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This Doomscroll episode is available on video as well as audio. Be sure to follow our guest, Lance Aksamit.
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00:00 — Donald Trump’s hush money trial is destroying his carefully coiffed tough-guy image
10:32 — House Freedom Caucus launches committee, doesn't realize acronym for it is “FART”
12:34 — Congress would rather ban TikTok than pass a privacy protection law
15:00 — Marjorie Taylor Greene gets 2 more co-sponsors to remove Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House
17:29 — Trump’s presidential campaign is so desperate for cash that he’s demanding Republicans pay him 5% of all their revenues
19:37 — Tesla forced to recall thousands of Cybertrucks for dangerous gas pedal design
22:03 — The science is settled: Tucker Carlson says evolution is not real
29:33 — Heineken beer is making a flip phone
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Donald Trump has been very public about remaking the Republican party in his political image by boosting people who flatter and praise him the hardest in primary elections. But his longstanding role as leader of the Republican party isn’t just having an effect on the politicians, it is also remaking America’s right-wing subculture in his personal image as well.
Besides being thoroughly corrupt and authoritarian, Trump is also incredibly strange, especially in his attitudes toward women and sex. That strangeness is filtering down into the Republican electorate as a whole, turning MAGA into a sexual fetish as well as a political identity.
It’s really something to see, and joining me in this episode to discuss is Amanda Marcotte, she’s a senior columnist at Salon who has been doing some interesting writing on how the Christian right is using sex to sell religion in the age of TikTok and Trump.
The transcript of our April 2, 2024 conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the complete text. The video of this episode is also available.
Related Content
* Dating in the present age has become quite the mess, how did it happen?
* Young Republicans can’t get a date — or a clue as to why
* How an oversharing Christian blogger inadvertently documented his own radicalization
* The sexuality of reaction is complicated and contradictory
* No one likes Republican dating websites, but we keep getting more of them anyway
* Anti-LGBT groups promoting ‘conversion therapy’ programs using gender fluidity language to promote them
* New research finds that regardless of their religious views, people are more likely to condemn women having casual sex than men
Audio Chapters
00:00 — MAGA isn't just a political identity, it's a sexual fetish
11:21 — How the "tradwife" lifestyle transformed from a worldview for women into a sex fetish for men
20:33 — Many Mormon social media influencers clearly do not live Mormon doctrines
25:59 — Fundamentalist Christians have realized that sex sells, in their own way
32:09 — Far-right Christians have realized they need unplanned pregnancies, and so they're attacking birth control
39:07 — Controlling women is both a doctrinal and political necessity for the Christian right
41:39 — How far-right activists hoodwink moderate Republicans about reactionary authoritarianism
46:00 — The disastrous effects of oppressive religion on women
50:22 — The role of identity and religion in conservative politics
55:18 — While religion often justifies sexism, there are plenty of non-religious sexist arguments also
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I think the American political media doesn't really talk about a lot of this stuff at all, because national journalists have to pretend that nobody has sex and nobody goes on dates. These things don't happen. And so you've basically kind of had the field to yourself a little bit in this regard, I have to say.
So tell us, what the hell is going on with MAGA and the sexualization of MAGA?
AMANDA MARCOTTE: Yeah. I mean, [00:02:00] it's a complicated subject, I suppose. I've been writing about it a lot on different levels. I hadn't even thought of it as something I was specializing in, but I think that what we're seeing is a few threads that Evangelical Christianity has really had a lot of dramatic changes in its self presentation around sexuality and gender issues that, even as their ideological beliefs about these things have not changed at all.
And then you are seeing this dramatic, a lot of the coalition that Donald Trump has built, and one of the reasons that the Republican party has become so incredibly dependent on him is he speaks to this group of, I would say, secular male losers who are very difficult to mobilize. I mean losers kind of are hard to get to vote.
And Trump kind of set off, I call it the dirtbag bat signal for the sort of Joe Rogan audience of male insecurity, just [00:03:00] this rat's nest of that. And I think that those two have kind of come together in this way, it is about sex and dating. It's about masculine self image.
Trump, because he is a sociopathic narcissist, I think he actually has this real talent for sort of speaking to people's deep insecurities, because what is a narcissist, but a person whose entire life is about being a narcissist? Like the conflict between their, both the part of them that has this like overbearing sense of self, this like almost godlike sense of self, and then the secret fear that they actually are the worst, which we see with Trump all the time.
SHEFFIELD: Well, he has so many insecurities of his own that he's very good at playing to other people. I think that's really what it comes down to. And you do see that also in the elections where he's not on the ballot, that there's the Republicans just have much lower turnout. [00:04:00] Because there is really this subset of people who, they like him as a person, or at least they're inspired by him.
MARCOTTE: Yeah, he's an aspirational figure. I mean, he's definitely like, when you look at the chuds that follow Elon Musk and like him on Twitter and whatnot, that's kind of like Pepe the frog dudes.
So much of it is: ‘Oh, wow, he's a big, fat, gross loser like me that smells like a butt and ketchup, and is repulsive in every way. And yet somehow he manages to be successful.’ That speaks to a certain mentality of people that want to be successful without being good at stuff.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and we're certainly seeing that with the Trump Media and Technology Group, recently they had to disclose to the public that they lost $58 million last year and made only [00:05:00] $4 million. So this is par for the course for a Trump business.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. I think Timothy Noah, if I recall, he wrote about this recently for the New Republic. I think that there are actually more people that invested in truth social than our users of it.
SHEFFIELD: Oh, wow. That, is hilarious, if that's true, yeah. They have what I think about 63 million shares, I believe, or something like that. Yeah. So there's a lot of, there's more Trump donors than Truth Social users.
MARCOTTE: Either way. Like the point is there, it's such a bad service that people won't take it even though it's free, but they will pay him money for this thing.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they won't use it, but they'll own the stock in it. If you're too extreme, too right wing crazy for Twitter under Elon Musk, he's basically opened the doors for everyone who is a complete psychopath, right wing nut job and said, come on in on Twitter. And they have, and so there [00:06:00] is basically no market if there even was one to begin with.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. I would say there was never really a market for it. And Elon is learning this the hard way too. Like the selling point of these services to those guys, to trolls, to right wing trolls is not their opportunity to speak to other losers like themselves. It's so that they can annoy people that they don't like because they feel on some level rejected, there's always such a mentality of, resentment and envy towards liberals. there's this real right wing rhetoric is all shot through with this real FOMO almost of the sense that that the left is having a good time. And they're the ones that have all the like musicians and artists and comedians and that, and the fun friends and the good parties.
And [00:07:00] so like it, it cultivates this childish desire in some people and we see it all the time on social media to just, well, pull on their ponytail then, and so without the liberals there to troll, there's not really any purpose for a social network of just a bunch of like fascists.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, this vibe exists with their romantic lives such as they are as well, because I mean, it is absolutely the case that when you go on various dating websites, there are no women on profiles saying things like, well, if you like Joe Biden, swipe left. That's just not happening.
And so, whereas in fact, there are a lot of, for very good reason, and I've heard from a lot of women that, they basically I used to Sometimes date Republicans and, once Trump came along, I, just don't bother with it anymore because if you actually like Trump and you're a guy, why you're an [00:08:00] a*****e, why would I want to be with you? It's gotta be very depressing for them.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. I think it is true that it's really underestimated how much perceived or an often real romantic rejection is feeling a lot of the, like resentment that a lot of like the men that get in, especially the low propensity voters that Trump kind of pulls on that are difficult to get out.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, the Joe Rogan stans.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. I think a lot about the Proud Boys and what, they, when they came onto the radar, I think by then most people's perception of them were just that there were this paramilitary, neofascist organization. What was lost is that in the beginning, the Proud Boys, when Gavin McInnes was kind of putting them together, a huge part of their sales pitch was, we're going to make you better with women.
It was a lie. [00:09:00] Gavin got these guys to do a bunch of stuff that actually made them lonelier and less attractive to women. Like for instance, the Proud Boys only hang out with each other. Like they never speak to women and so they get worse at it, right? Their entire social life kind of is built around right wing politics, which is just a terrible way to meet women.
And so they actually become more unattractive. But what's funny about that is it's just like circular logic. Therefore they become more addicted to the MAGA lifestyle because it's the like only people that will have them anymore.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it's, a, it is a self fulfilling curse in a sense that they become less effective and then also less able to realize that they're less effective at their dating.
And the other kind of interesting thing that, that isn't talked about a lot with this is [00:10:00] that younger people, generally speaking have been leaving evangelical denominations like the Southern Baptists for a number of years, and they've just been bleeding members.
But since Trump came along, there has been a small percentage of people who were in other Christian denominations who now identify as evangelical. And so it's it has been a little bit of a gravitational effect for them. And because they, feel like, well, that's, these are the people that agree with me politically.
So I guess. Maybe they're on to something where I don't know. It's, I mean, we can't tell what's going on through their heads since--
MARCOTTE: It's interesting. I was reading that book Exvangelicals last night and she had an interesting statistic, which was in 2000, And six, I do believe 23 percent of Americans identified as white evangelicals. That's dropped to 15%, but that includes, like you said, it's actually dropped more in a, in one regard in terms of like people that are like [00:11:00] church going evangelicals because the, a huge percentage of self identified evangelicals, I do believe up to 40 percent now do not attend church, do not belong to a church. They derive that identification from watching like Matt Walsh videos or something.
"Trad wife" has transformed from a worldview for women into a sex fetish for men
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, No, it is. And it's an identity rather than a belief system. And I think we're, we could definitely see that in regards to the whole tra wife thing, which you have been writing about quite a bit recently.
So for people who don't. Know what a what this whole trad wife thing is. What the hell is it? And we'll go from There's a lot to talk about
MARCOTTE: on one hand, I feel like trad wife is kind of like one of those self explanatory terms It just means traditional wife. But actually what it is it's an internet phenomenon It's it's like a hashtag trad wife, right [00:12:00] kind of thing and the idea of it is it's a bunch of social media influencers who present themselves in idyllic terms.
Like they, they have, they're influencers. So everything about them is kind of this like fantasy, but it's like a very politicized fantasy in that, they're, Pushing this idea that women have been tricked by feminism into believing that they should have a life outside the home, that they should want careers, et cetera, et cetera.
And that in fact, the real path to women's happiness is to be a stay at home wife. And not only a stay at home wife, but like a submissive stay at home wife, right? A lot most of them are very christian. A lot of them don't lead with that. But a lot of it is christian propaganda, right?
like right wing christian propaganda and you discover pretty shortly after like You might follow trad wives because [00:13:00] you like their sourdough videos or their You might envy their beautiful kitchens or whatever. They're little sweet, obedient children. But then what you get is this like message that it's because I adopt this like right wing Christian view of male headship in the house and female submission and, look how.
Wonderful. My life is and it's kind of a difficult subject to sort of explain in full to people because a lot of stuff on social media, there's actually a shocking amount of diversity within this kind of world. I mean, they're all selling the same fantasy, right? Of Women's joy is through submission, but some of them are kind of like trying to sell themselves to women.
Some of them are a little more obviously selling themselves to men and kind of pitches changes like person to person. So it kind of can be a diffuse trend. [00:14:00]
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the religious motivations are different also as well for, cause like actually a huge percentage of these women are Mormon.
And a lot of them are evangelical and, some of them are just there because he wants you to go to their only fans also.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and there's some crossover, but yeah, that I do want to be clear that it's like a lot of Mormons and then a lot of evangelicals. And while both have very like Rigid and sexist gender roles expectations, like the theology of them is a little bit different.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and but in terms of it does seem like that the audience, like they. Sort of understand that these are different things that are going on, but, some of them don't quite understand that I think, and so it's interesting because yeah, as you were talking about, I mean, there is quite a bit of.
Kind of a [00:15:00] fetish marketing, sub subtext to a lot of the videos that they're making, whether it's showing the, making sure that they put their breasts very large and out front and so you don't miss them.
MARCOTTE: It's true. so. So much of the trad wife stuff on Tik TOK.
When I first started researching this, I expected it to mostly be like what I was told it was, which was influencers that are selling a fantasy to women of a mad, like an understandable fantasy of kind of almost slipping back to childhood, but as a wife, wouldn't it just be nice to give up on all these adult responsibilities to make money and make decisions and take care of yourself and instead just have a man take care of you.
Right. And there is some of that content, but yeah, a lot of it was just here I am in a negligee, like stirring some vague thing in a pot really hard. I found a photo of one trad wife influencer and I put it up. I didn't even notice this, [00:16:00] like a lot of the people in my comment section did. She was.
Kind of like, sexually posed over a bowl that she was stirring. But when you actually look at it, it's a, colander. It wouldn't have something that you can stir in a colander. Didn't even bother to check that part of her photo.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's, well, because, yeah, because that's the other half of it is that it's, it is a fantasy to the men as well.
And that fits to the Trumpian worldview as well, because, like you've got on the men's side, of course, this enormous plethora of male content creators and influencers that, that's the fantasy that they're selling that, we will, if you follow my advice, you will be able to be a high value man and, be able to get someone who will do whatever you say.
And and that's, they're, playing into that for people who [00:17:00] actually believe that stuff, that they're kind of like the sort of The virtual Christian wife for them in some sense.
MARCOTTE: Well, and it's funny to me, cause I feel like there's a long tradition in conservative politics of packaging a political message.
It's like self help. Right. But it's gone. It's on steroids in the 21st century as part of the MAGA movement. Like a lot of people. Buying into social media stuff that purports to give you advice on how to make your sex life better, how to make your home life better, how to make your marriage better, how to, be more attractive how to be better at your job, other things like that.
And actually what it is it's, glib b******t that is just reeling you in for what it's real message is, which is this fantasy claim, this nostalgia, this functionally a fascist nostalgia [00:18:00] for the idea that in the past, before Roe versus Wade, before Brown versus the Board of Education, before all these things, life was good and it's only those progressive changes that are why you personally are finding it hard to achieve the things that you want to in life.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, that's important because, the actual policies that could be made to, if, allow people to have a single income household, they're against that. They're against family leave. They're against higher minimum wage. They're against unions. They're against, national health care.
they're, against all of these things. And so that's why it really is a fantasy and no, and it's, it is destructive in a sense because they are, it's I mean, in some ways it's kind of like the conservative feminism of Sheryl Sandberg, I would say [00:19:00] that, you can have it all, but don't actually do anything about this.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. And at least she was open to the criticism. at least on the surface she was, and they are not, it is interesting. Cause it's like, for instance, like in, in my, like my in depth article that I did on some of the people that are fighting back against trad wives online, like I opened talking about this Mormon influencer named Hannah Nealman.
She runs a little Instagram and all these other social media like feeds called ballerina farm. And that's because she. Used to be a ballerina and now she's a farmer's wife supposedly. And like they have eight children. She's only 33, which is kind of wild to me. And they run this farm and the whole kind of premise of the Instagram feed and their other marketing is that they have somehow made this like [00:20:00] fantasy of self sustainability happen, that they have this farm and they raise these animals and they sell farm goods.
And on that money, they're able to have this Enormous family and this perfect expensive kitchen and this gorgeous house and all this Extremely expensive stuff and what she doesn't really talk about is that it's because her Husband is the son of the jet blue founder not because they make a ton of money on their little farm project.
Many Mormon social media influencers clearly do not live Mormon doctrines
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they I mean that, that is kind of the fantasy behind all of these accounts either, they have money independently from that or they don't but they're just, Pretending to, in the hopes that they can get endorsements and whatnot for their social media.
MARCOTTE: And if you think about that, then that means that kind of by definition, none of these tradwife influencers are actually stay at home wives.
They are professional [00:21:00] content creators. Their job and my job aren't all that different. I'm just more honest about it.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, no, and it's true. And and, but, and some of the more, some of the right wing audience does understand that. And the men in particular. Some men do criticize these content creators for that.
and saying that, well, look, if you really are sincere about wanting to be a, trad wife, you need to get off of social media because you can't be a trad wife if you're a real trad wife, if you're out there, prancing around for a million Instagram followers.
MARCOTTE: It's funny cause, and that's where the Mormon thing, I think really kicks in cause you're ex Mormon, right?
So, that there's like a long tradition there of not necessarily being like, you must be a stay at home, non employed mother. Right. But that there's a lot of discourse about like having a workout from the [00:22:00] home kind of job so that you are present for your children. So it's a little less like overt about the idea that women should not be making money, right?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It's, still better if you aren't, but yeah. Well, and then to the Mormon thing, and one of the other things that you talked about in that is that, a lot of these women who are making this content, they're not following, they're clearly are not following the Mormon doctrines in their in their lives including specifically, with regard to the.
The undergarments that Mormons are supposed to wear, like they're wearing these clothes that very clearly would not be allowed if you were actually wearing them.
MARCOTTE: I love that so much. I, cannot tell you how much. So, in my reporting on this, I spoke to this wonderful couple. They're named Jordan and McKay Forsyth. They just go by Jordan and McKay online. Look them up. They're so much fun. They're ex Mormon and they did an [00:23:00] how Mormon influencers aren't wearing their garments. And I, and I was like, why is this such a big deal? And they're like, because it's mandatory. And the fact that church is giving them a pass speaks volumes about how much this is propaganda.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the thing is there is a long tradition in Mormon culture of doing this sort of thing, like allowing members who very clearly do not live the expectations and requirements. And they never face any accountability, quote unquote, for that. I mean, like the Jack Dempsey, for instance, the, boxer, the mid 20th century boxer he was regarded as a Mormon, but he didn't follow any of their practices. He smoked, he drank, he, and I think he, was not had any sort of, traditional Christian lifestyle, quote unquote. And they never did anything to him. Never. Whereas if you're a [00:24:00] regular Mormon and they find out that you're smoking and drinking, they will come to you and start harassing you about, Oh, you need to, give that up.
And I mean, even in Mormon culture, unfortunately there are Mormons who will literally go and feel your body to see if you're wearing the garments underneath. It's so creepy. Yeah, these, women are not being subjected to that, obviously.
MARCOTTE: Yeah, no, I mean, look at the pictures. It's impossible.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. But it's, yeah. And yet, there is this, I mean, that, really is though the, this whole milieu, it really does speak to this constant tension that right wing Americans live with every day of their lives because, they know that they can't prove their beliefs that evolution is fake or that, vaccines are, harmful or, or that, or that, well, in the case of Mormons that, Native [00:25:00] Americans were the, our ancient Jews they know none of their beliefs are provable and they also know that their lifestyle mandates are oppressive and annoying.
MARCOTTE: And off-putting.
SHEFFIELD: Off-putting. Yeah. And yet they continue to believe them. When I was Mormon, I was, constantly had that tension in my mind that like for Mormons, their, dating experiences much like as bad as it is for everybody else on dating apps and whatnot in the Mormon culture, they have congregations that you're supposed to go to as a young single adult. And their sole purpose is to get you to marry somebody in that congregation. That's why they exist. And you're also chaperoned by a 60 year old at these events. You can't have your own congregation of young people. No, it has to be run by old people. Yeah, so it's just it's just a horrible tension. They all live in their own cognitive dissonance.
Fundamentalist Christians have realized that sex sells, in their own way
MARCOTTE: Yeah. And [00:26:00] I think evangelicals have a very similar situation going on, which is, you see this happen a lot and it's kind of getting worse. It was bad in the Bush years and it's, been bad for 40, 50 years, but it's, it seems like it's getting even more pronounced as they're trying to sort of vacuum over those contradictions.
On one hand, they know that the prohibitions against sex before marriage, the prohibitions against abortion. and while they're not necessarily all against birth control, it's kind of discouraged or at least, stigmatized. All of this comes together to create a very strong and accurate image of them being just really against sex and, but you know, it's not popular being against sex. Like sex is super popular. So sex is more popular than puppies and ice cream. I always say [00:27:00] most people have sex, like 95 percent of people.
SHEFFIELD: Certainly more than any politician. Yeah.
MARCOTTE: 95 percent of people have sex before marriage. It's incompatible with modern American life. And so what you get is a lot of propaganda and books and videos and sermons where evangelical leaders try to position themselves as we're not against sex. If you follow our rules, you're going to have the best sex of your whole life. It's going to be just so fulfilling. It's just going to be amazing.
It's an obviously false promise, as anyone who has had sex could probably tell you. But of course this pitch is being made to virgins and that's the like bait and switch that they're trying to pull off. And it kind of requires like an ad hoc conspiracy of sorts of everyone just not talking about the fact that in reality [00:28:00] we find that Couples that do wait until marriage and you all follow all the evangelical rules have really high rates of sexual dysfunction and Unhappiness because that just doesn't work.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Because they don't even know who the other person really is, even themselves. That's the other thing. It's just a bunch of ignorance piled upon ignorance, both individually and sort of philosophically, that's really what it comes down to.
But this is very important in becoming very important politically for them as well, I think. Because there's that old saying that right wing Christians used to say about about gay people, that they can't reproduce so they have to recruit. But the opposite is true for the Christian right. That they cannot recruit anymore. And so they have to reproduce. That's the only way that they can get anybody to sign [00:29:00] up for their oppressive alternative lifestyle.
MARCOTTE: Even then most of the loss, like the loss that they're seeing in terms of losing membership is younger people. So you can raise somebody to be evangelical. You can bully them into believing it for a long time, but a lot of them are going to grow up and start to be like, this isn't working for me.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, I mean it is in fact the case like with Mormons, that now there are more former Mormons than there are current Mormons And similar things that are happening with evangelicals as well, to your point.
There is a little bit of pushback though, for among some of these Christian conservative content creators who are women that I think some of them have finally understood what it is that they are advocating for.
So like Allie Beth Stuckey, who is this commentator for the for The Blaze, I believe, and some of these women have begun [00:30:00] to occasionally say, okay, this is really horrible what you guys are saying. Like they have said that recently with there was this right wing fever about a video of women dancing to a rap song in Louisiana that, that it set off. the right wing fascists out there that they were saying, how dare these women, go out there and dance to this jungle song or whatever, why are they not home behind this stove, serving their man.
And, some of these right wing Christian women were like, okay, I'm not down for that. But they, they're, in this weird place where they don't, I don't know if they ever will Come out and just be like, look, you guys are wrong about everything. I don't think they can.
MARCOTTE: I don't think that they can cause they've sort of built their life around this, but it's certainly, yeah, it's certainly younger women. Hopefully you're seeing this and realizing they need to hit the eject button before they've gotten into deep because yeah, [00:31:00] The thing is back in the Bush years, like the Christian right, like definitely kind of marketed itself as a chivalrous movement, right?
You heard a lot about chivalry and there's a certain appeal and rationalization to the idea that, well, there's like a sexual hierarchy, but at least it obligates men to protect and cherish women, right? Like pets admittedly, or children, but not like equals, but there's still man has
SHEFFIELD: to submit to Jesus at least.
MARCOTTE: But now they don't even bother with that. It's just mean. And I think that they've they've given up on that argument and it's, I don't know. Like how you like they've just given up on persuasion, I think, and that's the end problem here.
SHEFFIELD: It's interesting to watch from afar.
Nice not having to be in the middle of it. I bet. [00:32:00] Yeah, if only we didn't have to share a country with these people, that's the only downside. I'd like it to be further afar.
Far-right Christians have realized they need unplanned pregnancies, and so they're attacking birth control
SHEFFIELD: But in the political realm, there's Turning Point USA has really been pushing ramping up a lot of propaganda aimed at young women to try to get them married off and having kids as soon as possible to kind of prevent them from seeing the world on their own or just seeing other people or seeing other cultures, other idea sets.
and they've really kind of pushed that quite a bit. You want to talk about that?
MARCOTTE: Yeah. I mean, I think that there's this, kind of a twofold thing. You have a lot of this kind of trad wife type material out there. That's like hyping this idea that getting married young and all that is a wonderful and great.
And again, I do think that there is a, I don't want to discount that there is like [00:33:00] a surface appeal to the idea that it would be nice to like, Never have to grow up and never have to be responsible for your own decisions, be responsible for household finances, be responsible for going to a job every day and doing it well, right?
And That has a certain appeal. But on the other hand, when you actually see the statistics of where young women are at, you realize that while people might enjoy that fantasy for especially you've come, you've been at work all day and it's been hard and you might go look at some trad wife stuff and think about it for 10 minutes.
And then the next day you're like, nah, I'm not going to do that. So where persuasion is not working, I think we're starting to see force and trickery come in. And obviously the most salient example of the force is the, is Dobbs is repealing Roe versus Wade and starting to ban abortion. But [00:34:00] that's coming with another, there's been a real uptick of and Peter Teal has been funding this a lot too, of propaganda being decimated on online that's trying to get women to give up on the most effective forms of birth control with lies saying it's bad for them.
And I think that's starting to work because it,
SHEFFIELD: if you don't mind, I actually have a clip that I want to play on that. So, yeah, that's why I got a clip on that. Alex Clark, who is a commentator for Turning Point USA, who focuses exclusively on young women, and she's an evangelical, and she basically, her biggest thing is lying about birth control to 20 something.
So I'm going to play a clip where she says some false information about that.
ALEX CLARK: Well, all of a sudden women are waking up to how absolutely toxic hormonal birth control [00:35:00] is. It accelerates aging. It amplifies feelings of anxiety and depression. It depletes our bodies of vitamins and minerals. It makes sex painful. It causes migraines, weight gain. It can affect how attracted we feel to our partner. I
UNIDENTIFED WOMAN: I know that. Oh my gosh. What else? There's, it's, it can cause so many hormonal acne. So people think, Oh, I went on to fix my acne. Well, it can cause acne. It can cause yeah. Infertility issues in the future. Not directly, but because it's depleting all of these essential vitamins.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. All lies. I just want to be very clear. Yeah. When I started the pill, my acne just went away. I had bad acne as a teenager and it just went as soon as I was on the pill. So I'm just going to put that out there. Anyway, like here's what drives me nuts. This has been a talking point that comes and goes for like ever since, like at least since the nineties, right.
And it's always been [00:36:00] untrue. And. What's also really frustrating about it is it's built on this assumption that is flat out untrue, which is that the medical establishment would let women have access to dangerous medications.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
MARCOTTE: Or like we do all those things.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. That allow us to have sex.
As if there was so much like support socially for women having like sexual freedom, that, the risks would ever be overlooked. And it's if you've ever been female and been to a doctor, you will find that is not true in the slightest. it's just not how it is. The idea that you, this, is assuming a level of respect for women's ability to make choices that I wish was true in American society, but is not.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it isn't. Well, but of course, the reason that they're doing this is, to what I was saying that they [00:37:00] have to reproduce. It is literally their only way of having any sort of political coalition in the future because, because yeah, they're usually losing young people in droves.
And this is why they become so paranoid about, racial replacement and, all that stuff. And it's, just lies upon lies because of course these illegal immigrants are not allowed to legally vote. So they very clearly are not shifting the vote totals in any way to the Democrats at all.
And the real reason why Republicans are having a harder time demographically speaking is that they're losing young white people. That's actually what it is. Because of how they oppress them.
MARCOTTE: Especially young white women. And I think, a huge part of this. Because, a lot of the anti birth control thing is, not just about getting people to reproduce, but also getting young women to give birth before they're ready.
Before they know they're ready [00:38:00] is, a great way to derail their, I'm, I don't think I'm only speaking for myself when I say before you're like 25, 26 years old, you're not necessarily the best decision maker in terms of who you're sleeping with, maybe Republicans. But I think that there is like a, not to make it too sound too sinister, but I do think that a huge part of this is like hoping that college girls and, very young women get rid of birth control methods that are very effective and switch to condoms, which a lot of men don't want to wear and that they get pregnant and then they find themselves submitting to marriages that they weren't necessarily going to make if they were had a total freedom of choice there.
Now, I don't know how true that is. Cause I think what actually happens is women still do not marry those men and, end up just being single mothers or finding a way to abort [00:39:00] the pregnancy, even where it's banned. But I mean, I think that's the goal
Controlling women is both a doctrinal and political necessity for the Christian right
SHEFFIELD: yeah, well, and they do, I mean, they do openly talk about the idea that when you look at women who are married versus women who are not, that non married women are more likely to vote democratic.
And so by their definition, if we can do anything to make women get married and for whatever reason we don't care we feel like that will help us. And it's, it is, it's magical thinking in some sense though, because, it doesn't, Factor in that, well, maybe the percentage of women who are interested in being married at all are more likely to be conservative because, there's plenty of people out there that are like, well, why, what's the point of getting married?
I don't see the point of it when I can have the same effects as not, without the ceremony. Yeah, I think it's a little bit of contract.
MARCOTTE: I think it probably is a little bit of both, right? That's my, I think that both women that are more conservative probably get married [00:40:00] younger. So thus are more likely to be married.
and then I do think that marriage can make women more conservative because men are more conservative than women. And because we live in a male dominated society, Men's opinions tend to become the dominant one in a married couple more often than not. Like they pull women in their direction more than vice versa.
If not, if nothing but to keep the peace. Right.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and then it's also a matter of interest as well, because women tend to not follow. Politics as a hobby compared to men, but a smaller percentage are interested in it compared to men. And that's, that's just how it is, at least how, things are right now, at least in this country.
Yeah, so I think you're right about that, that and so, like that's, that really is the motivation and it's just so much manipulation. And it's no, I don't think it's sustainable for them. And, but rather than admitting, look, we [00:41:00] have ideas that people hate let's become more moderate. They're not going to do that.
MARCOTTE: We're seeing that we're seeing that a lot, like that play out really. Like dramatically with the Dobbs decision. I think they've been caught really flat footed by how angry it's made people. I've done this work my entire career and I've been caught flat footed, but how angry it's made people.
And I have some long, boring theories as to why that might be, but it doesn't really matter. what's happened is, By banning abortion, they made people more pro choice and more adamant about it.
How far-right activists hoodwink moderate Republicans about reactionary authoritarianism
SHEFFIELD: It made people realize how radical they were. Like, because I think that's, that really is, the linchpin of, reactionary political success is camouflaging their radicalism.
If you talk to your average Republican, or let's say your average Republican leaner, so an independent who says they're not a Republican, but they [00:42:00] vote for them, in their mind, they actually think that the Democratic party is more extreme than the Republican. They really believe this.
MARCOTTE: Yes.
SHEFFIELD: That is the foundation of reactionary organizing is getting is camouflaging extremism and making, conservatives think that they're centrist, basically, I think.
MARCOTTE: Yeah, I think a lot of people like, so I know a lot of like pro choice Republicans and, what I would find in my discussions pre Dobbs with them was that they really wanted to talk about this subject as if it was a matter of personal opinion, as a map instead of policy.
Right. and they wanted to talk about what they can see what they perceived as they saw the abortion issue as a bunch of meanie feminists being mean to the sweet little church ladies who just don't like abortion. And it's no, I don't care if you don't [00:43:00] like abortion, just don't try to ban it.
Right. And by banning it, they've made feminists, they've proved feminists were right all along that it was never about somebody's personal choices. That's why we called it pro choice. Like it was always about letting people choose. The religious right was literally trying to take away extremely crucial health care access.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and they're doing that with this birth control stuff. I mean, that's, there is obviously no fertilized egg at risk in when a woman is using hormonal birth control methods.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. Well, but they, will lie about that through their teeth. It's insane. And to the point where I've, unfortunately that propaganda has gotten so widespread that I hear liberals repeat it all the time.
They think that the birth control pill kills a fertilized egg. It [00:44:00] doesn't, it prevents ovulation. That's how it works.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. But speaking of the, sort of educated Republican, I think, there's another person who kind of really personally, crystallized this, I think recently, which was Katie Britt in her State of the Union response to Joe Biden recently, that she, this is a woman who very clearly is a professional, educated, smart person, independent has always had, a high paying job and works very effectively and intelligently, but at the same time, she knows that's not what she's supposed to do.
MARCOTTE: Yeah, I think one of the reasons her response to the state of the union went over so poorly is like She's actually not all that great at doing the like Syrupy fundamentalist [00:45:00] trad wife bit, right?
I mean how much yeah, it's not her
SHEFFIELD: native language.
MARCOTTE: Yeah Even though she's from alabama and I feel like they just teach you that stuff from the cradle there Yeah I mean, she, had this sort of voice down the Fundy baby voice thing, but like she just could not sell it like but she looks the part.
And again, I think that she was put up to it by a bunch of like male leadership that told her that this was her way forward in the party and this was how she was going to get more power. And, she did her level best, but. And I think that's generally true. Like a lot of Republican women in leadership know that being able to sort of flatter and placate incredibly sexist men is the sort of path to success in their party.
And so they've, made their peace with that, if nothing else.
The disastrous effects of oppressive religion on women
[00:46:00]
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It like, yeah, in some level they have. And yeah, it's just, it is really. It's really unfortunate to see, because I mean, I do personally know people who have had those things happen to them. women that I knew when they were teenagers.
who were so smart and witty and, but then over time they're, they just sort of gave in, lost themselves and it's, it's awful to see. And, I really, that was ultimately one of the reasons that, that I left Mormonism was that I didn't like what it did to women.
But it was subconscious at first. I couldn't see, I didn't have the vocabulary for understanding. Well, why is it that these Mormon girls are so different from the non Mormons? I couldn't see it. I, didn't understand how to say it at first.
And then, eventually I realized that's why I don't want to date [00:47:00] them.
MARCOTTE: It's, funny. yeah, I, often have said my whole like life that like one of the like hardest things for patriarchy to do. Do is to convince men not to see women as human beings, because we obviously are. And, you really have to beat it out of boys and and nonetheless, some still managed to keep hang on to.
Like the obvious fact that like women are people and not just helpmeets put here to serve them. I saw a speech by an abortion provider many years ago where he did talk about like why he got into it. And it was literally that when he was in high school, he had a crush on this girl. And she couldn't get an abortion with her boyfriend that she was dating.
And his just total compassion for her, drove him to go to medical school and become an abortion provider. And I was just like, [00:48:00] well, aren't you sweet? not only were you moved by this girl's play, but you didn't even care that she was dating some boy other than you.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, no, true. And.
but this just bundle of contradictions it, also, it was manifesting recently with the Donald Trump Bible that he's out selling now, that a guy who is literally on trial right now for paying off an adult film star that he had cheated on with his wife while she was pregnant.
It's also selling a Bible for 60.
MARCOTTE: Well, there's a lot of old Testament prophets who did similar stuff. I suppose, well,
maybe not prophets,
but figures like the evangelicals are always comparing Trump to King David and it's like, all right, whatever you guys,
SHEFFIELD: yeah, well, [00:49:00] yeah. And, but, and, that really is how they've kind of justified it.
It is that. They do see him as God's instrument, even if. They acknowledge that he may not live the, the, ideas and and, from a theological standpoint, I do think that also, their theology also makes them vulnerable to somebody like Trump or this type of thinking, because, if you believe, well, I'm, can be forgiven for anything that I do.
I just, I'm already forgiven, I can sin as much as I want, or, or you go to confession and then it's over, like If that's really your mentality and your belief, you actually can get away with any manner of sin, quote unquote.
MARCOTTE: Especially men. I will say in my research on my trad wives piece, like a lot of the religious trauma therapists I spoke with said that they've had a huge influx of patients since Trump, because [00:50:00] the contradictions are more than a lot of people in the church could bear.
And it was a breaking point for them for leaving. So I think we've been seeing an exodus. That's probably in larger numbers than the stats show because of what you said, that it's been offset by people self identifying as evangelical, even though they don't go to church.
The role of identity and religion in conservative politics
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's, yeah, it is, it's an identity which is another one of these, every accusation is a confession things like, the right wing Christians.
Southern right wing Christians invented identity politics. That's the entirety of what their movement is about. It's not about ideas. They don't have any ideas. They don't have policies. Their policy is the government shouldn't do stuff. But that's not really a policy or an idea.
MARCOTTE: It's true.
They always yell and scream about like people talking about race and gender. And it's well, but it's, like conservative forces, like historically that [00:51:00] invented these categories in order to classify people based on how much power they're allowed to have. . Like the concept of black people didn't exist until racists needed it to justify chattel slavery.
and as a lot of gender theorists point out, the only reason we buy into this myth of like that there are men and there women and there's no in between and there's no ambiguity around those two categories, that they're just a black and white categories. Is that. We need there to be men and women in order to know who's in charge and who's the servant, right?
And I think that liberals are just using categories that we've been handed to criticize them, but we're not, the people who need them as much,
SHEFFIELD: yeah, well, and again, and it's something that the right wing, right wingers don't understand when they talk about, That women need to be feminine and [00:52:00] men need to be masculine.
When they say things like that, they don't understand that people on the left don't deny that either. If somebody wants, if a woman wants to be feminine, quote unquote, nobody says, no, you can't do that. There's nobody out there saying. No, you cannot wear a dress if you like wearing dresses, take that off right now.
MARCOTTE: And one of my favorite contradictions about that is the same people who say that like gender's, inborn, unchanging, and immovable also completely lose their minds. If a man wears a skirt or a woman does sports or yeah, does something considered not of their sort of gender stereotype. And it's well, y'all decide, right.
