutely.SHEFFIELD: So, but I don’t want to do that to everybody. So, but yes I do appreciate you coming on today, Ted. So you’re you’re on Twitter, you’re eh_miller. And then your book is called A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism. So thanks for being here today, Ted.MILLER: Matthew, thank you very much for having me on. And it’s been a real pleasure. I’ve enjoyed it.SHEFFIELD: Well, so that is our show for today, everyone. I appreciate you guys for tuning in, and of course this will be available in audio version over at Flux.community. And this show is one of several podcasts you can get over there. We’re a nonprofit media organization that focuses on in-depth coverage of politics, of religion, of media, and society, and understanding how they all fit together.The mainstream media doesn’t understand a lot of the history and understand how it all kind of fits together. And that’s important in understanding what’s going on today. So please do check that out.And please do tell your friends or your family about the show, if you like it. We’ve started up production again this year, and so far we’ve gotten thousands and thousands of views and listens.But we need a lot more because this is just such a big topic to fight for pluralism and try to preserve and understand how things are in the country, and how we can best push back against authoritarianism. So, with that I appreciate everybody joining me and I will see you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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

Episode SummaryWhile it’s easy to believe that Donald Trump unleashed the radical forces that threaten American democracy today, the truth is that they have been present within our system for more than 50 years. And in many cases, some of the same people like Roger Stone or Karl Rove who were active on the student right in the 1960s and 1970s are still active today.Although the mid-20th century is known as a time of left-wing activism and political change, the time period was also when today’s far-right began coalescing as well—and in a much more professionalized fashion that has managed to outlast many of their institutional former rivals on the left.There are many areas where this trend can be observed, but one of the easiest to see is in the constant discussion about the term “cancel culture” in mainstream political discourse. The phrase has been repeated so often that it means almost nothing to most people, but it does seem to have a vague meaning when used by Republicans to imply that they are the victims of some sort of censorship and persecution campaign.But in truth, the history of political cancellations really got started by the right wing. It's a history that is important to note and to discuss, especially because not only did reactionary college students invent the entire concept of getting people fired or reprimanded for their political opinions, they invented many of the tools of political consulting along the way as they battled the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements.Joining in this episode to talk about all this is Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. She is the author of a new book that is coming out called Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America.Due to some production difficulties, you may notice occasional glitches in the audio of this episode. The video of the conversation is available. Continue scrolling for audio time code chapters and an auto-generated transcript of the audio.Audio Chapters02:50 — While the left grew dramatically during the 1960s, so did the far right07:53 — How far-right activists practically invented political consulting despite getting little attention from historians15:39 — Reactionaries have been building fake student groups for 60 years20:45 — How right-wing activists then and now use student athletes to build control on campus30:07 — Today's far-right isn't conservative, and its creators didn't call themselves conservative37:55 — How libertarianism provided rhetorical cover through "fusionism" to the Christian right47:47 — More on fake student groups54:56 — How right-wing students in the 1960s teamed up with campus police57:31 — Reactionaries invented getting people fired for political views, but they falsely blame the left for it01:02:32 — Left-wing groups and donors spend almost nothing compared to right-wing youth groups01:13:28 — Many of today's far-right actors have been operating continuously since the 1970sAudio TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It's really great to have you here today, Lauren.LAUREN LASAABE SHEPHERD: Thanks, yeah, thank you for, thank you for the invitation.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Alright, so let's start with kind of a synopsis of your book is covering what time period is it covering here that, in your focus here?SHEPHERD: A very short period, just three years, 1967 to 1970.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. And why those particular three years?SHEPHERD: So, so the book is about, I guess it's easier to understand what the book is is about. So, I'm writing about the campus wars, so American higher education in the 1960s. And there's sort of this [00:03:00] misconception when people think of college campuses in the sixties that, they're radical hotbeds of activism and progressivism. We think of the anti-war movement. We think of the black power movement as it developed on college campuses. We think of Berkeley in 1964.So that's kind of the common understanding of what's going on in American higher ed in those years. But my book pushes back on that and says, yes, it's true. All of those things are of course there, but there's also a smaller group of students on the right, but even though they're smaller, they have sort of an outsized importance in the way that these campus wars develop.So, typically, we understand the war as being between left wing students, especially students associated with the new left and organizations like students for democratic society, or the student nonviolent coordinating committee SNCC and. What I'm suggesting is that the war is [00:04:00] actually a little bit more between students on the right and students on the left.So, yeah, so 1967 to 1970 is the question of why these are the years that I cover is because this is like the intensity, this is when the battles seem to be most consequential and certainly most dramatic. And so there's in terms of the narrative, it's just more interesting to look at those 3 years.This is the height of the Vietnam war. This is when the black power movement really starts to take shape. And we see a movement, at least among civil rights organizers, to step away from, this long tradition of nonviolence and to become a little bit more radical, a little bit more militant.And so I'm looking at how students on the right really push back against that.SHEFFIELD: And so, in this time period, it's, it is critical as a, sort of a formation for later decades in politics that came afterward. But I guess, to understand it fully, we have to maybe rewind it a little bit even [00:05:00] further to before your time period, especially to understand the figures that are involved here.So as you noted the 1960s were a big organizing and foundational period for American reactionary politics. And there were several people who were involved in creating different organizations and groups. Why don't you discuss some of those people in the groups that they had founded, please?SHEPHERD: Sure. Okay. So, some of the former students of the 60s whose names we might recognize today include people who have been very, very active in politics on the right. So, people like Newt Gingrich, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, David Duke, Pat Buchanan. Who am I missing out? David Keene, who is a one-time president of the National Rifle Association. Karl Rove. Gosh, I can't believe I forgot Karl Rove.So these names are, if you're familiar with more like late 20th century, American political history, we recognize [00:06:00] them as either activists or politicians some of whom have run for president or have held high office. Dan Quayle, for example, was a member of Young Americans for Freedom. And I'm sure we'll talk a lot about YAF today. He eventually went on to become the vice president of the United States.And of course, Sessions and Barr both have been American attorneys general. So, yeah. I introduced them to you as 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds before their national careers really took shape. They were still political activists. They were just college students really cutting their teeth for the first time in learning about what it means to be an activist or what it means to be an intellectual on the right.Or what it means to be a partisan. For example I can start with Karl Rove, if you like. Rove was extremely important and the College Republicans at the time, and he actually did not even graduate from college. He went to school in Utah, before his senior year, he dropped out [00:07:00] to work full time for the GOP.So College Republicans and YAF, other groups that, that we can talk about today, ISI is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It's the intellectual group for students on the right. They're all feeder organizations. And so through these organizations, the students learn the skills that they'll use for the rest of their personal and political lives.And I use them as examples, but the story is about American higher ed entirely. As policy and precedent, the legislation that these men, and they were mostly men, shape and design that affects higher ed.I mean, it's again, this is not just a personal story about them. It's something that affects all college students and faculty and alum and administrators. I mean, they've had quite a wide reach, and maybe they don't get enough credit for that for better or for worse.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.How far-right activists practically invented political consulting despite getting little attention from historiansSHEFFIELD: I think you're definitely right that people tend to, some of these 501c3 [00:08:00] organizations, they don't get a lot of press coverage or even historian discussion too much. And it is unfortunate as an analytical point, because these people basically invented political consulting. I mean, the way that it's currently known.SHEPHERD: Their style. Absolutely. Yes.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And created the idea of the permanent campaign, the permanent interest political interest group, like these things did not really, I mean, you could argue that there were, like some special case organizations. So like, the NAACP, for instance obviously, is a very, one of the earliest ones.But these were organizations for people who were not oppressed and trying to attain the same rights as everybody else. They were people who were solely dedicated to influencing policies and electing people.And it was just not a thing until these guys invented it. Why do you think they don't get as much attention, these organizations?SHEPHERD: Oh, [00:09:00] well, they do get a lot of attention. I think they just, the starting points maybe are less familiar to people. So yeah, if you'd like, we can talk about those individual groups and their functions. So, you mentioned these 501c3s, that's what many of them are, especially I. S. I. It's a nonprofit. And that nonprofit model, that educational model allows right wing benefactors ideologues to donate to it tax exempt. And then that money trickles down to students in classrooms.One of the one of the bigger projects Of, so I need to move back even a little bit further. The larger post war conservative movement as it's developing across the country, the story that I'm telling this is the campus-based version of it. So many of the people that I talk about, so like Rove or Sessions all of the others, they're influenced by elders in that conservative movement.So, like the William F. Buckleys, the Marvin Liebmans, the Richard Vigueries, other writers at conservative magazines, so [00:10:00] not just National Review, but also magazines like Modern Age and Human Events and Commentary, and a list of others. So the 501 C3 model really helps those older mentors recruit donors, people who can write big checks. And of course, you don't even need many of them, depending on how large the check is. And you can put that money inside these little shell organizations, and then go on to give that money to the students to help them stay on the college campus. So one of the big projects of ISI was literally investing in individual students to make sure that they go through graduate school, that they become lawyers or they become academics themselves and they stay in higher ed. It's this whole concept of balancing the academy. That's the terminology that they used and the idea is to like, let's start with Buckley. Buckley's big criticism of the academy is that it's too less left wing.It's too socialist. It's hostile to Christians. And so what, it's [00:11:00] what Buckley has in mind when he founds Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 is he'll create an activist organization on the right to counterbalance other groups like the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. So we've got ISI that does that. We have YAF that does that.And then of course we can't credit Buckley or even the post war right with College Republicans, because that's an organization that existed before. But certainly, YAF and ISI had a lot of influence on College Republicans in the 1960s. And then we'll drive it further to the right beyond that time.So, yeah, so those are the organizations, and we talked about them being a training ground just a second ago. Groups like YAF have an age cap, right? You age out of it at 30 years old. So once you've finished college and then even if you decide to go on to graduate school, once you finish that.You can't be a member anymore, but there is the next step and that is the American Conservative Union, the ACU, which we do know more about today. That's [00:12:00] probably known among your listeners. And also the national political, sorry, CPAC. We don't call it national anymore, but CPAC is still like a large.Right wing organization that works for right wing causes. So, even to bring it back to the college campuses college campus, these smaller groups, they all have their own purpose. So, right? We've said, I've said multiple times that is like the intellectual organization that train students to stay in the academy and influence higher ed from some intellectual.Direct in some intellectual direction. YAF is really more partisan or more ideological. So, they're willing to work across the aisle, right? So more nonpartisan, I should say. They're willing to work with say Southern Democrats, right? There were plenty of Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond who were on YAF's board at the time.And then the other organization, College Republicans is the partisan organization. So it's not. As [00:13:00] ideological as YAF, it certainly doesn't have as many of the YAF fire brands. So like we, I use Karl Rove as an example of a college Republican. If you want a good example of a YAFer, that would be someone like Pat Buchanan the presidential, the failed presidential candidate in the late eighties and nineties.But nevertheless, Buchanan still had a long career in Washington and along influence on the right, an outsized influence for sure. So yeah, these groups, they serve their individual functions, but they all work together too. And that's actually, the working together is a thing that doesn't really even develop until about 1968.So, my book is divided into two parts. And in the first part I explain what these groups do, who funds them, who the members are the demographics of the different organizations purposes. But I also talk about the antagonisms between them. So kind of an interesting feature of all these groups, since they have different purposes, they don't their goals don't always align.[00:14:00]So. We know today your viewers may be familiar with different, like, ideological camps on the right, like, traditionalists or libertarians. The, all of those differences were still there. So, there were antagonisms between the groups that prevented them from working together, and they were already such a small force.Anyway, that being divided was not helpful. It was not helping them. Conquer the campus left in the way that they would have liked. So after 1968, after the spring demonstrations at Columbia, and we can talk about those if you like the elders, the Buckley's and others on national board. Sort of got the students all together and said, like, look, we there's strength in numbers since we literally can't agree on anything that has to do with like politics or ideology.Why don't we just find the least common denominator among all of us? And that is we all hate the left, right? We all hate SDS. We all hate the black power movement on campus and the strikers and the sit ins and the peace Knicks and the hippies and the marijuana [00:15:00] smokers. So let's just. Let's just channel all of that energy, all that negative energy towards stopping them.And so one of the larger theses in my book is that's today. I mean, the expression of owning the libs didn't exist, of course, in the sixties, but that really was what was happening. It's if you put all of these minds on the right together and have them sit down in the conversation, they'll just tear each other apart because they all have really strong convictions and they can't seem to get them in alignment, but what they can do is turn against a common enemy. And so that's really where this whole owning the left comes from.Reactionaries have been building fake student groups for 60 yearsSHEFFIELD: Yeah. It's basically that's when the sort of messaging model for Republican politics, which has never changed ever since that point, and basically it gave birth, it was not just that they couldn't agree, it was also that they understood that they themselves, the [00:16:00] policies that they wanted were not popular. And so, so let's maybe talk about that, that they saw them, that they realized that they were not representing a majority of young people but they didn't want to ever publicly admit that so they've not quite like that at all.SHEPHERD: Yeah. Okay. So, let's talk about this concept called the majority coalition. So after the Columbia demonstration Columbia is just such a perfect example. So in the spring of 1968 if viewers aren't familiar with this story, that the short story is at Columbia university and New York, there were a group of mostly white left wing students of.The new left members of students for a democratic society who were opposed to the university's affiliation with the Department of defense, and they wanted to shut down all university research that would in some way. Continue American involvement in Vietnam. So these are anti war students again, mostly white.There are [00:17:00] there's another issue at Columbia at the same time. And that is that the university is trying to expand the campus into Harlem. The black neighborhood of New York and this expansion project is the construction of a new gym that would take over Harlem's morning side park.So this is a recreational area. This is an important space for the black community that lives there. And so. Many of the black students on campus are organizing to protest the construction of what they call Jim Crow because it was literally segregated members of Harlem. People who lived in that community would have access to the gym, but they would literally have to enter on a downstairs.Freeway downstairs door in the back, as opposed to like this spectacular main entrance that was up higher that Columbia students would use. And so it was it was really a matter of like territorial encroachment that was also extremely racist in literally the physical design. So we have two, two [00:18:00] left groups that are all going against Columbia administration.So at the time there are four separate. Right wing groups at Columbia that are all opposed to the left. They're not working together. They're all their individual clubs. Of yeah, there's a students for a free campus. There's 2 others. And then they're really not all conservative. Some of them are the jocks, like the athletes, the football team.And so why Columbia is so important is because for the 1st time, students on the right are able to get. All four of those groups to kind of work together under what they call a majority coalition. It was a majority of students on the right, but it wasn't the majority of the campus. But that's kind of the way that it was marketed or described.And so anyway they fought back against the, they fought back against the SDS and the Harlem protest, and they themselves were actually Pretty inconsequential, right? They didn't have anything to do with [00:19:00] ending the sit ins and the protests that took place that was, those were ended by New York city police and also campus police at Columbia, but nevertheless, it was an important moment for the conservative students because they realized, oh, okay, we can we can help the powers that be by.Sort of parading around on campus in our suits and praising administrators and presenting ourselves as clean cut squares saying we're the majority. We want to go to class. We don't. We've already paid tuition for our classes for the semester and these. Nihilist strikers are just trying to shut down the campus because they don't want to go to school or they're communist dupes or, whatever the reason was it was a way for them to kind of stick together.So it was unsuccessful technically, but for their playbook, it was like, look, why don't we create more. Majority coalitions. So from that point forward, Young Americans for Freedom, its national board sits down and creates an action manual for organizing. And every year [00:20:00] it redistributes this manual out to every single chapter in the country.Yes, has like 15, 000 members. So it's, I mean, it's not huge, but it is, there is a presence nationwide. We can say that. And so it's a gas job to Locate even moderate students on campus to start recruiting athletes or members of the student government, or just anybody who wants to go to class and doesn't want to see the campus shut down.And that's their way of kind of pulling people into the right. And so it's also the way that can market itself as. The student silent majority. So again, this is 1968. This is throughout Nixon's campaign for presidency when he's talking about being representing a silent majority, they're just borrowing that language.How right-wing activists then and now use student athletes to build control on campusSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And actually I did want to kind of highlight something you just mentioned with the idea of bringing in athletes into their coalition. It's something that actually you can see in the present day now as well. Like [00:21:00] Republicans have really focused on this in the past roughly five years or so through like, overtly elevating sports commentators to be Republican commentators also.So like they've got this guy named Clay Travis, who is just a sports core guy. But now he is a regular political commentator. He inherited Rush Limbaugh's time slot and through the company that was syndicating him. Along with another guy and the two of the, and the weekday co host of Fox News their morning program Fox and Friends.Ryan Kilmeade is a former sports reporter and then their weekend reporter I forget what his name is. They've got another guy over there who is also a sports commentator Will something or other. I forget his name. But yeah, and then.SHEPHERD: Limbaugh too came out of the sports world, right?SHEFFIELD: That's true. Well, that's true. Yeah, he was a Kansas City Royals announcer, for a number of years and so there's always been a [00:22:00] very strong connection just culturally perhaps with right wing politics and sports media which is interesting because they're also On the flip side there were a number of black athletes, in the, in your time period also who were linked to more, left wing political causes, Muhammad Ali being probably the most prominent, but certainly far from the only.SHEPHERD: So, wow, there, there's so much to unpack there, but I can tell you, at least for the sixties, part of the reason that the right wanted to recruit athletes is it had to do with pushing back against the peace movement? So, just to give you an example at the University of Southern California.So big football school. The new left was protesting at football games because they decided the violence of football was just a proxy for the Vietnam war, right? It's just another symbol of Americans glorifying violence for entertainment. And so they would protest outside of football games.They would try to get football games. Canceled.[00:23:00] Not in the way that we use cancel culture now, but actually maybe so maybe that is you could draw a straight line there. Anyway, so, so, yeah, so the right was very big on like recruiting athletes to say, like, look, these. Hippies, these peaceniks, they're against you.They hate you. And you've done nothing wrong. Like, you are a star representative of this campus, right? You pull in alumni dollars and right, you enhance the school's spirit and its traditions. And so that was a really easy segue to get sort of the jock crowd to join some right wing causes, even if they weren't explicitly, understood to be right wing when those athletes joined.And then I mean, if you want to go back even further to the right and athletics, you could talk about in this sort of, like, almost Christian nationalist tradition. There's this long history of, like, Christian manhood and, like, just, sort of an obsession with strength and virality that goes back at least to like Teddy Roosevelt, right?At [00:24:00] least to the beginning of the 20th century. And I'm sure probably earlier than that, I'm just not familiar with the literature there, but I know if, Any viewers are interested Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne spends a lot of time talking about in the front part of her book, talking about the visions of Christian manhood and strength.And it's, that's actually the reason for the creation of groups like the YMCA is to connect Christianity and athleticism and fitness.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it was, yeah, I know I was going to say, and that's, I mean, the name originally was the Young Men's Christian Association. And so, for sure, it's that.And, but and I guess another present day, maybe direct comparison to what you're talking about is that in Florida Ron DeSantis, the governor there has hired this far-right Christian nationalist named Christopher Rufo to oversee the rebuilding of a campus there called New College, and [00:25:00] one of the keys to his attempt to tear it down and rebuild it in their image is that they're bringing in a massive amount of athletes into the school and significantly expanding the budget allocated toward athletics, even though nobody at the school asked for that, none of the students or the alumni asked for it.SHEPHERD: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could talk for days about the New College situation. And I just, to start, I think it's an easy target. New College is a public campus. And so in that way, the state can have direct control over what goes on there. And also because it doesn't have an athletics program, like you can't, if you take a look at what DeSantis or what Rufo and others are doing at New College.You that could never happen at the University of Florida, right? They can never happen with a larger state institution that has a major alumni donor base and a long sports history and long traditions like that. I mean, you [00:26:00] would never. People would not, the alumni would not be okay with their alma mater being taken over and just unpacked from the inside out.But with New College, like I said, it's an easy target. It's much smaller. It doesn't have— it's alumni are, a little bit more hippie. They're softer. They're not going to throw hard punches and send nasty emails, although I hope they do. And I encourage anyone to do things like that in the name of saving new college from what it's always been.But, I mean, this you're talking about a campus that was literally founded. By hippies, students used to go to class barefoot and shirtless. I mean, that was not an uncommon thing. It's kind of part of the lore of the institution. And so, yeah, I mean, it's just very clear that it's an easy target, but if we can hang out on the topic of fitness for a little while, I think that's so fascinating.So, like, what comes to my mind is, have you seen the viral video of RFK doing pushups? Or just shirtless, right? [00:27:00] It's kind of striking to see someone of his age because he is more mature. He's older with like abs or biceps and, doing pushups. And I've read a lot of pretty hateful Twitter commentary about his form and about how strong is he, or he must be doping.He must be taking like human growth hormone or testosterone or whatever. Maybe he is, who knows? I'm sure. And he claims not to, yeah. Yeah. Right. And so whatever they, I don't, I can't, I'm not a medical doctor. I can't pass any judgment on that, but I just think it's interesting when we see like, the RFKs or even like right wing CrossFitters, right.The the couple, I think it was a husband, wife, or boyfriend, girlfriend, couple that, that started the first CrossFit box. And then now the whole movement. But I mean, we really saw them come out during the pandemic as being anti masks. anti maskers and anti vaxxers. And even, it's just so interesting to me, like, I usually associate, like, crunchy, whole, holistic [00:28:00] fitness and medicine with the left.But we've really almost seen that kind of horseshoe become a circle on the topic of health and fitness, because there are a lot of right wingers who. Have suddenly they're not even vaccinating their dogs anymore. That was an article that I read recently as people are because of political ideologies are bringing their dogs to the vet and saying, why are we getting these shots?Why is my infant being immunized for MMR? But it's just interesting though, when we see people like RFK. They promote fitness as such an individual thing, like such a personal responsibility. I have yet to see anybody, RFK or otherwise on the right say, you know what, as part of my platform, as part of my campaign, I'm going to expand public access to fitness.I'm going to invest in like recreational spaces and parks and communities. Or overhaul the American like way of eating, right? You just don't hear people on the right. If they're so concerned about health and [00:29:00] fitness and vitality they're not interested in making that something that's available to everyone.SHEFFIELD: Well, and certainly if you're concerned about people being healthy, you would probably want to support national healthSHEPHERD: care. You would think that would be the very first one to start.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and you don't know this, but actually this episode is actually going to be released right after an episode that explicitly talks about health and fitness with a very interesting historian named Natalia Petrzela.SHEPHERD: Oh, gosh. I can't wait to hear that. I love Natalia. She, so like me, she is also an ed historian. And like me, we are also fitness instructors outside of our part of work in academia. I love Natalia. I didn't realize that. That's exciting.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, her stuff's really great and and there actually is a through line though in what we're talking about here with this fitness of sort of politicization of fitness and that is that and again, this is [00:30:00] before your time period, but and we keep doing that, but I promise the audience here, we will talk more about your time period.Today's far-right isn't conservative, and its creators didn't call themselves conservativeSHEFFIELD: Like when William F. Buckley first got started with his, God and Man at Yale book and YAF was getting started in ISI in the 1950s. They didn't call themselves conservatives. And that is a point that is really, really important, I think. They called themselves individualists.That's what they call themselves. And, and it's important to understand because, like, these guys, they're not conservative. Like that's something that I think everybody needs to realize is that what calls itself conservatism in the United States is, it's like, it's sort of a, an imposter version of it.It's a, it is a reactionary ideology of. Which is individualism. That's what this is. And so, and it filters down into everything that they say [00:31:00] rhetorically, but also in their policy desires. So that, that poverty exists because of individual. failure and immorality.And, that's why they're so concerned about regulating people's sex lives and regulating their access to birth control or health care. And then, and then you see it, further in terms of the idea of collective action. And it's part of why they themselves have such problems creating an affirmative, policy goal, other than we want to destroy this stuff.So why don't you talk a little bit more about it?SHEPHERD: That's like the fitness topic. I mean, I could take this so many different ways. So yes when I, when Buckley himself, he was the first president of ISI at Yale in 1953, when he founded ISI, it was initially called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists.And then one of Buckley's own mentors said, you can't call yourself an individualist. You sound like you're creating like a colony of nudists. And so, it changed, they still kept the ISI acronym, but it became in [00:32:00] the oh my gosh, what is ISI saying for now? Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Thank you. And so, so yeah, that's, but the whole individualism, I mean, we, you really see that now in kind of the libertarian camp and like the extreme right. But I mean traditionalists don't really ever— I mean, to me, I see, at least on the populist right or the traditionalist especially the Christian right the individualist thing is not there so much because they do seem to understand the power of the state.It's just that they want to wield it for themselves. And I'll give you an example of that. Bringing this directly back to colleges. So, like, in Buckley's time in any of Buckley's writing and in all of the things that he had influence over with these college organizations, never did he say we need to dismantle the university as it exists.Instead, he was worrying about he, he was concerned about subverting it. So, putting in. Agents of the right, like,[00:33:00] I, one of my chapter titles is called eggheads for the right. So he wanted the university structure to still exist as it was. He just wanted this, like, parallel or almost like interior compliment that would balance the academy as opposed to what you see today at new college and even in West Virginia.Instead, it's like, no, we're just going to dismantle the whole thing. We're going to defund higher education. We're going to forget the humanities, forget the liberal arts. These are not important things. What are you ever going to do with an art history major? It's not helpful for the workforce, right?And college is about workforce training, not classical education. And so we need to invest in STEM and like business, programs. And so that's just to me, that's like a 180 from Buckley. And I don't mean to sound like I'm being too complimentary of Buckley. I certainly am not, but I can see that there's a clear distinction between what the right wants with the academy today and what maybe, a couple of generations ago, the [00:34:00] right was calling forSHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's, I mean, there, he was still, I mean, he did have a strong anti intellectual streak to himself as well. I mean, like he was constantly talking about how he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the phone book than by the faculty of--SHEPHERD: The Boston phone book.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, it was always there for him but that tension has always existed on within the American right especially because it's so linked to the Christian right and American Protestantism of the fundamentalist variety. I mean, Buckley was more of a fundamentalist, I mean, he was a fundamentalist Catholic rather than a Protestant, but there was still this idea of what cognitive psychologists call intuitive reasoning rather than deliberative or reflective reasoning.And so what those concepts mean just for people who haven't heard of them is that intuitive reasoning, basically it doesn't use [00:35:00] facts or observation to reach conclusions. It uses feelings.SHEPHERD: Vibes?SHEFFIELD: And so yeah, vibes and like we all use this type of thinking in our, regular lives and, like you, you'll be like, walking down the street, I don't know and think, oh, I have to be careful over here there's some creepy guys that. hang out here sometimes. And, maybe you had only seen them there once. But, it's possible they might be there, at some other point, right? And so that type of thinking it's not, it can be helpful in your regular life, but when it comes to evaluating, whether COVID vaccines are safe or, whether cutting taxes increases revenues for the government, that's not a good way to understand cause and effect.SHEPHERD: These are testable things, yes.SHEFFIELD: That's right. You can know whether the taxes bring in cutting them brings in moroni and spoiler alert it does not That's right andso but like but it's it's [00:36:00] also the way that fundamentalist religion works as well because if you believe that the Bible is literally true Yeah, I mean, and I can say this having, been a I was born and raised as a Mormon fundamentalist. And so I literally did believe that the Book of Mormon, that First Nations people are, ancient, are the descendants of ancient Hebrews.Like, I believed that. But I knew that I couldn't prove that. So if you were to challenge me on that, I would have been like, well, there's these ideas about this and that and. But I ultimately, I would have had to conclude, yeah, I don't have any proof for that. AndSHEPHERD: so... If you were honest enough to do so.Because I've heard people say, well, that's why we have faith, right? And that the, like, the concept of faith is, you can't prove this, but--SHEFFIELD: Yeah. But like, and so like, basically, yeah, you're right. But that's what they've done is that the political ideology of American reactionism is a faith based ideology, both in [00:37:00] terms of that it's built in for many of them on literal religion.But it's also built on that their secular ideas are of faith, like, I mean, you look at some of the very influential right wing economists like, that they, were very big on and even to this day, like, Ludwig, von Mises, like he had this entire rejection of We don't need evidence to have our theories economic theories like that's That and he came up with this idea that everything, you can understand economics through common sense and he had no idea that is literally a Fallacy, in, in Logic 101, the appeal to common sense is a fallacy, and it's the argument for mean credulity.SHEPHERD: So, while we're on.SHEFFIELD: I know we went on for a while there, I'm sorry.SHEPHERD: No, no, no, no, it's great.How libertarianism provided rhetorical cover through "fusionism" to the Christian rightSHEPHERD: And while we're on this topic, I mean, I think that's really why the traditionalist [00:38:00] right needs the libertarian right. So, this is one of the things we're talking about in the book, but this is not my original idea.There's this long, long pattern history of discussion of fusionisms. This is Frank Meyer's concept that the, Oh,SHEFFIELD: definitely. I want to get into that. Yeah. Traditionalism. Yeah. Talk about that. Yeah.SHEPHERD: Yeah. And so the reason is because traditionalism, I mean, it's, it. Is based on just the past and just like, some preference for a hierarchy that in the right estimate they benefit from right?So, whatever it is, if it's patriarchy, if it's white supremacy, whatever it is, the way things have been in the past benefit people. Who think this way and that's why they don't want to change them, but they can't explain it that way. Right. And not because they in some cases, maybe they don't have the words, but in other cases, you can't just come right out and say, well, I'm racist.I'm a white supremacist. I'm misogynist, right? None of that sounds good. And you're not going to be taken seriously, butSHEFFIELD: I'm rich. Therefore I should keep my money. [00:39:00]SHEPHERD: If you have some ideological justification, like some libertarian free market principles, small government principles, that's actually coherent.A lot of times the traditionalists borrow that language from libertarians, even though they don't like all of their ideas. But they borrow their language when it's necessary. And actually tell a story about this in the book too. This is a quick story. In the summer of 1969, YAF has its national convention in St.Louis, Missouri. And there's a lot of tension at the convention because there's a libertarian camp. So the libertarians are the minorities in YAF. But the libertarians are really starting to find common cause with the new left when it comes to Vietnam. They don't want to be drafted, right? They call the draft, the selective slavery system and a violation of the 13th amendment.And that, that doesn't sit well with the traditionalists who are very pro war, very interested [00:40:00] in American hegemony abroad. And they're anti communist, right? They don't want to see South Vietnam fall to communist North or to China or to Russia or, whoever, USSR, whoever they're afraid of.And so there's some other things like the libertarians are okay with drug decriminalization. They're okay with marijuana use and LSD usage and they find common cause with the hippies on things like that. And they don't think that the state. Police should be brought in to restrict these liberties from people, right?So it shouldn't be a crime to smoke weed if you want to and the traditionalist, right, just can't have that. So at the at this convention in 1969, there are literal fistfights between traditionalists and libertarians. After one libertarian student gets on the stage at this convention and he holds up a copy of his draft card and he takes a cigarette lighter to it and he burns it and that's symbolic, not just that he's burning his draft card because that's, of course, what the new left does, but it's also symbolic because yas. own emblem is the torch of [00:41:00] liberty. So he's, it's kind of a double entendre there and it's offensive to traditionalists in both ways.And so, yeah, this huge fight breaks out and they're punching each other. And then even once the fight settles the national board takes away the credentials of the libertarians so they can't come back to the conference. And when they try to come in there's more fights about that.And then the night that that Instance occurs they all meet under this is in Saint Louis. So they meet under the Gateway Arch, and they listen to speeches by Buckley who they boo the libertarians boo. And that's like, you can't do that. Buckley is a God. You cannot insult the master. And then they also there are speeches by Murray Rothbard, who if viewers aren't familiar, he's an archcapitalist. He is an arch-libertarian. I think he even sometimes calls himself an anarcho-capitalist. But anyway, he's a writer, a thinker. He's an extreme libertarian. And so, yeah there's more fights. There's more tussles. They make their way back that night to the hotel [00:42:00] room. You have students beating each other up in the halls calling for the death of the other of the other side.And yeah, it's Extremely dramatic, but as I show in the book, even after that 1969 convention, when all of these libertarians are expelled, and then they go on to create students for individual liberty, which eventually becomes the libertarian party of the United States in 1972 or 73. Even though they've been exiled from YAF, it doesn't stop YAFers from using their arguments.So it's a fascinating thing that these pro war traditionalists they're all for the war in Vietnam, but they themselves don't want to be drafted and so they get pressed on that all the time. The chicken hawk question. If you're so pro war, why won't you serve yourself? What are you doing?Sitting in a college classroom? If the college campus is so liberal and so terrible, go out and be a soldier, man, go fight. And then they come up, with all of these excuses, like, well, after I graduate, I'll go enlist. I'm just here because I want to be an officer rather than an enlisted man.And they have all these reasons, but they. Borrow lots of [00:43:00] arguments from the libertarians. And of course they need to because their own ideas aren't coherent or consistent to be defensible.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And you did see some of that also with the women who, the few women who did come up in that environment tended to, talk praise and they still, and they've done it ever since, like Laura Ingram is childless, has never been married or actually, sorry, she adopted children.And as a someone who had never been married and, a lot of these right wing women, all kind of do not practice what they preach. Oh, yeah.SHEPHERD: Interesting. For sure. And yeah, it's a weird right wing feminism. It's very, it tends to be very high feminism. Like Laura Ingram, of course is, considered by many accounts to beautiful, right? She adheres to like modern beauty standards. Michelle Malkin's another really good example, but even going back to like, like Phyllis Schlafly, like, of course, Phyllis Schlafly was she was married and she [00:44:00] did have several children. I can't remember how many she had, but she just jet set across the country all the time on these speaking on these stop ERA speaking tours with nannies, right? While preaching about the importance of women staying at home and being homemakers and at holding to this Christian traditionalist view of what women should do and be.But yeah, that's another good example of someone who is pretty hypocritical there. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah so, oh, absolutely. And on the sort of the reactionary slash libertarian feuding, I'm interested to hear what you think, because I do feel like that especially when the sixties, that there were a bunch of people outside of political movements, like they weren't activists who had a libertarian sensibility and they were not liberal or progressive. But. The issues that they were interested in [00:45:00] did align them temporarily with the political left. And so when we had those issues resolved as a society in favor of the left, so drug legalization, because it was a felony and imprisonment, you could be imprisoned for just engaging in same sex sexual relations. So like legalizing sodomy, legalizing same sex marriage marijuana, decriminalization reforms to the draft, et cetera.These are all things that the libertarian. People as you said agreed with the progressive left on and then once those issues were sort of taken off the table because everyone agreed Oh, okay, the left was right about this Now those people who had those libertarian inclinations are now like any Elon Musk. It's a great example of this and you know that they never understood what [00:46:00] Politics was about and they never understood where they were themselves. Like they thought they were on the left and then they're waking up all of a sudden and realizing, Oh, wait a second.These issues I was concerned about, now we're talking about different issues and what's wrong with the left now. I don't know what's your thought?SHEPHERD: Yeah. I don't know if I would say that Musk would wherever on the left, but certainly a liberal.SHEFFIELD: No, no, that they think they were,SHEPHERD: That's what I'm saying, or BillSHEFFIELD: Maher, another example.SHEPHERD: Yeah, I put Elon Musk or even Vivek Ramaswamy, like, who we have seen recently in the Republican debate. I can't predict the future, but it seems to me like he'll probably have a long career on the right. I don't know. We'll see. That those to me represent like a tech bro kind of personality who are interested in grift, and it seems like it's very, very easy to, become an overnight star on the [00:47:00] right and get a lot of celebrity and attention and money in ways that you can't do on the left. So, for example, like, Musk, right? He's, he makes a name for himself in developing, like, green energy vehicles, but now he's this right wing troll on Twitter, but it seems like he has found an audience there, right?He gets attention that he likes. And so his views over time don't have to be consistent. It's. It's more opportunistic to me and that's what. I don't know. That's what I see. I'm sure someone else has probably more fully developed thoughts on that. But I mean, there's, there's just a lot of grift on the right, especially in like, conspiratorial thinking, which Musk seems to constantly be elevating on his website.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, we certainly does love that. Well, okay.More on fake student groupsSHEFFIELD: So, let's then maybe go back to the idea of creating the sort of AstroTurf group because that strategy really did kind of solidify during your time period. You talk about it quite extensively [00:48:00] in your book and one of the things that they did with that was that, and Buckley did this earlier, but this generation that you're talking about also did is that they were, very.They went very hard after some students and some professors who said things that they didn't like. And so they tried to get them fired. I mean, tell us maybe one or two of those stories of how they went after specific things like that. If you could.SHEPHERD: Sure, so well, with the AstroTurf thing that's so the right is trying to, or claiming to represent a campus silent majority, but being very self conscious that they don't.So, in order to make themselves look like an actual grassroots, truly popular movement they can't use the banner of YAF because by. The late 1960s, you have had already earned a reputation as an extremist group, and a lot of people didn't really take them very seriously. But they started creating front groups, [00:49:00] so they would create a new campus organization and they would call it something completely different, like students for responsible university or, and this is that majority coalition model we talked about earlier. They would take their entire same roster, add 2 or 3 more new names and create a new group. Right? And so suddenly it's like, look, we have not only offers on campus, but we also have this other group that thinks like, yeah, well, of course they do.It's the same group. It's just their facsimiles. So that's where the AstroTurf comes in and another sort of dimension to that. Yeah. Astroturf implying that it's not grassroots is that they have all of these major funders. So, in 1 instance this is again at the University of Southern California.There's an underground right wing campus newspaper. Called the true Trojan and it's funded entirely by 1 member of the USC board who's. Maybe I did not get permission to use but, yeah this board member cut checks that would cover the cost of an [00:50:00] entire an entire print run for the magazine.And it would be coded as an alumni subscription. So just 1 alum subscription would pay for the whole thing. So that's another example of this astroturf nature. And then also the fact that yes, board members would create these annual, action kits and like manuals to, to teach all of their students how to work, how to hold certain events or how to invite speakers to campus, how to literally give them scripts of words to use to go knock around door to door in the case of like college Republicans asking for campaign donations.So, yeah, I mean, that's that goes back to the AstroTurf thing in terms of, like, pushing back against faculties, there were, there's a number of instances in the book. 1 of the big ones that appears early on is students claiming that they were penalized for their grades. So, 1 student whose name I will use James Courtney talked about being in a macro economics course at the University of Washington or Washington University.One or the other. [00:51:00] Anyways, in his, he said that he got a B in his back row course, because the instructor did not like the fact that he was a conservative. He was turning in papers with, a free market analysis, and then he got a B instead of an A. And so there was no, there's no way for me to test that, right?That's a claim. And I don't have that student's records. I. Don't know how to get in touch with your professor who's probably been dead for decades at this point. So to sort of triangulate that and try to figure out, is this true or not? I asked that same question to other students. Did you ever feel like your professors graded you more harshly because you, because of your politics, because your politics were different than theirs and a lot of times what I heard from students is like, oh, no, they always graded fair.If I got a bad grade, it's because I turned in some half baked analysis. And so, but that's an example of students like claiming, my professor is just brainwashing everyone and if you don't agree with him, he's going to penalize you.SHEFFIELD: Well, and they also went [00:52:00] after students fellow students to try to get them expelled if they were engaging in left wing activism.Can you talk about that?SHEPHERD: Sure. So, I mean, there's instances of students literally beating up activists. So, an example is that Cornell in 1969 in the spring there was a black women's, co op, like a dormitory residence hall or house. And 1 morning, 1 night a burning cross appeared in the front yard.And so after that, at the different black students on campus were organizing, they were protesting this. They were trying, they were demanding a black studies program. They wanted more black students to be enrolled. They wanted to see more black. People on the faculty and so members of a fraternity, which 1 was it?I think Delta up salon. Anyway, when a fraternity members literally went and beat black students up who were occupying a campus building. And so that, I mean, that's 1 example. There's [00:53:00] so many examples of fistfights. Another 1 where no 1 got hurt. Another example had to do with Jane Fonda. So Jane Fonda.Anti Vietnam War celebrity she would go around on her press junket advertising whatever big, headlining movie she had coming out and yaffers would show up and they would have these big giant signs and they'd stand behind her to make sure that they were on camera and their signs would read things like Hanoi or the title of HanoiSHEFFIELD: Jane.Yeah. Well, they called her. I hadHanoi Jane .SHEPHERD: Yes. But one of the signs I'm specifically thinking of they're holding it up and it says movie title bombed. Why can't we? So meaning like, why can't we bomb Laos in Cambodia and north Vietnam? Or just heckle her at events. I mean, oftentimes her bodyguards would have to have them removed.So I mean, they were, they were rowdy. And, and after 1969, Young Americans for Freedom, the advisory board literally started in its in its communication to its campus chapters said, you can use violence, right? [00:54:00] Especially if you see the left beating up police, get in there and start crashing skulls.That's not a direct quote, but that's the, that was the vibe that they were encouraging. Then to do they would also like explicit directions. They would say, okay, if a building is being occupied by, let's say the black student union, let's say that they're holding a sit in go cordon off the building.So, let's get a group of, a majority coalition students to lock arms and not let anyone come out. If these people want to occupy the building, we're literally going to starve them. We're not going to let reinforcements come in and bring them bread or bring them, food or anything to eat.They're going to sit in there for 567 days. Until, they have an agreement with the administration to come out, so they would do things like that. And then they would be very specific about what that cordon would look like. They would say, okay, everyone should lock arms. There needs to be a girl every 2 or 3 people because, no one's going to attack a girl.How right-wing students in the 1960s teamed up with campus policeSHEPHERD: But if someone does start, start fighting back, start screaming [00:55:00] like, leftist violence oftentimes when campus police were called by administrators to. To shut down a sit in or to solve some, issue on campus students on the right would deputize themselves. They would act as if they were members of the police too.And they would wear these little badges or, they would have code words like freedom that they would whisper to the cops to say, Hey, like, we're the good guys. We're on your side. We're here to help you. Just, stuff like that. But oftentimes they would identify themselves with blue buttons. So when the antiwar movement started wearing, like, it's black armbands they would wear blue buttons.It was just like the, the counter symbol to let people know, like, Oh, we're here. We're on the administrator side. And then addition to physical violence, they would also threaten legal violence. I mean, yeah. There are several instances, especially after 1969, and then just exploding after 1970, after the Kent State Massacre, where students on the right sued their trustees, or they sued the president, or they sued [00:56:00] other students who were involved in strikes because they were claiming Like, we've already paid tuition, right?You can't, you can't shut down the campus. You can't end the semester. Which was the case at many campuses after after the massacre at Kent State, you can't just stop the normal order of events when we've paid tuition. And so those, those suits weren't always successful, but in a number of cases 1, 1 instances at George Washington University where the injunction was, was ordered, right? A judge said, yes, you must keep the campus open. You must have normal class time operations. It doesn't matter that students are striking. And and that's important too, because even even the threat of suing a college president directly, like, like the individual person is can be enough to to make some sort of action occur to make them take some steps because they don't want to face the court system or whatever it is.So that's something that you have to use all the time and continues to use. If any of your listeners are [00:57:00] familiar with the podcast, know your enemy. It's produced by dissent magazine. They're at two guys, Matt and Sam, they do deep dives on the right all the time on their Patreon page, the, the base level, I think like.5 a month subscription to their podcast and, and the stuff they produce it's called a Young Americans for Freedom subscription. And yeah, YAF actually sued them. This was a month or two ago. And I think the, I think the suit got dropped, but I mean, it's, it's, it's a tactic that they're, they're still weaponizing all the time today.