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How conspiracy theories about the famous Rothschild family tell the history of antisemitism Nov 27, 2023

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The best ideas are timeless: Treat others how you want to be treated. Help people less fortunate than yourself.Unfortunately, many of the worst ideas are also timeless as well. And antisemitism is certainly one such idea.While many different people have been targeted by antisemitic conspiracy theories, the Rothschild family of Germany has a particular favorite among the world’s lunatics for centuries and more recently by the QAnon cult which has managed to recycle many old conspiracies for the internet age and invented some new ones as well.There are so many conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds that you could fill a book with them all, and my guest on this episode has done just that.Mike Rothschild isn’t related to the family that’s been the focus of so many bad ideas, but he does have a lot of experience focusing on conspiracy theories, having previously written a book about QAnon. His most recent book, which we’ll be discussing, is called Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.The video of this episode is available. The transcript of the audio follows. It is automatically generated and is provided for convenience only.Membership BenefitsThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.About the ShowTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffieldTranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Mike. Thanks for being here.MIKE ROTHSCHILD: Thank you for having me.SHEFFIELD: Okay, well, so, I have to imagine that you have two reasons why you became interested in this book as a topic. One being your last name, and then the other being that before this, you wrote a book about QAnon, right?ROTHSCHILD: Yes, so I've been writing about conspiracy theories now for probably about 10 years, and right as soon as I started, the first comments I would get were a Rothschild debunking [00:02:00] conspiracy theories, how stupid do they think we are the matrix must be broken, somebody unplugged the simulation.As this, stuff started to seep into mainstream culture. I started seeing all of these memes and conspiracy theories and accusations about the Rothschilds, and I knew I wasn't related to them. I've always known that, but. It felt like a really fertile ground to really do some myth busting and really kind of figure out what is this family? Who are they? What have they done? And I think much more importantly, what have they not done?And a lot of that came out of QAnon. Rothschilds are mentioned a lot in QAnon. They own all the central banks and they control everything and they have these occult human hunting parties and their vast Austrian lodges and things like that.So it really made sense for me as a next step after the Q book to really delve into the Rothschild myth.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. And it is, I mean, it's a myth that's been around for a long time and, you do [00:03:00] note and I think correctly that, people have written a lot of books about the Rothschilds over the years, like the family itself but not about all the conspiracies about them, which is kind of interesting in and of itself that nobody's actually done that too much before in an extended length the way that you did here.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah. Some of the biographies of the family touch on it a little bit. The, two volume Neil Ferguson books talk about it somewhat, but of course those were published in the late nineties.So there's a whole swath of. Internet nonsense that they miss out on. One of the big biographies of the family that came out in the early 70s talks about some of the stuff about Waterloo and the myths around that, but nobody had ever really put it together and certainly nobody had applied it to the current spike in antisemitism that we're seeing right now.SHEFFIELD: Oh, and yeah, absolutely. And so I guess, but before we get into all that maybe let's just do a quick overview of like I, some people want to, they actually don't even [00:04:00] believe that there are people that are Rothschild, that they even exist. I have heard people like, oh, that's just a made up thing on the internet have said that to me.ROTHSCHILD: That, I have not heard that one. Wow, that'd be a very elaborate made up myth.SHEFFIELD: Well, no, they just meant it as in that's just like Q, like as true as QAnon that there are Rothschilds. So, but yeah, okay.So, but who is this family line that kind of let's maybe start there. I don't want to get too detailed in the, into the weeds here, but like what, country did they get started in? And what are they known for as a thing?ROTHSCHILD: Sure. So the Rothschild dynasty that we know of really emerged out of the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto in the late 1700s.And at that point, Frankfurt was a free city in the Holy Roman Empire. It was the seat of the Emperor. So it was a very prosperous town for trade, for commerce. A lot of merchants came out in and out of there. There was a lot of shipping and there was a constant need for money. So there was a very thriving Jewish [00:05:00] community that made loans, sold and dealt in rare coins and metals, worked in textiles and exporting.They also lived in a ghetto, in a literal walled city that they were not allowed to leave except at certain times of the year. So out of that came it. The family patriarch mayor on shell Rothschild, and he very quickly became essentially the court banker to the crown Prince of Hess. 1 of the royalty of the Holy Roman Empire, essentially.And he he worked his way up to essentially becoming kind of his. Go-to for loans, for coins. And eventually mayor got his son Oshe involved in the business. And this is the early 18 hundreds when of course, the Napoleonic Wars are raging. And as the French invade Frankfurt, the elector of Hess, who's now risen up to become essentially one of the, one of the conclave who elects the Holy Roman emperor has to go into hiding.And has to hide the vast fortune that he has gathered and it's mayor and his son Amshel who are [00:06:00] essentially responsible for hiding this and a lot of what they do is they take this money and they essentially fund the opposition to Napoleon with it. So, they're, funneling gold and coins and things back and forth across the English channel.The family becomes incredibly rich very quickly to the point where. Mayer dies in 1812, and he's still a very prosperous merchant. His son Nathan, who became kind of the leader of the family after Mayer's death, died in 1836, and he's one of the richest men in the world. So this family built up a huge amount of wealth very quickly.And of course, wherever you see that, you find myths. And wherever you find myths attached to wealthy Jews, it eventually turns into conspiracy theories and anti Semitism.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess the other thing about it is and I guess I noticed you didn't mention this, but like the reason that the Jews historically had been in the Western world associated with banking is that Christians in the New Testament were prohibited basically from engaging [00:07:00] in usury or the charges, which was interpreted essentially to mean the charging of any sort of interest.ROTHSCHILD: Right.SHEFFIELD: And so by definition, then you could not operate a bank and be considered a good Christian, right?ROTHSCHILD: It was a canon law heresy on par with murder to lend at interest. At the same time these nobles and these churches they needed money. They needed money for palaces for great, houses of worship They certainly needed money to equip armies. So when they needed it, they went to the Jewish community because the Jewish community was allowed to lend it. So the Jews of really, up until the 1800s in Europe had a very precarious position of a lot of them had access to money, a lot of nobility needed it.So they had to go to these people who were outsiders and it were sort of hated for their wealth. That was also needed for their societies to prosper. So it was a very paradoxical position. And Jews still find themselves in positions like that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and, it is an [00:08:00] example of that, this these types of cross religious meeting needs-- they exist across the world in many different contexts.So for instance, in Israel, on the Sabbath there are plenty of people who do basically have to do work for ultra Orthodox Jews who live there because they can't do their, work on the Sabbath on Saturday.And then the Islamic world sent by the same token, during certain festivals, they can't do certain things. So they have to hire non Muslims to come in and do various things as well.And so that's the, how all of this got started of Jews and banking in the European world. And the Rothschilds they basically sort of became the proxy in a lot of people's minds for this. And then of course, we have to say, that a lot of the, it isn't just that people were angry that there were people with money. It was also that they had a different religious viewpoint. And that they, were not [00:09:00] Christian and, and I'm like, I mean, that historically, obviously was a huge thing.Now how did that over the years, was that something that people. I mean with the, Rothschilds specifically as a family, did you want to talk about that a little bit?ROTHSCHILD: Sure. They were often held up as, I mean, certainly in Judaism, the Rothschilds were really an aspirational figure. They were the family that one day you could be like, or you could meet them if, you worked hard enough.There was a mystique and an aura to what they had accomplished. But for many Christians and many antisemites and even now. They were considered to be one of the more visible Jewish families. They never really assimilated. You had a lot of these German Jewish banking families that left Judaism behind.They converted. A lot of them changed their names. But the Rothschilds were always very visibly Jewish. They visibly donated to Jewish causes. There were Rothschild hospitals, Rothschild museums, Rothschild synagogues. And so because of their visibility, and because of their, [00:10:00] Philanthropy, they became these kinds of outsized targets.And of course, there, there were aspects of the Rothschild mystique that were true. They absolutely played peacemakers to the royalty of Europe. They had enough money that if a prime minister. Or King said, I need 8 million whatevers to buy this, bridge or equip my army. The Rothschilds could do it.There's a story I write about in the book where the, where Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister of England, needed a lot of money really quickly to buy the Egyptian share of the Suez Canal. He went to Rothschild. Rothschild made the loan. The Disraeli paid them back with interest. And the British took control of a big part of the Suez Canal.For a century after that. So some of these things were true and did happen. It's just they're wrapped up in layers and layers of nonsense and conspiracy theory. Yeah,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's true. The other thing about it, as you said, it would kind of [00:11:00] merged over time with, that they, with existing other conspiracies about Jewish people.So, like that they're killing, Christian children et cetera, and, trying to or churches I mean, that, that's in it one interesting little aspect I think that maybe is not as Common nowadays, I feel like, with the Rothschild conspiracies about, that they secretly were controlling the Christian churches as well.Right. You, let's talk about that one. that's kind of a, it's like a conspiracy gone by, if you will.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah. You don't get quite so much of that anymore. The the idea of the Rothschild. The sort of global string pullers, I think it's much more connected to kind of finance and politics, but you get all kinds of different rabbit holes.When you go into some of this material about things that the Rothschilds are secretly doing to all of us, they, are polluting our bloodline and they're sapping our resources. It's very kind of classic almost [00:12:00] eugenicist conspiracy theory in a number of ways. And that the Rothschilds fund both sides of every war.So it really is that sort of whatever you're. Thank you. pet issue is, whatever thing is bothering you that day, you can blame the Rothschilds for it. You can find some book or pamphlet that blames the Rothschilds for it. It's a lot like how we view Soros these days. The guy who's just sort of behind everything, whether it is global wars or your own business failing, you can blame Soros for it and nobody in your community bats an eye.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he's going to fact check it. Right. Yeah. And, so I mean, these, ideas about them circulated in Europe for a number of years, but they also came to the United States as well in the beginning people I guess now is it, you, write about this idea of by a guy named, I don't even know how you pronounce it, Xavient Hayes.ROTHSCHILD: Oh, yeah, yes, one of the, Xavient, I think. I don't know, I can't remember.SHEFFIELD: Okay, yeah.ROTHSCHILD: I can't remember anything about his book, except it's really [00:13:00] stupid.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's basically, according to him, the Rothschilds were behind the American Revolution as well, which is interesting.ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, you can basically find somebody who is touting the Rothschilds as being behind anything. It's a big aspect of David Icke's books. Alexander Hamilton was secretly a Rothschild agent. I mean, it's ridiculous. There's no, the Rothschilds didn't have agents when Alexander Hamilton was alive. It just makes no sense.But you find it, that sort of grain of truth to it. And of course, one of the truths is that the During the American Revolution, the British relied on these bought and paid for German mercenaries, many of whom came from Hetz. They were called Hessians. The Declaration of Independence in one of the 27 grievances singles out foreign mercenaries on American soil.Many of them were sold by the elector of Hetz, who, of course, his court banker was Mayor Amschel Rothschild. [00:14:00] Now, that doesn't mean that the Rothschilds were funding both sides of the war. It's just one of those kind of. Little historical bits of trivia, but you can take it and run with it in any way that you want to, especially if you're just making it up.There are conspiracy theories that the house painter who tried to kill Andrew Jackson was a Rothschild agent. John Wilkes Booth was a Rothschild agent. I mean, it's just anything that…

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Encore: How Mormonism has been reshaped by Evangelicalism Nov 20, 2023