Is it inborn and therefore unchangeable by any choice I make, or is gender performance that we have to just constantly keep up by what the clothes we wear, the choices we make, the like way we present to the world. I feel like you have to choose. [00:53:00]
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and then from a theology standpoint, if they do claim to believe that, God is this, transcendent, non physical being that contains the essence of everything and everyone, so therefore you can refer to God as female, and that would be correct if you want to but you know, if you do that, like they get massively triggered and angry at you or calling God non binary. of course, like if you're talking about a non physical being that is eternal, of course it is non binary. of course it is but you can't say that to them.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. Every time that they're like, no, God is a man. I just. I'm just like, what does God have junk? I just want to know, does God have junk? I want but I never have the courage to ask that, but I'm always thinking it.
SHEFFIELD: I, I have once in a while asked people, did Jesus die for the [00:54:00] alien? I have asked someone that.
MARCOTTE: That's, a good one.
SHEFFIELD: And yeah, somebody told me that, yes, the answer was yes to that. Then I said, oh, okay, well tell me more. And then they
MARCOTTE: They wouldn't be unsaved because they haven't heard the good word. No, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I see. Well, that's the thing, like you're not supposed to, you aren't supposed to think about it too much.
You really aren't like that's all of the, like all of this stuff. That's the one consistent thing they have is that you're not supposed to expect consistency. You're not supposed to think about it. You're just supposed to follow. That's really what it is.
MARCOTTE: Aliens land. Are we supposed to meet them with Bibles and be like, ‘Oh good. You're saved.’
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I guess so. See, hopefully we'll have that, that, first contact. We can find that out.[00:55:00]
Well, so we're coming up on the hour here. So, is there any other aspect of this that we haven't talked about that you feel like we need to cover here?
MARCOTTE: No, I think aliens is good. That's some fun stuff.
SHEFFIELD: We've reached the natural end point.
While religion often justifies sexism, there are plenty of non-religious sexist arguments also
SHEFFIELD: Um, well, I guess, how about then let's just maybe end that, as much heretics like you and I do enjoy making jokes of this nature.
It is also the case, that a lot of these sexist stereotypes and submission narratives do, they're not dependent on religion necessarily.
MARCOTTE: No. And in fact, I think, maybe less so than when I was like first starting out as a feminist writer, but there was like this whole like notion.
and Jordan Peterson still kind of minds this territory a lot that like, there's something called evolutionary psychology that it, and it's not a real science, [00:56:00] but people present it as it is. And it is also the same kind of just so stories, but they package it as science instead of religion, that women are born to be helpers and men are born to be leaders.
And if you start to dig into it, you find that their claims are just unevidenced in all ways. And they're untestable also.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To say, well, this is how things were for humans 20, 000 years ago.
MARCOTTE: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: It's like, how do you know that.
MARCOTTE: Jordan Peterson and his lobsters is like the kind of thing that sounds persuasive at first glance and then you give it like five minutes thought and you're like, wait, none of that makes any sense. Is our society to look anything like lobster society? These claims here that are not testable, like you said, or like comparisons that don't really hold up under scrutiny.
So there is a secular version of it, but I do find it interesting that I, when I [00:57:00] look at like secular, like conservative spaces, I don't really see as much.
Of the sort of like elaborate Evo psych, like arguments that you used to see. I think it's just Donald Trump has kind of created this permission structure to just be a belligerent jerk about your views without ever even feeling the need to kind of prop up even a half assed fake proof,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and I was talking with somebody, another fellow ex Republican about that. And he made the point that I think was very interesting, which is that all of the arguments you used to see of this nature, they weren't for the general public, they were actually for the moderate Republican.
And once the moderate Republican was just like, yeah, I'll just vote for you no matter what you do. Then they don't even bother with the pretense anymore. And that's a really good point. Interesting idea. Yeah, and so and that is yeah, why I would say, you know the To the extent that there are [00:58:00] still any moderate Republicans out there, you guys need to f*****g stand up for yourself. Come on now.
Fascism is dependent on conservatism to win. It cannot exist without it. And conservatives need to understand that and they need to assert themselves because they are the first ones who will be up against the wall. The conservatives will, that's who they come for.
MARCOTTE: Yeah. I mean, that's. That's literally how Donald Trump is operating, right? He's following the fascist playbook of get the conservatives on your side and then purge them from the party. Hitler did it with the knight of the long knives. Trump does it with tweets, but it's, and that is less violent.
So I'll give him that, but it's kind of the same premise, right? You use them as a ladder to climb the power. And then when. You've gotten there. You just take them out.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so Amanda people who want to keep up with your stuff, how would they do that?
MARCOTTE: I recommend just going to [00:59:00] salon. com. I, write there every day. I have a Twitter account under my name, Amanda Marcotte. I post there once in a blue moon. I also am on Bluesky, which is a little bit more fun for me these days. So, check me out in those places.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. It's been a great discussion today.
MARCOTTE: Thank you, I've had a blast.
SHEFFIELD: So that is the program for today, I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation. And you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, you can get the video, audio, and transcript of the episodes.
And if you are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much. You are making the show possible. And if you can't afford to subscribe right now, I understand that. But please tell a friend or a family member about the show and ask one of your favorite podcasters to have me on. I do those once in a while as well. Those are always fun.
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00:00 — Arizona Republicans reveal that reactionaries have no real principles beyond getting power
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10:06 — Iran attacks Israel with drones and missiles, will it lead to wider war?
15:52 — OJ Simpson's death brought the world together
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08:51 — NH Governor Chris Sununu humiliates himself shilling for Trump
11:48 — RFK Junior's New York campaign director says she's trying to help Trump win
18:39 — Trump's dementia is getting even worse
24:30 — Right-wingers are angry at Scrabble now
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Introduction
For a variety of reasons, increasing numbers of Americans are turning away from marriage and dating. In a 2022 study, less than a majority of adults surveyed were married, while 37 percent were not in any form of relationship.
As the percentage of single people has increased, it seems also that social media is filling up with awful dating advice as well. Self-styled dating and relationship gurus are proliferating on places like YouTube and TikTok in particular, many of them recycling old tropes about manipulating people for money or sex.
Dating has also become a lot more political as the Republican Party has become much more radicalized. Even before Trump, right-leaning Americans have been targeted by websites and apps offering to help them get a date where they couldn't get it otherwise, particularly the male Republicans who seem to hate the idea of female autonomy.
Straight women are now also getting their own share of bad advice as well.
There's a lot going on in the world of romance nowadays, and to set the table for a mini-series of episodes, I wanted to have a fun and light discussion on the topic with my friend Camille Corbett. She’s a filmmaker and comedian based in the Los Angeles area.
The transcript of our conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the complete text. The video of this episode is also available.
Related Content
* That right-wing freakout about some women dancing at a gas station is about so much more than it appears
* Male popular culture is obsolete, and many men are suffering because of it
* Reactionary ideas are increasingly abhorrent to Generation Z, but young right-wingers are refusing to look inward
* The American far right has been obsessed with sex since it emerged in the 1960s, but it’s a history that’ isn’t discussed enough
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
03:31 — How the internet gave rise to the professional daters known as “pickup artists”
08:54 — Republican men are angry that women don't want to date them
14:12 — Women are getting into the dating manipulation advice game now
22:04 — Some former pickup artists are becoming right-wing religious figures
23:27 — Dating apps for Republicans?
29:52 — The new and unrealistic obsession with “high value”
36:06 — Some healthier advice for dating
Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So as I said in our intro, the internet [00:02:00] is filled now with awful dating advice and it's coming from all sides and all corners, it seems like, and I think people, if they're not into dating, this has kind of taken place under the radar for a lot of people.
And you have been there kind of seeing all this happen in real time pretty much, right?
CAMILLE CORBETT: Yeah. Low-key, I downloaded Tinder when I was 18, which is crazy to think about. So I never have been dating as an adult without a dating app.
SHEFFIELD: Oh, wow. So how much is the sort of physical, going into a bar and people talking to you, like does that even happen anymore now?
CORBETT: Yeah, I get hit on a lot in person, but I feel like I'll get hit on a lot, but sometimes men can't finish the thought. Like they'll be like, oh my god, you're so beautiful, I just want to come up to you and tell you that. And I'll be like, thank you. And [00:03:00] then they walk away because they can't continue the thought and be like, oh, well, can I see you later or something.
So I definitely think there's an awkwardness there. I've even dated a dude that told me that he would be scared to approach me in person. Would have never done it, but because of dating apps he felt comfortable. And yeah, which is crazy.
I'm like, wow. I didn't realize I was dating such a pussy. Oh, can I say that? I don't even know.
SHEFFIELD: Well, you just did!
How the internet gave rise to the professional daters known as "pickup artists"
SHEFFIELD: But yeah, online dating really did kind of change the way stuff happened and when this really kind of started hitting its stride in, let's say maybe late 2000s, there was a group of people who—basically men—who said, they made a business of giving advice to men telling them how to do things and how to talk to women and basically kind of manipulate women.
And they eventually called themselves the pickup artists. [00:04:00] You enjoyed reading their material, as you've told me in other conversations.
And then I guess sort of the dissatisfied customers of the pickup artists kind of branched off into their own kind of, maybe sort of feedback loop that kind of goes in and out is, and that's the incels. So for people who don't know about these guys, what would, what's your description of them?
CORBETT: I feel like pickup artists gamify dating. It's basically what's the most amount of women. And they tend to fetishize and have ratings and values for women. So if you're like, I don't know, a white girl in college maybe like 22 years old, that's a high get for these sorts of men. They have value for all of these sorts of women, which is scary to think about.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's. Yeah, no, ahead.
CORBETT: But so pickup artists, they basically [00:05:00] they just want to f**k the most amount of women as possible, and show their bros and it's totally not gay to show off the amount of women that you've had sex with to your close friends.
And I feel like incels are the men that hear the advice but can't actually apply it. And are just stuck in sexless lives for whatever reason. They have, I think, some theory that's you should be like six foot, have at least six inches and make six figures. Which is quite, I feel like that's like really a lot. I've dated a lot of people and I feel like that is unrealistic I don't know. I don't even think I've dated, or maybe I have dated a few dudes that meet these qualifications, but that's just not what is needed and you just don't understand women, but I feel like there's a plethora of reasons why they don't understand women or [00:06:00] why they feel devalued in that way.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and, a lot of the stuff goes down to techniques and things that they tell people to say to women. And from what you've told me in the past, like some of the guys would actually tell you the things that they had said to you were, that I read this somewhere that I should say this to you, right?
CORBETT: That someone would say what? Sorry!
SHEFFIELD: That they would say things to you and then you'd be like, what, are you telling me that for? And then they'd say, well, because somebody told me to say that.
CORBETT: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I've like--
SHEFFIELD: So give us some examples of that. I want to hear about some of these.
CORBETT: Oh, when I saw this morning, which is crazy literally I was just scrolling and I saw it. This dude was just like if a woman gives you her number say it back with one number wrong, and if she corrects you, then she actually likes you. One dude told me that he could tell that I liked him because I [00:07:00] shaved my kneecaps.
I was like, what? That's a signal? And he was like, yeah, I read it on Reddit. That sign is one of the signs. Yeah, I just feel like they have all these weird rules because I feel like, again, I've said this before, but I think that pickup artists are just successful incels. They're men that , really, wanted to , collect women and be able to have sex with a bunch of them.
And once they sort of figured out the tricks of the trade, I guess, because I do feel like a lot of it is tricks, which is just sad to think about in the woman's part, because, I feel like most women generally have sex for at least a semi emotional connection.
But yeah, it's so interesting to me because they create all these rules and laws. And then, sometimes they make so much money off of it through publishing books, publishing manuals. I think Andrew Tate has a s**t ton of manuals that people buy or like a university [00:08:00] pickup artists university vibe where you can just learn through the modules how to trick women into liking you.
And I feel really bad for the dudes where it doesn't even work because I don't even know what could be going on, whether psychologically, or just how you look physically, where you can't even trick a woman into f*****g you. But I've noticed from a lot of incels that, because I've dated a few of them, because it's kind of fun to date a dude that hasn't had sex in a year, it's, for obvious reasons, but yeah, I find that a lot of times it's their aggression that makes them not be able to have sex, it's like you hate women. You just want to f**k us. We can tell you hate us.
Who wants to be having someone inside of them hovering over them and they want them dead? That is terrifying.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.
Republican men are angry that women don't want to date them
SHEFFIELD: There's also kind of a political aspect. to this stuff as well, [00:09:00] because, like you mentioned Andrew Tate, but there's, these other guys out there these two brothers that host this podcast called Fresh and Fit. And a bunch of these—
CORBETT: Oh those dudes are weird. And then he was exposed for having set or being on seeking arrangements. The dude that runs the Fresh and Fit podcast was literally on Seeking Arrangements, paying for women. Because who would actually date him after, if he's on a dating app, right, you connect your social media profile to everything. You see his photo. Maybe he's okay, he's wearing a hat because he's clearly balding.
And then you go to his socials and you see it's just like him degrading all of these famous influencers. Why would you ever want to go on a date with him? You'd be like, no, you have to pay me to see me. There's no f*****g way.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, no. And that's the thing. And so I think there's a lot of men out there who are [00:10:00] Republicans, primarily. That they're in this dilemma because, younger women who, the ones who are, the most likely to be dating are much more likely to be Democrats. And so a lot of these Republican men, they're just really angry that they can't get a date with women because in part, because of their political views.
CORBETT: I saw a crazy tweet. Recently, where it's just like, why do women want to be alone instead of going like 50 50 and submitting to a man? I was like, that sounds horrible. When you put it like that, I'd rather be alone. I'd rather be alone. At that point, I, so, yeah, I definitely have felt that way a lot of times clearly dating in, in cell, , I've been like, oh you just deserve to be alone I don't think that there is a person for you in your current mental state and if, you're , obviously, some people that can be [00:11:00] can become so successful that they can , find someone but I feel like even then it's like a revolving door of people, if they're crazy.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, yeah. And some of that success, as you said, like, it would, it could maybe work. For a little while for some of these guys who just, they have so much money that they can just throw it around and get some, people for a little bit, but they're not going to stick around. But it , unless you, for the people that they sell the advice to, they don't have that kind of money.
They don't have that kind of thing or whatever. So, well, no, like the customers I'm saying, generally speaking, they're not going to have that. And so it doesn't work for them. So, but they, they, just get these people hooked on it. And that's where the whole incel thing comes from that, the guys that are giving you the advice to you, it's not good advice.
And or if at some point it might've worked at some point, before, cause I don't know. I, the. Well, I guess I'm getting ahead of myself. So like a lot of these [00:12:00] things, they're involving specific things to say to women. So like negging, as they call it, using negative compliments or insults.
CORBETT: Negging does not work. It really does not work. The few times I've dated incels, , I feel like they started out negging, and I've been , leave me alone and block them or something, and then they found just another way to contact me, and grovel and apologize. And then, I went on a date with them, but I was just like, what the f**k are you doing?
But yeah. It's weird getting negged because you're just like, why are you being mean to me? This is just too much. It's not attractive.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and maybe at some point that might have worked for some people at some point, but This is, this stuff has been around for like 20 years and I think, most, women at this point, either you figured it out directly yourself or your [00:13:00] friends or family members have told you that some people will do this or that, and it doesn't work anymore.
CORBETT: I feel like women don't know pick up artistry. They don't.
SHEFFIELD: You don't think so.
CORBETT: Not most women. Yeah, especially young women. That's why they prey on younger women. Like the younger they are, the less they'll know. That's why they're obsessed with women that are newly in college or stuff like that.
Because they were, I mean, high school is scary. I mean, to be right out of high school is too much in my opinion, at that point, you're just a masking pedophile. But I do think college is like, It's not pedophilia. It's just like you are praying after young, stupid b*****s. Cause I was so stupid when I was in college, I would have believed a lot.
But so I mean, not just, there's nothing wrong, obviously with being young and stupid. I definitely admire it, but yeah, I look back and I'm like, what the f**k? [00:14:00]
SHEFFIELD: How did I survive this?
CORBETT: Dude! Yeah, there was some moments and like dating where I'm like, why did I go to that dude's house? He could have murdered me.
Yeah, for sure.
Women are getting into the dating manipulation advice game now
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and then the other thing is that so now we're seeing kind of the, maybe the female equivalent of the incel or pick up artists. that's, starting to become a thing now as well.
CORBETT: I think those women are deranged. They're crazy. And incels have never experienced the life that they're claiming to be going after, or like the sort of men that they're looking for. I love it.
SHEFFIELD: No, I think it's, true because and, like some of them, like this woman named goes by Pearl Davis. I don't even know if that's her real name or whatnot. , they'll go out there and they give all this advice to women and they have never, been married and, or never been [00:15:00] in a long term relationship of any kind, and it's just like.
What do you even know about what you're talking about?
CORBETT: My favorite one is this girl. She looks super weird. I'll start by saying that she kind of looks like a Oompa Loompa and she like,
SHEFFIELD: send me the video so I can put that in.
CORBETT: Yeah, I will. But yeah, she always wears really bad, hair extensions and she just looks , Terrifying.
But she's always I'm a diagnosed sociopath. And as a very attractive diagnosed sociopath, this is what I do to trick men. And I'm sharing my what's it called again? Insights with you. Because I see women that have feelings or whatever. And I want to help my sisters. And I'm like She's, the best one.
To me, she's the best one because she is ridiculous. At least she's honest.
Unidentified Woman: I'm a diagnosed sociopath and this is how [00:16:00] I become an addiction to people. Let's be real, plebs needed addiction. You need to become all they think about, every moment of every day. To do this, they need to be on your schedule, not theirs. If they say 7. 45, it's 9 o'clock. You need to be completely unpredictable.
This is why men say, I've never met a girl like this before. She's different. So I tend to reply pretty quickly. But sometimes I vanish. Especially during a vulnerable conversation. You'd be surprised how scared guys get when they send a risky text. Thanks. You want them to think they've done something wrong.
Once you effortlessly come back, it'll be a massive sense of relief. They'll be grateful to see your name on their screen. It's like killing two birds with one stone. He's thinking about you 24 7. So you've effectively monopolized his time and taken out the competition. When men say that she makes me feel like the most important person in the world, there's a reason for that.
Because when he's with you, You give him 100 percent of your attention. You're not on your phone texting other people, [00:17:00] and you're not losing interest in his boring topics of conversation. When he's with you, he feels like a king. Now, you don't want to look obsessed, so plan your absences. This is when he'll be feeling his lowest.
Trust me, like I've said before, guys don't know the difference between anxiety and butterflies.
CORBETT: I'm like, what? I'm like, okay, coming from this place is way more grounded and real than being I only day to do that has Bugatti sprinkle like that's usually like the vibe
Doesn't make any sense. I find Also, it's hard for female pickup artists to actually Have any ethos because most dudes that are very successful do not want an outspoken woman So the idea of you going online and telling people how to trick men would be repulsive So it's so weird to me I'm, like I don't believe you
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I don't know.
It's like to me. It's uh modern day [00:18:00] or a newfangled romance novel kind of vibe is what it is because yeah because the stuff they're saying it's not going to work and it doesn't work for them.
CORBETT: On the average man and even if it's like a dude that makes over a hundred thousand dollars like they're saying these prized individuals you're gonna bankrupt them like I will say I'm gonna be honest I feel like it can be toxic.
Like female being female pickup artist thing or whatever, because when I was , Growing up or like not growing up, but when I was in college and stuff, I would consume female rap or listen to these female pickup artists. And I literally, because of it have, I feel so embarrassed to say this, have made multiple of my boyfriends go broke because of it, because they will be like, no, you can just ask for all of these things.
And it's like, Yeah, you can, but [00:19:00] should you, because if someone really likes you, they'll try and make it happen. You know what I mean? And so I feel like it's not grounded in reality. Cause the average man you can't ask for these things. Cause if you do, you really don't care about them as a human being.
That's how I feel.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, yeah, having money as the foundation of your relationship, that's not a good foundation.
CORBETT: Every female pickup artists are like, Money first, love second,
insanity. Obviously money is important, but it just shouldn't be number one,
SHEFFIELD: well, yeah, and what's kind of weird is that, a lot of these people are kind of just, reading old dating books to on the internet or just repurposing them.
CORBETT: Something that's also interesting is like a lot of these female pickup artists will actually be doing things that prostitutes do [00:20:00] like, I saw this video of this girl and she was like, Oh, sometimes I just go to restaurants and try and find men to pay for the bill, which I would never-- that's that gave me anxiety already.
Cause I'm a pretty attractive woman. I've never been at a restaurant and the dude's like, And I'm not eating with the man and he's paid for my entire meal like that's crazy because who is Alone at a nice restaurant, you know what I mean? Like what man is alone? Yeah, what it's usually like a group of people like someone will be with someone so it's like the likelihood of a man seeing you at a table and then paying for your entire bill seems very You really have to try like in a way that You It just wouldn't naturally happen.
And so it was interesting watching this woman she's like eating her steak, whatever. And then looking trying to get this man to pay for everything. And then in the comments of the video, all these women were like, this is a [00:21:00] prostitution. It's called freestyling. This is what we do when we're trying to pick up a john.
And I'm like, this way makes way more sense to me because I could never be so brazen, Asking for things like that. It's crazy.
SHEFFIELD: Well, no and the other thing is like if a guy's sitting there You know in a restaurant by himself eating he's probably working or you know Waiting for somebody to show up or something.
Yeah, he doesn't want to talk to you. He's not interested in other people He's deliberately alone.
CORBETT: And yeah, you're expecting someone to pay for your like 80 meal It's kind of crazy to me if they don't know you, like when a dude buys me a drink. I'm like, Oh my God, this is so much like, you know what I mean?
Cause they don't know me. So it's just weird to me that that is, I feel like, yeah, female pickup artist thing is just finessing. It's just , being like a hunter gatherer, gathering as many items from men as you can versus like a male pickup artist is Hunting for as [00:22:00] many bodies to make your body count rise or whatever.
Some former pickup artists are becoming right-wing religious figures
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and One of them, his his, he goes by the name Roosh that he was a pickup artist. A lot of these guys, the other weird thing is that they have kind of a, eventually they end up in some sort of weird religious place as well. No, I'm serious. No, cause like, and he's trying to, he's now marketing himself as a spiritual Christian leader or some s**t like that.
And but in a sense it, It flows out of it though, because, they have this hostile, domineering attitude toward women, which they are, they got it from their sort of, secular, sex obsessed viewpoint. And then they discover over time, Oh, Hey, the, the Christian fascists, they also hate women and want to control them.
So, Hey, maybe we have something in common.
CORBETT: That's dark to think about. Yeah, I'm Christian, but I [00:23:00] don't go to church for that reason. I don't think that also if you're Protestant, like realistically speaking, you're Protestant. Martin Luther didn't fight for you to go to f*****g church and have some hack, interpret the Bible for you. This is my thought. Sorry. Rants.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's probably true in his case. Yeah.
Dating apps for Republicans?
SHEFFIELD: and I guess one of the other kind of weird things about the dating environment now is that there is a Republican, there are Republican dating apps now.
CORBETT: I would go on there and scam. That'd be fun.
SHEFFIELD: Well, see, but that's, well, so the one that's out there now, and I, to be honest, like they have had trouble getting women to sign up.
It's called the right stuff. And but you can't get on there unless you have an invite from somebody else.
CORBETT: You can't? [00:24:00]
SHEFFIELD: Yes, you can't.
CORBETT: Republicans, if you're listening, get me a f*****g invite.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, but it's, interesting though, that, yeah, I mean, why do you think that they've had trouble getting women to sign up for their app?
CORBETT: Why would women be Republican when they can't even get an abortion? If there's a kid killing them inside of their bodies, like that's crazy. Well, obviously it's up to the state, but why would you stay with a party that doesn't respect you as a human being. Also, I find it so weird that people are so fixated on reproductive organs that aren't even theirs.
It's just strange to me because it's like most, yeah, it's just weird to me that, Republicans are fixated on that specific thing. It's a foundation of their party and why it just doesn't align with humanity and it doesn't align with women.
SHEFFIELD: [00:25:00] Yeah. Well, and, the other thing also is I would feel like that if you were, cause There are basically no Republicans who are kind of like non believing women.
Like the women who are Republican are all, fundamentalist Christians, basically. At least the ones that I've known. I have not, I have known one. No, two libertarian women. Two.
CORBETT: Fundamentalist Christians annoy me because then you'll ask them have you read the Bible cover to cover?
And then they're always like, no, I've been meaning to. It's like, b***h, pick a new religion that you could actually read. I'm sorry.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, okay. but so you think it's just that, that they haven't gotten, they have had trouble getting women to sign up. Because I would feel like the, Republican women that are out there, they are on these, evangelical dating websites or whatever, like that's where they would go.
CORBETT: They get snatched up to not a Republican too. I feel like [00:26:00] don't they get married earlier? It's like they do.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
CORBETT: If you're a man, I feel like most men like to get married a little bit later, like in their thirties and I feel like women like to get married younger and in places where they're more conservative women, the dudes are more down to get married at teenage years and stuff like that to find.
I feel like a lot of men that are Republican are looking for women. That basically are not their equivalent, like you generally want a partner that's on par with you, but they want someone that's basically a child and in order to get that they have to , go through different avenues like dating apps.
And I feel like it's sort of hard to find a partner if you're older and you want someone that's traditional, like a traditional woman wants to get married by the time she's like 21. And if you're like [00:27:00] 34, she doesn't want to marry a 34 year old man. It doesn't matter how much money he has.
It's kind of gross. I mean, maybe some are attractive, but it's very rare to see a man. I, know this because I used to have a sugar daddy and I would look at people that were, , in their 30s when I was, , in my early 20s. And I'm like, damn, they're old as f k. So it's like, why do you think a woman like that would want you?
I just feel like they have unrealistic standards. And then they go to these dating apps, expecting to be like these quote unquote, high value men and be able to find a plethora of women. And then they don't realize that it's not only women that get aged out of things like you cannot be old as f**k dating someone young and expect to have a notebook like relationship. It's just not the same thing. In the notebook, they were the same age. So yeah, I just think it's [00:28:00] like people aren't using their critical thinking skills.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and then for the women, when they, let's say, get out into their late twenties and, older who are Republican, they got into that setup because, they, themselves maybe were not quite as traditional, were wanting to be submissive and then yet they're in a part, they want to be in a party and find a man who has those values, but. They're not going to want to date a 27 or 32 year old woman who has a grown job and doesn't do whatever they say.
You're out of, you're not what they're looking for. And so a lot of them are really frustrated, it seems like.
CORBETT: Because it's like, Oh man, women that are too young for me don't want me. And women my age are just , b*****s. That's like the perspective for sure. I, I remember I dated this dude that was an incel for a minute and it was almost self inflicted [00:29:00] kind of because he could he just had unrealistic standards and um and he would complain about women his age Trying to , spin the block with him, or hit him up after they had previously rejected him.
And I'm just like, but those are the people you're most likely to be compatible with. Statistically speaking, if there is a year or two in between your ages, you're more likely to stay together, versus someone that is I, was like, maybe six or seven years younger than him. So I was just like, all our incompatibilities could probably be solved if you were literally just dating someone like me, my, a version of myself, older.
SHEFFIELD: A little older, yeah.
CORBETT: Yeah. Because five or six years is vast.
The new and unrealistic obsession with "high value"
SHEFFIELD: And a lot of that is about, unrealistic standards or thinking too highly of yourself in the [00:30:00] dating market, quote, unquote, I think that's the other thing. And I've seen this with a lot of guys that I know that, they're like, Oh, well, I get on these apps and I get matched up with these people and I'm not attracted to them at all and they're not, I don't feel like they're where I'm at. And it's like,
CORBETT: that's your level.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and no, and that's the thing. and, I guess, it's like everyone wants to think that they're above average. But of course, by definition, that's not the case.
CORBETT: No dating apps give you like a numbers. They rate you. I'm someone, like, whenever I go on a dating app, all I do is just put bikini photos. That's all I'm doing. Put bikini photos. And so I always I get a million matches. And I feel like dudes that I don't match with will literally try and hunt me out. Because I didn't swipe on them. They'll find my social media and, like, ask me out there and beg. [00:31:00] And I'm like, there's a reason why we didn't match.
But I feel like men always feel like they deserve more than they realistically can get. from a woman. You know what I mean? Like, specifically in LA, because I live in LA I feel like every dude thinks that they deserve this supermodel woman. And you'll ask them what their job is, and they'll be like, I'm a PA.
Or not like nothing's wrong with being low level or whatever, but also understanding, there's multiple factors to make you a lucrative person today.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and it's, just the idea because there's this term that everybody is now throwing around, referring to themselves as I'm a high value no woman or a man or whatever. And it's just like,
CORBETT: well, yeah.
SHEFFIELD: And it's like, who does that? It doesn't really help [00:32:00] people to, again, if everybody's above average, then that's not possible. Number one, and not everybody. is, most people are not going to be a high value, whatever. And stop trying to think that you're better than everybody.
I mean, that's ultimately seems like the advice that nobody is out there saying, you're not better than everybody else. And you're not and that, whether it's, physical attractiveness or money or like, those are not. The, ways of having a good foundation of a relationship.
And I think a lot of people, they, still haven't learned that it seems like.
CORBETT: I feel like in general, for both men and women, we're going to see a trend of more people, never having partners and, just being generally dissatisfied. I feel like with AI and stuff like that, I feel like people are just going to go after their ideal man or woman through that versus, actually trying to be with a human being at this point.
That's the vibe that I've been [00:33:00] getting, because I'm friends, with a lot of women that , are obsessed with romance novels. obsessed with really beautiful men and it's like you won't settle for anyone less than an Adonis. And I'm like, I, can't even imagine only dating dudes with six packs.
I don't even know what that would be like. And so I feel like it it goes not only for the incels, but for women as well. I feel like a lot of people are gonna be more chosen to be single. I maybe am biased because, , I work in Hollywood, but I see so many people who are like, I'm too good for everyone, but they're all alone.
But maybe they prefer to be alone than to be You know with anyone and I can respect that to a certain degree. It's not me because I'm needy but some people I can admire that
SHEFFIELD: Well and it is the case, yeah, that definitely the percentage of [00:34:00] people who are married has, has declined quite a bit. So actually in 2022, there was a survey that was done and found that only 45 percent of Americans were married American adults.
So it's the majority that's single now.
CORBETT: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. I have been someone that's always wanted to be married. So I've always come into relationships with compromise, but I feel like I've definitely as I've dated and talk to my friends who've dated, so many people are way more stringent than me and will not compromise on so many things.
And it's impossible to get married to anyone without compromise. I mean, I guess you can, but you won't be together for very long.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, that's, I think that's a great point in that people yeah, you got, people have to realize that, that you're never going to get everything you want and, and life, you I mean, sometimes you'll have a bad career moment or, you'll have some financial [00:35:00] struggles one way or another.
And if you can't accept that going into it, then, you're going to only have disappointment inevitably.
CORBETT: Yeah, that's so real. But yeah, I just feel like every, like on both sides, everyone has unrealistic expectations. Yeah, viewpoints. Like I always think about that one TikTok mantra, if he wanted to, he would.
And I'm like, what if he can't physically, it's just kind of interesting to me. Everyone has these unrealistic standards, but it's all because of social media, people are , selling the fantasy. And then half the time, people would be like, Oh, actually, that was a horrible relationship. He was like, beating my ass. And you're like, what the F**k, why are you trying to sell people lies then?
I know that if I was dating someone abusive and they were giving me a lot of gifts, I wouldn't go on social media and be like, Oh, I'm living the dream. That's crazy.
SHEFFIELD: Posting [00:36:00] pictures of the gifts, yeah.
CORBETT: Yeah, that's crazy to me. Yeah, it's crazy.
Some healthier advice for dating
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're, let's see, we hit all the things on the outline here. Was there any park any thing you want to go back to or that we didn't cover here yet?
CORBETT: Oh, I want to give dating advice.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. Go for it. What dating advice do you have, Camille?
CORBETT: I am a pickup artist now. My, if you want to date in 2024, You have to be able to compromise. You have to understand what real bodies look like, both male and female, because y'all are delusional and you have to be kind to each other. You can't immediately be competitive and confrontational and be like, well, can you do this and this?
Cause that's just too much. Remember that they are a person, [00:37:00] not an ATM or that they're a person and not a sex doll. But yeah, that's my advice.
SHEFFIELD: All right, well. Sounds good to me. I think that's some, good advice for people. And I guess for people who want to keep tabs on what you're up to, what's your recommendation for that?
CORBETT: I'm @thewittygirl on all social media, and you can also check out my podcast, Smokeshow Show.
SHEFFIELD: All right. It sounds good. Thanks for being here, Camille.
CORBET: Thank you for having me.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation. And of course, you can always get more episodes. If you go to theoryofchange.show, you can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes of this program.
So thank you very much and I'll see you next time.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Arizona Supreme Court reinstates 1864 anti-abortion law
07:51 — Donald Trump and Kari Lake are the latest Republicans who won't reveal their radical anti-abortion viewpoints
16:33 — Senate Democrats vow to quickly dispose of sham impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary
19:46 — Right-wing Christians are freaking out about Satan, the eclipse, and earthquakes
26:49 — Oregon ends decriminalization experiment for several hard drugs
29:48 — Beyonce becomes first black woman to top the Billboard country chart
32:20 — New Christian nightclub features Jesus rap and no alcohol or twerking
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Summary
The news is terrible. Americans are extremely divided along political and religious lines, and far-right radicals have completely taken over one of the country’s major political parties. It’s a lot to handle.
And yet, as bad as things are, it’s important to realize that they are improving. Although it may be hard to perceive right now, beginning with Generation X, every single generation of Americans has become successively more tolerant and more willing to update and expand the social safety net in ways that every other industrialized country has done so.
While Generation Z is by far the most active and progressive group of young people in decades, the older Americans who agree with them are going to have to stay in the fight to protect democracy by expanding it.
How do we do that though? It’s a complex question, a significant part of which is getting people with progressive views to be more open about challenging right wing extremism in their communities, families, and institutions, especially religious institutions.
In today’s episode, I’m pleased to welcome John Pavlovitz, he’s a writer, pastor, and activist who has personally experienced being canceled by intolerant Christians a few years ago. He’s since gone on to write several books and has a new one out that we’ll be discussing called “Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty is Trending.”
The transcript of our March 15, 2024 conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the complete text. The video of this episode is available.
--Matthew Sheffield
Theory of Change is part of the Flux network, please support our work and get more content like this by subscribing.
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Most movements to make political change fail, what do the ones that succeed have in common?
As the Republican base becomes stranger and more hateful, party elites are losing the ability to simultaneously reach it and the general public
Male popular culture is obsolete, and many men are suffering because of it
Statistics show that trans-inclusive policies don’t increase crimes against cisgender women and girls
The Christian right was a theological rebellion against modernity before it became a force for Republicans
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
07:04 — The mental health crisis lurking behind MAGA
17:48 — Religious fundamentalists have finally realized they do not have facts on their side
28:57 — The challenge of reconciling progressive values with ancient religious texts
33:59 — How to love MAGA relatives while still protecting yourself
40:34 — Understanding what tolerance actually means
42:38 — Religion should be about the values rather than historical narratives
51:39 — The world has changed less than our awareness of it, and this is frightening for people who never really paid attention
01:00:22 — The need for religious and non-religious progressives to unite around common values
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been verified. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So there are a lot of different themes in your book that are worth exploring and I really do think that, and this, this is a theme in some of your other works—that it's easy to see all these terrible things that are happening and conflict. But it's important also that we see more than just that.
JOHN PAVLOVITZ: Right. For sure. I think that it's really easy in the day to day being in the trenches of life and being really up close to so much that we're struggling with. And the news is bombarding us constantly with all the threats and all the things to be worried about.
And there, many of them are valid, but for me, it's always about helping people and myself right-size the threats and to realize that that is only part of the story and that there is so much beautiful work happening in the small and close of all of our lives. And sometimes it's important to remember that the, the agency that we have individually and collectively, and that's what the book and that's what most of my [00:04:00] work is about.
SHEFFIELD: Well, okay. So when you say “right-size,” what do you mean by that?
PAVLOVITZ: Well, I think many of us get up every day and we hop onto social media and we see something that alarms us or worries us and we want people to be informed. And so we share that. And then they, they share it and they repost it and then they comment to us and we get a notification about that.
Then we see it on our timelines again. And so what social media does and what that influx of media can do is artificially enlarge the bad news. So that by 9 a. m, 10 a. m, we've seen the same stories over and over again. So much that it's sort of saturated us and we can get so deflated that by the morning we want to just stop everything.
And it's important, I think, that we remember there are other, there's other evidence. There's other data that we need to take [00:05:00] in and be reminded of that to balance out all of the existential dread that so many of us are feeling.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, that's true. And well, and then also, I mean, you use the word existential and we're actually going to be doing a couple of episodes on theory of change about that later in the year existentialism proper.
