Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

Artificial intelligence is all over the news of late. People are using it to compose silly poems and making images of dogs driving cars. There’s also a lot of hype for the technology with some putative experts claiming we’re on the verge of sentient robots seeking to destroy us all. There are also a lot of naysayers who claim that the generative AIs that are out there like ChatGPT or Midjourney are nothing but toys and are just useless creators of junk.The truth, however, is somewhere in-between all this. It is actually true that ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Microsoft’s Sydney function are not sentient at all. But they are incredibly useful. And a lot of people are already using them to do incredible things. In fact, even if these technologies never improve, they are already going to reshape the way we work, learn, and play.Joining me today to discuss AI and its implications is Simon Willison, he is a technology researcher and programmer who does consulting work to help media companies parse and publish data. He’s also the co-creator of the Django, a Python programming framework.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests.ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield GUEST INFOSimon Willison's official siteHe's also on Twitter and MastodonYou can get the full transcript of this episode with links to various topics and articles mentioned at Flux or via Substack.  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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theoryofchange.flux.communityArtificial intelligence, or at least what we’re calling it, is everywhere in today’s world. Up until very recently, however, most of the software and services using AI haven’t gotten much public attention, and that’s because the primary users of AI historically have been governments, militaries, and giant corporations, all of which have one thing in common— huge amounts of data and huge responsibilities.In November of last year, the AI industry leaped into the media spotlight with a launch of ChatGPT, a text-based large language model program that can rapidly generate massive quantities of text in the form of articles, stories, and even poetry in response to typed human input.The attention has been massive. The launch of ChatGPT spurred an arms race in the small world of tech behemoth companies. Google, Amazon, and others have raced to get into the gold rush that Microsoft and its partners at OpenAI created with the launch of ChatGPT.This is a world that is uncharted territory and there are a lot of implications to the future that seems to be rapidly escalating in a way that is entirely unplanned and certainly unregulated. Now, what does that mean for the future? What does that mean for business? What does that mean for academics?What does it mean for society at large? There’s a lot to talk about here, and we’re bringing in two panelists to discuss. Gary N. Smith is a professor of economics at Pomona College. Jeff Schatten is an associate professor of business at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSIn order to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for this episode are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests.ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  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

The religious, political, and racial divides in contemporary America are some of the biggest they’ve been in our history, but there’s another one that doesn’t get nearly as much attention—generational divides. But age-based differences in political attitudes are becoming increasingly important as the Baby Boom generation—the first named generation in America and still its largest in history—is in its latter years.Boomers completely reshaped the United States: culturally, politically, economically, and in many other ways. By their sheer size, they have been catered to their whole lives. But now that society needs to cater to the needs and desires of younger generations, many Boomers are reluctant and even angry to let others have a chance.At the same time, however, many people in the age cohort are feeling like they never really got the opportunities that so many of their peers received. Joining us to discuss all this is Philip Bump, he’s a national columnist at the Washington Post and the author of a new book “The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.”MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSThis is an unlocked episode of Theory of Change. Please subscribe today with Patreon or Substack to ensure you get full-length access to the audio, video, and transcript of every episode.You can access the video and full audio transcript of this conversation at Flux or on 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.Your support is greatly appreciated!ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theoryofchange.flux.communityRupert Murdoch, the Australian-American media tycoon has accumulated billions of dollars since his Fox News Channel has been in existence. It’s done it by monetizing and stoking the rage of a large segment of the public against their fellow Americans through tens of thousands of contrived controversies like “The War on Christmas,” and constant obsessions over cartoon characters from SpongeBob SquarePants, Lego building blocks—even M&Ms chocolate candy.But now, for the first time in 27 years, Fox Corporation is facing a real serious threat to its bottom line from Dominion Voting Systems, an election logistics company that launched a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the right-wing infotainment channel for spreading lies that Dominion had cheated in the 2020 election which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.The case is one of the most serious threats against a large American media company in decades, but the lawsuit’s court filings have also been very illuminative in that they’ve given everyone a look at the inner-workings of Fox.Thousands of emails and text messages produced in the litigation have shown that Fox’s leadership and hosts think their audience cannot bear to hear too many things that conflict with their false beliefs. They also reveal irrevocably that Fox isn’t a news channel. It’s a Republican campaign organization.In this episode, we're featuring two reporters who have done a lot of great work covering Fox over the years. Justin Baragona is a senior media reporter at the Daily Beast and also Diana Falzone, who is a contributing editor at the Daily Beast. They just published one this week about how the lawsuit disclosures are affecting the employees at Fox.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSThe complete audio and video of this episode are available for free, but to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the full transcript of this episode is only available to subscribers. Please join today to get full access via Patreon or Substack.You can access this episode directly at Flux or on 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. ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  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

After decades of neglect, there is finally a large and growing body of scholarship and journalism about the Religious Right, the powerful Christian Nationalist movement that rules the Republican Party from the heights of the Supreme Court bench down to the municipal voting precinct.While there is a great deal of excellent research and reporting on the movement, it overwhelmingly tends to focus on the Christian Right as a political phenomenon and not as much as a religious one. As a result, we know a great deal about what the Christian Right does, but not why it does so.Fortunately, David Hollinger, our guest in this episode is up to the task. He’s an emeritus professor at the University of California-Berkeley and the author of Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative And Society More Secular, which demonstrates that the Christian Right was first a theological reaction against a progressive tradition of Christianity that began emerging in the middle of the 20th century.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSIn order to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for this episode are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.Once logged in, you can read, listen, or watch this complete episode via Patreon or on 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. ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theoryofchange.flux.communityAfter neoliberalism took over the Democratic Party in the 1990s, American politics shrank. We were no longer debating what the government should do for us, or even if it should do anything at all, for the most part. Instead, our politics focused on who are we, especially in regards to the question of who is American?Who are we and who do we want to be? These are questions that are old as time itself. Everywhere, as people discovered there were other people who lived next to them who thought differently about important topics such as religion, conflict has often been the result.Unfortunately, even as American politics is opening up to people of more races and religions than before, many of these lingering resentments are still around.Joining us in this episode to discuss some of this and how it impacted him is Wajahat Ali, he is a columnist with The Daily Beast and he is also more importantly for this conversation, the author of a book called “Go Back Where to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become an American,” which is just out in paperback.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSIn order to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for this episode are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help. Please join today to get full access.Substack:https://theoryofchange.substack.com/Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/discoverfluxIf you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal:https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/theorychangeIf 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. GUEST INFOWajahat Ali’s book:https://wwnorton.com/books/go-back-to-where-you-came-fromOn Twitter:https://twitter.com/WajahatAli ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChange Matthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield Matthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield 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 SummaryOne of the stranger things that’s happened in right wing media since Donald Trump emerged on the political scene is how obsessed with sex many far right figures have become. Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer, is one of many reactionary lifestyle influencers who preach a gospel of misogyny that they claim will lead followers to easy sex and money. Sex and birthrates are one of the most frequent topics you hear about on white nationalist and neo-Nazi podcasts.Some of this is surely due to the fact that the Republican party’s leader since 2016 has been a crass real estate investor more famous for his dating life than business success who also has faced numerous charges of sexual harassment.But that isn’t the only reason. If you look in the right places, you’ll realize that reactionary media has been filled with content about sex, dating, and marriage for many years. And it wasn’t exclusively a bunch of male pastors telling women what to do either.  Far-right women have always and continue to be in the mix.In 1963, Helen Andelin published “Fascinating Womanhood,” a book telling women to submit to their husbands, but also to manipulate them. James Dobson, the far-right political activist, got his start offering relationship and parenting advice to fundamentalist Christians in 1977. And Phyllis Schlafly, who started her career campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment was also a raging crusader against pornography, a cause that has recently been resurrected by reactionary leaders such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk.Far-right people obviously are still upset over the 1960s, but the language today is different. Joining me to take a look at all this is Seyward Darby, she’s the author of the book “Sisters In Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism.” She’s also the editor of The Atavist Magazine.We’re also happy to be joined by Katherine Abughazaleh, a researcher on far-right media figures like Tucker Carlson, who has also done some work examining the Republican dating website “The Right Stuff.” The transcript of the audio is below. You can watch this episode as well.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, ladies.SEYWARD DARBY: Thanks for having me.KATHERINE ABUGHAZALEH: Thanks for having us.