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Mormonism occupies an important place in the conservative religious realm and its adherents exercise significant voting power in the Republican political coalition in states like Utah, Arizona, Idaho, and even California. In today’s political media environment, Mormons are influential both as content producers like Glenn Beck and as content consumers, where they share many similar tastes with White Evangelical Protestants.But the comparative closeness the two fundamentalist traditions have today is a departure from the past. While Mormonism and Evangelical Protestantism were born in roughly the same time period of the mid-19th century, they almost immediately grew apart for political reasons, eventually leading to the largest Mormon sect, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), moving to Utah, which was part of Mexico at the time.The shared dynamic began changing for the two faiths during the mid-20th century as Evangelicalism adopted many of Mormonism’s “end times” concerns and LDS Mormons became increasingly absorbed into right-wing political media.One person who saw this happening in real time is Pat Bagley, a veteran editorial cartoonist who has worked at the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper for more than 40 years. Once a devout illustrator of Mormon media, he now follows his own set of rules with regard to both religion and politics. Along the way, he’s become a fixture in Utah and LDS culture, whether they like it or not.This episode was previously released July 29, 2021. The video of the conversation is available. An automated transcript of the audio follows.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Please join me in welcoming Pat Bagley.PAT BAGLEY: Hi Matthew.SHEFFIELD: So Pat, why don't we get started with you telling us a bit about how you got interested in cartooning.?BAGLEY: So I was attending BYU [Brigham Young University] and it was in this class that was personal finance and it was, just boring. It, was as do dirt. And I used to kind of scribble in my class notes and, do [00:01:00] caricatures and things like that.And so all of a sudden I had this idea about a talk that was current at BYU at the time. The Department of Justice was going to sue BYU because of its housing policy. And so all of a sudden I did this cartoon in the middle of my class notes, and I thought, that's not bad. So I took it to the Daily Universe, the BYU newspaper, and I thought that they were going to have their cartoonists take my idea and, draw it.But I showed it to the publisher, Nelson Wadsworth, and he said, do a finished copy and bring it back. So I did a finished copy of that cartoon, and I brought it back, and it ran next day in the Daily Universe. And when you see your stuff in print, it's pretty heady stuff, and I was kind of addicted after that.But a few weeks later, this is even better. A few weeks later, I was going to work at, I was working at a little graphics shop at BYU and I walk in and the secretary [00:02:00] says, congratulations on getting published in time magazine that what, and she described the cartoon. And as soon as I was off work, I went down and grabbed time magazine.Sure enough. The very first cartoon I ever did made it into Time Magazine, and since then it's been kind of downhill. But it's been pretty, pretty heady stuff.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, okay, and so, and that was what, the 1960s roughly was that?BAGLEY: So I've been doing this for 42 years, so 79?SHEFFIELD: 79. Okay. Oh, interesting. Okay. So I guess that was around the time when the church was, embroiled, the LDS Mormon church was embroiled in controversy, I guess they had just come out of it though, with regard to their treatment of people of African descent.BAGLEY: Blacks and the priesthood.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.BAGLEY: I was working at the Daily Universe. They actually hired me after I did that [00:03:00] cartoon, and I was working at the Daily Universe when they came out with their announcement. So, 79-80.I was born in Utah. And when I was 3 years old, family moved to California, so I grew up in Oceanside, California, went to school there, went to high school.SHEFFIELD: And Oceanside, just for those who are not familiar with Southern California, where is that?BAGLEY: It's just a little bit north of San Diego. But we'd always come back during Easter to visit family, and we had... lots of family here in Utah, and I thought Utah was kind of exotic. If you grew up in Southern California, the temperature is always the same. nothing ever changes. You don't have snowfall. You don't have leaves changing. And I've come to Utah and I've seen the leaves change and all this kind of stuff.And I thought that's pretty awesome. And so I was, I love the beach, but I also love, Utah.SHEFFIELD: And you've lived there since when did you move to Utah to go to BYU?BAGLEY: Yeah, so I went to BYU, went on a mission to Bolivia, got back, went straight back to [00:04:00] BYU, graduated, and worked a couple of graphics jobs before I got the job at the Salt Lake Tribune.SHEFFIELD: And you worked, and how long have you worked at the Tribune? When did you get hired on there?BAGLEY: So it's been, oh, geez, coming up at 42 years. I just, it was before the pandemic that we had this 40th celebration of me being at the Tribune. and it was kind of a big deal, and we had this thing at Rose Wagner, and, but that was 40 years, and that was almost two years ago.So it's been 42, 42 years I've been at the Salt Lake Tribune.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and in addition to doing editorial cartoons, you also in the 90s, in early 2000s, you were a bit of a Mormon publishing entrepreneur yourself. You're, why don't you hold up one of your books there for us so everybody can see it.BAGLEY: Okay, so, I wish I had.SHEFFIELD: But I've got what's and read the title for our [00:05:00] audio listeners here. Where have all the Nephites gone?BAGLEY: But the first book was Norman the Nephite.SHEFFIELD: And that's that little guy with the orange hair there.BAGLEY: Yeah, it's one of those search and find books where you have all these. It was like Waldo, Where's Waldo? Waldo was a big hit. And so this book came to me and they said, we want to do something kind of like Waldo. And we want to call it find the bishop. I said, nobody wants to find the Bishop, but it came up with this idea of Norman the Nephite, which is kind of a magical character because, nobody really knows what a Nephite looks like and I could go anywhere I wanted with it.And so they actually took me up on it and he came up with three books. There was Norman the Nephite, Where Have All the Nephites Gone? And the last one was A Nephite in the Works. So I did those books for Deseret Book in the early to mid nineties.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so for people who aren't familiar with Mormon culture, tell us a little bit about the [00:06:00] whole Mormon industry.Like, it's pretty huge. Wouldn't you say?BAGLEY: You mean the Mormon industrial complex?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, what, is it? What is it involved? Tell us, about it. What is it in there? You mentioned Deseret Book and some of the other companies? Who owns Deseret Book, how about that?BAGLEY: Deseret Book has got a captive audience, and I'm sure that you as a former Mormon heard that the only books that you should ever buy come from Deseret Book. If you can't get it at Deseret Book, then it's probably not okay. So it, they, practice a lot of control, through Deseret Book.SHEFFIELD: And the church owns the Deseret Book, isn't that right?BAGLEY: Oh, yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and that's something that's kind of interesting about Mormonism, although but not really though, because one thing a lot of people don't know is that a lot of the more, conservative or fundamentalist religions, they actually have these [00:07:00] publishing empires, lots of them do. So the Mormon church, so they've got the Deseret News newspaper. Then they've also got Deseret Book, but then they, and then they also have a whole host of publishing things affiliated with Brigham Young University. And do they have any others that, have or is that pretty much it?BAGLEY: Well, the KSL, you know, which--SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah, they own that too. Yeah. Which is a local television affiliate in Utah for those who don't know. And they, oh yeah. And they own Bonneville Communications.BAGLEY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: How can I forget that? Bonneville Communications is a, radio and television station ownership group and it owns a bunch of stations around the world. Isn't it? Or is it just in the United States?BAGLEY: I mean, there's the Liahona, which goes out to South America and Mexico. And here's the thing though, you can be Mormon and never have to be exposed to anything that's not Mormon. they've got you covered, from being a kid.They've got books [00:08:00] introducing you to the Book of Mormon, when you're two years old and you don't have to be exposed to anything that's not LDS.SHEFFIELD: The LDS Mormons are not really exceptional in that regard, because there are like the Seventh-day Adventists, they have their newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor, and even more modern publications like the Falun Gong cult in China, they own the Epoch Times, which has become one of the most popular right wing Websites in America, and they've got one in Germany too, apparently.And it's all designed to promote the religion. But, I guess there are some lighter aspects to that. So, besides the Norman, the Nephite stuff, what else? What were some of the other books you've got? You've got a couple of the other ones there that you made.BAGLEY: Well, I was kind of on a roll. So, I recommended they do a Book of Mormon timeline. Because you read the Book of Mormon and you have different groups going off in different areas, and then they pop back up and you kind of wonder, well, [00:09:00] wait a minute, do I remember where they came from? And, so the Book of Mormon timeline actually kind of pulls it all together.We were talking earlier and you said that you can still refer to it because it's accurate because this book is actually pretty good.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it was a guy on Amazon that he was like, wow, this is the most accurate Book of Mormon timeline I've ever read. And I still buy it. he was, giving you a plug there and you didn't know. And then you had another one, another timeline book too.BAGLEY: Church History Timeline. and I grew up in a family where, history is important and we like reading a lot of history. And my brother is the leading western trail historian in America. Yeah, he's in lots of books. There was one that was actually, that was reviewed in the Atlantic magazine and it's great stuff.He did a book called Blood of the Prophets, which was about Mountain Meadows. It is the best book about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But the narrative, it's just compelling. It's great stuff. [00:10:00] So I'd recommend Blood of the Prophets if you're interested in Utah history.SHEFFIELD: Tell us about the, for people who are not familiar with Mormon history, what was the Mountain Meadows massacre? What was that?BAGLEY: So it was the largest white on white massacre in American history. There was a group of 120 to 130 Immigrants coming from Missouri, going through Utah to get to California. And there's a place outside of Cedar City that's called Mountain ,Meadows where they were camping and the Mormon militia in Southern Utah ambushed them.There was three days where they were shooting at each other. And then the Fanchers, which is the immigrant group decided they would surrender and they surrendered as they were being marched to Cedar city. The Mormon militia, murdered them. Just killed them all, men, women, children.SHEFFIELD: And what was the reason for that?BAGLEY: Well, this was when Mormons were [00:11:00] sure that the American government was coming out to, wage war on the Mormons. There was Johnson's army that was, marching to come to Utah to impose order. And so they thought they were... Under threat, and so they, they did the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and it was, they realized almost immediately it was really bad they had done that, and they covered it up.But at the same time, Mormons have been persecuted. They were run out of Illinois. They were run out of Missouri. They've had a history of persecution. So. If you have a persecute, persecution complex because you've been persecuted, that's understandable.SHEFFIELD: I think there is an interesting parallel perhaps now with the way that Mormons were feeling at that [00:12:00] time and how white evangelical Christian fundamentalists are feeling now.Do you think there's a parallel there at all? There seems to be a lot of persecution feelings, on, in that subgroup.BAGLEY: Oh, yeah. I mean, there's, no question that they feel under threat. They feel persecuted and, but it's just, crazy stuff. I mean, they're comparing wearing a mask to a genocide.They're comparing getting vaccinated to slavery. And it's just nonsense. But, you ask them about it and they feel it in their bones, they are under threat. This is existential.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And actually, that reminds me of a cartoon that you did recently. I'm going to put it up on the screen. So, can you describe it for the listeners, just so they can understand what you've written here?BAGLEY: Yeah. I mean, there's the grim reaper. And instead of having, the thing that, what is it called [00:13:00] the scythe? Yeah. Instead of a scythe, he's got a golf club and it says 99 percent of COVID deaths are among the unvaccinated. And they're set up on a tee is this golf ball and a red hat, which, automatically identifies them as a Trumper.And he's saying, no one's going to jab me. Well, he's going to be more than jabbed by COVID because COVID doesn't care what you believe. Believe crazy stuff and then, screw around and find out.SHEFFIELD: It is such a unfortunate and terrible mentality. I mean, as somebody who's been making cartoon commentary for 42 years. Is that something that you've seen develop over time in the American right? or some people seem to think that this just happened with Trump, but I don't think that's right.BAGLEY: No, I mean, this has been going on for quite a while and actually you can draw a bright line between the establishment [00:14:00] of Fox News in 1996 and the erosion of trust in the institutions that make us a nation. They came out and said, we are fair and balanced. Everybody else is not. They're telling you lies. and they undercut trust in, government. they say the government lies to you. They say the only people you can trust are us, Fox News. So you look at the erosion of what's happened, of where we got here, how we got here.It started earlier, with Gingrich and, all that, but it was amplified by Fox News. And over the years, they've just gotten crazier and crazier. They got us into a war in Iraq for no good reason. they, were saying in 2008 during the financial collapse, everything was fine. there was no collapse.It was just okay. they [00:15:00] got us, Donald Trump. And they amplified this whole lie about Obama being a Muslim.SHEFFIELD: Now, in regards to, I guess your own career trajectory, it is, have, so you're, now, on pre, on the progressive side of the aisle. is that where you started off initially or, have, And if so, we, what was that experience like being a progressive in, in, in Mormondom?BAGLEY: So I grew up a Republican and this is back in the day where you could be liberal and be a Republican. I mean, there was Rockefeller, there was Percy, there was Hatfield, I think,…

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As libertarianism has radicalized, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names are turning toward fascism Nov 06, 2023