But one of the key tenants of of existentialism is that you are the one that's responsible for how you choose to respond to the situation that you live in. And, and you talk about in the book, a lot of people have this belief that somebody's just going to come in out of nowhere and fix everything and save us from this mess. And it's a nice, it's a nice thought, but it's, it's a fantasy.
PAVLOVITZ: It is the, the, the greatest movements in history have been born out of people who looked around, saw [00:06:00] the evidence in front of them, and And decided that as dire or as disconcerting as it may be, there's something that I can do to affect that.
And those 2 sort of resources we have our agency and proximity. We are always somewhere. We always have. Closeness to a community into a group of people and to need and then we have. something that we can do to affect that. It's the idea that the arc of the moral universe, yeah, it is long and it does bend toward justice, but human beings are the arc benders.
We, we have the ability to affect the times in which we live. We're not passive participants in them. And so, whether that comes from a spiritual place or from your own morality or your own sense of identity, That's what I want people to embrace that there is always something you can do. And as you said what happens is is objective reality, but then we editorialize that in our heads and we can [00:07:00] choose how we respond to everything happening around us.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And what an important part of being able to choose how to respond is. Is sound mental health care for yourself and and that, and that's something that you talk about also that, the, I mean, there is. A mental health crisis, particularly for Trump supporters. And I, it's something that, it's, it's something that really doesn't get addressed in, in most of the mainstream media coverage.
Like they love, sending a reporter on an expedition to a diner in Ohio or a church in Georgia. But they don't actually, really dig beneath the surface other than to simply ask: ‘Well, do you still like him?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Okay.’ And nothing beyond, well, what is it that was there inside of you before Trump?
And it's an important question to note [00:08:00] because a lot of people who are, are especially devoted to Trump. They weren't political at all before because they felt like there was nothing, there was nothing there for them. And for, for whatever reason they felt that way there's just this, this profound crisis that a lot of people are in of conservative and reactionary people are having, especially in the red states. And you talk about it.
PAVLOVITZ: Absolutely. And what I find is that when, when we do have media pieces about a Trump supporter and why they're still, we still have adoration for him, why they still support him, it almost is sort of a sideshow image that the media is creating.
But really beneath that, there's a sadness there for me. There's a, an understanding that a whole group of people in our nation. Lacked a sense of community or a sense of belonging so much so that they found in this person [00:09:00] and in this movement, a place where they somehow, as you said, felt that they belonged, even if that they were embraced conditionally, even if they were being, they are being used by a group of people.
And yet. They don't seem to understand that. And that's the saddest part. And what that movement has done, both politically and and religiously, it's leveraged the worst of people's fears and phobias and prejudices. And so you have a group of people who are not just. embracing a movement, but they are being weaponized to fear other people.
And I think the worst of religion and the worst of politics requires an enemy, an encroaching adversary. And that's the mindset that so many people are in. And it's just when people, no one is at their best when they're terrified, I think.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, true. And, and the other thing about it also is that the, the, the sort of panic [00:10:00] response that they're having, it is it, it, it makes them behave well, and they, they're choosing to behave and that's, let's be clear about this.
Everybody has agency, they're, they're responsible for their own actions as well. But, the, the, their actions that they're engaging in oftentimes are so repellent and so, awful that the natural inclination is to just. Get away from me. I want nothing to do with you. You people need to.
Go away and, and, and, and like, and, and, and it's even cropping up especially I think also in terms of, of romance especially between in the, in the heterosexual sphere where, there is a significant political divide that is emerging between women and men. And you see it on, dating.
So I hear from women all the time. They're, they're like: ‘I keep getting approached by these awful Trump men who don't understand what I think at all. And they don't want to understand me and they don't care.’ [00:11:00]
PAVLOVITZ: And that for me, Matthew is the real story here as someone who has worked in-- I've been in local church ministry for three decades, but now doing this work as what I call a collector of stories. And I hear from people, hundreds of people every week. And what has really surfaced from the pandemic. And then from everything of the tribalism, we've sort of been living with for the past 8 years.
This is really a relational crisis. There's the political side of it. And there's the, theological side of it. And aspect with the church, but this really trickles down into the relationships we have with our families and friends and coworkers and neighbors. And that is where we're going to have to reckon with all of this because it's where it settles into really where the rubber meets the road of our lives.
And so many people are living with a, with an extremely different feeling about their, their tribe of affinity that they [00:12:00] used to have.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and, and a lot of it is. It is, it's the product, it's the product of decay or disinterest by institutions that should have been there for them. And, and and we'll talk about the religion side of it in a second, but you know, like, I think that people who are have a left of center perspective often correctly note that the, the The Republican voters are kind of going against their own interest, to use a phrase that's often used.
But at the same time, they're doing it because they feel that what Republicans are offering them is their interest. In other words, their interest has changed. And so their economic interests may not be benefited, but they have, they have been made to want something different.
And yet at the same time, the anger and angst that they feel is actually the product of the Republican party because they don't actually care about their voters and they don't take care of them in terms of, funding for mental health care or [00:13:00] funding for healthcare period, or, not having job training programs for people who are displaced economically for a variety of reasons, and trying to cut out things like social and emotional learning in schools because, those programs are really, really important right now, especially because a lot of people are not interested in, religious institutions that you have to give them some sort of tools.
To deal with with adversity in their lives, and the right wing is is trying to make people not have those tools.
PAVLOVITZ: That's right. And when you when you inject that fear into a person's emotional systems, and they're going around every day, believing that there are constantly, Adversaries and enemies around them.
And then you have a movement that says, we'll take care of you. It, the details don't really matter. And I think the Republican party has done a great job of creating a mythology that people will simply [00:14:00] embrace. And, and that's, there's, that's a product of things like our critical thinking, breaking down and people's just lack of general knowledge about civics or what's happening in the world.
Or, partisan media, which takes out any bad news or any differing news to the story that they tell themselves. And the end product of all of that is a group of people who will embrace the, the lie that Republicans care for them. And when really there's zero compassion in that movement, and that's what's been Startling to me as a minister for all these years is seeing a cruelty, a movement of cruelty rise up in the evangelical church and in, conservative politics that is simply predatory.
And, and what I'm always trying to let people on the right know is that I'm for them. As well, I'm for their families. I want health care for, for their families as well as my own. I want to clean planet for [00:15:00] them as well as my family. And that's a hard thing in the, in the tribalism to, to hear,
SHEFFIELD: It is. And your point on that is, is really, really important because ultimately, the, the vast amounts of anger and loss and loneliness that, that is really what drives Trumpism it exists because, conservative institutions, they failed in what they were assigned to do. And, and that's a lot of that is on the, is on the, is on the traditionalist church and, and I mean, in terms of that, they haven't learned to evolve with the times.
So, I mean, like in many ways. We're dealing with the, our, our society as a whole is dealing with problems that were controversies that existed in the, in the early 20th century. Like, they, those were problems, that were debated by. Whether it was [00:16:00] Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard, or, these, these early 20th century philosophers, they saw this crisis of meaning much sooner than the rest of the world did, and, and they were writing about it, and, and, and Nietzsche also, I think, people, because of his sister kind of, um, she was basically a Nazi and kind of rebranded him, but you know, like so much of his work was, saying to people, look, what you derive meaning from is over.
And you cannot go back to it. And, I think that, that realization, It took a hundred years for everybody to finally have it. And, or at least in even maybe intellectually, they don't have it, but, but psychically, psychologically, they do have, and that's the moment that we're, that we're having right now.
PAVLOVITZ: It's some days I think for people like myself and possibly for you, many of your, your listeners and, and viewers is that there's a disbelief that [00:17:00] we're, we're Having these conversations and this struggle seems so profound that so many people seem to be pushing back against ideas that we felt like were now fixed parts of our society.
And just even the ideas that someone could marry the person they love, or a woman could have body autonomy voting rights, all of these things that felt like givens and maybe left us feeling a little falsely, that we had made more progress than we had. And, but now there's, there's an awakening, a disbelief that so many people are feeling and trying to decide, how do I find myself in this new environment?
What is my place? Where is my identity? And so it's happening from, both sides of the political aisle per se
.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and and just to go back to the religion side of things I mean, there is, there's, There's a real crisis. I think that like, I mean, when you look at surveys of Americans, a [00:18:00] large percentages of them have always disbelieved in evolution.
Even though it's been a scientifically proven for more than a hundred years and but it's, it's like, it's finally, They finally realized that they lost this because like before, let's say in the 90s, 2000s when the Internet was, first becoming sort of, completely mainstream and pervasive.
They really thought that the facts were on their side. They really did. And, like Ben Stein, for instance, the the right wing actor, he made a movie called Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed. which purported to, was a case against evolution. And I really actually encourage people to watch that movie because it's, it's so illustrative of this mindset and, but he, he put it out there and they all thought it was so great, but everybody else just laughed at it and thought it was absurd and, and stupid.
And like, That sort of thing [00:19:00] happens, has happened in so many people's lives. Like it used to be the case that people could say, well, like evangelical churches, they had tremendous growth in the United States for many decades, and they were always boasting against.
More mainline Protestantism or Catholicism that, Oh, you guys are headed for the grave. No one likes you anymore. You're losing all these members. We're, we're, we're going to win all this. And things have now actually reversed. That liberal Protestantism is now the one that's growing and evangelicalism fundamentalism is just collapsing.
And you said something, you wrote something in the book that I want to talk about in particular on this point. You said that. Honestly, I don't know if organized Christianity on balance is helpful anymore. I do know is that the compassionate heart of Jesus, I find in the stories told about him is helpful and urgently needed.
How is that perspective kind of terrifying to a lot [00:20:00] of Christians? Would you say?
PAVLOVITZ: What you wrote there, it probably is, but I think it's one of those questions that that many people of faith who are left leaning ask themselves all the time, because what progressive spirituality of any kind really is a willingness, as I say, to fight with and for our faith traditions to be ruthlessly critical of them to challenge them and to trust that the answers are going to be, Something that we can live with, but there is a sense of lostness or, or homelessness that comes when you look at the tradition of your past and you discover realities about it.
And then you have to decide, well, who am I now? And for me as a minister, that was where the journey began really asking hard questions about theology toward sexuality and toward racism and toward gender equity. The answer is I didn't like what I was getting because I had built my whole [00:21:00] life on this myth, this evangelical or this mainstream Christian orthodox understanding, at least in America of, of people's color of the marginalized.
And so now I'm in a place where so many others are is trying to decide how much of this faith can I hold onto? And how much of it do I need to discard? And what do I do with what's left? How do I identify?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, and that, and that, that's what's terrifying, I think, and that's what's driving a lot of this traditionalist Christian rage against everybody that, they don't, they don't want to have these thoughts.
These thoughts are, are dangerous. Mentally, they are, and, and what, or at least they seem that way. Like in my case, I was born and raised in a very fundamentalist Mormon family. And, and I had all those beliefs. I I believed that, I had God, God gave me revelations and I wrote [00:22:00] them down.
I was all in for this stuff. I read the Bible and all the other Mormon books in their entirety by the time I was eight and many times subsequently, so like, I really believed it and But at the same time, so I, I, I left that tradition when I was 27, there were still throughout my, my life up until that point there were always these little things that I noticed along the way and, and people would tell me, don't notice those things.
Don't think about those things. You need to put those away. Those don't matter. You'll find out someday in heaven, God will explain it all. And, and, and that worked for me for a while. But then once I, once I realized it's okay for me to not it's okay for me to decide what I believe is correct.
I don't have to do what other people tell me. And like, that's, I think that that moment for, because many people, for [00:23:00] them The value of religion is, is answers. And it doesn't matter if they're good answers. It doesn't matter if they're healthy answers. It doesn't matter if they're kind answers. What matters is that they're there.
PAVLOVITZ: Well, and exactly. And what I usually say is most people want a shorthand religion. They want a group of scriptures that they can kind of pull out when they need to. They can be told. What they're to think and feel about these big issues and that those things can be settled and they can attend a building for an hour on Sunday and then go on with their lives.
And as I said before, that the existential crisis, most people don't have the time to go through something like that. And it's necessary. And I, I, I didn't intend to be a minister. And so I entered into the church, not realizing that this was going to be a position where I was going to find myself.
And yet it made me keep asking those difficult questions. And you're right. Certainty was sacred in so many of the communities that I was a part of. And [00:24:00] doubt or questioning was some sort of character flaw. And it was only when I really. Realize that whoever and whatever God would be would not be intimidated by my questions.
Only people are intimidated by questions that I pushed into those things and began writing and speaking and preaching about them. And that's when the trouble comes because people are threatened not by something you say. Usually they're threatened by simply saying, well, is that possible? Could you be wrong?
The existence of hell be incompatible with the character of a loving God, and could women be actually equal to men and have their gifts be responded to in a spiritual community? And once you begin upsetting that, that turbulence comes and people will run away from it.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that's because, I mean, for me, I, I think that, that everybody wants to be seen, but most people don't want to be known.
And the one, and the, oftentimes the, [00:25:00] The most terrifying person to be known by is yourself.
PAVLOVITZ: There are those I think speed and activity in our lives can always mask a lot of things. And so when you see people who are running all the time and their lives are busy and they are busy because there's important things happening, but that can also anesthetize us from those deeper things that we don't want to give time to.
And you talked about the sort of mental health crisis. And I've written about what I call the mental health crisis of MAGA America in that, There there's a whole section of our population who not only rejects science, but rejects the idea of therapy and medication and mental health care. And those things are somehow some, moral failings.
And that's contributed to a large group in our population who simply haven't. They don't know how to process their feelings or talk about [00:26:00] their angst, especially men, as you, alluded to earlier, there's a divide here along gender that men have been done a disservice by their politics and their religion.
And it's now being shown tremendously.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really unfortunate because, it's basically making like right wing people often, try to. They talk about sort of the, the product, which is, a decline in marriage rates or decline in birth rates. And they, and they get very upset about it and they blame, almost anything for it, whether it's, chemicals or gay people or, whatever it is immigrants doesn't matter, but like what they, what they don't want to admit is that, that many men, especially let's say 30 and up, they don't have the tools.
To process the reality in which they live and, and, and, and that, and that they don't understand that [00:27:00] when the feminism has won and women are never going to go back and they don't have to go back and they should never go. And so if you can't accept that, then, you're going to have problems in with reality and you're going to hate everyone and you're going to hate yourself.
And that's terrible.
PAVLOVITZ: Sorry. And then there's an irrational response. So it's not really people don't even know why they're angry, what they're angry about. We were at the airport not long ago and it was like one of the news stories. Some man there just got frustrated by whatever he was frustrated by. And he started screaming and ranting and raving and running around.
And singing amazing grace and all these very bizarre things. And I looked at him and people were of course, laughing and filming him. And all I thought was this, this is a 60 year old man who still doesn't understand how to process his emotions and how terrifying and sad is that? And and, and you're right.
When you look [00:28:00] at the often with conservative politics. And religion, I always say that the attack is an inside job. It's a, it's a lack of being willing to look in the mirror and say, well, what are we contributing to this problem? And for me, Compassion and courage are so huge in the book, because I think that's what we're lacking in so many men who are conservative, they, they, empathy is, A lost art and then the ability to offer a differing opinion.
You know what, when I was steeped in the, in the religious world, in that evangelical world, it was so fiercely protected. I always say organized religion and organized crime are very similar because they're fiercely loving when you're on the inside, but there's such a terror of, of being pushed to the periphery or excluded altogether that people will do anything to stay in there.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they will. And, and [00:29:00] kind of related to that, to some degree, I feel like also with this religion sort of unprocessed, reality that many churches are dealing with is that, there are progressive religious traditions that they, they, they do support women's equality.
They do support, LGBTQ relationships and identities. But they, but they, they are not telling the full story in that they try to say that the Bible supports these things. And the, the Bible says it's okay to be trans or that, it's okay to be gay. And, if those answers are, they're very unsatisfying for a lot of people. I, and I, I think a lot of progressive people, theologians or ministers, pastors, rabbis, I don't think that they understand that, that when, that when people think that you're lying to them and because the reality is, like these traditions, they're not making it up, like right wing authoritarianism has all kinds of [00:30:00] scriptures that they can cite to and all kinds of historical contexts and all kinds of.
Saintly authorities or commentator authorities. They're not making this up that they And, this is not some invention and people, it didn't come out of nowhere. Like, this is real, and to pretend that it's not, it's insulting, I think.
PAVLOVITZ: And I think that's where you see, for me, Matthew, is over the last few decades, as the religious right has so commandeered, theology, spirituality, religion, a whole group of people who are moderate left leaning and have spiritual inclinations of some sort, have simply quieted and yielded the floor to this one stream of theology.
And because it is a messy thing to say, for example, for myself, I started with simply the six or seven verses that were so used the clobber versus to attack people who are LGBTQ. And I dug deep into [00:31:00] those and studied them to find out what the context was and how they were being used. And I came to find out that they were being weaponized completely inappropriately for the conditions in which they existed.
And yet that didn't just mean I was taking those six or seven verses because now I had to ask questions about the words to either side of those verses and to the books they were a part of and to the entire library of the scriptures. And most people As we've been talking about simply don't want to do that on the right or the left.
It's much, it's difficult to say this massive sprawling thing that I have embraced may not be what I thought it was. And what am I going to do about it?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and, and I don't know, it's just like when you, when you're trying to get into, Bible bashing with people who disagree with you.
Like, I mean, the reality is the Bible is such an immense book. and written by, hundreds of [00:32:00] people literally. And, so it, you can pick out any verse to say whatever you want it to say. And so at a certain point you have to understand that, really what these differences are, they are philosophical differences and they're more than they are theological.
And you have to be willing to admit that. And I think a lot of religious people are not there yet, but clearly you have gotten there.
PAVLOVITZ: And for me, whatever the, I call myself a spiritual mutt at this point, I have been at every sort of spot of belief or place of understanding. And what I've come to the realization, and I think many people have, whether they are religious or not, is that your faith, your spiritual beliefs only exist relationally. That's the only way they, they really manifest themselves. And so your theology is really irrelevant to people, especially younger generations who don't aren't steeped in the stories or the [00:33:00] mythology or the orthodoxy. And they're saying, well, what kind of life are you living?
Because they don't really care what you say you believe. And so your, your theology is only valid to the degree that your life is loving. And. So that for me is where the, where the whole thing nets out. What are people experiencing and what you have in the religious right is a group of people saying.
Well, yes, LGBTQ people are telling us we're hurting them, but we're not hurting them. And the women are saying we're being subjugated and we're saying, no, you're not. And it's, so it's a lack of listening to the oppressed or the maligned or the discriminated against. And simply choosing not to hear them in the name of a God of love.
And so that's where it all begins to break down. And it's just frustrating for someone who is not grown up in that environment to even relate to them. So there is just that, that chasm of communication that exists now.
SHEFFIELD: Uh, [00:34:00] yeah. And, and certainly in the, at the interpersonal level as well. And you talk quite a bit about.
That in the book and a bunch of, of chapters and especially on the idea of, how can you, how can you love someone that is toxic? I think that that's, that is a, a, a thing that a lot of people are struggling with now that, they have relatives who, might be virulently anti gay or, or whatever it is.
And yet they still, they still are there and you still do love them. I mean, so let's tell us a little bit about some of that.
PAVLOVITZ: Well, I mean, gosh, hundreds of times a week, people are sharing their stories with me via email or video chats or texts, and they're saying, this is where I am.
I am married to someone who I've been married to for 37 years and suddenly I don't feel like I know them. And so I never want to be [00:35:00] cavalier with people's deepest relationships and say, well, okay, just say goodbye to them and begin to craft a different kind of community. Sometimes that's necessary. But the truth is.
That's what part of the book is, the fighting for America, for the church, for marginalized communities, but it's also fighting for our relationships, and for the people that have been a part of our families and tribes for, since we were born. Those things aren't easy, but To discard and nor should they be.
So it's trying to figure out in each relational exchange, is this still possible to save where, where is the common ground? Or in some cases, do I just simply have to love someone from a distance and realize I can love and respect their humanity, but not want that kind of relational proximity to them. So it's, it's a daily battle to figure out how to wisely yield, Well, I always tell people we're in the tension between our relationships and our convictions all the time.[00:36:00]
And it's how, when do we choose one versus the other is a real challenge.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, not to put you on the spot, but what are a couple of stories that kind of illustrate the approach that you are advocating here?
PAVLOVITZ: Well, I've got a, a good friend. Her name is Susan and I talk about her in, in this book.
And during the 2016 and the fallout of the election, Susan said, I'm disheartened by everything I'm seeing and the tribalism and the animosity, and I want to do something about it. So she decided to have a bunch of women over to her house every week to play bridge and have lunch, but to intentionally talk about the topics of the week that were making the news.
And these were women who were Diametrically opposite her theologically and politically, and that was a case where she invited this turbulence very close and for a long period of time, and it's been very difficult. But what she's been sharing now. Seven years into this is that [00:37:00] there there's true relational intimacy happening vulnerability.
That's allowing people to say, here's, here's the heart of where I am. It's not just some drive by social media exchange. It's something substantive. And I think that's the only way we're going to make any headway is really meeting people's humanity and respecting their story and learning that story. I'm a firm believer that the more we get to know a single human being, the better it is to understand them.
We may not like them after that. We may not agree with their politics or their theology anymore, but we're going to see them as a fully complex human being. And I think we continually have to remember that. And also that there are these universal experiences that we're all having, grief, loneliness, and fear, And whether we're to the right or to the left, those forces are always pushing on us.
So if we can recognize the universal grief and loneliness and fear in the other, [00:38:00] maybe we can meet them in a place where we can, we can reach them and have an understanding.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and one of the other points that you make in this regard though, is that that a lot of times people, you have the expectation that. Love requires physical proximity, and I'm just gonna quote, quote from the book here. You said, you wrote loving another human being doesn't necessitate you placing yourself in harm's way.
It doesn't demand you sustain, sustaining repeated wounds, and it doesn't require you to make peace. With what you cannot abide. The biggest misconception people have about love is that they owe people they care for permanent proximity. They don't. That isn't love's expectation, despite the way we are guilted into believing.
PAVLOVITZ: And, and that idea of love, it's so easily weaponized or the idea of tolerance related to acceptance and love. [00:39:00] I. I hear every day. Well, John, you're from you're a leftist and how you're supposed to be so tolerant. Where's that tolerance when it comes to these things? And it's simply that's a semantic use of words to try and dismiss you.
But for me, it's really about, there are things that I will not tolerate and it's my willingness to dig in and find those hills worth dying on and declare them. I don't want to lose relationships with people I love or people who I've served at my churches. But if that's the cost of my authenticity, and if it creates in me a desire to speak explicitly on these matters and help someone else, then that's, that's worth it for me, because that's the other part of this.
So many decent human beings, I think, are intimidated And they don't want to enter the fray. They don't want to be in that messiness that is required when social change needs to happen. And many people are just [00:40:00] busy or simply too tired. And I respect that. And that idea about love and proximity is important because I think we can all be guilted into believing we have to keep trying when sometimes we're not in that place where we can.
And I, I always want people to respect their, Current condition. There are days when I feel like I can enter that fight or, or try again with a person who I love. And there are days when I can't because it's creating too much toxicity in me and I need to step away. So there's an ebb and flow to this as well.
That's that we need to respond to.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
And it's, and the word tolerance is an interesting one because in the, in the denotation that we're using it here it's actually a metaphor. The, the original meaning of tolerance. refers to metal, how it can bend and yet not break but still be hard. And that's That's really what I think is, is what we should think about [00:41:00] tolerance in this modern age here that, you can be as strong in your convictions as you want to be, and you don't have to break them.
But at the same time, in order to exist in some fashion or another, and that's entirely up to you to be able to bend. I think that's. Something we're thinking about
PAVLOVITZ: And, and deciding how, how much will I, will I tolerate in this context? And how much, when does the moment come where I need to separate myself from this?
Because for me, as a minister, I found that there was a dangerous ambiguity that I. That I engaged in because I knew what I felt, but I knew what my people could tolerate and language. And so I would nudge them to a certain point, but I knew if I nudged them here, it would be too much. And that's one of those places we do that in our relationships.
We say, well, I don't know if I can push back here because if I do, it's going to start this whole chain of events and this [00:42:00] conflict. And it's for me, it's really worth it. The key for all of this to me is to humanize the other person. So I can disagree with someone. I can even decide that I need to cut ties with them, but still see their humanity.
It's the moment that I dismiss them or create in them some stereotype or some caricature that dehumanizes them. That's when I've, I'm in a dangerous place because that is what I see on the right so much. They've been able to discard the humanity of so many different kinds of people, and that makes it easier.
To hold the positions they hold and to yield the theology they do.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so.
And you have a section in the book that you call the church. We really need what what.
PAVLOVITZ: Well, Matthew, this is, these writings come from constantly trying to figure out what, what is the church to us? [00:43:00] And the church for many people of faith, the church with a big C is just the global gathering of people. When I asked that question talked about earlier, is Christianity helpful? It's asking the same thing.
What is, what is the church to people? And there was a story we always told ourselves earlier in our lives that the church did this and did that. And it was the center of the community. And now it's, it's looking and saying, well, what is the, the net result of organized religion? And can we have churches That are known for their empathy, for their generosity, for their diversity, rather than being known as exclusionary predatory environments, which is what they have become to be known by so many people, either because they've experienced them that way, or simply because.
The religious rights prominence has created the false image that that is the only kind of church that exists. So to younger people, to people who have walked away from faith or [00:44:00] never stepped into it, that's made easier by people thinking, well, this is the only kind of Christianity there is. So the questions I'm asking are, as people gather collectively, in a spiritual community, how can they do it in a way that does no harm?
And if we ask those questions, maybe we're going to be better believers in how we practice.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and, and I mean, and specifically, what do you mean by that?
PAVLOVITZ: Well, people will talk about anger, for example, and growing up, I heard about righteous anger, that I, we are Christians, we have righteous anger.
And then I realized, well, everyone who has ever been angry, believes their anger is righteous and their cause is just. And so then. I wanted to replace righteous anger with redemptive anger. So, to say, what is the result of my anger? Does it lead to more people finding acceptance? Does it [00:45:00] yield to civil rights, human rights for more people?
Does it lead to greater compassion? Are more people fed and healed because of The things that I'm driven to do as a part of my faith. And if more people are not helped, I have to seriously ask if this is really worth my time. And the constant question I ask, people of faith is why do you have faith?
Why do you believe it's worth having? And what are the results of your faith that you can point to that it is an asset to humanity? And to be specific. And sometimes they really can't, sometimes it's really the idea of what I always thought the story of religion was, or what I was told faith was it's similar to America.
There, there comes a time when our myths that we grew up with about these things are exposed. And so we have to decide, well, what do I do now? Do I abandon the thing or do I alter the thing so that it is better than it was before or better than [00:46:00] it actually is?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and again, and then it's another sort of terrifying thing to contemplate, because those types of conflict, like they can exist within yourself within your relationship to somebody else, like, let's say, I mean, in the interpersonal level, discovering a something about somebody that you really didn't know about them. And it's so different from what you had expected and, being able to say, well, is this really why am I mad about this?
Yeah. It really is tough. And that's certainly true within a lot of religious traditions, that what is it that you're there for? Are you there for the values? Or are you there for the history book? And a lot of, I think a lot of religious people need to answer that question in, and they don't want to. It's scary.
PAVLOVITZ: Right. When you, when you answer it, honestly, well, that leads to [00:47:00] It often leads to grief. I talk a lot about grief in grieving the old story, and if we really begin to ask critical questions, and we answer them honestly, as you said, we have access to so much more information than we ever had than our parents had, our grandparents had, and so, We can have a mindset that's more expansive, but along with that comes a grieving of the old story, maybe a letting go of the former community that we were a part of.
And so there, there is, it's a frightening thing to say, even if I'm going to hold on to some sort of personal spirituality, where can I do that now? That makes any sense. Where's my sense of place. And so in my travels in person and online, I'm meeting people who are saying, I simply feel like I've lost. A sense of home in my country, in my church, in my family, and that is a huge societal challenge for all of us.
SHEFFIELD: It is, and [00:48:00] something that is interesting and relevant to that point because of the, horrible legacy of racial segregation in the American Christian community. A lot of white Protestants in particular, they have no familiarity with the black Protestant traditions that exist. And they don't understand that, the black Protestant traditions, they've dealt with a lot of these issues, a hundred years ago, 150 years ago of how can you exist in a world that doesn't agree with you? And that doesn't see you and like there, there's so much incredible theology coming out of the the black tradition and I would really urge, a lot of white Protestants in particular, but if you feel this way, black people have had these problems a lot longer than you have. And you should, you should read what they think about that.
PAVLOVITZ: I think what we use, we hear and see and use the word privilege a lot, but [00:49:00] what privilege is in this context is never having to have had this crisis that says, what, what is the world, what is my faith and how does it.
interact with the world and is the system that I'm a part of creating more harm than it's, than it's alleviating. And that is something that for white people of faith is new for many of us to ask these questions historically, because we've never been challenged to ask them. It's always been the assumption that we're on the right side.
And that's the other thing. There is just a terrifying sense of, wow, I'm, The stuff I've built my life on for decades, it's all up for grabs. And some people's response is to press in and some people's response is to avoid and distract and explain it all away and become hardened. And that's what you see the differences.
I think in the right, [00:50:00] the right is responding to all these questions and challenges and saying, it must be something else. It must be immigrants. It must be LGBTQ people. It can't be. White, cisgender, heterosexual Christians who were born in America and raised Republican. And that's, I can understand why you would avoid that if you fit those categories.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It's easy. It's easy to think that way. Yeah. And it's tough to want to recognize that you have advantages. As a person that, have enabled you to avoid thinking certain, that's what it comes down to.
PAVLOVITZ: It does. And we have always had the, the life of least resistance. And so once you have all of these questions and all of this turbulence, you begin to think the world's changing. And it's not that the world is necessarily changing. It's that you're having things revealed to you that were [00:51:00] not revealed to you before.
And that's constantly. Kind of conversations I'm having with even people saying, well, I'm trying to understand sexuality, but it seems like there's so many more people coming out now. Why is that? Well, it's because they're not as terrified in some cases as they used to be, and they're learning. Society is learning how to accept a more diverse understanding of sexuality and gender orientation, all those things.
And so, that's the other part of this. It's helping people see that this is not something new that's suddenly happening. You're just seeing it for the first time and there's going to be some difficulty in even in that.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's no, that's a great point that the world, to the extent that it's changing, the things have not changed as much as so much as your perception has expanded is really what it comes down to. And for me, when I left Mormonism, like that, that was really the thing that, that I can relate to that because, I had been, [00:52:00] because for Mormons, you're instructed to never read anything critical of the church . It's worse than marital infidelity in many cases and to read it, to read a, a former Mormon's book or something like that. And it's advantageous to the church or, the local leaders to say things like that. And understanding that people have an incentive to tell you not to read other people like that.
That's the thing that is always interesting to me. I always hear people say, well, you don't want to debate my ideas. You don't want to talk to me. I'm getting canceled for saying things. And they don't understand that. Well, actually people debated your ideas a hundred years ago and you're a side boss. And so we don't need, we don't need to hear your, your, your you don't, we don't need to have your ideas about, the 6, 000 year old earth and the schools.
We don't need to have your ideas about that homosexuality doesn't exist or that trans people are not real. It's just a mental illness. We don't need those things because. Transgender people have been [00:53:00] around, since the beginning of humanity and, and there is ample historical record to indicate that and, but you just don't know about it.
And your ignorance is not an argument is what it comes down to.
PAVLOVITZ: That's right. And for years, I think, Especially a white male Christian was used to being able to speak their minds unabated and unchallenged. And, and, and even when you look at the evangelical church, I think we've been closely tied to many organizations that are doing, who are now really instrumental in perpetuating this toxic Christianity, your, your Franklin Graham's, your things like that.
And what are found in those places. Was that they, they simply didn't allow, I speak all over the country. I have for a decade now doing this work. I've been invited by progressive churches, by humanist conferences, by [00:54:00] synagogues and mosques and atheist conventions, but I rarely. Really almost never been invited by a conservative church to come and simply have a discussion about the things we're talking about today, because there is such a control that's being exerted over the people there because they're terrified
SHEFFIELD: of you're terrifying.
Yeah, yeah, terrifying. That's really what it comes down to. And. But they're, and they're so scared of you that they can't even say that also.
Like,
PAVLOVITZ: yeah, that's right.
SHEFFIELD: Is the, like there, there are, are all these people out there that, are making millions and millions of dollars saying, Oh, I was a former progressive. And now, I love Donald Trump, like, Matt Tybee, or, some of these other out there and they never want to have actual debates with anyone. And the same thing is true, in the evangelical world, same thing is true in the, in the Mormon world. None of these people actually want to have a discussion of ideas.
What they want to do is [00:55:00] bully and call it an argument.
PAVLOVITZ: That's right.
They want to have a. Be in front of people and have a monologue that just hits the person over and over again with the talk, with the talking points and the critiques that they've gotten so used to throwing out there in social media world, and they don't really want to have a conversation.
And that's the sad thing for me, being someone who still has a heart for some of the tradition that I come out of. It's realizing that It's actually a better place. I want people to experience that expansive understanding of the world that you, you can ask questions. You can challenge ideas and it's okay.
And it's looking at a group of people who simply have sidestepped that altogether is just really sad to me because it means you really don't believe. What you say, you believe you're actually really worried. I talk a lot about how conservative Christians talk about this God who is [00:56:00] so all knowing and all powerful.
And yet that God seems really neutered because they're so terrified of everything. And if God were as powerful and loving as they say God is, there wouldn't be as much to worry about as they seem to be.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, and let's maybe end on two points here that trying to have that, that dialogue and, and being willing to, somebody who is, um, religious progressive I think a lot of religious progressives, they, and, and people would have told me that, that this was their viewpoint.
PAVLOVITZ: So I'm not just, making it up, but, and I'm interested in, and if you've heard this as well, but, Like a lot of religious progressives seem to think that, well, people will figure it out on their own. They will see that I'm right. And I don't have to advocate against these other people because they're just so obviously wrong.
And, and when people look at my material, they'll see that I'm right. And they don't understand that number [00:57:00] one, the, the followers of these people will never see your material unless you bring it to them. And then number two, why would you want to consign people to these, toxic churches where they are manipulated, where their money is stolen from them, where they are lied to, where their epistemologies are destroyed.
You Why would, do you, did you have any compassion for your fellow Christian? Aren't you concerned about them? Wouldn't you wanna save them? They deserve to be saved, don't they? That's what I would say
it, it's, yeah. Go ahead, Matthew. It's, it's the, it's that, but it's also, there's a point where I might allow someone to remain in their, their ignorance, intellectual ignorance or their.
They're toxic theology, and it's one thing to leave them with it, but I'm also leaving generations of people that they're existing around and damaging and influencing. So there's also that part about it to see for me, I [00:58:00] I've been so grateful for the power of social media because I was simply writing some words and those words were released into the world and those words could find the people they needed to find and challenge them.
And that's what I've, I've discovered is I need to speak specifically, not just to change the mind of the bully, but to stand with the people who are being bullied. So there's a, there's a dual purpose to the work we do in the world in this way.
Yeah. And, and I would say, for, I mean, people can, they're entitled to believe whatever they want.
And, but for, if you are, people need to, who are, our, our political struggles so much are the product of the fact that people do not distinguish between, Authoritarianism and conservatism. And it's the conservatives who, who allow this, their identity to be stolen. They have allowed, authoritarians to pretend to say, oh, I'm a conservative.
They have allowed that to [00:59:00] happen. And, and as a result, they've, they've taken over and they bullied the conservatives to be this little tiny rump. Of nothingness in the Republican party. And, they canceled and destroyed conservative evangelicalism and just stamped it out of existence almost.
And because the conservatives didn't stand up for themselves. So like, that is one thing that I do appreciate that you're doing to say, look, guys. Do you value your ideas? So you need to fight for them. Because no one's going to do it for you. And if you don't, you're going to lose
for sure. Yes. And, and they're, and they're seeing that, I think if the 2016 election goes differently, this.
Conservative religious evangelical right wing Frankenstein monster was on its last legs. And what it had been has been given over the past few years is a power and a voice that it hadn't really had. And I think if we can survive this time and get past this sort of [01:00:00] urgency, younger people, as we've been talking about, they're going They're decided these issues of gender equality and sexuality and race, so they're not going to be bogged down by those things.
And if we could just steward the nation and the world to keep them, having control over their bodies and their votes. Then I think we're going to be in good shape.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I think so. I think so. And let's maybe end with the topic of non religion. So, you're still a believer in God but a lot of people aren't, and, I think a lot of people who are not religious, they have a faith of their own that religion is just going to go away, and everything will be perfect after that happens.
And it is really naive because religion isn't going to go away. You're not going to get rid of it. It's not going to be destroyed on its own or ever. Probably people want to believe in a higher power for whatever reason, it seems evolutionarily we [01:01:00] are wired in some way, so many of us are. And so you have to realize that in the same way that right wing atheists have understood that, they need to make common cause with right wing believers, I think left wing atheists need to understand that as well. So you've, you've mentioned some of your experience on that, but let's maybe talk about
that a bit here.