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Reactionaries invented getting people fired for political views, but they falsely blame the left for itSHEFFIELD: Well, and it's, and it's important, really important because conventional political reporters, or local news reporters, they don't know this history at all, and essentially who kind of created political cancellations.I mean, the entire purpose of National Review was because they hated Dwight Eisenhower and they wanted to get rid of him because he was conservative, basically, and they were not. They were, reactionary.Let's talk about [00:58:00] that, that they moved into the Republican party and took it over and, systemically or systematically decided to bump off people who they did not find to be obedient to them. You want to talk about some of that?SHEPHERD: I mean, that's a that is a direct parallel of what happened at that summer convention to me. Like, I mean, I've, I've view these things in those terms.Mm-hmm. Of course, because it's my research. But yeah. I mean, so to, to me, canceling someone or, or this. Concept of cancel culture. It's just a boycott. So I don't know that we can give the right credit for the concept of boycotts because that I mean, that goes back. I don't know how long it goes back, but it goes back certainly before the post war movement in the United States on the right.But yeah, I mean. But ISHEFFIELD: guess as a they use, oh no, I was gonna say like they use it as a way of trying to claim that there's this, large group victimization of people with a, with a, an ideological, agenda. That is, they're trying to, I enforce it on us. And [00:59:00] we have no choice. No one everyone's trying to silence us.I've been really, they're the ones that, I mean, like, and I can say that, having been a former Republican political consultant in media entrepreneur, like, I, I was not somebody who was ever on board with the Christian right in my political career, but, and I'll give you an example of what I mean by that, but like, so when I first moved to D. C. to start up my career in political consulting and media. I, this was around when Facebook was very early on and, and I put on my religious affiliation, I put agnostic atheist. And I had several friends of mine say to me, Matt, That's probably not a good idea for you to do that people aren't going to like that.And, and, and at the time I, I thought, well, whatever, I don't want to work with those people if they hate that I don't believe in, their, their religious views. But in retrospect, they were a hundred percent right. Like I, I saw that people once they learned about what I [01:00:00] actually thought about things.They came after me to try to get me fired from jobs or try to like there was a fellowship program that I was directly encouraged to apply for by the guy who was running it. And he was very excited about this book I was going to write, and then I never got the book and it turned out that.Pretty much everybody on the judge's board was a Christian nationalist. And my book was about, here's how Republicans can sort of reconcile between irreligion and religion. That was the purpose of the book. And you can't do that. We can't have that according to them.SHEPHERD: What was the press? If you don't mind,SHEFFIELD: It was the Phillips fellowship journalism fellowship.SHEPHERD: Oh, fellowship. Okay. Yes. Yeah. I mean, the rights really great. I got to say, I got to hand it to him. They're excellent about funding scholars. Or, where other. Other people who have ideas that might that might benefit the right. And it's really interesting. [01:01:00] At a time when funding for scholars from the traditional sources, like Ford foundation, or or even even federal grants when that's.Going by the wayside, I mean, funding for the humanities for history for my discipline is almost entirely gone. I don't I don't know where someone would turn to today to get a grant for a historical project. I'm sure it would be extremely competitive. Yeah. So the right's very good about throwing cash at people or investing in their.Their projects, but, yeah, you asked about, like, National Review and its function. So, yeah, I mean, it really was about trying to convince its readers, that they are a minority a political minority and that they are. Actively being ostracized by the liberal media by, New England elites and trying to convince readers that this is a product for you that appreciates you and that will give you the tools, like the conceptual tools and that language and the understanding that [01:02:00] you need to push back against all of that and National Review.I had a had a major influence, the writers at National Review, so Buckley and others on the campus, right? I mean, they would, they would show them how to create a newsletter. And like the example I gave earlier, they would even fund them. So, and, and for your students who are headed for careers in the academy, that is, or for careers in journalism, CV.Like I was the editor of the campus newspaper. Let's just ignore the fact that it was an unofficial newspaper. ButLeft-wing groups and donors spend almost nothing compared to right-wing youth groupsSHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's true. And and it really is like that. That is the fundamentals of operational distinction between the contemporary American left and right is that the American left tends to try to see politics as something that should be organically developed.And so they don't. Yeah, they don't fund a lot of student activism and don't, I mean, yeah, like literally, we're at the point [01:03:00] now where you've got, turning point USA, you still got Young Americans for Freedom, you still got college Republicans, you've got young Americans for liberty, you've got And God, there's probably like two or three other ones.I can't think of right now. AndSHEPHERD: Sorry, I was gonna give you a couple more examples, but yeah, yeah,SHEFFIELD: Go for it. Yeah, but but no, I was going to say, but like, basically the only analog is College Democrats, that's it, for the most part.SHEPHERD: Yeah, somebody asked me this question recently too, and I was trying to think, like, who, who would be the 2023 version of, like, say, SDS?Or, or even, like, the, the Black Panthers or some, or the Black Student Union, or the WEB Du Bois Club and I can't, I couldn't come up with an example, but I think maybe the closest thing, and this is not a, a one to one comparison, but, like, some Bernie Bros. Like, I don't know, like, there's no but they stillSHEFFIELD: don't have an organization.Like, that's the thing.SHEPHERD: Yeah. Yeah. So it would be ad hoc, like, during a political campaign season. But, but now I'm thinking, I mean, I [01:04:00] really am seeing, especially among graduate students and among non tenure track faculty, postdocs visiting assistant professors. I mean, there's, there's a labor movement afoot, which is really exciting to me to watch unfold.And so, so maybe that might come something in the near future. I hope maybe that could parallel a, a new left group. Similar to like, what we saw in the 60s even, even like BLM, the BLM movement doesn't that I'm aware of have a campus base. I don't know. I don't know.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, and it is like, and I'll say, like as somebody who has been on the inside of the right and left the right understands at a central, in a central way that giving people a way to have a career in advocacy.Is important if you want to have it and, and, and like, [01:05:00] and it extends in terms of not just, donors, showering things with money, but it also extends to like media appearances, like Fox News will, they'll put on, any random person. who has an idea that they are interested in like that Oliver Anthony guy is a great exampleSHEPHERD: of that.The debate. Yes. Oliver Anthony is a perfect example. Even the the Republican debate, there was a question from a yaffer. I don't know if anyone caught that. I mean, it certainly jumped out to me. From young America's foundation, how they call it, but it's still it's the same organization as Young Americans for Freedom was.Yeah, there was not runSHEFFIELD: by anyone who is young though,SHEPHERD: right? Yes. Yeah. And like you mentioned campus reform and turning point USA, all these groups. I mean, like Charlie Kirk is like 30. I mean, he's not a college student and never was. So yeah, Candace Owen, another example of a 30 something shock job, but who, who [01:06:00] speaks on college campuses, that's, that's literally her, one of her main duties.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, well, and at the same time though, like, in her case, he was just a random. Low audience YouTuber who was making basically racist comments against black people. And that was how she got picked up. But like, I mean, you, you see that over and over that the right is very like, and I'll give you an example of somebody that I know, like he, he's a, has a pseudonymous Twitter account, doesn't run it under his own name.But one day he was making fun of some New Jersey Republican, local Republican. And. He got contacted within the week by another New Jersey Republican who didn't like that same guy and was like, repping one of his rivals. He got contacted within the week, an anonymous Twitter account, whereas on the left.Like, you can't even get these big podcasts to even post people on their show. Like, they always host the same guests [01:07:00] all the time and it's just like there is this complete freeze out of new voices on the, on the sort of established left. And maybe it, maybe it's a function of that there's not as much money available to them.But it is an interesting dynamic, I have to say as somebody who's seen things from the inside on both sides. Yeah,SHEPHERD: yeah, that goes back to what we were saying earlier about grift and opportunity with, Elon Musk and so many others, like, it's just easy to just become a right wing troll and then quickly get showered with attention and Oliver Anthony is another good example.And I know he's come out recently and say, like, after the, after the debate, he said, these are actually the people I was making fun of, but I mean, you can, I think he was funded by some. Some right wing producer like discovered and paid for his music and paid for the music video, like the outdoor video where he's playing his guitar at a concert.And it seems to be recorded live. It's it's not it's professionally recordedbut I do know that that song was produced by somebody who had an [01:08:00] interest in this sort of like, right wing populism that they could hear and conspiratorial sort of, through line that was in the lyrics of that song. So yeah, it's easy to just. To just rise up to stardom really quickly. Oh Oh my gosh.Why can I not think of his name? The Kenosha shooter. Young guy, Kyle Rittenhouse. Yes. He's another example of someone who just happened to be in front of cameras and do something that the right light. And then he's quickly elevated to fame. And I think he's been at Republican events ever since then.SHEFFIELD: Yeah and there's another guy who had just recently passed away Joe the Plumber, aka Joel Wurzelbacher, he was just a guy who asked a question to Barack Obama in 2008 and became an overnight right wing celebrity. And obviously there are some bad things about just elevating random people into your political discourse. Like the Republicans over the years, [01:09:00] several times have promoted people who are just outright fascist or a secretly a Nazi activists or things like that, but on the other hand it really gives them-- this elevation of new voices and willingness to put new people forward-- it gives a dynamism to the right wing that the left in the current day and age doesn't really have I would say.SHEPHERD: Yeah, I mean, there's this what is the saying about the left always eating its young. Yeah, I mean, there's so much like infighting and. Again, this is going back to some of the things that I talk about my research is what we saw on the right to before someone that in a leadership position and an inspirational position said, you know what y'all, stop and work together.And then they did but, yeah, that's that has yet to materialize on the left.. I guess what I see is like the left fighting liberals and liberals fighting the left rather than to me, liberals are our centrist, I, I kind of think of them that way and I know everybody does. But on the [01:10:00] spectrum, my understanding is that a liberal is probably more towards the center. And so there's like, the center to left, like, in fighting that it's just like, if all of that could be redirected to fighting against like this bubbling American fascism that is so apparent to me we can probably really do something about it.SHEFFIELD: I do think there is. There is also a New York DC problem with the left, much more than the right and like they, they don't want to include people who don't live in the "Acela Corridor" as it's commonly called. This is like a larger left problem that if you can't come to their office every day, then you're not going to get a job at a progressive organization because they want you to be in DC, even though basically what that attitude means is that they're totally cut off from understanding how to talk to people outside of their little bubble. And so [01:11:00] basically they become overly reliant on public polling. And public polling is, and I used to be a pollster so I can say this, is that it actually distorts your thinking if you don't understand how to use it.And the right is much better at understanding what polls are for because they basically invented it as a campaign tactic. But polls are for understanding how to say your message. They're not for determining what your message is.And that's the real difference between the left and the right in terms of how they use polls. The right will look at polls and say, this is how we need to talk about what we want to do. Whereas the left will look at a poll and say, oh, this idea is unpopular, which we want, so therefore, we're not going to talk about it. And we're not going to take action about it. And I have interviewed a number of very early same-sex marriage advocates and they all have uniformally told me that the Democratic party, [01:12:00] as a public matter, refused to do anything for them. And that they had to push for everything on their own. And in some cases were actually opposed by a prominent Democrats in their particular areas, even though privately they believed in, and Barack Obama was an example, Joe Biden actually was the first national left politician, to come out and he was, he was alone in being in favor of, it was actually courageous of him to do that.Most of them, they wouldn't touch it.SHEPHERD: That, that makes me think about like the, the right and it's relationship with the gay community. There's a really, I'm so excited about this, a really fascinating book that will come out next spring about gay Republicans. And it'll be written by Neil J. Young, University of Chicago. Yeah. I've gotten to read two chapters and they're both really fascinating. But yeah, that's, that's another thing too, is like watching, and also many closeted [01:13:00] Republicans.There are a lot of leadership a lot of members of the leadership on the right that were closeted over the years.SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. Well, let's, maybe get back to some of your book stuff. So you have some kind of fun messaging details that I thought are not commonly known about, like what YAF was doing against the Richard Nixon supporters, you want to talk about some of that? They're kind of funny and just weird. Let's talk about that.SHEPHERD: Yeah.Many of today's far-right actors have been operating continuously since the 1970sSHEPHERD: So in preparation for 1968, Young Americans for Freedom were recycling all of the things that they used in a 64 campaign.So, They would have like banners that would say apple pie mother and Nixon or they would dress up as cowgirls and call themselves. Yeah. Fats and they would pass out different campaign materials and just really make over the top sort of over the top sort of like. They would come out and over the top sort of [01:14:00] ways to where they're stunts.Absolutely. So, leading up to 1968, so there are a couple of different candidates that the right supports. And one of them is George Wallace. So I actually opened the book with a story about George Wallace coming to Dartmouth in 1968. And he, this is a speaking engagement. He is invited to campus.He comes up on the stage and he says all sorts of provocative things. But even before he gets there, there's already a mass of students outside who are ready to protest his appearance. And if somebody has said about the book before the way that that little vignette opens, that's actually something we would see today as students protesting conservative speakers on campus.So this, this thing, has a long history. But anyway, so, Wallace is there. There's Literally 1400 seats in the stadium or in the the room where he's speaking. And they're all full and there's an overflow crowd on the outside. There's campus police and [01:15:00] security to to take care of the hecklers.And as he's speaking, a group of students just flush through the barricade and they. Dorm inside and they run down the center aisle and they are trying to take Wallace off the stage but they're not successful. Wallace has his security. He literally has a getaway car already running and waiting for him and they take him out to the car as quick as they can.The mob of students follow him out to the car. They start beating in the top of the car and just, making a big ruckus. And I argue that all of that is purposeful. The students, of course, want to create a spectacle of their dissent. They want to show, like, we don't appreciate this guy who's out here saying, segregation today, tomorrow, forever.They don't want this person speaking on campus. Wallace, on the other hand, Loves that, right? That's catnip for him because then he can say things like, see, this is academic freedom. That's actually a direct quote. He says, this type of academic freedom will get you killed.[01:16:00] And so it's a, it's a good, that whole spectacle is a useful tool for both sides to talk about the intolerance of the other, so that's that's 1 Wallace story that appears in there. And, of course, in the 1968 campaign, there are lots of lots of students that try to get him nominated. There is, we were speaking about grift earlier. There's a lot of grift behind that. There's an unofficial youth for Wallace organization that uses Wallace's mass head is banner head for, for All of this stuff and they're soliciting campaign donations, but it's coming to the, the guy that's behind it.His name is his name is Joseph accord. And so accord is taking all of this money. He has no official affiliation with Wallace. Wallace literally his campaign headquarters in Montgomery literally sends the sky like a cease and desist. That says we're not affiliated with you.SHEFFIELD: Just like today. Just like today with all these people using Trump's name to raise money for themselves.SHEPHERD: Yeah. So, so that's another thing. And then [01:17:00] that group actually goes on. So Wallace will not get the Republican nomination. Of course that goes to Nixon, but he'll still go on to run as an independent and then he'll lose in the general election in 68, but he promises that he's going to run again in 72.So that Youth for Wallace group, so, not only is Accord behind it, there's a couple of other, like, extreme far right, white supremacists let's see, who else is there? But they, anyway, they all--SHEFFIELD: Well, Richard Viguerie is there also.SHEPHERD: Yeah, Viguerie, Viguerie is in my story, he, he's kind of in the background as like this advisor. I don't talk about him too specifically except for, to, to talk about his ability to help fundraise. But this group goes on and it becomes the National Youth Alliance, the NYA, and it's a white, literally it's a white supremacist college group, like, its whole function is to attack black students.They sell pepper spray as they use the slur, [01:18:00] but as basically control equipment is what they call it. And yeah, they just produce all sorts of horrible literature. David Duke is affiliated with this group. He has a chapter at LSU. There's an infamous image of Duke. I, I didn't include this in the book.Plenty of people might be familiar with this picture, but it's Duke, not at LSU. He's at Tulane in New Orleans. And he is protesting the, the trial of the Chicago defendants, he's, he's carrying the sign that says gas, the Chicago seven and then on the reverse side of the sign, it says something in relation to like communist Jews.And he's referring to members of the new left who are on trial, not all of whom were Jewish but, but some big name players like Abby Hoffman where and then also their defense attorney was Jewish. So anyway, they're anti Semitic, they're anti black. They're just. Scary people, but they're affiliated with Wallace and then the N. Y. A. Later changes names again. And it becomes like a neo [01:19:00] Nazi organization. That's still around today. Well, it's cartoons and another another name that sponsors the organization. Okay, so that's that's Wallace. There are a sizable group of YAFers who are behind Reagan. Reagan, again, like Wallace, loses in the general and he won't become president for a long time.But, when Reagan does become president, a lot of his former, like, YAF students will have positions in his administration. And for Nixon, the Yaffers do not love Nixon but they have to come around when he's the GOP candidate because they're certainly not going to support the, the Democrats anti war candidate.So, yeah, they campaigned for Nixon. He wins the nomination or he wins the election, and then they expect that he will keep this war going and that we will win the war. And then when Nixon starts doing things, just a few months into his role as president, when he starts doing things like Making the draft more equitable.Yeah. Other things that they don't like, [01:20:00] suddenly they turn on him and they literally, I mean, there's one of my archival trips was to the Nixon administration. And as I'm looking through like his college files they're all these nasty letters from Yafers, like demanding that he changed course on Vietnam and that he, that he stops Vietnamization and that he.Makes, he escalates the war. And then after Kent State in May 1970 for, for viewers who aren't familiar with this story, there's an anti war protest and the National Guard is sent in. The, the guards members shoot just a volley of bullets into a crowd of students and onlookers, not all of them were students almost a dozen people are injured, four people die.And Yaffe. Has just a sort of come to Jesus moment about how do we respond to something like this? The Kent State Massacre, by the way, that protest was in response to the United States invading neutral Cambodia. So on one hand, yeah, it's like, yeah, this is exactly what we want an escalation of the war into other territories, right?They're [01:21:00] concerned about this domino effect of communism. So they're. They want to get into Southeast Asia and just like take over everywhere. So they're excited about that. But then there are national guards been executing college students on campus. And again, like we said, not, not all of these people who were killed that day or shot and injured that day were even students at Kent State.Some were just literally passers by. The bullets extended 700 feet and beyond. I mean, there's literally a volley up into the air and over. So, but some students said, you know what, they deserve this. They shouldn't have been at the protest. They shouldn't have been around. And so,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and again, that's, you see that same type of attitude today, with the, oh, it's okay to run over protesters and, or, we support we support Kyle that, I mean, you see all that stuff as well.Yeah, that's right. And, sometimes I think there's a temptation on the center to left to think that Donald Trump did this to the Republican Party [01:22:00] and your book, your book shows that that's really not true at all.And all these tendencies that people see, now it, fascistic tendencies religious discrimination, racial discrimination. I mean, you've got it all right there. And. And it was done by people who nowadays are seen as sort of, perceived as anti Trump, stayed reliable conservatives.And that's not the case at all.SHEPHERD: No, that's not the case. And I, and I also, I, I don't want to overstate. My intervention here, like, that that argument is not one that only I have made. I mean, there are other scholars, John S Huntington in his book, far right vanguard, argue something really similar. I'm extremely excited about David Walsh.He's, he's a postdoc at Yale right now, but he's working on a book on the, on the far right. And he'll, he'll argue the same thing that, and even if you, if you look into like studies of the John Birch Society Edward Ted Miller [01:23:00] has two really good books, Nut Country.SHEFFIELD: I've actually had him on my show. Yeah. He's great.SHEPHERD: Oh, perfect. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, I don't want to overstate my, my contribution to this. I mean, there's certainly other scholars that would say the same thing. I'm not breaking anything around here.SHEFFIELD: You did a good job. That's what I'm saying.SHEPHERD: Thank you. I, I appreciate that. But yeah, I mean, these, these tendencies have been there for a long time and you're right there, there is a, some nostalgia, especially from like Never Trumpers from the Charlie Sikes of the world or from the Bill Crystals to say something's been lost since 2016. It hasn't. It's been there all along. It's maybe it's bubbled to the surface and maybe it's more transparent. You can see it now, but Trump didn't bring this in, he just fanned the flames.SHEFFIELD: Well, I think that is a great summary there.So we've been speaking today with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. She is the author of a great new book that I encourage you to check out. It's called Resistance from the Right. [01:24:00] Thanks for being here, Lauren.SHEPHERD: Thank you, Matt. I appreciate it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's been a great conversation. So where can people who want to stay in touch with what you're up to follow you on social media?SHEPHERD: I'm still on Twitter. I know it's a sinking ship, but I'm there for now. So.SHEFFIELD: What's your username on there for people who want to follow you?SHEPHERD: Oh, yes. So if you want to follow me on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, you can find me @LLassabe. That's L L A S S A B E. I'm also on Bluesky, but I'm not super active there. I'm very active on Instagram and my handle across all these platforms is at LLassabe.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Awesome. All right.Well, I encourage everybody to check that out and definitely get your book if you want to know the true history of the right wing of the 1960s.SHEPHERD: Thank you. 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

SummaryDonald Trump has been the dominant figure in Republican politics for nearly 8 years now, and yet if you read the opinion columns in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Atlantic, the disgraced ex-president is on the verge of being shoved out of the Republican Party.None of this is true, however. Despite constant hype from anti-Trump supporters of Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor’s presidential campaign has completely failed to launch. No matter what Washington-based Republican consultants want to believe, their party is over. The MAGA side has control of the Republican party.Accepting that has proven difficult for a lot of people, and it’s why trying to figure out how to defeat far-right extremism in the Republican Party has not really yet begun.As part of our ongoing “Why I Left” series, I’m joined today by Rich Logis, he’s the founder of “Perfect Our Union” and also a former Republican activist.You can watch the video of this episode here.Automated Audio TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: As part of our ongoing, Why I Left series, I'm joined today by Rich Logis. He is the founder of Perfect Hour Union and also a former Republican activist.And we're going to be talking about all this and, why are so many people reluctant to accept the full truth about the Republican party, but before we do let's get into your own experience, Rich. Tell us about [00:03:00] your time as a Republican activist.RICH LOGIS: Well, first off, thank you, Matt. Really appreciate it to be here. Thank you for doing this show, Theory of Change. I'm confident that there are actually many more of us out there than we might realize. And my start in the MAGA world actually I have to go back all the way to the year 2000.I was living in New York. I was 23 years old and I was very much a Ralph Nader voter. And supported him. And the reason I actually supported him first and foremost, more than any other reason, was because I figured out pretty quickly on that the two parties both disliked him. And even though the Democrats were more opposed to him, it seemed that both parties saw him as a threat and disliked him.And so when I realized that it was very easy to support him. And I voted for him a few other times throughout the years. Now that was 23 years ago. Now, fast forward [00:04:00] all the way to 2015. And something I figured out pretty quickly about Trump, and I'm not going to say I was one of these guys who supported him as soon as he came down the elevator.That's not true, but I did support him pretty early on. And the primary reason I supported him is actually the same reason I supported Nader. It's because I figured out that both parties were against him. And so more and more, I just very quickly and easily started to come to A lot of the political campaign rhetoric that Trump was espousing namely, but not limited to this could be America's last free election Hillary Clinton and the democratic party were existential threats to our country.I very quickly bought into that and we'll get into, I think some of the reasons why that happens to many people and why it happened to [00:05:00] myself. But once I got very full into my support. Even when I would hear him make statements, even when I would hear him present policy ideas, as much as I sometimes may have wondered and raised an eyebrow wondering what it was that he was actually getting at or trying to say, it, it didn't ultimately matter because.I saw the 2016 election as the, the pinnacle and the realization that I thought the democratic party was after, which was to win power at the presidency and never ever lose again. So I, I call it, I call MAGA and what has happened with the Republican party politically what their product is, is a product of political trauma.Now I was in that world starting in 2015. I very much ardently supported Trump even [00:06:00] going, not only in 2016, but going into 2020, even though, even though I knew that his handling, even then of the pandemic I knew was very indifferent to the death and the illness that we were seeing all around us, but it didn't, it didn't ultimately again matter because I view 2020 just like I did 2016, another year.This could be the last free election. Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton, the Democrats with Biden, another existential threat, we had to do whatever was necessary to stop them. So I wound up staying in the Republican world until about the mid midway point of 2021. So that, that gives me about six years as an activist.Now, it's very common to hear people say, Oh, I was a Republican for 30 years. I was a Goldwater adherent. I was a, I was a Reagan conservative. I was in George H. W. Bush [00:07:00] conservative. That was not my life, actually. I was very anti the two party system. It's why I supported Nader. It's why I came to support Trump, even though he was running under a major party.And so once I left that world in the summer. 21 which i'll get into some of the specific reasons why Yes, I was only an activist for six years, but i'm going to tell you matt that those six years I was so active. I was around so many other MAGA voters and activists that it probably was really more of the equivalent of 10 to 15 years of activism given just how Devout I was to the, to the MAGA world and something that is very underestimated and I think we'll get into this as well is even though it is a, a world, a reality that is dramatic and paranoid and really just rife with hysteria, MAGA does [00:08:00] provide a community and I think people do inherently yearn for wanting to it.To be in civic communal environments. And MAGA did do that. I think you see that really at the, at the rallies in particular, there is, we might say it's cult like and make the jokes about Jonestown and Jim Jones. The flip side with the flip side with the MAGA world is that people do feel like they're in a community and they feel like they're around like minded people and very much it's, it's a, it's a MAGA safe space. It's where people feel like they can be themselves and they can, they can share in all of the existential enemies that they're all working together in tandem to defeat in this political, and for many of Then this holy war, spiritual war that we are engaged in.So if you, if you think about this, [00:09:00] Matt, if you step back for a moment and think about political trauma and paranoia and hysteria and the opposing party is not just wrong on policy. They're just not wrong on ideology. They are bona fide enemies of the country and of the Republican conservative way of life.If, if, if someone thinks that they will support anyone. Or anything. And that's a, that is a point, you mentioned the press at the outset. I was a former journalist many years ago. I was not someone who covered local or excuse me who covered national politics, but I was a local reporter. And so I don't think I've ever really lost the that that part of the journalist side of me, even though it was probably suspended for those six years that I was in the MAGA world.But to address that point, because it's one we've talked about a lot, I've I've published stories, which are at my site, perfect. Our union. us,Why the mainstream media is so delusional about "saving" the Republican partyLOGIS: I wrote a piece [00:10:00] for salon in which I said that the mainstream national media, the centrist center left press, New York times, Washington post, the Atlantic. They have this well intended but delusional yearning to save the Republican Party, that, that there's going to be some, there's going to be some political savior who's going to come in and save us from Trump and is going to restore the Republican Party back to this era of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, and Thank you.I, I have a sense of why they do it. I think that the press and part of it, to be fair about this point, part of it is that most, most of those in the national press have not lived a MAGA existence. I have. So when they're looking at Trump and what's happened in the Republican party, they are looking at it from more in an abstract point of view.They're really into intellectualizing. And they look at wanting [00:11:00] to save the Republican party because they feel like it's their journalistic duty to try to to, to ensure that we have a, a relatively healthy two party system and that, and that somehow we're going to, enough, enough Republicans are going to, are going to awaken from this MAGA slumber.And they're going to say enough. And I think that what the indictments have shown all of them. The New York, the federal to federal in Georgia. My view is that these only strengthen him and I and while I am a little bit low to prognosticate, I would be much, much more surprised if he is not the nominee than if he is for next year.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Me, yeah, me too. And in terms of these non Republicans that, are, believe the Republican party is going to sort of organically dethrone Trump I think, I think for a lot of people who have that viewpoint, it [00:12:00] seems like, because for them, the Republicans that they know, so, like Uh, having formerly been a DC based Republican political consultant.In my, I was not religious. I was yeah, I supported same sex marriage. I supported abortion rights. I was, I did not like the Christian right. So like, if you were a journalist covering politics, like people had no problem dealing with me and talking to me about things.And, I think for some of them, they really thought that people like how I used to be were in control of the Republican party, that that's who was the. the base of the party. And, and it's just not true in most of the places. Now it is, it is the case that there are, still even now a pretty large number of people who vote Republican kind of habitually or, they, they just are like, well, I, I like low taxes and low regulation.And I [00:13:00] don't. I don't believe in this Christian fundamentalist stuff. So I just ignore it and those people are not relevant to me. And so, that's how they rationalize things and they don't really pay attention to politics. The extent they might pay attention to anything political is listen to Joe Rogan.And that's it like for, they don't watch cable news. They don't watch Fox. All of that is just. nonsense in their opinion. And so they don't really have an idea over what's happening in the party and who's controlling it, I think. So like that's kind of the, in my view, how the, these non MAGA Republicans and the, non Republican journalists, that's, I think that's how they're, they're kind of seeing things to some degree.I don't know, tell me what you think.LOGIS: I, I think that also this point on the, with the, with the press in particular, that it does seem to me it's relatively obvious to me that from column to column and op ed to op ed that [00:14:00] most, I don't think many in the press realize that the vast, vast majority of American voters, to your point, are actually not political and because they're not political, They're not consuming all of the news that we do.They're not, they don't know all of the names that we do. They're not aware of a lot of the conspiracies that have permeated all across MAGA and are, whether it's overtly or silence is content that are accepted and supported. By the actual Republican party apparatus. It's to your point, they may, they may have voted.I was, they were a Ronald Reagan voter and then they were a Bush voter and they're not, they're not maybe extreme partisans, but their voting habits are to typically just vote are down the, down the ballot. And they're Democrats like that too. We know that there are there, those are generally the people come out.And I always voted in the primary when I was in the, in the [00:15:00] MAGA Republican world, because we felt an obligation to ensure that we got the best candidate to, to stop this, this whomever it was on the democratic side was, was a threat to us. It didn't matter. The other person's policy didn't matter about the person's character.Didn't matter about the Democrat. Kennedy integrity, whether they were an incumbent or not, it just was, they're part of the enemy party. We have to do whatever we have to do to stop them and we'll nominate the person we think is best to defeat them. And so we do, we do forget, and I'm not saying we, you and I necessarily, but collectively, it is easily forgotten that most people aren't political.Now, those types of Republicans you're mentioning, something that I've written about, and I will continue to, to argue this point is that throughout our history, And there are numerous examples, whether it's the American Revolution, whether it's the abolitionist movement, whether the Civil War itself, when Abe Lincoln sides with the Union against [00:16:00] other Americans at the, within the Confederacy, they were still Americans, but they were still, Abe Lincoln still sided against them to try to win this war and preserve the Union, whether it was the United States aligning with the Soviet Union in World War II, Republicans aligning with Lyndon B.Johnson. There's other examples. Like. I could cite but with all of those examples, what underlines all of them and what ties them together inextricably is that they were very, they were very much what we saw historically were unlikely, but necessary alliances, and those Republicans who, who, who, If they, if they're not really aware, it's not such an easy task to make them aware, but I don't think that they're motivated by policy.I don't think they're necessarily motivated by ideology, but if there's one topic that I do think the midterm show that even nonpolitical, [00:17:00] apolitical voters can get motivated over. It is democracy. It is democratic institutions and those republicans who may not be partisans, they, they have to be invited into the fold and welcomed to, to maybe side with those whom they might disagree with on policy to policy.But this moment in history, I think, demands that these unlikely but necessary alliances really be formed. And I would, that's the kind of topic that I would like to see in the columns and the op eds of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Atlantic and some other sites and publications that maybe are similar.And we don't really see a lot of that. I think if the press spent the next year plus talking about how history demands in this moment, these unlikely but necessary alliances to, to continue moving the country forward, to continue on building on the ideals of our founding, to continue the perfection of our [00:18:00] union, I think that topic can resonate with people.I think the midterm showed it. Typically the turnouts lower Democrats overall did very, very well in the midterms. It says to me that the topic of the perfection of the union, preserving democracy, strengthening democracy that can get through in the new and, and the major center centrist and center left press outlets can, can lead on that if they want to.But I just think there's still, they're still stuck in the mud a little bit. They're still stuck on neutral. They're, they're just, Oh, this is it. I could just, I just imagine, some of the editorial meetings saying, Oh, yeah. With this indictment in Georgia, this, this is, this is finally it.This is fine. This is the Charlie Brown Loosey moment. She's going to finally hold the football for him. He's going to kick it. And what they're going to discover, the press is going to discover is that that's not going to happen. That, that it's not, it's not going to happen the way they think.How Republicans use psychological trauma to bind voters to the partySHEFFIELD: Well, you had mentioned this idea of political trauma in, in your writing and also [00:19:00] in our discussions before today. Let's talk about that a little bit more here. So, a lot of, as you correctly noted, a lot of Trump supporters do have this idea of Democrats as, a threat to the entire existence of the United States.And some of that, and, and on this show, we've talked a lot about. The religious aspects of that for, for many people that that's, that's why they think this, but it isn't only about religion for, for some people who have this viewpoint tell us about how you saw that when you were, when you had that opinion and, and why did you have that belief?LOGIS: Yeah, and I think that the, I would refer to it as the Christian theocracy that is, that is part of the traumatic MAGA world. But to your point, it's not the only aspect of it. Something that does exist and I think is [00:20:00] actually promulgated and sold very, very well in right wing politics and in their media apparatus is,there is, there are, There are mythologies that exist on the right that, as part of a lengthier discussion, I would argue actually date. All the way back to the beginning of our country, and those mythologies are centered on race. They're centered on sex. They're centered on gender religion. If you look at right now, the mythologies of of MAGA in particular, and I should say Matt, when I say MAGA, I'm also thinking the Republican Party to me, they're interchangeable.And, and I, I think it's even more accurate to refer to them as, as MAGA, even more so than the Republican Party. If you look at the mythologies right now, they're, they're really based on this. It's about gays, sex, marriage, and Christian [00:21:00] theocracy and guns as these holy war weapons. And there's this, there's a lot of this racial animus and hysteria and paranoia.President Obama is, is part of that. I call him the grim reaper because to this day, I think Barack Obama is actually the most lucrative figure in the history of the Republican party. He has, he has fundraised and brought ratings and all of that combined much more so than, than Ronald Reagan ever did. So I think it's just a side note that president Obama is the most lucrative figure.I'm writing this book right now, I just started about Obama and Trump to juxtapose their leadership styles. I think that they are the most polar opposite success of president that we've ever seen in the history of America, but that's just a little bit of a, of a side note. So when I, when I was in, when I was in, in that, in that traumatic MAGA world, what, what is hammered over the head [00:22:00] of the adherence in the MAGA world is that a less white, less Christian and less heterosexual America. Is a nation in decline make america great again did not start with trump. It was actually Ronald reagan said it even president bill clinton said it at the time So when we think about make america great again the way that people internalize this the way that they construe What that make america great again?What that that ethos really meant I think that to some extent some people can can interpret it on a case by case basis and for some They were, they were probably the ones I was around. They were, they were motivated by second amendment mythologies, the idea that, that the, the framers constructed that amendment to, to me, to what it meant was unfettered, unregulated [00:23:00] access to firearms.And while I'm didn't quite get. That deep in the rabbit hole with them on that, I, I broadly speaking, did concur with, with that idea. There were other times where I would be in, I would, I would congregate, break bread with those in the MAGA world, and they would, they would talk about these other isms that have been mythologized on the right.Communism. Socialism. Marxism is one that I think is relatively recent, and my My joke with Marxism is always, that I always ask, what did what did, let me see if I remember these, what did Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, and Gumo ever do to the Republican Party to incur such ire against them as, as, as the Marx Brothers.So that's one that's real, that is relatively recent. There's another that it would be, it was actually a relatively common discussion to talk about in America's racial history, [00:24:00] the discussion of, well, Yes, there was slavery, and yes, blacks were not treated very well, but that was hundreds of years ago, and why can't we just move on and get over that?And And at the time, yeah, I would say, yeah, why don't we just get over it? Post racial america all of that. So that was always a part of it There was another part where we talked about there would be discussions about you mentioned same sex marriage it would be oh, yeah, gay americans.They you know, they've got their right to vote You know what? What more do they want? Why do they have to flaunt it? Why do they have to show it and broadly speaking for the most part I bought into the mythology that we shouldn't look at anything through race. We shouldn't look at anything through, through class.We wouldn't. We shouldn't look at anything through economics. Everything about the democratic party is you're a victim. You're a victim. You're a victim vote for me, support me. I'm going to come in and be your savior and then keep them as victims, create [00:25:00] this, this permanent underclass especially in minority communities.And those Democrats who, who are, who talk a lot about equality and they talk about fair share and all of the, really what they're doing is just. Porting all the riches for themselves, giving some crumbs to others and keeping everybody coming back to keep voting for them. If you think about what I just said, Matt, right there, I cannot imagine something more insulting to the intelligence of tens and tens and tens of millions of Americans.And that is a lot of what I thought it, what motivated me. And there is this inherent part of our nature of us versus them. It's just, it's in us, it's in our nature. That the challenge is trying to resist that. But something that that MAGA, the MAGA traumatic community also provides is it provides this, this really warped form of identity [00:26:00] politics.And that identity politics is that America was built by. By by Caucasians that we were, we were a better country in the 1950s and 60s when America reached her apogee of of perfection and greatness. And that that part of that identity politics, there was this unison that we are the actual patriots.There's more of us and we're going to conquer the democratic party. And we're going to We're going to do to them what they actually want to do to us. For those listening out there, they might sit back and think, is this, is this true? I mean, did people really think that? And the answer is yes. And they still do.Yeah. In fact, I would, I would argue that the, I would argue that the, the the sycophancy of these, of adhering to these mythologies has actually only intensified since the 2020 election. Because remember, as Trump says, it wasn't that he was defrauded. It's that you MAGA [00:27:00] voters, you were defrauded. Wasn't that he was, you were, it's not that I'm indicted, you're indicted.And that generally is the, and that, that's a tie that binds that, that, that keeps the, the abuse. I call the traumatized the abused. And unfortunately there is something again in our nature where the abuse tends to come back to the abuser. And I think that Trump voters, which again, I was one, I don't think that all of their reasons for voting for Trump were.were invalid. These feelings of howling out of communities, jobs going overseas, feeling left behind and unheard by politicians. I think those are actually very real concerns. I mean, those are concerns that even President Obama had concurred with in the lead up to 2016. Now, unfortunately, with Trump, though, it's not simply to highlight those problems.