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We’re living in a time between times, a moment of dramatic technological change when the future is up for grabs. With the right kinds of policies, humanity is on the cusp of ending or significantly diminishing perpetual challenges of our species like hunger, climate disruption, and poverty. But if we make the wrong decisions, we will be handing over our future to people whose first priority is themselves—oligarchic billionaires who care more about achieving eternal life and exploring other planets than they do about affordable housing and ending diseases.The terrible irony about the battle for the future is that it’s being waged by people who believe in a century-old failed ideology that goes by a number of different names. Futurism, libertarianism, and technocracy are some of the names by which it’s known. What we should be calling it, however, is fascism.If you’re unfamiliar with the history of 20th century fascism, hearing someone today apply the term to people like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel may seem like an exaggeration. It’s not, however, especially because both of these men have direct connections to the original fascism. Theil, in particular, has explicitly written that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Today’s modern-day robber barons have invested in political parties and candidates in the United States and other countries, but they have even bigger ambitions than just controlling who wins and loses elections. They don’t just want to rule the next 20 years; they want to control the next 200 years.I won’t lie: The ideas and ideologies we’ll be exploring in the next several episodes are frightening and often extremely arcane. But it’s important to understand what we’re up against.That’s why I’m pleased to be joined in this first episode by Jonathan Taplin, he’s a former professor of journalism at the University of Southern California. Before that, he was a vice president at Merril Lynch, and before that, he was a filmmaker and music producer who worked with legends like Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese. Instead of talking about all these impressive accomplishments, however, we’ll be discussing his new book, “The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto,” which I strongly encourage you to purchase.Audio Chapters00:15 — Introduction02:39 — Interview11:31 — Libertarian radicalization is directly related to the rise of fascism15:18 — Mark Andreesen, a far-right billionaire who's mostly unknown to the general public25:32 — "Transhumanism" and the fascist imagination34:11 — Why "fascism" is an accurate descriptor for people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel47:05 — Why the U.S. left must create a grand democratic vision of the futureTranscriptThe transcript is automatically generated from the audio and may not be entirely accurate. It is provided for convenience only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It's really good to have you here today, Jonathan. Welcome to Theory of Change.JONATHAN TAPLIN: Good to be here, Matthew.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, first let's name the four billionaires that you are talking about in the book here before we get started with anything else,TAPLIN: Elon Musk, [00:03:00] Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreessen, and Peter Thiel.SHEFFIELD: Okay. And how representative are these four men of the Silicon Valley sort of oligarch class, if we can call them that, or as you call them, the technocrats.TAPLIN: Well, they are certainly at the top level of the net worth. Obviously, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. Andreessen Thiel and Zuckerberg are all billionaires not millionaires.And they controlled some of the most important companies in this country. So, I mean, in that sense, I think they rank at the very top. They do tend to be much more kind of anarcho-libertarian than a lot of leaders in Silicon Valley. [00:04:00] But that's something that we can get into later.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. Well, and actually the first chapter of the book is about libertarianism and techno libertarianism.I was really pleased to see that you did that because I think that, a lot of people, especially in the business press. They don't have much of an understanding of politics and they tend to report on business as just, well, this guy did a thing and this company did some stuff.And it's, very shallow and it's not giving the readers the bigger context and you are definitely trying to do that.TAPLIN: I was shocked that there's a new biography by a very well known biographer, Walter Isaacson, that just came out on Musk. And it was exactly what you described. He, obviously, he's like the kid in Almost Famous.He all of a sudden finds himself on the private jets with [00:05:00] all the beautiful girls and probably drugs, although I don't know if he takes them, but and he's just like, oh, wow, gee whiz. And, he treats Musk as if he's some kind of modern day, bipolar, pre epic Thomas Edison. Which is not what he is, uh, Thomas Edison made inventions that helped the world.The electric light and the phonograph were just things that ordinary people could take advantage of. But Elon Musk makes automobiles that cost 100, 000 that are very good for, very rich people who want a virtue signal that they care about the environment. And he makes very expensive rockets, which the government pays him a 30% gross profit on for every launch and he makes satellite systems that he sells to other countries like [00:06:00] Ukraine and then continues to make independent decisions as to where they can work and where they can't work. And, now he wants to put a chip in your brain. So, I mean, these guys are not.They come from a, kind of view that, uh, as Thiel has said, democracy and capitalism are not compatible. And so in that sense, they're on the side of capital. And quite frankly, as the head of OpenAI admitted, if their vision succeeds, the government will have no choice but to give everybody money.Universal basic income because most of the jobs will be taken by artificial intelligence and robots,SHEFFIELD: and it's important to note that the idea [00:07:00] of a universal basic income like that was a replacement for welfare by Milton Friedman, the libertarian ideologue economist. So that's been kind of the objective, irrespective of whether AI even existed or not. It certainly wasn't around in the 1970s to any real degree.TAPLIN: Matthew, can I ask you a question? Yeah. Can you imagine any Republican Congress putting forth the notion of universal basic income today?SHEFFIELD: Not, well, not right now,TAPLIN: look, I mean, it's obviously Peter Thiel wants, and it's obviously Mark and Andreson wants it, and certainly Mark Zuckerberg wants it because why else would anyone be on the metaverse for 8 hours a day, which is his business plan unless. They were sitting at home with nothing to do. Yeah,SHEFFIELD: no, it's, true. And,[00:08:00] and it's funny because this whole idea of the, this universal basic income that, and trying to get people to live in virtual reality and, just buy whatever the billionaires are selling to them.When you tune into more sort of, lowbrow right wing media, like Alex Jones or like a lot of Fox News, they act as if the people who are pushing this stuff are left wing. And, because like they'll talk about oh, they want us to eat bugs and to, have our, and to sit at home and watch porn all day.And it's like, the people doing that are on your side, like, those are your benefactors. It's their idea to do this.TAPLIN: Well, look, I think, there are two quotes at the beginning of, my book, which are epigrams. One is from the Yale professor, Timothy Snyder says, to abandon [00:09:00] facts is to abandon freedom.If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. And the second one is from Mark Andreessen. Who says reality has had 5000 years to get good, and it is clearly still woefully lacking for most people, we should build and we are building online worlds like the metaverse that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.So think about that last quote. I mean, who is reality deprived? Well, 2024 will be to create a virtual universe where you can live in a fantasy for eight hours a day. I mean, I just don't think that's a solution. And if you think that the, two [00:10:00] solutions on offer for us today are we take our collective Brain power, our collective technologies and our collective wealth money and try and fix climate change, fix the housing crisis, fix mental health crisis, fix the real world problems or the alternative is we assume that AI and robots would do all the work people will sit at home and they'll have nothing better to do than to think about pretending they're Tony Stark and living in Tony Stark's house and dating Gwyneth Paltrow's avatar and or dreaming of going to Mars with Elon Musk or dreaming of living to 200 as Peter Thiel wants to, or dreaming, of crypto wealth through NFTs because you bought, a bored ape that's going to be worth millions.It's all a [00:11:00] fantasy, and so I don't, I, if that's the two choices, I know which one I'm on.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's basically what they're trying to do, like, they're trying to say, look, we, it's impossible to fix the current world that we all live in. So. Let's just go to this made up one that we're going to own and you will have no control over that's I think the critical component because, people, because like,Libertarian radicalization is directly related to the rise of fascismSHEFFIELD: as you noted with Thiel there is this there has been a radicalization of libertarianism in the United States and as I, said, I'm glad that you started off the book with that discussion of libertarianism, because, when you look at the history of libertarianism in the United States in the, let's say nineties to early two thousands, a lot of people who had that perspective They [00:12:00] actually thought that they were on the left because they were against the Iraq war, because they supported marijuana legalization, because they were not Christian fundamentalists.And so, if you had those belief systems and you weren't that smart about politics and political ideologies, it was easy to think that you were on the left. And in fact, a lot of these people did. And as you note, like Elon Musk, for instance, and even Mark Andreessen, who are now just, full on radical right wing Republicans they were backing Democrats.And I mean, in the case of Musk. I think, some of it was that he was directly benefiting so much from the policies of Barack Obama. I mean, there's no question about that. And then once the money spigot was turned off, he decided to revert to type.TAPLIN: Let's be clear. They all had been, they all got And took advantage of the policies of both Bill Clinton and Barack.Yeah, the safe harbor [00:13:00] liability shield, which Bill Clinton put in the, digital Millennium Copyright Act is what makes their business different from every other business in the world. In other words, Rupert Murdoch had to pay 785 million to a voting machine company for libel. But there was far more libelous material on Facebook and Twitter on, that issue than there was on Fox News.And the reach was far wider. I mean, Elon Musk gets, has 135 million followers. Tucker Carlson on his best day was lucky to get 3 million people to watch him. So, I mean, Ross Douthat was right. Elon Musk is the most powerful right wing voice in America. So, when these guys decided to change, and I think it [00:14:00] was a real change, you're right, they were probably Libertarians and at some point voted for Democrats.But when they realized that the real key to their fortunes Was to have nothing happen. In other words, have total gridlock. Then they shifted their alliances and they, voted for not change, not the future, but just stasis for stagnation because that's what it's them. As long as there's no change in the tax policy or if they get lucky, Trump lowers their business taxes or their personal taxes. And as long as there's no change in antitrust policy, they're happy. Now, obviously Biden has made a real attempt to change antitrust policy and they're pissed [00:15:00] off. They don't like that one bit. And that's why they're all going to be full out against Biden coming up.This Google trial is a line in the sand.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Now one of the,Mark Andreesen, a far-right billionaire who's mostly unknown to the general publicSHEFFIELD: so one of the guys that you discuss in the book I think a lot of people may not have heard of him, Mark Andreessen. Tell us who Mark Andreessen is what he, what, how he started and what he's up to now.TAPLIN: Well, Mark Andreessen made the claim that he invented the browser. Now that's not really true. There were browsers before. He was a student at the University of Illinois and he did, uh, create a browser that was a kind of rip off of a another physicist browser, but [00:16:00] be that is made. He went to Silicon Valley and got money and started Netscape.So Netscape was arguably the first commercial browser and for about a year it ruled the world. And then Microsoft just made Internet Explorer part of the suite of tools that you got when you got Windows. For free, yeah. At the end of Netscape. It was just, you, got it installed when you got your computer, it was already there, you didn't have to download Netscape or anything, and Netscape was basically put out of business.Not before it went public and Mark Andreessen made about 20 million personally. So then he goes off and starts Andreessen Horowitz, which is the first really major venture capital firm that understood that social media was [00:17:00] the key. To the future, and he invests in Facebook in the earliest round, along with Peter Thiel, and he invests in a lot of other, uh, social media tools and other social media companies. And then Andreessen Horowitz grows and grows. And so he owns the largest NFT platform. Which is called OpenSea. 80, Wall Street Journal says 80 percent of the content on OpenSea is pirated. And if you bought a Bored Ape from OpenSea, uh, a year ago, Or a year and a half ago at the height of the, hype for 50, 000, you probably couldn't sell it today for 10. He also was what would be known as a crypto whale [00:18:00] and he, had Solana, he had large investments in other crypto companies. And 1 of the things we. Talk about in the book is, the following. If you remember November of 2021, if you were watching a football game, there's a pretty good chance that you would see an ad for one of the big crypto exchanges.And there would be Matt Damon telling you that fortune belongs to the bold or Tom Brady or LeBron James, or, a whole wealth of celebrities, Larry David. It got so bad that. In the 2022 Super Bowl, Madison Avenue renamed it the Crypto Bowl. There were so many ads. And so these guys, the whales, and Scott Galloway has [00:19:00] said that at that point in late 2021, 90% of all crypto holdings were held by 2 percent of the Bitcoin holders. So, and it was at 60, 000 a Bitcoin at that point. And so they unleash this advertising. The average sucker says, geez, I want to get in on this. They buy in at 60, 000 a coin. The whales are happy to unload their coins at 60, 000 a coin. And by May it's 19, 000 a coin. I Mean, they just, you just killed the suckers.It was a classic pyramid scheme and it's never come back.SHEFFIELD: It was a pump and dump and they and that's the thing about Bitcoin is they can keep doing…

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Theory of Change #091: Blake Chastain on evangelicals and exvangelicals Oct 23, 2023