PAVLOVITZ: I think that's been the most gratifying part about doing the work that I do is. Is creating the writing has become a hub for people who may be religious and non religious, but they're saying, Hey, there's enough here that we agree upon that we can formulate a sense of community. And those are things about, the fragility of humanity and the, the.
The interdependence that we all are a part of. And so those are really, whether you're a theist or not, whether you have spiritual leanings or you don't, we, we can align around things that are redemptive and productive. And so [01:02:00] that's, what's going to have to happen because this is not a, the fight is not religion versus atheism and it's not progressive Christianity versus conservative Christianity.
It's, I think, Empathy versus cruelty. It's, can we see our neighbor as a part of that? We're tethered together or that were enemies that were separate. And that's what you see. That's what we're fighting for is a group of a community that says we actually are better together than we are separately.
And those divisions are never going to be healthy. And so that's the work that I'm trying to do with the, with the book and with the writing and everything I do.
SHEFFIELD: All right. So yeah, it's been a great conversation, John. So for people who want to keep up with you, what are your recommendations for that?
PAVLOVITZ: Well, once you know how to spell my name, which is P A V L O V I T Z, there's not a lot of John Pavlovitz's around.
You can pretty much find me on any platform that you need to. I'm [01:03:00] kind of everywhere and would just look forward to conversations and, and questions and dialogue.
SHEFFIELD: Okay, awesome. All right. Well, thanks for being here today.
PAVLOVITZ: Thank you. Such a great pleasure. Matthew.
SHEFFIELD: Thanks for joining us for this conversation. You can always get more if you go to theoryofchange. show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of the episodes.
And if you're a paid subscribing member, thank you very much. You have unlimited access to the archives. And if you can't afford to subscribe right now, I understand. very much. You can help out the show. Nonetheless, if you go to Apple podcast or Spotify and leave a nice review there, five stars as short as you want just some sort of writing on it.
That is really helpful to get people to get recommended to watch or listen to Theory of Change.
So that will do it for this episode. I hope you'll join me next time. I'm Matthew Sheffield.
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00:00 — Trump trashes judge's daughter, gets slapped with gag order in Stormy Daniels case
05:53 — Stock of parent company of "Truth Social" collapses after disclosure it lost $58 million last year
12:41 — GOP congressman says Gaza should be treated "like Nagasaki and Hiroshima"
13:58 — Does the majority of Americans realize that right-wingers declared a "culture war" on us?
18:34 — Far-right Christian attorney John Eastman disbarred in California for trying to overthrow the 2020 election
21:52 — Rudy Giuliani tells bankruptcy judge he needs $3.5 million condo for podcasting space
24:49 — Patricia Richardson denies Tim Allen's claims of a "Home Improvement" reboot
28:51 — Lara Trump releases another godawful country music cover
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Whatever you may happen to think about Joe Biden or Donald Trump, the presidency is not a one-person job. Overwhelmingly, the work inside any White House is done by the advisors. They form policies, promote them to the public, and then make the federal government carry them out.
Ultimately, part of determining who you you want to be president should be examining who is giving them advice. In Joe Biden's case, he has surrounded himself by experienced and well-qualified officials, usually people who have [00:02:00] worked in their fields for many decades and have a lot of experience.
That can have some problems of its own in terms of insularity or perhaps or being too routine in their thinking. But whatever those problems are, they pale in comparison to the dangers of the people who are angling to staff a Donald Trump White House.
As extreme as Trump and his cronies were the first time around — which included sending a violent mob of supporters to the Capitol to attack the vice president and the Congress — a second Trump term promises to be much more radical. That's largely because since he was evicted from the White House, Trump has kept in touch with the same final crew of advisors who accepted and helped his plot to try to steal the 2020 presidential election. They have been radicalizing in tandem for years to fully commit to an authoritarian politics that includes everything from prison camps for immigrants to gulags for political opponents.
In most cases, a president's advisers usually work behind the scenes and the public doesn't get a chance to know much about them. But Donald Trump is different from other politicians in that he takes his advisors from the world of right-wing media, a sector of America's economy that has grown immensely since he came on the political scene.
There are a lot of people who will have Trump's ear should he win a second term, and fortunately, Media Matters for America, a progressive media analysis organization, has compiled a huge dossier of who these people are and what they want to do.
Joining me to discuss this dossier are Matt Gertz, he's a senior fellow at Media Matters who specializes in the connections between right-wing media and the Republican Party. And also Madeline Peltz, she is the deputy director of rapid response at Media Matters, where she focuses on emerging trends in right-wing media.
The transcript of our March 8, 2024 conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the complete text.
The video of this episode will be available on April 1, 2024 at 10:00 am Eastern.
Cover photo: Steve Bannon speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. July 16, 2023. Credit: Gage Skidmore/CC by 2.0
Related Content
* The Christian right was a theological rebellion against modernity before it became a force for Republicans
* How the term “Judeo-Christian” went from a liberal Protestant method of promoting tolerance to a Christian right codeword for oppression
* Dominion’s Fox lawsuit incontrovertibly exposed that Fox isn’t news
* Donald Trump still hasn’t learned the first rule of Republican politics: Right-wing media is only for the rubes
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
04:02 — Right-wing media were always integral to Republican politics, but Donald Trump made them essential parts
08:38 — Web and set-top streaming networks have enabled the launch of multiple Fox News alternatives that are far more extreme
11:15 — Extremist spotlight: Steve Bannon, MAGA's mastermind
18:57 — Project 2025: The Christian right's plan to impose its doctrines with the federal bureaucracy
24:15 — Extremist spotlight: Russ Vought, architect of Christian supremacism
31:17 — Extremist spotlight: Mike Davis, MAGA's authoritarian lawyer
35:44 — Right-wing activists frequently talk about imprisoning political critics while also claiming that Republicans are victimized by “cancel culture”
38:00 — Extremist spotlight: Stephen Miller, speechwriter and gulag designer
42:46 — Why MAGA activists lean into absurdity to describe their radical policies
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been verified. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Let's start with the historical points here, that right-wing media has always been kind of integral to the Republican party, much more so than left-wing media for the Democratic Party. But under Trump, things became much, much tighter than they ever had before.
MATT GERTZ: That's right. And it's the reason for that is because Donald Trump is himself very much a creation of the right-wing media, at least in his more recent incarnation as a Republican party politician. He is someone who in the wake of his repeated claims that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States snagged a weekly guest spot on Fox and Friends, which is the sort of insipid morning show analog on Fox News, and in that role was really able to get a hold of the wants and [00:05:00] desires of the Republican base by participating in that discourse by having an opportunity every week to give his take on the various grievances that were flowing through Fox News at the time.
And so what we saw during Trump was very much a Fox News creation and Fox News super fan acting from the White House. Donald Trump would get up every morning. He would watch Fox and Friends and other Fox shows beginning early in the morning, continuing to late at night.
And what he saw on that network really shaped his views, shaped his communication strategies all aspects of policy coming out of the White House from pardons to policies, to legislation in a real sense Fox News and the right-wing media more broadly we're a partner to the president on a [00:06:00] level that we've really never seen in modern American history.
And so it was really an extension of this trend that we've seen of sort of energy between the right wing politicians and media on steroids, so to speak. And that's continued with even more reactionary figures up to the present day.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And actually the other thing that happened during Trump that really kind of exploded was that there was a profusion of other right-wing media outlets, which were even more radical than Fox news. Can we talk about those a little bit? I want you both to weigh in on that.
Matt, why don't you start first and then Madeline, I want to hear from you.
GERTZ: I think what we have to remember about this is that the right new media is based on a political and business model in which the primary adversary is often the mainstream press. [00:07:00] If you watch or read or consume any sort of right-wing media, one of the first things you'll notice is that the level of media criticism bleeding through is much, much higher than you see in the mainstream press. They are constantly attacking mainstream news outlets and presenting them as illegitimate. And when you do that, you're creating more customers.
So what we've seen over the years is as the right has been able to delegitimize the mainstream press in the eyes of its supporters they've created more and more people who only want to consume right-wing media.
That has obviously created major outlets like Fox News that are fairly well-known throughout the media and political ecosystems, but also a wealth of competitors, smaller TV outlets like Newsmax, like OAN, as well as streaming giants like the Daily Wire, a wealth of [00:08:00] radio shows and a lot of independent and independent individuals as well. People who often were on Fox News like Megan Kelly or Lou Dobbs and lost their jobs there for one reason or another, and now are setting off on their own, this creates a real feeding frenzy that we'll often see in which these are very competitive outlets all trying to get market share from one another and so the fights between them can become quite fierce.
'Over the top' streaming networks have enabled the launch of multiple Fox News alternatives that are far more extreme
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And the other outlets, many of them are taking advantage of what's known in the media industry as over the top cable distribution and using digital platforms like Roku or Apple TV. Madeline, can you talk about some of these other channels in addition to Newsmax?
I think for people who aren't steeped in right-wing media, [00:09:00] there are so many of them out there and if you're just like a regular cable subscriber or you don't look at what's on the Samsung TV or Apple TV news section, you don't even know these things are out there, but they have tons and tons of viewers. And then of course around YouTube and other places as well.
MADELINE PELTZ: MAGA media certainly has coalesced towards over the top streaming. You see it with QAnon platforms having a sizable presence on Roku, and you also see it on platforms like Real America's Voice and Right Side Broadcasting, which each have their own little shtick.
In the case of Real America's Voice, it's Like a Fox News on an acid trip. Essentially you have you have personalities from the very deepest, darkest corners of the right-wing media hosting their own shows, just praising Trump completely, 24 hours a day, [00:10:00] seven days a week.
And this is a platform that the most hardcore MAGA fans are very in tune with and in touch with. Another example is Right Side Broadcasting, which really the bread and butter of RSBN is these live Trump events and live events. In fact, in general, they have a roving correspondent that is speaking to people in the crowds in rallies.
And so if you're a Trump fan and you're tuning into these rallies, which we're seeing increasingly, you're probably watching RSBN. So as the media landscape continues to fracture further and further the same way that major media companies are trying to get a bite over, over the top streaming so too are these fringe MAGA platforms.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they definitely are. And they, in many cases are getting hundreds of thousands of views on their, on their streams and on their videos, and certainly in the aggregate per month, millions of views across all the different platforms they're on. And then of course we have Rumble as well, which is a Peter Thiel-funded alternative to [00:11:00] YouTube, which is running all kinds of openly racist white nationalist content and has no problem with it, except when occasionally they get called out for something extremely egregious that is undeniable.
Extremist spotlight: Steve Bannon, MAGA's mastermind
SHEFFIELD: But in the case though, with some of the channels themselves, Steve Bannon is definitely the star over at Real America's Voice. And we know that he will play a role for a second Trump White House, because he worked in the first one. But he was fired so early on in the Trump White House the first time that I think to some degree, unless you're really into analyzing and reading right-wing media, I think people might've forgotten just what he was up to and how awful he was.
So I'm going to just play one of the clips that he said, this was something that he said in 2020, which got him banned from Twitter and Facebook when he said this.
(Begin video clip)
STEVE BANNON: Second term, second term kicks off with firing Ray, firing Fauci.
Now, I actually want to go a step [00:12:00] further, but I realize the president is a kind hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I'd put the heads on pikes, right? I'd put them at the two corners of the White House. As a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the program or you're gone.
Time to stop playing games. Blow it all out. Put Rick Grinnell today as the interim head of the FBI. That'll, that'll light some, that'll light them up, right?
Unidentified Man: You know what, Steve? Just yesterday, there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia. These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia.
These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.
BANNON: That's how you won the revolution. Nobody wants to talk about it, but the Revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was not, it was a civil war. It was a civil war.
(End video clip)
SHEFFIELD: So, yeah. And that is somebody who, would [00:13:00] like to be Donald Trump's chief of staff once again. And Matt, when you watch that clip, a lot, some of these MAGA media figures, far-right figures, they like to say: 'Well, I was just exaggerating for dramatic effect. And I'm not actually trying to do that.' How serious can we take those claims? What's your take on when they say we shouldn't take that seriously?
GERTZ: I think you should assume that they will go as far as they are allowed to go, as far as they are able to go. And the last several years have been an exercise in removing any guardrails that might exist on what they might be able to do if they were given power.
I mean, as you mentioned, Steve Bannon was someone who was fired fairly early on from the Trump administration someone who had been an early supporter of Donald Trump someone who chaired his campaign in its final stages in [00:14:00] 2016. But there were at the time some numbers of Republicans, even within the White House, who thought that someone like Steve Bannon was going too far.
What we've seen both throughout Trump's administration and certainly in the years since the 2020 election and January 6th is a steady move to purge critics of Donald Trump, purge people who might stand up against anything he might do from positions of power within the Republican party.
It is very much Trump's party now. It is effectively a cult, and because of that, if people like Bannon are put in positions of power, they will have a much more ability to carry out whatever they want to do than they had during Trump's previous administration.
SHEFFIELD: [00:15:00] Yeah, that's right. And to your point, one of the things that he did say explicitly is that, denying the reality that Donald Trump lost in 2020 should be a core platform of the Republican party and, and a prerequisite for working in a second Trump White House. So we'll roll the tape.
(Begin video clip)
STEVE BANNON: If you don't believe that Trump won in 2020 was stolen, you shouldn't be a senior party of you shouldn't be a senior member of the RNC, you just shouldn't. It's not a loyalty test It's a logic test because the whole thing flows from that and we wouldn't have spent 350 million dollars Remember in economics, you have two types of costs the types of costs that cost you money and resources You look at that. Hey, here's what's going to cost me, but the other is opportunity cost.
What could I've done with this? These resources if I'd done taken another course of action. What does that course of action looks like?
(End video clip)
SHEFFIELD: So, yeah, I mean, he's basically, [00:16:00] and he's gotten his, his way on that. I mean, he, he made that remark just last month as we were recording this, I said that in February.
And I think he was describing a reality that already existed, pretty much right, Madeline?
PELTZ: Absolutely. And it's an, it's a reality that he created through his show War Room. The comment that about the RNC is one tiny data point in the overall picture of the Republican party and the right-wing media at the moment, which is that this is the attitude that the myth, the lie that the election was stolen in 2020 lives on and not only that, but is a central point that they are driving home to their base as in an attempt to motivate them to vote. And that's the core of their strategy at this point, all these months out, and we'll see how it trends over time.
But we arrived here today by years of driving this point [00:17:00] home again and again, since before any ballots were cast in the 2020 election, to the chaotic post election period to leading up to January 6th, every single day since. They've been driving home this idea that the election was stolen and that Trump's return in 2024 is a act of vengeance and revenge.
And you've seen that on the campaign trail in some of the comments that Trump has been making. It's a central refrain that the advisors closest to him are trying to distance themselves from to very little success.
GERTZ: Just to add to that, table stakes right now to become someone in a position of authority in a future Trump administration is acknowledging and, as Bannon says, believing that the 2020 election was stolen.
Table stakes for becoming Trump's VP pick. Is acknowledging or [00:18:00] saying out loud in public that if you had been in Mike Pence's position you would have done whatever Trump wanted to ensure that he could remain in power, throw out electoral votes, whatever anyone who gets in that position is going to do so because they were willing to come forward and say that.
And Steve Bannon is the person who's ensuring that that's the case.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's that's an incredibly dangerous loyalty test that he's having. He's claiming it's not. But of course, that's what it is. And, either you're going to be somebody who's so insanely delusional that you actually believe that, the nonsense, or you're so sociopathic that you will say it anyway and not believe it.
And, neither one of those scenarios is somebody who I think most people would want to be in a significant position of power in the United States.
Project 2025: The Christian right's plan to impose its doctrines with the federal bureaucracy
SHEFFIELD: And of course, Steve Bannon [00:19:00] is just one of the cogs in this machine and the report that you guys compiled talks about many other people.
And one of the core things that they're doing and and they're using this kind of plausible deniability strategy of farming out a lot of the planning to third-party groups, so that they can say, well, we didn't really have anything to do with this. That's unofficial. These are other people that aren't working with the campaign, but if the campaign themselves isn't doing anything and isn't releasing any plans, then, isn't that, that's certainly fair to go off, I think. Can you Madeline, tell us about this whole Project 2025 thing?
PELTZ: Sure. Project 2025 is a initiative led by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. It is based off of a 900 or page policy book that covers every possible plank of a potential hypothetical [00:20:00] Trump, second Trump administration's agenda from governance and staffing policy to a review of every single department at the federal level, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, education policy, and certainly climate denial is factors very heavily. And the initiative is backed by a coalition of over 100 conservative allied organizations. So it's not just the Heritage Foundation. It's the entire conservative movement that has built out the most robust infrastructure behind a potential transition to a second Trump administration.
And that's what the 2025 refers to. At the forefront of this effort is, the first thing they really put forward is it is an attempt to purge the civil service to replace career bureaucrats, experienced diplomats, lawyers et cetera, with Trump loyalists. And they've [00:21:00] repeatedly emphasized that loyalty is prioritized over competency.
That's a very, very important thing. At the very forefront of, of the message of Project 2025 and they've implemented a system of loyalty tests that that are meant to vet applicants into their system to potentially staff a second Trump administration and really dismantle any safeguards that Any safeguards within the federal bureaucracy and consolidate control under what is called the unitary executive theory.
But and a lot of their policy plans are centered around the idea of Christian nationalism that America is 1st and foremost, a Christian nation and that, Biblical principles are at the forefront of any governing agenda for the next Republican administration.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That's right. And, and we'll talk about that more specifically in one of the other people that we talk about next here, but Kevin Roberts, [00:22:00] who is the president of the Heritage Foundation, he also has explicitly said that they have even more radical plans but they're not sharing them with
(Begin video clip)
KEVIN ROBERTS: The basis of the plan is public. You can see that at project 2025. org. There are parts of the plan that we will not share with the left, the executive orders, the rules and regulations, just like a good football team.
We wouldn't want to tip off our playbook to the left.
(End video clip)
SHEFFIELD: So, Matt do you think that the national news media in the reporting side, are they taking this stuff seriously, do you think so?
GERTZ: It's always hard to say. I mean, when you come down to it, if you are interested in information about project 2025, you can find it in accounts from the New York Times and other major outlets.
Are they flooding the zone with constant coverage about every aspect of how extreme these policies are? No, they [00:23:00] are not. When you look at the polling, you see that the American public has really been able to forget about a lot of the worst aspects of the Trump administration and as a result are not, I think, properly prepared for how bad things could be if he returns to that position.
I mean, part of, part of this, and I think. The reason why Schedule F is such an important part of this discussion is while Trump was able to accomplish a lot of terrible things, he was at times stymied by the federal bureaucracy by Republicans and Democrats who would block his various actions.
And people like Kevin Roberts and the Project 2025 plan and Steve Bannon are all really designed to make sure that doesn't happen again. Loyalty to Trump is the first principle [00:24:00] of anyone who goes into a future Trump administration, and that they will do whatever he says without considerations of whether or not it's a good idea or legal or ethical or anything else.
Extremist spotlight: Russ Vought, architect of Christian supremacism
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And as you said, Madeline, that a core component of this is Christian supremacism or Christian nationalism, as people sometimes call it. And this is a bedrock principle for the American reactionary movement. They've always had this desire. But the Republicans who came before Trump, the politicians, they were not really interested in doing that. Because in many cases, they were not, like Ronald Reagan was not religious really at all. And George H. W. Bush, what we seem to be kind of just like a, generic kind of a Anglican, I believe he was when when he was alive and.
But Trump, he doesn't really, he's not religious himself either, of course, but he knows that these [00:25:00] people are his most rabid supporters and will work tirelessly to give him power, and that's enough for him.
There's a guy named Russ Vought who is he is kind of the leader behind all of this, the Christian nationalist stuff. And let's talk about him in a bit here, but let's play something from him first.
(Begin video clip)
STEVE BANNON: Are you, you're, I guess your idea is to create kind of, uh, Handmaid's Tale and uh, and, and Cromwell's uh, you know, Cromwell's Puritan movement. All in the united states at the same time that punch list she went to went through is pretty uh, It is it's pretty interesting. Is is there any reality? To uh their overreaction and meltdown on all this sir
RUSS VOUGHT: No, they're just trying to scare Christians across the country from being engaged in the political process. And this is actually part of a 100 year strategy, and it's to level accusations on any particular regime priority, whether that's uh, [00:26:00] uh, you know, having a, a, a rule of law that considers all of us on the basis of being made in the image of God.
They call us bigots for believing that. They call us racist for believing that. And now in this area, they want us if you're a Christian, they want to call you a Christian nationalist. And all we're saying, all I'm saying is that we were meant to be a Christian nation. We should be a Christian nation. We should provide religious liberty for everyone in this country to practice their faith.
But that the Constitution, the system doesn't work. Western civilization does not work without the underpinnings of a Judeo-Christian worldview. That is the bedrock for all of our laws. So it is not unnatural for Christians to be a part of the, the political sphere, the public square, and to say, this is what I believe.
This is the bedrock for which I believe it. And to have it reflected in our laws, in just policies, in healthy—
(End video clip)
SHEFFIELD: [00:27:00] Yeah, so it's I mean, that's and once again, just to go back, Matt, to what we were talking about earlier, like, this, of course, is a conversation that occurs on Steve Bannon's show, because he is the hub for all this stuff. But he once again is doing this 'You shouldn't take it seriously when we say extreme things.'
This is a very, very common rhetorical trope for these guys. And it's a way to kind of shield their extremism to make people not take it seriously, even their own supporters seems like. Or I don't know, what's going on here?
GERTZ: I mean, I think a big part of it is, is interfactional in nature. I mean, obviously the Christian nationalists are a increasingly powerful part of the Republican party, but they're not the only part of the Republican party. And so, keeping at least a little bit quiet on exactly what that movement is trying to accomplish is in its [00:28:00] interests right now.
I mean, you could, you could sort of hear it when he kind of throws in the, the Judeo-Christian worldview in the end there, you, the Jews can have a cookie. It's fine. Yes, it's a Christian nation and everyone else here is just our guests, but don't worry, it'll, it'll, it'll all work out.
They, they are trying, and, and you see that every time this idea of Christian nationalist makes its way into a, a mass audience. The, the instant recoil from the people who establish its principles is to say, Oh, no, no, this is just an attack on Christians. It's fairly dishonest, but that that's basically par for the course.
SHEFFIELD: It is and for people who are interested we actually have on Theory of Change done a couple of episodes on the history of the term, Judeo-Christian. It was completely made up. And doesn't really have any sort of meaningful context in the, in the American legal system, because the American legal system is mostly based [00:29:00] on Roman law and English law. And those, of course, really have nothing to do with the Bible, needless to say.
So, we'll have links in the show notes for anybody who wants to check those out. Did you want to weigh in on that clip at all, Madeline, or we can move on?
PELTZ: Yeah, I think Christian nationalism is just the latest nomenclature on the right for the longstanding Christian white supremacist agenda that has gripped the Republican party. And the fruits that you're seeing bear today really started being organized in the 90s, in a lot of ways with the Moral Majority, the election of George W. Bush and the first mobilization of evangelicals as a major voting block.
And as the Republican party has further radicalized, moved towards explicit white supremacist ideology, the religious fundamentalism has fused with Trumpism to create [00:30:00] what they're calling Christian nationalism.
And it's really just repackaging of longstanding trends on the right. Trump isn't exactly a churchy guy. He isn't someone who. Is you see going to mass every day, but they have somehow turned him into this Jesus-like figure. And so so there is a fusion between the brash sort of playboy billionaire style and the religious fundamentalism that has undergirded the right for decades.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, to circle back on the Judeo-Christian term, like it's as, as you were saying, Matt, it is kind of a fig leaf to try to pretend to be religiously pluralist. But it's notable that, they don't mention, well, what about Hindus? What about Muslims? What about atheists? All of those non-Christians and non Jews do not have religious freedom. [00:31:00]
And if you look, if you delve deeper within the right wing theological systems, they do explicitly state that, that only Christians deserve full religious freedom, and Jews can have some, and everybody else, they're lucky if they live here at all.
Extremist spotlight: Mike Davis, MAGA's authoritarian lawyer
SHEFFIELD: And, one of the other figures who is very pivotal to this MAGA media universe and political sort of kitchen cabinet for Donald Trump is this guy named Mike Davis. I don't have a good clip for him because most of his stuff is Twitter posting. His most radical stuff is on Twitter. He did say, for instance. How about gas chamber for members of Congress lying to and he has talked about putting various people that he doesn't like in a gulag multiple times and it's, it's extremely concerning, right Madeline?
PELTZ: Yeah, Mike Davis spends [00:32:00] a good portion of his day unloading his unfiltered stream of consciousness onto the internet. A lot of that ends up being racist, targeted attacks against prominent Black women in American politics. As you said, he has many fantasies of extrajudicial murder in response to crime problems in American cities.
He is a advocate for undermining the rule of law, especially at the executive level. And he is the founder of this think tank, legal think tank called Article Three Project that really sprung onto the scene in the right-wing media with the nomination of Kentonji Brown Jackson. And he was pretty instrumental in pushing this smear that she was somehow a defender of heinous crimes against children. That was really something that Mike Davis drew drove.
And so, I think it's telling that so much of his profile has been established by [00:33:00] these heinous attacks on black women.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's important to note that. Mike Davis is not just some, random guy s**t posting on Twitter. He is somebody who was a clerk for Brett Kavanaugh when he was in lower a lower level judge.
And he, Steve Bannon often touts him as somebody he would like to see be the attorney general. And if not that have some, some non confirmed White House position within the Trump administration. And that seems extremely likely that he would have such a a high status position.
So I mean, this guy, I think out of all the people that we are talking about here today is, to me, the most deranged and sociopathic individual, I would say.
GERTZ: I will say that Mike Davis is the only person on this list who has called for me personally to be arrested and jailed. So there, there is that yeah, he just, he spends a [00:34:00] lot of his time going on different podcasts and going on social media and explaining that he has lists of people that he has developed, who would be arrested, charged, imprisoned, deported.
If you were to have a high ranking position in the Justice Department, it's never clear how much of that is a shtick or how much of it is serious. Again my general tendency is to assume that these people will go as far as they are able to go and that shtick can very easily become reality under those circumstances.
So, yes, I mean, the fact that he is someone who can be mentioned by Donald Trump's son by Steve Bannon as a possible attorney general pick is concerning. After all, the entire The view that Donald Trump has of the Justice Department is an organization that is supposed to exist to defend him and his allies and punish his [00:35:00] enemies. He got very, very angry during his term in the White House when the Justice Department did not behave that way and I think one of his top priorities, if he returns to that office, will be to make sure that the Justice Department does not exist as an organization separate from his personal whims, and someone like Mike Davis would certainly be willing to be the hammer that Trump is looking for.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And he would certainly know what layer, what buttons to push, and who to fire and, and what policies to put in because he knows it from the inside as a clerk for a high level federal judge.
Right-wing activists frequently talk about imprisoning political criticis while also claiming that Republicans are victimized by "cancel culture"
SHEFFIELD: To your point about these lists of people that he claims he wants to imprison or do whatever to, as we played earlier, wants to fire people who don't agree with him about 2020.
The mainstream media is very, very [00:36:00] terrible at promoting right-wing narratives about cancel culture. That they allow far right activists to claim that they're not allowed to discuss anything in public, that no one with a conservative opinion is allowed to participate in public life. And yet, you have people who would potentially be Cabinet-level officials in a Trump administration talking about imprisoning people for political disagreements.
I mean, we should never hear another word about cancel culture in the political system when they're talking like this. I mean, what do you think?
GERTZ: Yeah, I mean, the top priority of Donald Trump, if he is elected president, he has said, is retribution. He wants to punish people he dislikes and he wants as many levers of power to do so as possible.
He was kind of inept during his first term in office because he doesn't have a lot of interest in public [00:37:00] policy because he does not have a lot of know how of how the system works. But what Project 2025 is supposed to do is ensure that there is a real plan to carry out Trump's mission of retribution against the left, against the parts of the country that didn't support him, and it's really a pretty scary situation.
SHEFFIELD: It is. And we saw a preview of that with the Trump administration's COVID policy, that when the pandemic first broke out, the Trump White House explicitly said, well, we don't have to do very much because it's in a Democrat area. Which is, where the, the initial deaths were primarily in San Francisco and New York City.
And so, they've shown that they are capable of doing this and, and Project 2025 is, is the road map of how they'll do it on a much, much greater [00:38:00] scale.
Extremist spotlight: Stephen Miller, speechwriter and gulag designer
SHEFFIELD: And to that point, though we have another figure that is worth talking about here. People have, he's definitely more well known than Mike Davis. It's Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's longtime speechwriter and anti immigrant activist.
(Begin video clip)
MIKE DAVIS: And with this non controversial topic, immigration we have president Biden importing 10 million people into this country. These, a lot of these people are. Unvetted. They don't share our values. They don't want to assimilate many of them.
And so I'm going to start this with Stephen Miller, who's been the tip of the spear on immigration. What should we be doing in a Trump 47 administration to fix this disaster, this invasion of our southern border?
STEPHEN MILLER: Well, as I say sometimes, the immigration issue is extremely simple. The policies involved in fixing it are very complicated.
The simple part is, seal the border, deport all the illegals. [00:39:00] Now, that's the, that's the short answer, right? It's very, you get in, you have two policy objectives that you proceed with utter determination on. Seal the border, no illegals in, everyone here goes out. That's very straightforward. In terms of the policy sets to accomplish this, as President Trump showed in his first term, It's, it's a, it's a series of interlocking domestic and foreign policies to accomplish this goal.
In no particular order, just to rattle off a few fast, you have your safe third agreements, you have remain in Mexico, finish the wall, you have robust prosecutions of illegal aliens, you do interior repatriation flights to Mexico and not back to the north of Mexico, it's very important, you re implement Title 42, you have several muscular 212Fs, that's the travel ban authority, We did a few of those in the Trump administration.
You would bring those back and add new ones on top of that. You would establish large scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you grab illegal immigrants and then [00:40:00] you move them to the staging grounds. And that's what the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home.
You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement. And then you also deploy the military to the southern border, not just with a mission to observe, but with an impedance and denial mission. In other words, you reassert the fundamental constitutional principle that you don't have a right to enter into our sovereign territory, to even request the asylum claim.
The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border and to say no one can cross here at all.
(End video clip)
SHEFFIELD: So, yeah, that's actually some incredibly radical policy that he just described there. Matt, you want to kind of summarize what, like, if people aren't familiar with some of the terminology that he used there, what exactly did he mean?
GERTZ: What he means [00:41:00] is that they're going to deputize the National Guard from red states and nationalize it in blue states. They're going to then basically go door to door through US cities rounding up anyone who looks like they might be An immigrant, which means, brown people, effectively. And then they're gonna try to put them in camps and deport them somehow.
This is a horrifying plan. It is one that is against our fundamental values. It is one that would cause horrific damage to families across the country. It is also a, a very poorly thought out plan. And because of that will almost would almost certainly be a total s**t show disaster. We're talking about millions and millions of people, some of whom who have been here for decades trying to round them up and put them on planes is going to cost a substantial fraction of the U. S. Budget for many years. This is very complicated as well [00:42:00] as sort of, villainous in its very nature but it's something that people like Stephen Miller are saying that they want to do and something that Trump supports and throws as much weight of his weight behind as possible.
And so, again, we need to take seriously that these sorts of horrific policies, which are very obviously in violation of human rights. U. S. law treaty obligations and basic humanity could actually come to pass.
SHEFFIELD: They could. Yeah. And I mean, these are prison camps like that. He's talking about large prison camps with millions of tens of millions of people potentially being constructed in the United States.
Why MAGA authoritarians lean into absurdity to describe their extreme policies
SHEFFIELD: And Trump, as you said, has in fact, endorsed this idea. But to the extent that you hear coverage of Donald Trump's more negative aspects, it's more, he said this thing he, he, he made this [00:43:00] post on his website and it's not so much about the policy.
And I don't know if there's been any polling on this that I can think of off the top of my head, but on abortion, for instance, multiple pollsters have asked the public, who do you think is responsible for Roe versus Wade ending?
The majority of people say, do not say Donald Trump was responsible for it. And I think a similar thing, if you ask the average American, do you know that Donald Trump wants to build prison camps for millions of people in the United States, and do you support that? It's almost unbelievable in some sense, right, Madeline?
And that's goes back to the idea of the absurdity, that they intermingle the authoritarian and the absurd simultaneously, such that it won't be taken seriously, is what I would say. What's your thought?
PELTZ: Yeah, and I think that's why you see the Biden administration or the Biden campaign really zooming in on people, Project 2025 [00:44:00] as a heuristic for these extreme policies, I think.
In that CPAC panel, I was in the room when that panel was happening, and just the extreme arrogance and hubris of these people that this, the idea that these policies are widely popular, I think, is a miscalculation on their part.
In this past week, Miller, Bannon and others have made clear that the results from Super Tuesday and the general election candidacy, presumptively of Donald Trump, will be a referendum on mass deportations.
And that's the bet that they're making. And I think that it's, It's critical for the mainstream media to make that front and center, that the top priority of a second Trump administration is not kitchen table issues like health care or taxes. It's punishing brown people [00:45:00] and making sweeping assumptions about who should and shouldn't be here.
And then ripping the fathers and mothers and children out of their long held neighborhoods and sending them back to a country that many people don't know as their home. And so this is the choice that's in front of us right now.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And in many cases because they have also talked about getting rid of the idea of birthright citizenship, they're talking about sending people to a country they have never even been to.
And dumping them off there. And it's just, yeah, like this, this is the kind of stuff that the mainstream media should be talking about that instead of, particular scuttlebutt about, what attorneys of Trump are mad at each other. Or, these, these things he, nasty thing he said about a judge or whatever.
Like, obviously those things deserve some amount of coverage, but the things that [00:46:00] people should know are the, are the, is the actual agenda and it's. It needs a lot more coverage on it, what's your take on that?
GERTZ: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, Donald Trump is someone who says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country and that his political enemies are vermin.
That is a level of rhetoric that is so wildly oppressive. inappropriate, so, out of step with America's historic values, that it really should be front page news every time he says something like that, but it's not. I think in many cases we've seen the mainstream press become kind of inured to the his most extreme language and has really in by doing that allowed the American public to kind of fall asleep on some of these horrific statements and plans.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, I think that is the, the last of [00:47:00] our clips here that we've got for the episode. Is there anything that either one of you wanted to add or feel like we didn't touch on that? We should
PELTZ: Just the Media Matters is sharpening our focus on the MAGA media and we're going to continue to ramp up coverage over the next year less than a year to the election.
And this is something that we're really closely paying attention to. And we hope that our audience is too.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. And I should also mention that people should also check out the full guide because the people that we discussed here on this conversation, this, this was only a subset of the individuals who are covered.
And then there is a whole array of other people who may not have an official role in the Donald Trump White House, but they certainly speak for the people who would work in there. And sometimes they're used to kind of test a idea or concept with complete plausible [00:48:00] deniability because they can say, well, I don't have any position with (Trump.) And I say that because this happened with regard to abortion and no exceptions for any kind of abortion and very early, bans on the procedure, like in vitro fertilization, and now they're ramping it up against birth control.
Like that's. This, that's another critical area where I think that the average, non political person especially if you are somebody who can, have children, that this is something that will directly impact you and they want to take it away.
All right, well, Madeline, so for people who want to keep up with you on social media where should people go for that?
PELTZ: I'm on all of the platforms. My handle is PeltzMadeline, I'm on X, but also on Threads and Bluesky, so you can check me out there. But most importantly, just follow my work on the Media Matters website.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. And how about you?
GERTZ: And I'm @MattGertz, [00:49:00] not @MattGaetz, at all of the major platforms as well.
SHEFFIELD: Okay, great. Well, I encourage everybody to follow you on those places and thanks for being here.
PELTZ: Thanks so much.
GERTZ: Thank you.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation. And you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show. You can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.
And if you are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much. You are making this possible, and I really, really do appreciate it. And I understand if you can't afford to subscribe right now but you can help out the show if you just leave a short little review on Apple Podcasts, tell people that you think it's great, that actually is really helpful. It helps Apple or Spotify or any of the other ones that you might be listening to recommend it to the other people who are on the site. So if you can do that, I really do appreciate that.
And if you're watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post a new [00:50:00] episode. That is helpful.
So that's it for this one. I will see you next time.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Trump has to pay $175 million appeal fee which his lawyer thinks is a real victory, huh?
06:33 — Truth Social's stock is Trump's latest scam, experts say it's drastically overvalued
15:33 — George Santos leaves Republican party because he says it's too dishonest for him
20:43 — NBC News faces massive employee complaints for hiring insurrection supporting Ronna McDaniel
26:49 — Self-described pastor hired hitmen to kill guy dating his daughter
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Jewish fascism. It's a term that seems cruelly oxymoronic, a mockery of the memories of millions of people who were slaughtered by Adolf Hitler. And yet, Jewish fascism is real thing, an incredibly strange and hateful movement that's growing in both Israel and the United States.