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, let’s get started. We got a lot to talk about here, so let’s maybe just get started first with you, Seyward. Tell us a little bit about your book, briefly the people that are in there, and then and then we’ll go to you, Kat.DARBY: Sure. So “Sisters In Hate” is, as the subtitle suggests, about women who are or have been very active in the white nationalist space. And it focuses on three women who have radicalized into white nationalism over the last 15 to 20 years. And it’s, their lives, what led to that point. And then the roles that they played in various influencer groups as well as organized neo-Nazi groups in some cases.But the book also uses their stories as a jumping off point to look at the history of women’s roles in far right, organizing far right politics. And asks the question, why have we forgotten about them? Why do we ignore their contributions? And so I look all the way back to the immediate post Civil War period and bring it up to the present day with a diversion here, there into the international space namely Nazi Germany.SHEFFIELD: So Kat, you’ve looked at a lot of these right wing media figures that talk about sex and dating and whatnot. But your recent dive into the right wing dating website, The Right Stuff, tell us a little bit about that. What is that website and what did you find out when you went in there?ABUGHAZALEH: So The Right Stuff is this dating app that’s for conservatives and conservatives only. You can only get in through an invite, specifically through conservative influencers.And I was just curious to see what the people would be like on there. And so I talked to a conservative influencer on Instagram, pretended I was sick of liberal city boys on Tinder and went on the site.And it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect. A lot of guys holding fish or sitting in front of deer that they shot. There were a lot of prompts about January 6th and liberal conspiracies. It was a trip for sure.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right. Well, so when you say a bunch of guys holding fish. I mean, are you saying that this, it was seeming to be kind of like a rural dominated demographic that was there? Is that what you mean by that? Or like what?ABUGHAZALEH: When I say guys holding fish in a profile picture, that’s something you’ll see a lot on dating sites like Hinge and Tinder, and it’s kind of a red flag.Either shows no personality or no personality.A lot of these were suburban guys that wanted to show that they were masculine and outdoorsy. There were a lot of guys showing how much they could squat at the gym. A lot of guys showing that they owned guns, was less about where men were and more about how they were men.They seemed like they were always trying to prove something, and didn’t really feel like it was about dating at all.SHEFFIELD: Like prove to themselves you think? Or to other men or to like what? I don’t know. Let’s talk about that.ABUGHAZALEH: Yeah, I mean on The Right Stuff, you can’t search for your gender, so you can’t say I’m a woman interested in women or I’m a man interested in men.So it’s not like other men would be seeing these. But there were a lot of pictures that I was just curious how they thought it would appeal to the typical woman, seeing a guy holding a lot of guns in all of his pictures doesn’t really project safety. It seems like a lot of peacocking for no reason, if the reason you’re trying to find is to get a date.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So Seyward, I would guess that some of the women that you have looked at in your research, they might find those pictures to be appealing, I’m guessing, right?DARBY: Yeah, very much so. I think that an important thing to remember about the far right space, and this has always been the case, is that it is a hyper traditionalist area.And so this idea of ‘men are men and women are women,’ and they’re very clearly defined identities for each gender, and that there are no other genders. I mean, that’s like a given, right? But the idea of you have a lot of guns, you like to fish, you like to hunt. I think that on the one hand, of course I’m married, I’m not on dating sites, but I agree, like if I saw a man holding a bunch of guns, that would not exactly appeal to me, to put it mildly.But I think to some women, it actually does project safety. It makes them think, oh, this is someone who will provide for me, who will defend me, and who will also fight for me, if necessary. And so I think that, and I have not spent time on the website, but I would be curious to know on the flip side, like what did the women look like?Because I’m guessing that they sort of fit into a cookie cutter idea of femininity in the same way that the men fit into a cookie cutter identity for masculinity.SHEFFIELD: Well, since none of us have seen it, I guess it’s tough to say for sure, but–DARBY: Right.ABUGHAZALEH: But I mean, that’s how I tried to make my profile look definitely. Growing up, in a conservative area as a conservative I was trying to fit every single one of those ideals I learned as a kid into my profile. It paid off.DARBY: Right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we’ll talk about it more, but so one thing that is kind of interesting about these about The Right Stuff is that it isn’t the first right wing dating website that has been in existence. It’s actually something that I’ve written about for the Young Turks that since the internet came along, there actually have been five or six of these right wing dating websites dedicated solely to the idea that ‘the libs won’t let me get a date. They won’t date me. They’re mean to me. They just don’t understand me.’And so for those ones, some of them actually did have public facing profiles, and it was interesting and if you go, you actually can go to the Internet Archive and look at some, it’s like a digital graveyard. It’s such a great site. There’s my plug for them. And of course they didn’t pay me because they don’t pay anybody for anything.But you can see the profiles, and one of the things that you note when you look for them is that they are overwhelmingly men that were on these websites and there weren’t very many women.And of the women who were there that I saw when I was going through these historical sites, a lot of them just seemed obviously fake accounts. Just not real women. Like they would copy and paste a model picture from a magazine and pretend it was them for catfishing and scam purposes. Who knows what it was for?And I think it’s kind of interesting when you think about it in that sense, because I think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of single men who don’t understand the world has changed and that they need to change as well in order to succeed at it.That they’re also being sort of preyed on constantly by all kinds of grifters and scammers. In your research, Kat, you’ve, you talked, you’ve looked at how Fox News kind of forces that persecution narrative on a lot of their male viewers. Talk about some of the ways that you’ve seen that with some, or who are some of the people who do that the most there?ABUGHAZALEH: Tucker Carlson for sure tries to make men feel like they’re the victim. This last year at one point he said that if you don’t wear a dress that your trans neighbor is going to make you lick their feet, was how he described it. That masculine values are now illegal. That was something that he said, ‘illegal.’He talks a lot about how women are weakening our military, pregnant flight suits, that’s a rant that he’s gone on many times.It’s just a continuing cycle. He had Andrew Tate on earlier this year, or in 2022, I guess, to talk about how Andrew Tate’s rhetoric wasn’t actually that dangerous and he was being banned for dumb reasons.And it’s just kind of a repetitive cycle. Jesse Waters does the same thing. You also have people that might not say super explicit sexist stuff like many would think of, or really extreme things, but they always say, men are men and women are women. And that comes with its own implications. So it’s pervasive across the entire network.SHEFFIELD: One of the other things that’s kind of interesting is that when you look at the few women who are figures in these right wing media spaces, a lot of them do not live, particularly traditionalist lives themselves. And either one of you can jump in. I actually want to hear from both of you on this point.One person who comes to mind for me is Laura Ingraham, Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host. I don’t think she’s ever been married, or she was for a brief time. She never gave birth to children. She adopted children as a single mother, which was literally what Dan Quayle in the nineties said was this horrible, awful thing when Murphy Brown, the TV character did it. That’s Laura Ingraham’s life.And Anne Coulter, the far right columnist and blogger, she’s never been married. She’s never had kids. She pretty much seems to spend most of her time in bars smoking cigarettes with random people– obviously not a traditionalist, feminine woman, quote unquote.Is that something that you’ve seen, Seyward in some of the women that you’ve looked at? Maybe talk about some of them, specifically if you would please.DARBY: Sure. Yeah. I think absolutely, there are women, particularly ones who are more sort of public-facing, who don’t inhabit this hyper traditionalist role. At least, in pretty obvious ways, like the ones you’re describing.But I think too, it’s important to remember when you’re talking, and I did a lot of sociological reading and anthropological reading and whatnot, and studies into the far right indicate that there are so many more women we don’t see and don’t know about for the exact reason that being hyper traditionalist means not necessarily broadcasting yourself because you should be focused on home, family, husband, whatever it may be.And so just because, there aren’t as many of these female sort of pundits in the vein of, I don’t know, an Andrew Tate or a Jesse Waters, whoever it may be, I think that numbers are difficult to actually find and quantifying is not necessarily the way to do it, if that makes sense.It’s more about kind of thinking in terms of what are the different spaces in which these people who believe these things operate?But I think to kind of go back to the question you’re asking, some of the women who are more public-facing, and one of the women who I would put in this category is one of the women I profiled in my book, Lana Lokteff, who runs Red Ice with her husband, Henrick Palmgren.She’s actually addressed this directly in various interviews in her own programs where she said essentially we are at this pivotal moment–which, I mean, to be clear, white nationalists always feel like they’re at some pivotal moment if we don’t do something now, the world is going to collapse and white people are going to be extinct or whatever it may be. But her argument is essentially, ‘I don’t want to have to be doing this, but we are in such a state that we are essentially at a moment where, even some women need to kind of come onto the battlefield.’ In this case, it’s the battlefield of ideas, or whatever it may be, however you would describe their sort of world.But I mean, I think that’s a lie quite honestly. But at the same time, they are clearly, people like Lana, are trying to project this idea that I understand why you might have a problem with a woman like me doing something like this and that might be unattractive to you, that might not be traditional enough for you. But at the same time, I’m telling you that it’s necessary at this moment.This is something that I’ve heard her repeat in so many videos and interviews over the years. And I don’t think she’s the only female sort of pundit activist in the far right space who will give that spiel.And one of the texts that I use in the book to talk about Lana is the book, The Handmaid’s Tale, because in the book, Serena Joy, and this bears out a little bit in the show too, I don’t know if you guys have watched the show all the way through.But it talks about how Serena Joy, who’s the hyper conservative wife of the man who owns the handmaid essentially, and it talks about how in the before times, like before this revolution in which the hyper conservatives took over America, she was more in this sort of predominant public role, but then once they won, she was told to go back into the house and do her traditional wifely duties, right?And it’s an interesting– what would happen if the white nationalists of today actually achieved this society that they claim to want to achieve, what would it mean for women like Lana Lokteff, Lauren Southern, we can go on and on down, down the list of these influencers.Would they really be willing to give up that public facing influence, but also, I mean, they clearly take great pride in the work that they do, however regressive and awful it is. And would they be willing to give that up or are they just talking a big game right now?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Did you have anything you wanted to add on that regard, Kat?ABUGHAZALEH: Yeah, I mean, I just think that Phyllis Schlafly is like the OG for this, for really coining that. I mean, that’s who Serena Joy was based off of. And it’s this whole, oh, I regret that I have to do this, but I have to do this. She’s a martyr. She’s the person making a sacrifice for her children, for her family, or she paints it as a hobby. Even though Phyllis Schlafly was one of the most powerful tastemakers in Washington politically, she was behind so many right wing campaigns. She basically killed the Equal Rights Amendment, but she just painted it as a hobby, even though this was her full-time job, she was doing more than most men in Washington at that time.And a lot of other women have conservative women. A lot of other conservative women have taken that and used it as a role model.