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Episode SummaryIn previous episodes of our “Why I Left series,” we've heard the stories of people who have departed from various right wing political and religious traditions listening to the stories of individuals who have escaped these radical belief systems is important, but in this episode of the series, I want to put the pieces back together and look at the stories in the aggregate to see if we can find some broader trends.And to help with that discussion, we’re featuring Blake Chastain, host of the Exvangelical podcast where he has interviewed many different guests about their own experience of leaving evangelical religious beliefs.He's also publishing writing at the Post-Evangelical Post, which is a newsletter you can subscribe to on Substack as well.The video for this episode is availableTranscriptThe transcript is automatically generated from the audio and may not be entirely accurate. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Some podcast apps will cut off the text before the end.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Blake.BLAKE CHASTAIN: Thank you for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, but before we get too far into the weeds here, let's start off with talking about the Exvangelical podcast that you are doing and what you do with it and how long you've been doingCHASTAIN: Sure. So I have been producing the show Exvangelical since 2016. It is a show that's primarily focused on people's individual stories of why they have left evangelicalism, in particular, primarily white evangelicalism or white led evangelicalism. And really, my guests their stories sort of follow their biographical tracks with regards to starting in, say, like a three-act structure of starting in Act One.The types of environments that they may have grown up in, the, what particular denomination, what their original experiences were growing up in it or if they were introduced to it later in life, then what led them to start questioning evangelicalism. And what may have led to their break or what has over the last several years been the common language that's proliferated [00:03:00] online and elsewhere is deconstruction what led to their deconstruction, whether it was 1 catalyst or sort of single traumatic event or death by 1000 cuts sort of thing.And then finally, where they are now, I'm not. Primarily interest. I'm not interested in; I don't have a vested interest in people staying within the Christian faith or not. I'm just curious as to what led them to change their minds because that to me is the most fascinating thing. And there are so much individual and social consequence to making the choice to leave one of your faith of origin.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I don't know how it was for you, but when I was in Mormonism, that perspective, it was almost hard to imagine for me. To the extent that I thought about and the people that I knew thought about, sort of former Mormons it would just.Just be interested in talking about it and not trying to de-convert people, just, having it kind of a neutral perspective letting people do what they want and not judge them for it. I mean, is that something that you came to over time yourself or?CHASTAIN: I think so. I think that's something that I've sort of grown into as I've continued to do the show.I do remember one particular instance. There used to be this phrase that I would say, regardless of what someone's perspective was or what, where they had currently landed, so to speak with regard to their relationship to religion or to[00:04:30] religious groups. And I used to say something like, if there is a God, I'm sure that they would appreciate it.Or respect your decision. And then there was a guest that I had on that had landed in a more non theistic or atheistic place who sort of pushed back very, very, very politely but they objected a little bit to that language and framing and then, I received that and have since sort of stopped using that because it did feel like I was trying to shoehorn people into, keeping an open mind with regards to things.And there are some people that for whom the continued engagement with religious or spiritual practices Is too traumatic for them to continue to try to access and for me to do that is unfair. So that is something that I have learned over time, but at the same time, I think it is utterly valuable to society at large to continue to talk to people who have disaffiliated because they have something to offer people who remain in religious groups.And also, they are valid. Allies and political arenas where the opposition is something like Christian nationalism.SHEFFIELD: Well it's also the case that, these Christian nationalist groups, they ally with groups that are secular as well, and they have no problem doing that. And I do think that is [00:06:00] something that the people who oppose Christian nationalism have got to kind of pick up on a little bit better that, you don't have to, you don't have to agree with everybody in 100 percent way in order to ally with them to go for a goal to preserve, I mean, to preserve freedom. That's really what we're trying to do here.CHASTAIN: Right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, so, so you've been doing it since 2016. Have how much hate mail do you get nowadays? Is it less or has it decreased over time or has it remained kind of consistent?CHASTAIN: I, As far as hate mail, I mean, by and large I'm not as active on social media as I used to be my sort of extremely online phase began to peter out in 2019 or so.So., I have not been, as, as much a part of being, say, on the front lines of that and trying to either punch up to more powerful people within evangelical spheres as I once was. So I may be known to a lot of folks who have paid attention for a while, but there have been other voices and other people who have built larger platforms than myself in the intervening years, and they are likely probably more recipients of that because just because of.If you are building something off of one of the social platforms and build to hundreds of thousands of followers, then you will likely run into that more. I'm sure that people still within the evangelical fold see [00:07:30] me as someone that's maybe leading people astray or something like that.But oftentimes... Oftentimes, their critiques are, can be very nonspecific and not necessarily tied to a particular creator or commentator, but just, decrying this deconstruction movement or whatever else as something, but I mean, it is I think those comparisons comparing The online deconstruction movements and things like that to evangelicalism is not apples to apples.It is not a direct comparison because those groups have far more sway within our society and more resources and more organization.SHEFFIELD: Well, okay, so for people who haven't heard the term deconstruction, what does that mean?CHASTAIN: Yeah, so that essentially the way in which it has been used over the last several years is not necessarily the same way that you may have learned it within the context of say a philosophy class.It's not as specific as, as the way that, Derrida may have used it when or other French philosophers may have used it. What they are, how they are using that term is by essentially saying they're questioning the beliefs that they inherited from their faith of origin. So, and that can mean, say, within the context of someone who is evangelical or Mormon, and [00:09:00] I, you can absolutely speak to a Mormon experience.I think that is distinct enough that I don't really talk to ex Mormons on my show because I don't have that direct experience. But there just as a quick aside, #exmormon or #exmo is an even more popular hashtag on Twitter than #exvangelical is. By like, I think #exvangelical has around between 1 and 2 billion views and #exmormon has like over 5.So, but what deconstruction means is essentially you are questioning those beliefs, whether it's the teachings with regards to how you relate to society. About purity culture and sexuality or any other number of things, whether it's a theological question and then questioning those beliefs and then oftentimes realizing that you no longer affirm those beliefs and that can have significant consequences for someone's personal identity as well as how they relate to their faith group.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, and I think one of the other things that probably I would suspect the former Mormon and former evangelical experiences have in common is that there are a lot of practices of the various churches that people sort of come to view them as doctrines deriving from the scriptures or whatever. But in fact, they are just customs.And I think that discovering things in which you [00:10:30] might have had as a child placed extreme emphasis to you on that. 'This is very important. We're doing not doing this as a horrible sin.' And then you find out when you actually read the literature, it's not in there.CHASTAIN: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: So that is something that your guests have talked about pretty extensively a lot?CHASTAIN: Oh, absolutely. I mean. One of one of my early guests was a friend of mine from college. I went to a Christian college and one of, one of the ways that he described that experience of having been taught a particular thing and then.Learning from just living life after sort of leaving high school, college, these sort of protected places that often, would be called either the bubble or someone else called it a snow globe of sort of protecting people from the real world, so to speak, was that they were sold a false bill of goods and that they were The way in which they were taught to live did not function in any reasonable capacity once they were adults and say, married and doing and going about their lives.One example is also. Even learning just historical facts around things like the teaching of the rapture, those things can be presented as eternal as having been part of the Christian tradition from the beginning, [00:12:00] but in reality. That teaching is only about 150 years old. It came about in the 19th century but so much of 20th and 21st century American Christianity is based on this teaching of the rapture and that the world is supposed to get worse and worse and worse, and then Jesus comes back.So that de-emphasizes actually trying to make the world better. And that has a real impact on people's lives.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it really does. And you see it in a lot of different ways. But I think one of the most prominent recent ways that manifested was during the COVID 19 pandemic. I guess probably the most famous example of that was the governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, who had said that, we don't take this COVID stuff as seriously here in the South, because we're Christians and we believe in an afterlife and we believe that we're saved. And so if we die, we're actually going to somewhere better than the current place. So don't worry about it.CHASTAIN: And that's such a nihilistic take on this life that we have on this planet and.Even runs anathema to say the response to the Spanish flu from Christian groups in the early 20th century, those things were brought up by a number of commentators who were trying to push back on that sort of inherent nihilism. The other impact of this can [00:13:30] be people that are sensitive to these teachings develop severe anxiety and question whether they're saved and whether once the rapture does come.If they would be one of the people that would be spared it's something that, that several years ago was a trending topic on Twitter called rapture anxiety. And now as part of the, parlance and vocabulary that we use to discuss these things amongst former evangelicals, whether they use the term exvangelical or not to describe themselves.SHEFFIELD: Hmm. Yeah. Well, okay. So I guess you're saying then that people said that that was very common to have rapture anxiety.CHASTAIN: Yes. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And not just as a kid, but also as an adult as well.CHASTAIN: Right. Right. Right. Because those things are essentially sincerely held beliefs or like, formative beliefs that, that formed when you were young and then as you are an adult and say, go about go about your life and you may be deconstructing purity culture and, or that sort of thing and engaging in adult sexual behaviors, and then have these thoughts that, oh my gosh, what if what I was taught when I was a child is true? And am I going to be am I going to be damned or something like that just because of the acting like a normal human? And so those things can crop up even if [00:15:00] you even if you cognitively no longer believe in those things.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and then of course it also crops up even if you, still do believe everything. Just the idea that you're not how do you really know that you're saved? Because I mean ultimately, there is no official standard that somebody can say, 'Oh, that's it. You did it. Here's your stamp.' And I think that in some ways, a lot of the evangelical intellectual theological culture in, in a lot of ways, it seems to me that it's kind of continually reinventing the wheel, and having to go through controversies that Christianity as a larger faith tradition went through thousands of years ago and already was like: 'Okay, you know what? We're done with this one. We don't have to think about it anymore.'I guess my thought example of that would be the idea of universal grace and salvation, that was a doctrine that developed out of this lack of surety with 'well, what does it mean to have been saved? And how can you really know?'And the answer that people eventually settled on was, well, actually, we can't know. So, Jesus died for everybody, regardless of whether they acknowledge him or not. And I don't know. I mean, do you think that some evangelicals are having to come around to that, that insight that, other people came to 500 years ago?CHASTAIN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I mean, that is a that is something that can cause trouble for people in, in [00:16:30] those evangelical circles. One famous example from within evangelicalism is that Rob Bell, who was Considered a celebrity pastor in the early, late nineties, 2000s. And around 2010, he wrote a book called Love Wins, and that's essentially what he, what the book was about.It was about this idea that, that if God is loved and God saves everyone and pushes, push back on the idea of eternal judgment and hell and all of these things. And as a result. A number of the more conservative factions within evangelicalism pushed back and essentially tried to cancel him. That was not the terminology, that was not in our, our nomenclature at the time, but evangelicals have been doing things like this for a very long time.And what happened to Rob Bell is he eventually resigned from his church. He, and this was a church that was more sympathetic to his type of view, but he was also pressured by more conservative people within the same ecosystem, media and otherwise, like John Piper, who wrote a famous tweet called, that said, farewell, Rob Bell.And all of his books were pulled from. Christian bookstores, all of his books. So at Family Christian Stores, Lifeway, which is which was the retail bookstore chain managed by the Southern Baptist Convention, [00:18:00] they pulled all of his books and he was deprived of all those things and they've done it to a handful of other authors over time as well.When Jen Hatmaker affirmed queer people. Publicly all her books were pulled from those types of locations when Ray Bolts in the 90s early 2000s came out as gay, all of his all of his CDs and music were pulled from stations. So, the bounda…

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How 'unlikely voters' could be the key to the 2024 presidential election Oct 16, 2023

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SummaryIt's election season again, which means that public opinion surveys are constantly in the news. Trying to figure out what likely voters want is on the minds of everyone who works in politics or journalism. But what about the unlikely voters? What do they want?At first glance, it may seem a bit absurd to ask about the political views of people who aren't registered to vote, or who are registered but rarely do turn out to the polls. But the reality of American politics as it stands right now is that elections are often decided by such small margins that mobilizing non voters could be and likely has been crucial to winning elections, Barack Obama roused some of them in 2008 and 2012. Donald Trump appealed to them in 2016.When it comes to figuring out what unlikely voters think, there is no one more expert on the subject than David Paleologos. He's the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, which is known for its public opinion surveys, particularly a poll series they conduct of people who say they have no interest in voting.Timecodes02:01 — What is an "unlikely voter?"09:02 — Unlikely voters have moved toward Trump after preferring Obama11:45 — The difficulty of determining a correct poll sample is harder with unlikely voters15:23 — Non-voters seem to know less about politics than voters24:00 — Unlikely voters more negative toward Biden today than Trump in 201726:38 — How Republicans better utilize non-policy arguments than Democrats32:24 — Unlikely voters overwhelmingly uninterested in alternatives to Biden or Trump34:17 — Voting isn't too difficult, unlikely voters say42:12 — Could alternative voting methods increase public interest in voting?z46:50 — Trump's simpler messaging helps him with lower-knowledge citizens52:06 — Wrap-upTranscriptThis text is automatically generated from the audio and may not be entirely accurate. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Your podcast player program may cut it off before the end.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, David. Welcome to Theory of Change.DAVID PALEOLOGOS: Thank you. Great to be in Flux.SHEFFIELD: All right. [00:02:00] Excellent. Well, all right. So, let's before we get too deep into the subject here, let's define what is an unlikely voter. As you have done in these surveys here.PALEOLOGOS: So, an unlikely voter really falls into two categories: 1) People who are not registered to vote, obviously, they're not a vote if they're not registered to vote, and 2) people who are registered to vote, but who indicate on surveys that they're not likely to cast the ballot.So, normally posters will begin a survey and they'll say, how likely are you to vote in the upcoming election?Very likely somewhat, not very, not at all. If respondents indicate not at all or not likely, they get screened out. And in this survey, we did the exact opposite. If they said they were very or somewhat likely, we screened them out. And we proceeded with people who said that they were not likely or not at all likely to vote.SHEFFIELD: And how reliable are those indicators when people claim that they're not likely to vote? Tell us about the research about that particular [00:03:00] self-identification.PALEOLOGOS: So some people actually say it so that they will be disqualified from the survey and that they can hang up in a civil way.Some people genuinely are not likely to vote. And when we probe a little bit further in the survey, we get an idea about whether or not they voted in the past or whether or not they have a Democrat or Republican leaning preference. But when you look at the data that's from the U. S. Elections project. They do calculations based on voter eligible population for every state and nationally. And what we found is that it's not just a few million people that don't vote.It's a lot of people. We're expecting 90 million people who are eligible to vote in the United States in 2024 will not vote either because they're not registered to vote or they’re simply fed up and they won't vote. [00:04:00]And that's, that's a, an ominous number when you think about it, 90 million people.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. What's the percentage?PALEOLOGOS: Well, it's more votes than were cast for Joe Biden and Joe Biden set the record for most votes received by any presidential candidate in 2020. He was in the 80 million plus range and 90 million people exceeds that.90 million people are saying they're not going to vote even though they're eligible to vote. And that's a huge problem.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.PALEOLOGOS: So pollsters do these niche surveys, Democratic voters only, Republican voters only, caucus voters only. And these are very small subsets compared to the 90 million people who are Americans, they're citizens and they, they're just not going to vote. They're fed up.And so we thought back in 2012, why not pull them and figure out what's going on and then track [00:05:00] it. And we followed up with a survey in 2018 and now here in 2023, and there are some common threads in the data, but also some red flags and also some opportunities for candidates in terms of trying to convert those nonvoters into likely voters.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I mean, again, we're talking about such a large pool of people here that there's no question that not even 20 percent of them could easily make the difference for any presidential candidate. And certainly for a lot of congressional, or gubernatorial or, whatever down the ballot. I think there's no question about that.And there has been some research that indicates that Donald Trump was able to do that to some degree in 2016 and that that was a big thing he was interested in doing in 2020 as well, trying to identify nonvoters, disengaged people who were sympathetic to him.So it's, yeah, like this is something that's already happening, and you guys kind of were [00:06:00] ahead of the curve in that regard.PALEOLOGOS: So, yeah, I, I think so. And I'm surprised that people didn't copy. Usually people copy some of the work. Pollsters scoop questions and poach questions and different things from each other. It really hasn't been done.I think I understand why it hasn't been done, because it's really expensive. I mean, we do live caller surveys and you can get in and out of a live caller survey in three nights, three days, four days max. Getting nonvoters is tougher. Because these are people who aren't used to being polled, they're tougher to reach, they're disproportionate minority, they're disproportionate young, lower educated they're also disproportionate disabled.There's a much higher population of disabled people who have just given up on politics, they're just trying to survive because of their own issue or disability or family disability. So they're a tougher population to reach, but we think [00:07:00] it is essential.And I do think that it helped Donald Trump in 2016. It also helped Barack Obama in 2012, if you remember. Back in 2012 we did the survey, I think in August, which is kind of the low point of Barack Obama's numbers. He was really suffering a lag effect after the big 2008 win, hope and change. And then a lot of people hadn't really seen it on him, but they didn't have the same intensity.And he figured out that if it was just a persuasion campaign, he was probably going to have a real challenge. And so I think he, the, the DNC, from what I understand, just like Trump did in 2016, used the data to go out and find non-persuadables, people they didn't even have to persuade to vote for Barack Obama.They felt that if they could get them just out to vote that a high percentage of them would vote for Barack Obama. And that's exactly what happened. [00:08:00]SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And in the 2012 poll that you guys did Obama was the-- I mean, he wasn't the majority candidate, but he was definitely the preferred candidate of these unlikely voters in the survey that you conducted at that point.Now, you guys found a kind of a partisan reversal, if you will. That Donald Trump got more support than Joe Biden did.PALEOLOGOS: 2023. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And the exact opposite dynamic if you look at people who weren't registered to vote. It's about a two to one break for Donald Trump over Joe Biden.If you looked at people who were registered, but not likely to vote, it was a two and a half to one spread of Donald Trump over Joe Biden. And so what that suggests is the same advantage that Barack Obama had in 2012. Technically statistically Donald Trump has as an advantage, he needs to find those people and, having pulled it 3 times, it's tough to find the people, but if you do find the people, [00:09:00] again, he would not have to persuade as much.Unlikely voters have moved toward Trump after preferring ObamaSHEFFIELD: Now there were some other kind of interesting little splits when you looked at the numbers. So like women who were registered to vote in this sample, 32% of them said that they were in favor of Donald Trump. But only 11% said that they were in favor of Biden. But it was split evenly basically among men who were registered.But then by contrast, among unregistered men, they were much more likely to go to Trump. Whereas that dichotomy didn't exist so much for women who were unregistered.So these are small sample sizes though. So I don't know how much we can delve into it. But on the other hand, the disparity between these two different groups, is certainly higher than the margin of error, even for the smaller subsets. What's your take on all that is there anything to be gained from looking at these numbers?PALEOLOGOS: That's exactly the case. I mean, with smaller subsets, you're absolutely right. And your viewers should know that they take on a higher margin of error because they are [00:10:00] smaller sample sizes. So once you get to a subsample of 70, 80, 100 people, it's significantly higher margin of error than it is a subsample of 400 or 500.400 or 500 subsample, you're in the plus or minus. 4 percent range, or thereabouts 4, 4, 4 and a half percent range, but then when you get down to 100 subsample, you're plus or minus like 9%. So, yeah, I mean, you want to be careful looking at some of the subsets, but the common thread male or female registered or unregistered is a disappointment with both choices.I mean, to be fair, the polls generally show that a third-party candidate is the top choice, not Trump, not Biden. And in 2012, it was really all about a third-party candidate. And you've seen that not only in this poll, but in other polling data where people just don't want it to be a Trump-Biden matchup again.Whether [00:11:00] you're a Democrat, Republican, or independent voter or nonvoter, and you're seeing the same kind of dynamic here. Most people were opting for something else, a better choice than, than those. But if they had to choose between Biden or Trump. Trump was getting the plurality of support over Biden.And that speaks to a number of issues that are important to men and women registered or not registered. Be it the economy, immigration, parenting. You mentioned some of the female respondents for Trump. That's a big issue for a lot of people, independent as well, independent women. So a lot of these dynamics are in play here in 2023, as they were in the two previous surveys.The difficulty of determining a correct poll sample is harder with unlikely votersSHEFFIELD: Yeah, now with the sample, I mean, you had mentioned that it did take a lot longer to be in the field as the term goes in polling, how confident are you that this-- I mean, because statistically speaking, there is, there is the [00:12:00] concept of margin of error, but it's possible that the sample could be not quite accurate.I mean, like people have raised concerns about that with election polling that the percentage of people who answer the phone might be more inclined to have certain opinions or whatnot. And that's why the Pew Research Center and some others, and maybe you can talk about your own organization in that regard, has tried to make some adjustments to try to find people who might not be wanting to answer the phone or take a phone poll. I mean, let's maybe talk about methodology here, if we could.PALEOLOGOS: Yeah, sure. So for us, we wanted to go state by state and look at how many eligible voters didn't vote in the last two presidential elections. So we have real data on that. It's not subjective.We have data on how many vote-eligible adults in each state did not [00:13:00] vote. And what we did was we grouped those state by state into regions and made sure that those quotas reflected what the quotas reflected were actually for the last two presidential elections. So, in some states, obviously California has a lot of people who are transient, who are not registered.Some of them are just inhabitants. They're not legal citizens. Therefore they're not eligible. But we were only looking at people who were eligible to vote state by state that did not show historically high probability of voting. And you're right, it is tough to find those people, because people who are voters, people who take surveys, especially the super voters, the good voters, they're used to taking surveys. They're familiar with the question formats.People who aren't voters or who aren't registered. It's [00:14:00] really difficult, especially if you have a 15- to 20-minute study to keep them on the line and ask why they're not voting in many different ways or what would motivate them to vote. And it's very difficult to get all the way through to the end with respondents like that.So it does take a lot of time. It really is expensive when you're doing live calling. But one thing you asked about confidence. The one thing for sure is that we feel quite confident that the people that we reported in the survey were not voting, said to us that they were not voting either because they weren't registered or that they were not voting because they were done with the political system as it were.Some people could be motivated to vote and that's kind of what we talked about earlier. And the onus is on the campaigns to find those [00:15:00] people who might be on the fence who might be telling us in a survey. Yes, I'm registered, but no, I'm not voting next year.Those people might be persuadable to vote. But at this point, polls being a snapshot in time at the time that we did the field, they were not voting next year.Non-voters seem to know less about politics than votersSHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right. Well, so let's get further into the tables here and we'll have a link in the show notes for people who want to check out the complete results. So this is a population overall that seems to not know as much about politics as regular voters. You have a question in here about who is the vice president, and 70 percent of the respondents correctly gave the name Kamala Harris or some semblance of her identifying her, who she was.[00:16:00] And that was probably, that was higher than when, when you asked this poll in 2018, it was around 50 percent said Mike Pence.Now they also they also, there were, there were some interesting breakdowns, I thought, with their, with their ideologies. When you go through and you asked them to sort of place themselves on the ideological spectrum, 32 percent said they were moderate, 18 percent said liberal, and 16 percent said conservative. How do those match up with the voter samples you guys conduct?PALEOLOGOS: Yeah, so it's more of a perfect Bell Curve, right, in term…