But what does Jewish fascism look like, and why is it a thing? In this episode, I’m joined by Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive organization that studies right wing extremism. Our discussion is centered around his recent article for Religion Dispatches entitled “Meet the ‘Bronze Age Zionists,’ far-right Jews embracing fascism in the wake of October 7.”
The video of our March 6, 2024 conversation is available. The full transcript of the episode is available to Flux subscribers on Substack or Patreon.
Cover photo: A meme illustration circulated among far-right Jewish online activists showing an extremely muscular Jewish man being admired by a group of women in what appears to be ancient Rome.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
09:07 — Why some far-right Jews see themselves as similar to neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates
11:48 — Partial reconciliation between some white nationalists and Jewish fascists
17:54 — Why many political uses of the term “Judeo-Christian” represent fake pluralism
21:50 — “Bronze Age Pervert” and Jewish fascists’ struggles against antisemitic white nationalists
28:53 — Ben Shapiro’s antisemitism and the insidious concept of “bad Jews”
37:12 — Antisemitism is integral to right-wing politics, no matter what pro-Trump advocates may claim
43:48 — Building solidarity: The only effective way to combat antisemitism
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Ben.
BEN LORBER: Thanks, Matthew. It's good to be here.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I did want to mention to the audience that you have recently written an article over at Religion Dispatches about the phenomenon of Jewish [00:02:00] fascism. So if anybody wants to dig in even further than what we're going to do in this episode, I definitely recommend people check that out.
I guess this is a very strange topic to a lot of people, as I said in the introduction. So let's maybe first get started on who are these people and what are they doing?
LORBER: Yeah. Well, I think when you have a term like Jewish fascism, could be talking about a, wide range of phenomena, as I'm sure we all know, No there is a really horrific, war, an assault being committed by the far right Israeli government on Gaza right now.
And that's certainly, one locus of it, right? The, extreme right in Israel, largely though, not exc exclusively a religious Zionist, movement has been growing for decades and has been allying itself. With, all kinds of, European ethno nationalist leaders.
And then you also [00:03:00] have minority of the American Jewish community and the, the, global diaspora Jewish community. That's also outlying itself with the far right, around issues, ranging from immigration to black lives matter to, to support for, Israel, to To, the separation of church and state, right?
The, the global Jewish far right, really is very, similar to other far right movements.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And and in regards specifically to the idea of the fascists that we're talking about here, a lot of them are directly connected to the Israeli far right. And they are, doing a lot of memes and things like that in reference to, killing Palestinians and that sort of thing. And it's one of the things that you talked about in the article is that, these Jewish fascists are trying to make connections to other. Right wing extremist group.
So including [00:04:00] people who are explicitly antisemitic, including people who are jihadists or Christian supremacists.
LORBER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, online, something that myself and other researchers have seen since October 7th that I wrote about in my Religion Dispatches article is really a growth in these alt rights meme accounts that are Jewish.
They're run by Jews. Obviously it's possible that, they're anonymous, so they could be lying that they're Jewish, but it's pretty clear that they have a deep familiarity in Jewish religious iconography, in Israeli history, and Jewish identity.
Like much of the global far right, they're championing themes of, hyper masculinity. They're championing, vitriolic, racism both toward Palestinians and toward, like, Arabs and Muslims more broadly.Like much h of the far right, they're virulently opposed to the ceasefire demonstrations that have been very present across the U S and [00:05:00] many Western countries have in recent months.
They see these ceasefire demonstrations, through racist terms, right? They see predominantly Arab and Muslim and Palestinian led demonstrations as a sign of what they called the Great Replacement, right? What they view as like the dangerous, brown hordes who they see as threatening the stability of white Western Christian civilization, or as they'll call it, Judeo Christian civilization, and they're, and so there are these meme accounts who are championing this, but this is also the kind of of rhetoric that you hear from Israeli far right leaders and that we've been hearing for a long time, right? Folks like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett or Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli far-right leaders, they always depict Israel as the kind of frontline defender of Judeo-Christian civilization or the West against the Islamic East. And that kind of clash of civilizations.
And you hear this from [00:06:00] former president Trump. You also hear this in many forms from political leaders across the aisle in the U.S.
So we're really at at a dangerous moment where the Israeli right is really a core part of the global ethnonationalist far right, in some ways, leading the way.
And this is a very dangerous moment for progressive Jews like myself who really have a very different vision of Jewish identity and Jewish safety and all those things.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah that's right. And as you noted, there is a broad cross section of many of these individuals seem to be people with extreme fundamentalist opinions. And they are correct to be able to cite, specific verses in specific books of the Bible to support their ideas, but we do have to make clear that the Jewish tradition and Judaism itself has many conflicting pieces in the Bible has, I mean, has, we don't even know how many [00:07:00] authors the Bible has technically.
But nonetheless, it is the case that many more traditionalist Jewish theologians, are, they're into this idea of authoritarianism. They're into the idea that truth comes from God and they control what God says.
That's a very convenient narrative. And, it's one that. It runs consistently in a lot of religions as well. And it's one of the threads that you do see quite a bit in these individuals that you're talking to.
LORBER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that's, very much in common with either the Christian nationalist far right, the Jewish nationalist far right, also the Muslim nationalist far right, as they claim, and, not to mention like Hindu nationalists in India, right, really all religious ethnonationalism, they claim to hearken it back to some kind of primordial in truth that they find in their religious scriptures, right?
They claim that they're the inheritors of an [00:08:00] unbroken tradition stretching back into the very foundations of their religion. But I think that's really misleading, right? These are very modern, movements, right? They were built, the Christian right in the U. S. was built, by ideologues in the seventies and the eighties.
The Jewish nationalists, right? In Israel, I'd really strengthened and got kicked off, post 1967, post the Six Day War. We see similar things with the global Muslim far right. These are obviously all very complicated phenomena, but you know, they're modern phenomena and these people don't have a monopoly on what religious texts mean.
They don't have a monopoly on religious truth. I mean, are inspiring. Yeah, in movements within Judaism and Christianity and Islam that's all very different conclusions from our text. And I think it's always a danger that that nationalists and fundamentalists will, cherry pick in various religious traditions to kind of, bolster their political goals.
And it's really [00:09:00] important to remember that there's a great diversity of religious opinions and traditions out there.
Jewish fascists seeking common cause with neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates
SHEFFIELD: So we've got on the screen your Religion Dispatches article. And so, for people who are listening, you've got some of the memes that are, that they are using. And one of them is a meme of a muscular looking Jewish man who looks like a bodybuilder in front of some women who seem to be admiring him quite a bit and they are apparently Romans based on the architecture behind them.
And, it's, this idea of trying to integrate within the other nationalism said that we're talking about, as you were saying, and one of them as people can, let me just scroll down a little bit further here that you know, one of the, the means here I'll describe the first one, and then you can describe the second one.
So we've got a Confederate soldier depicted on the left side in front of a, confederate battle flag. And then we have a somebody who appears to be some sort of Israeli [00:10:00] soldier with a Israel flag in the background behind him. Now, what's, the image below that? The meme that we're, that's depicted there?
LORBER: Yeah. the image below is in many ways, even, more shocking. It shows. A Jewish man with, and you can't really, see it so well with the way that it's cut off, but he has like a, a Nazi yellow star on him, really in an embrace with a white power activist and he has a pin on his chest that says white pride worldwide.
And so the, the, idea was, is it really counter-intuitive, right? Because white nationalists are deeply antisemitic. They have antisemitic conspiracy theories at the core of their ideology, right? Their, central belief is that a Jewish cabal has taken control of immigration, of government, of media in order to wage war against white people.
So, but in the eyes of the Jewish far right, [00:11:00] this is an alliance they would like to see. They'd like to position the Jewish community within the broader far right, they see common enemies, right. They see, look, the state of Israel is under attack in their view, from brown people, essentially. And white people in the U. S. are under attack in their view from brown people. So let's get together and let's build a new traditionalist nationalist kind of vanguard alliance to save the West.
And that is a really a mockery of thousands of years of Jewish history, where it very much has been a European Christian civilization that oppressed Jews for thousands of years.
So to see it reversed now in this kind of, very, visible way is quite disturbing.
Partial reconciliation between some white nationalists and far-right Jews
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And, it should be noted that, that these outreach efforts while they are rejected by many traditional white nationalist Christian supremacist types, some of them have been reciprocating [00:12:00] and one of them in particular is a guy named Jared Taylor who has been running a magazine and website for many decades called American Renaissance.
And he is very friendly explicitly to to Jews who want to come in and be a member of his organization. And he's had many Jewish people speak at his conferences over the years. And then it's also the case that Richard Spencer, the infamous white nationalist activist had also said for a number of years.
And, he's perhaps changed his public stated views recently, but for the longest time, he said that Israel was a model for what he was trying to do. States. So, I mean, how's, how serious do you think the white nationalist community, if you will, is responding to these overtures by Jewish far right?
LORBER: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different factors at play. When we say the white nationalist in a community, that might mean very many [00:13:00] different things, right? There are neo-Nazis on the Internet who never want to ally with any Jewish people. They see Jews as the prime enemy.
And many of the neo-Nazis or other white supremacist groups like the America First Corporate Movement, they're actually very, anti anti Israel anti Zionist, but not out of any progressive politics or any real sympathy with Palestinians. It's really like a feature of their antisemitism.
But for others, right, like you mentioned, like Jared Taylor and the MAGA movement more broadly, if you want to consider the, MAGA movement kind of part of white nationalism, they're very welcoming to Jews, right? I mean, the MAGA movement has always tried to recruit different minorities into its coalition, right?
At its core, the base is white, evangelicals, and it very much You know, trades on white grievance and on Christian nationalism, but they've also been very adept at outreach, to African American [00:14:00] communities or to Latinx communities or to Jewish communities. And of course, many Jews in America are also white, but there are also, many Jews of color.
And Jews who are part of these other groups as well. But the global far right is, has always, had multiracial components and, multi-religious components. So I think it's important, to see these overtures, between Jewish nationalists and other, varieties of nationalists as part of this, kind of, diverse global nationalist coalition that that has room for Hindu nationalists.
It has, room for some conservative Muslims. It has room for folks like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, right? It's a diverse, movement. And I think more attention has to be paid to the subtle and clever ways that, the MAGA movement tries to make room for for religious and racial minorities.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, it is very important. But it's also worth noting that the way that they make this room, it is for people who know their [00:15:00] place that, you know, so for, so Israel is the place where Jews need to be, and India is the place where Hindus need to be, but within those confines of those states, they should have untrammeled power and have not have to have any regard for human rights or, minority rights of any kind. And and then of course you see that with as well with, far right, black politicians and activists like Candace Owens or many of these up and coming podcasters out there as well that are, black far right individuals. And of course, it's worth noting that that Enrique Tarrio, the former head of the Proud Boys is a Black Hispanic man. He uses that as a way to sort of shield his organization from accusations of racism.
LORBER: Yeah, no, that's definitely true. And there's another movement that's worth mentioning here that The National Conservatives, National Conservative [00:16:00] Movement.
They hold conferences every year. Yeah, National Conservatism, they're, primarily based in the U. S., but they've also held conferences all across the West. And, they, are hard-line Christian nationalists, right? They think the U. S. should become a Christian, nation with a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity, right?
Encoded in our laws and our policies and the identity of this country. But ironically enough national conservatism was started by an Israeli Jewish philosopher named, Yoram Hazony. And there are many there are many traditionalist, Jews in that coalition. And I've talked to some of them, like I went to the national conservatism conference in 2022 in Florida.
And I talked to many right wing Jews at that conference who said openly, we want to live in a Christian nation. We don't see it as a threat to us. If the dominant character of the United States is no longer, pluralistic [00:17:00] and there's no longer a separation of church and state. But if if fundamentalist Christianity is enshrined as the law and the culture of the land.
And some even said to me, I'd rather my kids be educated in a Christian private school than in a secular public school, because at least in the Christian private school, they won't be exposed, to liberalism or to transgender rights or to racial justice movements. So, and that was really shocking to me as someone, I mean, Christians have been trying to convert Jews and, trying to convert everyone else for a really long time.
So it's would you really want your. own child to go to a Christian private school for eight hours every day. And these, people were like, yes, because, to them, the greater enemy is the left. I thought that was a really disturbing, but fascinating look into their view.
Why many political uses of the term "Judeo-Christian" represent fake pluralism
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And one person who I think who really kind of. popularized that opinion among American Jews is [00:18:00] Dennis Prager, who is a radio host with a Christian supremacist company named Salem Media. And his interpretations of, Judaism are I mean, he actually has said explicitly that, The role of Judaism now in the 21st century is to convert people to Christianity because we have to preserve the Abrahamic values on DSO.
Since Judaism is not evangelical, well, then, I guess. Making people be Christians and helping Christians sign people up. That's what Jews should do. And like, like, and I, think to some degree, people who are, let's say more devoutly and more traditionally Jewish, they might have a general affinity for somebody like Dennis Prager, but not understand what he's actually trying to do to Judaism, which is destroy it.
LORBER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating because people talk a [00:19:00] lot on the right about a Judeo Christian West, right. As if there's this unbroken continuity. In the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, together really formed, the bedrock of whatever, like, we're calling Western civilization.
And that's, kind of an unbroken, 2000 year old, tradition, but really, like I was saying before the whole idea of a Judeo Christian West is. There's also a very recent, very modern invention. It was initially formed right after World War II, after the Holocaust, as a way to kind of make atonement for what, Europe as a whole, and Germany in particular, had just done to the Jews.
And to say, Hey, now the main enemy is communism, right? So we are the Judeo Christian West, and our enemy is communism in the East. And then once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the enemy became Islamic fundamentalism, [00:20:00] right? So "Judeo-Christian" has always really functioned more to signify who we aren't rather than who we are.
And yeah, I mean, I think it's very disturbing especially given that Christian nationalists, ultimately even though, Orthodox and right wing Jews are, in their coalition. The laws they want to make the laws of the land are disastrous for religious Jews as well. Religious Jewish law is not so anti abortion as, Christian nationalism is, right?
-
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Peter Navarro becomes first-ever Trumper to go to jail for his crimes
04:04 — Trump forced to admit he can't pay $464 million to appeal fraud judgment
09:07 — Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen will testify against Trump in hush money case after he loses bid to force them out
10:53 — Alina Habba, Trump’s airhead attorney, gets thrown under the bus in harassment suit against Mar-a-Lago
13:53 — House Republicans reach tentative deal to stop yet another shutdown threat by their own party members
20:22 — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem posts two infomercials on Twitter for some reason
25:09 — Florida man treated for having tapeworm larvae in his brain
28:42 — Ohio Republican senate candidate claims he did not make gay profile on sex website
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It’s all but official that the 2024 presidential election is going to be Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. And so because of that, we’re going to move to more of a general election focus on Theory of Change.
At this point in many of the surveys, Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them being that the Democratic party is operating under a politics of yesteryear against a Republican party that has not existed in many decades.
Besides being much more dominated by openly anti-democratic extremists, the American right has become incredibly professionalized with a gigantic infrastructure for networking, career advancement, legislation composition, and also propaganda.
Democrats, by contrast, have almost no institutions that are as explicitly ideological and which work to advocate for center-left ideas to the public. As much as Democrats often talk about how democracy is at risk in this country, and indeed it is, they have not functionally changed their behavior from an institutional standpoint.
And we will talk about that today with the guest in today’s episode with Rachel Bitecofer. She is a political strategist and the co-author of a new book called Hit ’Em Where It Hurts, and also the creator of a newsletter called The Cycle.
The video of this episode is available. The conversation was recorded February 9, 2024. The transcript of the audio follows. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
Cover photo: Lara Trump, recently appointed as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, speaks onstage at a lavish conference thrown by Turning Point USA. June 19, 2023. Photo: Gage Skidmore/CC-by-2.0
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54:16 — Why humor and mockery are so important in political communications
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Rachel.
RACHEL BITECOFER: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here today.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. so let’s I guess start off the discussion with what’s the elevator pitch behind your book here?
BITECOFER: Yeah, just contextually, I think it’s important for people to understand in this audience, probably in particular. This book is the product of a mission to, to bring the rest of the world up to what political science knows [00:03:00] about.
Voting behavior, the mass electorate voter psychology, political polarization, because the reason that I’m even sitting here today is a forecast using my academic work. I was a PhD. I was a professor at a university in 2018. That forecasted a really strong Democratic performance in the 2018 midterms.
And the reason I even put it out was I was frustrated watching and reading things like 538 and the Cook political report and others that didn’t seem to incorporate modern or recent political science literature, especially the literature on political polarization, because you guys hear the word all the time.
We’re polarized, it’s polarizing, whatever, but what people don’t know is that actually that has created a really distinct mass electorate that never existed. I mean, maybe back in the civil war, we don’t have polling. It’s never existed before, and it has conditioned behavior [00:04:00] in a different way than we’re used to.
What was happening in the nineties or when Ronald Reagan won and won almost every state on the map. Right? Those are things that can’t happen now because we have a different electorate. So motivating the book was to get a, the left predominantly to understand the reality of the American electorate, the role that partisanship party identification plays in vote choice.
And then the very, very rough clay that is the American voter, It’s not like the people who are watching us now, they are tuned out. They are mostly not interested in politics. And if you think about something that you’re not interested in, like say, I mean, NASCAR, I don’t know anything about NASCAR.
I couldn’t tell you one NASCAR driver, but if I was into NASCAR, I wouldn’t know a lot about it. I would be able to tell you a whole bunch, right? So, people don’t have an interest in politics. That’s the reason why half of the eligible electorate, basically it’s 60 40 percent in [00:05:00] 2020 don’t even bother to vote in the most consequential of our elections.
The presidential election people in America are very tuned out and that has gotten much worse in the modern media environment, which allows people to completely isolate themselves from political news and current events in and really just go all in on entertainment. Right. So,
SHEFFIELD: Oh, ’cause there’s, yeah, there’s just so much of it.
Oh, so much for to watch.
BITECOFER: It’s so much, right? Like, I can’t, sometimes I go into Netflix and I’m like, okay, what should I watch? Okay. Too much. I just, I quit . Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: I mean, hell, like, if you wanted to, you could literally. Only watch real housewives shows you literally do that for a year.
BITECOFER: Our system is built and based on a flawed foundation. So this book is 1st, getting you to understand. How that’s that assumption that the electorate is engaged and informed and the, they, the public knows all this stuff that’s happening with [00:06:00] Donald Trump, it’s a flawed assumption.
Okay. And if you accept that the electorate knows almost nothing about what’s happening in contemporary politics, strategically you shift, right? And it becomes, Oh, then we need a messaging strategy. That informs the electorate that they’re facing an existential threat to their health, wealth, safety, and freedom.
So getting that second part of the book is about getting people to learn how the Republican system operates, how they’ve developed and, institutionalized infrastructure to pull off. They’re, really, they have really strong electoral performance relative to the amount of people that they’re, Are in the Republican party and and they’ve used it to dominate.
Right. And so the book is about getting people to understand Republicans don’t campaign the same way their election messaging isn’t, Hey, I have candidate Tim, Tom, Tim Ryan, and he’s a bipartisan, moderate. Who’s going to get things done. He was up. [00:07:00] Good ideas. An extremist in JD Vance and JD Vance won that election.
Now there is a lean to the right on in Ohio, but at the end of the day, the voters that voted for JD Vance on that partisan label preference, the R on the, ballot next to him. Many of them, they had no idea they were voting for a fascist, a guy who’s actually espoused in the public record, very fascist views, especially about women.
Okay, they never heard that he would vote to ban abortion nationally. They never heard any of this because we are, our campaigns do not define our opponent. And so that’s what this book is about, getting everybody out of the old strategy. Understanding how modern elections work and how polarization has, really elevated the effect of partisan label.
And at the end of the day, if partisanship is going to predict the vote choice for 90 percent of voters, and it does, even those independent leaners, then you have to be designing a campaign that sells the entire brand. And that’s what the Republicans have been very [00:08:00] good at. Their brand good, our brand bad, right?
And so it comes, it’s a whole new approach to electioneering on the left.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, when it’s, when you’re talking about, defining the opposition the, Republicans figured out a long time ago and probably I’d say Paul Weyrich, the, right wing Christian strategist, he was the first one that really figured this out where he said that, people, it’s easier to motivate them against something than for something.
And that’s, and essentially like. And that’s right.
Television advertising doesn’t work, but Democrats keep wasting money on it
SHEFFIELD: There is so much political science that has, has, really just floated around within the academic community. And I mean, that was my major in college and I remember reading all these papers and then I would look at the way that the, Two parties behaved and I was on the right at this point in time. And I was like, wow, the Democrats, even though they all have these liberal professors don’t [00:09:00] pay attention to them at all. And what they say, and like one of the, key insides of political science is that advertising doesn’t work.
Especially at the higher, like the higher you go in politics, the less it works in terms of persuasion, because people already know who Donald Trump is. They already know who Joe Biden is. They already know who Barack Obama is or whoever, Hillary Clinton, they are, and they have their opinion.
It’s the same way that if I showed you, if you like, Pepsi and I show you a thousand ads for Coke, it’s not going to make you go buy a Coke. Yes. and it’s because of the, it’s not going to make you like
BITECOFER: it, especially. And really it’s not about the person. So it’s not Biden. I mean, Trump’s different.
Okay. But whatever. It’s not. Bush and Kerry or whatever. It’s the in American political science when the field of mine, mine is behavioral, right? When that field emerged, it was because we had finally invented surveys on telephone surveys. And people were like, people [00:10:00] like me, nerds, political scientists were like, Hey, now we can, find out things about the American electorate.
And so what they endeavored to do Was go find out about the electorate. It’s a seminal work in my discipline called the American voter. And what it found folks was this Americans don’t know jack s**t about politics. They can tell you the president is maybe the vice president. Beyond that, most Americans don’t have much context to work with when it comes to interpreting political phenomenon, but.
The political scientist who wrote this book argue, don’t worry about it because they have this handy cognitive shortcut that they can use to make informed political decisions that don’t require them to have all this information. What is that shortcut? It’s the party label. Okay. And partisan elections, no matter how much you bleach out the party part in the campaigning, which is bad for us, right?
At the end of the day, the voter is getting into the ballot booth. And if [00:11:00] I know nothing, I mean, say you were sitting there right now, Matthew, but you were a black dot. I didn’t know if you were a man or a woman, if you were rich or poor. Old, young, suburbanite, rural, nothing. But I knew that you were an independent who said, I lean to the Republican party or a Republican, vice versa on the other side, I would be able to predict your vote choice a year away from an election, a year away, as I have done in two cycles, right?
I’ll be able to predict your vote choice nine out of 10 times. I’ll be right. Nine out of 10 times, because that you’re not buying a candidate, you’re buying a party. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: And and to some degree we’re, kind of seeing that people not understanding that with, when you look at the, a lot of the discussion about public opinion polls and Joe Biden and Donald Trump, that, like, I, I think the.
The number one thing that happened in the Republican presidential primaries this year is that it wasn’t a [00:12:00] real primary. And that essentially because all the candidates were too afraid to attack Trump, basically it was a coronation of. You should vote for Trump because Joe Biden is the devil incarnate Republicans.
And you need to understand that. And that was the, message out of every single debate, Joe Biden is evil. That was it. It was never, well, Donald Trump is kind of dumb or he’s kind of corrupt or is extreme, even though some of, except for Chris Christie, he was the only one that was actually willing to criticize Trump.
And it was like the same, they, made the exact same mistake. The non Trump candidates that, that they made in 2016, they were too afraid to criticize this guy. And if you don’t criticize the number one person, well, you’re not going to win.
BITECOFER: Why would I pick a Trump alternative? If I can have Trump, right?
I mean, like they’re not going
SHEFFIELD: to tell me why Trump was bad. Exactly.
BITECOFER: Right. and as you point out, Christie did it. Now, if they had [00:13:00] all done it, I am convinced they could have put this guy down. Okay. But it would have taken all of them. Right. And they, just, they are so they’re like, it’s like, I don’t know.
They’re so Vic they’ve turned themselves into such hapless lumps of play. They can’t even figure out how to get out of a wet paper sack anymore.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and I think the reason for that is that, the Republican party is not actually conservative. it’s reactionary. It is not a conservative party.
And in many ways, the Democratic Party actually is a conservative party in America. It’s sad to say,
BITECOFER: if you don’t classical conservatism, which you and I both, I think, understand pretty well. Yes, I mean, honestly, the Democratic Party is trying to preserve our institutions and, that’s a classic neoclassic liberalism, right?
Like, it’s crazy. Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: and certainly not trying to socialize anything. Yeah. And, and like, and, something that was, and, [00:14:00] of course, like somebody who’s right wing, hearing us say that might say, Oh, that’s just a bunch of communists talking nonsense. I don’t have to believe that.
But something that is an objective fact to this point is that, when that American political consultants who are Democrats will go and work for the British Conservative Party because they see it as not that different from the Democratic Party.
BITECOFER: Right. It’s amazing. Right. Because. When I do a, I did a survey once to test this and I, because I had a wonderful five year run where I had my own survey research center.
It was fantastic. And so when things came into my mind, I could test it. When I tested, I said, I tested like brand, like awareness, like what is, what do you, what comes to mind when you think of each of the parties brands? Right. And guess what? I mean, you won’t be surprised at all. When I tell you what the most common word was that people Popped out in terms of hearing, what do you think of the Democrats?
Right? And it was [00:15:00] socialism. So let’s think about how Republicans do their swing messaging. Okay. It’s about branding us as socialist and more lately child pedophile.
And what it is like, okay, so a Democrat’s like, well, you can’t call people a fascist. They don’t know what it is. Well, nobody knows what the socialist is either. All right. It’s not that voters know that we’re socialist because there’s a bunch of policy points that prove it out. They just keep hearing the association, the word association and the way that we run like Tim Ryan.
Did in Ohio. I mean, we, did kind of a bifurcated strategic map in 22 where Michigan and Arizona ran against the Republican party and defined it as an extremist movement. And then the old strategy ran with people like Tim Ryan. What Tim Ryan’s apologetic democratic approach is this, the Republican opponent saying, don’t vote for Tim Ryan because he’s a Democrat and all Democrats are socialist.
Okay. And Tim Ryan’s messages. Yeah, but I’m not one of those Democrats. [00:16:00] And what you hear if you’re a swing voter is, boy, there’s something really wrong with the brand Democrat. And if you’re walking into a ballot booth where the most important thing on the ballot is going to be the D and the R and brand association and basically top of mind awareness of impression, then that it’s very dangerous and bad to be telling swing voters.
Yes. There’s something wrong with that brand. You have to elevate your own party brand because at the end of the day, It’s the perception of the Democratic brand on the ballot is going to predict your performance in a swing race and especially against an opposition that’s willing to make. I mean, think about it.
We’re living in a country folks. We’re living in a country. The only advanced democracy. That doesn’t even have paid maternity leave. Okay, everywhere else, I’ve paid 6 weeks or whatever of maternity, maybe 6 months in some cases. [00:17:00] Here, I was back to work 5 days after a C section. Okay, no paid maternity leave.
So we’re not anywhere close to a communist regime. We can’t even see communists from our backyard in this country. And yet a not insignificant part of the population, I would argue, probably about 50 million Americans think that we’re socialist.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, it is, I mean, and a lot of that is media effects.
And and as a discipline in political science, it has, there’s a massive, archive of studies that show that, It, media affects people’s opinions and yet when you look at the way that Democrats think about, Democratic leaders think about media, they seem to have the idea, and this is to the antiquated belief systems that you’ve been talking about, is that they seem to have this idea that, well, somebody can hear, 24 7 On six [00:18:00] different right wing cable channels and countless YouTube channels that Democrats are socialist pedophiles who are going to, let China take over America.
Yeah. They can hear that every single day of their lives. But then if we have, a hundred million dollars of ads on shows that they don’t watch for politics, that will counteract it. And it’s like, No, guys, that’s not how it works. But yeah, and, but this it’s so pervasive, this idea that.
Advertising is a panacea. Where, what can, let’s talk about why do you think that is?
BITECOFER: I mean, I, think there’s a real naivety about how media operates and how the Republican party operates in relationship to the media, I mean, Democrats don’t, it’s been, it was like me for five, six years now teaching people, actually public opinion flows From the top down, right?
The reason people are going to start noticing the economy is doing better. [00:19:00] Finally, is because the media is finally giving them headlines about how good the economy is. you can’t, you can, have things that are external, like, Gaza support from the Palestine people, but most of the time.
Media effects are shaping public perception, right? And even once you recognize that, then you have real logistic hurdles to implementing something like they have where they, as you pointed out all day long, if I’m a conservative, I’m going to consume different various. Conservative media, but it’s all going to be the same message over and repetition is what you need to make it sink in.
Whereas like us, we’re going to talk about 400 different things. There’s no repetition. 1 show is focused on this. 1 show is focused on that. And we can’t, we’re not going to, we’re not going to be able to compete with that. But what we can do. Because media follows campaigns is if we shape a narrow, if we’re shaping our message to create a narrative, then, and if we run [00:20:00] it from all levels, state, legislative house, Senate, gov president, it makes, I can make a cacophony effect.
Like the Republican party just did in 2021 was CRT. CRT is something even I, and I know almost everything had never heard of in, early 2021 and yet they took something I had never heard of and made it a household name, a national name. And made an entire election cycle revolve around it. How did they do that strategy and centralization?
We can’t stumble our way into better communication. We have to strategically design that system and intentionally centralize things. So that’s a lot of the work that I’m working on
SHEFFIELD: now. Yeah, no, it’s true.
Republicans invest in political networking and career building, Democrats do notz
SHEFFIELD: And of course the way that they’re able to do that is that they have and I can say this, as somebody who was on the political right, that the right wing spends probably in a [00:21:00] given year, at least 500 million on networking like networking organizations, internal networking.
And so they’ve got these groups like the council for national policy Americans for tax reform, CPAC, and Charlie Kirk’s many, organizations, which just alone, he controls like a hundred million dollars. That’s exactly
BITECOFER: right. You’re the only person I’ve ever met that knows that other than me.
SHEFFIELD: Well, that’s unfortunate.
BITECOFER: I mean, like, I lay out in the book, I’m like, look, this is what they do. Like we need, we don’t, we should stop telling rich people. We don’t want their money. We need. Billionaires and they have to start spending billions on building this infrastructure, Alec
SHEFFIELD: infrastructure of democracy.
BITECOFER: Yes. Infrastructure for democracy. And if we, and we have 500 grassroot groups for youth voting, all elbow grease. Okay. And spit, and there’s almost no one’s paid to run or to work in any of these [00:22:00] things. And they have turning point, they have a hundred million dollar For office buildings of 4 floors each because I went and debated Charlie Kurtz so I can see the infrastructure of turning point 1 of those buildings.
I didn’t access. Is outside labeled the turning point logistic center. So, 4 floors devoted to logistics guys. And like, we’re just getting like, we cannot band aid our way through this. We have to have an infrastructure that’s heavily invested in. We have to start right now because we’re already 15, 20, 30 years behind in that.
Depending on what institution you’re talking about. And at the end of the day, we, I mean, we, for years have been saying, Oh, they have all this stuff and why don’t we have any stuff? Well, okay. Then f*****g build it. It’s time to build it, dude. How many years are going to go by when you were like, Oh, we wish we had an Alec.
Like, we have to find these donors and have conversations about how to better spend their investment money in elections. Because as you just [00:23:00] pointed out, a hundred million dollars in all, in September, Isn’t going to offset 10 months of narrative setting by right wing media. Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: no, it’s true. And, and, I think, and this is something that I’ve talked about a lot on, on, on my show is that I, think that the reason why you don’t see this stuff taken seriously is that when they look at a, like, a Democratic, a large donor or a party leader or high level consultant, when they look at Ben Shapiro or they look at Charlie Kirk, they see a buffoon who says, constantly says stupid stuff. And you know what, they are that, but they also are heard by tens of millions of people every single week when they say these things. And so you can laugh at what they have to say-- and it is absurd and like I have a comedy news podcast, so we do laugh at it.
It’s worth laughing at it But the [00:24:00] problem is that things that are like fascism is both absurd and dangerous Yes and if you only think that it’s absurd then you’re going to lose to it
BITECOFER: Yes, exactly. I mean, I’m doing a project. That’s called Project 1933. It’s tied into my work, trying to get people to read the Heritage Foundation’s Manual for Leadership, which is reissued since 1980.
Every, time there could be a new incoming Republican administration. I thought, could these people have possibly put a thousand pages of a fascist autocracy takeover plan into the Heritage Manual? And I ordered it and guess what? Because they know we’re so in it. They can write their s**t in public and it describes how they’re going to use schedule of how they’re going to take over the civil service, how they’re going to ignore the court rulings.
it’s a pathway to fascism or transition to fast fascism. And I’m trying to get people to see what happened in Germany in 1933. [00:25:00] Hitler’s sworn in on Jan 30th. And it’s basically like the Trump’s swearing, right? Like, Oh, this guy’s going to be a hot mess. He’s going to, this government will last three weeks, but you know, the conservatives are going to reign them in this and that, and I’m not kidding by the summer, DACA was built and it’s filled full of the Nazi party’s political enemies, guys, three months to take long. So I’m like documenting it in real time. Like it’s a live tweet. Tomorrow, in fact, is the next segment of that where I’m trying to show people just how quick it is because all you need is a willingness to ignore the law to suspend the law to say the law is suspended and you are not going to ever sell me that this Republican Party.
Given Elise Stefanik was just on CNN talking about how she would have overturned the government, okay, overthrown the government for Donald Trump on January 6th. We have to believe them. They are quite serious. They are going to establish a fascist autocracy and we [00:26:00] have to panic now because if we wait until they’re actually doing it, like in Hitler’s Germany, it will be too late.
SHEFFIELD: No, exactly right. And, and I think on the Hitler point, one of the other things about him is that. People looking at him today, almost 100 years from when he first came along, they tend to think of him as just, this purely evil and, charismatic figure who was sort of, had an almost godlike competence of, dictatorship.
But that’s actually not how things were like. It is before he became, the absolute ruler, he wasn’t people thought of him as an idiot as a stupid moron who was constantly putting his foot in his mouth. And guess who that reminds you of. Yes.
BITECOFER: I keep trying to tell people, listen. Don’t compare [00:27:00] Hitler to like, or Trump to Hitler from 1944.
Okay? Like after he is murdered 6 million Jews in the gas chambers. What you should be looking at is the comparisons from 19 32, 19 33 Hitler, and if you do that. You’ll see the way the Nazis did their stuff was a victimization narrative. It was grievance politics, and it was an us versus them propaganda psych ops that they utilized a new mass communication tool to execute.
That was the radio. Never before could you beam a voice into a head. Of an American in their living room prior to that, and it was really instrumental in what the Nazis ended up doing. We’re in a very same situation because the invention of the Internet has completely and fundamentally changed how people are getting information and we learn that.
Because we know now that there’s a segment of the Democrats base, right? That has been radicalized over Gaza, probably [00:28:00] by social media content through TikTok and other things that were financed by Iran. Okay? We’ve never had a capability for foreign governments to put content into American brains directly.
It’s a new form of thing. And, Vladimir Putin used it to first elect Trump, help get Trump elected. And now it’s, being turned against us both domestically and internationally. So it, we’re really in a moment. Yes, there are differences. The United States is a stabilized, institutionalized democracy that’s been in operation for almost 250 years.
The Weimar Republic in Germany was never stable. Okay, so that is true folks. But at the end of the day, when you look at the mechanics of what happened, if the ruler is willing to say, there is a crisis of the border, the borders being invaded, I am suspending the constitution. That’s it. It’s game over.
Now you might say, well, won’t we all react? maybe, [00:29:00] but it’s really easy to say that you will when you’re not the one with the AR 15 pointed at your family, right? So maybe we’ll react, but if they’ve declared martial law and they’re shooting protesters in the streets, it’s not going to be sufficient.
The time to stop it is before it happens.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And we know for a fact that when Trump was trying to illegally cling to power in 2021, he was receiving advice from people. You need to suspend the constitution. You need to seize the voting machines. You need to declare a martial law because there is an insurrection.
And they were the ones talking about insurrection.
BITECOFER: Yeah. And we know this too, that was a white house meeting late at night after the, chief of staff had left because Cassidy Hutchinson told us. Right. And it came within seconds folks. And then actually it happened. Trump said, you know what I want to appoint, I can do whatever I want.
Right. I can appoint Sidney Powell. As a special prosecutor and literacy, [00:30:00] right? And, they’re like, yeah, you can do that, but we’re not going to do it. We’re not, no, one’s going to execute this for you. No, one’s gonna like, he tried to appoint her, but the rest of the room was like, no, we’re not going to do it.
Like they literally ignored a presidential order. People have no idea of any of that. Like my friends that vote regularly even, so they’re already better than most people. They don’t, know anything about what happened. They know there was an insurrection thing at the Capitol. They don’t realize it was part of an intricate, multi level, multi pronged, party wide conspiracy that came this close to ending democracy.