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it is interesting that you do in fact, see those criticisms lobbed against these women. So if you follow them on Twitter, they will get replies or you look on these websites that they have, they’ll invariably get these comments, ‘how dare you tell us what to do.’ABUGHAZALEH: I mean, have you seen that trad Twitter account? Sorry.SHEFFIELD: Oh no, go ahead.ABUGHAZALEH: Oh, There’s this account on Twitter that is dedicated to traditional masculine values, and they talk a lot about architecture and GMOs and not having chemicals near food. And this is what a wife should do.At one point they said, wife should be making breast milk ice cream for her many children that she keeps at home. Super weird. And then someone looked up the email associated with the website, associated with that account, and it’s a woman running that account.It’s not a man running that account, it’s a woman that’s posting all of this crap for the world to see. It’s complete hypocrisy on every level.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. But at the same time, that is something for me as somebody who was on the political right, part of what made me leave it was that I did see so much hypocrisy and so much blatant sort of essentialist moralizing or completely utilitarian that ‘Well, I don’t believe this thing, but I’m going to say it anyway because my audience wants to hear it, or it will help me get ahead with some politician or some person. So I’m going to say it.’And that type of thinking, I mean, it is all throughout, top to bottom. Like Sean Hannity recently was deposed in a lawsuit by one of the voting machine companies, and he was asked, well, did you believe these things that Sidney Powell– the one-time Trump attorney was saying about these conspiracies of Venezuela changing the votes and whatnot and krakens. And he said, no, not for one minute. I didn’t believe it.But he didn’t say anything to that effect on the air. And in fact, he put forward their ideas and allowed her to be on the air, at least in the beginning. And you see that over and over. I mean, it is so endemic and it doesn’t matter to them.And it’s why, I saw so many people, I mean even now you see people saying, I can’t believe the evangelicals like Trump so much. What’s wrong with them? I don’t understand it, what are they doing?And it’s almost like these people don’t have any familiarity with the culture that they’re talking about. Would you say that, Seyward?DARBY: Yeah. I mean, I agree that, a pretty hefty dose of hypocrisy and opportunism, it’s a hallmark of far right organizing.And when I was initially, so I started working on my book pretty shortly after the election in 2016. I didn’t know it was going to be a book yet. I thought it was just going to be an article. But I even remember talking to white nationalists, Lana Lokteff amongst them, who were willing to say that they didn’t even think Trump was conservative enough.Which is an insane thing to think about if you’re part of mainstream politics. But for white nationalists, he was not actually vocal enough on the question of race, and not definitive enough about the war on whites, and all of these sort of fantastical ideas that the far right has about what’s going on in America and the world.But they were more than willing to ride his coattails, to ignore the things they disagreed with, his ungodliness, whatever it may have been because it was useful.They’re savvy political actors and they’ve been incredibly good over time at getting ahead of, they’re some of the first people to use the proto internet because they realized, this is an incredible way for us to share our ideas.They’ve also been very good, always at glomming onto existing mainstream political trends and saying: ‘We’re not so different than this, what we believe is not so different than this.’I mean, anti-communism is actually a really good example of this. In the seventies eighties, especially the far right, even though that was aligning themselves with people who they didn’t necessarily agree with across the board, it was like ‘but this is a convenient alliance to have an ideological alliance to have.’ and they turned anti-communism in their space into something that was also very racist.One thing that I think is important to remember, and I thought about this so much over the course of all of my research, is that they are essentially turning the domestic, what we think of as the hyper domestic, things like turning your breast milk into ice cream, they’re essentially reframing that as a political act, saying: ‘Doing this is actually the way that you contribute to a better society, the way that you build a better society, the way that you build a more pure society.’Looking at it, it can seem so bizarre, but at the same time, essentially it’s saying women by not being people who are on YouTube all the time, by not being in politics, not being in industry, whatever it may be, by doing things like this, yes it is absolutely putting women in a box and keeping them at home. But home for the far right is a political front.And I think the Nazis were incredibly powerful at this. There was a whole Nazi women’s wing, women were given medals based on the number of children they had, and soldiers on the streets were told to stop and salute women if you had six kids or whatever it was because you were a servant essentially to the idea of nationhood and arianism and all these different things.And so, I’m always, the breast milk thing is such a good example where that is so weird and gross on the surface. But there’s so many layers there of what that is saying to women. And saying you can do these things that nobody else is celebrating. Everybody else tells you– I mean, and that’s not actually true, but this is the message, right– that everybody else is going to tell you is not really that worthwhile. Maybe it’s weird, but we are telling you it is important. It is special. It is something that will actually contribute to a purpose greater than you know yourself.And so anyway that’s a ramble. But those types of signifiers are fascinating to me because they really are a portal into how the far right politicizes domesticity. I think that’s just a really important part of all of this conversation.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting that in the 1950s and 60s, the reactionary media at that time, they were upset about this slogan that Betty Friedan and other early 20th century feminist or mid-century feminists were saying ‘the personal is political.’They hated that line. But now, their ideological descendants have adopted it wholesale and probably even more so. And you can tell us in the research that you’ve done, Kat, you look at Fox News and other right wing media figures, they’re still upset about the 1960s, aren’t they?ABUGHAZALEH: Oh my God, yes. I actually did a TikTok yesterday talking about some things that Tucker’s had a tantrum about, and one was he did half a monologue talking about how Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist. And once again, the Kennedy assassination happened 60 years ago, and this was half a monologue on the most watched news show in the country.I’d also like to urge everyone to read this book, The Flag and the Cross by Philip Gorsky and Samuel L. Perry. It’s incredible. It talks about white Christian nationalism. It addresses a lot of the hypocrisy about how Christians and hypermasculinity– it’s turned into this racist belief. So even if you have people of color who are Christian nationalists, they don’t really have racist beliefs. It’s unique to White Christian nationalists and that turns into being willing to allow Trump to be a leader because they want a warrior, they see Christ as a warrior. They don’t see him as a peaceful figure, who hung around with prostitutes and poor people. They see him as a warrior. And even though Pence is a devoted Christian, they see Trump as the warrior they need.They want someone to fight for them. It’s a fascinating book, super recommended. It’s absolutely incredible. Very enlightening. Lots of research, but yeah, they’re still mad about these things. This is something that just continues on and on, and it also goes into that idea of this war against conservatives, or White people, or Christians, or whatever. You can sub in white for any of those things, even men.And so they’ll be mad about something that happened decades ago, because it shows this imaginary timeline they’ve created for themselves. Last night, Tucker said that we don’t talk about how bad South Africa has gotten since in the last 29 years– 29 years ago, apartheid was abolished.And so they just create this entire other timeline where there’s a White genocide in South Africa, and you can refer to this thing that happened all these years ago, even if it wasn’t true. This history that they create for themselves is so important just to establish these values no matter how ludicrous they are.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and at the same time, it’s why they constantly are telling their followers not to trust other media sources because you cannot construct an alternative reality if your people are getting outside news and they’re getting outside opinions. It doesn’t work. You can’t keep them in the dark.And Fox News, I think, is the best example of this because they’re infamous for all the things that they say that might be horrible or biased or whatever, but probably just as big, if not a bigger impact of their media, is what they don’t say. And what they don’t tell their audience about.ABUGHAZALEH: During the January 6th hearings, Fox would air with no commercials, so that way no one could click over to see what was happening on any other news channel.Tucker actually did an entire thing where he was like: ‘Every news channel is showing these hearings, but we’re different. We’re not showing these hearings.’And then he talked about it for 30 minutes about how it was so unfair that other news channels were covering Biden’s speech where he talked about extremism and fascism. There was a little box in the corner on Tucker’s screen with Biden talking, but they didn’t air any of it. And then the chyron said Tucker’s live reaction to Biden’s speech when they weren’t hearing any of it.So they just don’t show things. I’d say there’s like a 50 50 shot of whether primetime programming at Fox is actually going to talk about what’s happening, or it’s just going to be some other completely ridiculous story that they’ve pulled out of their ass.SHEFFIELD: It’s because it’s not a news channel. It is a political, arm. That’s what it is. And Fox is really no different in the content-wise from. The only difference between Fox and let’s say Lana Lokteff’s show is just how far they’re willing to go, I would say.And I mean, is that something Seyward, that you have seen them remark on it. I mean Ben Shapiro has been on Lana Lokteff’s show as a guest, he was there for at least 30 minutes. And they had a great conversation.DARBY: Yeah, I mean it’s been really interesting, because I started watching Red Ice as research, let’s see, seven years ago, I guess, six, seven years ago. And things like South Africa, that’s a great example. And I actually bring this up in my book because that has been a talking point, and I know you guys know this. I’m just saying it for the audience. That has been a talking point for white nationalists for so long.Basically since the end of apartheid, if not, honestly a little earlier than that, they have made this a talking point forever. This idea that what is happening in South Africa is the attempt to eliminate white people and nobody’s talking about it anywhere because liberals have taken over the world, whatever.And that was something that I remember like watching on Red Ice, whole segments about it, bringing in experts six, seven years ago. And then I remember the first time Tucker ever talked about it. I can’t remember exactly when it was, but I remember the segment and it was kind of like my head exploded, right?Because it was like, oh, it’s happened like this. It has been mainstreamed. Because whether we like it or not, even though Fox is not a news channel, it is a mainstream channel insofar as the number of people who watch it, the influence it has, all of these different things. So this is a long way of saying it’s been really fascinating to watch.Fox was always awful, but to watch Fox move farther and farther to the right and really start honestly going farther in the way that you’re describing. Red Ice, once upon a time was the only kind of show– increasingly Fox is willing to go that far or get really close.And I’m sure there are researchers doing this where you could kind of pick white nationalist talking points, things like South Africa, and essentially trace the evolution of how they started moving through the right wing ecosystem until they became staples of Fox News coverage.And I think, to your point about how it’s really a question of are they going to actually cover what’s going on or are they just going to cover whatever, not even cover, just talk about whatever they want to talk about. I mean, again, white nationalists in their media ecosystem have been doing that forever as well.And I think the vilification of media by not just the furthest fringes of the right, but over the last, 20, 25 years of the media generally by conservatives, has seeded this idea that is now bearing fruit where people just do not trust mainstream people who are on the right, do not trust mainstream news.I remember one of the subjects in my book, Ayla Stewart, she was known as Wife With a Purpose back when she was very active online. She was the only woman who was supposed to speak at Charlottesville, for instance. She was a big deal for a minute, hyper, hyper trad wife.I remember her talking, she would do these videos where she would talk about how she gets up in the morning and she checks YouTube because that’s where she believes news is living. And when she would hear about a news story because she happened to be in a store, or in her car, or whatever, rather than what the rest of us do– I would like to think go to trusted news sources. She would go to YouTube and see what her favorite talking heads, the Lana Lokteffs of the world, quite frankly, were talking about.And I think that Fox News has now sort of really leveraged that idea of vilifying other sources of information. ‘Only pay attention to us. If you’re not paying attention to us, you’re missing the truth.’And so if we’re talking about South Africa and this alleged White genocide that is happening, which most certainly is not happening, it’s not that we’re off the news, it’s that we are telling you the truth that nobody else wants you to hear.And I think it’s so important from a psychological standpoint to realize people love to believe that they have information that other people don’t have, that they’re special, that they get it, that they see the secret truth. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular, or one of the many reasons they’re so popular.And Fox News is just constantly beating that drum of if you pay attention to what we have to say, you are going to know the real truth. And I mean, to be clear, the White nationalist media ecosystem, they’re still very much saying that. And now Fox is just on it and has been on it for years now.SHEFFIELD: I agree with you. And another example of that, Seyward, is this idea of the White genocide or replacement theory. It was an idea that had been around in White nationalist activist circles for many years. But at the same time, began slowly percolating into the less overtly racist outlets like Fox and OAN or Newsmax, but they were doing it not as a racial thing, but as a political thing.So this was Democrats trying to bring, import other Democrats so that Republicans would lose. And Kat you kind of talked about this a little bit, that there’s kind of a interchangeability between White, and Christian, and Republican, and it’s all the same. It means the same thing. You can literally sub any of those three words at any given point, and it would still make sense, right?ABUGHAZALEH: Yeah. I mean, I think that a big thing we need to realize here is this is all to make these men that are watching feel impotent. They’re being replaced by immigrants, they’re being replaced by people of color. They’re being replaced by women that are entering the workforce, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Muslims, disabled people, whatever it may be.It’s to make them feel impotent, because that’s how they feel, because they see not being the conqueror, not having all of the power, or having some people get their agency, as a slight against them, which it’s not.It just means more people have rights, not that any of theirs are being taken away. And so it ties into that hypermasculinity, that sexual aspect where they’re so repressed. They’re focused on all of these ideologies and all of these very reactionary ideas because they feel impotent and because they don’t really have much besides that sense of victimhood and pride that they have worked towards, or that they are feeding into with these YouTube feedback loops and stuff like that. It’s just preying on insecurity.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess another way that they do that also is in this hypocritical idea of the sexualization of children.So right wing Christian cultures have many things that are sexualizing of children like these beauty pageants for seven year olds, they will put them in swimsuits and make up and ask parents to tell them how sexy they are. I don’t know how you can get more sexualizing of a child than those pageants. But they love them.ABUGHAZALEH: Purity balls.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and then, yeah, and that’s another way, there are all these different “purity rings,” and saying that you as a girl, or even as a woman– I mean, in the Mormon culture that I came out of, there’s this idea that you’re your father’s property almost. Even if you’re an adult woman, until you become married, you are literally in Mormon culture, if you’re a single adult now, male or female, they treat you just the same as if you were a 17 year old. You cannot be a full participant in the church. And that’s how it is.And these purity balls and purity rings and all this stuff. And then at the same time then, they’ll go and complain and say, ‘Oh, the left wing is sexualizing the kids, and they’re trying to take their innocence away,’ even though plenty of drag shows are not done by gay men. There are straight men who do them. There are women who do drag shows. It’s not necessarily anything to do with homosexuality at all.But for them it’s an expression that they don’t control. It’s not something that originates from them, so therefore it’s evil and hypersexual. And their other stuff, ‘well, that’s just normal.’DARBY: So, yeah we’re seeing a sexualization panic right now, and we’ve seen sexualization panics before.But I think you really can’t underestimate how important it is that these panics appeal to women. Maternal instinct, this idea that we are uniquely positioned to protect kids, to take care of kids. And so it’s no surprise that we’re seeing these sort of mom organizing groups, like Moms for Liberty and whatnot pop up and start organizing around the country against books and topics in schools that they see as risking sexualization of kids.And this has been over time, again, going back to, I mean, a hundred plus years, and probably before that, we’ve seen time and again, women sort of stepping forward activism-wise to say ‘we are here as women to stop the sexualization of children, to stop the poisoning of children’s minds.’ And I think that absolutely there are men who are like, ‘I’m going to pick up arms and go protect the kids,’ whatever it may be.But I really think in terms of who is being inspired to act, what does that action look like? So much of it is actually non-violent from a literal firing of guns, punching of faces perspective.I think the other thing about the sexualization panics that’s really important is that sexualization panics have always, again, it’s one of those issues where the far right is like, can’t we all agree that we should protect the children? And that’s a way where you start to see overlaps with more mainstream conservatives in some cases, even with people further to the left, where there’s this idea of, okay, well we can all agree that hurting children is bad.And so this is also a recruitment in its own way, because it’s saying, well, obviously even if we don’t agree on everything, we can agree that corrupting children, corrupting their minds is this negative thing. And so to me, that’s why the critical race theory panic, the sexualization panic, those two things have obviously been happening side by side.Even QAnon, right? Which is all about, allegedly not all about, but largely about, protecting children and this idea of a cabal that’s out there hurting children, these are all such important recruitment issues and recruitment grounds especially for women. And I think, appeals to ideas of what it means to be a woman– to be a good mother, be a good citizen, and tells them there are things you can tangibly do.There are petitions you can sign, there are meetings you can go to, there are groups you can take part in. And all of that is so scary, because the effects of that can really linger. And we’ve seen that before in textbook wars and other instances over time where far-right women have been at the forefront of rewriting reality, rewriting history.So yeah, that, that is the stuff that keeps me up at night. What are the ways in which policies down to what’s happening in the classroom policies, not necessarily federal policy. The ways that things are being shaped and changed that are then not easily reversed.SHEFFIELD: It is definitely a way of getting a lot of women involved in right wing politics, because I don’t know if you if either of you guys have seen some of these women who are filmed showing up at these school board meetings, it predominantly seems to be women who are going to these and talking about ‘you evil teachers and you evil school board members,’ and in many cases they don’t have kids that go to public school, but they’re there anyway.And they’ll talk about how they’re there to stop Satan. And they’re there to push back against the demons that are trying to take control of our culture. And they really believe this. It’s something I think that, to your point earlier where you were saying that there a lot of these sort of deeply religious conspiracist viewpoints that many women have, and it’s kind of buried.They don’t talk about it in public, they don’t talk about it to the parents of the kids at school. They don’t talk about it other than to their very close friends.But they might wear– so there is actually is an evangelical woman I know that she has a QAnon shirt, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t know what QAnon was, and some of the lore of it. So her shirt says, ‘Pedos get Stilettos,’ and it shows a woman’s shoe crushing a skull.And you can buy it on QAnon websites, but if you didn’t know that, you might just think that’s some sort of weird, punk design or something, you wouldn’t know what it was.Because it is very, it’s buried very deep. And lots of women that I have known, in my former life as a fundamentalist Mormon, everything is just buried under layers and layers of repression and internal worry and concern about not sharing, casting pearls before swine.Kat, you probably saw some of that growing up and living in Dallas yourself, right?ABUGHAZALEH: Yeah. So I went to Catholic school and every summer I would go to this Baptist summer camp that was super fun. I mean, you had an hour of Bible study a day and then the rest of it was going on water slides and hanging out at the lake, and I’m super glad my parents sent me.I made a lot of great friends, and for the most part my counselors were pretty great, but you’d always have like one or two that would just say some things that are absolutely nuts, like total indoctrination. I remember very vividly when I was six years old, maybe seven, I asked a counselor if you have to hear about Christ to go to heaven, what if you’re like a child in Africa that’s never heard about Christ, and then you die?And then she just looked me in the eyes and she goes, then there was a reason they were born there.And saying that to a small child is insane. So it’s the same thing with hypocrisy. They’re the ones indoctrinating these kids. And who doesn’t want to protect kids? You’re a monster if you don’t. All roads go back to Phyllis Schlafly. She was the first to really weaponize kids in the modern era, in my opinion.And I mean, what do you say to that? If you try to argue, if you try to say: ‘Hey, look into this more, media literacy is so poor in this country,’ then it’s like: ‘Oh, so you’re pro-pedo.’ And that’s not what it is.It’s just you’re telling a lie and it’s really hard to fight back against a lie that is so close to human spirit, especially when this is actually doing damage to children. When you’re hurting not just trans or gay kids, but you’re preventing them from getting the education that they need, you’re preventing them from knowing about sex education. Just knowing their own body, if something is wrong or if an adult touches them. All of these things, when you try to take it out of the school system, you are hurting the children.DARBY: Right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.DARBY: I mean, I wanted to really quickly, because I think, one of the things we’re really talking about here is power, right? And people feeling like they can seize power in their lives. And that kind of brings me back to one of the things you were saying, Kat, a minute ago about kind of appealing to men’s feelings of impotence and insecurity.But I think there’s sort of like another side to that coin, right? Where it’s saying, but you can regain a feeling of power by actually not doing very much, by not challenging yourself, by not trying to like navigate this complex world by saying no, just kind of be this basic instinctual version of yourself and that will make you feel better.And I think that something similar goes on with women absolutely, in terms of the channeling of ‘Be what nature meant you to be, and you will be part of something bigger than yourself.’ But I really think, and this is kind of, I guess the essence of conservatism, you could argue is not trying very hard, right?Rather than taking a thing and trying to unknot it, and trying to understand the complexity, it’s saying here is a simple answer and a simple solution that will make you feel empowered. And I think that’s such an important part of all of this, and especially of radicalization to the far right, is that people are being told they’re doing something important.They’re doing something based on knowledge that other people either don’t want them to know about, or are ignoring, or are too blind to see, or whatever it may be. But really what they’re being told to do is remarkably lazy. And I think that that is such a key aspect of this. The hypocrisy of what they’re being told to do and who to be is simultaneously ignoring complex realities, not actually trying to be like a better person or make the world a better place, but saying no, no, do the basic, frankly, often racist, cruel, misogynistic, whatever it may be, thing. But don’t worry, it’s not actually all of those things. It is something good and important and revolutionary.And I think that’s the other side of the coin, I guess, is the thing I keep thinking about.