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Encore: Edward H. Miller on how Republicans became the John Birch Society party Oct 09, 2023

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Episode SummaryWilliam Faulkner’s line that “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” is certainly true in regards to today’s Republican Party, which, quite literally, is an outgrowth of a conspiracy revolution that began in the 1940s and fifties, and never really stopped.A key figure in the through-line of American reaction is Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, a conspiracy group that he founded in 1958, which still exists today.The John Birch Society has many interesting stories of its own. And we’ll discuss that in this episode, but Welch and his group are also important in their placement relative to other Republicans. And also how people outside the GOP responded to them, particularly Democratic and progressive elites.There’s a tendency among elite Democrats to think that the radicalization loop that the Republican Party has been stuck in is just somehow irrelevant, that people will automatically know that right-wing extremists are foolish and crazy, and so therefore, they don’t need to be countered. But as we’ve seen, this is a terrible error.Joining me for an in-depth discussion about all this is Edward H. Miller. He is a teaching professor at Northeastern University and the author of A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society and the Revolution of American Conservatism, which just recently came out. He’s also the author of Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy, which he published in 2015.(This episode of Theory of Change aired previously on December 10, 2021. The video of the conversation is also available.)TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, Ted.EDWARD H. MILLER: Oh, it’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me on your show.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, all right. So I guess before we get details of what we’re talking about here, tell us a little bit, how did you become interested in this material about right-wing extremism in 20th century America?MILLER: I attended Boston College for my PhD and I took a seminar with professor Seth Jacobs at Boston College. And it was a graduate seminar on from 1865 to the present, and I read Lisa McGirr’s book Suburban Warriors. It’s a classic, came out in 2001 and it explored the rise of the conservative movement and the suburban warriors of Southern California, looking at the grassroots and how they got involved initially in the early 1960s, and how they came to California and how they helped elect the Governor Reagan in 1966 and then pursued social issues throughout the seventies. And then finally supporting Reagan in 1980.They also were very much active in the (1964) Barry Goldwater campaign and having read, having read Suburban Warriors, I became interested in other epicenters of American conservatism. And I wondered if there were more. And she mentioned in her book that there were more in Atlanta which Kevin Kruse had explored in White Flight.And I came upon Dallas, Texas, and I looked at Dallas, Texas, and in very much the same way. I explored, I did a study of Dallas, Texas called Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy that took a look at the individuals, the grassroots figures, as well as the elites, who led a movement for conservatism, getting involved in the Goldwater campaign, getting involved in the Reagan campaign in the 1980s, as well as 1976 when he ran against Gerald Ford for the nomination.So it was a great moment in my career to discover a topic that I became really fascinated with. And then the rest is history.I started to pursue that topic. And I had an advisor at the time who mentioned, instead of Dallas, instead of heading all the way down to Dallas to do your dissertation, why don’t you study the John Birch Society?And I said well, I’m not really, I’m not really sure I know enough about the John Birch Society. I looked at the archives at Brown University where they’re located. And at the time, I thought it was an organization that was not as important as it is. And I thought it would be an outlier and it would not help my professional career, to be honest, to study that.But I continued to heed his wisdom and pursued that as my next book. I’m looking at Robert Welch and I became interested in biography.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. So the John Birch Society, I think you’re right that a lot of people haven’t heard about them. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. One of them being that sort of Republican elites tried to take attention away from them. And we’ll get into that. But it also kind of fits within this larger tendency among sort of centrist pundits, or, liberal, conventional, liberal professors to think that, right-wing extremism is just the fringe of the fringe. It’s not relevant to anything. And nobody cares about what they think. And this is a tendency that’s, unfortunately, very consistent in American history. And we keep seeing that over and over again.Even in terms of the history of American conservatism, writing it, for a long time, the only people who wrote about this movement that came along and literally took over a political party were the people who agreed with it. And there were no academics just writing a neutral history. There were a handful of progressive historians that were writing about it. Otherwise, it was just not something that historians were interested.They wanted to have the 50,000th book about Adolf Hitler and World War II. Because of course we need more of those, right? But something that happened in your own country, a party getting taken over by crazy people, ‘well, that’s not interesting.’ Would you agree that people kind of did that in historian academic world?MILLER: No, I think it’s absolutely true. The conservative movement, the narrative of the conservative movement was shaped significantly by one of its most important inventors, William F. Buckley, who was a prolific writer and there’s the phrase, “If you write the history, that’s how it’s remembered.” And he, that’s what he did.He continued to write a lot about the history, not in a monograph form, but in essays and articles. And he was very much a gatekeeper of American conservatism. And him and other folks like George Nash who explored the intellectual history of American conservatism, determined that there were three strands of American conservatism. An anticommunist strand, a traditionalist strand, as well as a libertarian strand.And both of those folks were very instrumental in determining what historians looked at. And so, a famous historian said in, I think it was the early 1990s, he said, ‘Well, how come we don’t have any books on American conservatism?’And there it began. And we started to see a plethora of historians exploring American conservatism, starting of course, with the McGirr book, which is probably the most famous.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then of course we got Rick Pearlstein who has done a number of interesting books. But even once he got started, I still think there was this tendency of, you could just kind of ignore and only I would say, really in the the 2000s did things really get started in the academic world to try to look at this stuff.And there’s just so much material that really hasn’t been written about. And in your case with Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. And that ignorance, despite all these many great volumes that have come out, you still have David Brooks– the New York Times columnist, who now says he’s a moderate Democrat– he wrote a column this week that came out in which he lumped Dwight Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater and said that they were in the same tradition. Even though the entire point of the Barry Goldwater political career was that Dwight Eisenhower was, if not a commie, a sympathizer and a liberal.MILLER: Yeah, just to give you a rundown about their ideological background, Dwight Eisenhower expanded Social Security, he expanded education, he passed a scientific bill that would add more engineers in the United States. He built the interstate highway system.Goldwater, he wanted to take all those things apart. He he wanted to decrease the size of the government and introduce less regulation. He spoke of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.And there were five times in 1954 that Dwight Eisenhower refused to use nuclear weapons, despite the fact that his Joint Chiefs of Staff and his vice-president were encouraging it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yep.MILLER: So there’s a dramatic difference.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. There’s this tendency, I think for a lot of elite centrists or liberals that the only Republicans that they know are well-groomed articulate people like David Brooks or like William F. Buckley and so, to their minds, they don’t think that these people could have any radical ideas because: ‘Well, look, they know how to use a salad fork. They eat soup with a spoon.’They keep doing it. Like they did this with David Duke when he was a young activist, ‘I’m against the KKK. I’m a former KKK member, but then look, I can wear a suit and I look nice on TV.” And they were putting him out there all the time.And then they did this with successive far-right figures over the decades. And more recently with some of these alt-right people. I remember there was this Mother Jones story, which I think will live in infamy in which the lead of the story was about how this white nationalist, he knew how to use chopsticks to eat togarashi tuna. And that was the lead of the story!MILLER: Their culinary habits may have been different, but their statements weren’t obviously different. William F. Buckley said that the white race was the advanced race in a National Review article. And that would be something that would be abhorrent today. He argued that he was for paving over voting rights rather than opening them up. So he was very open to this idea of limiting democracy. There was also other statements he said that the 14th and 15th amendment were inorganic accretions to the Constitution. Those are important amendments that provided voting rights for African-Americans as well as equal rights to African-Americans, at least in theory.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then his first book, God and Man at Yale, was quite literally him urging Christian conservatives to cancel professors at Yale University. It was just this long litany of: ‘Professor So-and-So doesn’t believe in the resurrection, Professor So-and-So said this thing about John the Baptist , Professor So-and-So might be an atheist, Professor So-and-So is a communist.’Just this endless attempt to cancel people. And then at the same time, going around and saying that they are the oppressed ones. That’s just this consistent behavior, and Donald Trump, for all the terrible things he did, one thing he did was that he showed people that there is this tradition in Republican far right politics to, try to oppress everyone else, while saying that you are the victim.MILLER: Yeah, no, I agree. I think that it is at least given us an opportunity and we’re seeing that today, there are a number of studies that are coming out. John Huntington’s work, my work on Robert Welch, there are other historians who are exploring the far right, that are going to be on the shelves very soon.And also the global far right. We’re starting to combine what was going on around the world to what was going on in the United States. We’re starting to see it as a global movement. So I think that’s an important step we’re starting to see figures embrace what Kim Phillips-Fein called the “baroque strangeness” of American conservatism and the charlatans. And the quote losers, the people who we thought lost, ultimately have turned out to be the winners in politics.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That’s a great segue into talking about your book here. So, Robert Welch. Who was Robert Welch? The John Birch Society still exists today. So what is the John Birch Society and who was Robert Welch?MILLER: Robert Welch was born in North Carolina in 1899 was first a candy manufacturer and a very precocious individual. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at the age of 16. He actually started to attend there at age 12. And before a brief career in the news business, he decided to attend Harvard Law School, dropped out of Harvard Law School because he was unhappy with Felix Frankfurt’s political philosophy. And then became a very successful candy manufacturer. He created such childhood favorites is the Sugar Daddy, Junior Mints, the Sugar Babies. And there were other types of candies and he did very well in his own career. After that, his business failed due to the crash in 1929.And then he went to work for his brother. After many successful years, his brother was even better at business in the booming 1950s as he was in the 1920s, Welch decided to get involved in politics.He had, he always had a an interest in politics. He ran for lieutenant governor and lost, came in second for the Republican nomination in 1950. But what he did was, he started an organization called the John Birch Society, which was a far right organization that pursued free markets and single issue goals such as ending the career of Earl Warren, impeaching Earl Warren, prohibiting fluoride, getting the United States out of the UN.SHEFFIELD: So his first book, let’s talk about that, tell the audience about his first book is I think that’s another key to understanding him.MILLER: Yeah he was always interested in, he was an intellectual. He was very upset by the the firing of (Gen. Douglas) MacArthur by Truman. And he wrote a book called May God Forgive Us.And this book posited that it was Stalin, not Truman, who fired MacArthur. It was a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy of the State Department to lose the Korean War. And it was a conspiracy among the State Department to lose China. This is really a book about China. He is a member of a group that is fascinated with China and Formosa [Taiwan].SHEFFIELD: And that idea, sort of has come back again, this obsession with China now.MILLER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And that’s one thing I do want to emphasize to people in this episode is that so many of the ideas of Robert Welch, of his conspiracy theories, his targets of his theories, just the general ideas of them, like the fluoride, that was the precursor to being concerned about vaccines that we see today. And the obsession with communists and now we’re seeing that with critical race theory and antifa obsessions.Basically, I think the easy way to understand the career of Robert Welch is that he was a proto-Alex Jones in a lot of ways, but a smarter version of him. Would you say that’s an accurate summation of him ?MILLER: I think that, if you take a look at the styles that Alex Jones has, Robert Welch is not, does not have that animated, pumped up style. Robert Welch would drone on about that the fluoride is going to get into your system and it’s going to enervate the vigor of the American public. And we’re going to turn to communism and that we’re on a slippery slope to losing the sovereignty of the United States, but he would do so in a way that was not that is not as histrionic. That’s not as dramatic. If you look at his films, they are a lot more calm, and he would present himself in a way that– it was just a different style than Alex Jones. He wouldn’t be dressed up in a frog suit.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess I should clarify, not in terms of their personal style, but in terms of their entrepreneurship, their conspiracy factories. Alex Jones has made multiple films, so did Robert Welch. They both made multiple films. They both had multiple publications. And they both were actively, constantly trying to get into Republican politics and align themselves with candidates. Alex Jones was Ron Paul, he was endlessly flacking for him for decades before he started working for Donald TrumpMILLER: I’ll use a line from The Wire. ‘Everything has to fit together in the mind of Robert Welch, everything kind of connects.’ And this connects to that. He…