[00:28:00]Then present ideas, innovation to try to start to ameliorate some of those ills. What Trump did is he took those valid fears and exploited them. And I will continue to say that to a large degree, MAGA voters, even though I'm not defending ignorance, they have been victimized through this trauma of MAGA, and it keeps them coming back.For a variety of reasons, I think, and I think not the least of which is the reason I went through, which is that it's really, really hard to admit when one is when one was mistaken. Because again, that's not in our nature to do that. It's not in our nature to say I was wrong. And when I decided to to publish my mea culpa I was ambivalent about doing it not because I was ambivalent about the the conclusion I came to But when I was thinking about penning these mea culpas, I was thinking You know, is anyone going to really care about this, but I felt like I needed [00:29:00] some closure And I'll get into the reasons why I left MAGA, but I needed some closure, and I felt like the way to do that was to announce to the world that I was wrong.It shows that people can change their minds, and while it's not painless, it is really liberating, and it is possible. MmSHEFFIELD: hmm. Yeah.Despite his many lies, Donald Trump often tells the truth about how little Republican elites value their votersSHEFFIELD: And, one of the other things about the trauma of the, the Republican voter is constantly experiencing is that, so Trump told the truth about the Republican party in 2015 and 2016.And so, like when you, when I, when I go and read various right wing discussion boards and, and forums and Twitter accounts, there, there is an overwhelming sense that. They don't like the Republican party. They only like [00:30:00] Trump and like that really is the key to, I think, to his hold on these voters that a lot of these, professional political class doesn't get is that.They, Trump correctly pointed out to them and routinely points out to them that, the Republican party that sold itself as the representatives for rural America, for, blue collar white people, for Christians for, people who work with their hands the Republican party said, we are the party for you and then proceeded to.Systematically betray them on every single level, whether it was, outsourcing their jobs, whether it was deregulating the companies that they work for whether it was rolling back the taking away their health care, whether it was, even, even making it taking no action on abortion other than, like, in terms of [00:31:00] popular support, they're, they decided, well, we're just going to do this through the courts.We're not going to try to persuade people on abortion to agree with our viewpoint. And so, and then, and then. And they politicized their religion so much that it actually made their religious viewpoints less popular over time. And so literally everything that they told their electorate they were going to do for them.They did the opposite for them, and, they took all the money that, should have been spent on infrastructure in various states, and, didn't spend any of that, and said they went and, started gigantic foreign wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and sorry, and Iraq. And... So Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate in 2015 to actually admit that that had happened.Something that, in retrospect now, no one denies that this happened if you're a Republican. They admit that this happened. Like, a lot of [00:32:00] Republicans now, probably, I haven't seen any polling on it recently, but you know, if you ask, I would bet that a majority of Republicans now disapprove of George W.Bush, have a negative viewpoint of him. And so, like that's, that's the thing that these, DC political Republicans don't understand is that their voters hate them. They hate them. And so you can't, you can't win them back with more of the same telling them you're going to make things the way they were before Trump.No one wants that.LOGIS: I, I would, so I'm, I'm actually publishing an article probably this week at the new republic. And one of the points that I make in it is very much in alignment with what you just said. It was very common. I mean, not once in a while common to be at MAGA events, Trump clubs with those with whom again, I would break bread, congregate, go to their homes.We'd celebrate holidays [00:33:00] together. It was very, very common. To have discussions about how much we loathed the establishment Republican Party so much so that even with some, they, they disdained some of the so called rhinos, Republican in name only, they disdained rhinos for some of them, even more than they did the Democrats, the Democratic Party itself.And there, there's this, so I have this hypothesis that. Whenever there's an indictment or there's some, there's some legal problem that, that Trump has, and he's going to be in and out of court probably in next year in the campaign. I have this hypothesis that privately, I think the Republican party is ecstatic about that.I, I, I think that they look at it as, wow, we can actually have truly the best of two worlds here. The first is we could have Trump go away. Because they're still, party still has a little bit [00:34:00] of that delusion also, which I guess is somewhat ironic that they have that sense as the, as the center left centrist press does.So there's this first part of, oh, we could finally, finally be, be done with this guy, do away with him. But then there's that other side, that other side of the word, which is, but, He's still lucrative to us. We can still fundraise off of him. We can still say that Merrick Garland and Joe Biden are persecuting him and thus persecuting other Republicans and conservatives, weaponizing the law against them just because of what they think or what they say.So I think that the, the, the MAGA world, like the Republican party, I have spent so much time. In retrospect, since leaving the MAGA world in 2021, that when I look back on a lot of the, I had these discussions about, well, the Republican Party was a certain way at one time, or conservatism [00:35:00] was a certain way at one time, and I think that there is, there's a workshop test that happened when Trump started to bring you.Yeah. To the forefront of national politics, which is trickled all the way down to state trickled all the way down to local that there's this workshop test where people view him as this and Maga as a as an ethos where they look at him and Maga and say, This is what I've been waiting for my entire life.I mean, how many people, Matt, think about this, back in your circles. How many people do you know who said, depending on their age, they might have said, Wow, George W. Bush is exactly the guy represents exactly what I've been waiting my whole life for. Or people who said, Oh, John McCain, rest in peace, he's exactly what I've been waiting for.And then Mitt Romney said, Oh, he's, he's boy, Mitt Romney, he's, he's, he's the guy to do he, I've been waiting my whole life for another guy like that, like another Ronald [00:36:00] Reagan. And then all of a sudden here came a guy. And that, that, that gravitational pull for people. I think that a lot of people, Matt, they didn't, they didn't realize.And for some, they probably still don't, they don't, they didn't realize at the time that because of that. Years long experience and exposure that so many had to right wing politics, that they were low hanging fruit. They were, they were traumatized, whether they knew it or not. And, and they had the, they had the perfect outlet, which was MAGA.And what MAGA does for them is it Affirms, it validates what they believe, what they think about America, what they think about, about the world, about how rhinos and Democrats and globalists conspire to erode our freedoms and usurp our rights. [00:37:00] And try to buy, buy fiat or some surreptitious way, take away our constitutional rights.And in the MAGA world, you're, you're around people who think that. And, and so you don't just have, you don't just have the energy of, of one person who thinks that. You have the energy of millions of people. And for me personally...SHEFFIELD: Yeah, you're, you're part of something. That is much bigger than yourselfLOGIS: and I don't and again, I don't think your point I just don't think that the the the DC the DC press the national press the coastal press You had a term for it.I'm blanking on it. The what's the railway called up and down the up and down. Yeah, right. The Acela quarter, right? The Acela, the Acela conservative movement of, no, no, no, we're, we're, we're people who value integrity and we're people who value character, right? And evangelicals who, who, you know, they, they, they, [00:38:00] they they, they value, family support the rule of law.Yeah. All right, the rule of law, high, high morality. We support high morality. And then all of a sudden there's this very fair question to evangelicals, Christian theocrats. And I'm not saying that all evangelicals are, I don't like to make blanket statements, but the evangelicals, the Christian theocrats who do support Trump and MAGA, that we can, we can make an exception, a lot of exceptions that have been made over the last many, many years by millions of people.Well, we can make exceptions because. If, if this is God's will, if, if he, if he commands that this flawed conduit of righteousness is the man to save us from these demonic secular Democrats, then so be it. And. I think for many of them, they, they, they deep down in their heart of hearts. Those are sincerely held beliefs and I think you see, I think you see this [00:39:00] every single day in a lot of the way, whether it's a social media boards or the comments within, within that, within the right wing apparatus on those message boards, you see it really, it shows itself.It manifests itself very clearly.The moral relativism of Christian fundamentalismSHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. And it's interesting because. When you look at a lot of the rhetoric the more highfalutin rhetoric out of Trump Trumpist commentators, they have this idea, like Jenna Ellis, Donald Trump's recently indicted former lawyer.She, she believes that Republicans and, Trump supporters, they believe in moral absolutes. Like they, they constantly are saying that they're against moral relativism. And so for them, like they don't. They don't see it as inconsistent to support Trump because for them, they are thinking systematically, in other words, that, they believe that their viewpoints are the [00:40:00] absolute truth and they have no knowledge of the history of, of fundamentalism and how it actually was just kind of invented.In the 19th and early 20th centuries actually in response to science it's basically a science of the Bible. Like that's what Christian fundamentalism is. And it completely collapsed under its own weight because, basically once people realized that, you can put all these chronologies in the Bible and, go back and calculate the, the age of the earth according to the Bible, you can do that.But that's assuming that, the, the, that it's a literal document and you cannot prove that in any way whatsoever. And so, like, and then, but they, but they base it all on a moral philosophical standpoint called divine command theory, which basically says that, What God, that God alone is the determiner of moral morality and right conduct.But of course, since there is [00:41:00] no, giant billboard with coming down from heaven saying, this is what God thinks about X, Y, and Z. Anybody can claim that they have God's authority. And in fact, that is, what a lot of the, especially on the Protestant side of things that they believe that.And so. It is the height of moral relativism to have these viewpoints because they have no basis for determining what God says authentically and then they have no basis of authority. So really, it just comes down to, well, this is what I believe and what I believe is true because I believe it.LOGIS: I'm going to make a bit of a general statement here.And that statement is that, When we look at how the two parties, we were talking earlier about apolitical voters, primary voters. So my general statement is that if you look at the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, MAGA, the Republican Party is really essentially [00:42:00] solely a primary party. And I think the Democratic Party, not going to say that they don't have some aspect of that, but I do think that the Democratic Party is more of a general election minded party, the GOP is not, and what the really highly traumatic figures on the right, what they really understand well, is they, they understand what A lot of that trauma is that's experienced amongst their voters, the hysteria, the paranoia, the wake up in the middle of the night, sweating fears.And Christian theocracy is really a very important mythology for them because we know that probably most likely, right? We know that the United States is, is a, is a nation that. Has fewer [00:43:00] churchgoers. And, and there's a variety of reasons that people can debate as to, as to why that is, but as we, as we diversify over time, of course, there are people who are, are Christians who may be as part of our growing diversity, but there's also those who, who are not, whether they share in other religious beliefs whether it's another Abrahamic religion or some other religion, or maybe they're just more secular mind.And so. No one's actual First Amendment right to freedom of worship is being infringed. No one's rights are being infringed. Those who want to express their religious views however they want to are able to do that. But for the politicians and the pundits on the right who recognize that there's this, this constant, always growing, always expanding, Hysteria and paranoia on the amongst the MAGA voters [00:44:00] that we are, we are becoming and have been becoming over time a less Christian nation.And thus, to your point about morality and relativism, if we're becoming a less Christian nation, That means we're becoming a more secular nation, and as we become more of a secular nation, then we become more of a communist and socialist and Marxist nation. And again, Matt, I have to emphasize this point amongst the, amongst the primary voters who think that they genuinely believe that.But I'm going to say this, the politicians who espouse that b******t, they don't believe that stuff. They don't think that. I mean, I, part of the reason I left MAGA, if I, if I can mention this, because I, I, I want to give the reasons why. It was actually Rhonda Sanchez, who was the impetus for my eventual egress out of MAGA.Republican politicians' abrupt change on Covid made Rich question the partyLOGIS: So I've lived in Florida for many years, and [00:45:00] here, here when the, when the pandemic started in 2020, we, we, right, high, very highly populated senior citizen state. So I think that. Overall, I want to try to be fair on this point. I think overall, from when the pandemic started until about spring 2021, I thought that Governor DeSantis actually handled the pandemic relatively well.Based on what was known based on how data was changing. We know that that was all happening, but what he was more than anything that I was most pleased about if he was very, very staunchly pro vaccine, he was touting the vaccine. He was taught he helped develop a system here in the state. So senior citizens could be the first ones vaccinated.I was impressed. I was relieved. And I remember when and where it really started for me. Mhm. Is when, if you recall the, the Delta surge started in the summer of 2021. Now, at the time [00:46:00] I had two young kids, I wasn't overly concerned about them getting sick. But what I started to see, and especially in the local press, is I started to see that Delta with kids were, were, were becoming ill from COVID.And there were even, sadly, the occasional stories about children dying from COVID. And we didn't really see that in the alpha stage. We, we started to see it more with Delta. And I remember talking with Floridians here and, and even, even actually pro vaccine Trump voters, because I do think that I should mention that they're, they are out there and I knew some of them.And I remember conversing with them that and saying, when kids started getting sick, very explicitly, saying Governor DeSantis is going to divorce himself from the anti vaccine crowd. He has to. I'm not saying that seniors getting sick and dying was not tragic. It was, I think, though, that when kids start getting sick, and I'm not a scientist, I'm not an immunologist, I'm not an infectious disease [00:47:00] doctor.So I do not speak about topics I don't know about. But I think that once kids started getting sick, it showed that COVID had become more contagious, had become deadlier. And I just remember We're thinking this is the Santa. He's going to, he's going to sever ties. And actually the exact opposite happened.And seemingly overnight he went from an advocate for the vaccine to an anti vaccine Republican. And I, and I, I just, I think, I don't, I don't mean that in a literal sense, but in somewhat of a figurative sense and somewhat, I guess, of a literal sense also, he, he became anti vaccine overnight. And that was a shock.And a jolt because even as a MAGA person, I was not anti vaccine. I didn't think that COVID was some Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates bioweapon. As a side note, which I'll get to in a moment, I also didn't believe that the 2020 election was [00:48:00] stolen. So when I saw DeSantis do that, when I saw him become ardently in in opposition, the vaccine.It shocked me and jolted me to the point where pretty quickly I started to doubt my support for him because of that topic. And the reason is because I just think that there are certain topics, there are certain issues rather that when there's a line of demarcation, if that line of demarcation is crossed, I don't think there's any coming back from it.And I think with, with the vaccine and COVID, I think the line of demarcation that the Santa's crossed and subsequently so many other Republicans in the party that what, and of course many of their voters, the line of demarcation that was crossed was he went. From pro vaccine to someone who then said, even though he may not have literally said these words, but he said that it was that avoidable death and suffering were [00:49:00] acceptable when that line is crossed.You cannot come back from that. Yeah, you cannot realize.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And you realize that he was doing this deliberately that, because he saw a political advantage. Into becoming anti vaccine and it wasn't, and I don't want to put words in your mouth. So you tell me what you thought, but, it's like you realize that this was not sincere, like his motivations were purely.Calculating and not based on altruism, not based on leadership, just based on, well, this will get me more Republican support. So I'm going to do it.LOGIS: There started to be an uptick in, in notoriety with Trump getting booed at his rallies over the vaccine. Very clearly there [00:50:00] was information and knowledge that the Santas had that the, the MAGA, because you can't win a primary without MAGA.It's new. It's mathematically impossible. I mean, right now it's mathematically impossible. There's not enough time to go and get those apolitical Republicans to vote in primaries. So mathematically right in the here and now it is statistically impossible. I mean, 0 percent chance of winning a primary when you're talking about statewide or, or, or, or even in certain cases, certain even local state seats, local seats, it's not possible.So he very clearly saw that shift. And he just immediately adapted his rhetoric. I did not believe then that and I do not believe right now to this day that Rhonda Sanchez, that he believes that that the covid vaccine is what is what he says it is that there that there were these. [00:51:00] unmarked adverse effects, that it was some bio weapon biome.He calls it the bio medical state, that it was some form of tyranny to oppress us. And then he hires a a surgeon general for our state who in any reasonable context would be left out of a hospital, left out of a medical school classroom. Deep down, I know that Ron DeSantis doesn't believe what he says about the vaccine.I know that he doesn't believe What he says about how, how, how kindergartners and elementary school and all kids of all different ages are being indoctrinated to be, to being made gay and being made transgender. I mean, I know teachers, okay. They, they're so busy. Like they don't have any time to make kids gay.I mean, even if they wanted to, they're just, they don't have the time or the, neither the time nor the energy to do it. I know that deep down, he does not believe this. [00:52:00] And as I started to see that. Insincerity unfold. I mean, it's one thing for a politician to change his stance, flip flop and lie, because we almost expect that, right, of a lot of politicians.But again, I'm going to come back to this point, because it was the first prong, the two prong reason that I, that I left MAGA, because I always say with my MAGA egress, to paraphrase Hemingway, it happened gradually and then suddenly all at once. Once I started to realize with the Sanchez and then subsequently later on the Republican party, even Trump himself, because he, he kind of waivers right on the vaccine.Sometimes he's proud of it. Sometimes he doesn't want to talk about it. I saw that line of demarcation being that the Republican party said that it, that, that avoidable death and suffering. are acceptable. And I think there's other topics that I will add to that. For example, firearm related deaths.That's that's another area where where Maga and and and by extension, the [00:53:00] Republican Party, they've adopted a stance that avoidable death and suffering. It's okay. It's acceptable. It's acceptable to do that of all ages, not just Children of all ages. I don't believe you. I don't believe you can come back from that.And then the other two prong, the second prong of this, Matt, was that when January six happened, okay, for many, many months, I was in the, well, it wasn't good, but what's the big deal camp? That was some, some idiots who went and rioted. They were a bunch of idiots. They were dopes. They, most of the people there were peaceful.Why are we still talking about this? Okay. Why are we still mentioning all this? Just move on from it. And this was happening right around the time when DeSantis made his, made his flip on the vaccine, summer 21, the continued stolen election rhetoric of Trump. I started to more and more realize just how, and again, to use this adjective, how traumatic it really was [00:54:00] for the country, for MAGA voters.So I decided to do something which was to question and challenge my own understanding of what really led to January 6th. And so I decided to delve deep into some of those, some of the conspiracies that have since... permeated across MAGA, but are overtly and publicly endorsed by Trump himself, whether it's QAnon or Oath Keepers or Three Percenters or Proud Boys.Once I started to get into the rabbit hole of these organizations, these conspiracies, it started to make a lot more sense why January 6th happened. So I had. I had this road to Damascus moment where I had to make one of two choices. I either continue to support this, the support of acceptable [00:55:00] deaths, the support of acceptable suffering, the support of this trauma based on, on conspiracies and hysteria and paranoia that have resulted in loss of life, that have resulted in Widows that have resolved resulted in permanently injured police officers.I had to, I came to, I came to the line and I made, I had to make one or two choices, thankfully. And I give thanks for this, Matt, every day I give gratitude for this. I didn't cross over that line because I often think to myself, I often think about this, what if Trump had won in 2020? I don't. Really want to think about.I have thought about and I don't have a pretty picture of how I would have continued to think about all of these traumatic [00:56:00] mythologies. I think it's extremely unlikely that I would have had this political and personal epiphany had trump won in 2020. I think I would have simply Carried on with as bad as everything that Trump might've said, or the Republican Party does, or how much I can't stand the establishment Republicans and the RINOs, I, I dislike them almost as much as the Democratic Party.However, having said all that, if I, if Trump wins and I'm still in that world, which I think almost certainly I remain in that world, I'm still unified against the never ending existential threat. And I think a lot of people, Matt, I can't say this for certain, but I have a, I've got a pretty strong inkling about this that I think some people came to their own line.Some decided not to cross it, but unfortunately and sadly, some did. And democratically, that's the first step [00:57:00] to. And I'm going to use this, put in kind of quotes, defeating MAGA, because I don't, I don't really think that ideologies can be defeated in the way we think about simple wins, simple losses. But democratically is the first way to do it.I'll come back to the point about unlikely, but necessary alliances. I believe that MAGA is going to be democratically defeated next year. I think that the Republican Party knows that their party is terminally ill. I believe that the Republican Party is expecting, they are preparing, they're, they're building the bunker, so to speak, going to the mattresses to quote the Godfather, that they are expecting massive, even perhaps historic electoral losses up and down the ballot next year.If that happens, which I believe that it will, it's, it's what my wish is, because even though I am not registered with any political party, I am registered to vote. I, I cannot, I, I, I must support Democrat [00:58:00] candidates next year, whatever my reservations or qualms about some of what I think about the Democratic party and some of their candidates and some of their activism, I don't really see a choice, I mean, theoretically we have a choice, but I don't really see a choice and I will support Democrats up and down the ballot.And once the Republican Party, I believe is in its current form, once it is mercy killed, now there's another challenge. And that challenge is a really uncomfortable one. And that uncomfortable challenge is those who decided to form those unlikely but necessary alliances are going to have to be the ones who lead the national reconciliation.With the MAGA voters who, who will, I, I, I do think some are going to come to the conclusion that they have to leave behind that world. Maybe that sounds naively optimistic. I don't mean for it to sound utopian. I don't mean for it to sound Pollyannish in [00:59:00] any kind of way, but I, I really do think that it's going to happen.And I'm not making an exact comparison between the Confederacy and MAGA. But. After the Civil War in postbellum America, it was, it was the goal of Abe Lincoln, who was assassinated three days after the surrendered Appomattox, and sadly, it's one of history's saddest urges that Lincoln did not get to see some of the fruits of his labor reconciled, and, but two presidents later, we had U.S. C. 's S. Grant, and even right after the war ended, and then as president, U. S. Grant led the reconciliation reconciliation. amongst the Northern Union residents and former soldiers and the Confederate soldiers. And that was really hard for Lincoln. I mean, I can only imagine how difficult it was, how difficult it was for Lincoln, for, for Grant.And I'm telling you, Matt, I think we are in that moment right now. I, for as much as people will talk about, make these comparisons about the Civil War and right now, I actually think the better comparison [01:00:00] Is what happened after the Civil War and what I believe will and has to happen after democratically MAGA is defeated next year, and I know a lot of Maybe Democrats or Trump loathing Republicans who hear that.That's probably, they're probably not going to really like how that sounds. Right. They're going to say, screw them. They, they made the bed when I'm lying in it. It's not our responsibility to reconcile with them. I understand those points. And I'm not saying that there aren't some similarities between right now and antebellum America in the lead up.to the Civil War. But there is going to be a necessary reconciliation because you're talking about tens and tens of millions of Americans. And our democracy, we, we cannot keep moving forward in the perfection of this union with tens upon tens upon tens of millions of Americans who are living in a balance of reality.We can have disagreements about policy. We can have disagreements about approach. We can, we can argue data and studies [01:01:00] and America is a big place. We have a lot of room for beliefs and opinions and facts and data, but we have to come to a place in the country where there are more of us who agree on basic sets of facts, and that's going to be really, really hard.But I, I, I, and I, I think that the idea of saving is again, well intended, but I think it's one of the more Sisyphean delusional endeavors of mankind, the idea that we can save someone or save something. But having said that, I think that MAGA voters need to be saved from themselves because what that, that, what that world, what that, what that world has done to them, both pre MAGA and during it.What that world has done to, they, they have harmed themselves. They have, they have, they have, they have harmed their, their communities. And I'm trying to say this without casting aspersions [01:02:00] or judgment, but they've, they've harmed their own lives. And as a result of that, the country has been harmed. And as someone who was a former MAGA voter, I am imploring those out there who are going to hear this.And I guarantee Matt, they're going to know someone, probably close to them. And they're going to say, I can't get through to my, to my mother. I can't get through to my dad. I can't get through to my wife. I can't get through to my, my, my son. I don't invite my daughter anymore to, to Thanksgiving. That is trauma, and it's not going to be easy, can be healed.Democratically is the first step. After that, now we're going to need leaders on the side of reconciliation. And that's going to be, again, that's going to be a really arduous task, but anything that is worth it in the long run typically is arduous, right? It, it, it's, it's going to be, and we, and [01:03:00] we are gonna need to have innovative ways of figuring out how to rebuild and, and mend again, these civic and communal ties.We're going to need to, we're going to need to do that. And just one other point, man, I think this is very important to note this. When I write these, whenever written, these mea culpas, I, I, I, I'd be remiss if, if I, if I omit that there is some trauma on the Democrat side because it's, it's not that uncommon.It doesn't happen a lot, but it isn't. That rare where I'll receive a comment from someone who identifies as either a democrat or some anti trump voter And they will say to me rich, I You know, I just go away you you voted twice for this guy Actually, I voted four times for trump because it was twice in the primary also, I voted two hampton's primary in general election.I did not vote for him in last year's election I'll have democrats or those traumatized from trump. Tell me just stop talking. Shut up Go away. You're, you're a, [01:04:00] you're a Nazi in sheep's clothing. I had a, someone say that to me and, and these are people who right now I'm, I'm aligned with them broadly speaking on, on the, on the importance of strengthening our democracy and our democratic lowercase d institutions.So it exists not there too. It's not absent on the side of the world. Left where, where, where there is this trauma, and I think some of those individuals as well, I want to be invitational to them to invite them back into, in, in, into, into more of that mending that civic tie because I think there's gonna be some reconciliation needed with those who, no matter how many times I, I'm remorseful and say I was wrong, some of the anti-Trump voters are, are, are gonna say to me, I don't care.What you did was unforgivable. We have to somehow move on from that too. It's going to be hard, but we need to figure out ways to do it. Yeah,Why Democrats are trying to divide MAGA from RepublicansSHEFFIELD: And it is interesting when you look at [01:05:00] some of the political strategizing from Joe Biden during the 2020 election. That he did, make it a point to differentiate between what he called the ultra mega.Republicans and, just kind of the habitual ones. And that is, it is, it is an important thing to, to note. And but another thing that's going to have to be part of this reconciliation is that, people who live outside of the right wing media ecosystem.And it's, it's got to be pierced in many different ways because, if, and I, and I, I agree that, it seems likely that Trump is not going to prevail in 2024, but you never know. I mean, Biden could have some physical ailment or who knows what. And, but let's say that happens, the, the right wing media media [01:06:00] ecosystem is going to go into overdrive after that moment to try to blame, to, to cast aspersions on the rest of America, because I mean, it's important to note here that basically, these far right media outlets like Fox news or daily wire or gateway pundit or any of these other ones.Yeah. , their goal is to get their audience to hate America. That is what their goal is.They want you, if you believe the things that they say are true, they are telling you not only is Satan controlling the Democrats, But America is a fallen nation. It is a nation that is communist. It is a nation that is godless. It's a nation that is, dominated by insert whatever group you are terrified of the most here.And, people who are outside of that, they can, it's I, I do think that it's [01:07:00] probably the biggest difficulty that they face in trying to oppose this mega extremism is to understand, it's totalizing, this is something that, they, it is brainwashing. That is what is going on here.And if you're a leader. Or you have access to funding or whatever, like you need to reallocate what you're doing because, throwing some TV ads out there about how Trump is bad or whatever, like all of that's over once the election's gone, all that money you spent. Is flushed down the toilet nothing lasts from that and, you haven't really accomplished the goal if, if that's what your objective is, is to defeat this extremism.It has to be a lasting project.LOGIS: Well, just as Matt, just as I think that MAGA voters. Either don't realize or do realize and don't care just as MAGA voters don't realize or [01:08:00] don't care that the politicians they listen to do not believe what they're saying. I mean, whether you want to talk about, I mean, maybe Trump believes that he really.Lost the election. I, I vacillate a little bit on that. Sometimes I think he does, sometimes I think he doesn't, but everything else that he talks about, whether it's, transgender ideology, or we're gonna, what was the one idea he had? We're gonna, we're gonna build cities, like this, like, this brave new world, Huxleyan idea, like, he doesn't believe any of this stuff.He's a, he's a, He's a pro abortion rights, pro abortion access guy, but,SHEFFIELD: but, supported same sex marriage.LOGIS: Absolutely. He's, he's, he's on saying, he said, Oh yeah, I'd let a transgender person participate in my, in my pageants. But if you don't know, or you don't care, you're not realizing that, that, that these politicians are, if you're MAGA, you don't realize, or don't care that they're lying to you.[01:09:00] They mock you in private. They are insulting your intelligence. They are, They are exploiting you, both your, your spirit and your soul and your money and your wallet. And I, I think the other side of this too, and I'm glad you brought this up with Fox because my hot take on this is I think that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch are the two most traumatizing figures in the history of American media.Some might argue, Rush Limbaugh, some might argue and Andrew Breitbart they're certainly. Their legacies are certainly traumatic, but I think Ailes and Murdoch are the, are the, are the ones who stand atop that very traumatic mountain and look at the Fox pundits. I mean, look at these, Sean Hannity does not believe what he said.Laura Ingram does not believe what she says. Jesse Waters, they do not believe. And people watching that, you, you, you wonder. [01:10:00] One of the reasons that they are watching this, even if some of them think, well, I don't, yeah, that's probably not true, or, well, that might be an exaggeration, or, but again, it's the feeling of validation.It's the feeling of, we're a, we're a, we're a browning and darkening nation. We're a diversifying nation. White Americans are projected to be a minority. in the year 2040 based on what we know about population and census demographics. And so that stuff is, is just, it's like the Ludovico technique from A Clockwork Orange, right?Where the eyelids are sewn open and the character is Labarge, right? I think was his name. He's just, he's being indoctrinated and propagandized with the film in front of him and his eyes are open. He can't close them. So he's seeing that. That is what. happens and what is done and continues to be done on the right wing media apparatus side.[01:11:00] And when I was, when I was in MAGA, especially near the end of it, I was a Fox viewer pretty much every night, watch Tucker Carlson and think, wow, that's. That's awful. Or that never thinking, wow, that really happened. We're listening to a Laura Ingraham and think, and then all of a sudden coming out of that world turned Fox right off.And once it turned off, I'm telling you that it started to clear some of the fog of my own mental state. The brain fog that I had, it started to go away. And so we can't, we cannot overlook that. I, I won't, I don't want to overlook the fact that a lot of this media that's on the right wing side, these are people who don't believe this.They simply, they, they, they have the proverbial finger on the pulse. They, they know what is lucrative. They know what will drive. The audience and keep the audience because it's important. Retention is very, very important in media because of of of the of [01:12:00] the fleeting attention span that we is our homo sapiens species just has right.So getting the getting them to tune in is one getting to read is one. But then there's the other about retaining them. And I think that the center center left press there, they're coming. They're trying to approach us more as actual journalists. Thank you. And I don't want their news stories to be biased.Okay. I want them to be as unbiased as possible. And I'm not saying that the center left and centrist pressed are the only savior there. It's not that they're going to save the day. I don't think that it's fair to put all of that, the onus on them entirely. But if we start now piecing together some of these topics we've been talking about, like Defeating MAGA democratically, unlikely, but necessary alliances a media, an adult media, I call adult media, national media, national media apparatus, who is, is not just engaging in group group think, [01:13:00] but their columnists and their op eds are, are very much clear and explicit that.We are in a state right now where we do not have a healthy two party system and whatever my, whatever my dislike of the two party system, because I think dislike of the two party system is probably a commonly, it's probably an issue that actually binds a political and very political people right in this kind of way.So whatever we've always been a two party system that we're always going to be, but we are not a healthy two party system right now. I don't say vote Democrat because I want one party rule, but the only way that we're going to develop a healthier two party system is we must mercy kill this current iteration of the Republican party.And then after that happens, then the more serious considerate Republicans, whether we're talking a Mitt Romney type, or we're talking about someone like a Brian Fitzpatrick, who's in Pennsylvania. [01:14:00] He's a, he's a congressman, maybe a guy like a Spencer Cox in Utah, the governor. I saw him speak recently.Again, don't agree with his, a lot of us don't agree with some of his policy approaches, but he's, he's an adult, right? He's sensible. Okay. I can sit down at a table and talk with a person like this, those more responsible Republicans. They're going to have a big decision to make also. Because they're going to need to figure out where do we go once this MAGA Republican party has splintered?Because I think that's what happens after next year, Matt. I think you have a further splintering of the GOP. You have the MAGA side. You have the, more of the Mitt Romney McCain side. And then you have what I'm going to call, quote unquote, more liberal Republicans. And these are going to be Republicans whose policies are very much a purple shade of red.So if you think about what I just said right there, that you're, you still got all these factions who are, who are still going to have to compete for the attention span of primary [01:15:00] voters. You're going to still see that. Yeah.How multi-party voting can help disaffected people from getting seduced by reactionismSHEFFIELD: Well, and, and some of what's got to happen is that people need to be going, pushing for rank choice voting to make.third parties easier to win because, cause the reality is that there are a lot of people who may not like, some Trumpist Republican who ends up with a nomination. But they don't feel like there, that there is an alternative. And so, but you know, when you look at where ranked choice voting has been.put into place, it actually has helped to defuse some of this right wing extremism. So like in Alaska, for instance, where they put in ranked choice voting for the general election and, and for their primaries that, Sarah Palin was the, was the leading Republican candidate up there, but she ended up not winning the, the general election because a lot of the supporters of the other Republican.[01:16:00]They just couldn't stomach somebody like her. And they didn't have to, like, that's the beauty of ranked choice voting is that you can say, I don't like the Democrats but you also don't have to like who the Republicans put in front of you either. And that's the beauty of that. And, and it's, and it's really going to be something that's a really important goal.And then the other thing is that, is getting people to accept that, you don't. Let's say, let's say you don't want to vote for the Democrats. Just don't vote for Trump or, the people that he puts forward. Like that is a thing that people are also moving to. Like when you look at, especially like in Georgia, for instance in 2020, Donald Trump got, and he got, at least I think 70, 000 fewer votes.than the other down ballot Republicans did. And, and we saw the same thing in Arizona where Carrie Lake, when she was running for the governor's seat there, [01:17:00] she got, at least a hundred thousand fewer votes than the other Republicans did. And some of whom actually ended up winning their race.And that's, that is something that, that people should really be thinking about as well. And, you may not be able to bring yourself to go and vote for a Democrat. And, no party's entitled to your vote. No one's entitled to get your vote, I don't think. But, at least do yourself and the country a favor and don't.Go out and support people who want to destroy the country and have a dictatorshipLOGIS: That that's part of the logic why I've remained a. We call it in Florida, an NPA, no party affiliated voter. And I feel exactly the same way. And going all the way back to the outset of our conversation today, Ralph Nader, running as the green party.And there was this feeling, we, and of course being in New York at the time, I realized even back then, well, [01:18:00] Al Gore was going to win the votes anyway. So it was a risk free vote for me, but there also was this feeling with, with the rate with the excuse me, the Nader. Campaign where, we were really sticking it to, to, to al Gore in particular.We were, we were sticking it to 'em and, and, and we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna show them no. No one is owed our vote. You have to earn it. You have to work for it. And that's why I've decided to keep this NPA status. And one contradiction I want to underscore is that you've heard this talking point recently that The place to really quote unquote, indict Donald Trump is not in the courtroom.It's at the ballot box. And I, I'd like to underscore the, the the contradictory hypocrisy of that statement because the Republican party prides itself on saying that we're a Republican, not a democracy, which actually isn't true. We're actually both. And that's a whole other conversation [01:19:00] about how the framers quite ingeniously devised a.Complex majority rule, democratic, lowercase d republic. So when they, when I hear the GOP or MAGA or otherwise talk about we're a republic, not a democracy, I find it, I find it contradictory. And they note that it is that that same party who says we're a republic, not a democracy, wants a democratic resolution to, to, to Trump.And so, again, I don't, I think it just comes back to as part of my. As part of my remorse, as part of the feeling of the mistake that I made, where I want to try to get through to MAGA voters is, is to say to them that, number one, I don't think, I think that most MAGA voters deep down are good people. I was at an event recently and met many MAGA voters whom I did not know, met them for the first time.[01:20:00]And honest to God, Matt, I mean, the people I met, if I, if I were on the side of the These are people who would have pulled over in the rain, helped me change a flat tire, and wanting to take in money to do it. There is a goodness in them. There, there, there, there is a decency. And While it's going to be really difficult, we are gonna and and the right wing apparatus, we have to go up against, we're gonna have to go up against those conglomerates.We're gonna need to go up that go against that force field, but with this good and decency that that are in them as human beings, we have to find ways of appealing to the better and braver angels of our nature, because I know that deep down that so many of them are good people. And when I've had discussions with them, I haven't tried to change their mind.I think that's another futile endeavor, the idea of changing minds. But what I've, what I've said to them eye to eye, just like we're talking now, as I said, I don't want to, I don't want to [01:21:00] try to persuade you to change your mind, but I want, I want to ask you this question for you to think about. Is it possible that some of your, just like I thought, is it possible that some of your sincerely held beliefs, your opinions are mistaken, that they are incomplete?That maybe they lack nuance. Maybe they're too black and white. And let me tell you what I discovered. Even though it was a small sampling size, granted, wasn't hundreds, it was not even dozens. It was a handful. Let me tell you what I discovered when I asked that question of MAGA loaders at an event I attended recently.There was a little bit of silence and they said, it's possible. Yeah, it's possible. So right there, the door creaked open just a bit because it's, it's, it's not. It's not go even for me. It didn't happen [01:22:00] overnight. Yes, I joke it was it happened gradually and then suddenly all at once. It's going to take time because once the door once the doors open, that's where we appeal to them as fellow human beings as fellow Americans.They are never ever to your point that you made earlier. They are never ever going to get that from most of the politicians they listen to whom they vote for to the pundits they listen to. For the most part, Matt, these are you. These are rhetorical performers and whatever, whatever my, whatever my strong, I've had strong feelings about this.How disinformation gives permission for extremismLOGIS: I hope that that's come through here, but whatever my feelings about some differences of opinion policy, I might have with the Democratic Party. I see their party mostly comprised of people who I think see government as a way of improving people's lives. It doesn't mean that it always, it always [01:23:00] get it right.It doesn't mean that we're not going to disagree with how they, how they may have came, came to an outcome. But the, but the way that MAGA looks at government is they want government to be retaliatory. That's what this entire Disney episode was about here in Florida with the Santas. And the reason that they want this retaliatory government, the reason that they are, they are, they are willing to abdicate.Some of their own freedoms into some light version of authoritarianism is because some light version of a dictatorial type government is because that's what they see the Democrats as. So they're, they're willing to, to vote for this, for this, for the MAGA side. Even if it, even if it means being mocked, having their intelligence insulted, having rights taken away, [01:24:00] especially ones that have existed for decades, like the right to abortion access.They see the Democrats as that authoritarian dictatorial party. And so because they see the Democrats that way, they're willing to accept it on their side because they see, they see right wing retaliatory government as superior and preferable to a left wing one. And All throughout this conversation today, I think what runs consistent through it all is that there was a, there is a lot of trauma in the country and, Trump was able to capture the lightning in a bottle, so to speak, he figured out pretty quickly what These MAGA or MAGA in the making voters want it to be, it's like you said earlier about the feeling of, of, of losing their country.Our, our, our culture is being eroded. Our values are being eroded. And it comes right back to the slogan, make America great again. [01:25:00] Restore America to this constitutional mythological place where Children prayed in public schools and we kept our doors unlocked at night. Down the street from where the kids prayed and where you kept your doors unlocked were black Americans who crossed over the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery to ask, to ask not for preferential treatment and rights, but equal treatment and rights.So we tend to forget the fire hosing of blacks or the stones and the pellets thrown at a Ruby Bridges or George Wallace standing in front of the school or. fill in the blank of, of, of, of gender discrimination and discrimination based on sexual orientation. So America was great for many people in that mythological epoch of the 50s and the 60s.Sure it was for many, [01:26:00] but it wasn't for everyone. And that perfection of the union I think President Obama, speak so eloquently about this history doesn't move in a straight line. It zigs and it dags. It's uneven. We make progress. Then we take a step back. We make progress. We take a step back. If you look at the founding of America and the constitution itself, bill of rights, yes, it's a complicated document because our founding was complicated.Our framers were complicated, but if you actually look at the constitution, the bill of rights, it's very much a. a progressive, meaning progress, they are compromised progress documents. They are documents that, that establish that the country over time is going to be best when there is more equal protection and equal right to quality under the law.The constitution of framing and the framers documents do, there is, there's, there's a, there might be a Conservatism side too, but I would argue it's really more of a [01:27:00] conservation than conservative because I have a, I have, what shall we say? I love, hate with conservatism. Even when I was in the MAGA world, I actually had a little bit of a love, hate with conservatism because I think that conservatism writ large, it's not that all of the tenants of it are, are bad.It's not that some of them aren't aspirational, but the biggest problem with conservatism over the years is that. The messengers of conservatism are Ideologically, they're malleable. They're, they're whatever that they need to be. So if conservatism is about your one is principled, no matter what one support speech, even when we don't like it, we uphold the rule of law, even if we don't like who's indicted or convicted.If someone is a, says he or she is a conservative and stays true and consistent to that, fine, that's a message you're all listening to. But let's be honest about this. Let's be candid. If you look at the most prominent conservatives over the years, they do not, they do not follow [01:28:00] this supposed principled position that they, that they claim that they adhere to.Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Well, and, and I mean, ultimately, those disempowered conservatives who, are actual believers in the rule of law. They have to accept and understand that MAGA is not conservative. It is reaction, reactionism. It is, a hatred for, because the, the point of conservatism is supposed to be sort of a way of tempering the changes demanded by.Liberalism or, social democracy. It's supposed to say, Hey, I'm not against change. I just want to make sure we do it right. And we do it in a safe way. That's what conservatism is supposed to be. Conservatism isn't supposed to say. I want to go back to the way things were. And that's something that Dwight Eisenhower really tried to get the Republican party to [01:29:00] understand in the 1950s.And, and ultimately, a Republican, for the Republican party to be. Become, again, a part of the American political experiment in a successful and, and healthy manner, they have to, to go back to that Eisenhower perspective and understand that the biggest threat to conservatism is reactionism, that they are coming for you first, and so you need to come for them.LOGIS: Well, I think that's why social issues have always been so effectively traumatic for the right way. Because they are reflective of changes that we see, we see more men marrying men, more women marrying women, we see more diversity around our lives, our communities, businesses, we frequent, frequent, excuse me, our workplaces those are, those are, [01:30:00] those are, those are visuals.And so when people start to feel like, well, this is not the, this is not the America I grew up in. And now, of course, that that way of thinking has trickled down into the right wing youth movements, right, with Turning Point, where we see that, where there's, there's young, young men and women, late teens in their 20s, who are, are basically growing up and probably the best time ever to be young, right, but they're being told.Well, let me tell you how America used to be, let me tell you what it was like in the 60s. Let me tell you what it was like in the 50s. Boy, if we get, we get back to that, that's, that's the America I know, the Chevrolet, apple pie and baseball America, right? That's the, that's the, that's how we're, and, and so young people, right, are, are, are hearing this and thinking, yeah, I want to go back to this America, but.They're not really asked, but you never really lived in that America. So, how, how do you know, how do you know about [01:31:00] what it really was? And you mentioned earlier a point about, the less densely populated areas of MAGA, maybe, and I think this is another blind spot with the, with the press, the centrist center left national press is that there's, there is this, I think there is this underlying.Maybe even almost, it's maybe a bit taboo, but there's this underlying sentiment of a lot of MAGA voters being uneducated and uncouth. I'm going to tell you something, Matt, the MAGA voters, a lot of MAGA voters I was around were anything but. They were affluent in some cases, successful. They were professionals who worked in highly regulated industries.They were credentialed. They were educated. And they did not fit that stereotype, if you will, about who the quote unquote typical MAGA voter is. And so if the press is not even really [01:32:00] understanding the population of, of the, of the movement that they're talking about, like who actually is comprised demographically, it's going to be very hard.If you don't even really recognize that, it's going to be really hard to kind of burrow in and, and ask why, why, why is this persist. Why does it have this appeal? Because I mentioned again the point about just like it's just like the confederacy. The confederacy was not, it was defeated. But the ideology, the lost cause of it remains to this day.Now what's happened over time And I, I give credit to activists on this and educators what's happened over time is that there have been there have been increasingly fewer and fewer adherence to the confederacy. And I think that over time. That's a worthy goal. That's an aspirational goal that over time, as we democratically defeat them as we work toward reconciliation as we put that work in that necessary work of strengthening democracy and [01:33:00] democratic institutions.I do believe, and again, maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part, but I don't think it is, I do think we'll start to see fewer and fewer adherence to MAGA over time. We have to have a sense of urgency, but we have to be patient about it. But, if MAGA is not democratically defeated, and while I generally don't like guilt by association, I don't see how we avoid it with Republican candidates and MAGA this election cycle. I'm not, I'm not really sure we can, at this point and moment in time in our history, I'm not sure we can really separate it. Not all the Confederate soldiers supported slavery. Some of them joined up to make money or help their family and they just got into a war because it was a, it was a, it was a, a financial endeavor for them.But having said that, Lincoln and U. S. Grant didn't. Differentiate between those who were like that and those who [01:34:00] wanted slavery, not only in place, but wanted to expand it. I see that as the moment right now and Unfortunately, Matt, not to contradict myself on this, but the flip side of this conversely is that what I'm saying to you right then and there about, having to defeat MAGA and, and guilt by association.This is, this is potentially fatal for democracy. This is not, this is not, this is a sign of a dysfunctional democracy. And, and I do, I do think. That America's democracy is stronger than weaker, but we also have to acknowledge, and I think this can come from that on those unlikely alliances. We have to acknowledge that there are always forces who are seeking to weaken it because the Republican party writ large as a party apparatus does, does not believe in as much accessibility.to the franchise as they could. They are, they are, they are a party who sees democracy as [01:35:00] adverse. They see democracy as that, as the mechanism by which to bring in that change. And the more people, Matt, the more people who say, okay, these changes are good for the country. They don't harm me. They don't harm my livelihood.The more people start to think about that, the more the grip of the Republican party weakens. But having said that, It is still a very, very strong grip. It is still a strong grip.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, well, so, I think yeah, it's been a, it's been a great discussion here, Rich. Let's put up your Twitter info on the screen here.Yeah, thank you. So you are at... Perfect our union on Twitter. And then your website address is remind me of that one again.LOGIS: Yeah. So website you can contact me there. My writings are there as well. They're all open, no paywall to perfect our union. us and I'll just make a quick public service announcement here, Matt, if I may, anyone who's listening, who's watching this, [01:36:00] if, if they feel like they, if, if they're, if they're in a situation where they want to try to get through to a MAGA voter.They are, they are welcome to contact me at any time. And however, whatever public service I can give here to complete strangers or those I know, I'm happy to do it. So anyone out there listening and watching I don't want you to hesitate to contact me. If you feel like my story here can, can help in how you're trying to get through and maybe reconcile in your own household or your own family or your own community with some MAGA voters.We remember that they are, most of them are good people deep down, but they've been led astray and they've been failed and exploited. And we can change that. I do really believe that we can reverse that. So anyone out there, you are welcome to contact me at any time. You can communicate with me on my site, perfectourunion.us.SHEFFIELD: Okay, all right. Well, I [01:37:00] think that'll do it for us today then. It's been a great discussion. Thanks for being here.LOGIS: My pleasure, Matt. Thank you. Anytime.SHEFFIELD: So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for watching or listening or reading. Please do encourage your friends and family to know about the show as well.Just go ahead and direct them to theoryofchange. show. Thank you very much for your support and I will see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryAs American conservatism is rotting out from the inside, it is slowly being replaced by both reactionism and fascism. It is a horrifying story to see, but there are also a lot of interesting things to notice as conservatism is decaying. One of those things that fascism is just as much an aesthetic as it is an ideology.While it's become much more radical and obsessed with imaginary stories of national doom, the American far right has also become dramatically more interested in fitness and on looking good as they define it, with an additional focus by many on ancient Greek and Roman people who are known for their statues and philosophy.That such a rapid interest in fitness would coincide with the political career of the obese ex-president Donald Trump is more than a little bit ironic. Nonetheless, some journalists and media outlets appear to be overstating the degree to which fitness may be associated with fascism.This episode's guest is Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. She is the author of a new book called Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession and a previous one called Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture.The video version of this episode is available on YouTube.Audio Chapters02:26 — Today's classroom battles began in the 1960s08:11 — How Donald Trump supercharged the macho reactionary tradition12:37 — Fitness culture is cross-political and fascists are discovering their own athletic history18:22 — Wellness culture is far older than you think22:00 — Folk medicine, religious fundamentalism, and skepticism of doctors25:58 — Homoeroticism and the fascistic aesthetic31:38 — Media sensationalism about fascist gym people38:44 — Right-wing activists using fitness and health advice to radicalize teen boysAutomated TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Natalia.NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: Thanks for having me. Glad to take this conversation from Twitter to the screen. So glad to be here.SHEFFIELD: That's right. Yes. Cool. All right. Well, so, you have written two books. Fit Nation is your second book. Your first one is very relevant to the present moment as well. So let's maybe talk about the first one and before we get into today's subject as well.PETRZELA: Sure. So my first book was Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture. And it's one of these things, I guess, that I should be very grateful for where it came out in 2015. And honestly, my choice of topic, which was connecting curricular battles over race and sex at the time, people [00:03:00] were like, wait, why are you connecting these things? And now, as we see these battles over CRT and so-called gender ideology flaring up everywhere, now I'm like doing media for that book again. So I'm sorry that the political culture has taken that turn, but I was glad to have done a decade of historical research to help understand its origins.SHEFFIELD: And for people who may not have heard the term gender ideology, what does that mean?PETRZELA: Yeah, so that's a term and I say it sort of with air quotes that the right uses right now to talk about what they consider to be the kind of imposition of an ideological perspective on gender and what they define that as is this notion that gender is socially constructed, that the binary of maleness and femaleness is not real, that children can choose different gender identities, and then a close kind of addendum to that is that parents don't have a right to know [00:04:00] about to know or to dictate their children's gender.And I think a big part of it is also the notion that gender is disconnected from sex, from biological sex. So they, they say that that constitutes gender ideology and that is being imposed on children at schools often without the knowledge or against the will of their parents. And that is a very powerful talking point right now.SHEFFIELD: It is. Yeah. Yeah. And especially in regard to transgender people as well that, that you see a lot of people particularly predominantly, but not exclusively on the, on the Christian right who have, they have really, really believe that this is a religion an alternative religion that is trying to establish itself.And they speak of it as such.PETRZELA: Yeah. And that actually, the real historical origins there, like my book, I'm a historian and I was talking about the sixties and the seventies and a little bit, the 1980s. Similar moment to today, but obviously different issues. Nobody was talking about [00:05:00] transgender rights back then, but they were talking about this kind of new liberal or progressive approach talking about sexuality with kids as itself a religion.And they called it secular humanism. And what you heard all the time was that the secular humanists have this new religion and it's softening kids up for communist takeover basically. And they're using sex to do that. And so, I guess jumping right into the somewhat salacious content here, but something that you would hear all the time was that sex education is kind of priming kids to let go of any kind of sense that this is inappropriate, or this is immoral or this is private. It has kids kind of talking about and indulging in their desires, and this will allow children to basically be so caught up in like a frenzy of sexual ecstasy or distraction that they are ripe for being taken over by communists because, there are loyalties have kind of been taken away from their family and from, [00:06:00] from God and country and family, really.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and they kind of, and, and that conspiracy theory kind of, I mean, it, it circulated somewhat widely on the political right, certainly within the John Birch Society, especially and that was one of the focuses of your book. Book as well. Because the John Bridge Society was founded out here in California, where I live, Southern California.And really had, a huge amount of success out here. And in a lot of different ways, I mean, it's, I, the, and when we were talking a little bit before the show about how. The, the, the historiography of, of the American right tended to be mostly focusing on kind of these New York Manhattan nights, like William F.Buckley, right? And the reality was that Buckley and his friends. just figureheads. They were people that were marching ahead of the parade and pretending to lead it.PETRZELA: Right. And they also, I mean, a book like Buckley's God and Man at Yale, right? [00:07:00] That is a very particular kind of conservative intellectual tradition, like the John Birch society.And some of these folks that I'm talking about who are organizing in churches and coffee clutches, they're circulating like these. pamphlets. Is the schoolhouse the place to teach raw sex? This is not emanating from a kind of, I don't know, elite intellectual culture at all. It's really a kind of much more grassroots effort.And it's one, yeah, that the historical tradition, the historical profession had largely ignored. So as we were saying before, 2002. And in response, in some part to this 1994, I think, essay that Alan Brinkley had written in the American Historical Review where he said we need to pay attention to his two conservatives.There was just this raft of new literature that was looking at grassroots conservatism. I kind of came into college, by the way, I grew up in a very liberal place. So to me, like conservatism was this, like, have I ever met one kind of thing? I'm not proud of my parochialism, but there really [00:08:00] was a lot of intellectual interest, including my own in understanding this phenomenon better.And there wasn't really much work at all done on schools. And so that's kind of how I got interested in this as a dissertation topic at that time.How Donald Trump supercharged the macho reactionary traditionSHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and you, and your current book I think also you, you took the that you, you got ahead of the crowd as well, once again. So congratulations on that FITNATION and now, especially I think with Donald Trump, the, the rise of Donald Trump, it, it kind of reoriented the American right away from this sort of anti-government, we're going to limit the government, that we're going to obsess over economics and, and things like that. And, and Trump with his just flagrantly anti-intellectual and, Mussolini-esque mien, it, it made them, a lot of their people decide that well, maybe, maybe We were wrong to focus on that. And our voters don't really like that.PETRZELA: Right. And there's more of this embodied kind of like red blooded version of, of [00:09:00] conservatism. That's what you're talking about. Right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so like for Trump, like he doesn't have a coherent ideology really, he's doesn't have a consistent viewpoint of taxes, he's promised five or six different versions of healthcare, including saying that Canada's and the UK's healthcare systems are great. And the, and the national health service, socialist healthcare in the UK is great according to Trump, but then Obamacare is bad.PETRZELA: Yeah. No, I think that that's right. And so that, as you're saying, created this reorientation.And so, the reason that I came on here and that you and I were talking on Twitter is because there has been this kind of raft of, I think, deserved attention to this phenomenon that there's all this kind of like fitness culture activity, which is coded very right wing, right? This kind of building muscularity and brawn and cultivating pure bodies and kind of elevating an ideology of [00:10:00] unsparing individualism through the gym. And I do agree with you that the Trump, the Trumpian rupture has something to do to with the rise of that kind of conservatism at the same time. It is so funny that Donald Trump would have. anything to do with the resurgence of any kind of fitness, anything, because one of the things that was remarkable about him is that unlike any of his modern predecessors on the right or on the left, he hates exercise.Like you have George Bush, you have Clinton, you have Obama, you have all of these presidents across the aisle who, are constantly saying oh, look at me jogging, or I like to lift weights, or Reagan is posing on a Nautilus machine at the gym. It's uncontroversial because everybody in America thinks exercise is good for you and believes in some way that someone who exercises is disciplined and has their head on straight.Trump breaks with all of that, and he embraces a much older kind of Version of what like a [00:11:00] powerful leader should look like he actually espouses this kind of 19th century idea about energy bodily energy where he's like, you're only born with basically like a battery and like, why would you use any of that energy exercising every day?He'd say like, I have friends who do try out bonds. They're crazy. Like I would never waste my energy that way because he believed it was a finite amount and he and so he, he really derides all of that. He talks about, he's. Donnie two scoops or whatever with his double ice cream cones, his big red stakes, much more that image of the kind of fat cat as the power broker rather than the, jacked very capable kind of fit guy that you're seeing being promoted right now on shows like Rogan or otherwise.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah. No, it is. There, there is a tremendous irony. And, and I mean, that's, it's, I mean, that's the thing about Trump and his movement is that everything is a hypocrisy and irony simultaneously, like here you have a guy who's [00:12:00] talking about toughness and being strong and yet Constantly whining about everything.He cannot shut up about how people are unfair and mean to him and complaining aboutPETRZELA: them. I know. And it's funny though, that right now, he's in this pissing match with Chris Christie and what's his big insult for Christie, Chris Christie, like you're so fat, they like trade these things back and forth.Whereas that's never really been a problem in terms of what Donald Trump thinks is inappropriate. Figure for our leader to cut.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and certainly he's no statuesque figure himself. So, yeah, it's true.Fitness culture is cross-political, and fascists are discovering their own athletic historySHEFFIELD: So it's interesting though, that this kind of obsession with fitness, it isn't coming necessarily from the base, not coming from Trump himself, but it's, it's kind of the, this refashioning that's happened in the right-wing intelligentsia, such as it is, and that's really who's doing this. And I guess probably the biggest proponent of all this is [00:13:00] this guy who's been writing under the name Bronze Age pervert. And people who knew who. For quite a while. His name is Costin Al Maru, and I'm sure I'm saying that wrong.But he's I guess a Jewish Hungarian he got his PhD somewhere. I forget where it was. M.I.T.PETRZELA: M.I.T. And went to my high school.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.PETRZELA: I had no idea. How crazy is that?Yeah. Sorry if I--SHEFFIELD: You didn't know him though.PETRZELA: If I was outing that, that you were going to save that, but yeah, I was shocked.I read, I read that Atlantic article just because it's interesting. And I was really surprised to learn that I didn't know him. I think he's younger than I am, but not that much. We were there at the same time.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and what's interesting though, about this, this vibe that, I mean, he's really kind of just sort of a recycling of the aesthetic that people like Richard Spencer and some of these, alt right people, as they called themselves, were pushing earlier that this I mean, this idea that they're somehow the inheritors [00:14:00] and must be the defenders of the white race. And therefore they not only have to know the culture from which they came and take credit for, but they also have to defend it.And part of that includes apparently being physically fit.PETRZELA: I mean that tradition goes back a long way. Like I think that the current version of it that you see in some of these alt right, well, they're not really called all right anymore, but some of these like far right, exercise environments is much more kind of Marshall than the people in the early 20th century.One of the things I discovered in my research, like long before this was like on CNN, every era in the Atlantic. was that early enthusiasts of strength training and of exercise often presented it very much as this way to preserve the white race. Less we have to be strong to go to war. But what's interesting about what they were saying is they this was a time when nobody went to the gym.So they were kind of freak shows for spending this time [00:15:00] lifting weights and, kind of caring what they looked like and really suspicious. Like you must. And then gyms were horrible places. I mean, they wouldn't even count as gyms.SHEFFIELD: Filled with disease.PETRZELA: Yeah, like that. And they were considered to be places that gay men hung out.So also like really unsavory. And so these early enthusiasts, lucky for this historian here, had to like, really articulate well, why would you do this? Why would you lift weights? Like, why is this good? And so often what they talked about was strengthening the white race. Think that this is a time.When there's enormous immigration to the United States from Southern Eastern Europe and our kind of racial typology of that time saw those as inferior races, right? Semites and so forth. And enslavement had ended just a couple of decades before us. You also had all these free blacks.And you had the expansion of the white-collar economy. So all of the so called like best men are sitting all day at work in these clerk offices. And you should see the panic about this. They're talking about, Oh, the slope [00:16:00] shoulders and the paunch and the sallow faces. And so there emerged these boosters who are like, this is a real problem for the perpetuation of the race.And they talk about it just like that. And so you've got to go and get strong so that you can have more babies. And one of the things that was really remarkable as a historian, and I'm not the only one to write about it, but I couldn't believe how explicit it was in some sources was that you saw these guys and some women talking about.Women need to cast off their corsets, which were popular among white, relatively affluent women. They need to pick up weights. They need to get strong. I'm reading this and I'm like, wow, how progressive and how feminist and all this. And then they say it's because we need fertile women. And these women of the so-called darker races are popping out babies at higher rates.And if you want to preserve the white race, women have got to strengthen themselves to do so. And the way to do that is by weight training, et cetera. And that's really remarkable. And they talk also a lot about the distinction [00:17:00] between deliberate strength training versus manual labor, because that was like a real, as I was saying, a real assumption that they come up with came up against you're just essentially meatheads, not the word that they use.the time. No, no, no, no. I'm not a mere breaker of stones, like just having brute force. I deliberately train for a kind of civilized superior body. So that's in like the early 1900s. And I think we see a version of that today in some of these communities that you're talking about. Although I agree, it's less the fertility angle and more the kind of we've got to prepare for a potential, a potential race war.And also, I think we've got to preserve and embody a kind of traditional kind of masculinity when all these gender roles are in flux. I think that's a big part of it too.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. And I mean, in, in the case of the current people, some of that is also kind of, inflected through Germanic fascism, which kind of [00:18:00] imported a lot of yoga traditions and physical fitness and which it was also hypocritical as well because Mussolini was obese and yet was constantly walking around with his shirt off.So, but, like, there's that consistency or inconsistency. The inconsistency is the only consistency.PETRZELA: That's a good, a good role for writing history. Yeah.Wellness culture is far older than you thinkSHEFFIELD: Well, so at the same time, like there, there was also a focus, there's another kind of aspect of all this, that you know, what people now kind of call wellness or focus on nutrition or what they think is nutrition.And in terms of like herbal supplements and whatnot, I mean, that's, that's a tradition that's been around in the United States for, since the very beginning. Why don't you talk about that aspect of things as well? Yeah.PETRZELA: So that's a big kind of through line in my book. And what I'm trying to explain is how fitness, how exercise went from this strange subculture.To being a social [00:19:00] imperative where the majority of Americans do not work out, but pretty much everyone agrees exercise is good for you and kind of feels bad. They don't exercise enough. Like I'm generalizing, but that's true. How did that happen? And the argument that I make is that fitness exercise went from being considered narrowly physical and therefore kind of suspicious to being subsumed in a larger wellness ideology where working on your body was seen as imperative to being a kind of full person.So by the time it really kind of starts like after World War II, where I argue that we start to worry we start to define health. As less the absence of disease and more a kind of overall thriving that is psychological, spiritual emotional and involves working on your body and your mind and people across the political spectrum really glom on to that, like this idea of this holistic interconnectedness, and also the idea that it's up to you to take control of your health.And that's very powerful among [00:20:00] certain activist groups on the left who are like, yeah, self-determination. I'm not waiting for some doctor in a white coat to tell me I don't understand my body. Like I can do this, but it's also very, very compelling on the right when you have, where you have people who are espousing kind of this.Traditional conservative ideology, personal responsibility, and picking yourself up by your bootstraps--SHEFFIELD: Rugged individualism.PETRZELA: Yeah, rugged individualism. And don't wait, don't be lazy and wait for some pill or wait for universal health care. You just need to get outside and go for a run. So, come on.And so that's really, really powerful kind of across the board. So I would say that wellness ideology becomes so powerful because it has that kind of reverberation and traction across the political spectrum. But wait, so you asked me like, how did we get, Oh yeah. And part of that in terms of like junk science and sort of like you said, nutrition with a kind of smirk because a lot of this advice is not so great.Within that ideology, also across the political spectrum, is a [00:21:00] deep kind of skepticism of institutions, of received expertise, of the government, and so you see people coming out of places like John Birch, talking about, like, there's, we got to get the fluoride out of the water, and like, the government's trying to, they, they, I don't know if John Birch was against polio vaccines, but there were some who were there's that kind of, like, anti vax sentiment, but then you also have like feminists who, honestly, I totally understand, are like, you can't trust big pharma.These are the people who greenlit drugs that gave us cervical cancer, right? And so you have this embrace of like natural solutions and all of these anti counterculture solutions, which have a varying degree of effectiveness and scientific kind of veracity.But I think that's been brewing for decades but really, I mean, we saw in the pandemic that, that really blow up, but I would say yeah, that, that stuff has had appeal across the political spectrum for a long time. [00:22:00]Folk medicine, religious fundamentalism, and skepticism of doctorsSHEFFIELD: Yeah, it has. And one of the interesting things for me that I personally had had some contact with is that, I was born and raised as a very strict Mormon and Mormonism, it literally spiritualized 19th century health viewpoints through what they call the word of wisdom.Which was basically a distillation of conventional beliefs among educated people in those days. One of which was that drinking hot liquid was bad for your body and you shouldn't do it. And so therefore the only thing you should drink, like it was like the, it was like temperance up past several inches.So they were not, you weren't just going to not drink wine or spirits, but also you were not going to drink. Tea or even anything hot chocolate, even in the, in the original interpretation of that. And, and then there were, I mean, I think to some degree people know about the, the origin of graham crackers and as a, as a way to, to stop people [00:23:00] from, from masturbating.So like there's this, this connection between religious viewpoints and, and health viewpoints. It's always been there. And both in this country and, and, much older than this one as well.PETRZELA: Right. Well, if you think about it, it makes an intuitive kind of sense, right? What you put in your body is very intimate and very powerful.And so it comes to kind of take on the belief system that you're living in. And I think, it's not this kind of this is more about kind ofAnd I ask, I get asked questions of like, how do you like sort this stuff out and figure it out? And it is really, really hard because like I was saying with the idea of the feminist health advocates questioning big pharma. There are good reasons to question big pharma, like the big food industry really is trying to poison you, right?On the other hand is the answer to, or I shouldn't say trying to poison you, but they are trying to get you addicted to foods that do not serve your best health. I feel very [00:24:00] comfortable saying that, right? I completely understand why there are some people who take that and go like screaming in the other direction.We've got to plant our own food, etc. Like it actually kind of makes sense. And I don't, I haven't figured out exactly how to navigate that or at least give useful advice beyond like, check your sources, look at various look at various news sources, like talk to actual people, not people on the internet.But I think one of the really unfortunate things of the past several years has been the weaponization of this notion of do your research, right? Do your own research that QAnon has totally taken over and it's been used as a way only to undermine any, any information really. rather than I think to create new information.And I think that's really hard as a historian, what I always used to say to my students, and I still do, but now I have all these kind of caveats. It's like, let's go to the primary sources. Let's read, let's not take their word for it. Now I'm like, do I sound like QAnon, and so I think it really is [00:25:00] hard to figure that out.And I think though that acknowledging that difficulty though. is kind of helpful because you understand that there are people like Bronze Age Pervert who I don't have a lot of empathy for, but I think there are a lot of people, especially like during COVID who were really trying to figure out how to just like live a good life and not get sick and protect their families.And a lot of this information is really primed to like. Get right in there in that uncertainty, with like very apparently certain answers.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And one thing I tell people is that it's fine to be skeptical of institutions, but you need to be skeptical of the skeptics also, because ultimately, they're trying to sell you something.even more often than, a government, a government office is not trying to sell you something. Right, right. They get their paycheck regardless of what you do or don't do.PETRZELA: Yeah, that's a good point.Homoeroticism and the fascistic aestheticSHEFFIELD: So, but so I guess [00:26:00] one of the other things that's kind of interesting with this kind of right wing focus on fitness is that there's in some regards there, there is a there's always been an undercurrent of, homoeroticism in fascism.And, you certainly have seen that with Bronze Age pervert, but also who, many people have accused of being gay. But people have said that Richard Spencer is gay and a number of these and some of these, white nationalist activists are gay. Like there, there's a guy named Greg Johnson who is a publisher of books and he's, a, a gay atheist man.And so like in, in some regards, it's, it's almost like this is, It's the only way that some gay right-wing men feel like they can express themselves in a permissible way in this subculture. I don't know. It's weird.PETRZELA: That is interesting. So, I am not a gay right-wing man. So like I am, I can't say I completely understand the mindset, but I [00:27:00] do think it's important to realize something that is often forgotten in these current depictions of like Big muscular men who train all the time is like the alpha male.I think one thing that's really important to realize is that for so long, like well into Arnold Schwarzenegger as celebrity, as a bodybuilder in the 1970s and onward to be a man who was that built and spent that much time on his body automatically made you suspicious for being gay. Like automatically, like when Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing promotion around pumping iron in the like mid, I can't remember if it's 76 or 77.He says to a journalist and pardon my French, he says, I, I'm paraphrasing, but this is the slur he used. He goes, guys, people have got to know that just because a guy wants his body to look nice doesn't mean he's a fag. And he goes on to basically say like how that's his goal to dispel this.And that really was the dominant idea. If you care that much, what you look like, if you spend your time. building your muscles, hanging out with other sweaty men, looking at those [00:28:00] magazines, spray tanning yourself. That's girl stuff, right? Men are supposed to be interested in the mind. And I think that we forget that now because one, there's really been a mainstreaming of kind of a stent attention to aesthetics among straight men in the past, like 30 years.No question about that. So it's considered less inherently sort of suspicious or just positive of homosexuality. But that's existed, I think, for a really, really long time and, again, I don't know so much about these subcultures, but there is a lot of homophobia, of course. And so I think that the fact that this kind of bodybuilding is so much about building masculine strength at a moment when so called gender ideology is like saying, well, what is a man anyway?And toxic masculinity is bad. traditionally gay male space actually becomes a lot more acceptable, right? Like, because what we're getting strong and we're getting jacked and like that kind of eliminates some of what we're considered the like more suspicious or [00:29:00] subversive aspects or, or associations with it, but it's complicated.SHEFFIELD: It is. Yeah. And it's, it's almost, like the. See like, the, the guy who was married to Arianna Huffington Michael Huffington, he was a, a, a gay Republican. He didn't, for a long time he refused to be called gay because he said that he was, he was masculine and so therefore he could not be gay.And, and it's like, like, this is a, this is kind of an undercurrent of. Far right, homosexuality throughout history is that they've always wanted to not believe that you could, that there was another way of being, having that as your orientation.PETRZELA: Yeah. Well, you should talk to my friend and colleague, Neil J.Young was this great book coming out on gay Republicans next year. So he's the man to talk about this for sure. And he's actually a gay man too. But yeah, I think that that's right. And I think that is associated with the fact that, of course in the United States for a long time to have an out gay identity was [00:30:00] very much connected with the identity politics of the left, right?So that was less acceptable if you identify as a conservative, but something that's really interesting that's come through in Neil's work and also in a great book by Clay Howard about the Bay Area and kind of the politics of privacy is, there are. Quite a few gay male Republicans who are all about small government getting the hell out of our bedroom.Right. And especially as those men have gained more economic power, that small government sensibility like works great for taxes too, and so it's not, I think it's like a, not that you're saying this, but it's a simplistic view when people are like, okay, Republican, how is that possible? And I understand where that comes from, but the notion. The gay masculinity is immediately coded as left wing, I think is really, really misguided. And I should also say like, there were theorists in the nineties who were writing about body fascism among gay men in the gym. And they weren't talking necessarily about political fascism, but they were talking about this [00:31:00] kind of like unsparing unforgiving hierarchy of kind of the bodily aesthetic of gay men.And that, that, and, and like, that was, we talked about that. Talk about that a lot with women, but the gay man had like just as much, if not more of a hierarchy in that regard. That also has a lot of things to do with the HIV AIDS epidemic and the fact that gyms were real community centers for men, but also beyond that displaying a really fit muscular body in that period meant you weren't sick.Right. So that kind of aesthetic was like re-layered on regardless of politics, but as a matter of almost displaying survival.Media sensationalism about fascist gym peopleSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so lately there have seemed to be, it's almost like every other month or so, articles coming out in publications saying working out is fascist now, and you need to realize that.I think it is a disturbingly common article and I, [00:32:00] it's odd that it keeps getting written. I mean, what, what's your take on that?PETRZELA: Oh my God. Well, I don't know if you know this, but you know, I was a victim of like a major clickbait drama around exactly this issue where I had Donnie Trump Jr. like screaming about me saying, do you know this or not? Oh, I don't know that. No. Oh, I was like, are you soft peddling this story? Cause you think I might run screaming. Oh my gosh.So let me tell you because I think it's relevant. So I write this book fit nation. It's slated to be published very early January coincide with the gym rush.I got this really good journalist at, at a time magazine who was interviewing me about the book. She interviewed me about the book. One of the questions is like, what's a surprise when you had, when you were researching this, the surprise was the story that I told you about how strident some of these early 20th century strength enthusiasts were about women lifting weights in order to make more white babies.So that was like something I mentioned in there. The interview was very long. I talked about many, many other things. The headline that they give it was the white supremacist origins [00:33:00] of exercise in America and like six other facts or something. It comes out December 8th, sorry, December 28th. So it's like right in the middle of Christmas and New Year's.I was actually in Egypt. I see like, I didn't even see the article first, but I see my alerts like pinging and it's all of the like far right, like the blaze daily wire, like all of those kinds of sites. And the, what's the idea? The idea is, Oh, everything's racist. Now woke professor says you can't even go to the gym anymore without it being racist, which was so not the point.And in the interview I had said. I kept, I first thought, you go girl, women lifting weights. And then I kept reading and it's important to keep reading. But this thing took on a life of its own. Hannity was calling me, my brother's watching Fox and friends in some waiting room. He's like, they're talking about you on Fox and friends.God felt like it was nonstop, including Donnie Jr. So some of it, I was getting death threats. The president of my university was getting contacted. The Daily [00:34:00] Mail wrote full articles, New York Post, it was crazy. Donnie Jr. gets wind of it, and thank God he didn't mention me by name, but it was easy to find.And he's screaming about this, like, woke professor, everything's racist now, they want you to be obese typical feminist, lazy feminist. So yeah, so that happened. This is relevant to your question, I think, because I do think that some of what is driving this like exercise is white supremacy. And you need to know this is just like this click bait media culture that we're in.I mean, that headline was so stupid and I hope you're listening time magazine and I tried to get them to change it. It was so stupid, so disconnected from the nuance that I tried to impart with this book and so clearly meant to drive outrage. And I think the clicks of honestly, some not so reflective people on the left who like love that stuff too.And yeah, so I think that that's part of it. On the other hand, I do think that, in a very positive and helpful way, we are looking much more thoughtfully at. [00:35:00] The way is that like really noxious ideologies show up in apparently innocuous aspects of our everyday lives. The gym is one of them. I mean, I'm glad that this conversation is happening.One of the main things that got me interested in writing this book like a decade ago was basically the concept that I had in my mind of like, Guys, it's not just the gym, like this place you go every day and spend a lot of money and sweat and everything is not just about physical exercise. There's a philosophical, emotional, ideological component to that.And I didn't really know it at the time, but part of that community building, which was happening there. Was for some folks absolutely about resurrecting this kind of early modern version of masculinity and strength to resist what they see as the kind of decline of civilization, the weakening of masculinity and the increasing, I think, impurity of the body.And we're seeing that [00:36:00] resurging. And I think. Interest in it both comes from a really good place of wanting to understand our world better and a totally awful clickbait-y place that is, I, I'm sorry to be caught up in, unfortunately.SHEFFIELD: And people need to realize that just because you're learning about, certain aspects of history of a thing, it doesn't mean anything necessarily about how it is now or how it was in some other time period. These are just at the, everything is like a. These are just like threads that you're pulling and it's okay to pull a thread.PETRZELA: Yeah. And like, this is interesting stuff, but like one of the things I often ask my students is like, especially because white supremacy has now become such a kind of buzz phrase is when they're like, well, that's white supremacy culture. I'm like, okay, how, you know what I mean? And I'm like, it's often not wrong, but like, it's not enough to just like dismiss it out of hand, or like to.Yeah, to call something white supremacy culture just out of hand and not go beyond that. And I think that that's unfortunately what the tone of some of these articles [00:37:00] are at the same time giving, attention to something really important.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, and by that logic, Going to college is wrong because colleges, were owned slaves and they were started as Christian supremacist indoctrination propaganda centers.So therefore you shouldn't go to college, right? If that's what you believe.PETRZELA: Right, right. But these are like ridiculous perspectives, right? Like these aren't perspectives. These are such sort of purist, ideologically driven perspectives that nobody really lives by. These are the kind of things people say on Twitter and then they go to class or go to the gym or whatever.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, and I think, a healthy aspect of things for the left versus the right is that, people on the left might pop off and say something like that, but it doesn't really have any heft behind it, the people at the top aren't saying, you know what, that's a good idea there.Yeah. On the right, they'll go and make a book out of that or a Fox News rant about that.PETRZELA: Yeah. I [00:38:00] will say that one of the things that keeps me on the left is that there are these studies that show that like left wing media, et cetera, tends to just like have more evidence behind it. Like there's a higher evidentiary standard and like that to me means a lot.So yeah, I think that that, I think that's absolutely right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, okay. So. Now, do you see this physicality based right wing viewpoint as, I mean, is it really going to go anywhere? I don't, I don't know that it's going to.PETRZELA: Look, I'm a little scared. I mean, I hope that this is just this extreme perspective and set of people that's going to kind of, that we're maybe paying outsized attention to and that it's maybe not going to go anywhere and these guys are just going to like, start running marathons or lift weights for fun or something.Right-wing activists using fitness and health advice to radicalize teen boysPETRZELA: That being said, like, I think we're remiss to ignore it too much. Look, I'm the mom of a 13 year old boy. It's really hard to grow up as a boy right now. One of the things that I think is so disturbing when you start paying attention to this kind of manosphere [00:39:00] and what's being directed at young guys is that there is this real mixture of like misogyny.And like just really awful racism, et cetera. It's often bound up with semi sound advice about the gym. Like Andrew Tate is someone people write about a lot. And like, I try not to listen or watch too much and thank God my son doesn't watch. Or if he does, he doesn't seem to care for him at all. But like one of the things that's so noxious about this guy, who's literally serving time for trafficking and is like a known pimp who has raped women and like promotes this horrific misogynistic perspective.He says things that are like. Get off your butts and go work out. Come on. Like you're going to feel so much better if you put down your phone and you hit the gym, you know what, that's actually good advice, but what's really hard to disaggregate is the way that that gets tied up with this totally noxious stuff.And I think like, this is not the whole answer. But I do think I'm sometimes a little more critical [00:40:00] or, or, yeah, I guess a little more critical of the left because that's kind of like where I live. It's the educational environments that I'm in. I do think, it's important for people on the left, especially educators, to kind of reckon a little bit more honestly or fully with like, What it means to be a young man and what it means to like, want to be strong.And what it means to, inhabit a kind of like cis hetero identity is something more than just toxic. And like, if you can, like, if someone with a really wonderful, enlightened perspective around gender equality and these educators. Absolutely exist are like, yeah, guys, like you should go lift weights.Like that's awesome. Right. You don't hear that as much. And I think that that's unfortunate because there's really wholesome, wonderful stuff that comes from building bodily strength for boys, for girls. Like we should not see this to the right. That's really bad.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, that, that is a great point. I feel like at some point the left understood this a lot better when, with this slogan, the personal is political, which was very popular, in the [00:41:00] the so called new left of the 70s.But now, this idea of. In, seeing your, your lifestyle through your politics and integrating them. That's, it's almost kind of, kind of regarded as dumb or day class A among people on the left to do that, I think.PETRZELA: Oh, like it's superficial, like, because it's consumerism, is that what you mean?SHEFFIELD: To some degree, yeah. And I don't think it's wrong to say that. Because, obviously you've got people like Gwyneth Paltrow selling all kinds of crap to people. So being progressive isn't something you can reduce to buying stuff, or being gay is not about buying rainbow s**t. Or being a woman is not about doing X or Y, none of those things are true.But at the same time, if you can't speak to cultural issues and you think it's beneath you, then you're leaving a lot of people behind.PETRZELA: That's absolutely true. But I would say the earlier [00:42:00] iteration of the personal is political, which was about like, we need to talk about domestic violence and leave for pregnancy and birth control.And like all of those issues of the body, which were considered like, Oh, that's like. Home stuff like that's not the realm of politics. You deal with that privately that no, we need actual policies to address that. I think that's still really, really salient. And then I think what you're talking about, yeah, that's interesting.That's sort of like chapter two of the personals. political in the 1970s and the kind of consumer culture of like the me generation and retreats in organic food and, yoga and all of that. And seeing those kinds of embodied individualistic practices as a form of politics. Yeah, I think those do get that we cast aspersions on those honestly often on the left, but I've resisted that because I think honestly casting aspersions on that as political action tends to serve to like, say, women's consumerism is silly. Like that's often what those critiques come down [00:43:00] to. And I don't necessarily think that's true. And I think that even though capitalism, yes, is deeply problematic and we should like criticize it endlessly fine, but within that we're not just kind of capitalist dupes, like we make meaning in these environments.And some of the first writing I did about fitness was about how these fitness communities, yes, they were exclusive by dint of the fact that you have to pay into them, et cetera. But at the same time, they at the same time they were places when people kind of like really reconstituted their sense of community, their sense of themselves, et cetera.So, yeah, I'm, let's keep the personals political around certainly as Roe is reversed and we have all of these like. Very, child marriage is back like we need it. We need that. But I think also this consumerist dimension to it. It's still really relevant.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's a great point. And hopefully people will remember that. And think about that more because yeah, you can't cede lifestyle advice to the, the fascists. You, [00:44:00] you can't do that?PETRZELA: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Cool. All right, well, it's been a great discussion here today.PETRZELA: Thank you.SHEFFIELD: So where can people find you on Twitter and elsewhere?PETRZELA: So I'm on x slash Twitter and Instagram at @NataliaPetrzela, and I have a podcast Past Present, my book, Fit Nation.Yeah. Or nataliapetrzela.com.SHEFFIELD: Okay. And spell your name for everybody who's listening?PETRZELA: Oh right. Not everyone's looking. Natalia, N-A-T-A-L-I-A. Petrzela, P-E-T-R-Z-E-L-A.SHEFFIELD: Okay, cool. All right. Well, it's been great. I appreciate you joining me today.PETRZELA: Well, thank you so much. I look forward to this coming out and thanks for reaching out. It's really nice when a Twitter friend, transfers into a more engaged conversation.SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us and you can always get more at flux.community. This show is a part of the Flux Media Network, and we have lots more podcasts and articles about [00:45:00] politics, religion, media, and society. And of course you can go to theoryofchange.show to go to the section of Flux where we have all the previous episodes of this program.And you can subscribe as well on Patreon or Substack, so I encourage everybody to do that, and thank you very much to those who are paid subscribers. I really appreciate your help. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theoryofchange.flux.communityWe live in a world of unprecedented convenience. Many of us can do our jobs entirely remotely. We use our smartphones to do a million different things. Electric cars are commonplace. And you can pretty much get anything delivered in a matter of days, if not hours. There's no doubt that when it comes to commerce and communications, things have never been easier.But outside of those areas, particularly when it comes to personal relationships, many people are finding modern day life to be anything but convenient. Some people have struggled with making friends or even realizing that they need them. And in many cases, the organizations that used to help us build relationships, like churches and community organizations, are no longer relevant to many [00:02:00] of us.On the romantic side of things, modern day media, whether explicit or not, has enabled us to know what we find attractive in others, but there's absolutely no guarantee that we can get what we seek. Sure, dating websites and apps have made looking for that special someone easier than ever before, but actually finding relationships that are lasting and meaningful is often very difficult.I hope you've enjoyed the previous two episodes in this miniseries, and I'm pleased to wrap it up with a conversation featuring Nyomi Banks, a woman who's seen firsthand many of these trends I've just described throughout a very multifaceted public life which began in adult entertainment but has since taken her into a new career as a life coach and personal advice podcaster through her new program, Ask Nyomi: Bridging the Gap.In order to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for this episode are available to subscribers only. The free version runs 30:12 while the paid subscriber version is 1:07:34.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 subscribe via Substack or Patreon to get unlimited access.Audio Chapters (Full Episode)02:57 — Ask Nyomi: Bridging the Gap's unusual audience11:53 — Being spiritual while working in adult film15:48 — Entering a new career to help her father26:21 — A brief brush with racism in the porn business34:29 — Why didn't she see as much racism as others have noted?38:46 — On "gay for pay" in adult media40:42 — Has porn made it any easier for regular people to be non-heterosexual?43:25 — On being spiritual but not Christian or religious44:31 — Starting and stopping an OnlyFans account50:48 — Continuing her fan relationships as a lifestyle podcaster57:33 — Why anti-porn attacks are about social control01:00:17 — Why you have to love yourself before you can do anything else 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

Tasha Reign, an adult entertainer, discusses sex work, consent, and companionship. The podcast covers topics such as the challenges faced by sex workers, the speaker's journey from being a reality TV show participant to a porn star, and the surprising support received from conservative women.