And that’s why they devised Project 2025. They’re actually taking applications from young conservatives who they’re going to ideologically scream. They’re going to have this whole data bank of pre scaring to people who were like you, right? You. That are committed to loyalty to not to the constitution, not to anything else, but to Donald Trump personally.
And I mean, that’s just where we’re at. [00:31:00]
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And the, and so all those people that refuse Trump. In 2021, if he wins, they will, no one like that will be allowed in,
BITECOFER: Donald Trump’s going to like pick a vice president that helps him do something like, he picked Pence because he wanted to get, make sure the evangelical vote, the most important constituency in the Republican party was squarely behind him.
And he’s, a hot mess personally. And we thought maybe they would care because they’re supposed to like be religious, but apparently not like that. He’s not doing that this time. Trump has one criteria for Veep, will this person do what I want them to do when I seize power? And that’s it. Okay. And that’s why Elise Stefanik was auditioning on CNN the other day.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, exactly. And of course, they also do this at the, sort of thing at, the local and state levels as well. And, you mentioned a group that I think a lot of people might not have heard of [00:32:00] called Alec. What is Alec for people who don’t know what that is. Yeah. In the Republican.
What do
BITECOFER: they do? Yeah. Yeah. Within the Republican massive infrastructure, which is, as he pointed out, at least 500 million a year, but probably significantly more if we could, actually look
SHEFFIELD: at the media, it’s over, billions.
BITECOFER: Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. Well, one of the things that they did when they were developing a plan called red map, which is what they use to gerrymander, they, they had good timing, they had Michael Steele strategy.
Fire Pelosi, nationalized politics, a referendum on Obama and Obamacare seized in 2010, and they ended up having this great electoral performance right at the right moment, because that was a redistricting year. And they use that power to redistrict themselves a ton of state legislative seats at the same time, what they were doing was building something called the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Alec L A L E C. And what that does [00:33:00] is it, streamlines legislation for the state level. So when you look at Florida, right, we all know they have a thing called the stand your ground law, because we all know Trayvon Martin was brutally murdered for no reason because of the stand your ground law. What people don’t realize is stand your ground is a law that’s in multiple States.
And it came out of this think tank called Alec, which writes what we call model legislation. So they basically take a law, they, write it up. It’s, and it’s always crazy s**t, like trans bans or stand your ground or busting the unions or whatever it is, right to work that all comes from Alec. And then they introduce it all across all the state legislatures that they control in the same legislative cycle.
And that’s how you can get somewhere where like. Ron DeSantis starts ranting about trans people, and within six months, every state legislature that’s controlled by Republicans have passed brutal anti trans legislation. It’s because it’s all centralized, it’s all coming out of ALEC, and we have [00:34:00] absolutely nothing like that.
SHEFFIELD: And I think, it’s really that network is so important because it allows them to move with extreme quickness in to impose their agenda on states and local and locality so like, and you, saw that, for instance, certainly with various, anti CRT laws, various, book censorship laws, teacher censorship laws, and, they just rolled these out before anybody in the local communities had any idea what the hell was going on. And like, and, they rolled the local media as well, because, they would give these signs, to their protesters and they’d show up somewhere and at a school board and say, I’m concerned about this or that.
And these were in many cases, professional. Right wing activists, not parents at the school, no connection at all to the area. And the local media had no idea that this was happening and who was doing this. And they didn’t ask anybody. [00:35:00] And so, they would just report it as here’s some concerned parents who were talking about schools and, and, they, fooled a lot of people and, it’s only now that.
They have, caused so much censorship and so many and suppress so much free speech that people are now realizing, oh, I actually have to pay attention to my school board election. So lunatics who want to, impose Christo fascism, don’t take over my school board.
BITECOFER: I mean, I don’t know if you saw this, but yeah, just yesterday, a Utah, one of these moms for Liberty school board nuts, right?
It was a man, but whatever, that’s the group that’s promoting Christofascism on our school boards. He accused a Utah student, a minor child of being transgender. She is not. And now she’s in police custody because so many people came after her that this poor, innocent, random kid. I mean, what, is that?
Right? Imagine if that was your kid, [00:36:00] like, what, how angry would you be that some dude on a school board set radical extremist to the point where you have to put your kid into protective custody? Right. Like we, yeah, we have to make sure that we’re communicating to people the stakes, because although we are disorganized, disinterested and not motivated are, and there are few in number, but they are all of those things.
How right-wing activists use mainstream media to push their message through manipulation
BITECOFER: And they also are very strategic. I lay it on the book, how they made CRT a household name using not only right wing media ecosystem, which is 1 part, but by getting our mainstream system to validate. The crazy stuff that they want to talk about. Okay. And, we see that last night too, with the, dirt her report for Joe Biden there, they’ve been pounding this narrative, trying to paint him as senile.
And now they’ve got this great report that they can point to. It’s none of it is an accident guys. Like it’s all intentional. And I was reading a book from another ex conservative [00:37:00] activist. I was talking about, Hey, I, everything that I was indoctrinated with, I thought like the left had.
All this stuff that was like, similar to the stuff on the right, all the strategic infrastructure with long term plans and goals that were, rolling out step by step radical plans. And then she gets out of the conservative movement into the, other side and realizes, okay, no, actually there’s no liberal conspiracy there because there’s no, nobody’s doing
SHEFFIELD: it.
Yeah. And there isn’t even a liberal media. No. Like, Right.
BITECOFER: There’s just a media that has been like, since the sixties, we, changed the model from, for media in America so that it had to turn a profit. It used to be that the networks we keep it when we’re talking about a very different environment.
So it was CBS, NBC, ABC, basically at the beginning, those networks in order to use the public airwaves had to air Public affairs programming as a public service, the news, things like that, even though those [00:38:00] things were not very profitable or didn’t turn a profit. It was kind of, the cost of doing business to access the American mind for entertainment and make money.
Okay, after we move away from that model. Suddenly the newsroom is faced with a problem. The corporate owner of the media station is saying, Hey, we need you to be profitable. We’re not going to operate you at a loss. And once that happens, they have to meet what people want psychologically. And people don’t want hard news, dense stuff, serious conversation.
We’re conditioned, we’re human beings and we’re conditioned for certain things. And at the end of the day. If you are operating a new station with a mandate to maintain a profit margin, you’re going to give people what they want, not what they need. So we stopped eating our civic vegetables a very long time ago.
And now we’re, really harvesting the ice. We’re harvesting now was planted back then in the 80s and 90s.
Right wing messaging can impact people who aren’t even conservative
SHEFFIELD: [00:39:00] Yeah. No, it’s true. And we’re seeing this on so many ways when it comes to different issues, like, and I think most principally currently with the economy that, you have, it’s just amazing to me how ignorant economists are about media studies.
They know literally nothing about it. And they don’t understand that, when you going, like ever since right wing media became enormous in roughly like 2012 or so Republicans, when you ask them, if the economy, how is it going with the economy? They say it sucks. It’s horrible.
It’s a depression. If a Democrat is the president and that’s irrespective of how it’s going, you could have, 10 percent GDP growth and, 1 percent unemployment. And they would say it was depression. Yes. And in fact, they did do that. We know for a fact that they, when, the after Obama was reelected, the economy was going great.
It’s been fantastic. And, but Republicans [00:40:00] said it was horrible, the worst ever. And and we’re seeing that over again now with Joe Biden. And it. And that constant, and this is just purely a repetition of the message. So they all believe it. And then that sort of is a. Infectious belief to people who don’t know anything.
Like if you’re a political person, their right wing neighbor tells them, Oh, we’re in a depression right now. We’re in a recession right now. What do they know to say otherwise? And who, who have they heard to tell them that’s not true? So they believe it. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why we are where we are with the economy, but you know, like your average economist, they’re like, Oh gosh, that just must be inflation.
That’s all it is. And it’s like, you guys haven’t looked at any. Actual polling other than the usual ones you look at and
BITECOFER: just to reiterate how powerful the effect that you’re describing is. [00:41:00] And I do this every transition, like, every time the party switches in the White House, because the Gallup data goes back forever.
So you can do it for a long time. It’s much stronger of an effect in the polarized era, but it’s always been there. You have a let’s say outgoing Republican Trump, right. In December, November of the election year, you have an incoming Joe Biden. When you look at that four months of Gallup data, almost immediately upon the inaugural, you will see the Republicans that thought the economy was wonderful under Trump suddenly dropped down to 10 percent and it inverts completely, right, because Democrats are less tribal, so they’ll be more honest.
There’s still a partisan thing to it. And so, Trump is in office. The economy is awful. Trump’s out of office, even though we’re in a pandemic, Democrats are much more likely to say the economy was good even before it actually became good again. Right. So it, partisan, when I talk about partisanship and my frustration and my motivation to even become this person that I am [00:42:00] today, it’s, because it is so powerful.
And yet we ignore it in almost all of our analysis. We don’t understand. Like I did a survey once at the Watson center, my polling firm, I wanted to see like, okay, can I, since people don’t know anything, they, know maybe the Republicans and Democrats, the position on guns on abortion, but beyond that, not really.
Right. So I ran some policy questions by voters in an experimental survey design where I would rotate. The party proposing the policy to show people when you get, look at how Republicans act for a policy proposal. They’re told it’s a Republican that wants to do it massive support, but at the same policy description is assigned to a Democrat.
Collapse, I mean, and not just little changes, 5, 10, I’m talking 40 point movement on that. Okay. And so it really is completely [00:43:00] underestimated and understood how much partisanship matters. And in a modern public mass opinion. What we’re seeing in a lot of survey data now that we, this didn’t used to be so much of an issue is, basically a measure of latent partisanship.
So you have the partisans and then you have the lingerers that are basically closet partisans. And really, if you wanna know how the public
SHEFFIELD: is, , partisans in denial
BITECOFER: is what, right? And so if you really wanna know, like, not necessarily how the public is feeling, but how. Like the top level, top of mind awareness narrative in the independent bucket is, you have to suss out those leaners from your independence and sample enough that you can look at pure independence only.
And that’s where you can see things like how successful Republicans have been defining Biden as senile and having dementia when we all know that Donald Trump has much worse mental acumen problems.
How political branding influences people who consider themselves "independent"
SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. One of the other things that I think a lot of people who do [00:44:00] left-leaning politics is that they, don’t understand that the political.
Viewpoints of people that they were more of an X, Y graph rather than a left to right graph. And, once you have that realization, I think that, you, you understand, like when you look at and on the screen, we’ve got a graph for those who are listening, you want to check the show notes to see the graph.
But basically like libertarianism can be perceived as both left and right. It, because most people, they don’t really have. A sound conception of, well, the government should spend more on this five things and not on these and less on these five things. People don’t think in those terms.
They think in terms of, who do I, what do I prioritize society or the individual, or do I prioritize reason or tradition? And so, and I, and it’s relevant to this discussion because I think there are a lot of people out there who are, they have a libertarian standpoint. And we’re seeing, we’ve seen during the Trump years that a lot of libertarians have come [00:45:00] home to the right wing. Whereas before they, they have maybe a more secular outlook. They’re not religious fundamentalists. So they saw the Republican party as disgusting full of, theocrats. But then under, like with the rise of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren AOC, the Democratic Party is kind of relearning its former economic populism that it had for a long, for a long time.
And these Republicans who, or these libertarians, they’re, disgusted at that because in their viewpoint, everything should be about the individual. And so in their case, if they’re, if the, party that’s saying less regulations and less lower taxes, then they’re going to go for that.
And that’s why I mean, I think the news media is, Filled with people like this the mainstream media that you know, they thought the rich Christian right was gross But now they’re saying oh their Democratic Party has become [00:46:00] too extreme. They’re just out of control. What’s wrong with them? Communist woke stirs
BITECOFER: Well, keep in mind.
I mean we’re talking about A branding operation of now steady for 14 years, 2010 on that have been defining making sure to elevate the squad. Right? I mean, so let me, let’s look at this thing. Right?
The "both parties" critique of politics is completely disproven by actual data
BITECOFER: I study stuff in quantitative form and we have great measurements of polarization and we can see which party has an extremism problem.
The Democrat, every party is going to have a base of ideologues that are nuts. Okay, but the question is about proportion how much proportional control and how much power do they have? Yeah to those bases have and so when you look at the Democrats, right? They’ve got the squad and the whatever the Hamas 11 you But it’s a lot of people dude 11 11 And they don’t have any committee chairmanships and they don’t control anything.
And they certainly aren’t running [00:47:00] the RNC, the DNC, and they don’t have a president in the White House. I mean, they’re basically neutered and the Democratic Party remains pretty much where it’s been the last 2, 20 years, which is predominantly dominated by moderates. Okay. It’s a 70 percent moderate party, a 30 percent ideological liberal party and on the other side.
Okay. 10 years ago, this was the truth for the Republican party, 70 percent establishment Republican, 30 percent Tea Party base, right? When that began in 2010 and what has been so remarkable as a political scientist is to see that invert. Okay. And it’s happening only on that one side right now where it’s actually the base, that’s the majority population.
The 75 percent of the Republican party that’s pro Trump, pro MAGA, pro christofascism, whatever it is, been, it dwarfs [00:48:00] the Mitch McConnell part of the party now. And, that’s the big difference, but the image. It’s very easy to make, to paint. I mean, that’s why I’m, it’s frustrating. Right. I haven’t had to write a whole book.
Like how can Democrats let themselves be defined by 10 people that have no power where the Republican party has all these extremists in charge and we’re not even telling people we’re not defining them around these crazy people. And these crazy people are actually running the ship.
Right.
SHEFFIELD: So we, yeah, Mike Johnson, Donald Trump.
BITECOFER: Yeah. That’s exactly right. And I, it is just a mathematical fact. Polarization is asymmetrical. Democrats are less polarized either, both in the mass public and in, voter, member of Congress behavior. And, at the end of the day, we’re now up against a real Radicalized party in the Republican party.
These are people that are living in a world in which some, truths are self [00:49:00] evident. Number one, Joe Biden stole the election and is illegitimate. Number two, the COVID vaccine is more deadly than COVID. Number three, Donald Trump is an innocent man. Who’s never done anything wrong, right? Those things sound loony.
Okay, but that’s the that is the truth that many millions of Americans are living in day to day. And that’s why we’re under this existential threat level in 2024.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and but what’s. Terrible is that the, the vast majority of Americans don’t have those opinions. Almost all of that majority doesn’t understand that Republicans believe those things.
That’s right. And because if they did, they would be. Exactly.
BITECOFER: And we know it because we did that. We told people in two states in 2022 in Arizona and in Michigan, we told people what, what was happening with the modern [00:50:00] Republican party and made them see. And they rejected them. I mean, bye. September, it was clear that Michigan was uncompetitive for Republicans and that gubernatorial race.
So it, it’s clear to me, like once people find out about, but right now what they, most people who are going to go cast an R ballot in 2024, all they know about Republicans, honest to God, it’s low taxes. They have impressions. Low taxes, good for the economy, good on national defense. We both know that’s not the case for the last 20 years.
And yet those images, those issue ownership effects are still very profound in data. They’re going to remain so until we rebrand the Republican party and define it as a extremist cult.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Now, and I’m glad you mentioned the idea of issue ownership. Ownership, because that is something that you do talk quite a bit about in the book and it fits into the larger point that, for most people, [00:51:00] they, you know, they, don’t have a coherent idea about what the parties think about things.
And even under the, huge propaganda operation of Republicans telling them lies about what Democrats think, they still, all the people who are kind of, who are, will vote for Republicans, all they know is that the Democrats are extreme on that issue. They don’t actually know what, even an exaggerated version of what they, of what Democrats think.
They don’t know it. All they know is Democrats are extreme on education. Democrats are extreme on X. And that’s all they know. And like, and it is, when you, and I think anybody who has a MAGA relative or a Republican in denial relative or friend, like that’s all they really know to say to you about anything that Democrats are, Godless, communist, transgender, black people, radicals, or black [00:52:00] radicals.
That’s all Democrats are. And, if you don’t, and again, because like, because Democratic leaders, they know that’s an absurdly stupid idea, and it’s lies. It is, outright lies. They think, and you talk about this, that, This idea. Democrats are obsessed with the idea. Well, the American people will figure that out, right?
But will they figure that out?
BITECOFER: Right? That’s the whole like, if you had to sum up what the book is about. That’s what it’s about. Right? No, they will not figure it out. American people are plenty smart, like all civilized Western democracies living through the greatest period of human development ever. Okay.
There’s no human that has ever walked the earth that is more fortunate than you living in the 21st century. We can grow new livers out of pig kidneys and right? Like humanity is Peak [00:53:00] freedom, peak individual liberty, like libertarian friends. I have to tell you the entire right era of individual rights is a liberal concept.
It comes from the liberals, not from the Republicans. And yet no one knows that, right? No one understands that we’re living through this incredible time period of Massive calories, massive, people used to starve to death dude in the West, like all the time, millions and it’s so different now.
And we, we don’t do a good job of telling that story and making sure that people understand. how benefited they are from to be alive right now and be living in America, but that it’s all very, new, very. Very new. I’m the first generation as a woman born in 1977, that was born with the actual legal equality.
Okay. Because prior to that, women couldn’t maybe get a credit card. They couldn’t do bank loans. They couldn’t get birth control in the 60s. You couldn’t even get it as a married couple until the [00:54:00] Griswold decision said that actually it’s a privacy matter and people should be able to make their own decisions.
So if you’re big into individual rights and liberty, Okay. I’m telling you, you’re looking at the wrong party if you’re thinking about voting for Republicans.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, definitely true.
Why humor and mockery are so important in political communications
And one of the other things as a co host of a comedy news panel show, I certainly agree with you. You talk about the idea, the importance of mockery as a political strategy.
SHEFFIELD: So what do you, why do you think that is so important?
BITECOFER: Yeah, so, I was greatly concerned. Headed into this new Congress, because I knew that they were going to weaponize the government and use the committee process to try to politically damage Biden and other Democrats and I, the media has always assisted them every time, like, no collusion memo.
Or Benghazi and butter emails or whatever, right? The media will treat things that are delegitimate as legitimate, and once you do so, [00:55:00] you have legitimized it. CRT is a case in point of that. The Democrats kept explaining how it’s this and that, and it’s illegal theory and not about, it’s not even in the schools.
Now you’ve legitimated the stupid rando thing that Chris Ruffo basically steals from some freaks PowerPoint, right? Like you so mocking. Is about preventing the legitimization of the false premise of their b******t investigation. And it’s so critical to our survival because when we, meet they’re crazy with a factual rebuttal.
All we have done is legitimated the crazy. And so mocking the crazy is a way of making people see it. Number one, but number two, it’s about making people feel like, I don’t want to be with stupid, right? So if we’re making fun of them and making, highlighting how ridiculously stupid they are, it’s much more likely that people are going to be like, oh, That’s [00:56:00] crazy.
They’re crazy people. And instead of trying to define why it’s wrong.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the reason for that is that you can’t, fact check your way out of delusions. Like, and if, you disagree with that goes, try to have an argument with the schizophrenic about their hallucinations, whether it’s exactly
BITECOFER: exactly right.
And so, when you look at like the lead, like the Democrats on the house oversight committee have been just tremendous at this, right? Every committee hearing that they’ve had, they have strategically mocked. Yeah. The Republicans and prevented them from painting a false narrative about what is a delusion.
It is a delusion to argue that Joe Biden was selling porn interference with Hunter Biden. Okay. And the way to deal with that is to make sure people see it as ridiculous. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: And. When you do that, like, it irritates the hell out of them. Yes, it does. And you certainly see that in those hearings. [00:57:00] They are constantly losing their minds when they’re fact checked like that.
Well, they’re so used to like Both
BITECOFER: mocked and fact checked. Yeah, they’re so used to us swinging on their pitch, right? So, like, it surprised them. That they couldn’t get the media to legitimate these Hunter Biden allegations. Okay. It’s the pride them that Democrats didn’t come in and like, grow the witnesses and dah, And accept the premise, the false premise that instead they use their state. They use their committee hearing time as a stage. Right. And they made their strategic mocking. The point of the coverage, and it was so it’s been very helpful, though. We’ve got lots of room to improve. There are signs of improvement, both on the electioneering and my work and others on team reform, pushing these reforms, because I’m certainly not alone and in the terms of media.
Being at least a little bit more wary of, carrying the Republican water when they serve [00:58:00] them up something. But, we’ll see how this her memo continues to be covered. It was last night was a real backslide, in my opinion, the media jumped right on it and treated it as a legitimate conclusion and not a political document designed to get them to say that Joe Biden’s senile.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, exactly. And and, I think one of the other things that, that the right wing is very good at is pushing and, you do talk about this also, that pushing a simple message. So like Republicans don’t run on their agenda. They don’t actually tell you what they want to do, except for maybe on immigration, that’s right at this point.
That’s all they, will tell you about what they will do on every other issue. They don’t ever talk about it. They don’t talk about what they want to do with taxes. They don’t talk about what they want to do on regulation. they don’t talk about spending. They don’t talk about anything else except for immigration.
And so it makes it easy if for people who are really into that issue to be really [00:59:00] motivated to support them, but it also makes it so that the voters that they don’t have to debate their positions because nobody even knows about them because and so they have no. So, like, there’s, this idea in in warfare of the idea of an attack surface that when you that you want to have as small of a from an aerial bombardment, you want to have as small of a surface possible.
And that’s basically the, core strategy of Republican politics is to minimize all attack surfaces of their own, and then maximize the attack surfaces of Democrats. And they’re remarkably successful
BITECOFER: at it. Yeah. And we have to be too. So like, like to me. Nothing frustrates me more than, well, we’re Democrats.
We just can’t do that. No b******t. We can, we must, and we will. And if we don’t, if we don’t, we’re all, we’re going to be looking at some serious hurt for especially Brown people in this country. The Republican party has been very clear. [01:00:00] That they’re coming for communities of color day 1, they’re talking about route mass deportations and roundups and folks.
There’s no way you do that without really trampling on the rights of Latino Americans, many US citizens and people who have legal. Entry are going to be terrorized if we do this, if we let this happen. So it’s now or never when, Republicans go low, we got to hit them where it hurts.
SHEFFIELD: All right.
Well, there you go. You wrap that up very nicely there, Rachel. I thought you’d appreciate it.
All right. Well, so we’ve been talking today with Rachel, bit of cough. Ah, dang it. coffer. I’m going to, I have to do that again. So God, I always, it’s because you only have one F in there. It just makes
BITECOFER: me famous so I can never get rid of it. That sucks.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. I have to do that again here. So, so we’ve been talking today with Rachel bit of coffer [01:01:00] and she’s the author of the book, hit them where it hurts.
And you can get that everywhere now on the internet wherever you want to including bad places like Amazon, but other places.
BITECOFER: Where if you really like my capital, you can listen to the audible. I recorded
SHEFFIELD: it myself. Okay. There you go. And then you are also on various social platforms at Rachel Bitterkofer.
That is with one F for those who are listening. And so you can I encourage everybody to check you out over there. And then you also have a podcast and subset called the cycle, so people can check that out as well. So, all right. Thanks for being here today.
BITECOFER: It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matthew.
SHEFFIELD: So that is the program for today.
I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation. And of course you can always get more. If you go to theoryofchange.show, you can get the full episode archive with the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if [01:02:00] you are a paid subscribing member. You get complete unlimited access and you can sign up on either Substack or on Patreon.
If you go to patreon.com/discoverflux you can subscribe that way if you don’t like Substack. And then of course I encourage everybody to go over to flux.community where this show is part of the Flux Network and we have several different podcasts and articles to check out about politics, religion, media, and society.
And how they all intersect and get our help, get this let’s do that again. And you can go to flux.community to get more podcasts and articles about politics, religion, media, and society and how they all intersect. And we need to band together people who are opposing fascism in this country. And I appreciate everybody who is supporting the show.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Peter Navarro ordered to report for prison by judge
02:38 — Trump admits he wants to cut Social Security
05:20 — Right-wingers devise new idiotic conspiracy about Joe Biden after boffo SOTU speech
07:23 — Katie Britt’s strange Republican response is still freaking people out
10:06 — Trump is having trouble paying bills, raising the question of whether he's managed to suck MAGA dry
16:55 — Oppenheimer sweeps Oscars as everyone expected
22:02 — Sydney Sweeney’s breasts have ended wokeness, right-wing influencers say
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President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union speech on Thursday, but most of the focus since then has been on Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, who delivered the Republican response. And with good reason. Her Handmaid’s Tale setting and melodramatic delivery were so disturbing that even party apparatchiks couldn’t contain their disgust.
“It’s one of our biggest disasters ever,” one Republican strategist lamented to Daily Beast reporter Jake Lahut. Veteran right-wing operative Roger Stone called Britt’s performance “godawful” in a tweet which he later deleted.
Saturday Night Live memorialized the humiliation for the ages in a brutal parody delivered by famed actor Scarlett Johansson which portrayed Britt as a “scary mom” who randomly alternated between being seductive and on the verge of tears.
None of this was supposed to happen, especially because Britt doesn’t normally talk like the caricature she portrayed on Thursday.
Her strange demeanor was a deliberate choice, one that’s reflective of the tenuous connection between the Republican political class and the angry Christian fundamentalists who comprise the party’s base voters.
A protégé of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Britt has risen rapidly through the ranks, joining his leadership team as an informal adviser after only a few months in office. Republicans have been eager to put Britt forward as a young female face for a party that’s finally becoming associated in the public mind with no-exception abortion bans. She was even starting to be touted as a potential vice presidential pick for presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Britt was seen as particularly useful by party leaders since she is the junior senator from Alabama, the state whose supreme court just gave embryos in a freezer full personhood rights. While this radical viewpoint is commonplace among Republicans—more than half in the House of Representatives have endorsed the Life at Conception Act which would place severe restrictions on in vitro fertilization—the vast majority of Americans disagree. A February Ipsos poll found that 66 percent of respondents believed that zygotes should not be considered as people, with only 30 percent of independents agreeing.
“She looks like the moms at school drop off who would typically vote Republican but who’ve been convinced by Instagram that the GOP is taking her sister’s IVF away,” far-right Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey wrote in a comment praising Britt’s response “optics” while condemning her delivery.
Being an overtly anti-feminist party’s ambassador to women is a fraught but essential task. Besides having to deny and obfuscate about the Republican base’s authoritarian vision of controlling women, they have to make excuses for a presidential candidate found legally liable for rape who has been accused of the act by 17 other alleged victims.
Trump made it clear that women voters are on his mind during a Saturday campaign speech in North Carolina.
“They talk about suburban housewives,” he boasted as members of the audience cheered. “Women love me. You know, I protect women. I protected. I protect.”
Britt’s mission was so important to Republicans they sent out instructional talking points to right-wing commentators ahead of her speech comparing her to legendary public speakers like Ronald Reagan and hailing her as “America’s mom,” before she had even said a word.
Contrary to the preemptive praise, however, Britt’s performance this year recalled the breathy speeches routinely given by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, another youngish female Evangelical often touted as someone who could allay women’s concerns. Noem herself has been hailed as a more intelligent incarnation of Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor whose bizarre cadence and compulsive winking proved chronically befuddling to political observers in 2008.
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While Palin’s shtick was off-putting to most Americans, her antics were well-received by White Evangelicals, the plurality demographic of the Republican base, which loved her obstreperous insults and crass Christian supremacism.
This was the core demographic that Britt was trying to reach on Thursday, reactionary Christian women who have either used in vitro fertilization or know someone who has. Unlike Palin, however, the Alabama freshman senator seems not to prefer the native tongue of these voters. A lifer in the Republican political class, she is one of many right-wing women who, like Serena Joy Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale, have built careers serving a movement that attacks women’s rights.
For decades, professional right-wing activists were able to bridge the gap between their rabid base and the (usually educated) minority of independents and Republican-leaners who falsely believe the Democratic party is more extreme. But now that Trump is openly embracing violent and totalitarian rhetoric, this task has grown increasingly difficult to manage. Republicans’ core voters have become so bizarrely hateful that appealing simultaneously to them and the broader public is becoming nearly impossible. The two sides are so far apart culturally that trying to reach both is off-putting to everyone.
This is why Katie Britt’s speech has been so universally panned. Her use of what progressive activist calls the “fundie baby voice” accent that is so common among women reared in reactionary Christianity came across as bizarre and freakish to everyone else. At the same time, Britt also seemed inauthentic to many hard-core Trump devotees since she was engaging in a form of code-switching, away from her daily dialect of highly educated political professional.
“No one was surprised that McConnell’s handpicked senator resonated so poorly with the base,” one Trump-aligned strategist told the Daily Beast, calling Britt’s delivery “the stuff of nightmares.”
Far-right activist Laura Loomer concurred with that sentiment in a Twitter post:
The GOP thinks they know what women like.
So they actually thought it would be a good idea to put Katie Britt in her kitchen reading a script with forced emotion and fake outrage to get to suburban women vote.
Women like men. Actually, We love strong men. We don’t need a woman in a kitchen who failed acting class to tell us our country is a mess. Now the GOP is a laughing stock because of the awful optics of last nights’ SOTU “rebuttal” by Katie Britt.
I saw shadows of this happening last year in Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s Republican response to Biden. While she did not deliver her talking points in baby voice, the words that she spoke were filled with right-wing slang terms like “CRT” or “woke mob” that she never even bothered to define, rendering her message almost incomprehensible.
Expect more of this to happen as the various election contests continue to move forward. Republicans are having to become stranger and more extreme to maintain the loyalty from their base voters. If Joe Biden’s team is smart, they will highlight this process every step of the way.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Alabama Supreme Court says embryos are babies
08:44 — While Alabama thinks killing cells is sinful, it loves the idea of experimental gas executions
14:52 — Republicans have driven out all the sane people, but many apolitical people haven't realized this
22:34 — Mike Lindell loses in court after trying to avoid payout to man who debunked him
Cover photo: Residents of Lee County, Alabama are seen along the roadway as they welcome Donald Trump and Melania Trump. March 8, 2019. Credit: Andrea Hanks
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This episode is a very special one because I'm excited to announce that here at Flux, we are adding another podcast to our network, The Electorette, hosted by Jennifer Taylor-Skinner.
To introduce Jennifer to the Flux audience, I wanted to bring her on Theory of Change to talk about her program, and to discuss a big news event, the retirement announcement from Sen. Mitch McConnell, who will be resigning as the Republicans’ leader in the Senate. There's a lot to talk about with his legacy. And I think it's pretty clear at this point that Mitch McConnell paved the way for Donald Trump in many, many different ways, and we'll get into that.
The video of this episode is available. The conversation was recorded March 1, 2024. The transcript of the audio follows. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
Cover photo: Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican Leader, at the Armed Forces Reserve Center in Richmond, Kentucky. October 11, 2023. Credit: PEO ACWA/CC 2.0
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Related Content
* Republicans are banking on a fusion of Trump autocracy and McConnell nihilism, but will it work for them?
* The Senate filibuster hasn’t just stopped progressive legislation, it’s also radicalized Republicans
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Flux is adding a new podcast to our network, "The Electorette"
05:06 — Mitch McConnell announces he's retiring and didn't designate a successor
09:49 — McConnell attacked democracy for decades but he is despised by far-right Republicans
21:15 — Although Donald Trump and McConnell hate each other, they were still close allies
24:49 — Nikki Haley's doomed presidential campaign is an echo of the death of Republican foreign interventionism
30:33 — Haley and the quandary of right-wing women being in a party that wants to control them
39:37 — Alabama supreme court granting full rights to embryos is the latest example of how extreme Republicans have become
43:22 — Issues and ideas to watch in the general election
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Jennifer.
JENNIFER TAYLOR-SKINNER: Thank you, Matthew. I'm happy to be here.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's, exciting, and I'm glad to have you as a member of the Flux Network.
And so before we get into the topic of the show, though, can you tell my audience and the Flux audience just a little bit about your show and how long you've been doing it and what you do there?
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Sure. The Electorette, it's a play on the word electorate, of course, Electorette. I started the podcast, I think in mid or late 2017, a lot of things were happening in 2017. We know what the biggest thing was, of course, it was, Trump's inauguration, the election after the 2016 election. For me, I was really frustrated at all of the misogyny in the media and in the political discourse, directed at Hillary Clinton.
And we don't need [00:02:00] to revisit that. There was a huge problem. I mean, there was a huge problem. And one of the primary reasons why I believe that she lost. And what I wanted to do with the electorate was to get people used to hearing women in leadership roles. Hearing women express their expertise in the context of politics, because I think that's, that, that's part of the problem.
If you look at some of the statistics, like very few of the experts back then, at least who were talking about politics on television were women. Right. And so I wanted to kind of change that with the electorate. And so what I do is on the electorate, I interview only women or people, anyone who isn't a, man, about things that are really important in politics right now. Anything that's important to social justice or any cultural issues. And we kind of have these in depth conversations about, what's happening, and that's what The Electorette is. And it's been really helpful for me.
Actually, it's been kind of cathartic for me after that kind of post [00:03:00] 2016 PTSD or trauma we all have. But yeah, so I've been doing it for a while now. It feels like it hasn't been that long, but it's been a while. So that's what The Electorette is.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's also and it's also important, I, do want to say, from my standpoint, that I feel like that the podcasting space, especially the political podcasting space, doesn't have enough women in it as well, and that's a serious problem.
A lot of men, regardless of what their race, they don't have as much at stake when it comes to these far-right policies that are being shoved on everybody now with increasing frequency, like a lot of them, they just. It just doesn't, it's not as real to a lot of men.
And that's why I personally, try to have as many women on my shows and, work with women because it is an imbalance that needs to be corrected, I think.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Yeah. And I just want to clarify that it isn't a lot of people when they think about podcasts, [00:04:00] like The Electorette, they think it's a show about women's issues and it's not because all issues are women's issues, right?
It's about all issues, we can talk about the economy. We, we talked about climate change. The thing is that the, conversations that you're getting are through the lens of women, right? So climate change will affect everyone of all genders, all races. It'll affect some people more than others, but the solutions will look different through the lens of someone who is.
We'll be more affected through the lens of someone who's marginalized through the lens of a woman. So that's what I wanted to do. So it isn't just about women's issues. I mean, if you want to categorize abortion as a woman's issue, it's, sure, that's fine. Abortion isn't just a woman's issue.
I just want to make sure that's clear. So it isn't just issues like that. It's anything that you can think of, but through the lens of, women. So men, listen to The Electorette to, or if you're not a man, anyone, everyone's welcome.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Well, and yeah, I'm excited for people to be able to do that in a [00:05:00] somewhat greater numbers. So I'm, glad to have you on board.
Mitch McConnell announces he's retiring and didn't designate a successor
SHEFFIELD: All right, so the news topic that we're going to go through today, I think is that it's one that is pretty significant is, which is that Mitch McConnell who is now the longest serving Senate majority leader in history announced this week as we're recording that he was going to be resigning.
In November and that he would serve out his, term in office but he would step down as the leader of the Senate Republicans and, and it's it's a little weird because I feel like to some degree, the. It didn't get as much coverage as I thought it would. Did you feel that way at all? I mean obviously we have this hellish news cycle.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Right, we have a hellish news cycle. I mean I feel like, so granted it only just happens, right? And like you said, we have a hellish news cycle. I think there was a, [00:06:00] bombing or a, a, bomb scare, I think in Alabama that happened, on the same day around the same time.
So there's a lot of things to cover. And honestly, that maybe there was probably more coverage of it online between, Politicos and, going on about, why they're so happy that Mitch McConnell is stepping down. I think that maybe some of the, joy on the left, on our side was maybe a little kind of premature or misplaced because, Mitch McConnell, when he does step down as majority leader, he's going to be replaced by someone who is younger and who's probably more extreme.
I'll just say that.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, definitely somebody who will be more even more, beholden to Donald Trump. Because he's going to work very hard to try to put his stamp on that Senate leadership election.
Trump, of course, was very instrumental in getting Mike Johnson to be the Speaker of the House because before originally the, guy who was going to take over from Kevin McCarthy was [00:07:00] going to be Tom Emmert, who Trump explicitly said he did not want him to be the Speaker.
And, magically the party that, that, that claims to hate cancel culture, Magically, they canceled this guy and he did not have a chance at it.
And so, Trump's it'd be interesting to see who he tries to put, put his finger on the scale for but that's definitely gonna, it's probably gonna be a thing.
That's going to be a months long kind of summertime. Discussion, perhaps whoever can kisses ring the hardest, I guess,
TAYLOR-SKINNER: The only exciting thing that I see the thing worth celebrating in relation to Mr McConnell stepping down is that regardless of who replaces him, he was pretty effective in bringing forth this kind of right wing Christian nationalist vision across the country, right, on a national level, just in relation to his [00:08:00] judicial appointments and reshaping the Supreme Court.
And so why I think that him stepping down is, a good thing for, our side is that I can't imagine anyone replacing him who will be that effective. Right? I mean, he, if you're on their side, he was really, good at what he did. Just thinking of the Supreme Court judicial appointments, the way that he finagled getting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and denying, Obama, a chance, President Obama, a chance to appoint a Supreme Court justice and, with Merrick Garland's and then flipping the script when Ruth Bader Ginsburg got died.