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The forgotten history of how right-wing college students invented 'cancel culture' Oct 02, 2023

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Episode SummaryWhile it’s easy to believe that Donald Trump unleashed the radical forces that threaten American democracy today, the truth is that they have been present within our system for more than 50 years. And in many cases, some of the same people like Roger Stone or Karl Rove who were active on the student right in the 1960s and 1970s are still active today.Although the mid-20th century is known as a time of left-wing activism and political change, the time period was also when today’s far-right began coalescing as well—and in a much more professionalized fashion that has managed to outlast many of their institutional former rivals on the left.There are many areas where this trend can be observed, but one of the easiest to see is in the constant discussion about the term “cancel culture” in mainstream political discourse. The phrase has been repeated so often that it means almost nothing to most people, but it does seem to have a vague meaning when used by Republicans to imply that they are the victims of some sort of censorship and persecution campaign.But in truth, the history of political cancellations really got started by the right wing. It's a history that is important to note and to discuss, especially because not only did reactionary college students invent the entire concept of getting people fired or reprimanded for their political opinions, they invented many of the tools of political consulting along the way as they battled the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements.Joining in this episode to talk about all this is Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. She is the author of a new book that is coming out called Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America.Due to some production difficulties, you may notice occasional glitches in the audio of this episode. The video of the conversation is available. Continue scrolling for audio time code chapters and an auto-generated transcript of the audio.Audio Chapters02:50 — While the left grew dramatically during the 1960s, so did the far right07:53 — How far-right activists practically invented political consulting despite getting little attention from historians15:39 — Reactionaries have been building fake student groups for 60 years20:45 — How right-wing activists then and now use student athletes to build control on campus30:07 — Today's far-right isn't conservative, and its creators didn't call themselves conservative37:55 — How libertarianism provided rhetorical cover through "fusionism" to the Christian right47:47 — More on fake student groups54:56 — How right-wing students in the 1960s teamed up with campus police57:31 — Reactionaries invented getting people fired for political views, but they falsely blame the left for it01:02:32 — Left-wing groups and donors spend almost nothing compared to right-wing youth groups01:13:28 — Many of today's far-right actors have been operating continuously since the 1970sAudio TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It's really great to have you here today, Lauren.LAUREN LASAABE SHEPHERD: Thanks, yeah, thank you for, thank you for the invitation.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Alright, so let's start with kind of a synopsis of your book is covering what time period is it covering here that, in your focus here?SHEPHERD: A very short period, just three years, 1967 to 1970.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. And why those particular three years?SHEPHERD: So, so the book is about, I guess it's easier to understand what the book is is about. So, I'm writing about the campus wars, so American higher education in the 1960s. And there's sort of this [00:03:00] misconception when people think of college campuses in the sixties that, they're radical hotbeds of activism and progressivism. We think of the anti-war movement. We think of the black power movement as it developed on college campuses. We think of Berkeley in 1964.So that's kind of the common understanding of what's going on in American higher ed in those years. But my book pushes back on that and says, yes, it's true. All of those things are of course there, but there's also a smaller group of students on the right, but even though they're smaller, they have sort of an outsized importance in the way that these campus wars develop.So, typically, we understand the war as being between left wing students, especially students associated with the new left and organizations like students for democratic society, or the student nonviolent coordinating committee SNCC and. What I'm suggesting is that the war is [00:04:00] actually a little bit more between students on the right and students on the left.So, yeah, so 1967 to 1970 is the question of why these are the years that I cover is because this is like the intensity, this is when the battles seem to be most consequential and certainly most dramatic. And so there's in terms of the narrative, it's just more interesting to look at those 3 years.This is the height of the Vietnam war. This is when the black power movement really starts to take shape. And we see a movement, at least among civil rights organizers, to step away from, this long tradition of nonviolence and to become a little bit more radical, a little bit more militant.And so I'm looking at how students on the right really push back against that.SHEFFIELD: And so, in this time period, it's, it is critical as a, sort of a formation for later decades in politics that came afterward. But I guess, to understand it fully, we have to maybe rewind it a little bit even [00:05:00] further to before your time period, especially to understand the figures that are involved here.So as you noted the 1960s were a big organizing and foundational period for American reactionary politics. And there were several people who were involved in creating different organizations and groups. Why don't you discuss some of those people in the groups that they had founded, please?SHEPHERD: Sure. Okay. So, some of the former students of the 60s whose names we might recognize today include people who have been very, very active in politics on the right. So, people like Newt Gingrich, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, David Duke, Pat Buchanan. Who am I missing out? David Keene, who is a one-time president of the National Rifle Association. Karl Rove. Gosh, I can't believe I forgot Karl Rove.So these names are, if you're familiar with more like late 20th century, American political history, we recognize [00:06:00] them as either activists or politicians some of whom have run for president or have held high office. Dan Quayle, for example, was a member of Young Americans for Freedom. And I'm sure we'll talk a lot about YAF today. He eventually went on to become the vice president of the United States.And of course, Sessions and Barr both have been American attorneys general. So, yeah. I introduced them to you as 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds before their national careers really took shape. They were still political activists. They were just college students really cutting their teeth for the first time in learning about what it means to be an activist or what it means to be an intellectual on the right.Or what it means to be a partisan. For example I can start with Karl Rove, if you like. Rove was extremely important and the College Republicans at the time, and he actually did not even graduate from college. He went to school in Utah, before his senior year, he dropped out [00:07:00] to work full time for the GOP.So College Republicans and YAF, other groups that, that we can talk about today, ISI is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It's the intellectual group for students on the right. They're all feeder organizations. And so through these organizations, the students learn the skills that they'll use for the rest of their personal and political lives.And I use them as examples, but the story is about American higher ed entirely. As policy and precedent, the legislation that these men, and they were mostly men, shape and design that affects higher ed.I mean, it's again, this is not just a personal story about them. It's something that affects all college students and faculty and alum and administrators. I mean, they've had quite a wide reach, and maybe they don't get enough credit for that for better or for worse.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.How far-right activists practically invented political consulting despite getting little attention from historiansSHEFFIELD: I think you're definitely right that people tend to, some of these 501c3 [00:08:00] organizations, they don't get a lot of press coverage or even historian discussion too much. And it is unfortunate as an analytical point, because these people basically invented political consulting. I mean, the way that it's currently known.SHEPHERD: Their style. Absolutely. Yes.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And created the idea of the permanent campaign, the permanent interest political interest group, like these things did not really, I mean, you could argue that there were, like some special case organizations. So like, the NAACP, for instance obviously, is a very, one of the earliest ones.But these were organizations for people who were not oppressed and trying to attain the same rights as everybody else. They were people who were solely dedicated to influencing policies and electing people.And it was just not a thing until these guys invented it. Why do you think they don't get as much attention, these organizations?SHEPHERD: Oh, [00:09:00] well, they do get a lot of attention. I think they just, the starting points maybe are less familiar to people. So yeah, if you'd like, we can talk about those individual groups and their functions. So, you mentioned these 501c3s, that's what many of them are, especially I. S. I. It's a nonprofit. And that nonprofit model, that educational model allows right wing benefactors ideologues to donate to it tax exempt. And then that money trickles down to students in classrooms.One of the one of the bigger projects Of, so I need to move back even a little bit further. The larger post war conservative movement as it's developing across the country, the story that I'm telling this is the campus-based version of it. So many of the people that I talk about, so like Rove or Sessions all of the others, they're influenced by elders in that conservative movement.So, like the William F. Buckleys, the Marvin Liebmans, the Richard Vigueries, other writers at conservative magazines, so [00:10:00] not just National Review, but also magazines like Modern Age and Human Events and Commentary, and a list of others. So the 501 C3 model really helps those older mentors recruit donors, people who can write big checks. And of course, you don't even need many of them, depending on how large the check is. And you can put that money inside these little shell organizations, and then go on to give that money to the students to help them stay on the college campus. So one of the big projects of ISI was literally investing in individual students to make sure that they go through graduate school, that they become lawyers or they become academics themselves and they stay in higher ed. It's this whole concept of balancing the academy. That's the terminology that they used and the idea is to like, let's start with Buckley. Buckley's big criticism of the academy is that it's too less left wing.It's too socialist. It's hostile to Christians. And so what, it's [00:11:00] what Buckley has in mind when he founds Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 is he'll create an activist organization on the right to counterbalance other groups like the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. So we've got ISI that does that. We have YAF that does that.And then of course we can't credit Buckley or even the post war right with College Republicans, because that's an organization that existed before. But certainly, YAF and ISI had a lot of influence on College Republicans in the 1960s. And then we'll drive it further to the right beyond that time.So, yeah, so those are the organizations, and we talked about them being a training ground just a second ago. Groups like YAF have an age cap, right? You age out of it at 30 years old. So once you've finished college and then even if you decide to go on to graduate school, once you finish that.You can't be a member anymore, but there is the next step and that is the American Conservative Union, the ACU, which we do know more about today. That's [00:12:00] probably known among your listeners. And also the national political, sorry, CPAC. We don't call it national anymore, but CPAC is still like a large.Right wing organization that works for right wing causes. So, even to bring it back to the college campuses college campus, these smaller groups, they all have their own purpose. So, right? We've said, I've said multiple times that is like the intellectual organization that train students to stay in the academy and influence higher ed from some intellectual.Direct in some intellectual direction. YAF is really more partisan or more ideological. So, they're willing to work across the aisle, right? So more nonpartisan, I should say. They're willing to work with say Southern Democrats, right? There were plenty of Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond who were on YAF's board at the time.And then the other organization, College Republicans is the partisan organization. So it's not. As [00:13:00] ideological as YAF, it certainly doesn't have as many of the YAF fire brands. So like we, I use Karl Rove as an example of a college Republican. If you want a good example of a YAFer, that would be someone like Pat Buchanan the presidential, the failed presidential candidate in the late eighties and nineties.But nevertheless, Buchanan still had a long career in Washington and along influence on the right, an outsized influence for sure. So yeah, these groups, they serve their individual functions, but they all work together too. And that's actually, the working together is a thing that doesn't really even develop until about 1968.So, my book is divided into two parts. And in the first part I explain what these groups do, who funds them, who the members are the demographics of the different organizations purposes. But I also talk about the antagonisms between them. So kind of an interesting feature of all these groups, since they have different purposes, they don't their goals don't always align.[00:14:00]So. We know today your viewers may be familiar with different, like, ideological camps on the right, like, traditionalists or libertarians. The, all of those differences were still there. So, there were antagonisms between the groups that prevented them from working together, and they were already such a small force.Anyway, that being divided was not helpful. It was not helping them. Conquer the campus left in the way that they would have liked. So after 1968, after the spring demonstrations at Columbia, and we can talk about those if you like the elders, the Buckley's and others on national board. Sort of got the students all together and said, like, look, we there's strength in numbers since we literally can't agree on anything that has to do with like politics or ideology.Why don't we just find the least common denominator among all of us? And that is we all hate the left, right? We all hate SDS. We all hate the black power movement on campus and the strikers and the sit ins and the peace Knicks and the hippies and the marijuana [00:15:00] smokers. So let's just. Let's just channel all of that energy, all that negative energy towards stopping them.And so one of the larger theses i…