Episode SummaryFor thousands of years, humans have been buying and selling sex. The ancient Sumerians in 2400 BCE included female and male prostitutes on a list of known professions, so the term “oldest profession” is actually more than just a cliché.Despite the fact that sex economies have existed for far longer than most civilizations, many people seem uncomfortable with discussing the important roles that sex workers play in our society, economy, and even our politics. In 49 of the 50 states, prostitution is illegal and far-right Republicans are seeking to ban birth control and pornography, shortly after they succeeded at rolling back a nationwide right to abortion access.While the suppression efforts are part of larger efforts by radical Christian nationalists to roll back modernity, they are also the product of cooperation with less religious people, some of whom even call themselves progressive, to ban work arrangements that don’t really understand.Joining me for an in-depth discussion about the history of sex work and how it’s being revolutionized by the internet is Kaytlin Bailey, she is the executive director of Old Pros, an organization that does both research and advocacy for sex workers. A former standup comedian, she is also the host of “The Oldest Profession” podcast.A computer-generated transcript of the edited audio follows. The video of our August 10, 2023 conversation is available.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here, Kaytlin.KAYTLIN BAILEY: Thank you so much for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, there's a lot of ground here to cover and I think, as I said in the intro, I think a lot of people may not be familiar with a lot of the topics that we're going to be talking about here today. And I should mention that this episode is going to be the first of a few that are going to be talking about sex work.But I wanted to have you come on as our expert to get it started. So how about let's maybe define some terms here first. So, sex work, what does that [00:03:00] mean?BAILEY: Sex work is a broad umbrella term that encompasses all erotic labor exchanges. It’s a phrase that was coined by Carol Lee in the 1970s to push back against prohibitionist feminists at the time who were using the phrase prostituted woman, but sex work refers to full-service sex work or sort of plastic prostitution.It also includes legal forms of sex work, like stripping or pornography. Domination, foot fetish work and because we're trying to build a big tent, I would like to include Hooters waitresses and other people who use erotic labor as a part of their job.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, okay, and there are some other terms as well, like, a lot of sex work jobs involve kind of a murky legal status in many jurisdictions.BAILEY: The thing that unites all sex workers, whether their work is directly criminalized or not, is the stigma against [00:04:00] sex work. So, there are perfectly legal strippers orLegally registered sex workers in brothels in Nevada that have their children taken away from them or lose job status or are kicked out of school or housing because their employer or landlord or significant other found out about their involvement in some form of sex work.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Yeah. And you use the word decriminalization there. Let's maybe define that. And especially in regard to some of the other terms.BAILEY: Sure. There are only four models for policing prostitution. So, there's criminalization, right? Which criminalizes both the buying and selling of sex work. The way that this plays out is that mostly providers are criminalized.But there's also legalization regulation. So, this is the model that you see in Nevada or Amsterdam, where some forms of prostitution are legal, but you have to work in a registered brothel. And this is sort of [00:05:00] a model that tries to contain and control sex workers and really diminishes the negotiating power of sex workers and creates a two-tiered system where the overwhelming majority of people who are doing this work outside of the registered brothels have no legal protection at all.There's also end demand. Maine actually became the first state in the U S to pass this law, but it originated in Norway. This is sometimes it's referred to as the Nordic model, the Swedish model, Canada has experimented with these laws, but the theory is that in order to reduce the demand for the oldest profession, they try to criminalize the clients or buyers or third-party folks.But of course, it's impossible to surveil clients without surveilling sex workers. And because of the stigma associated with sex work, this leads to people being evicted, a temporary reduction in in demand, which sends people into, a more economic desperate [00:06:00] position that they were in, and desperate people do desperate things.So everywhere that the end demand model has been implemented, violence against sex workers goes up. It undermines our ability to screen our clients or to self-advocate. But what sex workers all over the world have been asking for decades is decriminalization, where neither the buying, selling, or facilitating sexual services is criminalized.And this allows people to report crimes committed against us and move throughout the communities that we're already a part of.SHEFFIELD: And it's the idea that you can just be, like a freelance worker and in charge of your own schedule, that's kind of the way basically a lot of people are doing it anyway, because they don't like other arrangements to be working for somebody else.BAILEY: Yeah. I think it's important to remember that sex work is work, but it is also sex. So, any [00:07:00] kind of surveillance or criminalization or effort to regulate the consensual adult choices that are being made in a very private space is going to erode all of our all of our freedoms. There's no way to surveil sex workers without surveilling-- well, everyone.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's interesting, because the same types of models of regulation, they exist with regard to hallucinogenic drugs and, but it's interesting that people seem to be more open to the idea of decriminalizing crack, which can literally destroy your body and brain, and meanwhile, the idea of decriminalizing or legalizing sex work is just somehow offensive. What do you think is the dichotomy network here?BAILEY: From a policy perspective, I think it's really important to remember that drugs are a substance [00:08:00] that can be regulated. But sex workers are service providers.We are people, we are neighbors and mothers, and we have other jobs. So, it's not actually possible to contain and control us in red light districts or exclusively in registered brothels. Sex workers are and have always been everywhere. So, efforts to contain and control us.End up creating a criminalized class, and that reduces our ability to self-advocate for safety and health. And this is the kind of thing that leads to rapes and also murders that we’re not able to report or get a hold of.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Well, and a lot of it also does pertain to the fact that that a lot of this does come out of both misogyny and also anti LGBTQ attitudes as well, because, historically basically acknowledging that there are people out [00:09:00] there who are doing this it's an affront to some people. That it should not exist and should not be known to exist.BAILEY: Sure. I do think that sex work in general is an existential threat to the patriarchy. It's very hard to have a patriarchy if you don't know who the dads are. And I will say that the long history of criminalizing sex work is very much grounded in misogyny and. also homophobia. I'll give you an example of the CANs laws in Louisiana cans stands for crime against nature. And this was a statute that was originally written in the 1800s to target the gay hustler scene in New Orleans. But it was a Louisiana law that made talking about oral or anal sex, a federal crime. And so, when the tough on crime the Reagan administration came through the police officer started using that statute to arrest black women and trans women and charging them with these cans [00:10:00] laws.In addition, they forced them to register as sex offenders, and this really all came to a head in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina when thousands of black women were turned away from shelters for being registered sex offenders when really all they were guilty of was simple prostitution.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and only with adults, like, that's being clear with that.BAILEY: Yes, that's right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. In some of your advocacy, have you seen kind of a stigma applied both from men, but also from women against sex workers? Like who's doing this in your view?BAILEY: Yeah, I mean, the criminalization of sex work is really a very old coalition between, the religious right and the righteous left, there's [00:11:00] a long and dark history of progressive dating back to the progressive era of criminalizing vice. And a lot of this was grounded in white supremacy.You, if you look at the man act or the white slave law that was passed in 1910, this is really something that is coming from feminists who are sort of demanding this protection against, what would be sort of a, a trafficking panic from the late early, early 1900s. And so, I think it's really important to understand that although prostitution has become a symbol of violence against women, the decriminalization of sex work is the only policy that actually reduces violence against women.So, when Carol Lee coined the phrase sex work in the 1970s, she was really pushing back against. people who considered themselves feminists that nevertheless found themselves advocating for, more police to arrest vulnerable women.SHEFFIELD: [00:12:00] Yeah. Yeah. And it's, and it's also I mean, when we've, we were talking about this topic earlier I think you had said something like that, that some, sort of anti sex work feminists, they kind of think it's like, the sex workers are, have hacked the system, that they're cheating in a way.BAILEY: Sure. I mean, I certainly can imagine, especially before women had a lot of other job opportunities that, brothels and bars were a real source of anxiety within the household, right? When women don't have property rights and their husbands are, spending their paycheck that is supposed to go to the mortgage or to feed their families.At a local tavern. This is the energy that propelled us towards prohibition. But we know what prohibition does to markets. It doesn't make them safer. And I would implore folks that consider themselves to be feminist to remember that you cannot help people. people you are hunting, and that the oldest profession is not a problem that we can arrest our way out of.We can talk [00:13:00] about ways of raising the negotiating power of victims, of increasing folks’ ability to do other work, but we can't send SWAT teams into massage parlors with legally licensed masseurs who are giving their clients sexual services and call that a service to the community that we're arresting and raiding.I do think it's important for listeners to understand, especially as we are absolutely on the ascent of another moral sex panic that is targeting the queer community, the trans community, and also sex work, pornography and consensual sex work.And so, when our government says that they're engaged in anti-trafficking work, we like to envision a good guy with a gun Rescuing a victim from a violent situation. But what, in fact, is happening is that law enforcement officers are engaging in sexual services [00:14:00] with folks and then arresting those people for engaging in those acts.This is not a situation where the good guys are going after the bad guys and people end up better off for it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's also that it's with a lot of these, that as you were saying, that if you're trying to protect people who may be coerced into this, because, and there are some studies that have indicated that legalization or decriminalization can in some jurisdictions has increased trafficking to some degree. But there are conflicting studies with that—BAILEY: No, the studies have shown that there's an increase in sex worker advertising when the when legal penalties are removed, which makes all of the sense. So, if you look at the case of Rhode Island, which decriminalized indoor sex work between 2003 and 2009, you absolutely saw an explosion of sex worker advertising and people traveling to Rhode Island in order to engaged in decriminalized sex [00:15:00] work.You also saw a reduction of gonorrhea rates by 40% and a reduction in reported rapes by 30% and an overall reduction in violence against women. So, the results were actually very positive. You didn't see an increase in violence. You didn't see an increase in exploitation. You did see an increase in prostitution.Now, I think that those results would You know, it wouldn't look like that if the entire region was decriminalized, but when you have an isolated area where this is the only place that you can go to engage in this work without the fear of arrest, of course, you're going to see an increase. But New Zealand decriminalized prostitution in 2003, and although there was a temporary uptick in advertising, the markets really leveled out, and it's Mostly you've seen a reduction in STIs and violence against women and an increase in sex workers who feel comfortable reporting crimes committed against them.But you haven't seen a huge uptick in prostitution overall because the entire country [00:16:00] decriminalized, it wasn't country concentrated in one city or area.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess I just meant in the sense that that for instance, with drugs marijuana legalization, that in California, when, when we decriminalized marijuana out here, it led to an increase both in the legal sale of marijuana, but also the illegal sale of marijuana in some, in some ways.And so, and like, but it's important, I think, the Rhode Island experiment, if you will, it, it shows that. You, you really need to stick to a policy for a while because there are effects that may exist in the short term but are going to go away once the pressure is off, or something like that.And but you mentioned the violence against women. I remember reading about the, the rape rates in the various counties in Nevada where prostitution is legal, [00:17:00] and there's one of them, Elko County, where there are no rapes and there were literally no rapes in that, in that, in the years that they were looking at.BAILEY: I think some context here is really important because you're only allowed to have a legally licensed brothel in a county with less than 700,000 people in it. So, there's no way to work legally in Vegas or Reno, where the highest demand is. And so, the overwhelming majority of sex work that's happening in Nevada is happening outside of these legally licensed brothels. And these brothels came into existence in the 1970s and were very much a compromise sort of between the mafia and local law enforcement.And these brothels are beloved in the communities that they're in. It's a huge source of tax revenue. There are a lot of counties in Nevada that wouldn't have adequate healthcare service, but for the revenue that these brothels provide. But it's not a model that we want to replicate nationally because it really doesn't increase the negotiating power of the people who work there in order [00:18:00] to work as a legally licensed prostitute in Nevada, you have to register with the local sheriff's department.This becomes a subpoenable fact about you for the rest of your life. You can imagine how this. plays out in child custody cases. You have to be hired and work at one of a handful of legally licensed brothels. You're working 12- or 24-hour shifts. And because you are a legally licensed prostitute, you don't actually have the same freedom of movement that any other citizen of that county would have.You have to remain on the premises of the brothels or face a fine. You can't just go to a bar or go to the movies. Because all of these laws are about restricting, containing, and controlling sex workers.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Right. Well, okay. But I actually only meant to talk about it in the context of violence.BAILEY: Oh, sure. So, yes.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So that basically, there are people, especially like people like Jordan Peterson, talk about sexually frustrated men and how it's this plague on society and only [00:19:00] they are concerned about it.And no one wants to give an outlet to these men who can't get a date or whatever. And yet then they also go adamantly against sex work. And the facts are pretty clear that when you have some form of legalized prostitution, that it does protect the rest of the women. And also, the sex workers themselves.BAILEY: There was a fascinating comparative study that was done, Scott Stern, I believe was the lead researcher comparing the impact Craigslist erotic services had on the cities when it became available. So, Craigslist erotic services, if you don't remember, was a place on Craigslist where people could advertise their interest in engaging in either casual or paid sexual encounters, and it became available in different cities at different times. And what they found is that everywhere that Craigslist Erotic Services became available, the female homicide rate dropped on average [00:20:00] 17%. We already talked about what happened in Rhode Island when indoor sex work was decriminalized.You saw a reduction in rapes of 30%. These results have been replicated in places like Amsterdam or, as you mentioned, in Nevada, clear correlation between access to professional sex workers and a reduction in gender-based violence. I think this has two causes. I think that the presence of sex work allows women to escape abusive relationships.And I think there is something to that point as much as I loathe ceding any ground to Jordan Peterson that there is something about sex workers that turns the temperature down on, on male violence. And this goes back to the epic of Gilgamesh, when Ishtar, the goddess of love and war sent a harlot to spend seven days or excuse me, six days and seven nights with a warrior.Teaching him how to bathe and have table manners and yes, [00:21:00] who was, experiencing intimate sexual moments with him, which helped ease his transition from a violent theater of war back into civilization. And this is something that, like, militaries have known about for thousands and thousands of years.The relationship between sex workers and soldiers is very long. But I, I also think that the military is responsible for some of the most egregious human rights violations when it comes to sex workers. There are the comfort women that we know about in Japan, armies have done similar things and the horror story that you, you think about of like, a woman and a line of men, but it's only the during times of war that you, that you see that that kind of thing play out.But also, here in the United States in 1917, when the U. S. got involved in World War I, we passed something called the American Plan. And our effort to reduce STIs, we shuttered all of the brothels that had been, legally operating in cities across the country. And we also deputized [00:22:00] local law enforcement to arrest women in the vicinity.And this led to a very dark chapter in our history of arresting women for being in public and making the wrong kind of eye contact with a cop. So, I think it's really important for folks to remember that the criminalization of sex work always undermines women's ability to move freely in public space and that efforts to contain and control us rather than reduce the STI rates for example, when they shuttered the brothels in Alaska STIs went up 300%.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and so part these efforts to kind of crack down on things are religious derived as well. And, and we've certainly seen a lot of that. And I guess right now, lately, the Christian right has been focused on trying to ban abortion. But they made very clear that they have an agenda of [00:23:00] items and banning birth control is on the list and rolling back, same-sex marriage is on the list. Some of them are openly talking about banning pornography entirely.One of the ways that they have attacked porn is to be putting in age verification laws. Can you talk about that a little bit?BAILEY: Sure. So, Pornhub, for example, has stopped operating in, I believe three states. I know it's Virginia, I believe it. I'm not sure what the third state is, but age verification laws would force users to upload identifying information, right? Their I. D. in order to watch pornography. Now, legal porn performers, of course, are already subjected to a ton of regulation. They have to sign all kinds of consent forms. They have to upload their own ideas. But the fear here is that users are effectively putting themselves on a stigmatized list.And so, the, the ramifications of that, it's just, [00:24:00] it's, it's too much. And so Pornhub, one of the largest sources of pornography said that they, they can't comply with that law. And so, they are not making their sites available in those states. There's one case I believe of a woman in Louisiana whose husband is in is in the army.And so, pornography is a big part of their relationship, especially when he's overseas. And I believe that she's currently suing, and I wish her luck in her case to get access to pornography. There's one more point I want to make which I think it's really important for folks to understand the history between the criminalization or censorship of obscenity and the criminalization and censorship of information about birth control and abortion.This dates back to the Comstock laws of the 1870s, and he was on a crusade to remove pornography or smut from public space. But in doing so, criminalized [00:25:00] information about birth control and sort of famously went on to arrest Margaret Sanger for obscenity when she was simply trying to share information about how to prevent unintended pregnancy.SHEFFIELD: Well, and we're seeing that now repeat in the state of Florida. Where now they have expanded their, don't talk about gender identity or any sort of sexual education stuff all the way through high school. And now, people can be, fired for having a picture of their spouse or trying to tell children about condoms or how to buy menstrual products.BAILEY: No, it, it, it is it should be alarming. I think the, the long history and the tenacity of conflating the existence of queer people. with obscenity. And so, I know a lot of well-meaning liberal moms that, have a discomfort [00:26:00] with pornography and stand behind a lot of these laws that are already being used to persecute LGBTQ plus folks and make it harder for not just young people, but all people to access information about their own bodies.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I think that's a, it's a point worth exploring here, because the idea of publicly acknowledging that sex exists, but even further is that this idea that there are some people who do not agree with a conventional viewpoint about sex and sexual relationships, that really is kind of the root of the conflict here, I think, especially for the, for a lot of these fundamentalist religious people.That the idea that there could be a woman who says, ‘I don't care if I have sex with 10 people in a week, [00:27:00] it doesn't bother me. I don't think there's anything wrong with it and I'm going to do that for my job.’ Or there's somebody who says: ‘Yeah, you know what, I'm going to go and find other men and try to help them fulfill needs that they can't get in their regular lives,’ that cannot exist. It's an affront, right?BAILEY: And it's, I think a big part of my job is reminding folks that we already live in a society where people are having all kinds of sex all around you, whether you live in a suburban home or an apartment, people are engaging in sex that might make you uncomfortable. Already, and there's no amount of criminalization or censorship or prohibition that's going to change that.But similar to abortion, we cannot legislate this away, but we can make it less safe. And that's exactly what criminalization and [00:28:00] censorship does.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Well, it's a, and I mean, let's delve into it a little bit further. Like, why do you think they're so disproportionately concerned about this compared to, I mean, like you, you talk about as drugs versus as a substance that could be regulated.But it's, it's more than that, right? It's about other people having an agency that you don't approve of.BAILEY: I think we should get really specific here because the overwhelming majority of laws targeting prostitution are directed at women. People of all genders have always engaged in this work.And a lot of the same language and rhetoric and statutes. that have been, applied to criminalized prostitution are used to target the queer community. But this has always been about controlling women. And I think that this can, this really dates back to the Catholic church, which codified the Madonna.a horror complex and [00:29:00] sort of waged war on fertility deities and priestess prostitutes and powerful women that did not subject themselves to the normal standard of, fidelity or the, this obsession with chastity. I think that informs our obsession with sex ed and contraception and also prostitution.And my basic argument and the point that I make on the Oldest Profession podcast over and over again is that whorephobia is the foundation of misogyny. Hmm.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Now you mentioned the idea of, of Madonna hoard. Let's for people who haven't heard that term, butBAILEY: sure. So, dating back to one of the oldest deities that we have written records about Ishtar the goddess of love and war and the myth around her is that she was Born a virgin every morning and she went to bed a w***e every night and priestess prostitutes were an important part [00:30:00] of the temples that held space for her.And this is at a time when temples were really the organizing force of the ancient world. They weren't just places of worship, but they were also places where important decisions were made. They were the keepers of important knowledge, especially around fertility. They were also the only bank in town. But these temples, polytheism transitions into the Greek empires and the Roman empire and the Roman empire falls and is replaced by the Catholic church.The Catholic church sort of separates that ancient deity and turns her into the two Marys, right? The virgin mother and the repentant w***e and does a lot. Undermine Mary Magdalene who, there's no evidence to suggest that she ever engaged in the oldest profession, but Pope Gregory called her a sinful woman from the pulpit in 591 and really locked into this [00:31:00] idea of That she was a sinful woman and that justified over a thousand years of denigrating her contributions, her significant contributions to the Christian church.And so, this institution that was ostensibly built on the teachings of Jesus, right? And love and forgiveness became about persecuting people who are engaging in these older rights. And so, we have a long history of the Inquisition targeting courtesans or known sex workers for witchcraft and conflating sexual fidelity, especially amongst women with holiness or, or godliness, which is not something that, like Jesus, the historic figure was especially concerned.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, he was documented repeatedly in the New Testament to have been regularly, with and befriending,BAILEY: Much more comfortable with sex workers than he was with tax collectors, for example,SHEFFIELD: Well, actually, [00:32:00] no, he was friends with the tax collectors as well. So, but, but, but, but getting biblical with this, like there is another figure even older than Mary, the two Marys that was like, she was kind of in a large part, I feel like one of the, the very first canceled literary figures, and that was Asherah, and she was, so the, the Hebrew the ancient Hebrews and Judaism grew out of Canaanite polytheism.And Asherah was the wife of the chief deity, and she was the last remnant of that. Over time, the worshipers of Yahweh sort of censored and extirpated all the other deities, but Asherah was the last one that survived, and she was a fertility goddess and people continue to worship her.And she's in the Bible. Like that's what's interesting is and it's really like, and you see people being killed for [00:33:00] worshiping her and, and praying to her and like, she was God's wife. So why wouldn't they pray to her? But yeah, like it's, I mean, that's, that's, it's, it's, it is interesting that there may be something to this monotheism and creating a male deity that a female deity could not.be allowed to exist.BAILEY: And, the Catholic Church is, has a long and well documented history of being much more committed to patriarchal control and property accumulation than they are to love and forgiveness or anything that I might associate with Christian values.SHEFFIELD: Well, and then there's also the Lilith story. Do you want to tell that one?BAILEY: Yeah, so Lilith the story of Lilith coming from the Old Testament was Adam's first wife. And so, the myth, as I understand it, is that Lilith and Adam were created at the same time and from the same clay.So, this [00:34:00] Lilith really wanted to be on top during sex. Now, most marriage counselors of course would tell you that that wasn't the real problem, but it is what the scripture literally says. Both God and Adam agreed that Lilith wanting to enjoy sex with Adam was an existential threat. And so, she left she left the garden of her own volition.started a love affair with some other, some other figures and was living independently. And this all-knowing, all-powerful God could not get Lilith to come back to the garden. So, we see, sort of a very early complication to patriarchal control or this all-powerful God.And so, God made Adam a, a consolation prize, Eve, from Adam's body, his rib or some other part, depending on which translation you're looking at, who was supposedly smaller and more submissive than the original Lilith and even [00:35:00] Eve is blamed for all human suffering from eating from the Tree of Knowledge.SHEFFIELD: So yeah, so and it is it's really important, I think, to know this history because I think there are a lot of people who—I mean there's kind of a paradox that I feel like that the more educated you are on the political right, the more likely you are to support sex workers, whereas in a large measure, the more educated you are on the left, the less likely you are to support sex workers.BAILEY: And I think that's really important because I know a lot of otherwise smart, well-meaning people that support laws that inevitably hurt. The people that those legislators or advocates are claiming that they're trying to help, right? I think everybody is interested in increasing the negotiating power of victims.We all want to see fewer victims of rape, sexual assault, [00:36:00] violence, but. Efforts to contain and control prostitution or efforts to eradicate the oldest profession inevitably hurt people who are engaging in that work, whether they're doing that by choice, circumstance or coercion, this really isn't a problem that we can arrest our way out of.SHEFFIELD: For people that may have some resistance to this, that, when you look at especially people who come from, impoverished backgrounds that, there, there are some jobs that That are just, there's only a few jobs that are even possible for them to do because they have no training, they have no network, they have no education, and so you're, you're, you're going to take away something that will help them not be impoverished.That's what you're going to do to them.BAILEY: I know. And yes, sex work has been a reliable survival strategy for millennia. It has been a way of people, able to accumulate some kind of capital. I think that sex work has funded more [00:37:00] entrepreneurs and artists than all of the grants combined. But It's interesting to me that when prostitution is turned into a symbol of prost it when prostitution is turned into a symbol of exploitation, we end up focusing all of our efforts on eradicating or suppressing prostitution, and we ignore huge swaths of exploitation.We do have real slavery and exploited laborers in this country in our own prison system in agriculture, in mines. And so there are all kinds of jobs out there where we could really be doing more to reduce violent exploitation. But instead, all of those resources are being redirected at mostly adult consensual sex workers.SHEFFIELD: Well, it's also that I think there's, there's a, the, the right wing has under Trump developed an ability to, masquerade as populist in some issues. [00:38:00] So like they talk about big tech and talk about, regulating these. technology companies as if they're not completely in the pocket of all big business.And they're doing that with regard to, this sex trafficking panic that they're, that they're pushing that, they want you to focus on this, which in many cases is just vastly overhyped and exaggerated. doesn't exist to nearly the degree that they are telling you, so that you don't talk about the other exploited people, and you don't help workers that are going on strike, and you don't sympathize with them.BAILEY: I think that's a really great example. And I think that Marriott Hotels is a classic example of exactly this phenomenon, right? So Marriott Hotels has engaged in a PR campaign to raise awareness about trafficking, right? And so, if you check into a Marriott Hotel, you'll often see something on the door or signs throughout saying, if you see something, say something, but all of the signs of. [00:39:00]Trafficking that they list are just signs of sex work, right? They want to discriminate against women traveling alone or people who have multiple guests in the room or people who ask for multiple towels or people with acrylic nails. Meanwhile, Marriott Hotels uses third party companies in order to clean their hotel rooms.So, there's absolutely. Trafficking that's happening at Marriott hotels, but it's not the consensual adult sex workers who are trying to work in the rooms. It's the cleaning staff whose labor rights have been undermined because they've been farmed out to an ungovernable third party.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And in many cases are sort of imported illegal immigrants are not able to advocate for themselves.Correct. Yeah. All right. Well, and now in terms of the empowerment of sex workers that we have seen, I think one of the biggest trends that's evolved has been [00:40:00] OnlyFans. And. That has really revolutionized the pornography industry and done so in a way that seems to have overwhelmingly benefited the workers in against the studios and whatnot.Let's, can, tell us about that.BAILEY: Any time that you are able to directly connect fans to a performer, an artist or a content creator, that's the, that's the best situation, right? As a, as a content creator, people giving you money directly cuts out the studios. It cuts out potentially exploitative third parties, which I think is one of the reasons why we've seen so much of a reaction to OnlyFans.If they've been through the ringer in terms of their ability to accept credit cards or the different regulations that are trying to shut them down. But this is absolutely a model that empowers individual performers at the expense of the larger studio system. And the more regulatory efforts there [00:41:00] are, the more you concentrate power into the hands of a few.We've seen this in big tech and, pornography is no exception. The more of a regulatory burden you place, then the fewer and fewer people are able to meet that bar. And so OnlyFans I think was revolutionary and it helped a lot of people get fund again, schools, startups or just an artistic career or just their life, just the ability to eat and pay their rent.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and we certainly saw that during the pandemic when a lot of performing venues were shut down entirely.BAILEY: Yeah, I knew a lot of folks during the pandemic that lost, their, their day gig and their night gig at the same time. The theaters were closed and also, they weren't able to work at restaurants.And so, it makes sense that we saw a huge influx of people engaging in this work. Unfortunately, because of the reaction. You're also seeing a lot of those same performers who are now, being fired from jobs, being denied [00:42:00] spots at universities or, training for nurses. And with the surveillance technology that we have and facial recognition, we have folks that have only fans accounts that are being denied access at the border.because they're a known sex worker, even though the sex work that they're engaged in is perfectly legal. So, there's a lot of ramifications and this is very much still happening now. Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Well, and I guess, yeah, given the, it's benefited a lot of different people and people have had contact with it much more than before.And I think, it's, it's made people more aware of that. That there are people that they know who are doing this and that also de stigmatizes it.BAILEY: And that I think is something that's really important, right? Your listeners probably already know and like a sex worker that lives amongst them just because they're not out about that.I think OnlyFans made that more visible, but sex workers have [00:43:00] always been part of every community.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I guess speaking of that though, you have referred to sex workers as “we” a few times here. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Like, what's your background with all this?BAILEY: I mean, I think it's important to say that there, there really is no typical story. People have engaged in this work for. All kinds of reasons throughout human history, and this work looks different to everyone. I started doing full service hourly sex work in 2004, 2005. I used a message board to schedule and screen my clients.And we met at hotels sort of in the Golden age where we had cell phones, but not smartphones no facial recognition technology yet. And then when I moved to New York to pursue standup comedy I started doing sugaring, which is a new word for a very old thing sort of courting individual patrons to [00:44:00] to support my work.So, it was not an hourly gig, but more of a long-term commitment. But there are as many forms of sex work and as many, nuances and shades of gray of this as there are people, what it means to be a sex worker. It's like, what does it mean to be an actress? Like every career is different.SHEFFIELD: Well, and I, now what about that there is some tension, I feel like also maybe perhaps that for women who might have married up, as they say. They don't want to be thought of as a client and service provider relationship with their marriage, and that makes them uncomfortable with the idea of sex work.BAILEY: Sure. I would say that one of the benefits of being a sex worker as opposed to a wife is the, getting paid up front and having the purchasing power of, being paid a wage or being paid for your services.Every marriage is different. I am married to a [00:45:00] relatively high earner, but it's fundamentally different, partnership is fundamentally different, I think, than paid companionship. I also, want to push back a little bit that, yes, there are many wives out there that consider, their partner, their husband seeing a sex worker as, as cheating, but there are also wives out there that You know, think about sex workers as a paid service that their husband sometimes engages in, right?Whether their wife is suffering from a chronic illness or, the spark has left the marriage. I personally don't believe that one person has the right to sort of. take sex away from another, another person. And I think that marriage can be complicated, it can be a relationship, it's an economic relationship, it's a, community or companionship, raising children.So, I, I don't know if this, like, sex workers versus wives is as clear cut as, as you would like to suggest. There are a lot of married [00:46:00] sex workers, and there are a lot of wives who support that, that see sex workers, or also support their partner seeking sexual services elsewhere because paid companionship is not a threat to the marriage or union or partnership in the same way that having an emotionally messy extramarital affair might be.SHEFFIELD: I did want to get into the. The prostitute with the heart of gold.BAILEY: Sure.SHEFFIELD: Because I really hate that people in Hollywood discount that.BAILEY: Yeah. Because I mean, sex workers have been, it's like, yeah, sorry.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Like, there's a reason that that exists.BAILEY: Because we're often the last line of, of defense for vulnerable people. Brothels were also places where nursing happened. It's where people fleeing domestic violence situations went. It's women helping other women and sex workers helping folks that are in trouble. It's a story you hear over and over again. This is why madams settled the West.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:47:00] When it's, it was also the only way for a lot of men to even have any sort of conversation about feelings or psychology and they may not have even known about those terms. And even now, who might not even know they could go to a therapist.Well, okay. Now, what about people who might say that, I mean, and there have been some studies that indicate that, excessive use of porn can be damaging for individuals.BAILEY: I mean, there were studies in the Victorian era that said that it led, it led to blindness and cancer, but you know, that was a different world panic.SHEFFIELD: Well, that's what, yeah, no, like, I want you to talk about that though. Sure. People who, like, I mean, do you think that there, that people should realize there's a healthy amount of using anything?BAILEY: I think that if we're going to crack down on anything. And I'm just, I'm continuously frustrated by this impulse that we have as a society to look around at like the [00:48:00] very real labor exploitation, right? The very real economic disparity, the very real suffering that so many people are surviving, or many are not and decide to focus our attention on people enjoying themselves.By themselves. People have been engaging in solo sex for as long as a, I mean, this predates us as a species. Anyone who's visited a zoo can tell you that this is a thing that, that creatures engage in. And so, this impulse to pathologize something that is. So natural and so ubiquitous feels like it's a projection and reflects our inability or unwillingness to address a very real problem.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. So you would say that it's people who may have issues with excessive porn use probably also have issues in other ways. Sure. And you shouldn't [00:49:00] focus just on that.BAILEY: People can get addicted to anything, reality television, sugar. Even drugs. And I don't think that we have a good track record of trying to criminalize or suppress that leading to good outcomes.We didn't solve drug addiction by criminalizing drugs. We're not going to solve what you might call porn addiction or somebody wanting to change their relationship with pornography or masturbation by trying to eliminate smut from public spaces.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And especially because plenty of people have no problem with how they use it in their own lives.BAILEY: Yes. And so, people that, people can go on their own journey and decide everyone gets to decide what their boundaries are around erotic content or participating in masturbation or sex, but these are very personal choices. And so, I think that it's important for us to recognize this pattern again, of like moral panic or.[00:50:00] pathologizing something that can be innocuous and natural and dare I suggest helpful actually.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and there have been studies that show that like porn has been helpful for a lot of people who, because as you said, like in marriage situation for absence or physical or emotional trauma on the part of their partner that they couldn't survive in that marriage if it wasn't.So what's kind of the final takeaway you would have people that we haven't maybe talked about?BAILEY: I think it's important for folks to recognize across the political and ideological spectrum. We've been really wrong about the oldest profession for a really long time. I think it's important at this moment in history when we're dealing with multiple cascading crises to. Listen to sex workers.There is nobody who is more motivated to reduce violence and exploitation within the sex trade than sex [00:51:00] workers themselves. And we have a lot of good ideas, but the first thing that we have to do is stop the arrests.SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. Well, I think that's a great, great message for sure. All right. Well, so we've been talking today with Kaytlin Bailey and she is the executive director of Old Pros and you're also on Twitter at Kaytlin Bailey. That's K-A-Y-T-L-I-N-B-A-I-L-E-Y for those who are listening.BAILEY: Yeah. I'd also encourage if you're interested in this topic, we send out a newsletter of sex worker rights related news every Friday.And you can sign up for that at oldprosonline. org. And you can also follow us across social media platforms at Old Pros online.SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. Well, I encourage everybody to do that. Thanks for being here.BAILEY: Thank you again so much for having me, Matthew. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I hope that this is a conversation that your listeners enjoy, and I hope they will learn a lot.SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the show [00:52:00] for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us and I encourage everybody to go to theoryofchange.show where you can get full access to all of the previous episodes and future ones, and you can subscribe on Substack or Patreon. We have free and paid subscriptions available, and I thank everybody who is a paid subscriber very much, you have complete access to all the transcripts and audio and video. Some of those things are not available to the unpaid members, so I do appreciate everybody who supports us that way.And then also I would encourage everybody to go to flux.community. This show is part of the Flux Network, so do check that out. We've got lots more podcasts and articles about politics, religion, media, and society.And if you've got a podcast or other show like that or you're interested in writing, please do reach out to us. We are interested in expanding our network and the number of people that we work with as well. So I encourage everybody to reach out if [00:53:00] you are so inclined, but that's it for today. I appreciate everybody for being here. I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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