And then within weeks having hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, like that was kind of. If not, I hate to use the word evil, but you know, it was kind of masterful and I can't imagine, I can't envision anyone on the Republican side being as effective as he's been. Right. So if anything, that possibly could be a good thing for [00:09:00] Democrats.
We'll get someone, it's kind of a circus right now, thinking of who's, left, who's remaining.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And that is actually a good point because when you look at the House side of things, they're just incomplete and total chaos and they all hate each other and they're all constantly going after each other and tearing at each other's throats.
And as a result, they really can't pass anything like this, because under the Johnson speakership, this has been the most unproductive Congress in terms of bills passed in a very, long time. I think depending on the metric at least, in the past 100 years or and I've heard somebody claim it was since the civil war, but I didn't look up the stat on that.
But yeah, no, and I think that's a great point.
McConnell attacked democracy for decades but he is despised by far-right Republicans
SHEFFIELD: And it's also, funny though because. Yeah. The right wing hates Mitch McConnell and and it was funny because when I was on the, in, in the right wing media space. I liked Mitch [00:10:00] McConnell because I did see him as effective and skilled at at, legislative strategy and tactics.
And I would tell that to my fellow Republicans who hated him and they just, they did not want to hear it.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Right, right. Well, look what we have now, right? I mean, lots of people did see Roe v. Wade being overturned, but you can chalk that up to Mitch McConnell, right? It's on his plate. He did that, right?
Affirmative action. All of those really huge decisions that have gone through the Supreme Court are due to his remake of the Supreme Court by, not only did he make, over 200 judicial appointments broadly, but, he, there were three big Justices on the Supreme Court under, Trump due to Mitch McConnell and his leadership, I guess, and speaking of, yeah, speaking of the house side we were mentioning the house Hakeem Jeffries had.
Nancy Pelosi is his mentor, presumably, right? They work very closely [00:11:00] together, and he's been very effective. He will be very effective, if, Democrats regain the majority there. Whoever takes over for Mitch McConnell, because Mitch McConnell is His health status is kind of questionable. We don't really know what's happening with him.
They're not being very transparent with that. We're not really sure if there will be that kind of back and forth mentorship. Right? Will he be able to mentor someone to be the kind of leader that he has been in the Senate? I very much doubt it. So that's another good thing for Democrats.
Hopefully.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and on the judiciary side of things besides. Reshaping it, in a pretty much a wholesale fashion because of how long he was the leader. He, the, what he did with that is, is really important because. He, I think he understood before almost any other Republican that the public isn't going to vote for their explicit agenda.
So, they're not, the [00:12:00] public isn't going to vote for privatizing social security. They're not going to vote to. Criminalize abortion. They're not going to vote to get rid of same sex marriage. They're not going to vote to eliminate the department of education. Get rid of the affordable healthcare act.
They're not good. They don't want any of these things that Republicans have been obsessed with for decades. Right. Those those ideas are unpopular, but McConnell figured out that if he could rig the judicial system in favor of Republicans, they could still get Those outputs through the courts in a way that would also not jeopardize their electoral futures.
I mean, it is incredible what he figured out in that regard, because basically that strategy has allowed, cause the Republican party is very different compared to right wing parties outside of the United States in the industrialized world, [00:13:00] they're much, much more radical. They're much further to the right.
And that happened because of Mitch McConnell, even though he, was not on the, he wasn't directly aligned with the Freedom Caucus types. He protected them through the filibuster and through his takeover.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Right. Right. Right, exactly. And, although you can't get the majority of the public to vote for those specific legislative aims, right, you can get them to vote for Donald Trump. For some reason, there's a disconnect there.
And presumably it's because Donald Trump doesn't really talk about legislation at all. Right. If he kind of skirts around it, he basically just talks about his grievances when he does rallies. He's only recently started to talk about abortion saying that, he's up for it.
Like a 16 week abortion ban. I think he's reduced it to 15 weeks. But the people who are steadfast Trump voters are not really, I don't think they're really listening to that. Right. [00:14:00] They're just voting for their man, Donald Trump. So. Yeah, it was a really good merits there. Trump and McConnell together to kind of remake the country in, their image.
It's not really good, great for everyone else, but actually it's not really good for anyone. It's not good for anyone. Even the people who are voting for Trump, it's actually terrible for them. And, hopefully someday they will wake up and see it. I doubt it, but yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and it is, and that combination, it is, it's been really important because I think the other thing about McConnell is that, because he is You know very, he's very intelligent.
He, is well dressed, he's well spoken, he's articulate. I mean, he's not particularly exciting, but you know, he, his stature within the Republican party gave permission to a lot of people who are, sort of white collar upper middle class people to, be like, well, see, this is still the same [00:15:00] Republican party that it was always.
That Trump didn't, he didn't take, he didn't become a dictator. We constrained him. We, hemmed him in and, and, he really gave them permission to think that. And so like, it'll be interesting with him gone, if that affects anybody's permission structure. I don't know.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Huh. That's interesting because I think Mike Johnson also gives that same appearance, right?
They give this appearance of kind of these, non emotional, rational, intellectual Republicans. But if you step back and you look at their positions, they're essentially the same. As Donald Trump, right. Mike Johnson is a very extreme. I know we're talking about the house again. He's a very extreme.
I mean, we don't need to go into him, but but yeah, I could see how Mr. McConnell, has that image of, being kind of a non reactionary, comparing him to someone like, I don't know who's on the Senate now that
SHEFFIELD: Josh Hawley.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Yeah. That's a great example. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. [00:16:00] And so, and he has a better, and it's, who knows what the guy believes because he never really talks about it in terms of religion.
Right. But, at the very least he knows not to wear it on his sleeve the way that a Josh Hawley or, some of these other people, very much are interested in doing And that's important because and, I'm speaking from my own personal experience here that, when I was on the right wing, that as a secular conservative person, I really wanted to believe that people like me, were equal partners in the party or even slightly above.
I didn't want to, I desperately did not want to think that I was You know, in some sort of junior arrangement with religious fanatics. Because I mean, the reality is, the people who have these extreme, viewpoints about whether it's suppressing women or going after non Christians or anti LGBTQ stuff or [00:17:00] racist stuff.
Like they, fortunately they are still a pretty small, they are a minority in the United States but they're, they have a lot of power in the party and Mitch McConnell gave them that power. He knew who they were, he knew what they wanted and, he decided, well, I want to be the Senate majority leader, so I'm going to go along with it.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: And you're right. He is kind of a closed book. It's hard to know what he's thinking. I think the most emotive I've ever seen him was, during the Obama administration, during Obama's term, he said, my, my goal is to make, Obama a one term president.
That's probably the most emotion I've ever seen from the man. It was, like boarding on anger, I guess, perhaps. But yeah, it's, he's a, closed book. That one.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I think he said that he believed his most significant accomplishment was keeping Merrick Garland off the [00:18:00] Supreme Court, which, that's probably accurate to say, and certainly unfortunate as well.
So, but I mean, the other thing about McConnell that I think is worth thinking about and talking about is in the context of him as sort of the. The last survivor of the Ronald Reagan republicanism.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: When I think about those years, one of the things that I do remember about Mitch McConnell is that, and that's really relevant in the battle that's happening right now with aid for Ukraine is, he used to be a staunch supporter of NATO, and that used to be an issue that you could count on, either side of the aisle, right? Republicans and Democrats, during those years, he was a staunch supporter of NATO. And now that's all off the table. And that's specifically due to whatever Trump has going with, Putin.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's also that. McConnell was, in his line of thought, it was more of the, robust militaristic foreign policy tradition, whereas Trump clearly identifies more with [00:19:00] the, libertarian isolationist kind of thing.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Yeah. I mean, I'm not really sure Trump thinks about foreign policy that deeply.
I mean, that's another conversation. I mean, I think that he's just taking direction from some unknown, invisible, source. I really don't think that he thinks about foreign policy that, yeah, I don't think he has a philosophy. I don't think he, even libertarianism, the isolation, if he is an isolationist and, he arguably is, it's not an idea that came from his own head.
It's disadvantage the, disadvantage democracy to disadvantage us in some way, but I think, what I'm getting at, and, again, that's a whole other conversation.
SHEFFIELD: We could talk about the specific people if you want, but to be honest, like those articles, and I've seen a couple of people do those articles, I don't know that's necessarily going to be the only candidates that are going to be along because like RFK junior, for some reason, endorsed [00:20:00] Rand Paul to be the Senate majority. Yeah, so what do you think? Do you think it's worth talking about these other people or not?
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Not really. I mean, because honestly, I've seen the names have been floating around mainstream media or the people who might replace McConnell, but I have a feeling that it's going to be a wild card. It's someone that we haven't thought of kind of like Mike Johnson, right? And whoever that person is going to be, they're going to be younger and they're going to be very extreme.
The only thing that I think that we might have going for us is the fact that they, won't have that strategic mind that Mitch McConnell has, and they'll be less effective in the end, right?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it'll, I think that's right. I think that's what will happen. And probably we'll have more chaos in the Senate Republican caucus, which, it's certainly bad for America, but it is good that they can't get their act together.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, in some [00:21:00] ways, yes. We do need two functioning parties.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Although we don't need a strong Republican party. Thank you.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: No, we don't. We don't need a strong Republican party.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
Although Donald Trump and McConnell hate each other, they were still close allies
SHEFFIELD: I guess before we move on from McConnell though, I did want to touch on that in some of the, valedictory coverage or review of McConnell coverage that you're going to see this idea that he was some sort of opponent to Donald Trump.
And I think that's only barely true. So to the extent that they opposed each other, it was a matter of particular strategy for specific events. It wasn't their overall agenda. They agreed on most things overall, because they're in the same party and. And I mean, ultimately, when Mitch McConnell had that chance.
To go after, to get rid of Trump, he could have gotten rid of him during that second impeachment, because the house [00:22:00] explicitly impeached Trump before he had left office and left several days for that trial to happen while he was president and Mitch McConnell deliberately refused to try Donald Trump during that time window and then after Trump had left office and then after Trump had left office, explicitly said, well, we can't vote to convict him because he's not the president anymore.
And then not acknowledging at any point in time that, oh, and I made it so that, that was the case. I mean, it's just really, dishonest. And, like, ultimately he never opposed Trump in any meaningful way. And I really hope that the mainstream media doesn't do that. Doesn't lie about that or get that wrong.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Right? I mean, the thing is, if there's 1 consistent thing about Mr. McConnell, or 1 reliable thing is the fact that he, is interested in furthering [00:23:00] conservative power, no matter how that happens. And I think that he realized at some point that. Supporting Donald Trump, supporting him by just being quiet or like letting him get away with things was helpful in him furthering conservative power for the longterm, right?
He probably didn't like. Donald Trump's style, he's probably a bit of a snob in that sense, but he realized that, A, they, like you said, they, neither of them have scruples. That's the one thing they have in common and they kind of made, an uncommon, atypical pairing that kind of worked well for furthering this extreme right wing agenda.
On a national level, they kind of worked well together, even if they're nothing alike, even if they don't like each other personally. And so I think Bishop McCollum at some point realized that Trump was, useful in helping him further that agenda, maybe faster than he realized that, he could do it on his own.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's, it's One of the things I often say is that it's important [00:24:00] to, for people to distinguish that most of what calls itself conservative in America is actually reactionary. It is not conservative because a conservative is somebody who wants to keep things how they are, whereas a reactionary wants to roll back modernity and attack the foundations that everyone.
Except as their, as, as our current way of life, like a conservative would be in favor of keeping Roe versus Wade rather than wanting to overturn it. And, and McConnell, I think, it really illustrates that, The partnership of, between conservatism and reactionism that they are allies ultimately, and that, and that a conservative generally speaking is not willing to oppose reactionism.
Nikki Haley's doomed presidential campaign is an echo of the death of Republican foreign interventionism
SHEFFIELD: And I guess the other person though, that kind of is at that intersection is Nikki Haley though. And for, if McConnell was sort of the last empowered conservative in [00:25:00] Republican politics, she's kind of like the. I don't know, like the dying breath of, that Reagan conservatism if you will.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: It's really hard to pen Nikki Haley down. Right. I, can't really get a good sense of who she wants to be politically and who she wants to be seen as broadly, in some senses and in some ways, she wants to parrot the most extreme.
Right wing talking points. Right. When she was given a chance to clarify the Republican or the conservative position on, what was the cause of the civil war, which was clearly, slavery. She said something like it was just freedoms or some, something random. Right. She didn't give the right answer.
She knows what the right answer is. She knows what the right answer is, but she performed the most extreme right wing answer. That she knew was floating around at the time and the same thing with IVF, if you'd asked Nikki Haley about IVF five years ago or three years ago, she would not say what she did the other day in [00:26:00] her interview with her interview.
I think it was on MSNBC. She said, I think of embryos as babies. Let me get her exact quote. She said you can cut this out. She said, in her interview, I think it was on MSNBC. She goes, Embryos are babies to me, embryos are babies, newsflash that's the wrong answer.
That's the wrong answer, but it's the extreme answer, right? And she's in this really interesting position where, you know, people who are at the far extreme of conservatism right now, usually fall in line under Trump. they fall on their, Trump voters, their MAGA. But she is also.
Taking these extreme positions, but she's also one of the only Republicans who, is, openly and publicly speaking out against Trump, right? So I'm not really sure what, who she's hoping to capture, who her audience is and what she's planning to do. I mean, one theory I have is that she's hoping something will happen.
she's hoping something will happen to Trump. And that, that, that's my longstanding [00:27:00] theory that she's hoping that, one of these cases will come through in her favor and she'll be elected because she's not winning any of the primaries. but I don't know. I, she's not in touch with who the conservative base is right now.
I think it's clear to them that. She is just parroting these points and she may or may not actually believe them. So anyway, that's my first take on Nikki Haley. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and when you look at the, exit poll results, I mean, yeah, to your point that she's, getting nowhere, anywhere close to the majority of, self identified Republican voters in the primaries and, she's getting independents and Democrats that's who is voting for her.
But she also doesn't want to speak to them or like actually court, like, figure out, well, why are these people voting for me? What do they want? How can I give them what they want? Instead she keeps, grasping [00:28:00] in vain for the MAGA coalition, which despises her. And that's been, and she'd been doing this and all the Republican candidates who ran against Trump, except for Chris Christie, they all followed this same strategy.
They refused to tell the truth about him. And then, as a result the, voters kind of, well, they didn't choose them. Like it's, hilarious that Republicans, Republican consultants always love to say. But you need to draw distinctions between the parties and the candidates.
And that's what will make voters go to you if you do that. But they never did that with Donald Trump. They never, and, they were all afraid. They were all afraid of, him. That he would attack them. Even though, of course, he still attacked him anyway. Like that was, that's the even more absurd situation about it is that.
They thought somehow that if they didn't attack him directly or, in a, tough fashion, that it would [00:29:00] somehow redound to their benefit. And it never did. And this didn't work in 2016 either. It's just, it was amazing to me, the incompetence and, timidity from Republicans with him.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Another interesting thing about Nikki Haley's place right now in the Republican party and, also running against Trump in this primary is that. Donald Trump never has to say her name. He laid the groundwork for how his base feels about people like Nikki Haley, long before she ran against him.
He laid the groundwork for how conservatives and Republicans feel about people like Nikki Haley. Way back in 2015, arguably, and he was making all of those misogynistic points about Hillary Clinton. He was telling his base how to feel about women as leaders, right? And that is, that's the context within, where Nikki Haley is stepping into the Republican party and conservatives do not like women, arguably they've never really liked women and they like [00:30:00] women even less thanks to Donald Trump.
Right. So he doesn't have to utter her name. They don't like Brown people. Nikki Haley, of course is Indian American. They don't like Brown people. They don't like women. And also, he's been making comments about the way women look, if they aren't, young and blonde, like his daughter.
Yeah. That's also a strike against them. So he's laid the groundwork. She, he doesn't have to say her name at all. And I think that's one of the challenges among many that she has.
Haley and the quandary of right-wing women being in a party that wants to control them
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, good point. And she herself also is kind of illustrative of this quandary that right wing women are all in because, like, when you, when I was on the right wing that all the women that I knew who worked in Republican politics, all of them, with the exception of two, I knew hundreds of women. All of them, except for two were very religious. All of them. Because like, if you're not super religious, there just [00:31:00] isn't really any incentive to be in the Republican party if you're a woman.
And because the party is, as you said, it is actively hostile to you. It is trying to take, control of your body. Late last month, there was a controversy on the right wing about a video that was posted on TikTok of some women dancing.
And these reactionary Christians and, their incel allies. They were enraged about this, it looked like some sorority had put together a group event to go to a Mardi Gras party. And so they were dancing to this local rapper who wrote a song about a guy that just goes around and films Louisianans having a good time.
And does, and really, and like that guy, the guy actually is is a fun It's really a fun personality because, what he does is. It really does show like there is something that is special and unique about the culture of Louisiana especially in regards to the South. Like [00:32:00] it is a really integrated place.
Where people of all races are hanging out and having a good time and acknowledging and sharing in each other's humanity not just you know, sharing a drink or a cigarette but you know, like Actually being there with each other and hanging out with each other Like that is my favorite thing. Absolutely about New Orleans and that whole culture Which of course is why the right wing was so angry about it because you can't have A bunch of white women dancing to a rap song that's not allowed.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Right, right, right. Wow. That's a whole other show we could go on about that. Yeah, I agree with you about New Orleans. I love New Orleans. It is a place where, there is a lot of, cultural intermingling thing about that video and the sorority girls or the sorority women, rather it's a white women, dancing to this rap song.
When I first heard about that story, I mean, the first thing that came to mind is that their, ire, [00:33:00] their anger towards Taylor Swift. I don't know if he made that connection, but they have an expectation. They have an expectation of white women, right? Especially white women who look a certain way, that they adhere to certain cultural values, right?
And so publicly they were saying, Oh, Taylor Swift were mad at her because she might endorse Biden, right? That doesn't really, that never really made sense to me. What they're angry about is that I, think this is just my theory that they are that they are. That's the word of the guy had a great word in my head that they suspect that, or they are upset that she is a, I guess messing with the NFL, but her boyfriend, Travis Kelsey he is kind of very similar to that culture that you might see in New Orleans and that, he's kind of, has one foot in black culture, he's not, he's not Tom Brady.
Right. His longtime girlfriend before Taylor Swift was a black woman. Right. And I think that's just a little bit too cold. I don't know if you know that. Did you know [00:34:00] that? I didn't know that.
SHEFFIELD: No.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: And so I think, so that's been my theory about one reason like maybe they're not aware of that. I think Taylor Swift is just, flirting too close culturally outside of what they think white women should be and how they should behave.
If that makes any sense.
SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah. I mean, throughout history, it has always been the case that, reactionaries, especially religious fundamentalists, one of their top priorities is controlling the bodies of women. And whether it's controlling them, what they can do with their reproduction, but also just what they're allowed to do in public that, they basically, should be kept, that they are communal property. That's what women are. They, do not, they are not human. They have no human rights.
They are there to serve men. And, by this, this collection of women just out there having, and, and, maybe they didn't know that this was from a Mardi Gras clip. [00:35:00] Perhaps they didn't know that. And that's what this I mean, you go to anyone goes to New Orleans in February or the entire state of Louisiana. That's you're going to see this scene, hundreds of times because that's just what it is. But, like, let's say they didn't know that shorn of the context.
Yeah, it was a violation of the social contract that they envision yeah. For their women and they think of them as their women that women do not have agency. They do not have yeah, they don't have agency over any aspect. They should not have agency over any aspect of their life. That's what this really, the freakout really was about.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Right. But I agree with that. And, bringing this back around to Nikki Haley. So there is no, environment in conservatism where a woman could really, truly be in leadership. Right. Cause you can't not have agency and also lead. So I'm not really sure what she's doing. [00:36:00]
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean, and, it says, in the Bible explicitly that, a woman should not be over a man and a woman's desire should be to her husband and, like that's, and, I'm always love, watching that interplay between right wing women, because like that was, seeing all of that rage against these women just for dancing and public and having a good time and they were not being sexualized in any way in their behavior. Not really at all.
They were modestly clothed if if that's a thing that you're supposed to do, but whatever, like there's not really any basis that they could have criticized them. And they weren't doing drugs
but so a lot of these right wing Christian women, they looked at that, that this outrage of the far right Christians, especially the men, but even some of the, a lot of the women, like they looked at that and, they were appalled by it because it was going [00:37:00] against everything that they're trying to do, which is to keep, because like, basically like there's this saying that right wing Christians have about and, that have about people who are lesbian or gay, which is.
They cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. You ever heard that one?
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Oh, no, I haven't. I've been away for long enough, thankfully I haven't heard that one.
SHEFFIELD: And that's not true needless to say, because of course there are plenty of people who are bisexual, or even who, might identify as exclusively homosexual, who might occasionally have heterosexual sex, like, that's not true.
Independently of that not being true. They themselves, the Christian right is actually in this situation now where they actually cannot recruit because like there's, and I would love to hear from people if you know of anyone of a woman who has willingly, converted to far right Christianity.[00:38:00]
I just don't see that happening, unless you were brainwashed from an, as a girl into having some guilt and, desire, desire that this is the right thing for you to do. Unless you, if you had no contact with, A Christianity of any kind. I don't think that any woman is gonna sign up for far-Right Christianity.
So. And then at the same time, their, ideas are also so, there's claims about the world, evolution is not true, the earth is 6, 000 years old, there was a flood of Noah, and there was a burning bush and, I mean, all this stuff that just ludicrous and, more mature Christians don't believe happened.
there were no ancient Jewish people in Egypt that massively came out like none of that's true. And so like mature Christians don't believe that. But because those beliefs are so absurd and so obviously absurd now. People are not signing up for this stuff, so they [00:39:00] can't recruit and so they must reproduce like right of this situation.
And so, and like, and I think that ultimately is the, main reason why they are so obsessed with controlling women, because if they can control women's ability, to have children. And, do it at their command, then they still have at least some semblance of a chance of the future because they sure as hell aren't getting Congress in the United States.
Alabama supreme court granting full rights to embryos is the latest example of how extreme Republicans have become
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Right, Which I guess brings us around to what happened, I guess, was it earlier this week, or was it last week, the IVF decision out of Alabama, which sorry, I just shifted the conversation on you.
SHEFFIELD: Oh, no, it's all right. Yeah, well. And that's another example of that, that, and I think Tommy Tuberville, when he was asked about it, he was like, well, we need more babies. And it's like, [00:40:00] who, says that? Nobody says that we have plenty of people in this country and there's plenty of people coming in, like if, it's not your business however many babies there are and if you really believe that you would give incentives for.
You would approve mandated maternity leave and federally funded maternity leave and paternity leave. If you actually believe that, you would do these things.
They're not, they don't have any consistency of being pro life, quote unquote, because they love the death penalty. Then, and, even with the IVF stuff, like you are seeing that the national party is, at least pretending to support IVF because I mean, as a polling matter, like there's plenty of Republican families that have done it.
But this is a great example of how, this is a party that has become so much more radicalized, just in the past, let's say 10 years or so, maybe since the tea party.
That are, 10, 12 years [00:41:00] that, they have to maintain this fiction for people, right? I think, and especially for women, like, I mean, is that in your own travels and work and whatnot? Like, have you seen women who have this? Fiction about the Republican party. What are, have you seen that?
TAYLOR-SKINNER: I personally don't know anyone in my sphere of friends. Or, because I think that it's obvious, right?
I think it's, very obvious, right? We have people saying, I mean, you think about, five years ago, even just, I was going to say 10 years ago, but even five years ago, the idea of granting an embryo. In the freezer personhood would be, we would have laughed at that we would have literally laughed at that, 10 years ago, so I don't know anyone who can't see that the 2 parties.
Are not the same, right? And I'm kind of thankful for that. Yeah, [00:42:00] so that's all that. that's the answer to your question. I don't know anyone who thinks that thankfully, right? I mean, it's just so obvious and so many different levels, right? And so many different ways and legislation. So,
SHEFFIELD: yeah,
but unfortunately, though, like, I mean, the national media to a large three does operate under that fiction in a lot of ways.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Yeah. And I'm not really certain why they do that. I think maybe, part of our conversation, I think we were having it earlier offline about, some of the editors or people behind the scenes could be more conservative than they are liberal or progressive.
I don't really understand how they aren't, I mean, I understand in that they believe that they should report on the parties equally, but that's under normal circumstances. We, aren't. Under normal circumstances, right? We are a skirting with a reporting with rather authoritarianism, right? And, having these extreme ideas and legislation take over the country.
So they have an obligation to report [00:43:00] that the 2 parties are not the same. And, and I think, for the most part, and it's just be just because. It could be biased because of the news stations that I'm watching that, the reporters that I'm watching aren't really saying that, but enough are that it's not really making it out to, all the constituents.
Issues and ideas that will likely have an impact in the 2024 presidential election
SHEFFIELD: All right, well, I guess maybe let's wrap then. What do you think are kind of the big themes that we're going to see emerging in the general election and the presidential contest?
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Oh, wow. Oh, the general election. It's, I'm curious as to where this IVF case will land in terms of voters, particularly white women.
I mean, me as a Black woman, I'm always thinking, so when I go into general election, the thing that's foremost on my mind, I'm not thinking about what will Black people do, right? That, doesn't worry about me, right? I worry about, how will white. women vote, right? Because they've been kind of voting for Republicans for a really long time.
And because they're voting against their [00:44:00] own interests, it kind of affects all of us. So I think we have to watch for that because the IVF decision, the majority of people who use IVF are white women. It's that demographic that the Republicans rely on. Um, their, affirmative action is also something that will affect them.
So I think it's something to watch out, like, where is the needle going? And I'm curious if, If we look deeper at that breakdown of voters for Nikki Haley, those kind of independents or those, people who are voting for her over Trump. I wonder if those are white women who are hoping to, not bring on another Trump term, but can't bring themselves to vote for Democrats.
So that's something to watch out for. I guess the second thing that I'm, that's foremost on my mind is misinformation and disinformation. Right. That's a huge one. It's kind of this invisible monster. Thinking back 3 years ago. I can't remember how long it's been since Elon Musk took over Twitter, for.
The X, formerly known as Twitter, but, we were all hand wringing about the [00:45:00] disinformation that's going to, kind of be proliferated in that space. And we just we stopped talking about that. And I think the assumption is that it's something that's going to happen in the future, right?
It's kind of in the back of our minds. It's something that's going to happen. We're in the middle of it right now. Right. Every time you watch a video or you get a headline or some, you read something online, especially with, all of the upheaval, in relation to our foreign policy, you should assume that information has been manipulated in some way, and you should always double check.
Right. So we are in the middle. Of the disinformation age of social media, specifically on Twitter, you're living it right now. Right. And I don't really know if there are any measures to counter that. I mean, Twitter is a private company, but that's something that kind of, frankly, keeps me up at night. So that's, probably the second thing.
And I guess I guess, a close third would be, foreign interference in our election. And that's, [00:46:00] related to the disinformation. We still really haven't gotten to the bottom of, that, what happened in 2016. Actually, I think we have gotten to the bottom of it, but, the media doesn't really cover that.
I had a guest on a couple of weeks ago on the electorate, Jackie Singh, and she's a cybersecurity expert. And we were talking about that and how. Whenever you talk about this information or whenever you talk about foreign interference in an election, cycle, there's kind of this collective eye roll, I think, among people, especially people on social media or people who think that they're really tied into into social media.
SHEFFIELD: Russia collusion hoax.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Right, exactly. And it's just like, well, it's. These are conspiracies. There have been legitimate organizations who've uncovered that these things have happened. And I think that, frankly, the collective reaction has been a part of the manipulation that we've all been under, right?
If we've somehow been taught to dismiss it and to downplay it, right? Doesn't really make sense to me. Yeah, so that's, [00:47:00] those are the three things. And I, honestly, if there's a fourth thing, I guess I'll lump those last two things together as number two, but the, third thing I think is, there are judges planted around the country, conservative judges who are willing to they had a playbook from 2020, they know what to do and what not to do to help, Donald Trump when, take over an election that he hasn't actually won. And I'm just, I'm, a little nervous about how that will play out. state legislatures. Exactly. So I'm very worried about how that will play out. There are people who are sitting in, willing and waiting to help Donald Trump.
Still an election. Yeah, exactly. I, try to avoid saying that word because they also accuse us of stealing an election. But I mean, it's like, they're the ones who sold the election. But anyway,
SHEFFIELD: yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, no, I think those are definitely all things to keep an eye out. And, I think that we yeah, it's been a [00:48:00] great discussion and
I look forward to having everybody see a lot more of you in the future flux and on this show and some of the other the other ones that we're doing. So I'm really excited.
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Matthew. It's really fun. I love talking to you.
SHEFFIELD: And so for people who want to keep tabs on what you're doing on social media, what's, the best way for them?
TAYLOR-SKINNER: Well, I'm mostly on Twitter, fortunately, or unfortunately at Jay Taylor Skinner, right.
Or Twitter formerly known as Twitter. I went on X as Jay Taylor Skinner, right. I don't really do Facebook that often, but yeah, find me on Twitter. Ranting or two N's about something, two N's. That's right. J. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Awesome. All right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation. You can always get more. If you go to theory of change dot show, you can get the video audio and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access.
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00:00 — Trump wins South Carolina but 40% of primary voters rejected him
05:33 — Hunter Biden’s lawyers say federal prosecutors mistook sawdust for cocaine in photo
09:18 — Former NRA CEO found guilty of scamming members, must repay millions
16:36 — FBI informant who lied about Joe Biden says Russia told him what to say
22:15 — Far-right Christian Canadian family realizes Russia is terrible after moving there
27:51 — Tiffany Haddish claims she's going to investigate Gaza war and find a husband at the same time
34:46 — Texas anti-abortion group is protesting a statue it says is “Satanic”
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Introduction
The automotive industry is in a state of turmoil right now, as a number of manufacturers, particularly Ford, have scaled back the production of both vehicles and battery technology. But nonetheless, all of the companies have said that they will be continuing to move toward an all electric strategy, which makes sense.
But the last part of that response is something you certainly don't hear about in the right wing media coverage of these developments. And then there is, of course, another interesting and bizarre development in the electric vehicle industry, and that is the political radicalization of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who has gone from being a proponent of clean energy technology, and somebody who was widely respected in the industry to somebody who is a full scale radical right wing lunatic.
What does that mean for the future of Tesla? What does it mean for the electric vehicle industry? And have governments themselves also made mistakes in terms of what policies they have implemented in order to facilitate the transition to clean energy vehicles, something that must be done in order to protect Earth's environment from climate change?
There's a lot to unpack with all of these developments. And so I wanted to bring in a friend of mine named David Roberts, who writes a newsletter called Volts, which focuses on electric vehicles and other and other environmentally friendly products and services and regulations that we're going to need to have to really create a holistic solution to our climate change problems. David is a former writer over at Vox, but now he is exclusively writing over at Volts.
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The video of this episode is available. The conversation was recorded February 8, 2024. The transcript of the audio follows. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
Cover photo: A photo of the 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV.
Related Content
* How today’s disinformation economy was built on the lying techniques of Big Tobacco
* As libertarianism has radicalized, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names are turning toward fascism
* Social media moderation standards are more about epistemology than technology
Audio Chapters
0:00 — Introduction
02:52 — The automotive green energy transition is only just beginning
11:46 — The myth of a "free market" in vehicles
18:21 — How the initial success of Tesla made automotive manufacturers misunderstand their own business
25:32 — The role of hybrids in the EV market
29:42 — Why open standards are a necessity for new technologies to mature and spread
38:35 — The political radicalization of Elon Musk: The elephant in the room
41:58 — Climate scientist Michael E. Mann's legal battle against climate change deniers
52:56 — The future belongs to those who will make it
Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And now joining me today is David Roberts. Welcome to Theory of Change. David.
DAVID ROBERTS: Hey man, how's it going?
SHEFFIELD: Good. Well, so the car industry, it is really in turmoil right now. They have made mistakes with regard to electric [00:03:00] vehicles and there's a lot to talk about in all this. I guess let's maybe start with the right wing basically is giddy, I think, with all this news of manufacturers scaling back their production whether it's Ford, or especially Ford. What went wrong first?
ROBERTS: Sure. I would just like to start with a broad point. So, and this will be the theme today, which is EVs are inevitable. They're taking over in any large scale transition like this, especially as it's just getting going, there are all sorts of short term bumps and side paths and mistakes and fluctuations.
And that's what we're going through right now. And they're interesting to talk about. But this is all like five years from now, 10 years from now, we'll look back [00:04:00] at the conservative giddiness about all this and just roll our eyes. Like, it's like saying, Oh, you know, DVDs are a fad or, Oh, cell phones are a fad because like one cell phone manufacturer, lost money one year.
It's all silly. These things are all going to iron themselves out in short order and EVs are going to take over. That's the big picture point I would make. Yeah the smaller picture point is and it's, how much of this is automakers screwing up and how much of it is just like the situation they were stuck in, it is debatable because right now we're in a situation where, because of this loophole in our fuel efficiency laws, which I'm sure most people are familiar with at this point, which basically gives light trucks, i.e., SUVs, a different economy standard fuel economy standard.
So, automakers started making more and more SUVs because they [00:05:00] could sell them for more and make more money. They make more money on big cars than they do on little ones and they didn't have to make their big cars efficient like they had to make their little cars efficient. And so they just been making more and more big SUVs.
And then of course, like. If the market is flooded with big SUVs, all the advertising is about big SUVs and all the deals and discounts are on big SUVs. People are going to start buying big SUVs. And then like the people who don't buy big SUVs are going to start getting nervous because they're surrounded by big SUVs.
So they're going to buy big SUVs. And then you're going to have a bunch of people come along and say, Oh, look. Americans love big SUVs. It's just in their character. It's just in their, it's just in our national character that we love this. This is a goofy bit of economic analysis that we do in lots of areas.
Like, it's like sprawl and single family homes and sprawling suburbs. It's the only thing we're building. It's the only thing available. [00:06:00] And so that's what people buy. And then we conclude from the fact that people buy them. Oh, this is what people want. It's just in our national character that this is what we want.
No, it's just all that's out there anyway. So, so right now, like Ford and GM, the big us automakers are making money hand over fist on giant SUVs.
SHEFFIELD: And that's and medium sized ones as well.
ROBERTS: They're in there and they've been writing that high on the hog, for several years now. So they are understandably loathe to give that up.
And so what they've been trying to do is, just make giant EV SUVs, make giant high end expensive SUVs. And I think you get the exact number, something like right around 35,000 is the sort of midway point that cuts about 50 percent of the market is below that about 50 percent of the auto market [00:07:00] is above that, and everything that's been made almost without exception, except for like the Leaf and the Bolt basically are above that threshold.
So half the market's been locked out. So that's a mistake. And then also we're just in sort of an awkward period. Like Ford only has two EV models to speak of the Mach E, which isn't really taking off. And then the Ford F150, which was supposed to be a big deal, but has run into supply chain issues and cost issues and ended up costing a lot more than they thought it would. And so it's not selling as fast as they thought it would.
And they're just in the midst of working on a bunch of new models. So they're in a sort of awkward pivot point right now. GM is in an awkward pivot point because right now their most popular EV is the Bolt. People love the Bolt. I have a Bolt. I love it. And that's just the little hatchback. It's like the only little hatchback EV available. So people are [00:08:00] buying and buying it.
They tried to, they're trying right now to shift to a new battery platform called Ultium that's going to be a much better battery with much better range. And all their new EVs are going to be built on that platform.
The Bolt is built on the old platform. They tried to shut Bolt production down so they could pivot and focus on this new battery. And then everybody got super pissed and like, there was like a revolt, popular revolt. The only thing that was affordable. Yeah. Yeah. So, so they've been forced to keep making the Bolt, but anyway, like there awkwardly in the midst of pivoting and just putting together new models. Do you know what I mean? It's just like a weird time in the market.
Whereas like, I think people should pull the lens back, look at like in China, their EV manufacturers are offering like 30 to 50 different models and there are chargers every couple of blocks, and it's just like, it's just [00:09:00] the idea that and they're standardized also. And they're standardized. And there are lots and lots of low cost models. Like there are models at every sort of point, price point along the, at every price point.
So we're just in, we're on our training wheels now and our big automakers are scrambling to catch up. And this is like Toyota's big mistake, Toyota for some reason clung to the dream of hydrogen cars for way longer than is sane or rational. I mean people have been pounding the table, trying to tell them hydrogen cars are going nowhere for literally decades.
But they clung and clung and now they've kind of let that go. And now they're frantically trying to pivot to ease and their latest line is, well, it's going to be plug in EVs are going to be the big thing. And they're still sort of resisting full battery [00:10:00] electric.
I think that will last another year or two. They will see which they will see how things are going and they'll scramble and catch up. So sort of like all the big—so my point is all the big U.S. automakers are for a lot of sort of idiosyncratic reasons in a strange moment of pivoting right now, and that's why you see all these fluctuations.