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Ex-Republican activist discusses how he went from Nader voter to Trump backer Sep 25, 2023

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SummaryDonald Trump has been the dominant figure in Republican politics for nearly 8 years now, and yet if you read the opinion columns in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Atlantic, the disgraced ex-president is on the verge of being shoved out of the Republican Party.None of this is true, however. Despite constant hype from anti-Trump supporters of Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor’s presidential campaign has completely failed to launch. No matter what Washington-based Republican consultants want to believe, their party is over. The MAGA side has control of the Republican party.Accepting that has proven difficult for a lot of people, and it’s why trying to figure out how to defeat far-right extremism in the Republican Party has not really yet begun.As part of our ongoing “Why I Left” series, I’m joined today by Rich Logis, he’s the founder of “Perfect Our Union” and also a former Republican activist.You can watch the video of this episode here.Automated Audio TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: As part of our ongoing, Why I Left series, I'm joined today by Rich Logis. He is the founder of Perfect Hour Union and also a former Republican activist.And we're going to be talking about all this and, why are so many people reluctant to accept the full truth about the Republican party, but before we do let's get into your own experience, Rich. Tell us about [00:03:00] your time as a Republican activist.RICH LOGIS: Well, first off, thank you, Matt. Really appreciate it to be here. Thank you for doing this show, Theory of Change. I'm confident that there are actually many more of us out there than we might realize. And my start in the MAGA world actually I have to go back all the way to the year 2000.I was living in New York. I was 23 years old and I was very much a Ralph Nader voter. And supported him. And the reason I actually supported him first and foremost, more than any other reason, was because I figured out pretty quickly on that the two parties both disliked him. And even though the Democrats were more opposed to him, it seemed that both parties saw him as a threat and disliked him.And so when I realized that it was very easy to support him. And I voted for him a few other times throughout the years. Now that was 23 years ago. Now, fast forward [00:04:00] all the way to 2015. And something I figured out pretty quickly about Trump, and I'm not going to say I was one of these guys who supported him as soon as he came down the elevator.That's not true, but I did support him pretty early on. And the primary reason I supported him is actually the same reason I supported Nader. It's because I figured out that both parties were against him. And so more and more, I just very quickly and easily started to come to A lot of the political campaign rhetoric that Trump was espousing namely, but not limited to this could be America's last free election Hillary Clinton and the democratic party were existential threats to our country.I very quickly bought into that and we'll get into, I think some of the reasons why that happens to many people and why it happened to [00:05:00] myself. But once I got very full into my support. Even when I would hear him make statements, even when I would hear him present policy ideas, as much as I sometimes may have wondered and raised an eyebrow wondering what it was that he was actually getting at or trying to say, it, it didn't ultimately matter because.I saw the 2016 election as the, the pinnacle and the realization that I thought the democratic party was after, which was to win power at the presidency and never ever lose again. So I, I call it, I call MAGA and what has happened with the Republican party politically what their product is, is a product of political trauma.Now I was in that world starting in 2015. I very much ardently supported Trump even [00:06:00] going, not only in 2016, but going into 2020, even though, even though I knew that his handling, even then of the pandemic I knew was very indifferent to the death and the illness that we were seeing all around us, but it didn't, it didn't ultimately again matter because I view 2020 just like I did 2016, another year.This could be the last free election. Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton, the Democrats with Biden, another existential threat, we had to do whatever was necessary to stop them. So I wound up staying in the Republican world until about the mid midway point of 2021. So that, that gives me about six years as an activist.Now, it's very common to hear people say, Oh, I was a Republican for 30 years. I was a Goldwater adherent. I was a, I was a Reagan conservative. I was in George H. W. Bush [00:07:00] conservative. That was not my life, actually. I was very anti the two party system. It's why I supported Nader. It's why I came to support Trump, even though he was running under a major party.And so once I left that world in the summer. 21 which i'll get into some of the specific reasons why Yes, I was only an activist for six years, but i'm going to tell you matt that those six years I was so active. I was around so many other MAGA voters and activists that it probably was really more of the equivalent of 10 to 15 years of activism given just how Devout I was to the, to the MAGA world and something that is very underestimated and I think we'll get into this as well is even though it is a, a world, a reality that is dramatic and paranoid and really just rife with hysteria, MAGA does [00:08:00] provide a community and I think people do inherently yearn for wanting to it.To be in civic communal environments. And MAGA did do that. I think you see that really at the, at the rallies in particular, there is, we might say it's cult like and make the jokes about Jonestown and Jim Jones. The flip side with the flip side with the MAGA world is that people do feel like they're in a community and they feel like they're around like minded people and very much it's, it's a, it's a MAGA safe space. It's where people feel like they can be themselves and they can, they can share in all of the existential enemies that they're all working together in tandem to defeat in this political, and for many of Then this holy war, spiritual war that we are engaged in.So if you, if you think about this, [00:09:00] Matt, if you step back for a moment and think about political trauma and paranoia and hysteria and the opposing party is not just wrong on policy. They're just not wrong on ideology. They are bona fide enemies of the country and of the Republican conservative way of life.If, if, if someone thinks that they will support anyone. Or anything. And that's a, that is a point, you mentioned the press at the outset. I was a former journalist many years ago. I was not someone who covered local or excuse me who covered national politics, but I was a local reporter. And so I don't think I've ever really lost the that that part of the journalist side of me, even though it was probably suspended for those six years that I was in the MAGA world.But to address that point, because it's one we've talked about a lot, I've I've published stories, which are at my site, perfect. Our union. us,Why the mainstream media is so delusional about "saving" the Republican partyLOGIS: I wrote a piece [00:10:00] for salon in which I said that the mainstream national media, the centrist center left press, New York times, Washington post, the Atlantic. They have this well intended but delusional yearning to save the Republican Party, that, that there's going to be some, there's going to be some political savior who's going to come in and save us from Trump and is going to restore the Republican Party back to this era of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, and Thank you.I, I have a sense of why they do it. I think that the press and part of it, to be fair about this point, part of it is that most, most of those in the national press have not lived a MAGA existence. I have. So when they're looking at Trump and what's happened in the Republican party, they are looking at it from more in an abstract point of view.They're really into intellectualizing. And they look at wanting [00:11:00] to save the Republican party because they feel like it's their journalistic duty to try to to, to ensure that we have a, a relatively healthy two party system and that, and that somehow we're going to, enough, enough Republicans are going to, are going to awaken from this MAGA slumber.And they're going to say enough. And I think that what the indictments have shown all of them. The New York, the federal to federal in Georgia. My view is that these only strengthen him and I and while I am a little bit low to prognosticate, I would be much, much more surprised if he is not the nominee than if he is for next year.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Me, yeah, me too. And in terms of these non Republicans that, are, believe the Republican party is going to sort of organically dethrone Trump I think, I think for a lot of people who have that viewpoint, it [00:12:00] seems like, because for them, the Republicans that they know, so, like Uh, having formerly been a DC based Republican political consultant.In my, I was not religious. I was yeah, I supported same sex marriage. I supported abortion rights. I was, I did not like the Christian right. So like, if you were a journalist covering politics, like people had no problem dealing with me and talking to me about things.And, I think for some of them, they really thought that people like how I used to be were in control of the Republican party, that that's who was the. the base of the party. And, and it's just not true in most of the places. Now it is, it is the case that there are, still even now a pretty large number of people who vote Republican kind of habitually or, they, they just are like, well, I, I like low taxes and low regulation.And I [00:13:00] don't. I don't believe in this Christian fundamentalist stuff. So I just ignore it and those people are not relevant to me. And so, that's how they rationalize things and they don't really pay attention to politics. The extent they might pay attention to anything political is listen to Joe Rogan.And that's it like for, they don't watch cable news. They don't watch Fox. All of that is just. nonsense in their opinion. And so they don't really have an idea over what's happening in the party and who's controlling it, I think. So like that's kind of the, in my view, how the, these non MAGA Republicans and the, non Republican journalists, that's, I think that's how they're, they're kind of seeing things to some degree.I don't know, tell me what you think.LOGIS: I, I think that also this point on the, with the, with the press in particular, that it does seem to me it's relatively obvious to me that from column to column and op ed to op ed that [00:14:00] most, I don't think many in the press realize that the vast, vast majority of American voters, to your point, are actually not political and because they're not political, They're not consuming all of the news that we do.They're not, they don't know all of the names that we do. They're not aware of a lot of the conspiracies that have permeated all across MAGA and are, whether it's overtly or silence is content that are accepted and supported. By the actual Republican party apparatus. It's to your point, they may, they may have voted.I was, they were a Ronald Reagan voter and then they were a Bush voter and they're not, they're not maybe extreme partisans, but their voting habits are to typically just vote are down the, down the ballot. And they're Democrats like that too. We know that there are there, those are generally the people come out.And I always voted in the primary when I was in the, in the [00:15:00] MAGA Republican world, because we felt an obligation to ensure that we got the best candidate to, to stop this, this whomever it was on the democratic side was, was a threat to us. It didn't matter. The other person's policy didn't matter about the person's character.Didn't matter about the Democrat. Kennedy integrity, whether they were an incumbent or not, it just was, they're part of the enemy party. We have to do whatever we have to do to stop them and we'll nominate the person we think is best to defeat them. And so we do, we do forget, and I'm not saying we, you and I necessarily, but collectively, it is easily forgotten that most people aren't political.Now, those types of Republicans you're mentioning, something that I've written about, and I will continue to, to argue this point is that throughout our history, And there are numerous examples, whether it's the American Revolution, whether it's the abolitionist movement, whether the Civil War itself, when Abe Lincoln sides with the Union against [00:16:00] other Americans at the, within the Confederacy, they were still Americans, but they were still, Abe Lincoln still sided against them to try to win this war and preserve the Union, whether it was the United States aligning with the Soviet Union in World War II, Republicans aligning with Lyndon B.Johnson. There's other examples. Like. I could cite but with all of those examples, what underlines all of them and what ties them together inextricably is that they were very, they were very much what we saw historically were unlikely, but necessary alliances, and those Republicans who, who, who, If they, if they're not really aware, it's not such an easy task to make them aware, but I don't think that they're motivated by policy.I don't think they're necessarily motivated by ideology, but if there's one topic that I do think the midterm show that even nonpolitical, [00:17:00] apolitical voters can get motivated over. It is democracy. It is democratic institutions and those republicans who may not be partisans, they, they have to be invited into the fold and welcomed to, to maybe side with those whom they might disagree with on policy to policy.But this moment in history, I think, demands that these unlikely but necessary alliances really be formed. And I would, that's the kind of topic that I would like to see in the columns and the op eds of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Atlantic and some other sites and publications that maybe are similar.And we don't really see a lot of that. I think if the press spent the next year plus talking about how history demands in this moment, these unlikely but necessary alliances to, to continue moving the country forward, to continue on building on the ideals of our founding, to continue the perfection of our [00:18:00] union, I think that topic can resonate with people.I think the midterm showed it. Typically the turnouts lower Democrats overall did very, very well in the midterms. It says to me that the topic of the perfection of the union, preserving democracy, strengthening democracy that can get through in the new and, and the major center centrist and center left press outlets can, can lead on that if they want to.But I just think there's still, they're still stuck in the mud a little bit. They're still stuck on neutral. They're, they're just, Oh, this is it. I could just, I just imagine, some of the editorial meetings saying, Oh, yeah. With this indictment in Georgia, this, this is, this is finally it.This is fine. This is the Charlie Brown Loosey moment. She's going to finally hold the football for him. He's going to kick it. And what they're going to discover, the…

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Fitness has always been political Sep 18, 2023

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Episode SummaryAs American conservatism is rotting out from the inside, it is slowly being replaced by both reactionism and fascism. It is a horrifying story to see, but there are also a lot of interesting things to notice as conservatism is decaying. One of those things that fascism is just as much an aesthetic as it is an ideology.While it's become much more radical and obsessed with imaginary stories of national doom, the American far right has also become dramatically more interested in fitness and on looking good as they define it, with an additional focus by many on ancient Greek and Roman people who are known for their statues and philosophy.That such a rapid interest in fitness would coincide with the political career of the obese ex-president Donald Trump is more than a little bit ironic. Nonetheless, some journalists and media outlets appear to be overstating the degree to which fitness may be associated with fascism.This episode's guest is Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. She is the author of a new book called Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession and a previous one called Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture.The video version of this episode is available on YouTube.Audio Chapters02:26 — Today's classroom battles began in the 1960s08:11 — How Donald Trump supercharged the macho reactionary tradition12:37 — Fitness culture is cross-political and fascists are discovering their own athletic history18:22 — Wellness culture is far older than you think22:00 — Folk medicine, religious fundamentalism, and skepticism of doctors25:58 — Homoeroticism and the fascistic aesthetic31:38 — Media sensationalism about fascist gym people38:44 — Right-wing activists using fitness and health advice to radicalize teen boysAutomated TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Natalia.NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: Thanks for having me. Glad to take this conversation from Twitter to the screen. So glad to be here.SHEFFIELD: That's right. Yes. Cool. All right. Well, so, you have written two books. Fit Nation is your second book. Your first one is very relevant to the present moment as well. So let's maybe talk about the first one and before we get into today's subject as well.PETRZELA: Sure. So my first book was Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture. And it's one of these things, I guess, that I should be very grateful for where it came out in 2015. And honestly, my choice of topic, which was connecting curricular battles over race and sex at the time, people [00:03:00] were like, wait, why are you connecting these things? And now, as we see these battles over CRT and so-called gender ideology flaring up everywhere, now I'm like doing media for that book again. So I'm sorry that the political culture has taken that turn, but I was glad to have done a decade of historical research to help understand its origins.SHEFFIELD: And for people who may not have heard the term gender ideology, what does that mean?PETRZELA: Yeah, so that's a term and I say it sort of with air quotes that the right uses right now to talk about what they consider to be the kind of imposition of an ideological perspective on gender and what they define that as is this notion that gender is socially constructed, that the binary of maleness and femaleness is not real, that children can choose different gender identities, and then a close kind of addendum to that is that parents don't have a right to know [00:04:00] about to know or to dictate their children's gender.And I think a big part of it is also the notion that gender is disconnected from sex, from biological sex. So they, they say that that constitutes gender ideology and that is being imposed on children at schools often without the knowledge or against the will of their parents. And that is a very powerful talking point right now.SHEFFIELD: It is. Yeah. Yeah. And especially in regard to transgender people as well that, that you see a lot of people particularly predominantly, but not exclusively on the, on the Christian right who have, they have really, really believe that this is a religion an alternative religion that is trying to establish itself.And they speak of it as such.PETRZELA: Yeah. And that actually, the real historical origins there, like my book, I'm a historian and I was talking about the sixties and the seventies and a little bit, the 1980s. Similar moment to today, but obviously different issues. Nobody was talking about [00:05:00] transgender rights back then, but they were talking about this kind of new liberal or progressive approach talking about sexuality with kids as itself a religion.And they called it secular humanism. And what you heard all the time was that the secular humanists have this new religion and it's softening kids up for communist takeover basically. And they're using sex to do that. And so, I guess jumping right into the somewhat salacious content here, but something that you would hear all the time was that sex education is kind of priming kids to let go of any kind of sense that this is inappropriate, or this is immoral or this is private. It has kids kind of talking about and indulging in their desires, and this will allow children to basically be so caught up in like a frenzy of sexual ecstasy or distraction that they are ripe for being taken over by communists because, there are loyalties have kind of been taken away from their family and from, [00:06:00] from God and country and family, really.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and they kind of, and, and that conspiracy theory kind of, I mean, it, it circulated somewhat widely on the political right, certainly within the John Birch Society, especially and that was one of the focuses of your book. Book as well. Because the John Bridge Society was founded out here in California, where I live, Southern California.And really had, a huge amount of success out here. And in a lot of different ways, I mean, it's, I, the, and when we were talking a little bit before the show about how. The, the, the historiography of, of the American right tended to be mostly focusing on kind of these New York Manhattan nights, like William F.Buckley, right? And the reality was that Buckley and his friends. just figureheads. They were people that were marching ahead of the parade and pretending to lead it.PETRZELA: Right. And they also, I mean, a book like Buckley's God and Man at Yale, right? [00:07:00] That is a very particular kind of conservative intellectual tradition, like the John Birch society.And some of these folks that I'm talking about who are organizing in churches and coffee clutches, they're circulating like these. pamphlets. Is the schoolhouse the place to teach raw sex? This is not emanating from a kind of, I don't know, elite intellectual culture at all. It's really a kind of much more grassroots effort.And it's one, yeah, that the historical tradition, the historical profession had largely ignored. So as we were saying before, 2002. And in response, in some part to this 1994, I think, essay that Alan Brinkley had written in the American Historical Review where he said we need to pay attention to his two conservatives.There was just this raft of new literature that was looking at grassroots conservatism. I kind of came into college, by the way, I grew up in a very liberal place. So to me, like conservatism was this, like, have I ever met one kind of thing? I'm not proud of my parochialism, but there really [00:08:00] was a lot of intellectual interest, including my own in understanding this phenomenon better.And there wasn't really much work at all done on schools. And so that's kind of how I got interested in this as a dissertation topic at that time.How Donald Trump supercharged the macho reactionary traditionSHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and you, and your current book I think also you, you took the that you, you got ahead of the crowd as well, once again. So congratulations on that FITNATION and now, especially I think with Donald Trump, the, the rise of Donald Trump, it, it kind of reoriented the American right away from this sort of anti-government, we're going to limit the government, that we're going to obsess over economics and, and things like that. And, and Trump with his just flagrantly anti-intellectual and, Mussolini-esque mien, it, it made them, a lot of their people decide that well, maybe, maybe We were wrong to focus on that. And our voters don't really like that.PETRZELA: Right. And there's more of this embodied kind of like red blooded version of, of [00:09:00] conservatism. That's what you're talking about. Right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so like for Trump, like he doesn't have a coherent ideology really, he's doesn't have a consistent viewpoint of taxes, he's promised five or six different versions of healthcare, including saying that Canada's and the UK's healthcare systems are great. And the, and the national health service, socialist healthcare in the UK is great according to Trump, but then Obamacare is bad.PETRZELA: Yeah. No, I think that that's right. And so that, as you're saying, created this reorientation.And so, the reason that I came on here and that you and I were talking on Twitter is because there has been this kind of raft of, I think, deserved attention to this phenomenon that there's all this kind of like fitness culture activity, which is coded very right wing, right? This kind of building muscularity and brawn and cultivating pure bodies and kind of elevating an ideology of [00:10:00] unsparing individualism through the gym. And I do agree with you that the Trump, the Trumpian rupture has something to do to with the rise of that kind of conservatism at the same time. It is so funny that Donald Trump would have. anything to do with the resurgence of any kind of fitness, anything, because one of the things that was remarkable about him is that unlike any of his modern predecessors on the right or on the left, he hates exercise.Like you have George Bush, you have Clinton, you have Obama, you have all of these presidents across the aisle who, are constantly saying oh, look at me jogging, or I like to lift weights, or Reagan is posing on a Nautilus machine at the gym. It's uncontroversial because everybody in America thinks exercise is good for you and believes in some way that someone who exercises is disciplined and has their head on straight.Trump breaks with all of that, and he embraces a much older kind of Version of what like a [00:11:00] powerful leader should look like he actually espouses this kind of 19th century idea about energy bodily energy where he's like, you're only born with basically like a battery and like, why would you use any of that energy exercising every day?He'd say like, I have friends who do try out bonds. They're crazy. Like I would never waste my energy that way because he believed it was a finite amount and he and so he, he really derides all of that. He talks about, he's. Donnie two scoops or whatever with his double ice cream cones, his big red stakes, much more that image of the kind of fat cat as the power broker rather than the, jacked very capable kind of fit guy that you're seeing being promoted right now on shows like Rogan or otherwise.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah. No, it is. There, there is a tremendous irony. And, and I mean, that's, it's, I mean, that's the thing about Trump and his movement is that everything is a hypocrisy and irony simultaneously, like here you have a guy who's [00:12:00] talking about toughness and being strong and yet Constantly whining about everything.He cannot shut up about how people are unfair and mean to him and complaining aboutPETRZELA: them. I know. And it's funny though, that right now, he's in this pissing match with Chris Christie and what's his big insult for Christie, Chris Christie, like you're so fat, they like trade these things back and forth.Whereas that's never really been a problem in terms of what Donald Trump thinks is inappropriate. Figure for our leader to cut.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and certainly he's no statuesque figure himself. So, yeah, it's true.Fitness culture is cross-political, and fascists are discovering their own athletic historySHEFFIELD: So it's interesting though, that this kind of obsession with fitness, it isn't coming necessarily from the base, not coming from Trump himself, but it's, it's kind of the, this refashioning that's happened in the right-wing intelligentsia, such as it is, and that's really who's doing this. And I guess probably the biggest proponent of all this is [00:13:00] this guy who's been writing under the name Bronze Age pervert. And people who knew who. For quite a while. His name is Costin Al Maru, and I'm sure I'm saying that wrong.But he's I guess a Jewish Hungarian he got his PhD somewhere. I forget where it was. M.I.T.PETRZELA: M.I.T. And went to my high school.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.PETRZELA: I had no idea. How crazy is that?Yeah. Sorry if I--SHEFFIELD: You didn't know him though.PETRZELA: If I was outing that, that you were going to save that, but yeah, I was shocked.I read, I read that Atlantic article just because it's interesting. And I was really surprised to learn that I didn't know him. I think he's younger than I am, but not that much. We were there at the same time.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and what's interesting though, about this, this vibe that, I mean, he's really kind of just sort of a recycling of the aesthetic that people like Richard Spencer and some of these, alt right people, as they called themselves, were pushing earlier that this I mean, this idea that they're somehow the inheritors [00:14:00] and must be the defenders of the white race. And therefore they not only have to know the culture from which they came and take credit for, but they also have to defend it.And part of that includes apparently being physically fit.PETRZELA: I mean that tradition goes back a long way. Like I think that the current version of it that you see in some of these alt right, well, they're not really called all right anymore, but some of these like far right, exercise environments is much more kind of Marshall than the people in the early 20th century.One of the things I discovered in my research, like long before this was like on CNN, every era in the Atlantic. was that early enthusiasts of strength training and of exercise often presented it very much as this way to preserve the white race. Less we have to be strong to go to war. But what's interesting about what they were saying is they this was a time when nobody went to the gym.So they were kind of freak shows for spending this time [00:15:00] lifting weights and, kind of caring what they looked like and really suspicious. Like you must. And then gyms were horrible places. I mean, they wouldn't even count as gyms.SHEFFIELD: Filled with disease.PETRZELA: Yeah, like that. And they were considered to be places that gay men hung out.So also like really unsavory. And so these early enthusiasts, lucky for this historian here, had to like, really articulate well, why would you do this? Why would you lift weights? Like, why is this good? And so often what they talked about was strengthening the white race. Think that this is a time.When there's enormous immigration to the United States from Southern Eastern Europe and our kind of racial typology of that time saw those as inferior races, right? Semites and so forth. And enslavement had ended just a couple of decades before us. You also had all these free blacks.And you had the ex…

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How a former porn star is helping straight men understand intimacy and themselves Sep 11, 2023

Show notes

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We live in a world of unprecedented convenience. Many of us can do our jobs entirely remotely. We use our smartphones to do a million different things. Electric cars are commonplace. And you can pretty much get anything delivered in a matter of days, if not hours. There's no doubt that when it comes to commerce and communications, things have never been easier.

But outside of those areas, particularly when it comes to personal relationships, many people are finding modern day life to be anything but convenient. Some people have struggled with making friends or even realizing that they need them. And in many cases, the organizations that used to help us build relationships, like churches and community organizations, are no longer relevant to many [00:02:00] of us.

On the romantic side of things, modern day media, whether explicit or not, has enabled us to know what we find attractive in others, but there's absolutely no guarantee that we can get what we seek. Sure, dating websites and apps have made looking for that special someone easier than ever before, but actually finding relationships that are lasting and meaningful is often very difficult.

I hope you've enjoyed the previous two episodes in this miniseries, and I'm pleased to wrap it up with a conversation featuring Nyomi Banks, a woman who's seen firsthand many of these trends I've just described throughout a very multifaceted public life which began in adult entertainment but has since taken her into a new career as a life coach and personal advice podcaster through her new program, Ask Nyomi: Bridging the Gap.

In order to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for this episode are available to subscribers only. The free version runs 30:12 while the paid subscriber version is 1:07:34.

The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help. Please subscribe via Substack or Patreon to get unlimited access.

Audio Chapters (Full Episode)

02:57 — Ask Nyomi: Bridging the Gap's unusual audience

11:53 — Being spiritual while working in adult film

15:48 — Entering a new career to help her father

26:21 — A brief brush with racism in the porn business

34:29 — Why didn't she see as much racism as others have noted?

38:46 — On "gay for pay" in adult media

40:42 — Has porn made it any easier for regular people to be non-heterosexual?

43:25 — On being spiritual but not Christian or religious

44:31 — Starting and stopping an OnlyFans account

50:48 — Continuing her fan relationships as a lifestyle podcaster

57:33 — Why anti-porn attacks are about social control