Episode SummaryThis episode is the first in an occasional Theory of Change series of in-depth discussions about the politics of different states and how, unfortunately, right-wing extremism is becoming more common in many areas.The first state we're going to be discussing is Idaho. It’s one of America's most beautiful states with amazing mountains and lakes, lush forests, and gorgeous fields and plains. Unfortunately, it is also home to many of America's most insane people as well.Our guide to the politics of the Gem State is Marty Kelley. He is a senior editor with the Wonkette humor blog, and a long-term resident of Idaho since 2001.You can watch the video of this episode, continue reading below for a rush transcript, or read it on the web.Membership BenefitsThis is a free episode of Theory of Change but 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/mattsheffieldTranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Marty.MARTY KELLEY: Good to be here.SHEFFIELD: All right, great. So Idaho obviously has a very long history, and we'll get into that.But let's maybe start off with, I think it's fair to say that Idaho kind of has sort of three basic political divisions. Political regions. The northern part tends to be extremely radical and filled with white nationalists and all assorted. religious extremists as well.The central part of Idaho, which is kind of the Sun Valley area, which includes Boise, which is where you live and other areas around there. That is basically the area I'm calling the business and Berkeley section of Idaho, where all the money's made and all where all the godless commies like yourself live.And then in the southeast part of Idaho, that is the heavily Mormon region of the state.[00:03:00] And there's when we'll get into that, but Mormonism in Idaho also has some very interesting divisions of its own.So you moved to Idaho in 2001 after getting a PhD in rhetoric and composition at the University of Arizona. So, what brought you to Idaho?KELLEY: Well, my now ex got a job at Boise State University where she is still teaching and tenured and doing amazing things with ESL composition and writing.And I've stayed because we have a kid together who's now 26. And I can't believe that that happened. And since 2012, I've been writing for the political humor blog Wonkette, my dream job.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well--KELLEY: I can do that anywhere and Boise is a good affordable place to stay.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it certainly is definitely a lot cheaper than many parts of the country for sure.And you know, all kinds of great outdoor activities as I was mentioning. Boise itself also is actually. Pretty nice place to be I have to say it to anybody who hasn't checked it out And you should definitely put it on your bucket list.KELLEY: I like it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so, but now you're You were not born in the region, but for you were born nearby in Washington, right?KELLEY: No, in Oregon.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, all right. And it should be noted, in the recent past couple of years Idaho has unfortunately gotten some attention for a lot of different right-wing extremist stuff.KELLEY: Oh, yes.[00:04:30]SHEFFIELD: Especially with different people trying to move in and ban books and etc. But there's unfortunately a longer history than that.And I mean, I guess probably, you know, probably the, the... At least we'll, we'll start with the 20th century, I guess, kind of the most famous Idaho right wing extremist was Ezra Taft Benson, who was a native son from Rexburg, I believe and he was, rose to become the agriculture secretary of Dwight Eisenhower and then was a big conduit for people into the John Birch Society and, and also was a big publicizer of another guy.Now he was Cleon Skousen, I believe he was from Utah but, you know, they were both part of this fringe sect of, you know, extremely right-wing Mormons and those people have always had a home in, unfortunately, all parts of Idaho, but particularly in the, in the Southeast. But, you know, as we kind of move toward More times when people watching or listening or have been alive.Because I believe Benson was born in 1899. So I need to say that was a while ago, but more contemporaneously Idaho became the focus of national attention in 1992 with Randy Weaver. Tell us about who Randy Weaver was.KELLEY: Well, Randy Weaver was a very extreme. Survivalist right wing fellow who showed [00:06:00] up from time to time at the Aryan Nations compound in Northern Idaho.And thank goodness they eventually got shot down in a lawsuit with the SPLC. But in 92, Weaver was I think the feds were trying to arrest him on charges of selling a sawed-off shotgun illegally. And there was the siege at Ruby Ridge and during that his wife and son were killed. You can go to the Idaho state historical society and at their museum, they have the front door with the bullet hole in the glass, which is something to see.And then of course, after that siege was over, the charges fell apart and it became a rallying point for the entire right wing led to the Waco occupation and siege. And then that led to Timothy McVeigh. Then shortly after we had Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage, who was already very, very popular with the militia folks in supporting them.Who said that Oklahoma City was, was the wrong thing to do, but it was certainly understandable. And that was kind of the end of her career. Thank goodness. You can still see cars around Boise with bumper stickers that say, 'Can Helen, not salmon.'SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess she kind of has a [00:07:30] spiritual successor nowadays in Janice McGeachin. Tell us about who she is. There's a lot of stories.KELLEY: Oh, she has lots of spiritual successors now. Janice McGeachin was the Lieutenant Governor of Idaho when Butch Otter was governor and the two in Idaho, the Lieutenant Governor and governor are elected separately.And so they are not a ticket. So she was constantly trying to do weird right-wing things whenever he would leave the state. And at 1 point during the coven, emergency, he went to a conference somewhere while she was acting governor for a day, she tried to rescind all COVID measures, all mask mandates, and it was she, she got a talking to when he came back and then she did it again the next time he was out of the state.SHEFFIELD: Yep. And she also became famous for her campaign ads featuring flags and Bibles and, and--KELLEY: Right, she was in a notorious video sponsored by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which we'll mention again. Soon after they sang a little, I think it was the Idaho anthem. I honestly don't know. They sang a song together and in her part of it she was seen in a camouflaged four by four [00:09:00] holding a gun and a Bible.SHEFFIELD: Which has, you know, quite a lot of visual similarities to ISIS videos.KELLEY: Very much so. Everyone noted that at the time.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, although, you know, there was another woman who had been featured in this photographed herself in a similar way, a younger woman. Oh, right. And I forget what her name was, but people she posted it somewhere and, and she soon became a meme.And then she actually said, ‘I don't know why people are doing this.’KELLEY: Because it's totally different, different flag, different holy book, different guns.SHEFFIELD: That's right. Yeah. And, you know, and one other person who may not quite be as nationally infamous as, as McGeehan, is Bo Gritz. He was a guy who actually ran for president as an independent candidate.He was another one of these Utah, Idaho Mormons. And he was involved, he... Had his own compound kind of, I believe, not too far away from where Randy Weaver had his, you know,KELLEY: If you live in Idaho, you have to have a compound.SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, apparently everybody's either in Boise or in a compound.KELLEY: Mine's rented, so--SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well and you know, and I think I think it's and this is a subject we'll come back to at the end But I think you know part of the kind of divide for a [00:10:30] lot of people is that because there are so many vast open areas of Idaho where just nobody's there. You can drive for maybe an hour and not see another car on the road depending on where you're at, and then at the same time, they are not, you know, if you drive a little bit further, you'll come into a you know, modern Western city like Boise, and it can be kind of jarring.I think to some of these people. It seems like you know, I it's one thing about right wing extremism that I think people who haven't don't have a first-hand exposure to it is that you know So much of it is psychological It's not political. It's just seeing that other people have a different way of living and it's wrong.KELLEY: That's right.SHEFFIELD: And it's wrong. I mean, and that's kind of, I mean, that's kind of a, I mean, a large part of what you guys write about it at Wonkette is highlighting that type of behavior from these right-wing figures.And it's unfortunate because, I'll let you speak to it, but it seems to me that the national Republican party is basically, and not just with Trump, over time becoming ever more like these people who were like Bo Gritz who were kind of laughing stocks in the nineties. Somebody like him, like, another Idahoan, Ammon Bundy you know, they have a constituency their constituency.KELLEY: Yeah, very much so. We've it's, it's a small, radical, annoying, [00:12:00] strangely powerful sometimes bunch of crazies.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and I mentioned Ammon Bundy.So he comes from a whole family. Let's talk about them. You want to get the background on those guys?KELLEY: Well, the Bundys are some Mormon fundamentalists who have a vision of the coming apocalypse. What is the white horse something or other?SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, yeah. So somewhere there's a Mormon prophecy from Joseph Smith that the, that the male priesthood holders of Mormonism are going to save the United States and that there will be someone will emerge as if riding on a white horse. And he will sweep in to become the president and save America right before the destruction of the wicked.KELLEY: Yes. Yes. And Cliven was into that, and I think Ammon even more so. I honestly don't know Cliven being the father, Cliven being the father who had the standoff in Nevada and then Ammon ran the standoff in Oregon at the wildlife refuge and escaped excuse me, escaped criminal charges in both of those.In Nevada, because the FBI completely screwed up at the prosecution and didn't share I, as I recall, [00:13:30] didn't share important information during discovery. So it got thrown out and then in the Oregon case, they were all basically let off because the jury, as if you ask me, the jury just nullified the case, they didn't want to prosecute them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, which, you know, and it's funny considering how much they claim to be upset at writing and looting by Black Lives Matter. Well, you know, here's some law-and-order you guys could have done and didn't exactly do it,KELLEY: But it's still, you know, it's still okay to shoot federal cops because they're wrong.They don't have the right to, to enforce laws. And in fact, no parts of the Federal, the federal government isn't allowed to have land outside of Washington, D. C. and military bases. It's a special copy of the constitution that belongs to the Bundy's.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah well, and I guess, yeah, that, you know, that's, those ideas kind of come out of this sovereign citizen.KELLEY: Right, right, combination of the sovereign citizen and the, the sagebrush rebellion stuff.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, yeah, and, and basically, they had this idea that they don't have to pay taxes as well because the United States as a government was ended secretly, and I always forget the year of the thing.KELLEY: I believe it was with the 14th amendment in 1865, 1867, whatever that was.SHEFFIELD: Of course it has something to [00:15:00] do with slavery, right?KELLEY: Yeah, and then we, and then the U. S. became a corporation, and we were all owned by the government until we put a legal notice up that we are now free persons, and we don't belong to the government anymore.And that's never held up in court and they keep doing it year after year.SHEFFIELD: But it makes a lot of money for the people who, who tell you.KELLEY: It's a great scam!It is. If I didn't have a, if I didn't have any sense of ethics at all, I could make a lot of money.SHEFFIELD: Yeah well, I guess, you know what though, you guys do have at least one, another positive thing, a positive thing that you guys are known for, which is Napoleon Dynamite.KELLEY: That's true. That's true. We have the shots.SHEFFIELD: That's right. And when, you know, they, they should have, they should have said what high school Uncle Rico had his football career.But yeah, as somebody who grew up in, in Utah, which has a lot of the same geography and. And characteristics. I was just like, Oh man, this was my childhood on the silver screen. At least the minus the, the fundamentalist Mormonism parts.But yeah, so, all right. So with the, so that's kind of, I don't know, like a rose gallery, if you will, of, of famous right-wing Idahoans.but I guess before we get into, get beyond that though, let's I did want to mention, so, we, we've talked about Mormonism [00:16:30] in the Idaho context a little bit and it's kind of interesting for people who are not from Idaho or, or not Mormon is that Idaho kind of, it's got the, the Mormons on Idaho are kind of split with each other that so for instance there is the, the Brigham Young University, which most people know of is in Provo, Utah but then there's also one in Rexburg, Idaho called Brigham Young University, Idaho formerly known as Ricks College.And Ricks/BYUI has always been kind of like the more fundamentalist version of Brigham Young University. So like, for instance, you're not allowed to wear shorts on campus if you go to Brigham Young University, Idaho. Whereas, in fact, you can have the distinct pleasure of wearing shorts if you go to Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University.KELLEY: Provo sounds like it's a little weak on doctrine there.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, although I've never seen them where they claim what book of scripture says you can wear shorts. I don't know that one. And last I heard, I believe they also don't allow open toed sandals at BYU Idaho.KELLEY: As is only correct.SHEFFIELD: That's right, you know, toe cleavage. You go there and no one has ever even heard of the term toe cleavage. [00:18:00] But apparently it does exist and it's evil.KELLEY: Well, that's obvious.SHEFFIELD: That's right. Yeah.KELLEY: I grew up Catholic, so I can identify.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, the thing though about Idaho Mormons is that they're, they kind of, because of the remoteness, I guess, maybe, or who knows what it was, the Idaho Mormons have always been a little bit weirder than the Utah Mormons. And it's funny for people who have never lived in either of the states, they're like, what the hell are you talking about? People cannot believe that there's any difference, but in fact there is, and people and everybody who's watching this who's from Utah, you can back me up on this, I'm sure.But yeah, and so, but like they've, I don't know, it's like a lot of the, the, there, there is this fringe Mormon movement, and I know what they call it it's a website called the LDS Freedom Forum is what they call it. And it's full of all kinds of fringe Mormons who love Ezra Taft Benson and Clive and Bundy and, you know, pretty much all these other people.And they've been very angry about particularly lately about COVID and vaccines, which the mainstream LDS church has actually been very positive about those things. And Utah, as you, as you mentioned in our preshow chat, was one of the, the highest vaccinated states because but yeah, I guess apparently not Idaho.Is that right?KELLEY: Not [00:19:30] so much Idaho. No, it's funny because the, the mainstream. Mormon political establishment Butch Otter the current governor Brad Little, whose name isn't nearly as much fun, they tend to be pretty reasonable. And it's bizarre, actually, just, I didn't know until talking to you that I, that there is this.More radical Mormon subculture here. And I didn't even notice it. Although I give it a moment of thought then yeah, sure. Ammon and his followers. But when I think of Idaho Mormons, I tend to think of the respectable right-wing Republicans who make up one of the two major parties here. The other being the batshit lunatics from Northern Idaho.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well it's true. And then like that was yeah, it's, you know, Mormonism really is kind of the Republican party in miniature. In that it's made of, you know, businesspeople who just want to make money, it's made of people who just want to sing the hymns in church. And then it's made of people who are completely f*****g nuts, who hate everyone else.KELLEY: So it's diversity is what it is.SHEFFIELD: That's right. That's right. Yeah, and, and I guess, you know, the, the people that are completely nuts, though, they have been really getting agitated lately with all of [00:21:00] this with especially with the COVID pandemic. And so the right wing in Idaho has been growing particularly agitated because of the pandemic and vaccines and other things like that recently, but One of the other things that they've been interested in is the idea of Greater Idaho.Tell us about Greater Idaho.KELLEY: Greater Idaho is the brainchild of this guy in Oregon named Mike McCarter, who thinks that it would be a really terrific idea for the right-wing counties. Of Oregon and maybe a few in Washington to join up with Idaho and become a new state. It would be basically everything from anything outside the influence of the Portland and Eugene areas in Oregon would join with Idaho, and then we'd have one big right wing state that would have basically the they think it would be an advantage because there wouldn't really be any change in Congress because greater Idaho would still just have two right wing senators.And Oregon would, what was left of Oregon would still have its Democrats. And they've actually held nonbinding referendums in something like 10. Counties where it has passed[00:22:30] which basically doesn't mean anything because the legislatures of both Idaho and Oregon would have to sign off on it.Then Congress would end then the president would. So it's not really going to happen, but it is, it's, it's a brainchild is a favorite idea of some right-wing monitors. They also think that it's important to prevent Boise from ever getting. Enough electoral power that it becomes something like Portland.So if you bring in all the right wingers from Oregon and Washington into this one state, then there's no chance that the state Capitol will ever be able to outvote them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's true. And then, and I'm trying to remember, I don't think they've done a vote, any votes in Washington.Have they?KELLEY: I don't believe so. I, I haven't actually kept up with that. I do know that a few years ago in,SHEFFIELD: Oh, and I guess some of them and some people are talking about. Some California counties as well.KELLEY: Oh, right, right. Yeah. There are some people who also, also want to include some of the counties in Northern California.Basically that would be the, this would override the state of, what is it that they wanted to call it?SHEFFIELD: Jefferson.KELLEY: Jefferson. Yes. Yes. This is an alternative to Jefferson. That would be even bigger. Yeah. Bigger [00:24:00] and bigger and crazier.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, oh, and, but, and if I'm, and they also don't they're so trying to make these other counties be part of Idaho, but then also they don't seem to have a plan for paying for the governmental structures that are owned.KELLEY: They wouldn't need to because it would be small government, and everyone would take care of the homes.SHEFFIELD: Ah, yes. Yeah. Like the hospitals, nobody would use those. And schools. No one would use themKELLEY: There wouldn't be enough of a taxpayer base to pay for the basics. Like, and they could all homes against Russia. I'm not against Russia against Canada. Probably.SHEFFIELD: Well, there is a Moscow, Idaho, right? Now that now that I think about it, which, and actually they've got some great wine over there.I have had some over there. It's an excellent place for wine. Yeah. And so, but it's, you know, it's like. It's just like this, this prolonged fantasy.KELLEY: That's all it is. It is never going to happen. And yet they really think it's a neat idea. So there will be, there will continue to be referenda and it will continue to do nothing.Even when they met with some right-wing members of the Idaho legislature a couple of years ago, the most that the Idaho people would say was. Well, that's interesting.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and as I [00:25:30] understand just this year there was a resolution in February to discuss the idea. It wasn't even a discussion.It was literally, can we have the discussion? And they said yes. And then they didn't do it.KELLEY: Well, they're too busy banning books and outlawing trans people.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and actually let's, let's talk about that. So yeah, books, books have become suddenly very controversial in Idaho.KELLEY: As with everywhere else, as with everywhere else.Yeah, the, the cultural wars are running hot as ever here in the Boise area, fortunately it's gone fairly well. There was an attempt to I was the library board, as I recall, and it went nowhere in not in Boise, but in nearby Nampa or Meridian. I think it was Meridian. When there was a library board meeting that one group of crazies wanted to storm everyone else heard about it and outnumbered them 10 to 1.So at least in the same part of Idaho libraries are safe, but in other parts of the state there have been a couple of libraries that were shut down because there was just no more funding or no one to work at them. So yeah, it's, it's very sad. And the legislature [00:27:00] last year passed a couple of absolutely crazy bills in the house that fortunately went nowhere in the Senate because the Senate so far is still tends to have more of the pro-business normal Republicans, rather than the crazies.But, but this year they, they did manage to do the trans the transgender excuse me, the gender affirming healthcare ban which is just awful they also passed that bizarre bill outlawing travel to Oregon or other States to get an abortion. So people could be put in jail, not for crossing the state line, but for traveling toward.Oregon or Washington to get an abortion with a minor who wasn't their own child in the car. So a parent wouldn't be arrested, but an aunt could.And it was signed by Brad Little, who, despite being one of the more. Sane, comparatively conservative Republicans knows that he's got the crazies always looking for a chance to go after him.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's true. [00:28:30] And I mean, it's when you think about it, just to compare the Democrats, I mean, in Idaho, you, you said, you know, nothing about the democratic politics in Idaho because we never hear from them.KELLEY: Exactly. It's, it's true. I mean, we, there are definitely. Democrats who are very good, especially in the Boise area and they do well, they have their voice in the legislature, and they have managed to keep some sanity in the place.But as far as being any kind of a counterweight to the crazies, I don't know what they would do frankly, because there's just not enough of us.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, because I mean, the Boise metro area has about 750, 000 people and Idaho has a lot more than that. And, but you know what though, I mean, I think it is, it's worth pointing out that a lot of this craziness probably does—I mean, you were saying that it does, they're trying to counteract that they believe a lot of people have moved into the Business and Berkeley section of Idaho and they're trying to do something to sort of disenfranchise them.KELLEY: We aren't quite to the point of where was, Oh of, of Texas [00:30:00] where they took away the elections board from the biggest County out for, for Houston.Yeah. They just said, nope, you can't have your own elections board anymore.SHEFFIELD: But you know, they're thinking about it. Yeah. And you know, and, but I mean, I guess, you know, nationally probably the, the only Democrat that from Idaho that anyone had ever heard of. And, and this is just barely, it's Paulette Jordan who ran for governor in 2018, and I guess she ran for Senate in 2020 no idea what she's doing nowadays, though.KELLEY: Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. It's. A, almost a suicide run for an Idaho, for an Idaho Democrat to run for major office. I don't know when our last, let's see, I can't recall when we last had a statewide Democrat in a major office.SHEFFIELD: I guess what Frank Church?KELLEY: Well, right. Frank Church was certainly the last Senator from Idaho.We did have a Democrat who was elected, I think for one term after, after, boy, we had a one term Democrat within the last 10 years in one of the two congressional districts but lost again. You know, former Idaho representative Raul Labrador, who is now [00:31:30] the state attorney general. It's crazies everywhere.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the big progenitors of that craziness is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, right?KELLEY: They are very big. They said a lot of they managed to have an outsized voice in Idaho politics. They were central to the protests against COVID lockdowns. Not that we ever actually had them against any kind of reaction to COVID against masks, against any kind of public health orders.They and Ammon Bundy did things like protesting outside the home of a. Police officer who arrested someone for violating the lockdown nuts. There was a public burning of masks on the steps of the Idaho Capitol. So that was a good use of fire and plastic. And the Freedom Foundation is they just have all sorts of.Wonderful ideas about how we can make Idaho more right wing. They have a, an annual freedom index that tells you which members of the legislature are sufficiently to the right. They're very involved in the school censorship business and their blog.Most recently [00:33:00] is running articles about great Americans during June because the Democrats are doing something else during June. They won't even name pride. Oh, this is their little joke. It's called pride in America. So they have promo Elon Musk.And Charles Lindbergh, the article on Charles Lindbergh talks about what a great patriot was he was and what a great aviator doesn't have one word about the anti semitism or the America first thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, he helped us stay out of World War Two until it was unavoidable. And then he was a great patriot during the war.Nothing about his medal from Hitler. Cause why would you mention that? It's not like we have, not like there's anything wrong with being a Nazi.SHEFFIELD: No, no, there's, according to them, there is not. And it's just a difference of opinion. You know, why would you, why would you cancel someone for being a Nazi? Oh, right. And I guess there's, you guys also had some people trying to start up a Patriot Front group up in Coeur d'Alene that I guess they got arrested recently.KELLEY: Oh, right. Yeah. They, it wasn't that they were, were running one, but, but yeah, they, they came in from all around the West and tried to March at a pride parade last year.I'm not sure whether they were armed with anything more than, you know, clubs and, [00:34:30] and the usual armor and, and shields. But yeah, they were certainly a nasty group and most of them were convicted. And the fun thing of course, is that. Now on Elon's Twitter, you'll be told that if you mention the Patriot Front, you'll be told, Oh, wait, no, they're just an FBI front group.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I've seen people say that and I've asked people that and according to them, it's obvious that they are. It's just obvious they are, yeah. Because they have clean clothes and uniforms, and that makes them FBI.KELLEY: That must be it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well and it's like well, hey, I guess you never heard of Mormons, But you know and I don't know but you know, I have to say though I do still feel like though that I mean, you know, we, we discussed Paulette Jordan, you know, earlier in the episode that I mean, she did a lot better than a Democrat has for governor in quite some time. And you know, a lot of people are moving to Idaho to the.Voicing area and in Sun Valley. And I mean, you know, is this just do these people see the writing on the wall for themselves? Do you think?KELLEY: Well, it's hard to say. I think that. So far, Idaho has been lucky in having more sane people than crazies. Going back to the Aryan nations there [00:36:00] were certainly Nazis there, but there was also a very, very strong pushback from the Corn Lane community.You still see bumper stickers that say Idaho is too great for hate. In fact, in Boise, we now have down by the library, we have an Anne Frank memorial that was put up by people who were disgusted by the reputation that Idaho got from the Aryan nations. So., I like, I, without sounding like a Pollyanna, I like to think that at some point sanity will prevail, but we're going to go through some stuff.Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, there is a group out there called reclaim Idaho. Have you ever heard of those guys?KELLEY: I don't know. There's a Twitter group called the Idaho 98% that I certainly like the name of that does what it can to oppose the crazies out there, or at least to point out that they are spouting nonsense.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I think you know probably what's going to have to happen is that you know, it’s like People who live in more progressive parts of the country. I think it's hard for them to really grasp the dilemma that progressives in these reds in red states have is that [00:37:30] you know, you the national party has--KELLEY: Why don't they just move?SHEFFIELD: Yeah.KELLEY: I live here. I'm an American!SHEFFIELD: I have the right to live where I want to live, or I have to live where my job is, you know?KELLEY: Right.SHEFFIELD: Or whatever it is. Or my, where my family is or whatever. And the national Democratic Party did really, and this is part of why I'm doing this series, is that the national Democratic Party for a brief few years when Howard Dean was the chairman, actually had a 50-state strategy. But once Obama was able to come in and put his own people in, he was like, okay, you know We don't need that because I can win without this stuff. Let's just save our money guys And let's not do that.And so as a result, I mean, you know a lot of Democrats and red states feel like no one gives a s**t about is that, you think that's a fair assessment?It feels that way sometimes. I don't know about missing out on national attention, but although that is reality,A lot of it comes to, I think that there was this, so there was a book that came out it was around the time that Obama first came on the scene, it was called The Emerging Democratic Majority and the thesis of the book, people only took the first half of the thesis. The thesis of the book was, if Democrats can take their existing electorate and then [00:39:00] add on a new group of people who are college educated and are, you know, Hispanic or Asian who are immigrating in, then they'll have a majority. But. They basically, the National Democratic Party, especially under Hillary Clinton they basically kind of lopped off that first part of keeping the existing constituency.And they're like, hey, well, we got, we have the emerging majority here. Let's go for it, guys. We were let's put all our money into the presidential races. I mean, I think that might be part of it also is that. You know, they were shut out. The Democrats were shut out of the presidency for, for, for 12 years during Reagan and Bush and Bush 41.And they, I think to some degree it kind of made them miss their priorities that they took Congress for granted. But they, and so they became obsessed with the presidency and kind of lost the--KELLEY: I absolutely agree with that. And also the, the left has, the Democrats, the left have simply fallen down on what the right was so good at going back to when I was in college when the right was making sure that there were right wing people running for school boards and for local county officials.And you just don't see that kind of organizational effort on the ground [00:40:30] from Democrats. We should be doing the school boards. We need to be doing state legislatures at every level, not just every four years saying, okay, let's elect a president. Cause we can probably do that, but without the building, the party building that goes on with the lower-level efforts, you just don't have, Oh God, I'm going to use a sports metaphor: You don't have a bench.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it's that also, and it's that, you know, they're missing the crucial aspect of the American electoral system, which is that, you know, it's deliberately. Like, I always hear people complain about, Oh, the Electoral College is unfair. The Senate is unfair. And it's like, guys, we've kind of been that way for more than 200 years.So, so, you can, you can complain about that. And you can complain about, you know, various Senator is not doing what you want, or you can try to do something about it. And, you know, and I guess to some degree, you know, the, the greater Idaho fantasy of, of the Western right wing is, it's almost like there's a left-wing version of that.And that's, you know, let's, we're going to expand the Senate. We're going to have Puerto Rico as DC as a state, and we're going to break up California, and we're going to do this and that. And it's like, okay. When are you going to get the power to do this ?KELLEY: Right, right, [00:42:00] exactly.SHEFFIELD: Who's going to give it to you?KELLEY: Exactly.SHEFFIELD: The other thing though about it is that, you know, so the American political system is not just, you know, the Senate's biased, obviously, for, for smaller population states but also, you know, just the fact that, I mean, you know, people on the, on the left talk about how.The presidential system should be about people rather than land, right? You know, you see those maps of you know, look at all this land that voted for Republicans. And it's like, that still does actually matter. That, you know, if you--KELLEY: It's what we've got.SHEFFIELD: It's what?KELLEY: It's what we've got.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.KELLEY: And, you know, we're not going to, to change that anytime soon.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's, it's also that you can't like, let's say you do somehow, let's say there is enough population shifting such that, you know, the, the blue states quote unquote, end up to having a permanent house and presidential majority. It's going to be problematic that you're creating a country that is just so incredibly geographically polarized.And it's, and not just for the, for the sake of national unity in the, that the Senate's not going to be that way, number one. And then number two, you're creating a huge problem for people who do live in urban areas like Boise or like, let's say Albuquerque, Mexico, or, you know, Texas Democrats. And [00:43:30] you can't just wave them one and say, Oh, well, you know, we'll have a national divorce.And that's like, guys, you're literally probably, you know, consigning a third of the people who you consider your political compatriots.KELLEY: Exactly.SHEFFIELD: You're consigning them to a confederacy. That that's what you're going to do.KELLEY: No, thank you.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.KELLEY: It's not that we it's not that we need to redo secession and let that go for, we need to do reconstruction 2. 0 and do it right. Although how we do that, I don't know.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, but it, you can't start it until you start talking about it.KELLEY: Right, right.SHEFFIELD: And that's just, you know, and, and because I mean, cause that, that is, it's actually an opportunity when you think about it. Because, you know, the, the Republican party in these different states.And not just the national party, but at the state level you know, even, I mean, here in California where I live, I mean, the Republican party here is nuts. Like they're insane. Like they're actually probably more insane than the national Republican party. And you know, so, but especially in red states where the, you know, people, the majority of people had been voting like in Idaho, I, I think since the nineties for, for actually no, since LBJ, I think he was the last Democrat to win Idaho in the presidential election. You know, like, so you've had one party rule. In many states in the country for [00:45:00] decades.And what has it gotten people, you know, it hasn't, it, there's all kinds of problems and, and it there's, you should think of that as an opportunity if you're a progressive to come in and help people and say, look, you have been abandoned, like that's, that's the thing people don't get about, about Trump and the appeal of Trump is that the reason why he has such loyalty from people is because Republicans abandoned these people.And so, and you know, he doesn't really care about them, but at least he pretends to.KELLEY: Right, right.SHEFFIELD: And they, and they love him for that.KELLEY: He's given up so much for them!SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's how they feel. But at least he's acknowledging that they exist. And that's kind of hard to say that the national Democrats have really done that. I mean, when you look at where they put their ad dollars and, and their campaign cash.Well, so we're coming up to the end here. And I think we've hopefully covered all the, all the major points here and other Idahoans will have to chime in if we, if they think we missed anything, but I mean, do you have any, any parting thoughts for, for the audience as we wrap it up here?KELLEY: When you think about the polarization in the red states and the lunacy, remember that there is never a 100% vote in any of these red states. In Idaho, [00:46:30] Democrats do get 20 and 30% of the vote. That's the same in other red states too, and we can't just forget the people, the, the, the progressives in the red states.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. No, I think that's a good point. Good point. All right, so you are--KELLEY: Oh and read Wonkette. You should definitely read Wonkette.com. That's a...SHEFFIELD: Yes. There we go. Yes. W O N K E T T E.KELLEY: Yes, dot com.SHEFFIELD: For those who are listening. All right. And then I guess you are at least until it falls apart, you're on Twitter over at DoktorZoom. That's with a K though, not with a C. So people can follow you on there as well.All right Marty Kelley, thanks for being on Theory of Change.KELLEY: Well, thank you very much.SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for watching or reading or listening. And you can go to theoryofchange.show to get all the other episodes. And if you're a paid subscriber, you can get full access to video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And I do appreciate everybody who supports the show like that.We're not subsidized by billionaires or universities or anything like that. No, we're made possible by people like you. And so please do share the show as well. And if you could subscribe financially, that definitely is appreciated as well.But please do tell your friends and family about the show and what we're doing here. I do [00:48:00] appreciate it very much. I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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

Ever since the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the Republican party has been in a radicalization loop in which successive generations of leaders overthrew their predecessors by claiming they were not reactionary enough. But since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Republican radicalization has increased at a level never before seen.And there’s a reason for this. Older, white fundamentalist Christians over 50 years old are the overwhelming majority of Republican voters. According to a recent Pew Research survey, 70% of people who voted Republican in 2022 were older than 49 years of age. Unfortunately for Republicans, their reliable core of loyal voters is slowly dying off and the number of people who aren’t religious has increased dramatically since the internet became commonplace.Trump and other Republican leaders have realized the only way they can win elections without having to become more moderate is to whip fundamentalist Christians into a frenzy by merging DC Republican rhetoric with the previously fringe movement of QAnon, which is itself an outgrowth of the “Satanic Panic” that started in the 1970s and has never really stopped, even though it faded away from mainstream media in the 90s.As you’ll see in today’s episode, right-wing media figures are telling their fan bases that progressives and transgender people are literally possessed by demons. The rhetoric we’ll be playing today is so extreme and so disturbing that it’s not often covered in mainstream media, which is a problem of its own as well.Joining me to talk about all of these very concerning media and political developments is Julie Millican, she is a vice president at Media Matters for America where she’s worked for more than 15 years. Currently she oversees partner programs and media accountability efforts.Also here today is Olivia Little, who is also at Media Matters as a senior investigative researcher. She’s written about many different right-wing media figures and most recently has been doing some incredible research about the new Christian extremist group that calls itself Moms for Liberty.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thank you for being here today, ladies.OLIVIA LITTLE: Thank you.JULIE MILLICAN: Yeah. Thank you.SHEFFIELD: All right. So, let's just start off with you, Julie, you've been looking at right-wing media for 15 years. Things have gotten worse in recent years. These fringe figures, well, formerly fringe figures, were always there at the margins. Is that right?MILLICAN: Yes, that's definitely right. Yeah. Many years ago during the Obama administration, for instance, you would start to see some inklings of these more fringe figures or just internet figures, internet websites, like the Gateway Pundit, for instance, starting to have a little bit more influence over how the conservative media infrastructure at large was talking about issues.We saw back then that this type of commentary was intentionally kept in the background, but that it was obviously gaining some influence and in certain circles what we saw at the time was say, some early inklings of conspiracy theories that were being floated around Barack Obama's birth certificate, for [00:04:30] instance, is one of the first instances that I saw some of these conversations that were happening in more fringe communities start to be a little bit more embraced by more traditional media outlets on the right as well as the Republican infrastructure as a whole.It's where Donald Trump actually was able to gain a foothold. I think a lot of people maybe aren't aware of the fact that he used to have a weekly call-in segment on Fox and Friends which is Fox News's morning talk show. And he would call in every week, talking about the birth certificate.He at one point, if I'm remembering correctly, had a bounty out for it. He was going to pay people to find his original birth certificate, but this was something that was really embraced the fringes and then started to kind of build a little bit of momentum, I think for where we.See both the media infrastructure and the Republican Party today. A lot of it has been fueled by the increased prominence of social media. Particularly as a news outlet, it is allowed for more and more filter bubbles to form people to get pushed to more and more extreme content. And what this is kind of ultimately led to the Trump presidency that was then staffed by the very people who had been pushing some of the more extreme elements before. And then it fully became off to the races from there. Just like a race to the bottom, both within the right-wing media infrastructure and the Republican political apparatus that followed it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's also the case Olivia, that, the Republican, Donald Trump in [00:06:00] particular, his White House and political advisors, they saw when the QAnon movement began, they saw that as a useful tool for them and really kind of, tried to speak in code to it over the years.And, it's gradually become much more prevalent in, in their rhetoric. Would you say that?LITTLE: Okay. Oh, absolutely. They understand that it appeals to the masses and it's sort of this easy explanation for a complex problem. So of course they're embracing it because it's useful.MILLICAN: Yeah, to jump in if you don't mind it's one of those things going back to your point about the satanic panic. It's always about the children, right? It is something that the right has. Successfully weaponized for decades. And it's appealing to people because nobody wants to hear about children being harmed.Everybody wants to protect children from being harmed. And it's not, it's a gateway, I think, to kind of push people into more extreme positions. Because once you get them, I'm bored with the fact that or this belief that there's these global elite somewhere that are, in cahoots to harm children, like you can then start pointing the fingers at well, it's these groups of people and they're the ones that are doing it.And they're not just doing that. They're doing all of these other terrible things. And it's a way to really push people to both embrace a political ideology that they may not have been involved with. previously. But also just to embrace, more and more extreme beliefs and [00:07:30] more and more extreme rhetoric and action that comes from that.SHEFFIELD: Well, it's also that, the QAnon movement is kind of the final form of a lot of this Christian right rhetoric that we had seen earlier in Republican politics. And that it's easy to get people to focus on these fantastical, phantasmagoric conspiracies and Satan, imaginary stuff.The way that they're doing things, currently with QAnon and some of this stuff is a continuation of how things were—I mean, like you look at Pat Robertson, he kind of really got this started in Republican politics by mainstreaming things like the New World Order conspiracy theory. He actually wrote a book by that title and was trying to push this extreme paranoia and as he got older and had more media under his own control, the mainstream media kind of forgot some of those aspects of him.But things have just gotten so much worse in terms of the level of extremism that you see in large-scale Republican and right-wing media outlets.So we've got a bunch of different clips here to get through. I want to get started with some of those. Basically the discussion here, we're going to organize it around these packages of clips. And what I want the audience to see in this first package is that Republican political elites, many of whom are not even religious themselves, necessarily, or [00:09:00] Christians for that matter, basically, they're telling the right-wing voter base and evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Christians, that there is a war against them. And that they need to think of themselves as at war with modernity. And they actually use that verbiage, you'll see in one of the figures here.So the first one is an opening prayer that was given at the recent Moms for Liberty convention. And we'll play that. And then Olivia, maybe you can give us some more details on Moms for Liberty and what they're up to.(Begin clip)PAT BLACKBURN, Moms for Liberty: We have one father, and he's our God. He has called each of us here for such a time as this.Nothing you've experienced this week has been a coincidence. I don't believe in coincidences. Because for months, the leadership team at Moms for Liberty met every morning at 9:15 in the morning for our daily fortification. We read scripture and we pray. And we gave this summit to God, and we said, God, you make it yours. And so [00:10:30] we have had a wonderful week. And no matter what our enemy tried to do to stop us, we've had a very successful summit. (Cut in video)Lord, we celebrate every win and every success because you gave it to us. And we thank you.And so some of us are going carry home some awards tonight, but most importantly, each and every one of us are in this because you called us, and because we're being a willing vessel.So that we can walk in the spiritual walk that you would have us to walk in. And so our rewards are truly laid up in heaven. And no one and nothing can take that away.(End clip)SHEFFIELD: Tell us about Moms for Liberty, Olivia. How did they get started? What were their initial issues and what have they kind of gravitated toward and are known for today?LITTLE: Right. So Moms for Liberty began in early 2021 in Florida. And they initially went all in on. Like anti covid mitigation policies. And they did that in order to cast this sort of like wide net and recruit new followers in a way that they knew wouldn't work if they went all in on like critical race theory.Because they initially tried to, you go back on their archives you'll see that they tried to fundraise based off of anti-CRT advocacy [00:12:00] and they tried to, they had information pages about CRT and but so, so from there they shifted, went all in on anti-COVID mitigation policies.And once those policies, like masks lifted and once schools were reopening, they did a 180 and they went back pursuing anti-CRT advocacy, anti-LGBT advocacy, and they made that pivot, but they were able to channel this parental frustration about the pandemic into pushing their own political agenda that wouldn't have happened without the pandemic.So they really took advantage of parental frustrations during COVID to push their own agenda. And so from there, they grew, they started in Florida in early 2021 and really didn't have many followers or like much of a structure. But early on, we see that they had massive right wing media support and massive right wing political support as well.And they have since moved across the country with the help of these right-wing politicians and right-wing media. They moved across the country harassing or strategically harassing school boards and teachers throughout the country and, now I was just at their summit in Philadelphia.But we've seen a very consistent increase in radicalization or open extremism from the group that at first, they tried to at least mask it, but now it's completely mask-off [00:13:30] in terms of how extreme the group has become.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It was worth talking about some of the rhetoric that was in that prayer, specifically in the context for it.So it was at the recent conference that they had, which you attended and reported from. And the prayer was given at their award ceremony on the final night of the conference. The name of the awards were called “For Such a Time as This.”And that phrase might not mean anything to most people, but in the fundamentalist Christian circles in the United States, it is a very important meme in right-wing Christian circles.It refers to a verse in the story of Esther in the Hebrew Bible in which a character tells Esther, who was this Jewish woman who was captured along with many other Jews and made to become the sex slave of this foreign ruler. And her Jewish friend tells her, ‘maybe God has raised you up for such a time as this.’And in the right-wing evangelical culture, they've kind of made that their mantra that they are God's personal servants. And you saw that also in the prayer that, God's, her repeatedly saying, God has designated us. And she used the phrase again “for such a time as this.”I mean, this is some rhetoric I think that maybe a lot of times, Julie, maybe you can jump in about the fact that a lot of mainstream reporters don't seem to be aware of a lot of these code words that are being used?MILLICAN: Yeah, I would say that's right. If they are aware of it, it's [00:15:00] certainly not being included in the coverage. I don't think the context of the religious extremism that's underlying a lot of the advocacy that we're seeing on the right these days is really being spelled out to people.I don't know, sometimes it seems like there's an aspect of it where the media is just generally reluctant to talk about religious extremism, especially when it comes to Christianity, especially when it comes to religious extremism on the right, they certainly didn't have a problem talking about religious extremism when it was coming from other religious groups.And we see the same type of reluctance when it comes to talking about acts of terror that are committed by people on the right or like that are inspired by issues on the right that not being described as acts of terrorism, whereas they would have been if they were religiously motivated from Islam, for instance.So I think that there has been this general reluctance to either see the signs or at least contextualize the signs to a more mainstream audience. That is doing a disservice to people fully kind of understanding, the different codes that are being spoken, but also, it's not like we're really so much in code anymore.I mean, pretty explicitly embracing a very right wing and work stream that I think, most would realize version of Christianity these days than they used to in the past. Like Fox News, for instance, I mean, their Fox Nation platform has an entire prayer show. They've had segments on their weekend [00:16:30] programming.They have a Faith and Friends concert series that was sponsored by the Museum for the Bible. They have on Fox Business; they'll sell airtime to like Christian nationalist pastors to give sermons on the weekends.They've been pretty open, I think, in a way that I don't think you have to worry about being accused of being biased or anti-religion by reporting on what these people are actually saying and doing. But I do think that this aspect is being lost.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it is important for the people who are outside of that worldview to understand this is what's coming for you, especially if you are somebody who is LGBTQ, or somebody in your family or your friends who are, that these are people that are being directly viciously attacked, pretty much 24/7 by right wing media now and—MILLICAN: By demonic forces, as you would say. It's like they're literally being compared to demons. And it’s not just fringe people who are saying this, like we have Donald Trump himself, like regularly appears on the Victory Channel, for instance, as do many other mainstream Republican politicians.And this is a network that openly embraces Christian nationalism. And this is the type of thing that they have a plan for what they will do when they retake control of the government, and they're pretty open about it.And for some reason, this just doesn't get covered and people, broadly, I would say who don't live their [00:18:00] lives paying attention to what these right-wing figures are doing or don't live their lives surrounded by people who are more fundamentalist in their religious beliefs, they don't have any idea that this is going on, or that this exists. And it's just kind of happening right under everybody's nose.