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the other thing is that the ideas that they present to people, they don’t work. So if you’re a man who wants to date more or have more sexual encounters for whatever reason, that’s whatever, that’s people’s decision, right? But they will tell you to do things that make you less appealing to women. And if you’re a woman and you want to get married, they will tell you to just marry whoever comes along and not care about who they are as a person or where you are as a person.And then their ideas about you can be an independent thinker by watching all my podcasts. You can think for yourself by believing everything I tell you. And you can do something really important for the world by watching YouTube for 50 hours straight.And none of these things are true. But then they have the second round, which is to give them a blame narrative, which to say that, well, the reason you don’t succeed at having a good marriage, or good dating life, or good sex life, or good career, well, it’s these other people’s fault.It’s not your fault. It’s not our fault. We are blameless. We are God’s servants on earth. We’re the manly men who are being repressed. I mean, it’s just complete cycle. They give you destructive advice, and then they give you a reason to not look at why it didn’t work.ABUGHAZALEH: Yeah.DARBY: Absolutely.SHEFFIELD: Alright, well, so let’s maybe just wrap up a little bit with, I mentioned in the introduction, the book “Fascinating Womanhood.” Can we talk about that a little bit, Seyward, and then there actually are a lot of modern tie-ins to it. It’s a book that a lot of people haven’t heard of, but gosh, it’s so influential. But yeah, go ahead.DARBY: Yeah. It is it is essentially like the anti-feminist mystique. And a lot of people have not heard of it, even though it has sold millions and millions of copies. And it’s essentially like a guidebook for trad life, for traditional lifestyles, this idea of how to be the perfect woman vis-a-vis a man.Because I mean, that’s the other thing about the way gender is defined in this space, like one necessarily needs the other, right? Because together they create literally children, White children, but also, create this ideal society. And so I think that thinking of it almost as this regressive guidebook is, I think again, even though it’s, what is it, 60, 60 years old.SHEFFIELD: It was 1963 when it came out.DARBY: Yeah. Yeah. So, it’s an old book, but it has really found new purchase, I mean, had always been, I think, popular.SHEFFIELD: It’s still in print. It’s still in print.DARBY: Yeah. It’s still very much in print. And had found, it had always had readers on the far right, particularly hyper conservative Mormon societies. Helen Andelin, the author was Mormon.But then recently because of this sort of popular resurgence of hashtag #tradlife, hashtag tradwife, like all of that stuff it has found, even more and younger readers. But yeah, it’s it’s things like how to make your husband happy when he comes home from work. Like how to be attractive to your husband, how to act like a little girl to manipulate your husband into doing this or that.SHEFFIELD: Even stuff like go to bed in your makeup, and then once your husband’s asleep, go and wash it off and then sleep, and then wake up before him and put it back on so he can see that you have it on.DARBY: Right, right.SHEFFIELD: That’s the kind of stuff that’s in that book.DARBY: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s scenes like that in Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. But obviously those things took at the time. And what is fascinating, fascinating, about Fascinating Womanhood now is like these sort of tips and tricks are being sort of repurposed in the age of digital technology when people love tips and tricks, right?Like they love to go onto TikTok and learn how to do this or that, or onto Instagram and learn how to do this or that.I sound like such an old person right now, but I think that it’s the sort of like ideas inside it really lend themselves to that kind of like popular-ification.And so yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s sold millions of copies and inspired other similar books. And one of the, one of the subjects in my book, Ayla Stewart, Wife With a Purpose, she credits Fascinating Womanhood with really helping her decide to become a tradlife subscriber and a tradwife, like a very proud tradwife.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, to your point though, and maybe Kat, you can go to this as you were saying, Seyward, that a lot of the ideas or methods that are in this book, they can and are actually reduced to life hack material. And you actually do, you’re now seeing a lot of the biggest lifestyle influencers on Instagram or TikTok, they are hyper conservative Republican women, that are showing ‘this is what my house looks like, here is my interior design idea, here’s my idea for a children’s activity.’That’s who really kind of dominates a lot of Instagram spaces is these far right women. And many of the women who are following them have no idea that this is happening to them. I mean, have you seen anything like that, Kat, in what you’ve looked at?ABUGHAZALEH: I mean, going on Twitter, yes, but I do feel like that hasn’t really been, there’s not like a Today show where it’s like trad life hacks, there isn’t that yet, but I mean that’s definitely a thing and I think it’s a brilliant. But overall, it’s just this general fear that I think has mostly penetrated the mainstream, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see that way more in the future.DARBY: I was just going to say, I mean I have seen it more so in like the meme-ification, so there are whole Instagram, Facebook, I’m admittedly less on TikTok because I’m an old person who can’t really deal with that much technology, but I’ve definitely seen the meme-ification of some of these tradlife, tradwife life hacks.And I think it’s one of those things where you know, to your point about what do lifestyle influencers, what is the lifestyle that they are actually advocating? And oftentimes, it is a remarkably traditional conservative, kind of look at my nice house, everything is weirdly white. Lots of big written words on the wall, like all that kind of stuff.And I think it would not surprise me to see like it’s all slippery slopes, right? And so, the more sort of overtly ‘women should be in the kitchen, women shouldn’t vote,’ all of the very, very hyper trad stuff, kind of bleeding into and finding purchase in what is a more popular sort of conservative aesthetic.That stuff has been around, like there’s a whole part of Stormfront, which is a place I spent a really obscene amount of time when I was researching my book, because one of my subjects had found white nationalism on Stormfront, which is the oldest neo-Nazi sort of social forum message forum on the internet. There had long been a whole space, I think it’s called like sugar and spice or something like that. And it’s essentially like a trad woman, trad White woman, space and it’s life hacks, right?And so like that stuff has always existed, and you’re just constantly watching it trickle out, get sprinkled, sugar and spice getting sprinkled across other spaces. And then, sometimes it finds purchase with different types of influencers.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I, and another example of that would be that, when you look at some of the HGTV shows, a number of them have actually been created by far-right Christian activists. So the Benham brothers had one, then people found out, ‘Holy crap, these people are part of these, radical anti LGBT Christian supremacist groups.’But it wasn’t just them, like then some of their other figures, they may not be as radical, but they are aligned very firmly with the evangelical suburban in– in many cases, like this is actually an outgrowth of Texas lifestyle, Southern Living type magazines and whatnot.So yeah. All right. Well, did let’s maybe get into the final wrap up here. Did you guys have any final thoughts you wanted to share in this topic that you were thinking about in the discussion? Why don’t you go first Seyward, and then we’ll go with you, Kat.DARBY: Yeah, I mean, I guess my pitch always to people is to not ignore the women.It’s really easy to ignore women in this space, especially because they are attacked, and marginalized, and treated as objects by a lot of the men in this space. But at the same time, there are women who agree with them. There are women who fight alongside those men. There are women who pave the way for, I mean Phyllis Schlafly being a great example, for some of these playbooks that we’re seeing now.And I think our society has a tendency to overlook women’s contributions to progressive causes, and also have a tendency to overlook their contribution to regressive causes. And so, angry White men is a real problem, but angry white women is a real problem too.SHEFFIELD: All right, cool. All right. Well, Kat, what’s your takeaway for people that you want them to have?ABUGHAZALEH: I mean, absolutely, angry white women are just as much of a problem. You need to look at these things, but I don’t think people understand how easy it is to be manipulated, especially White people, especially White men and White women that fall into this rabbit hole.I was talking to a friend who was expressing concern about something about children. They kept talking, I was like, you are on the cusp of falling into a QAnon hole that it is going to be very hard to climb out of. No one is immune to propaganda, whether it’s racist, whether it’s sexist, whether it’s homophobic.Nobody is immune to propaganda. No one is immune to these types of campaigns. And it’s really important to keep your eyes out and to understand that. Because I feel like a lot of people think they’re too smart or they’re, too stubborn to be able to be shifted in one way or another. And especially with the media literacy in this country, it’s easier than ever.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, it’s been a great discussion. I appreciate both of you joining me today and we’ll be sure to post links to all your various endeavors in the show notes, so people can check those out. Thanks for being here.ABUGHAZALEH: Thanks for having me.DARBY: Thank you.ABUGHAZALEH: Nice to meet you Seyward!DARBY: You too!SHEFFIELD: All right. All right. So that’s the program for today. I appreciate you and we’ll be back next week with another one. And just wanted to remind everybody that you can support the show at patreon.com/discover Flux, and we really appreciate it. And go to Flux.community to get more podcasts and articles about this subject and many others.So I hope you can check us out and please do leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever other podcast platform and make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well. Thanks. I’m Matthew Sheffield. 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.communityEpisode SummaryFor a number of years, surveys from every pollster have found that most Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction. Surveys in other countries like the UK have found the same. And it doesn't matter which party or person is in charge.We live in interesting times. And that's not a good thing.In the past several episodes of Theory of Change, we've been talking about some of the technological and political movements that have led humanity to its current situation. I highly recommend checking those out first before you get to this episode.And that's because our guest for this show argues that the problems we're facing aren't just caused by political groups, but by a set of ideas that is pre-political and actually animates people who don't think of themselves as political.In this episode, we're featuring Douglas Rushkoff, he's the author of several books, including his latest, “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.” He’s also on Medium and hosts a podcast called Team Human.You can follow him on Mastodon as well.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSThe full audio, video, and transcript for this episode are available to subscribers only because 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. ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityConcerns about globalization and the rise of politicized religion have led to dramatic increases in political extremism in the United States and many other countries in recent years. But another huge factor has been the shrinking of what people feel like they can expect from their government.For about the last 30 years or so, most countries with mature industrial economies have been ruled by left and right parties that espouse neoliberal views that governments can’t and shouldn’t do much to boost the economy, and that deregulation and privatization are preferred.It was already apparent to many people, but the Covid 19 pandemic made it very clear that the invisible hand is a terrible manager for a national economy. The global supply chains that worked so well for many years broke down entirely, and that there have been shortages of everything from toilet paper to automobiles. The many problems that China has had in particular have also made it obvious that locating almost the entirety of the world’s electronics production to China and Taiwan was a disastrous idea no matter how cheap it may have been.The rapid development in multiple countries of many different vaccines against the SARS-CoV2 virus has also demonstrated that governments can successfully drive rapid scientific and commercial innovation that would’ve taken the private sector alone many years to accomplish.After ruling our politics for decades, neoliberalism appears to be on the way out. But what’s coming next? Joining in this episode to discuss is Nils Gilman. He is a senior vice president at the Berggruen Institute, and he’s the deputy editor of Noema, an online magazine about philosophy, governance, and technology. And just recently, he co-wrote an essay entitled “The Designer Economy,” which is a multifaceted look at what’s displacing neoliberalism and who’s doing it.The lightly edited video of our conversation is below. The transcript of the edited audio follows. Please note that you must be an active Flux subscriber to access the entirety of this discussion.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityEpisode Summary“The personal is political” was one of the early rallying cries of the Second Wave feminist movement. Decades later, the universal adoption of the internet has led to a new culture around cryptocurrencies with an ethos that could be summarized via similar phrasing: “The personal financial is political.”After decades of languishing in rightful obscurity, extreme forms of anti-government libertarianism have seen a massive influx of converts by melding crank views about the Federal Reserve and fiat currency with a desire to get rich quick through buying and selling made-up digital tokens like Bitcoin, Ethereum, even joke ones like Dogecoin.Most people don’t understand how cryptocurrencies work as a technical matter. But they also don’t understand the politics behind cryptocurrencies either. That’s a serious problem because underneath all the hype is a radical anti-government ideology that seeks not just to overthrow government currency but even democracy itself.For this discussion, we’re featuring David Golombia, the author of the book, “The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right Wing Extremism.” He’s also a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.The lightly edited video of our conversation is below. The transcript of the edited audio follows. Please note that you must be an active Flux subscriber to access the entirety of this discussion. Thank you so much for your support. Please subscribe today for as little as $3 per month.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, David.DAVID GOLUMBIA: Thanks very much for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, as I mentioned in the intro, I think a lot of people know cryptocurrencies exist. They know that Bitcoin exists. They don’t really understand how it works.So why don’t you, before we get started into more of the discussion here, just give us an overview of when did cryptocurrencies get started, and how do they work?GOLUMBIA: Sure. Well, the history here is kind of complicated for a lot of different reasons, which we might be able to get into.One of the most important historical strands for understanding them is the operations of a group of people who we should talk more about variously called the “cypherpunks” or the crypto anarchists, who since the late 1980s had seen a number of digital technologies as being tools with which they could attack what they call the state, but which I prefer to call democracy.And it’s pretty clear that to them, these two things are identical. What they hate is democracy, and they are doing whatever they can to destabilize democracy. One of the things that these people saw from the very beginning was– in their own view, which is a conspiracy theory type view– that because in their view the state controls money, and we can talk about what that means exactly, but they thought, oh, well, we should have our own form of money that the state won’t be able to control.And since the early 1990s, these cypherpunks have been trying to develop alternative currencies that would sit outside of the quote unquote state financial system.What they mean by that is always very unclear, especially as we get into practice. But during the 1990s and early 2000s, they iterated several versions of a currency that could somehow sit outside the regular financial system. And Bitcoin was probably, it was probably the 20 or 25th version they came up with in practice.Several of the earlier versions were taken down by law enforcement because one of the ideal functions of cryptocurrency is to purchase services and products that are illegal otherwise.SHEFFIELD: So the idea though of crypto, what the crypto in cryptocurrency, what does that mean?GOLUMBIA: Well, it’s funny. It comes out of the fact that these cypherpunks, the thing they are obsessed with is encryption. And encryption technology brought– I mean, encryption isn’t even a technology, it’s just a method, it’s the thing that spies use to communicate with each other. It’s any form of obscuring a message using some kind of regular technique that then the person who is supposed to get the message can und decipher, can decipher for themselves, right?So any kind of code into which something can be encoded and then later can be decoded as a form of encryption, the cypherpunks realized early on that.Machine encryption, machine enabled encryption could potentially make messages very difficult for somebody to intercept and decode on their own. Because in the real world of encryption, there are three parties. Right? There is the person who writes the message and encodes it, and the person who is supposed to receive the message and has the authorized.The proper tools for decoding. And then there are the people who are watching in the middle, the third party, who might be able to use a variety of other techniques in order to see the transaction or the message that they aren’t supposed to see. That’s famously what Alan Turing became well known for, is that he developed a computational tool, a bomb, that helped to decode encrypted German messages during World War II.The cypherpunks are really paranoid, and so one of the things they think is that government is trying to watch everything we do, which is not untrue, taken in on its face. And so they were kind of, and still are, convinced that if they could encrypt every message with very strong encryption, they could prevent government from seeing what they’re doing.So part of their goal was to have a financial tool that was heavily encrypted, and that couldn’t be viewed by government. Now, the truth is that Bitcoin, we didn’t really get to Bitcoin, but Bitcoin doesn’t really use encryption in that particular way. It does use some of the techniques involved in the kinds of encryption that they use.One of the places this is most visible is that each user who uses Bitcoin has what is called a wallet. And a wallet is really just a software file. And the software file has an address or a label that you can point at. And if you see one of these addresses or labels, it’s a long string of meaningless characters and alphabetic, numeric, and even special characters, the same kind we use nowadays for strong passwords.And the technique to come up with those addresses uses some of these encryption techniques. But in fact, As I’m sure right. These libertarian-fueled ideologies are always deeply incoherent. And so Bitcoin, maybe I should just explain a minute, like how Bitcoin itself works. What they thought was this great solution.SHEFFIELD: So for crypto, it can mean both the idea of encoding messages, but it also can be used in the idea of hiding identity. Sure. And so in this case, that’s probably more what we’re talking about here, is that, so in other words, when you have, when you hold a cryptocurrency, it’s not linked, generally speaking, not linked to your identity. People don’t know who it is that actually they’re transacting with necessarily, unless they find out through some other means.GOLUMBIA: That’s right. The Bitcoin network is just made up of these wallet addresses which don’t– you can’t actually encode decode them. They don’t mean anything. They’re just arbitrary strings of characters.SHEFFIELD: They’re random. Yeah.GOLUMBIA: They’re random. You can however, use other methods to figure out who is using those wallets and then whether or not they are, it becomes actually quite possible to figure out who is translated.SHEFFIELD: Sure.GOLUMBIA: With the Bitcoin network. Which is one of the sort of ironies, because it certainly was the case that they wanted to make a network that was impenetrable to law enforcement and financial oversight. But in fact, they made something that is incredibly easy to view and that in fact, whose entire history, all the transactions on the blockchain are public.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So you mentioned blockchain, so let’s discuss that one.GOLUMBIA: So let’s just talk about blockchain. What the thing that Satoshi Nakamoto, which is a pseudonym that was used by one or more people around 2008 to write a paper about proposing this network that used several different software techniques that people had already understood for a long time.And what he came up with was the idea that you would distribute a piece of software that anybody could download onto their computer. And when you run this software, what it does is it does two things really. One is that it takes in all the transactions on this network and it puts them on your computer.And then as new transactions are made on the network, it does some complicated math to validate those transactions. And every computer that downloads the software and runs it is participating in. Essentially the same kind of thing that a bank or a broker or any other financial entity has to do, which is to validate the transactions rather than having one entity or a limited number of entities doing that validation.In the case of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that Satoshi came up with the innovative idea is that this is done by everyone. Everyone who chooses to participate in this network is also simultaneously participating in the validation of transactions on this network that is sometimes referred to as a distributed ledger, where a ledger is like the thing that any organization has to use to keep track of its finances and distributed means it’s on lots of different computers. That and that–SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And just to clarify for people, the ledger meaning all Bitcoin transactions from the beginning of the release.GOLUMBIA: From the beginning.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So the entirety of it all is all out there. And in order to participate in these transaction validations, which they kind of erroneously or misleadingly term “mining,” you have to have a computer now at this point that has to be immensely powerful. And uses this process, uses a huge amount of energy, such that it’s actually becoming a serious problem in many localities who feel they don’t have the electrical power to enable large numbers of computers to participate in it.GOLUMBIA: Or they may have incentivized power to be provided to people with low incomes. And then the Bitcoin people may come in and try to take advantage of this and buy cheap power that was not intended for rapacious capitalists, but was intended for very poor people. But to go back to something you just said, that is really fascinating is that when the Bitcoin white paper came out, what excited people so much was that everybody could download this software onto their computer.And in fact, what I didn’t say is that the process of validating the transactions creates the possibility of a Bitcoin being issued to one of the computers that successfully validates the transaction. And that’s how Bitcoin is created by all these computers running. And every once in a while, a Bitcoin gets spit out to one of the ones that does the transactions correctly or successfully.And at the beginning, anybody could download the software and run it. I ran it for a little while. You could run it on any cheap computer, and not only could you run it, but in the early days, you could get a hundred Bitcoin by running the software on a cheap computer for a few weeks.Of course it wasn’t worth anything at the time. And it’s also important to say, I don’t think Satoshi Nakamoto thought about how these tokens would be valued in the real world. He just thought of issuing them. I can send out lots of tokens and or people will start to generate these tokens and they’ll accumulate a lot of them and they can use them to buy drugs and other things that are illegal.But he didn’t really think about the valuation of, again, this is sort of a typical libertarian, there’s a blind spot of something that maybe a non-libertarian would look at and say, wait. And another thing that the– to go to what you were just saying that that someone with a little more like sanity and background might say is, well wait a minute, something built into this blockchain technology, to the Bitcoin blockchain at least, is that it becomes more difficult over time to validate the transactions. Partly because in the early days there weren’t very many transactions, so anyone could download the whole software under their computer.But over time it’s become enormous. It’s actually become prohibitive to even download the whole thing, let alone to process it. And I, in addition, the blockchain network, the Bitcoin blockchain network makes these transactions more difficult in an automated way. And so in the beginning you had this rhetoric of—and they used the word right, we’re going to democratize finance.Everybody in the world can participate in this wonderful movement. Everybody can share in some kind of egalitarian way in the creation of this new financial system. Isn’t it wonderful? You know it, but what quickly happened as it happens in all these kind of deregulated, libertarian spaces, of course, is that people with the most money and power swoop in and they buy up all the resources and the.the fact that you had this algorithmic increase in the difficulty of the Bitcoin transactions meant that it very be, very quickly became impossible for an ordinary person to mine Bitcoin. It became something that only people with a huge amount of power and money could do, and that’s where it sits today.There are very few entities that actually mine Bitcoin. It’s unprofitable for the most part, unless you have access to very powerful computers. and very cheap power. And so in fact, it’s become a kind of arbitrage against the price of certain kinds of computing processors and the availability of cheap power all over the world.And you actually have seen the Bitcoin miners move from country to country looking for the cheapest power available, which they kind of convert. And that’s, and they, the server firms are now enormous, right? The move from running it on your desktop computer to needing enormous, huge warehouses full of very fast computers with tons of air conditioning needed so the processors don’t melt.And the energy waste of that is unbelievable. Yeah. All these things are doing is sitting there validating these transactions in an extremely redundant, repetitive really useless way. Occasionally spitting out a Bitcoin that somebody gets. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Well, and the other thing about it, and of course, and we’re talking about Bitcoin here, but of course most of this applies to the other, the huge number of cryptocurrencies that are out there as well.GOLUMBIA: Yes.SHEFFIELD: And so, there are others of them out there, but I think the other key thing from a political standpoint, I guess as a technical matter, I think we’ve covered all the bases there, I think, unless you think there’s another part we need to talk about.But as a political matter, the original Satoshi Nakamoto paper about Bitcoin, it was an inherently political document. And the reason that, that he, or they said they were creating it, was that they believed that governments destroy value by not having a gold standard based currency.Now these are viewpoints that are, up until the emergence of cryptocurrency as a somewhat well-known thing, these were viewpoints that were limited to extremist cranks who worshiped Ron Paul, the crazy libertarian guy who ran for president a bunch of times and just got laughed out of his candidacy every time.GOLUMBIA: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And these were controversies that were settled in the 1930s, and that Americans overwhelmingly said, yeah, you know what? We don’t want a gold backed currency because we see that harms us. It creates deflation in many cases.And the foundational claim of Bitcoin and a lot of other cryptocurrencies is that government backed currencies are manipulated by governments and that they fluctuate too widely in value and that they destroy the assets of people who have it, have their assets in those dollars, or francs, or euros, or whatever. And so therefore, they needed to create a system that was independent of these arbitrary systems.But of course, the reality is that when you look at commodity based currencies like gold, the price of gold just fluctuates immensely. Absolutely is not stable in any real way. And of course Bitcoin fluctuates significantly in value and so do all others.GOLUMBIA: Very significantly. Yes. That’s, it is fascinating. Right? And that’s actually what part of what really got me interested in Bitcoin in the first place, is I spent some time working on Wall Street in the FinTech sector before, the financial technology sector, before Bitcoin ever came along.And one of the things you learn working on Wall Street is that there are a lot of cranks who hang around Wall Street, right? And you learn to distinguish between the kind of cranky thought and the mainstream thought, which, and the mainstream thought of course has many problems, but it doesn’t have quite the same problems that the cranky thought does.And one of the key words that you see around the cranky stuff is gold, right? Now gold is obviously a valuable and interesting commodity, and it may even have a small place in the diversified portfolios of very wealthy people who want to have their hands in a lot of different buckets.But if you look in the back of the magazines that, and newspapers that once were published on Wall Street, there were plenty of ads for gold. They were always far in the back of the magazines, right? And they were always, they had this very conspiratorial overtone of like, ‘the stock market is about to crash at any moment. The only safe investment is gold. Put your money in gold. And by the way, I sell gold.’ Right? And so, it was just a lot of apocalyptic conspiracy theories.SHEFFIELD: And they would say this regardless of the state of the actual market. I mean, they were running this during the nineties bubble. They were claiming even at the beginning of the bubble.GOLUMBIA: They were running them all the time. They ran them for 20 years. This is one of the ways that, you know that the people I worked with managed to show me that this stuff was conspiracy theory. That they just run these all the time.Right? It doesn’t matter what’s going on. They have goal to sell, and this is their best method for selling. It is to tell you the world is about to collapse. And these, the, as you mentioned, the 1930s, right? This stuff does go all the way back to the early part of the 20th century. And when the US and other world markets thought about separating themselves from the gold standard because there are problems with the gold standard.And then we kind of went back on it and then there’s Bretton Woods when we stepped away from it again. And to be very fair, these people don’t even understand what the gold standard is. Right?They say they do, but their view is that– which is very interesting is that, and it was that way from the beginning too– is that well, what you are actually doing is trading gold, which is limited in supply, and that gold is fixing the amount of money that can circulate.And that isn’t actually how a gold standard work, right? A gold standard, the key word there is standard, right? The standard in the gold standard is a price relationship between the money in circulation, and however much gold a government happens to have in its reserves. And those standards, those were ratios changed all the time, right?And it turns out that in fact, your currency was only moderately impacted by whatever the standard was. And the real problem with the standard was less on the national level than the international level because it created this sort of– it was very hard to value international currencies against each other because you had this third quantity out there of how much gold that each one of these banks have in their vaults in one of these central banks in governments. And it just was incredibly complex and not very useful.SHEFFIELD: The other thing about gold pricing is that it can be very volatile. So if you have–GOLUMBIA: Absolutely.SHEFFIELD: Somebody who is flooding the market with gold, they can, they could, and they did, they were able to take down the value of various countries’ currencies because of that requirement.Or if gold became harder to mine, then you would have inflation. So the stability was never really there. But I mean, the main concern, I think, for a lot of countries besides having to have all this gold for no reason that they didn’t use was the prospect of deflation, right?Which is the worst type of economic circumstance that you can have at the nation state level. And that was a significant problem during the Great Depression, and ultimately was the main reason why the United States went off the gold standard.GOLUMBIA: You absolutely do not want deflation.And to sort of bring this up to the Bitcoin story, the only way that this really figures directly to the Bitcoin story is that. And it’s important to say it isn’t even inherent in the technology itself, it’s just that the way Satoshi Nakamoto built the Bitcoin blockchain, he just arbitrarily said, we can only ever issue 21 million Bitcoin.And it’s going to get harder and harder to issue them as they, this is that same difficulty thing I was talking about before. As you get closer and closer to 21 million, it’s going to become harder and harder to issue them. And so the story there was the supply of Bitcoin is limited, therefore, Bitcoin is like gold, whose supply is limited.Therefore, this currency is immune to inflation, which is bonkers, right? And it’s not. It’s bonkers and it is conspiracy theory in the sense that the far right likes to say that inflation is only about printing money. That inflation is about central banks issuing more currency.Certainly the issuance of currency by central banks can play a role in inflation. It probably played a role in the current bout of inflation that we’re having, but it is not, by any means, the only thing that happens that causes inflation, and it isn’t the definition of inflation, the definition of inflation is a loss of purchasing power, right?And if you don’t have to dig far into cryptocurrency discourse even today, to see them having flipped this all upside down and say, no, inflation just means how many tokens there are in circulation; so Bitcoin cannot experience inflation because the total number of tokens is eventually going to be limited.And when you say to these people, well, yeah, but Bitcoin tumbled in price by 50% over a three to four month period, its purchasing power got cut in half.And they say, that’s not inflation, because the number of tokens didn’t change that much.And your mind just boggles like they have inhaled so much helium or whatever, that they can no longer even sort of encounter reality.The only reason we care about inflation is because we care about purchasing power going down, and vice versa with deflation. And of course they say deflation is actually a wonderful thing. And if you try to give them any of the voluminous academic and political work on why deflation is actually not a good thing and why mild inflation probably is a good thing, you’re just completely at a loss.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and to that point, as a political matter and we’ve kind of talked about it somewhat already in this episode. And I would, for those who are interested in kind of the political background, check out episode 56 of this program where you can get another sort of historical look at that with Richard Barbrook.But going into that, the political theory into this, it is an outgrowth of this sort of crank libertarianism, it is emphatically anti empirical. And it’s based on the thought of people like Murray Rothbard and people who really, who actually literally call themselves anarcho-capitalists, that they actually want anarchy. They want to destroy the government. And they don’t actually, they’re not actually able to make coherent arguments or defenses of their belief systems.And that’s something that really you see with cryptocurrency evangelists, that they don’t actually understand very much about economics. They don’t understand very much about history. And they don’t realize that all of these things which they claim to be true, have been disproven, decades if not centuries ago. But they don’t reason from observation. They reason from principles, first principles.And the first principle in their mind is this sort of outmoded viewpoint of freedom. It’s what I call Freedom 1.0, which is only the state can be tyranny and only the state can oppress.Whereas most people operate from Freedom 2.0, which is that oppression can exist from both the private sector and the public sector.GOLUMBIA: And if you go to that Freedom 1.0 thing, you might argue that the principle could be phrased a different way rather than freedom of the individual. It might also be seen, not rather because it’s compatible with it, but it is maximum power for me, regardless of the cost to anyone else.That’s all I care about is a amassing as much power as I can get. And screw everyone else, right?And you see people using phrases like this when they have those, like libertarianism in four words, things that go around on social media at times. And that is certainly what you see in these people. I mean, they and this is part of, we didn’t talk about this a lot that much, but it’s not clear that the people who built Bitcoin really understood what would happen in regard to its price that it would take off and become something people used to get rich.In fact, if you read the