That's why you see certain models getting dialed back other models in development. And so, and Tesla, to Tesla dominating dominates this market and has been, but they only have 5 models and they really only have 2 mass market models.
SHEFFIELD: And they're, and the platforms for them are pretty old.
ROBERTS: And they're like four or five years old. Yeah. So they are also frantically working on a low end mass market, 35, 000 or under car,
SHEFFIELD: [00:11:00] Which was originally what the S was supposed to be. because if you remember—
ROBERTS: If they're really going to do it. They're really going to do it this time. It's really important for them that they do it this time because if they don't, because right now, all these big Chinese automakers are staying out of the U. S. market because they don't qualify for these big tax breaks that we've implemented. And there are giant tariffs on them. Like, we're doing everything we can to keep them out. But if, like 2026 comes and Tesla has not come out with a mass market model yet and no other automaker has yet either.
I wouldn't be surprised if BYD or some other big Chinese automaker doesn't start selling low end SUV or low end EVs in the US market.
The myth of a "free market" in vehicles
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and just to step back to a point you made kind of at the beginning there one of the things that you often hear Opponents or like fossil fuel proponents say in regards to [00:12:00] fuel, in regards to cars is that they claim that they want a free market and but the reality is the United States with its electric vehicle policy is not a free market.
Because again, like these, you get special benefits if you make an SUV, you're exempt from the higher, more stringent cave standards. And so it's not a free market. It is actually a market that deliberately, well, maybe not deliberately, but at this point it's deliberate because nobody's changed it.
But at this point, the market subsidizes and encourages SUVs. So it's not a free market, but they don't, they never admit that. There is no, there is no market of national significance that is free. I mean, there's no such, there is no such thing. The entire auto market. I mean, even beyond all the regulations and subsidies and gifts that these, like these automakers, if they want to cite a battery [00:13:00] factory in your town, these towns and states are giving them breaks on taxes billions of dollars in subsidies to cite things different places.
Like, it's just like. Regulations and subsidies from top to bottom, and that is inevitable. There's no way around it. So we have the market that we created, right? We have the market that we designed and we designed a market for large.
And that's what they're making their money on. And now, and even beyond the internal sort of subsidies and regulations in the market itself, there's infrastructure. Like we built infrastructure around and for certain kinds of vehicles, and now we need a new infrastructure and the free market is not going to create infrastructure.
That's not what it does. I
never did. In the first place, like the American and the freeway system. Yeah.
ROBERTS: Gas station, freeway system, gas stations are hugely subsidized. Like it's all, I mean, [00:14:00] it's all designed and we designed it and and what happens is you design a market, you end up with certain incumbents, with power in that market.
Mm-Hmm. . And then they fight changes. And that's what's been going on. That's why we're late to the EV game in the first place. That's why we're sort of slowly stumblingly pivoting in that direction is because they are writing this cash cow of large SUVs and they do not want to let it go. So that's the tension where we're seeing, but yeah, there's no, no free market anywhere in this vicinity
SHEFFIELD: And in any country for that matter.
ROBERTS: Any country, in any large market.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah no, that's right. And so it's and it's an it's a point that I do think gets lost. A lot in the, Economist type articles the Economist magazine that, they, there's just this, it's just this fiction and elaborate fiction.
[00:15:00] And everybody just assumes that the current conditions were natural and they weren't, we, we made these things on purpose,
ROBERTS: this is not unique to the car. This is not unique to the car, right? Like what happens is powerful people set up systems to their benefit, and then it's also to their benefit to pretend that the system they set up descended from heaven or grew out of the earth, just natural and organic, the way things work, like any powerful incumbent is going to say that, like, I use the.
The coal industry as a, as an illustrative example of this. So like coal has been subsidized up and down the wazoo from the time it was discovered in this country. Mines were subsidized, production subsidized, consumption was subsidized. And coal was on top for a long time. And then when other cheaper alternatives to coal emerged,
SHEFFIELD: even the healthcare of the employees also let's
ROBERTS: fight off any attempt to regulate or [00:16:00] change the energy industry by saying, we believe in the free market, the free market should decide we shouldn't pick winners and losers, right?
Like once you've been picked as the winner. You have every say, ah, no more picking winners and losers. Let's just leave it here. And then the minute cheaper alternatives came along and started out competing coal, all of a sudden the free market rhetoric vanished and it became about heritage and the hard workers that we have to protect and they need subsidies.
And they just came with their 10 cup banging for more subsidies. No one truly supports free markets. The idea of free markets is a disguise that incumbents use to to obscure their privileges. It's just what I would say. And that's what's going on in energy. It's what's going on in EVs, but the F and the flip, I think people need to make, I think the sort of popular impression of this is [00:17:00] you have a market free market just shaped by consumer demand and then along come. The lefties and the climate people that and the do gooders that want to come interfere in this market and pick winners and losers and distort. That's the word, right? Distort the market with their preferences, but that's not what's going on right now.
You've got, and this is true in energy and it's true in evs right now. You've got products that are better. And cheaper on a life on a lifetime basis, then once they're competing against, and the reason they're not, the reason they're having trouble is because the incumbents are so heavily subsidized and protected, it's not do gooders coming along, trying to insert.
Inferior products in a great market. It's inferior products being protected by incumbency, by power, by regulations, by subsidies against better [00:18:00] products coming along. And that's true in electricity to, it's true. And it's true in home heating, like in a bunch of these areas. Where there's the clean energy fights going on.
It's better products coming along, trying to break into markets that are very well protected where incumbents are very well protected and that's very true in the car market too.
How the initial success of Tesla made automotive manufacturers misunderstand their own business
SHEFFIELD: Well, now at the same time, I mean, there are, it is interesting also to just to step a little bit further back in the history of, of electric vehicles that when they were first being explored as an, as a consumer product the initial electric vehicles were very small and were, they were trying to be as affordable as possible.
And as a result, they did develop a bad reputation among people for being slow and small and Yeah. I mean, and they were doing what they had to do because that was the technology that was available. But nonetheless, like, so when Tesla came along and of course as everybody I [00:19:00] think who is watching or listening knows it was not Elon Musk's idea.
Thank you very much. . We have to say that you did not the car. No. That what they did though was that it did, that idea did bring a different orientation to. The electric vehicle market, which was to say that, which was to acknowledge the fact that when you have a engine that can generate instant torque that can use much develop much higher horsepower for the weight distribution, et cetera, more equal distribution, that those are things that are useful and great in a sports car.
And a performance vehicle. And so like, kind of reoriented things. But and they kind of reoriented it too far. I feel like, which to your point, like they, they completely got out, almost everybody got out of the low end electrical, the affordable electric vehicle market and was like, no, we're going to make a supercar with a thousand horsepower.
And they all decided that [00:20:00] why do they have problems getting into the truly big market of sales?
ROBERTS: I mean, I give all praise to Tesla for what they did, which is precisely what you say. And this is not, I mean, this is just because battery technology got better and better, right? I mean, the early EVs, I mean, the early EVs were like in the 19 hundreds, like 1910, like there was a big, there's some fascinating history. There's sort of a, one of these sliding doors moments at the very beginning of the 20th century where electric cars were competing against gas cars. And it's funny, you go back and read. You go back and read about that debate, and it's almost the same debate, like the advantages of electric cars were the same then that they are now.
They're cleaner, they're less loud, they're more reliable, but it was just range. Batteries weren't. Good enough. And ultimately that plus a lot of, again, subsidies, et cetera. And so gas cars one. And so when EVs came back, like the nineties or whatever, [00:21:00] it was again, with very sort of underpowered batteries.
And so you made these small cars that didn't go very far and didn't go very fast. So what Tesla did really is just take the improvements in battery technology, which have been. Lately rapid and mind blowing and just show us consumers like, no, you can do this with, you can do this with batteries.
Now you can go really, really fast. You can go really, really far with batteries. But as you say, I think a lot of people took the long, wrong lesson, which is like, oh, like there's this huge market in high end luxury. EVs, let's all heard into that. because that's where we can make our money. because it's hard to make that.
You make more money on a big SUV. You don't make as much money with small electric cars.
SHEFFIELD: Or a smaller ICE car for that matter.
ROBERTS: They're better for everyone except for car companies. So. So you need pressure to make them, but yeah, like we're [00:22:00] rapidly, I mean, again, I emphasize over and over again, we're in a weird, awkward, early, we're like preteens in this market.
So there's a lot of sort of awkward stuff that's going on. That's going to work itself out like in short order. EVs will be able to go farther than gas cars. That's not far away. That's less than five years away. And then range is gone, right? And then charging is very difficult and we're doing it poorly here in the U S relative to Norway or or China or other markets.
But that's like, the market logic of all these EVs, profusing all over the place is going to drive charging. And in five years, like that's mostly going to have settled itself. You know what I mean? Like this stuff is short term. The range worries are short term. The charging worries are short term.
The, Oh my God, it doesn't work in the cold. Like all that stuff, all this stuff is going to [00:23:00] look silly. Within five years, we're going to figure the batteries are getting better and better. They're Toyota's about to says they're coming out with a solid state battery that goes much farther, has much better range than existing batteries.
So all like the range issues are going to disappear. The charging worries are going to disappear. And all of these sort of like the idea that these are deal breakers or some sort of substantial barrier in the way of this market, it's just silly. The market has overcome these barriers. In other parts of the world and can easily do so here.
It's just a matter of time. So, a lot of these, a lot of this is just noise short term noise. I, I just want to emphasize that over and over again. Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: Well, and, and the, kind of rejection of these. High end electrical vehicles that actually is a free market response because outside of this country where the manufacturers make and present [00:24:00] smaller electric vehicles to consumers, they buy them.
ROBERTS: And so imagine that far as I can't afford it is like a free market decision. Yeah, I don't have enough money. That's a free market decision. Yeah. Like I, I mean, we could barely afford our Bolt, but in China, like, again, like I just encourage people to read a few articles or go watch a few videos about the kinds and range of EVs available in China.
It's not just that there's all different sizes of cars and all different sort of focuses of cars is that the technology they're putting in the cars, like the cool thing about an EV is it's like an iPhone on, on, on wheels. Right. And so it gets Updated with new features the same way your iPhone does.
Like this is something Tesla is doing already. Like the big updates in Teslas are mostly over the air over wifi. It's mostly the sort of internal technology of the screen. And so the stuff they're doing in Chinese cars with [00:25:00] stereo systems and voice recognition and all the different screens and technologies, they're just like way ahead of us.
Like really cool stuff is coming that people have not seen. In cars before, like, right now, we're just sort of like. I think to the average American, an EV is just a normal car, right? It's just a car you drive and it looks and basically operates like any other car, but the technological possibilities inside an EV are unlimited.
And we're just scratching the surface of that stuff.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.
The role of hybrids in the EV market
SHEFFIELD: Um, that's true. And, but I do want to talk about hybrids though, in this context because the other thing, so I don't agree with Toyota's hydrogen fascination, but at the same time,
ROBERTS: I think they finally let go.
SHEFFIELD: I think they seem to be.
Yeah. Well, but in terms of hybrids, I think that they do have a point, especially in particular markets that are rural in country is already in countries that have very [00:26:00] little electrification period. Like there's a, there, I think they're right about that for some markets to, to say that, EVs cannot always be the answer, but of course they need to be in the longterm, but right now, this is, they shouldn't be criticized, I think for saying, look, hybrids are okay for some circumstances here.
ROBERTS: Well, let's distinguish here. There are hybrids like the original Prius. And then there are plug in hybrids. Plug in hybrids, I think are going to be big and are big in other countries. Like, we've seen in the last couple of years, sales numbers on what they call PHEVs, plug in hybrid electric vehicles.
Those numbers are starting to go up. And it is. I think ultimately a temporary solution, right? It's a gap filler. And this is a car that will go all electric for a certain number of miles, excuse me, and then flip over to gas. And that's it. And given that like 95 [00:27:00] percent of car trips are three miles or less, despite what people.
Despite what people seem to think, the vast majority of car trips are short and can be done all electric. And then you have the gas engine in there for your longer or like if you're rural or whatever. So it is a good gap filler and it is, I think, going to be big. Just the question is. How long right? So, if you're an automaker, how long is this gap going to exist?
How long will it be before EVs and EV infrastructures are so ubiquitous that you just don't need this gap filler anymore? Is that going to be. Three years, five years, 10 years, like, swinging your production line around and designing several new models of car is no small. Yeah, it's no small. So, so it's just a big, it's all like, this is true in so many areas of clean energy.
It's not a matter of [00:28:00] what's going to happen. It's just a matter of speed. It's just a matter of. How long do you think it's going to take and that can make a very big difference in your short term investment strategies in your short term success as a business like those. These are not small things like it's societally long term.
It's clear where we're going. But in these short term fluctuations. Yeah, like, so I think there is a big market for plug in hybrid electric vehicles. Like, like, we're considering 1, we have a we have a 2nd vehicle that's on its last legs and we have an and yeah, we'd like a car that is capable of going on long road trips in the charging infrastructure, especially, once you get in the interior of the country, some areas.
It's not holding up yet. So, we've thought about it but, I would just emphasize, this is not a resting place. Like P haves are not where we're going to end up. It's just a matter of bridging here to there. And so there will definitely be some successful, he have models and they're [00:29:00] already taking off.
And again, again, we have like in the U S like two or three, like. Our choice of P has our choice of plug in hybrids is so sad compared to what they already have in China. Like in China, there are make they're making plug in hybrid electrics that will go almost 100 miles. On pure electric before they switch over, which is like 99 percent of your of everybody's, literally just has the gas engine in there as like, as a backup.
So there, there's already way better plug in hybrids available in other places. And those will get here eventually. Yeah.
Open standards are a necessity for new technologies to mature and spread
SHEFFIELD: And one of the other infrastructure things and we talked about a little bit is the, the idea of the charging station. And this is yet another example of American political leaders failing to understand, take understand how things work in the rest of the world.
And, like in the [00:30:00] United States, right? And this is, so I will bring in the comparison of cell phones here that, for the longest time, Apple had their lightning standard for phone plugs and tablets and lightning sucks. It's a terrible Android. It delivers lower voltage.
It's slower from a data perspective. The plugs are less durable. It sucks, but they were continued to allow to make it, and they were only making it just as a way to force. Apple customers to buy Apple products and make it more costly to you to leave their ecosystem
ROBERTS: and charging like 35 bucks for replacement.
SHEFFIELD: Yes. Yes. For worse, a worse product. And so, the European commission, they finally got tired of that. And they said, look, everybody, if you want to sell a cell phone or a tablet in our, in our governing area, You're going to have to use USB C as your connector and, Apple and their, apologists and [00:31:00] fanboys and girls, they said this was horrible in the end of the world.
Apple couldn't possibly do this. Couldn't possibly use USB C. This was wrong. It was, communism. And then, when the law came out and flipped over, Apple said, okay, yeah, we're going to, we're going to do it already.
ROBERTS: They're on already. They're on to complaining something else is communism now, and nobody's thinking twice about lightning cables.
And that's the cycle of life. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing is like big economies. Making big transitions plan. They need to plan. They need to do things on purpose. They need to figure out where are we going and what's the most rational way to get where we're going. We just don't do that here. We pretend.
Like we have a free market. We pretend like we don't plan. So our planning ends up being ad hoc, reactive, shoveled through the tax code. So it's opaque and nobody knows [00:32:00] how it freaking works. We just do planning poorly. And so we stumble and back our way. Into these things like, yes, the entire transition to evs could be a lot smoother if there were some sort of national plan.
And if there was some sort of like, planning about where what parts of the country are best. Where should we start with EV infrastructure? What highways should we start with? We just need to do some planning, but we don't do that. So we're just sort of, blindfolded hacking our way into the future.
We'll get there eventually, but it would all be more sensible if we had. Some sort of national plan for how to switch over from gas stations to EV chargers. I mean, another the backside of this problem, the front side is how do you get enough EV chargers enough places that even people who can't plug in at home.
Right? This is the big. The big dilemma, who can't plug in at home, have enough charging around them [00:33:00] available at work or wherever that they can manage without it. That's the front end. The back end is as you're switching over to to plug in hybrids and then eventually to, to EVs the amount of gas cars in the road is going to eventually start shrinking.
And it's in all the high end consumers, all the wealthy people are going to have nice new EVs and it's going to be. Poor people left with the gas cars. And then as there are fewer and fewer gas cars, gas stations are going to start disappearing. And so what do you do to avoid the situation of the country's poorest people being stuck with cars that they can't find fuel for?
How do you dial down gas station infrastructure in a rational way? In a just way that isn't just a mess of inequality and, sort of like, who gets caught holding the bag? Nobody's even really talking [00:34:00] about that yet. But again, it would be nice to have some sort of plan or guidelines or at least rules or at least some, like, if we could just discuss openly nationally, this is going to happen.
Here's how we'd like to see it done. Here's the way we could do it where the fewest people would suffer. We just don't do that. So, so gas station is going to be an interesting phenomenon in like 5 to 10 years.
SHEFFIELD: So just with regard to the electric charging standards it is
still the case that there is no government mandate for charging standards and there needs to be. And I mean, fortunately though, at least Tesla did finally open up their standard as a as a thing that manufacturers
ROBERTS: kind of forcing the issue. It's everybody, like this with the other automakers are like, fine, we have no choice.
Like these are the, they brought their such total market dominance. That they effectively were able to [00:35:00] force their charging standard on everyone else, which is fine. We need, you're right. We need a good one and it doesn't matter that much which one it is.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, and these are things that, that again are inevitable.
And part of that planning that you're talking about, because when any new technology is in the process of becoming pervasive. Standardization is a requirement for full penetration, full establishment, and that was true with railroads, that was true with, railroad gauges, that's true with electrical plugs for just for normal use, and just a variety of things.
ROBERTS: Yeah, exactly, standardized IP addresses, like, that's what enabled the Internet to work.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so, and, and the reality is sometimes, these private organizations can get that job done. But sometimes the government has to put their hand on the scale because at the end of the day, proprietary systems are advantageous to the proprietors. That's what it comes down to. [00:36:00] And so, but they're not, a monopoly is not a free market either. And so if you want competition, you have to have open standards. And you have and, so at least we're finally, everybody's. Seems to have adopted at least in, in North America the Tesla SAE J 3,
400 plugs.
So that's good.
ROBERTS: Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I used my first level three charger the other day. First time, first time ever. I got a level two installed, when we got our car, but I've never actually stopped, I've charged at home. So I've never actually stopped on the highway. So I had to stop on the highway for the first time ever the other day and plug into a level three and it's.
Easy peasy smooth took me 10 minutes. I peed. I peed, got a cup of coffee and I had, whatever, 100 miles enough to get home. It's already, it's already. On the verge of easy enough, especially in some places, but yeah, we're, I mean, we'll standardize over time and and charging will come along and charging will get more powerful and faster and we'll get batteries that are able to charge faster.
Like they're [00:37:00] already talking about these, like one and two megawatt chargers that can like zap you up in 10 full, a full charge in 10 minutes. Like that's, those things are huge draws on the grid. So.
SHEFFIELD: And that's what it yeah, what you repurpose the gas stations for with those like any new gas station constructed will have to have to charging ports.
That's yeah, I
ROBERTS: think that will be standard. That will be standard. But what I wonder is like, as gas stations go away. Maybe this is just like a gen X thing, but like convenience stores in gas stations are this weird thing in America that are, they're so ubiquitous and so much a part of my life.
Like so many of my memories. Rotate around them, even though they are manifestly kind of ugly and unpleasant. They never, never nice ones, they're all very like utilitarian, [00:38:00] but they're so familiar and so, like so many movie scenes, just like so much of our culture. Revolves around gas stations and convenience stores.
I wonder what's going to, like, are they just going to vanish? And you know what I mean? This will be something where our
SHEFFIELD: kids, high power chargers. That's what you do with them, man. That's a, that's what I think you turn them into.
ROBERTS: Yeah. Well, I don't know if the placement like geographically is going to be right.
And we're certainly not, I don't think we're going to need as many as we have gas stations. I don't know. I just find that whole, I'm so curious to see how that plays out. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, I mean, we'll have to see.
The political radicalization of Elon Musk: The elephant in the room
SHEFFIELD: So, I guess one of the other things though, that, we got to talk about who the person who is the elephant in the room in electric vehicles.
And that is Elon Musk. He really has gone from somebody who was widely respected in the industry and among environmental advocates to somebody who, actively He is consorting and funding and boosting, some of the people who [00:39:00] opposed his entire business. That's really what this guy's doing.
And I, I honestly, I have to wonder how much, how can he even stay like, can't, will he be forced out? Do you think what's interesting
ROBERTS: is made to shut up? We've all been watching his. Which I think is a very familiar arc, right? It's, there's nothing particularly unique about the arc he's been on.
Like people getting red pilled right in front of us is a familiar, it's pretty familiar dynamic at this point. But the question is like the end of the road. Of that, the end of that red pill road is climate change is a hoax and fossil fuels rule. Right. And so he's getting swept along so quickly.
And he started saying, not quite that, but like things in the vicinity of that. So I'm wondering if he's going to get so red pilled, he's going to end up in opposition to his own [00:40:00] business. And I would like. I would not be surprised at all. It would not. I mean, he came out the other day and said, all we need to do on climate change is a carbon tax, right?
So, and this is a very familiar sort of conservative line, like all your regulations and subsidies and standards are just market distortions and all you need is a carbon tax, but if that were true. If all we had ever done is a carbon tax, Tesla would not exist. Tesla is a creature of subsidies. It is a pure creature of us government subsidies that would not exist without the loan programs.
Office. It would not exist without a deliberate effort on the part of US policymakers to accelerate the EV space. So it's wild to sort of just on a sociological level, psychological level to see how far he'll get red pilled and whether he'll end up opposing himself, whether he'll end up trying to tear down his own business [00:41:00] because he's gotten so far up Joe Rogan's ass.
I mean, and I'm, I don't know the question of like, is him being an extremely public. A hole going to hurt Tesla's sales is interesting. I go back and forth. I don't know that it really has yet. Like there are bigger forces that, that Tesla is going to, like I said, like they need to make this mass market car.
They need to nail that, that the cyber truck is just that. Absolutely embarrassing, ridiculous time, self own waste of time, ridiculous. So if they don't get that mass market vehicle, right, then they're kind of screwed. And I think that's gotten, little to do with public opinion of Elon Musk's tweets but yeah, it's a, I mean, it's a remarkable thing to.
It's a remarkable thing to watch. Yeah.
Climate scientist Michael E. Mann's legal battle against climate change deniers
SHEFFIELD: Well, and, and related to that [00:42:00] very much so is legal judgment that was recently rendered in favor of the environmental scientist, Michael E. Mann against two right wing columnists for slander. And this is something that he kept out for 12 years and has It's incredible that he stuck at it but he won and against two guys yeah, and against Ran Sin Sinberg, who was a writer at Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian sort of junk science place and then against another guy named Mark Stein, who I guess, Not don't see much of him nowadays, but he was a Rush Limbaugh substitute host and he wrote something at a national review.
And basically, yeah, so I compared Michael Mann to a child molester. And yeah. And called him and I'm actually, I'm sorry, I don't remember which one called him a fraud or a child molesters. People can look that up
ROBERTS: of fabricating data. I mean, yeah, [00:43:00] the funny thing about this is. Just, just narrowing your view just to climate stuff, the right wing from Limbaugh on has been right wing media has been nothing but a giant cascading torrent of lies and slander.
That's all it's been. This is like, like you go, you could go throw a rock at the internet 10 years ago and hit. Slander, like it was constant in unending and still is constant and I just think it's I just think it's there's something funny and sort of quixotic about Michael Mann being such a cussed stubborn guy that he's like, I at least in this one instance, at least these one, these guys, I am not letting this go.
I am. I'm going to pursue this until there's some accountability. And this goes to show you like, yeah, [00:44:00] Any one of that massive cascade of lies and slander trying to get some accountability for it is a 12 year, ordeal. And like that dude has been through a lot. He's been subject to a lot of harassment and all the usual threats and stuff from the right.
And it's been financially difficult. And like, it was not easy for him. Like he really had to pursue this. And that just goes to show you like. The massive asymmetry here, the massive, massive asymmetry, just like lie and lie and slander all, like a thousand times a day and any one of those trying to get anyone, any third party authority to come in and say definitively, yes, this was a lie and slander takes 12 damn years.
So like, it's just like. It's just such a massive asymmetry. It's disheartening, like I'm glad he won, but it's just like, it's such a pebble in a. It's such a [00:45:00] pebble in a waterfall, you know what I mean? Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: well, and and actually I had a previous episode for people who are watching or listening about how the tobacco industry kind of pioneered a lot of the tactics of disinformation that were later put to use on climate change and later on COVID as well.
And I mean, like. And this is yet another example, though, of how, a lot of times, people will on the right or there, because there are so many people out there who call themselves moderates, but who are actually conservative and they're very, very overrepresented among elite.
National media editors, I would say they're conservative. They're not moderate. And, but what they have
ROBERTS: is reactionary centrists. That's the term. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, but the thing about them is that they fetishize this idea, of free markets. So they have, they call it the marketplace of ideas.
And they say that anything is up for debate, but the reality [00:46:00] is, yeah. These people, who are out there committing slander routinely, saying some, so and so is a pedophile or, a fraud or, whatever slander they're doing. Those are, that's not how a real life marketplace works.
It's like, have you guys ever been to a farmer's market? Like you have to have a permit to be there. You have to, like people inspect your products, like people, and people are allowed to return things to you if they don't like it. Like these are all rules that are imposed on your free market, your marketplace of ideas.
All markets have to have rules. Otherwise they cannot function. And the same thing is true with regard to information markets. That if everything is up for debate, then nothing is up for reality. Then there is no reality because I can literally say, you can literally, I mean, we got people now that are saying the earth is flat and that, the moon landings were fake and all this stuff that.
You would think that we wouldn't have to talk about this s**t on [00:47:00] the, people that are doing fact check websites wouldn't have to waste their time with it, but they are.
ROBERTS: Poor souls, poor souls. It's amazing. Those facts haven't worked yet. They keep fact checking the same stuff over and over again.
Is that going to stick? I mean, here's what I would say. Go back and read your Milton Friedman's, your Hayek's, your whatever, your Adam Smith's and read about the characteristics Of a free market, what it takes to create a free market. Part of that is ease of entry and exit, right? You have to be able to get into the market.
You can't be excluded from the market by non market forces, et cetera, et cetera. So if you have. A gang of billionaires who is taking your entry into the marketplace of ideas and putting millions of dollars behind it and buying up the largest cable network in the country and buying up all the local newspapers and buying up [00:48:00] all the local tv stations and buying effing twitter and pumping your lie Through all those channels and excluding other voices, you, by definition, do not have any kind of free market.
Those are market distortions. Those are monopolies. Those are, this is like, it's a classic, classic market distortion, like the reason those idiot ideas. Still are circulating and still have to be fact checked over and over and over again is not that they're succeeding on their merit. It's that they've got a bunch of malign right wing billionaires pumping money behind them, forcing it out into the public again and again and again and again, that's why they're still out there.
Like I, at this point, like. They are as refuted as refuted could be. All the conventional mechanisms for assessing ideas have been brought to bear. Like this question is settled. If there were anything like a referee [00:49:00] of any kind left. They would have stepped in and said in blown the whistle and said, yeah, this is over like TKO.
You guys are done. Let's move on there. But they have very deliberately for decades now destroyed anything like referees, slandered referees, tried to claim that every referee is actually secretly biased for the left. I mean, this was Limbaugh's thing, right? He's like government, the academy. Science.
All of it is just the media. It's all just secretly leftist. So anything that looks like a third party referee who's ruling against you, you don't have to trouble your brain about that. You don't have to trouble yourself. That's just it's a lie. It's just another. The only person you can really trust is me and they've succeeded in doing that.
So there is not, there's just science. There's no mechanism now for ending any debate. There's no mechanism now for anyone winning. There's [00:50:00] no mechanism now to settle. Yes, this is true. Let's move on. So you can like you can throw out like, Oh, it's cold today. So much for global warming. And then some poor intern will put together, a beautiful, presentation or video about.
Why that's nonsense and everybody will watch the video and be like, Oh, that's nonsense. And then a year later, they'll come out and say it again. Like, you can't stop them saying there's no one now. There's no mechanism for settling things. And so things just go on forever. Arguments just go on forever.
This is why, I mean, I'm, I know at this point I'm very much preaching to the choir, but like. This is what they learned from Watergate, right? They're like, Oh, like, like it looked like a partisan back and forth, but then this sort of set of institutions and hearings and officialdom stepped in and officially settled that it actually happened and imposed some [00:51:00] accountability and settled the thing, right?
Like, like they called it. And so this is what the right wing learned from that is like, we got to get rid of those. Not let's stop lying and cheating, but we got to get rid of those referees. We got to get rid of anything that looks like a third party referee that could, that could vote against us.
And they started with media. They, we just have to create our own media and that's what the whole thing spun out of. And so now like you can have. Trump take documents, openly steal documents, say he's stealing them, say he wants them, he's like, yeah, all the facts laid out in front of you as clear as day, but no one can come in and just say, Oh, that's settled.
That's wrong. Here's your accountability. There's like nothing left that can do that. So we just can't settle anything now. And everything looks like. An endless partisan back and forth scrum. And that is [00:52:00] what they want. That is what the tobacco people wanted. That's what the anti climate people want.
They don't want to convince the public that they're right. They, because like, what would that mean? They're right. Like anti climate people have like. 50 different d*****s talking points that don't fit with one another. Like climate change isn't happening. It's happening, but it's not bad. It's happening, but it's not caused by humans.
Like what are they supposed to be right about? They're not. Not, or it's good. They even say that, . Yeah. Or it's good. They're not trying to convince that they're right. They're just trying to create the impression that this is just a big, nasty, endless grinding fight that you moderately engaged average voter.
Just don't want to mess with like, you just don't want to think about it. You want to like, you want to get away from that. Let's just make it unpleasant. So that people just don't want to deal with it, and that's what's happened on climate.
The future belongs to those who will make it
ROBERTS: It's not that they've convinced people that climate denial ism is [00:53:00] true.
They've just made the entire subject so viscerally unpleasant that people don't want to engage or think about it at all. Like, that's the success.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and ultimately, I think that's the takeaway. That I want people to have is that, their goal is to get you to give up.
It's to get you to walk away. It is, as Steve Bannon said, to flood the zone with s**t. And ultimately they're not trying to win through persuasion. They're trying to win through perseverance. Two can play at that game and they should
ROBERTS: Well, can they, like, are there other Michael Manns out there?
Like he's, he's such the rare exception. This is such the rare exception to see,
SHEFFIELD: That's why I said it should!
ROBERTS: At this point, the only really institutions. Like this has been my experience of the Trump years. It's just like one institution after another, just incredibly disappointing. Just failed to stand up, failed. Like when their time came, [00:54:00] they failed miserably and like pretty much the only institution left that is imposing any kind of accountability or establishing any clear factual record is the judiciary is the courts. Like they're the only ones now restraining Trump in the right. Which is why the Federalist Society exists.
It's precisely why they are going directly after the judiciary because it's the last referee standing and they want all referees gone. And that's what filling the judiciary with hacks like Eileen Cannon is all about. It's just to make the legal arena just like everything else. A vicious It's Endless ambiguous scrum that no one wants to deal with.
They want to make it, so that to me is the, is it's kind of like the last fight. It's the last it's like, we've retreated and retreated. And that's like the last institution standing. So, I wish people would, and they've taken over the Supreme [00:55:00] court and they're busy, like undoing a century's worth of laws and they're.
Enabling Trump and already like the court is half gone. I just like, to me, if the court goes, that's, if courts become thoroughly corrupted like this and become thoroughly partisan, that's kind of it. Like there's nothing left. The media is. Completely capitulated the academy is got its tail between its legs is in full retreat.
As you can see all around you, like, science, like, there's just nothing, there's almost nothing left to stand up to the tide of a BS reactionary BS. Sorry. Not a very optimistic.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean, I will say though, like if you look at polls of younger Republicans, at least on when you regards to climate change, they actually do believe that it's real [00:56:00] and they do believe that humans are causing it. So--
ROBERTS: I'm so curious about that. I'd love to interview, I'd just love to interview some of them.
Like, what do they mean? By that, like if you take what the IPCC says, seriously, what they say is. If we want to keep a safe atmosphere, a safe operating space for human beings, we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases. We need to get to zero as rapidly as possible, which involves revolutionary, rapid change directed by governments.
And if you don't, so what does it mean? What is conservative believe in climate change mean? Like, how do young conservatives propose to get to zero emissions? As rapidly as possible if they don't believe in government, I'm [00:57:00] genuinely curious and baffled by the whole phenomenon.
SHEFFIELD: I don't. Yeah, well, no, it's a good question.
I mean, I think to some extent, you look at early Ron DeSantis. His gubernatorial, his governor term for the first term, he actually had some pro environment policies. So like, I don't know what's, well, I don't know what the future holds for these guys. because you know, having been a former Republican, you're constantly any, who has any sort of heterodox viewpoints, you're constantly afraid of being canceled.
Like that's the biggest thing no one ever talks about is that Republicans love cancelling people. They invented it, in fact.
ROBERTS: I mean, it's not like, like right wingers, fundamentalists, reactionaries impose uniformity. This is not a, this is not some unique thing to the present moment. This is like a, this is like a truth of history going back to, going back centuries.
Like the whole idea that the left. Which is literally pushing more choice, [00:58:00] more diversity, more freedom for more kinds of people like this weird funhouse mirror image that they're the ones trying to be tyrannical is such a bizarre. It's bizarre to me that it persists. Like, of course, right wingers want everyone to think the same way.
That's sort of what it is to be a right winger. Like you want a male. White, Christian, landowning, hegemony. Like that's, and that's one kind of thing. That's a monoculture. That's what fundamentalists everywhere want is a monoculture. This idea that it was ever anything else is bizarre.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, and I think overall. I mean, the demographics are not destiny, but you know, there's a reason that the right wing is freaking out so much is that, because I, no, because I'll tell you, I that, huh? I used
ROBERTS: to, well, no. Like I, for instance.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, but it only [00:59:00] happens though if you make it like the future belongs to the people who make.
And so there are trends that exist that are both positive and negative for either side of the spectrum, but they can't become real unless they are made to happen. And so, like, that's my message to the Democrats is you guys have to understand that, you can't alienate your voters. You can't forever force a choice between the lesser of two evils.
You have to give people things that are good. And if you do. They will like you.
ROBERTS: Well, it's will they, because Biden came in and like engineered the greatest economic recovery of any country in the world and sparked a manufacturing renaissance precisely in those areas of the country that were hurt by globalization.
Like he did a bunch of, he did a bunch of good things. And doesn't seem to have gotten f**k all political credit for it. Like it's not clear to me that
SHEFFIELD: one knows that he did it though.
ROBERTS: That's yes, [01:00:00] this is the thing is the media, I hate, I harp on it over and over again to the point that people make fun of me, but like objective circumstances are not driving what's going on.
In this country, like people don't know what Biden is or has done because the media is a grossly distorting filter. And so they only get negative. They only get negative news about Biden. And I just like think to anybody who thinks that some, that there's some magical other candidate that could come in at this point that the media would not find some.
Like they found her emails. They found his age. They would find something about Kamala Harris. They would find something about Pete Buttigieg and you'd get the same dynamic. It's a structural dynamic. It's not unique. The Biden is just what I would say. And the final thing is anybody who takes comfort in the idea that demographics are slowly going to [01:01:00] crush the right.
I would just say that like reactionary movements that are responding to their own perceived inevitable obsolescence have created some of the worst. Historical crimes in history. You know what I mean? Like a cornered shrinking movement is extremely dangerous. Like it's maximally dangerous at the moment when it's maximally in peril.
So, like, I just think people need to boost their tragic imagination about what could happen in the next few years, I really think people do not. Appreciate how off the rails things could go when this sort of white male Christian establishment is in a panic about it's reducing power and influence.
They could make. Lots of really bad things happen. We should not [01:02:00] feel any sense of comfort that like demographics are slowly, but surely going against them. That's precisely when they're the most dangerous.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, no, it's true. And people, yeah, people need to keep in mind what's at stake and what.
Could happen because yeah, there is no bottom for the reactionary right.
ROBERTS: I mean, I mean, Trump's out there joking about the kind of s**t that would literally start a world war. Like it sounds fantastical to even talk about it, but like the idea of a world war breaking out of a nuclear exchange, like all of that is on the table.
If he wins, no, no tragedy is off the table. If he wins, I just don't know if people are really, if that's really sunk in.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, but I mean, I guess we can only do what we can do, right? We can only pot at the
ROBERTS: clouds.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and I got, I got clouds in the background here on our video. All right. Well, David it's been a great [01:03:00] conversation, so people can keep up with you on social platforms at dr volts.
That's a D R volts. If you're listening and then over on volts dot W T F. So thanks for being here. Thanks a lot, Matt.
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