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that's right. And, and I think a lot of political reporters who came up before the Christian right was completely liberated by Trump, Julie, I think they may not know how right-wing media is so much more important and significant than progressive media is on the left. What do you think of that?MILLICAN: Oh, that's absolutely the case. First of all, the right-wing media infrastructure is just massive. It is enormous. It is extremely well funded, and it's extremely well-established. And they've also done a really good job in being able to take advantage of the opportunities that social media has presented, as far as being able to spread and shape a narrative.The right-wing media is particularly good at making a lot of noise around issues, and they are in lockstep in their messaging often and how they're talking about things and the things that they want people to be upset about. They spend a lot of time knowing first of all, that fear and anger drives engagement. And they play on that. They keep people angry. And they keep people fired up and that keeps people engaged and it keeps them motivated to want to act.And so I think that the right has spent decades, very successfully [00:19:30] building up an infrastructure that could take advantage of the fact that they have a very engaged base that may be smaller, it may be a smaller group, a portion of the population, but they're extremely engaged.They're extremely active, and they're very influenced by what they hear, and they don't trust anything that's coming outside of their circles. They very much are not going to trust information that's coming from a mainstream news source.They're certainly not going to trust anything that a liberal or a progressive or a Democrat has to say about anything. And so they are all listening to one very loud group speaking from the same hymn book, more or less. And that has a lot of influence on how people behave and act.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, for sure. And actually to illustrate that point, we're going to go into another clip. This one is featuring Charlie Kirk, who is the founder of Turning Point USA, which is this extremely well-funded, I think over a hundred million dollars across all of his organizations, group that targets young people for right-wing radicalization, particularly young Christians.(Begin video clips)CHARLIE KIRK, Turning Point USA president: What changed is that an outgrowth of modernity, and we're living in this postmodern, post-structuralist, everybody gets to decide their own truth for themselves. This social contagion that is spreading the country at a rapid pace that disguises itself as “transgenderism.”MICHAEL KNOWLES, Daily Wire host: This is yet another reminder that science is mostly fake, not, not that [00:21:00] scientism or the politicization of science or whatever other squishy language, the, the more I don't know, centrist kind of people want to grant, but the whole endeavor, the whole endeavor of the scientific revolution, the premise of which is that reality is fundamentally physical, that is flawed.It's not true. The modern scientific culture has given us certain nice things, but it's given us a lot of bad things as well.(End video clips)SHEFFIELD: So Charlie Kirk, he's basically telling his audience and we'll get into the other guy as well, who was there. So Charlie Kirk is telling his audience of, basically white evangelicals and hardcore Catholics that. They are at war with modernity, that everyone is out to get you.And then you saw in that second clip there Michael Knowles, who is a podcaster with another very well-funded organization, the Daily Wire telling his audience that science is fake.Olivia, you've written about some of these people over the years tell us about Charlie Kirk's group and the Daily Wire.LITTLE: Yeah, of course. So Charlie Kirk is behind Turning Point USA, which is a libertarian right-wing organization that is directly recruiting and trying to radicalize young people. It targets both students in college. They now have TPUSA [00:22:30] groups that are in high school as well.And the organization exists to create a next generation of right-wing radicals, essentially. It's an organization that promotes far right, right-wing indoctrination and, again, intentionally targets young people so that they're able to spread that message through the years.And then the Daily Wire is a conservative news outlet that Media Matters monitors as well, and the Daily Wire was started by Ben Shapiro, so the right-wing media outlet that has a number of shows that preach the same sort of sentiment of anti-science or culture war nonsense constantly to viewers.MILLICAN: Yeah. And to your point, they've increasingly embraced, especially over the last couple of years, Charlie Kirk has been bolstering his connections to faith leaders and have started to increasingly embrace a far-right Christian message. I mean, even if you look at his presentation, frankly, like when I watch that video, I'm struck by the fact that he just looks like he a televangelist, like he is—his tone and his presentation. Just all of that is very clearly nods to an audience that is primed to receive a message in this very specific way.And he's recognized that, and has taken advantage of that, I think, to build a bigger following.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and the other thing also about Turning Point is that they've been under a lot of pressure from the [00:24:00] even further right. From this guy named Nick Fuentes, who is an open Hitler admirer and self-proclaimed fascist who says that he wants to, basically, eliminate non-Christians from America and to drive out Jewish people seemingly, that had talked about maybe not directly about killing them, but hasn't said that was wrong or something that he would oppose.MILLICAN: And he calls for, yeah, he calls for a holy war all the time. So I mean—SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and he's targeted TPUSA because he knows that the people who are going to these conferences of Charlie Kirk, they actually are very susceptible to his type of message. The metaphor that I use for this process of what's happening here with the right is that as their numbers shrink, when something is evaporating, that it becomes more and more concentrated over time, even much more of the essence of that thing, but also in the worst possible way. And that's really what we're seeing.And in order to kind of counteract that, Kirk has become more and more extreme, much more Christian nationalist and apocalyptic in his rhetoric. What do you think about that Olivia? Do you agree with that analysis?LITTLE: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I think it also aligns with what we're seeing from a number of groups like TPUSA and Moms for Liberty collaborate often. They were a sponsor or one of the nonprofit sponsors at this past summit, but [00:25:30] in the same way, we're seeing this increased radicalization because actors on the right themselves are becoming more radical.They're keeping up with that or following lead to a point that we don't know where it's going to end because everyone is getting more radical and they're just following other right wing figures' lead. And that's both organizations and individuals.SHEFFIELD: Did you want to add anything on that, Julie, before we move on?MILLICAN: Sure. I would actually I think one of the things that I find interesting, but also disturbing about that trend is that it seems like it's really accelerated over the last couple of years, particularly since the pandemic. How quickly people have become radicalized and how quickly they then push these organizations and these movements and these figures to be further and further to the right.It's not this type of—it's not a slow creep to extremism. It's really fast and it's heading to a place where I don't think any of us really want to think about what the end-game is. Because it almost feels like there's no bottom because at one point, some of the stuff that Charlie Kirk is pushing now around, demons and satanic influences and stuff like that, would have not been considered something that would be embraced by a well-funded right wing organization and the political infrastructure that supports it.But now not only is it embraced, but he's chasing the lead of Nick Fuentes. Is that what's next? Is that what's on the horizon? Is there just going to, kind of [00:27:00] keep going down that path because they feel like they are increasingly responding to a base that's more and more radicalized, and so they have to continue to go that to maintain their power and influence.I think the trend that we're looking at is really disturbing, and it's really disturbing how quickly everything seems to be moving in that direction.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And to that end we've got another package of clips here that show them talking explicitly about some of these demonic things that they're telling people.And it's easy for somebody, if you're not superstitious yourself, to look at this and just be like: ‘Oh, that's so absurd. It's so stupid. No one could believe that stuff.’ And you need to realize that's wrong. A lot of people believe this stuff. And it's really concerning that that is the case.(Begin video clips)ALEX JONES, Infowars owner: But in this world, we're told men that who dress like women are women, and that women should act like men, and that really masculine men, that are real men, are a bad commodity.And that's because an alien off-world force, it's spiritual, it's interdimensional. It has a transmission. It has a spirit, but it also has agents, aliens, demons. And they are working against us around the clock because they know we are about to go from our embryonic level to birthing into the next level. [00:28:30]ERIC METAXAS, right-wing radio host: You were talking about something extraordinary, and I just love you to touch on, on that subject, because—ROGER STONE, Republican consultant: True.METAXAS:—it's, it's at least very interesting.STONE: I think that there has, that, that a, a portal, a demonic portal opened above the White House around the time that the Bidens moved in. This was brought to my attention by a Christian who lives in North Florida who sent me a bunch of photographs and a bunch of documents and also some notations in the in the Bible about portals.MICHAEL KNOWLES: Isn't it odd how depictions of demons, how depictions of weird, ghoulish, devilish, demonic figures are always androgynous? They're never super-duper hypermasculine chads. They're never beautiful, truly gorgeous women with classical proportions and representations of beauty. They're always androgynous. They're always trans.And the reason for that is that the devil hates human beings. And sexual difference is at the, basically at the very core of human nature. The difference between man and woman, the complementarity of man and woman, is right there at the heart of human nature. And the devil hates humanity, and so he tries to cut away at the very core of humanity.CHARLIE KIRK: Witchcraft and the occult is a real thing.JACK HIBBS, far-right pastor and political activist: Yeah.KIRK: And there are portals to darkness, and you have to be vigilant about this. [00:30:00] And that I believe that there are leaders—HIBBS: Wait, they made fun of that?KIRK: Oh, the mockery, Jack! ‘Who are you to say all that?’ Because, well, it's kind of interesting, they make fun of it because no one actually wants to say that out loud that we're in the midst of the high, most consequential spiritual war, I think—HIBBS: Absolutely!KIRK: Of a millennia, right? No one wants to say that out loud.(End video clips)SHEFFIELD: So, in that first clip, these people are telling their audience that trans people are demons. And it's almost unbelievable. Julie, when you have talked to people outside of work about some of these things, do they find it hard to believe that these things are being said in American politics by major figures?MILLICAN: It depends on who I'm talking to. I come from a background where I actually have family members who have gone down the Christian nationalist path and tend to espouse very similar things.But I also have people who have no exposure to any of this in my life. And then for them, it's absolutely just mind-blowing. They think it's a joke. They think nobody seriously, actually says this. And anybody who does say this is just in a frenzy. And anybody who would be listening to them would obviously see that this is nonsense.And it's just not true. I mean, there is, there's an audience for this. There's a lot of people who believe in this. Spiritual warfare has become an extremely [00:31:30] common talking point among mainstream right-wing political figures and right-wing media figures. As I mentioned before—SHEFFIELD: And what is, what is spiritual warfare?MILLICAN: It depends on again, who you're talking to or whose definition of it is, but essentially there is this battle for your soul and the soul of humanity, the soul of America, because it's often very much framed around this idea that we are agents of God. We have been put here. God has given us the power.Government does not have the ability to control. We are fighting these satanic forces of evil who are putting the LGBT community and on the map who are, supportive of abortion rates who are not, traditional women who are not at home, et cetera. Like there is this a spiritual battle for your soul and the soul of America that these people are waging every day, or they see evidence of this every single day. And that is what's driving a lot of the political conversation. It's also driving a lot of the actions that we see. I think Olivia could speak to some of this, even just how it manifests itself on a very local level.Moms for Liberty has adopted a lot of this kind of spiritual battle framework in their messaging. And you would See this come up, even when people were going to their local school boards to protest mask mandates, even you would hear them invoking God in this and saying, this is, you don't have the right, it's just God's will and God would never do this and all this stuff is fake.So I think Olivia could speak to some of like how this plays out on the ground. But it's very much become an extremely [00:33:00] mainstream position within the right and way of rallying their base and their community.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and actually you gave a perfect segue to the clip the next part of the clip here that I'm going to play, which is from a Moms for Liberty convention speaker.(Begin video clip)KRISANNE HALL: I'll tell you why this is happening. Satan hates the image of God stamped on every human being. Therefore, Satan hates women because women bring forth the image of God.Now we shouldn't be surprised by this, whether it be our Christian, our Jewish brothers and sisters, because the Bible tells us this is how it will be! Genesis 3:15 reads: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman. Between thy seed and her seed, it shall bruise thy head and [thou] shall bruise his heel.”We are not only bringing forth the image of God, Satan knows it's through us that comes his ultimate destruction!(End video clip)SHEFFIELD: So Olivia, who was this woman that was in the clip there?LITTLE: Yeah, so that's [00:34:30] KrisAnne Hall who is a far-right Christian nationalist, she was speaking at one of the general sessions at the Moms for Liberty Summit in Philadelphia, but her rhetoric was sort of mimicked by other speakers at the event.As you heard, both by her and the video we watched prior to that these people are positioning their opposition as satanic, right? So anyone or anything that is opposed to them, or their ideology is satanic. And what they're also doing in that is positioning the members themselves as divine, as carrying out God's will and creating this sort of war of good versus evil and trying to convince these individuals that they're on the side of God and godliness.And again, in the case of Moms for Liberty. They have framed public schools as something evil. Like there's some evil demonic force in schools that's trying to corrupt your children. And by doing that, they're not only scaring parents, but they're mobilizing them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's important also to note that Fox News also is involved with this radicalization as well. Like these are not just, internet people or podcasters or whatever.These are Fox News figures. And we saw that Jesse Waters, who is now the centerpiece of the Fox primetime lineup is pushing these demonic war allegations and whatnot.(Begin video clip)JESSE WATTERS, Fox News Channel host: So parents already have to deal with high crime and inflation and now they have to worry about demonic teachers turning their classroom into a drag show? [00:36:00] You'd think Biden, who's almost 80, would know better. But he doesn't. Maybe that's why they call him "Creepy Joe."SHEFFIELD: But also, you have Tucker Carlson. He was probably the biggest proponent of satanic panic rhetoric before he was fired at Fox.(Begin video clip)TUCKER CARLSON, former Fox News Channel host: The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy. (Cut in clip)Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself. We can change the identity we were born with; they will tell you with wild-eyed certainty. Christians can never agree with this statement because these are powers they believe God alone possesses. That unwillingness to agree, that failure to acknowledge a trans person's dominion over nature incites and enrages some in the trans community.People who believe they're God can't stand to be reminded that they're not. So Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other. One side is likely to draw blood before the other side. Yesterday's massacre happened because of a deranged and demonic ideology that is infecting this country with the encouragement of people like Joe Biden.(End video clip)SHEFFIELD: But you know, other people out there, Harris Faulkner has been who filled the spot for him a little bit. She kind of copied a lot of his rhetoric as well. You want to talk about the [00:37:30] role of Fox in this a little bit, Julie?MILLICAN: Sure, I'd be happy to. So Fox has had a longstanding narrative around. They like to push this idea that their viewers are being persecuted in some way.And that all these liberal forces are out to get them, et cetera. And that has really been translated into this like Christian persecution narrative. Like Christians are being discriminated against the people. They're the ones that are losing their first amendment rates.When other marginalized communities gain rights that they don't think they should have access to gay marriage, for instance, equality under the law, et cetera everything always goes back to well, my religious freedom should Trump, X, Y, Z. And that it's really Christians who are being persecuted against.So when you have that backdrop, this is not a new narrative on Fox. This is a narrative that Fox has been pushing for quite some time, but like everything else has just become more blatant and more extreme and more embracing of a. far right religious ideology. You have the Tucker Carlson's, when he was at his peak, with millions and millions of viewers every night pushing this idea that, transgender people are the work of the devil and that there is, Liberals are demons and like everything that has been framed in this way that anybody to Olivia's point earlier, who is in opposition to you is not on the side of God and therefore you only have to answer to God.I think the kind of troubling part about this embrace as well is that there, there is no room for dissent within the right [00:39:00] around some of this rhetoric. And I think you could probably speak to that a little bit as well, based off of your own background and experiences, but it feels that if you try to challenge the religiosity and the message that they're sending and how extreme it has gotten, you're against God at that point. And you're part of the problem and you've been corrupted by the devil. And like, when you don't have the ability to have open and honest conversations about what's happening, it drives the conversation even further to the extreme, I believe as well.So Fox has been pretty influential in mainstreaming a lot of what we had seen that had maybe been more contained to a more Christian media audience, because let's not forget, there is a massive Christian media infrastructure as well. Obviously, Pat Robertson was the vanguard of that, but it has expanded enormously.But a lot of those conversations kind of stayed there. They weren't brought to a more mainstream audience. And Fox has really served the bridge, I think, between. Those two worlds and it's increasingly blurred together as just being part of the right-wing media narrative and conversation ever since.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's also the Fox itself has been under pressure as well from far-right rivals like OAN and Newsmax. I guess maybe not OAN as much, but like, Right Side Broadcasting Network. You see a lot of these new streaming internet streaming services that they basically all compete to be who can be the most [00:40:30] pro-Trump, who can be the most alarmist, who can, I mean, Newsmax regularly shows people praying these, really extreme Christian prayers. And there was a woman who I saw on right side broadcasting network who was outside of Trump's recent indictment in Florida. And she was talking about all of the same stuff.(Begin video clip)UNIDENTIFIED TRUMP SUPPORTER: Yes, he's our president. Loves America. Loves the people of America. And we have to fight. We have to help him and support him. All of this is lies from the deep of hell. These people are from hell. Okay. It's evil. Yes, it's evil. We have the devil reigning right now. I just want to cry.(End video clip)SHEFFIELD: As you were saying earlier, Julie, that, people who are sort of in the center left need to understand this is happening and that there is probably no limit to what the right wing media and political elites are going to tell their followers like, and it's, it's scary to contemplate that, but we need to, we need to.MILLICAN: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: So I'm going to play the last clip here.This clip is featuring it starts with some women in a school board meetings. What we'll do is I'll play the clips and then you guys can react to whichever ones you want to react.(Begin video clips)UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I'm from Oakland Park, and I'm here for the children. There is zero evidence that COVID 19 exists in the world. [00:42:00] PCR tests are recalled. This is a plandemic. Fake virus. Bioweapon jab. Fake president.You will not experiment on my children. It's always been about the children. We know you're coming for the children. We will not comply. We only answer to God.People are waking up. Nothing can stop what is coming! You vote yes, you will all be tried for crimes against humanity!UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: These are demonic entities, and we need to stick together. Remember, we have authority in Christ Jesus!These are demonic entities in all the school boards of all the United States of America. And all of us Christians will be sticking together to take them all out!All the police officers that kick us out for our First Amendment right will also be going down with them. Do you understand?I'm a nurse. Infectious disease. 13 years. Masks don't work. These doctors that sit up here that were sneering at us and looking at us like we're scumbags, they need to go back to f*****g medical school!UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Ma'am, you're out of order. This is your last warning.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (audio difficulties) Turn my mic on!UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Communications?UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: They need to remember: Natural immunity is best. You are all [00:43:30] demonic entities! You are going to be taken down. The Lord--UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Excuse me ma'am, you've already had your first warning, and this is your last. She cannot speak anymore.TIFFANY JUSTICE, Moms for Liberty: I don't know what to say to you. There is always a bridge. There is always a reason. There is always a reason why something happens, right? One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler—AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Woo! Woo!JUSTICE: I stand with that mom!LARA LOGAN, Far-right media figure: So the next time you read somewhere, or hear on one of your shows or something, that the secret to everlasting youth is young blood.Why don't you ask, whose blood? How many? How much? Is it a baby's blood? How much of a baby's blood do you need? Whose baby? What happened to that baby? How do you get the blood? It's not the hard questions. It's the simple questions. Because the devil is always in the details. Always in the details.ALEX JONES: I think instead of them getting full satanic control of the planet and doing this, and turning us into lab rats, I think it's just best, God, I'm on it. God, go ahead and vaporize it if that's the right thing to do. Seriously.In fact, I'm asking, and I'm not praying to God to vaporize the earth. I want to fix things. I want to turn it around. I'm saying if it [00:45:00] gets to the point where we're not going to turn it around, and God knows that, and we've chosen wrong, I ask for the children's sake that God not allow the earth to continue on to produce children for this thing to feed on.I ask God, respectively, to blow the planet up immediately. Seriously, I mean, I want God to blow it up now instead of doing this, okay?SHEFFIELD: That's really horrible stuff. Do you want to give us the Alex Jones overview, Julie, of what's been happening to this guy over the years. He's gotten even crazier, it seems.MILLICAN: Yeah. Alex Jones is a really, really well-known conspiracy theorist who has managed to build a massive audience for himself and frankly made a ton of money advancing conspiracy theories and then selling products that conveniently help promote, the types of things that he's saying.So, for instance, he's been a big doomsday er about the end of the earth and makes a lot of money selling, prepping, meals and things like that. He has herbal supplements that he will sell to increase your vitality and masculinity; and essentially is just preying on an audience of people who maybe don't have the best critical thinking, but don't trust mainstream news sources, have a kind of tendency towards spiritual thinking in the first place.And he has built a huge name for himself. So he's probably most famous, I would think in most circles for attacking the children who were killed in Sandy Hook as being crisis actors, the parents [00:46:30] whose children were murdered or faking it and he got sued for that by the Sandy Hook families.It was a long, protracted legal battle. But ultimately, they prevailed and were able to get massive awards from him. But I think what people maybe don't recognize is that, as he's needed to keep his own influence and to keep his listenership engaged and to gain more influence, he's embraced more and more extreme forms of conspiracy theories, but it's become a lot more religious in his rhetoric to do it.He's also become more mainstreamed, frankly, like, Trump administration figures were, very, very interested in what Alex Jones was saying back during the 2016 campaign. Roger Stone, who is extremely close to a very close advisor, longtime advisor for Donald Trump.He's a regular on, I mean, he was employed by Infowars Alex Jones's media entity. And he had been on this network for years. He pushes the same conservative and right-wing conspiracies. It's very cynical. I don't think they believe, well, at least Roger Stone doesn't believe any of this.He's a man who's famous for having Nixon tattooed on him. back. This is people who started to get more and more mainstream embrace by the right.He's good friends with Joe Rogan. He's been on Joe Rogan's podcast, has been influential in pushing Joe Rogan down a more and more explicit conspiratorial bent with his own thoughts and broadcasts. He is Joe Rogan is a [00:48:00] podcaster who really came from the MMA fighting world was, kind of started off, he was very famous for that, talking about sports and kind of started down this path of, I'm just asking questions, questioning authority to openly hosting and calling into Alex Jones's show. I think he even called him during the January 6th insurrection, talk to Alex Jones. I mean, it's pretty it's pretty disturbing that this is the type of rhetoric that so many people are listening to, but it's also influencing like more national, like conversation and position.And I think the thing that that clip demonstrates to the main, the biggest, problem with all of this, is that it's really laid the groundwork and created an environment where it's acceptable for followers to be openly advocating for, or potentially even engaging in violence. And that, that is something that we have been seeing time and time again.Obviously, it's been a lot of, lone, wolf with a gun, going in and committing atrocities. They're being inspired by of the Alex Jones is of the world and people who are pushing that type of rhetoric and it's only going to get worse, the more extreme that they get.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and it's important to note also that yeah, like you mentioned these mass murderers motivated by right wing beliefs that, within the kind of even further to the right of Nick Fuentes, you have people that they venerate these mass murderers and call them saints, just like, seeing themselves as sort of the early Christian [00:49:30] crusaders against the evil, demonic forces.That's really what they're doing and there is no sort of centrist base of media or political power in the Republican Party. All the energy, the gravitational force of the right is on the far right. And so what they want filters into everything, even people who may not agree with that and may have never heard of these people.Like, I think that's something that, having been, come up in my own experience as a former conservative media person, a lot of people that I knew didn't really, including myself, had no contact with these extreme right-wing figures. And so they thought that they didn't matter.And that was ultimately what led me to leave the right was that I realized, oh my goodness, these people, they set the agenda for the Republican party. They're the ones who have the base. That's where the base of the voters is.And it's really awful stuff. And Olivia, you found the clip there that we were playing there with the from the Moms for Liberty there. You and I had some got some new friends on the internet after, after that clip came out.But what that, so tell us about that clip and what was going on there.LITTLE: Yeah, so that clip is from the final night of the Moms for Liberty conference. And that is Tiffany Justice, one of the Moms for Liberty co-founders going on stage and saying, everything happens for a reason.And then goes into, [00:51:00] saying that like one of the moms from a chapter quoted Hitler, someone like cheers in the audience, and she's like, I stand with that mom. But I thought it was really jarring that instead of apologizing and saying it was a miscommunication from the chapter they doubled down on using an uncritical quote from Adolf Hitler on the front of a newsletter. And so that was Tiffany Justice, once again, like doubling down on that use and failing to admit any sort of wrong, which is what we're seeing over and over and over, is that they are becoming more extreme because they fail to acknowledge that something is wrong within the group or, like, that they've made a mistake.So instead of rejecting it, they just accept it and move on, which has increasingly radicalized the group. Yeah,MILLICAN: if I may jump in there, Matthew, I was going to say just to add to that, to get back to your point, very much at the beginning of all of this about, Donald Trump taking everything further and further to the extreme, I think that lack of accountability, lack of apologizing and just going full force, like there is no Ability at this point for the right to back down on anything, and that I think also is something that, you see play out time and time again.What Olivia was just talking about they can put Hitler quotes out there and it's going to be defended because anybody who criticizes them is obviously the enemy and we will not back down to the enemy and that is an adjustment. That is a change that I think has played a huge role in just how much more extreme and how much works from the voices are that are coming out of the right at this point when there's no accountability at all, and there's no [00:52:30] shared sense of what's just regular decency at this point, that that's going to create a lot of problems. And that's what we're seeing play out time and time again. To your point and to Olivia's point about this earlier.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's that they feel like that apologizing for something awful that someone said is wrong, that in and of itself is the wrong act and Olivia, there was a panel at the Moms for Liberty event, and I guess you were not in that one, if I remember right.You guys weren't there for that. But it was like, there was this panel where they discussed the idea that you should never apologize for anything. Can you tell us about that a little bit, please?LITTLE: Yeah, and the speaker at this panel was actually Christian Ziegler, who is the husband of one of the Moms for Liberty co-founders, Richard Ziegler and also the chairman of Florida's Republican Party.And he basically told the audience that, never apologize, never apologize. Because it, I mean, obviously for a number of reasons, but I think for them, they think it shows weakness. is one part of it, but two, they just never want to be wrong. And I think that's caused so many problems, not just within the organization.But I think it's a tendency of different right wing. Individuals and organizations to not apologize and it's just sort of like spiraling out of control at this point, because again, this is like a Florida, like political operative it's someone who was Trump's digital surrogate in [00:54:00] 2016, telling people don't apologize and something that Trump does as well.Like, it's just a strategy that they're using, And I think it's really alarming, especially in the context of uncritical Hitler quotes, too. That's, that should be a no brainer of an apology. And even then, they can't do it. Or instruct mom to do it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and also that several of the audience members, just at the mere mention of Hitler, she hadn't even gotten to the point about I stand with that mom, or whatever quoted Hitler.Woo! I mean, that's, that to me is the most shocking part of that clip. Yeah, that they were applauding such a thing.And, and it's, and there is also another religious aspect of this and, as somebody who was born and raised and as a fundamentalist Mormon, like there is this very strong tradition in reactionary Christianity that it would be, you have to regularly contemplate dying for Jesus, you personally need to think about that.And Jenna Ellis, who, who was one of Donald Trump's election heist lawyers she has as her pin tweet up there that if they try to cancel Christianity, I will not bend, I will not break they will have to kill me first.Like they really do see themselves as being—they glorify at this idea of having to die for their beliefs.And we saw in the, in the Alex Jones clip that, here we have him saying, God, please destroy humanity rather than [00:55:30] let Democrats beat Republicans. That's basically what he's saying there. I mean, it's really horrible.And yet these, this rhetoric is not something that we see featured in news coverage, whether it's on TV or, like a lot of the reports that came out of the Moms for Liberty summit, they didn't mention this stuff, and they heard it being said, like that prayer that we showed earlier, all of these reporters were at this event, they didn't mention that she had said that, they didn't mention it.There was a reporter for Mother Jones who was there who did mention it in an article, the video that you captured, Olivia, with Tiffany Justice, but that was it. You and that Mother Jones reporter were the only people who mentioned it. And yet, they had probably at least 30 or 40 people, you can tell me the number, Olivia, but they were there. They saw all these things happening, and it was a real failure of journalism, in my opinion.What do you think?LITTLE: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And it's something that we've seen from the beginning, and I think mainstream media has long platformed Moms for Liberty and un inaccurately covered them.By letting them get away with extremist activities or harassing school board members giving or sending violent threats against school officials and in, framing them as just moms, which is sort of, which is what we've seen mainstream media do. They've allowed them to get away with so much [00:57:00] extreme activity While keeping, well, while sort of, wearing this mask of respectability, or this mask of just being mothers and, yeah, so, so this inaccurate coverage, whether it's at the beginning or at the summit I think, is dangerous for one because it again, lets them try to frame themselves as a respectable, like rational group when that's not the case at all.And omitting those things allows them to maintain that false image. And so they're actually doing them a service, right? Or giving them good publicity, which is just absurd given what they're saying, what they're doing and what they've been doing for years, frankly, at this point.SHEFFIELD: As we're getting to the end here, we've gone through all the clips here. What's the message that you would have, Julie, to people who are just regular viewers or listeners that, what can they do about all this stuff?What would you, what would you say to them?MILLICAN: I think one of the things that I would say to them is to pay attention to what's happening in your own community. Because a lot of this organizing is happening on the ground locally. They're able to take advantage of like elections that people don't tend to pay a lot of attention to, I think particularly on the left, people are very fixated on national politics and don't pay as much attention on what's going on in their schools, for instance, and they don't pay attention to school board races.They maybe don't have children, and so they don't think about it. They also are not paying attention to what's happening in the local state houses. And there's also coupled with that [00:58:30] really a dearth of local media. Local media has been gutted. There's not a lot of places where people can get good information about what's happening on the ground.And I think that's how these types of movements are able to gain, take advantage of that and gain a foothold. So the thing that I would say people should do is get involved with their own community and find out where is this activity? Is this happening? I promise you this is real they are a very, again, well-funded and well organized movement but they're not in the majority and the ways that you need to start to counter is to get involved with what's happening locally in your own community and start to take this on and don't be afraid to hit it head on so that, that's where I would say people should start to focus their attention and their efforts.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's great. All right, well, Olivia, what were there any aspects out of Moms for Liberty that when you went there that that you think we haven't talked about here that might be worth knowing?LITTLE: Well, I think we've covered a lot from the summit, but just to jump off of Julie's point and something I even observed there is that they're not as big as they say they are.And we know that like an early Washington Post article had one of the co-founders talk about how they include Facebook likes and Facebook members in their group totals. Which is just a totally inaccurate and inflated number which, it makes people on the ground feel sort of powerless, but there is hope because they're really not that big, they're just really loud and have a strong political [01:00:00] infrastructure backing them.But combating them or pushing back against their frankly, bigoted policies and advocacy is not insurmountable. It's something that you can do, and you shouldn't be intimidated by them because they lie all of the time. All of the time.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, that's a great point. And also, yeah, you're, what you said about not being intimidated as well. That's the goal of these groups is to so pollute the political discourse to make people who have, who are decent and normal and support human rights to just be so disgusted that they leave that they see the battle to these radicals, and we can't do that, we can't do that.MILLICAN: Yeah. That’s a hundred percent right.SHEFFIELD: All right. So, this has been a great discussion. I appreciate both of you being here for it.So, Julie Milliken is on Twitter at JMillzDC. That's J-M-I-L-L-Z-D-C.And then also Olivia, you are on Twitter as well, and yours is OliviaLittle. So, I don't have to spell that one out for people, hopefully. But, yeah, thanks so much for being here. It's been a great discussion.LITTLE: Thanks.MILLICAN: Thank you for having us.SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us. And if you liked what we're doing, please go to theoryofchange.show where you can subscribe. We have free options on [01:01:30] Patreon or on Substack. And then if you are a paid subscriber, you get full access to the archives with video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.And then I also encourage everybody to go to flux.community for more articles and podcasts about politics, media, religion, and technology, and how they all intersect with each other. So please check that out. And I thank you very much for being here and I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryAfter two years of a global pandemic, most people have no interest whatsoever in COVID-19. And that's completely understandable, given all the hardships and inconveniences that everyone faced as a result of the pandemic.Almost everyone is ready to move on from covid, but there is one subset of people who are obsessed with still talking about it. And that is the same paranoid activists and politicians whose weaponized ignorance prolonged and exacerbated the pandemic to begin with, making it so much worse for everyone even as they insisted it was no big deal.How the pandemic was prolonged by ignorant and wishful thinking public policy is a story that still deserves to be told, even as almost everyone would just like to get back with our regularly scheduled lives. And it especially deserves to be told because the covid contrarians who made things so much worse are trying to rewrite the history of what happened.And for that reason, I was very pleased to learn about the new book of today's guest. His name is Jonathan Howard, and he is an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York University. And the book that he has written is called “We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace Anti-Vaccine Movement.”He's also a blogger at the great medical blog, Science Based Medicine.Transcript MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Jonathan.HOWARD: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Matthew. I sure appreciate it.SHEFFIELD: All right. So before we get into the book, let's maybe discuss there's kind of two different categories of people here that I think you're correct to sort of differentiate [00:03:00] between each other on some of this wishful thinking, public policy and covid.Tell us what these two groups are and what your focus is here.HOWARD: Yeah. So I have been studying the anti-vaccine movement for about a decade. And the first group of people were, and I've always been fascinated by anti-vaccine doctors in particular, to me they're sort of like arsonist firefighters spreading the very thing that they're supposed to prevent.And the first group of doctors would be anti-vaccine doctors. In 2019, for example, these would be doctors who were opposed to the polio, measles, HPV vaccine, all of the routine childhood vaccines. Some of these names became a little bit famous during the pandemic.You may have heard of some of them. Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, for example claimed that vaccines made people magnetic. The only doctor in the book who I know, my old friend, Dr. Kelly Brogan, who morphed into one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors during well before the pandemic and during the pandemic. And these people are for the most part [00:04:00] doctors who you and all of your Now, for those of you who of recognize as not trustworthy sources.They are germ theory deniers. They do not believe that HIV causes AIDS, for example, in all sorts of crazy stuff. And you will not find them in hospitals treating sick people. The second group of doctors, these are the doctors who I talk about the most and call them contrarian doctors. These are doctors who were widely respected, some of them before the pandemic as paragons of evidence-based medicine.I even discussed a Nobel prize winner. So these are people who are definitely not quacks before the pandemic, and they mixed good advice with bad advice. So the good advice would be covid is very dangerous for grandma and very dangerous for someone with obesity and a lot of medical problems, but it's harmless for the vast majority of young people, for example.And these doctors were very famous and influential during the pandemic. They advised President Trump. They advised Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. They advised [00:05:00] Ron DeSantis in Florida. They were ubiquitous in the media. They have very large social media presences. They were in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the Atlantic, really just downplaying the pandemic and spreading misinformation about it in a way that was very hard for people to pick up, again, because they mixed good advice with bad advice, and they didn't say obviously crazy things that covid is all a 5G hoax, for example.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it is important to note that, because the mainstream media, it wasn't just the right-wing media that was platforming some of these people. So let's, for some of these mixed advice doctors, maybe let's talk about some specific people that you do discuss their work and some of the things that they were doing.HOWARD: Yeah. So one of the doctors who I talk about the most and start the book with is a man by the name of Dr. John Ioannidis, [00:06:00] who is a world-famous researcher. He works out of Stanford University. He's an epidemiologist, and he wrote a paper called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, about 15, 20 years ago, which is one of the most famous papers in the history of medicine.And he really made a name for himself, calling out bad science and promoting better science, wanting medicine and doctors to do better, so that we make the right decisions for our patients.And he's someone who I famous favorably quoted in some of my earlier writing. And during the pandemic, starting in March 2020, he really underestimated the virus saying that it would cause many fewer fatalities than the flu, for example, and he was a ubiquitous media presence, and he made all sorts of statements that three years later turned out to be wildly underestimating the virus, but they were obviously wrong at the time.I will give you an example. On April 9th, 2020, he gave an interview [00:07:00] to the Washington Post in which he predicted that 40,000 Americans would die of covid this season. By April 9th, 2020, 20,000 Americans had already died and 2,000 Americans were dying every day. So unless covid vanished, his prediction was going to age very poorly, very quickly, which tragically is what happened within eight days. His estimate of 40,000 deaths this season was surpassed.And what did he do? Was he chastened? Did he revise his estimates? He did not.He gave an interview to right wing Fox News firebrand Mark Levin, in which he said that the fatality rate of covid was one out of a thousand Americans. Or one out of thousand people who contracted it.And that too was pretty obviously false. By that point in the pandemic, 10,000 people here in New York City had died.If the fatality rate was one in a thousand, that would require 10 million New Yorkers to have already been [00:08:00] infected with the virus when in fact only 8. 3 million people live here in my city, New York City. So it was just this obviously mathematically impossible claim. And how did he get around this?Well, he started spreading what I can only describe as conspiracy theories that have become gospel truth amongst the QAnon set that people were dying with covid, not of covid. That it was the lockdowns that killed people. That doctors killed patients through premature intubations, that death certificates couldn't be trusted.And the people who did die of covid, they were just 80-year-olds with multiple medical problems who were just about to die anyway. So it's really not that big of a deal. And rather than admit that he underestimated the virus, he just started spreading these conspiracy theories, and these became very popular, and his ideas were taken to the White House by probably the most famous of all the doctors I write about, Scott Atlas.And the title of the book, We Want Them Infected, comes from the plan [00:09:00] that some of these doctors developed to purposefully infect hundreds of millions of unvaccinated young Americans in the hopes that spreading the virus would get rid of the virus.And obviously that didn't turn out to be the case, unfortunately.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and Ioannidis, he also was involved with this controversial antibodies study that was done very early on in the pandemic, which claimed that many thousands of people had already, or tens of thousands, had already contracted the disease in the San Francisco area. And that turned out to be completely bogus research.And it's important to note also, though, that people at the time were questioning this research. So it isn't that people got it-- because here's this, we're in this kind of strange after effect, which I did talk about in the introduction here, where that the people who had said [00:10:00] it was no big deal, that they want everyone who was engaging in a more scientific approach to the pandemic, they want them to be liable for every mistake that they made. But the let's do nothing or we want them infected crowd, they don't want to have accountability for their own mistakes.And I guess that's part of what got you interested in this, right?HOWARD: Yeah, what got me interested in this is, as I said, I've been interested in the anti-vaccine movement for a decade after my old friend, Dr. Kelly Brogan, the only doctor who I mention in the book, who I know personally, or knew personally, I haven't spoken to her in 10 years morphed into one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors, and it was a real shock. It took me a while to realize this, but it was a real shock to realize that everything she said about the HPV vaccine and the MMR vaccine, for example, was being plagiarized by famous doctors from UCSF, from Stanford, from Harvard, from Johns Hopkins, top universities in [00:11:00] order to discourage young people from getting the vaccine.And let me just, I'll defend Dr. Ioannidis a little bit in that he didn't completely downplay the pandemic. He recognized that it was a big threat to nursing homes and to older, vulnerable people. But in some ways, in my opinion, that made him a little bit more dangerous is because he was mixing the good advice, we have to protect nursing homes, with the bad advice, which is for everyone else it's no more dangerous than driving to work back and forth. And one infection will lead to permanent immunity.But yeah, these doctors who declared the pandemic over from day one, essentially are very, very eager to beat up on Fauci and all of his mistakes.Any one of his mistakes, any one of his misstatements. The man who spoke thousands and thousands of words on the pandemic got a few things wrong, and he shouldn't be given a free pass. But you're absolutely right that they feel they want to be absolved of their mistakes and they don't really, don't seem to feel that they've made any.