early stuff, it’s not clear at all that they even speculated that this could happen. One or two of them did. But that’s what really made Bitcoin take off, is that it turned out that if you mined some Bitcoin, and you mi you made a hundred Bitcoin and it happened to be worth a thousandth of a penny when you were a thousandth of a dollar.When you mind it and now it’s worth a dollar, you have just earned a tremendous amount of money and if it goes up to $10, and when you start interacting with these people on social media who believe this cryptocurrency stuff, right? It’s just like, I got power from this. It made me rich. Screw you. That’s— that is the extent of their ability to reason about it.Right. And like, it’s hard to argue with the fact that it may have temporarily made many of them wealthy. Of course in the beginning. Yeah. Especially in the beginning. I mean, it’s very hard to sell your Bitcoin nowadays. So, and actually turn it into dollars. So, it’s a, maybe this may be a side note that you don’t really need, but it’s, this the word we u you know, that you use on Wall Street to talk about this view of this conspiratorial view of economics is sound money, right?It’s the view that if you have a limited supply of money, somehow things are going to be real and stable in a way that having this floating currency is not, and this is the thing that all the people even today will talk about is the advantage of Bitcoin. But what is really funny is it’s not true in Bitcoin at all, right?Because Bitcoin, as soon as you start to have things like loans and futures and options and margin, right? The ability to give somebody some percentage of what you have and then let them trade 10 or a hundred times that yours, you’re doing the same thing that happens in the regular financial markets.And that is all over Bitcoin. All the big failures that we’ve seen in recent years in recent months, in fact, like FTX and Terra Luna and so forth have involved these incredible loan schemes that, you just, you can’t even believe that people fall for them. Where they say things, they have absolutely safe loan us here.Bitcoin 100% returns in one year. And if you’re familiar at all with finance, like your BR three alarms are ringing, right? Like no. If somebody promises you a hundred percent safe loans completely safe loans and a hundred percent return, there is something wrong going on, right? And in fact, they use Bitcoin in all the same ways that they critique the financial system for, and even worse, because it is completely unregulated, and nobody knows who is backing these loans and who actually has the money. And you can’t go back and trace these systems.And so this again, goes to this sort of like, well the problem is that the real financial system has regulations and laws that govern it. And if I say I’m going to loan you some money and I can’t actually deliver the interest rate I promised you, then I might get in trouble.But if you’re in the world of maximum power and profit for me and screw everyone else, which you have in Bitcoin, it’s great. You can’t actually get it. Yeah. You’re completely screwed.And it is, I, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry when you read people on social media talking about how they lost not just their life savings, but multiples of their life savings because they ended up borrowing money or they took mortgages on their house, other kinds of crazy things to go and become rich in Bitcoin. And then it all turned to nothing.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I think another persistent parallel with the libertarian ideology here, is that they don’t want their own actions to be regulated, but they want other people’s actions to be regulated.They want to be able to buy and sell whatever they want to buy and sell, but if somebody commits fraud against them, then that needs to be illegal.GOLUMBIA: Absolutely.SHEFFIELD: And you’re seeing that so much with the outrage against Sam Bankman-Fried and other people like him, there are these demands that he be investigated for fraud and regulated, but not anyone else.GOLUMBIA: And even why isn’t there depositor’s insurance for people who put money in FTX, and you just hang your head, like you just said, banks. I mean, Alex Mashinsky, right? Another one of these guys who used to walk around with this t-shirt that said, banks are not your friend. And then it turned out he was stealing money, all the money that people had given him.And in fact, at least in the US but also most democracies, your deposit would be insured and the person who runs the bank couldn’t actually walk away with all the money, and you would just be screwed. Right?SHEFFIELD: Yeah.GOLUMBIA: That doesn’t happen in real banks.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean the ignorance obviously is the underlying commonality with this cyber libertarian ideas. But fundamentally, they do not understand that a free market, quote unquote, cannot exist without government intervention, because otherwise, you cannot have contracts, otherwise there is no punishment for fraud. There is no punishment for theft without the government doing it.And so therefore, the market is the creation of the government. It cannot exist without the government.GOLUMBIA: It’s completely right. And if you follow some of what the anarcho-capitalist people say, they really have– no market is free because it turns out that when you have a free market, much like what happened with the distribution of the Bitcoin mining nodes, in which very powerful people quickly swooped in and basically took over the whole network.Well, of course that’s what happens in completely deregulated areas of capitalism. And they will then say, well, the fact that the big players took over means it wasn’t a free market, and you just hang your head in shame, right?In fact, one of the few things that a government can do in a capitalist country where you do have relatively free markets is create some ground rules that make it, that to some extent, try to make the players be somewhat equal amongst themselves. It doesn’t work very well. I don’t know, we’ve had so few antitrust and anti-competitive actions taken, but at least there is the theory there that it could work, and you can bring an action against them.And in other countries it’s done better. But there is, on the one hand, as much power to me as possible. And on the other hand, this talk of some kind of egalitarian distribution of power over everyone and these things are, do not actually go together very well.They really use this language over here of egalitarianism to justify massive concentration of, especially of wealth, but also of political power.SHEFFIELD: Well, and to that point, one of the foundational thinkers of behind this extremist libertarianism is this guy named Murray Rothbard, who was a really abhorrent person, created a number of libertarian institutions, including the Cato Institute, as co-founder of that. But he also came up with the idea that ‘most people don’t agree with our anti-government views, so what we need to do is make common cause with racists.’And he actually wrote a memo that said, you know what, David Duke is the prototype of a Republican presidential candidate. That’s who Republicans should be if they want to win.And that thinking was kind of later adopted by Pat Buchanan, which then was transferred to Donald Trump.And he even had written at length about how a true free market would have a market for children, slaves. Child slaves. That you could sell your baby once you had given birth to it, that you should be able to do it because that’s freedom. I mean, it’s just really horrible.And beyond the sort of extremist ideas about policy, he also absolutely hated the government. And one phrase you quote from him in an essay he wrote called The Anatomy of the State, he wrote: ‘We must therefore emphasize that we are not the government, and the government is not us. The government does not in any accurate sense, represent the majority of the people.And so, these are fundamental attacks on even the shreds of oversight and accountability that do exist in our current systems. And whatever country you’re in, these people want to overthrow that. And there’s no coincidence that the most activist backers and promoters of Bitcoin are also promoters of the idea.Like this guy [pen-named] Mencius Moldbug, or Peter Thiel, other cryptocurrency advocates, they actively talk about how they want to destroy democracy, because it’s inefficient and they understand that there is a tension between the desire for equality under the law and their desire to get as much money as possible.GOLUMBIA: Absolutely. And of course many of them quote Rothbard. You see Rothbard all over some of the early crypto writings.And he’s often referenced even by people today. And part of this is his real hatred for people, I think in general, for minorities, and in that essay, he doesn’t really give arguments for why the democratic sovereignty is a lie. He just asserts that it’s a lie. Right?And if somebody were to try to give examples of places where, actually I do think we have a certain amount of power in crafting our government, and I do think it’s right that government is by the people, for the people of the people. And you tried to actually do some empirical study of it, he just would reject it because he believes in principle government, whatever in the world that is, it’s just evil, right?And that is like the heart of conspiracy theory, projecting this nebulous, formless bad ‘other,’ that has so much power over you, which is resonant with all kinds of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but which are themselves, they sit on top of this kind of ur-conspiracy theory of the world is actually controlled by these very powerful people who want to hurt you.And what is so interesting about it is, that kind of resembles the power that a lot of these people want. They want this kind of strong absolutist, feudal like power for themselves. And they really abhor what they see in this kind of Nietzschean mode, right? This kind of weakness of people who support democracy and say, well, actually, I don’t want all that power for myself. I accept the fact that my power, my political power is shared with everybody else that I live with, and I’m only going to get my way some of the time. And that’s good. It’s good that other people should get their way some of the time. That’s how we create a stable society. And like, and in fact, it would be politically and morally bad for me to always get my way.And we were talking beforehand a little bit about they do use evangelical religion to spread this. If you look at the sort of splinter groups of evangelical Christianity that have been created alongside the Cato Institute and Focus on the Family and the Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell, and so forth, they also, they spread anti-government hate.And they conjure this vision of this harsh absolutist ruler who isn’t quite Christ. It’s something like God who one must absolutely submit to.They teach this. There’s a great book by Jeff Sharlet called “The Family” that talks about this. There’s a documentary you can watch about this, and they preach this, what to any ordinary Christian does not sound like Christian religion, right?It’s all about, there is an absolute authority and one must submit to him. And it is like these people who really help to create a bridge between Christianity and Donald Trump, who obviously does not embody any ordinary Christian values, but he does embody this view of an absolute ruler, to whom one must submit, and who has accrued all kinds of power and wealth to himself.It is really poisonous. And there is the politics that embodies our politics, that you might argue that it’s a sort of resurgence of a kind of monarchical politics.It is certainly part of the things that we think we have made some progress in across the world in the development of democracy, and more egalitarian political systems, and the rule of law, and all these things to which even the leader is subject.And just to go back to what you said, Rothbard doesn’t really have arguments against this.Another one who is probably, if anything, even worse than Rothbart, is Hans-Herman Hoppe, a German theorist who is often associated with them, also a leading anarcho-capitalist. I mean, it might not be right to call him a Nazi exactly, but he is, if there is a line between him and Nazism, it is so thin as to be indistinguishable. And he also has no arguments.He just has all these like weird analogies and metaphors, and yet, he will tell you that the state is the worst thing that has ever been created in human history. And you must pursue your own power at the expense of anyone else and everything else in order to achieve freedom.It’s a noxious doctrine. And it is really, it is a different face of fascism, but it is fascism is exactly where it leads. And the people you mentioned, Moldbug, and the other far right, alt-right theorists who are associated with Silicon Valley, they are all, at the very least, curious about fascism, if not openly embracing of it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and actually we’ll get into that in the next segment here, but that’s going to actually be only for Flux Patreon subscribers. So, please do sign up for that. You can go to patreon.com/discoverflux to get the full episode here on video, audio and text. So please do support us. 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