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it is [00:12:00] important though, I think to acknowledge that a lot of the people who are criticizing a sound medical approach to dealing with the pandemic, that they don't understand that science, the literal process of it is trial and error and that it's inevitable that you will have some things which might not end up proving very effective. Was it weird to see so many people who did have scientific training kind of forget this basic tenant of scientific reasoning?HOWARD: It was weird again precisely because of the doctors who I write about who I had heard of I admired them all and I, they have excellent pedigrees and some of them are famous, and it took me a while to realize that they were kind of just making it up as they went along. I didn't really consider the fact that they were just kind of.How do I say this in a non-vulgar way, but you know, just. Talking out of their ass, essentially. And I'll tell you why, because one, one thing that I have that [00:13:00] basically none of the doctors who I write about have is experience working with covid patients. I worked throughout New York city's covid experience.And during the first three months of the pandemic, we probably had it worse than just about anywhere else in the world. I think the next three years after that, we had it relatively. Easy compared to a lot of the rest of the country. But as I was witnessing our hospitals being deluged and overwhelmed with covid patients, and as I was witnessing more people dying a single day than in my entire career, I was simultaneously reading these smart doctors from Stanford and Johns Hopkins and other places, essentially saying that the whole thing was overblown, and I couldn't quite put two and two together because I figured that these smart.World famous scientists and epidemiologists must know something I don't. And I remember when that Santa Clara antibody study came out enthusiastically telling my wife that, hey, we might be closer to the end of this pandemic than the beginning and wouldn't that be wonderful. So [00:14:00] I certainly wanted. Everything that they had to say to be correct.And it was only after a few months passed that I really began to revisit some of their earlier work and try to meld it with what I had seen in front of my own eyes and realized these things were totally incompatible. And they were just making these statements based on their own wishes, not reality.The Santa Clara antibody study that you talk about was led by researchers from Stanford. John Ioannidis being one of them, another one, Jay Bhattacharya, and. They used that to claim that covid was 50 to 80 times more prevalent than was already known, and they spoke about covid as a disease that was mild for the vast majority of people.They said that the vast majority of people probably don't even know that they had been infected. This is what they were saying in April 2020. Yet these same doctors in March 2020 we're saying that the virus wasn't going to spread very quickly, very far because it was only spread [00:15:00] by close conduct. Post contact.So whether they thought the virus was not going to spread very far or that it had already spread very far. They were very consistent. Don't worry about it.Doctors preaching a "do-nothing" about covid message got richSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I do want to get into the kind of larger framework that a lot of them seem to have been operating from. But let's before we get to that, go focus on your earlier research about anti-vaccine advocates.How did you get interested in that as a topic, and what was, I guess, what were some of the you, you mentioned Kelly Brogan,HOWARD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Matthew Remski discussed her too, a few weeks ago on your show. It was interesting.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, and so you mentioned her as somebody who you had known, but you've seen this up close from both a sort of research perspective, but also a personal perspective.There seems to be a very large demand, a market for a doctor who [00:16:00] will tell people that vaccines are terrible and evil. I mean, let's talk about that.HOWARD: Oh, yeah. No, I absolutely could have gotten world famous this pandemic and probably been flown all over the country and the world giving speeches and my social media profile would have exploded had I come out against vaccines.But there's always been a small number of doctors who have been opposed to vaccines. This is hundreds of years old, as old as vaccines, and I never really thought about vaccines much until my old friend, Dr Brogan, started posting messages on Facebook shortly after she left NYU where we trained together against vaccines, and I've never really been interested in vaccines per se as much as I have the anti-vaccine movement, and this actually goes back to my fascination with how people think with neurology and psychiatry, what could lead a doctor to take medicine's most amazing achievement and trash it.And Kelly Brogan is not stupid. She went to MIT. She went to Cornell. She trained with me. [00:17:00] So, so what fundamentally went wrong with her after she no longer had to care for sick patients in the hospital, she decided viruses and bacteria don't even cause disease. I don't really know that I have the answer to that, but the very first few times I started reading her Facebook posts about the anti-vaccine movement and about her anti-vaccine ideas, I couldn't really refute them.I wasn't super familiar with the history of measles or pertussis or this sort of thing. It was only reading some of the, my fellow co-authors on science-based medicine, Steve Novella and David Gorsky, and a bunch of other people that I really began to see the flaws in, in her ideas. And in 2018, I wrote a book chapter with Law Professor Dorie Reese, and a book called Pseudoscience.And the book was about the fallacies and flaws of the anti-vaccine movement. And prior to the pandemic, my interest in the anti-vaccine movement was kind of seen as a quirky thing. And, but it really prepared me for this moment. I was really [00:18:00] ready to see and to recognize all of the covid minimization and recognize that it's parallels to pre pandemic minimization of measles and other vaccine preventable diseases.So unfortunately, I was ready. But even I vastly underestimated its scope and its influence. I did not predict that hundreds of thousands of Americans would refuse vaccination. Well, millions did, but hundreds of thousands refused it and paid for it with their lives.How Trump's conspiracism has brought anti-science people of left and right togetherSHEFFIELD: Yeah, they did. And it's unfortunate. And it's also the case that all of this sort of, well, let's step back because originally there were people who were Democrats, Green Party, who didn't like them and there were hardcore Christian conservatives who didn't like them, and there were secular libertarian types who didn't like them either. It was kind of spread out over time.And that's one of the [00:19:00] political manifestations of the covid pandemic is that because Donald Trump was the president—and I think that's probably the main reason this happened—is that he did kind of draw this conspiracy-oriented thinking over into the Republican Party such that, and I've talked about this on some other episodes.And so maybe hopefully you have seen this graph before. Do you recall this at all? I don't want to. I'll cut this part out if you don't know it..HOWARD: I've seen versions of this. Yes.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. All right. So, so on the screen that basically the way that the political system kind of originally work before coven before trump was that conspiracism disbelief in sort of non-evidentiary based thinking it was a system that kind of pervaded both the right and the left and then over through coven and trump.Things basically, conspiracism has sort of metastasized into a specific right-wing ideology. And Trump [00:20:00] has done that. And that's why you do see now a number of people who had some sort of identity as vaguely left wing. Are now engaging in full scale, super Trumper love stuff. And people who before were like somebody like Jimmy door, who was made his career as a left leftist political commentator now is out there saying how great Trump is.How terrible vaccines are, and the Democrats should just leave him alone.HOWARD: I think he made a video specifically about me, to my credit.SHEFFIELD: That's right, yeah. Yeah, and of course we've got the presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, that is kind of basically recycling all of these things as well, and I maintain that he basically is The Trump 2. 0. That's him. 2. 0 and you've got to be careful.HOWARD: Or maybe he was even Trump 1. 0 in that he's been doing this for a long time. He got his start in the anti-vaccine movement in 2005 and has just for [00:21:00] the past 20 years almost been America's leading anti-vaccine voice with tragic consequences wherever he goes.Measles follows the most famous and deadly being a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019, where I think 83 people ended up dying and including 50 or so children under the age of four. And he just has a long record of being sort of the Pied Piper of viruses and bacteria. Is that the right analogy? Maybe the Pied Piper takes was, maybe he was the person who took the snakes out of Ireland.Anyways, he's the Johnny Appleseed of virus and covid. So, so maybe even he was really Trump 1. 0.The Hoover Institution at Stanford University as an incubator for far-right viewpointsSHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, I think that's a fair point. That's a fair point there, Jonathan. And well, so, but I guess beyond Trump though, there, there was. There were preexisting right wing political institutions as well that all of this anti vax [00:22:00] stuff and covid, covid contrarianism fit into and originated from as well.So, like the people we've been discussing, especially Jay Bhattacharya, they all predominantly were affiliated with not just Stanford University, but also the Hoover Institution, which Is a Republican think tank, which I guess sort of ended up being established there under the sort of the custodian of Herbert Hoover's presidential papers after he left the office and it's basically sort of been kind of a.Well, an incubator for right wing fanaticism on the campus of one of America's best-known universities. And they played an enormous role in promoting a lot of these ideas, including getting them directly to The Trump White House. Let's talk about that.HOWARD: Yeah. So Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was one of two authors of three authors of a document called the great Barrington declaration.The others were Martin [00:23:00] Kuhldorf, who was an epidemiologist and vaccine expert at Harvard at the time. And the third is a woman by the name of Sunita Gupta. who is at Oxford and these doctors, none of them treated covid patients and they came up with this document, which again was published on October 4th, 2020.called the Great Barrington Declaration because that's where it was signed. And this was basically a town in Massachusetts, correct? Those who don't know. And this was basically the idea that the best way to get rid of covid was to spread covid. So I'm going to present their idea as, as kindly as I can.So they Noticed as did we all that covid was very dangerous for a certain subset of people, again, older people and people with underlying medical conditions. And it was relatively mild for the vast majority of healthy 10-year-olds and healthy 20-year-olds, although some healthy 10-year-olds and healthy 20-year-olds have died of covid.And they felt that if there was mass [00:24:00] infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated young people in all, in October 2020, that herd immunity would arrive. And all we had to do was establish a wall between vulnerable people and non-vulnerable people. Vulnerable people would live in a world of zero covid and not vulnerable people, meaning you and I, would live in a world of pure covid.And once enough of us were infected, they estimated that it would take three to six months. Herd immunity would arrive, vulnerable people could leave their isolation and the pandemic would be over. And they use that language. They spoke about the pandemic being over and the three-to-six-month timeframe comes from directly from their frequently asked questions page.And it's still on there. They assumed that one infection led to permanent immunity. They assumed that vaccines were potentially months or years off when in fact they turned out to be two months off and they did not consider any negative outcomes other than death. [00:25:00] So either you survived covid or either covid killed you or you emerged just fine.And by this point in the pandemic, they had already met with Donald Trump. They were given an Oval Office meeting with him in August 2020. And they, the day after the great Barrington declaration was signed, they met with health and human services director, Alexander Azar, I think at the white house. So, so they were very influential, and Donald Trump and the Trump administration started echoing their language of protecting the vulnerable and trying to achieve herd immunity to mass infection.But there were a lot of problems with it. Namely that wallowing off vulnerable 70, 80 million vulnerable Americans from not vulnerable Americans. It is very easy to say, but very hard to do, and they never came up with any sort of plan for this. You can go to their Frequently Asked Questions page, and what was their plan to protect old people living at home during the pandemic?And it was four sentences [00:26:00] long, and it said things like, Feed older people should have groceries delivered to them. Okay, that's not a bad idea, that sounds nice, but setting up a food delivery program for 80 million Americans for months on end, that’s a little bit easier said than done. And as I said, vaccines became available two months later in December 2020 vaccines are not a panacea.They're not perfect. We all know that I don't want to oversell them, but it made their declaration become obsolete within months. Despite this, they continue. to be and still continue to be anti-vaccine for young people. They still prefer that young people get natural immunity, even though thousands of young people have died from the virus.And they minimize their deaths by saying it's more dangerous for grandma. And so these people, I think did a lot of damage and they were definitely some of the inspirations behind the headline we want but. Behind the title, we want them infected and at every stage they minimize the pandemic. So [00:27:00] Jay Bhattacharya wrote an article in March 2020 in the Wall Street Journal called Is the coronavirus as deadly as they say?And he felt it wasn't. He said that the coronavirus likely had one tenth the fatality rate of the flu. He predicted that it would cause 20 to 40,000 deaths. And even he at the time said That if it's true, the coronavirus would kill millions without quarantine and shelter in place orders, then such drastic measures are surely justified.That's not a direct quote but close enough. So they just wildly underestimated covid at the start. They minimized all of the variants they repeatedly declared the pandemic over and were completely sheltered from the consequences of their world, of their words.And since, since I know you want to focus on some of the right-wing ties, the Great Barrington Declaration was signed and written under the watchful eye of a man by the name of Jeffrey Tugger, who [00:28:00] is this sort of anarcho-capitalist type person, and I'm going to make him sound a little bit like a cartoon villain because it's true. He is and was overtly pro child labor. In 2016, he wrote an article called Let the Kids Work, and the title gives it away. He wanted children to drop out of school and join the workforce. He suggested that at least some children, he suggested that Walmart and Chick fil A would be wonderful places for children to work.He also felt that children should smoke. He thought that smoking was cool. And teenagers could look cool and smoke and they could enjoy it, and then they could quit by their early 20s before it did any damage. He did not believe that cigarettes were addicting, and he also had some ties to racist organizations 20 years ago, something called the Sons of the Confederacy.So these people who wanted children to work and children to smoke had a profound influence on our course of the pandemic, and especially with regards to [00:29:00] children and young people.How creationists worked with Republican donors to oppose sound Covid-19 policiesSHEFFIELD: Yeah, and another aspect, and unfortunately, I guess you hadn't seen my article when you were writing your book, was that these people, Jeffrey Tucker and his colleagues at the American Institute for Economic Research, as they call it, are also strongly and closely affiliated with the Creationist.HOWARD: I did not know that.SHEFFIELD: Well, you remember I sent it to you and you actually, you read it and you said, oh, I wish I had seen this. Yeah, yeah, no, I didn't know that at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, but no, I'm like, because so I, so basically. This Jeffrey Tucker actually comes from a political tradition called paleo libertarian, and it's like it's older than kind of the modern day libertarians who are might, you know, not be religious and might have some more centrist social viewpoints like they might support same sex marriage or transgender rights, for instance, he's from the paleo libertarian tradition, [00:30:00] which What basically is their viewpoint is that the government, the best government is what's in the Bible, the Bible is the only government book you need, and they don't explicitly, they don't wear that on their sleeve a lot, these guys, but they also employ some of the top creationists.Advocates are people who were working closely to get this Great Barrington Declaration passed. And Scott Atlas had been on the podcast of the Hoover Institution guy named Peter Robinson, who has just been a kind of relentless creationist propagandist over the decades. I mean, like, I am guessing that people who are, were trying to affiliate with these guys who had some inkling of science, they probably didn't know that they were getting in bed with creationists to push this stuff, but they were.HOWARD: Who knows what they knew? I certainly haven't seen any of the authors of the Great Barrington [00:31:00] Declaration. Expressed disgust with Mr. Tucker's pro child labor, pro smoking views, the number of them went to work for him after the pandemic or a few years later, and something called the Brownstone Institute, which has become one of the major spreaders of medical misinformation and even Threats against frontline healthcare workers.Mr. Tucker published an article called who will be held responsible for this devastation with a picture of a guillotine on it. And that was retweeted by Martin Kuhldorf, one of the doctors who helped author the great Barrington declaration. So they don't seem particularly uncomfortable with some of this stuff that I think would horrify most normal people and normal Americans.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's, it is really disturbing, but it, and that's why it is important to, to highlight this information because, like, the closeness between reactionary right wing extremism and conservatism, people who have conservative viewpoints, they are, I think there's a [00:32:00] temptation, and I can say that having been one earlier in my life, that there's kind of a temptation to think, oh, well, those guys are just harmless.They don't, they're not relevant, people don't pay attention to them, but that's not reality. Like, these people are significant, and as we've been talking about here, they had direct ties into the Donald Trump White House and were setting policy. And a lot of that policy basically, it kind of boils down to that, I mean, if you look at the kind of the right-wing viewpoints about sort of public policy, generally, a lot of the thing is, a lot of the sentiment is just simply, well, we can't do anything about it.Let's just leave it how it is. These are problems that are unsolvable like racism or poverty or. Things like that are already in other countries. Let's build a wall. Let's keep them out. Let's not try to help them with their own country or their law enforcement. Like, that's the default approach is to do nothing.And people were just [00:33:00] sort of applying that carte blanche to something and they had no, I mean, Jeffrey Tucker spearheading A medical response in a lot of, and Scott Atlas, I mean, he has a neuro, he is, if I remember right, an x ray technician, like that was his job. He's a neuroradiologist.HOWARD: He's a neuroradiologist, so he looks at MRIs and CTs, which is also my sort of secret passion.I love doing that too, but no, he had no expertise and he was discovered by Donald Trump because he was on Fox News saying what Donald Trump wanted to hear and what the great Barrington declaration proposed and what these people proposed was, as I said, it was this idea of mass infection of unvaccinated youth by getting rid of all attempts to stop the spread of the virus.Except this sort of mythical protection of the vulnerable. So they wanted everything open. They wanted everyone to lead a normal life. And they spoke about it almost as [00:34:00] an obligation. So Martin Kuhldorf wrote about how our grandparents went off to World War two to fight and they sacrificed themselves for the good of their country.And that's how we spoke about young people getting covid. He said, you essentially have a duty. To contract the virus before you're vaccinated so that it will, you can protect grandma and it will go away.What's interesting is they speak about themselves as the sort of heroes of the working class. They feel that the lockdowns were just as utter devastation of working-class people. They say it was the worst assault on the working class since segregation in Vietnam. So comparing lockdowns to those historical horrors, I think is a little overwrought. I do want to say that no one claims the lockdowns were harmless. Everyone knows that the lockdowns did have a lot of harms, and the same way I call out these doctors for being sheltered for the [00:35:00] consequences of their words, because they did not and do not treat covid patients.I'm always trying to be careful to recognize how I was privileged, and I never missed a paycheck. I never was lonely because I was at the hospital every day. My children's schooling was obviously affected, as it was everyone else, but I was protected from the harms of the lockdowns for the most part.And I just want to be open and honest about that. But I think if you were to Go to some factory today or are certainly some meat packing plants and ask people, do you feel that the lockdowns were the worst part of the pandemic for you? Most of them will probably say no. It was someone who lost a loved one that I lost.The conflicting messages of covid contrariansSHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and then, of course, the same people who were there, their approach is completely incoherent as well, because. They were simultaneously saying that covid was no big deal, but then also it was a Chinese bioweapon. And it's like, well, if you're going to make a bioweapon, that's probably not a very good one.[00:36:00]And it doesn't even jive with China's response to covid either, because the country that stayed in lockdown and re engaged it repeatedly and extremely, you know, viciously in a lot of cases, unfortunately, was China. So like they unleashed a bioweapon to destroy their own economy. That's basically what they're saying, but it's no big deal.HOWARD: Yeah. That was one of my science-based medicine articles, a satire article called let's repeatedly expose unvaccinated children to a virus that came out of a Chinese lab. So it was essentially the, these sorts of things that Chinese are to blame. For this virus, which is just the cold.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it doesn't make sense.And but, and they're continuing this approach. A lot of these people as well by going after the coven vaccines now currently. And now they've a lot of them. I wouldn't say all of them, but a lot of them have also kind of shifted into larger [00:37:00] anti-vaccine. Advocacy against other diseases and the public opinion surveys, actually I'll put a link into the show notes for those who want to read it, but actually Republicans became more anti vax for MMR vaccines than they were before covid.And it's directly related to all this misinformation. I mean, but what's, so like, I mean, guess the, their big thing now is carditis. What is that? And what, what are they saying? And what's their response?HOWARD: Yeah, so before I talk about that, let me just talk a little bit about pediatric covid and covid for young people in general, because Myocarditis predominantly affects young men.So, if you look at how many children have died of covid, the exact number isn't entirely clear. There are reasons that some cases may be missed, and maybe some cases have been over counted as well. But around 2, 000 children have died of covid so far, maybe a little bit more. And hundreds of thousands of children have been hospitalized and millions of children have been made [00:38:00] sick by the virus.And some of these children get very sick. About one third, depends on which variant is circulating, but about one third to 20 to 30 percent of hospitalized children need to be in the ICU and about five percent of those need to be intubated. And some children have had seizures and strokes or amputations or lung transplants.plans. And these outcomes are very rare, but rare outcomes multiplied by 73 million American Children. Has it added up to a lot of sick and injured and dead Children? The toll covid's toll easily equals or exceeds that of many other vaccine preventable diseases. And I want to be very clear that all of these numbers would have been much higher had we listened to these doctors and allowed 70 million American Children.None of whom were vaccinated to contract covid all at the same time in the spring of 2020 as they want, as they wanted. So the vaccine [00:39:00] came around. The first children were vaccinated in, I believe, May of 2021. And soon after that, reports started coming out of myocarditis. Initially, the initial response or signal for this, I believe was from Israel.So myocarditis. is inflammation of the heart, and it can be serious. It can be a fatal condition. And when we're talking about vaccine myocarditis, we need to talk about two things, how often it happens and how severe it is. So if you're talking about children under the age of 18, and it mostly occurs in males between the ages of 12 to 25 or so, it does not occur in younger children, fortunately.So how often does it occur? Well, the numbers are a little bit all over the place, but the most recent meta analysis, which is the sort of study of studies, pegged the rate at about 1 in 15, 000 males after their second vaccine dose. So if you run the numbers of how many males were vaccinated here in the United [00:40:00] States, again I'm speaking just 18 and under at this point, there are probably about 700 to 1, 000 cases of vaccine myocarditis here in the U.S. And then we need to discuss how severe it is. Well, fortunately, it seems to have a very favorable and benign, mild course in the vast majority of children who get it. That's not 100%. There have been some cases of fulminant myocarditis in children. It has sent some of them to the ICU. I'm aware of one child in the entire world who plausibly died of vaccine myocarditis, someone in Japan.There may be others out there, but catastrophic outcomes seem extremely rare, fortunately. In the latest series from Canada, as doctors have learned about the condition, most they, they sent most children home from the emergency room and those who spent the night in the hospital only stayed one day.So I don't want to minimize it. It's a big deal whenever a [00:41:00] child gets sick and whenever a child is sent to the hospital and these Children will have to be followed over the long term to make sure that there's no cardiac scarring. So it's a real side effect. And other vaccines have caused myocarditis at around this rate as well.But compared to what covid has done to children, it's just not even close. As I got done saying, thousands, two to two thousand children have died of covid, and hundreds of thousands have been hospitalized. And my, the virus causes much more severe myocarditis at a much higher rate. Especially in this post infectious autoimmune condition called MIS, multi system inflammatory syndrome in children, which has affected about 10,000 American children and killed about 80.And about 80% of children with this condition have myocarditis, which has caused hemodynamic collapse in some children. Most children with this condition go to the ICU. Fortunately, seems to have vanished with most recent variants, so we're not seeing a [00:42:00] lot of myths these days. But a lot of the doctors who were very, very, very, very worried about vaccine myocarditis would speak about literal death from covid as vanishingly rare, not something to fear. So doctors spoke about this rare, usually mild vaccine side effect as a fate worse than death. And I mean that very literally and that's the definition of what it means to be anti-vaccine.And the vaccine for children, it's not perfect, especially with some of the newer variants, just like for adults, but there have been 25 or so studies from around the world showing that it's very effective at limiting rare but grave harms in children. And the world would be in much worse place off had no children have been vaccinated.The impossibility of "shielding" seniors from covid while allowing everyone else to take no precautionsSHEFFIELD: Yeah, no question. And the other issue with that sort of, we want them in technical approach is that. Not only is there no way to [00:43:00] sort of get food to elderly people or protect them in nursing homes or whatever, but like a lot of children live with their grandparents in one way or the other. And so if you're forcing those children to go to school, you're literally taking them and delivering a virus to their parents or grandparents that you supposedly want to protect from.And they never, that was something that I did see people. Try to ask the advocates of this idea. Well, what are you going to do about those kids? Oh, well, we'll figure it out. Like, they never, ever had any sort of response to specific scenarios and that is highly likely. And recently--HOWARD: They did have a response, but it was the wrong response.They said, children don't spread covid. They said children pose no risk to teachers and children pose no risk to older, their older relatives at home. So they had her as wrong. Yeah. It's hard to the extent that it was [00:44:00] true early in the pandemic. It obviously isn't true of newer variants. And that's one of the things these doctors did is they treated this brand-new virus as this old predictable friend that we know everything about and they can totally minimize variance.I will say one thing since school closures are probably the most controversial aspect of the pandemic and one of the most hated and I didn't like it for my children. They had remote schooling for a year, and it really set one of them back quite a bit, I think. And. No one likes school closures. We were all.Didn't want that to be true, but it's important to realize that the virus closed schools too. So once schools reopened, especially during the delta and during the omicron waves, a lot of them had to close again because there were not enough teachers there to teach the students or a couple of times schools were officially open, but students were just sent to [00:45:00] classrooms taught by National Guardsmen are.I know one of my One of my kids just spent the entire day sitting in the auditorium during the Delta wave because there weren't enough teachers there. So I do just want to push back on the idea, not that you said it, but that schools were closed just by overly cautious Democratic politicians when in fact it was the virus that closed schools.And here in New York City, during our first wave, we lost 74 educators, including 30 teachers. And 70 out of those 74 educators were in schools. I don't know. I can't prove that's where they contracted the virus. But had we done nothing, how do we just let all students and all teachers get infected? There would have been more dead teachers, and that's not good for Children have to recognize.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and that's assuming a lot of teachers wouldn't have just quit.HOWARD: Oh, yeah, of course, of course.SHEFFIELD: Because that's what would happen is that a lot of people would have said why would I risk my life for this job? I'll go get another one or be [00:46:00] unemployed or go live with someone.HOWARD: Right. I don't want to come off as in favor or opposed to school closures.I really voiced no opinion on the topic. Other than to say we should be honest about what would have happened had we never closed schools and just let the virus run rampant there. And you're absolutely right. Teachers would not have shown up to work and a lot of parents wouldn't have sent their children once.One child died in the school that would have an effect on every parent at the school, or they wouldn't want them to bring the virus home to their grandparents. So I think the idea that everything could have been just fine if it only wasn't for teachers, unions and democratic politicians.It's evidenced by the fact that the virus did close schools in every single red state as well, even after politicians tried to open them. So we don't have to ask what would have happened. We know, we know what did happen in schools couldn't stay open when there were zero [00:47:00] mitigation measures in place.Herd immunity is real, but it requires vaccinesSHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good point. And I guess another thing that is important, I think, to note here is that the idea of herd immunity, it is a real medical term, but it's not improper to speak about herd immunity and usually, I mean, often it's used in the context of a vaccinated population being resistant to disease, but it is the case that natural herd immunity can In existence, some scenarios, right?And so these guys weren't just completely making stuff up like a completely imaginary concept, but they were misapplying it to the circumstances.HOWARD: Well, humanity has never before eliminated a virus by spreading that virus. Humanity has never achieved herd immunity to a virus without a vaccine. The biggest problem being newborns.So if you look at measles in the 1950s and sixties, before there was a vaccine. What would happen is cases [00:48:00] would, like a giant jigsaw upper, kind of jigsaw shape. Anyways, peak and trough, peak and trough, up and down. So one year there would be 4 million people infected. And then the next year there would be 300,000 people infected.Then a new crop of babies would be born, and they would be infected. So we do have herd immunity to measles. We have herd immunity to chickenpox. We have herd immunity to polio as well, because those vaccines and those diseases induce. very long-lasting immunity. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case with our current vaccines in this current shape shifting virus.So the idea that we could have achieved herd immunity through the mass infection of unvaccinated young people Absolutely turned out to be a fantasy and people who still claim otherwise. I mean, what restrictions do we have to drop today in order to achieve herd immunity and end of the pandemic, as we were promised, I want the pandemic to end, [00:49:00] too.Why most doctors won't debate anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, okay. So, but going back to the kind of their general anti-vaccine advocacy. Now, I have one of the, it's been a topic in recent weeks where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has kind of launched his presidential campaign on an anti vax line and is his great ally, Joe Rogan, the podcaster and former Fear Factor host boosting him and saying, you guys need to debate Kennedy.And of course, a lot of people look at that and they say, well. Bobby Kennedy is just some mentally ill lawyer. I'm not going to debate him as a medical professional. I'm not going to debate it in that job. And I think as somebody who has, if that's your viewpoint, you're certainly entitled to that. I mean, what's your response to that?You've written about it.HOWARD: Yeah, so this invitation to debate Robert Kennedy was extended to Peter Hotez, who is a, expert in tropical diseases in [00:50:00] pediatrics in Texas and developed a patent free vaccine, which is, I think I read 100 million doses of it have been given in India. So he's a real hero of this pandemic.He hasn't been right about everything either like everyone else. And I can understand how a lot of people felt he should have debated Kennedy, right? If the science is on your side and the facts are on your side, why not just humiliate Kennedy during a live debate? But there's several reasons why Dr.Hotez refused and why he made the right decision. The first of these is that by agreeing to even show up, he kind of elevates Kennedy, right? When you think about something to be debated, you tend to think about each side really brings something to the table here. But this would be the equivalent of NASA scientists debating a flat earther, right?You really don't need to do that. The second of these is that live debates tend to reward the best speaker, not necessarily the person with the best information. For example, I am so well versed in anti-vaccine [00:51:00] arguments. I am sure I could win a debate. against 99% of doctors if I was to take the anti-vaccine side.I could probably humiliate them and win the debate, but I would be wrong. The third reason is that it's impossible to fact check claims in real time. It's very hard on anti vaxxers and Robert Kennedy in particular, are known to just spew a fire hose of lies and misinformation that are very difficult to fact checked in real time.I'll give you an example of this. When I first encountered the anti-vaccine movement, one of the first documents I encountered was something called 200 evidence-based reasons not to vaccinate something like this. And this was written by Sayer G, the head of a pseudoscience website called Green Med Info, who was recently on a conference call just last night with Robert Kennedy.And he was named as one of the disinformation dozen during the pandemic as people who spread some of the worst and most information, misinformation online. Anyways, [00:52:00] so he collected 200 articles that he felt proved vaccines were dangerous and unnecessary. And one of them was titled a measles outbreak and occurred in a highly vaccinated population.Okay. That doesn't sound good, but when you actually read the article, what it said is that in this city, I think it was San Diego, a measles outbreak occurred, even though 95% of children were vaccinated. Because the 5% who are unvaccinated clustered together and created this sort of pocket of vulnerability, so it was really a very pro vaccine article, but he just rearranged the title and rearrange the words to make it seem like vaccines didn't work.It would be close to impossible to be able to refute all of the misinformation in real time. And I am for debates, and I extend an invitation to anyone here to go to Science Based Medicine if they wish to [00:53:00] debate me, pick an article of mine and let me know what I got wrong. So I'm not afraid of debates.I don't think Dr. Hotez is necessarily either. But I prefer to do it in writing, and I'll say this too, Dr. Hotez agreed to go on Rogan's program, he was a guest at the start of the pandemic, and just answer questions without having to share the stage with a crackpot who has left dead children in his wake, and he was right to refuse to do that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's also worth pointing out that there are a number of people who, I guess, are, what people are now calling science communicators. Who did say, well, okay, he doesn't want to do it, but I will debate Kennedy on your program. Why don't you invite me on, Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan has completely ignored these people.And because I, because you are right that people in a live debate type format, you can do things like filibusters or delay or just take up all the time and use, yeah, as you were saying, [00:54:00] just this litany of nonsense arguments and then say, Oh, well, you didn't refute, you know, I made 20 arguments and you only refuted one of them.And of course the logical answer to that as well. Because you made so much nonsense that I didn't have time to refute all of it.But on the other hand, somebody who has a debate background or a rhetorical background could call out such techniques. And in fact, that technique that we're talking about here is sometimes called a "Gish Gallop" in debate parlance after a creationist, there we go again, who would use it as a way of saying, see, this proves that the Bible creation story is true because I made these 50 points, and that's not reality.But Rogan has a record of doing this, that he doesn't invite people onto his podcast who disagree with, and then at the same time, we'll very rarely try to call out people and try to demand that they appear on his program [00:55:00] when they may have any number of other things going on in their lives or whatever it is, like people have a million correct reasons not going this guy's program at his command, but he doesn't invite people who disagree, right? The record is indisputably true in that regard.HOWARD: So he had on Dr. Hotez at the start of the pandemic, but before there were any vaccines. And to me, the whole thing bothered me in a different way, just in that live debates are performances, they're spectacles. And that's what people wanted.People wanted to see Kennedy own and dunk on Hotez, like it was some sort of WWF competition, wrestling competition. And then, given what I saw during the pandemic, and the number of people I saw die, it just seems kind of an inappropriate thing to do.And it wouldn't have changed anyone's mind. Everyone who was on Hotez's side before the debate would have been on [00:56:00] Hotez's side after the debate, and same with Kennedy. So people just wanted a show, and that's all that Rogan cares about. He just wants entertainment, he just wants eyeballs, he wants to be seen as heterodox or controversial, which is why he won't have someone on like Dr. Hotez, these days at least, just to answer questions.SHEFFIELD: Because he doesn't want his questions actually answered. What he wants to do is hector and berate someone that he doesn't like for saying mean things, as he defines them.HOWARD: Correct.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the other thing is, though, even on their own standard, they don't even meet their own standard of that.They will not engage in the debate. And your point about why a written dialogue is probably the ideal for this type of interchange of beliefs, because that is how the scientific world works right now.If you have evidence to show that vaccines cause some condition or whatever, and you have real [00:57:00] definable, replicable data that was soundly constructed and interpreted, there are people who will engage with your point, if you have it written out. And it is extremely, I think, notable that these anti vax doctors and whatnot, they confine almost everything they do to just blathering on a podcast and they're not writing research papers, by and large, or if they do, they're on just a little tiny sliver of their argument.And it's like 99% of the argument is not in the paper, but 1% is, and so therefore you should believe the part that they won't actually try to prove.HOWARD: Yeah. And so there's an internet adage called Brandolini's Law. Hopefully I'm saying this right, but it says. Essentially, the amount of effort it takes to refute b******t is an order of magnitude greater than the energy it takes to create it in the first place.And one of my more recent articles on Science Based Medicine was discussing this principle. And someone did agree to debate me, a [00:58:00] businessman by the name of Steve Kirsch, who has become one of the Twitter's most outspoken anti-vaccine advocates. And he's a complete not job for lack of a better word saying that vaccines have killed hundreds of thousands of people and only saved a handful of lives.And he's very inappropriate. He was gambling. He put up some sort of wager about whether this child who died of covid was actually had underlying conditions or not. I mean, just speaking in a wildly inappropriate way, treating dead children almost as sport.But anyways, I said anyone is always welcome to debate me. Like I said, my articles are there, and anyone can write a rebuttal to them. And he did. And it was full of basic factual errors and omissions.And I wrote a response to it. Just based on three sentences of his where we talked about vaccine myocarditis and I went through all of the studies regarding vaccine myocarditis, all of the studies showing that the virus causes myocarditis at a [00:59:00] much higher rate and a more severe myocarditis.And again, emphasizing that which causes more myocarditis isn't the point. Even the question because of what the harms of covid are not limited to myocarditis and that article was about five pages long. I suppose if you printed it out just based on three sentences of his and it never could have been done during a live debate unless you gave me half an hour to just sit and read the article. So live debates reward the best speaker, the slickest speaker, the most charismatic speaker, not the person who is right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's, I think that's definitely true. All right. Well, let's see. Are there any other aspects of the book here that you think are worth getting into? I want to make sure.HOWARD: Oh, I think they're all worth getting into, but yeah.SHEFFIELD: Well, that you want to make sure the audience will come away with.HOWARD: Just that it was 99% of doctors comported themselves with honor and [01:00:00] bravery this pandemic, and it was just really sad to see a small number of sheltered, very influential doctors spread gross misinformation, and the last chapter of the book is sort of about what to do about it, and I think we just need to do what you and I are doing today, which is not tolerate gross misinformation.We need to leave space for people to have different ideas, and not everyone who questions vaccines is anti-vaccine and we need to not label people who disagree with us as misinformation necessarily. But people who just spread wildly fake statistics or repeatedly declared the pandemic over, they need to be called out for the bad actors that they are.So I'm grateful to you for doing that and having me on to allow me to do that as well. I appreciate it.Covid contrarian doctors don't seem to have much actual experience with covid patientsSHEFFIELD: Okay, great. And I guess, well, maybe let's have the last topic. I think, and you talk about it in the book somewhat, that there does seem to [01:01:00] be a distinction between people who actually treated with patients and their approach to the virus.The people who were pushing these non-actions basically had no experience, direct experience with covid. Were any of these people, did any of them have covid treatment experience? And did it affect them if, I mean, do you think that's relevant?Why do you think that's relevant if they did?HOWARD: So I think a handful of the doctors who I mentioned did treat covid patients in one way or another. But for the most part, very few of them did, and most of the ones who did treat covid patients worked out of San Francisco, relatively well-off environment. I don't think that they saw some of the nightmare scenes that we saw here in New York City.And elsewhere throughout the country and I, the doctors who I write about say things that no doctor who treated covid patients who worked in the [01:02:00] hospital would ever say things such as hospitals were being overwhelmed by the worried well, by people who are just showing up to the hospital in a panic, convinced that they were going to die. They were overwhelmed by people who were dying and were very sick.And when you read the accounts of some of the doctors who worked here where I worked at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, we didn't even have it nearly as bad as some of the hospitals in the outer boroughs. Elmhurst Hospital in Queens was really the epicenter neighborhood called Corona, ironically enough.But it was like a war zone there. According to the descriptions, just people dying in hallways. People stumbling outside of the hospital. And this was just not unique to New York City. This was in Italy, and Spain, and Iran, and India, all over the world at various points of the pandemic.And I think that my experience with it didn't allow me to predict the course of the pandemic any better than anyone else. I made erroneous predictions, which I include in the [01:03:00] book. I want to hold myself to the same standards that I hold everyone else, but it really gave us a lot of humility. I think about what the virus can do.I did see some young, healthy people suffer and some young, healthy people die of the virus. Not many, but it made me realize that young people weren't totally immune from covid's worst effects. And there's something about having skin in the game that's valuable, meaning if I successfully convinced large swaths of my community to reject the covid vaccine, I would be creating more work for myself and more risk for myself.The doctors who successfully did convince large swaths of the country to reject the covid vaccine, they never had to see someone express vaccine regret. They never had to see someone with their last breath, say goodbye to a family member on zoom saying, I really should have gotten the vaccine and so, there's something to be said for having skin in the game.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. I think [01:04:00] so. All right, well, this has been a great conversation. We've been talking today with Jonathan Howard. He is the author of the new book, We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace The Anti-vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of covid.And you are also on Twitter. You've got the number 19 in your username. What's what is covid 19? Is that what that is? What is that?HOWARD: No, no that's always been my lucky number. I wore that. I played baseball and 19 was always my number. So, okay. Well, superstition.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so for those listening, it is 19 J O H O. So Joe Ho, presumably your nickname. Yes. Okay. All right. Well, great, Jonathan. It's been a good conversation.HOWARD: Thanks for the questions and thanks for having me. It was great to be here. I really appreciate it.SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today.I appreciate everybody for joining us. And of course you can go to theory of [01:05:00] change. show to get the full. Audio, video, and transcript of this episode. And if you are a paid member or subscriber, you can get complete access to every episode in the archive. So I appreciate everybody who is doing that. And I strongly encourage you to do it if you are not.And of course, if you can't, I understand everybody has a different financial situation, but you can support the show just by giving a nice review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or subscribing on YouTube, that's another important way to support the show as well. So I appreciate everybody who is doing that in one way or another.Thank you very much. I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe