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Adult media has gone mainstream and changed itself for the better, star Tasha Reign says Sep 04, 2023

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Sex workers, people who earn a living as escorts or adult entertainers, are some of the most visible people in media nowadays.

According to the web traffic stats company SimilarWeb, three of the top 15 websites in the world are pornographic video services. And yet, despite how popular porn has become, a lot of us don't know much about the people who work in the industry. That's unfortunate, because a lot of them have very interesting stories to tell.

That's why I was pleased when I learned about the new memoir of Tasha Reign, a long-time adult performer whose book, From Princess to Porn Star, A Real-Life Cinderella Story, is filled with all kinds of entertaining stories and also deep thoughts about the status of women in society, the importance of consent, and the way that sex workers provide intimacy for people who might not otherwise have any. Porn is far from perfect, but the caricature that's often painted of the people work within it is far from accurate.

The video of the July 24, 2023 conversation is available. The full transcript and audio chapters are available for paid subscribers.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

The ‘world’s oldest profession’ is attaining new relevance in the internet age Aug 28, 2023

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Episode SummaryFor thousands of years, humans have been buying and selling sex. The ancient Sumerians in 2400 BCE included female and male prostitutes on a list of known professions, so the term “oldest profession” is actually more than just a cliché.Despite the fact that sex economies have existed for far longer than most civilizations, many people seem uncomfortable with discussing the important roles that sex workers play in our society, economy, and even our politics. In 49 of the 50 states, prostitution is illegal and far-right Republicans are seeking to ban birth control and pornography, shortly after they succeeded at rolling back a nationwide right to abortion access.While the suppression efforts are part of larger efforts by radical Christian nationalists to roll back modernity, they are also the product of cooperation with less religious people, some of whom even call themselves progressive, to ban work arrangements that don’t really understand.Joining me for an in-depth discussion about the history of sex work and how it’s being revolutionized by the internet is Kaytlin Bailey, she is the executive director of Old Pros, an organization that does both research and advocacy for sex workers. A former standup comedian, she is also the host of “The Oldest Profession” podcast.A computer-generated transcript of the edited audio follows. The video of our August 10, 2023 conversation is available.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here, Kaytlin.KAYTLIN BAILEY: Thank you so much for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, there's a lot of ground here to cover and I think, as I said in the intro, I think a lot of people may not be familiar with a lot of the topics that we're going to be talking about here today. And I should mention that this episode is going to be the first of a few that are going to be talking about sex work.But I wanted to have you come on as our expert to get it started. So how about let's maybe define some terms here first. So, sex work, what does that [00:03:00] mean?BAILEY: Sex work is a broad umbrella term that encompasses all erotic labor exchanges. It’s a phrase that was coined by Carol Lee in the 1970s to push back against prohibitionist feminists at the time who were using the phrase prostituted woman, but sex work refers to full-service sex work or sort of plastic prostitution.It also includes legal forms of sex work, like stripping or pornography. Domination, foot fetish work and because we're trying to build a big tent, I would like to include Hooters waitresses and other people who use erotic labor as a part of their job.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, okay, and there are some other terms as well, like, a lot of sex work jobs involve kind of a murky legal status in many jurisdictions.BAILEY: The thing that unites all sex workers, whether their work is directly criminalized or not, is the stigma against [00:04:00] sex work. So, there are perfectly legal strippers orLegally registered sex workers in brothels in Nevada that have their children taken away from them or lose job status or are kicked out of school or housing because their employer or landlord or significant other found out about their involvement in some form of sex work.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Yeah. And you use the word decriminalization there. Let's maybe define that. And especially in regard to some of the other terms.BAILEY: Sure. There are only four models for policing prostitution. So, there's criminalization, right? Which criminalizes both the buying and selling of sex work. The way that this plays out is that mostly providers are criminalized.But there's also legalization regulation. So, this is the model that you see in Nevada or Amsterdam, where some forms of prostitution are legal, but you have to work in a registered brothel. And this is sort of [00:05:00] a model that tries to contain and control sex workers and really diminishes the negotiating power of sex workers and creates a two-tiered system where the overwhelming majority of people who are doing this work outside of the registered brothels have no legal protection at all.There's also end demand. Maine actually became the first state in the U S to pass this law, but it originated in Norway. This is sometimes it's referred to as the Nordic model, the Swedish model, Canada has experimented with these laws, but the theory is that in order to reduce the demand for the oldest profession, they try to criminalize the clients or buyers or third-party folks.But of course, it's impossible to surveil clients without surveilling sex workers. And because of the stigma associated with sex work, this leads to people being evicted, a temporary reduction in in demand, which sends people into, a more economic desperate [00:06:00] position that they were in, and desperate people do desperate things.So everywhere that the end demand model has been implemented, violence against sex workers goes up. It undermines our ability to screen our clients or to self-advocate. But what sex workers all over the world have been asking for decades is decriminalization, where neither the buying, selling, or facilitating sexual services is criminalized.And this allows people to report crimes committed against us and move throughout the communities that we're already a part of.SHEFFIELD: And it's the idea that you can just be, like a freelance worker and in charge of your own schedule, that's kind of the way basically a lot of people are doing it anyway, because they don't like other arrangements to be working for somebody else.BAILEY: Yeah. I think it's important to remember that sex work is work, but it is also sex. So, any [00:07:00] kind of surveillance or criminalization or effort to regulate the consensual adult choices that are being made in a very private space is going to erode all of our all of our freedoms. There's no way to surveil sex workers without surveilling-- well, everyone.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's interesting, because the same types of models of regulation, they exist with regard to hallucinogenic drugs and, but it's interesting that people seem to be more open to the idea of decriminalizing crack, which can literally destroy your body and brain, and meanwhile, the idea of decriminalizing or legalizing sex work is just somehow offensive. What do you think is the dichotomy network here?BAILEY: From a policy perspective, I think it's really important to remember that drugs are a substance [00:08:00] that can be regulated. But sex workers are service providers.We are people, we are neighbors and mothers, and we have other jobs. So, it's not actually possible to contain and control us in red light districts or exclusively in registered brothels. Sex workers are and have always been everywhere. So, efforts to contain and control us.End up creating a criminalized class, and that reduces our ability to self-advocate for safety and health. And this is the kind of thing that leads to rapes and also murders that we’re not able to report or get a hold of.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Well, and a lot of it also does pertain to the fact that that a lot of this does come out of both misogyny and also anti LGBTQ attitudes as well, because, historically basically acknowledging that there are people out [00:09:00] there who are doing this it's an affront to some people. That it should not exist and should not be known to exist.BAILEY: Sure. I do think that sex work in general is an existential threat to the patriarchy. It's very hard to have a patriarchy if you don't know who the dads are. And I will say that the long history of criminalizing sex work is very much grounded in misogyny and. also homophobia. I'll give you an example of the CANs laws in Louisiana cans stands for crime against nature. And this was a statute that was originally written in the 1800s to target the gay hustler scene in New Orleans. But it was a Louisiana law that made talking about oral or anal sex, a federal crime. And so, when the tough on crime the Reagan administration came through the police officer started using that statute to arrest black women and trans women and charging them with these cans [00:10:00] laws.In addition, they forced them to register as sex offenders, and this really all came to a head in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina when thousands of black women were turned away from shelters for being registered sex offenders when really all they were guilty of was simple prostitution.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and only with adults, like, that's being clear with that.BAILEY: Yes, that's right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. In some of your advocacy, have you seen kind of a stigma applied both from men, but also from women against sex workers? Like who's doing this in your view?BAILEY: Yeah, I mean, the criminalization of sex work is really a very old coalition between, the religious right and the righteous left, there's [00:11:00] a long and dark history of progressive dating back to the progressive era of criminalizing vice. And a lot of this was grounded in white supremacy.You, if you look at the man act or the white slave law that was passed in 1910, this is really something that is coming from feminists who are sort of demanding this protection against, what would be sort of a, a trafficking panic from the late early, early 1900s. And so, I think it's really important to understand that although prostitution has become a symbol of violence against women, the decriminalization of sex work is the only policy that actually reduces violence against women.So, when Carol Lee coined the phrase sex work in the 1970s, she was really pushing back against. people who considered themselves feminists that nevertheless found themselves advocating for, more police to arrest vulnerable women.SHEFFIELD: [00:12:00] Yeah. Yeah. And it's, and it's also I mean, when we've, we were talking about this topic earlier I think you had said something like that, that some, sort of anti sex work feminists, they kind of think it's like, the sex workers are, have hacked the system, that they're cheating in a way.BAILEY: Sure. I mean, I certainly can imagine, especially before women had a lot of other job opportunities that, brothels and bars were a real source of anxiety within the household, right? When women don't have property rights and their husbands are, spending their paycheck that is supposed to go to the mortgage or to feed their families.At a local tavern. This is the energy that propelled us towards prohibition. But we know what prohibition does to markets. It doesn't make them safer. And I would implore folks that consider themselves to be feminist to remember that you cannot help people. people you are hunting, and that the oldest profession is not a problem that we can arrest our way out of.We can talk [00:13:00] about ways of raising the negotiating power of victims, of increasing folks’ ability to do other work, but we can't send SWAT teams into massage parlors with legally licensed masseurs who are giving their clients sexual services and call that a service to the community that we're arresting and raiding.I do think it's important for listeners to understand, especially as we are absolutely on the ascent of another moral sex panic that is targeting the queer community, the trans community, and also sex work, pornography and consensual sex work.And so, when our government says that they're engaged in anti-trafficking work, we like to envision a good guy with a gun Rescuing a victim from a violent situation. But what, in fact, is happening is that law enforcement officers are engaging in sexual services [00:14:00] with folks and then arresting those people for engaging in those acts.This is not a situation where the good guys are going after the bad guys and people end up better off for it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's also that it's with a lot of these, that as you were saying, that if you're trying to protect people who may be coerced into this, because, and there are some studies that have indicated that legalization or decriminalization can in some jurisdictions has increased trafficking to some degree. But there are conflicting studies with that—BAILEY: No, the studies have shown that there's an increase in sex worker advertising when the when legal penalties are removed, which makes all of the sense. So, if you look at the case of Rhode Island, which decriminalized indoor sex work between 2003 and 2009, you absolutely saw an explosion of sex worker advertising and people traveling to Rhode Island in order to engaged in decriminalized sex [00:15:00] work.You also saw a reduction of gonorrhea rates by 40% and a reduction in reported rapes by 30% and an overall reduction in violence against women. So, the results were actually very positive. You didn't see an increase in violence. You didn't see an increase in exploitation. You did see an increase in prostitution.Now, I think that those results would You know, it wouldn't look like that if the entire region was decriminalized, but when you have an isolated area where this is the only place that you can go to engage in this work without the fear of arrest, of course, you're going to see an increase. But New Zealand decriminalized prostitution in 2003, and although there was a temporary uptick in advertising, the markets really leveled out, and it's Mostly you've seen a reduction in STIs and violence against women and an increase in sex workers who feel comfortable reporting crimes committed against them.But you haven't seen a huge uptick in prostitution overall because the entire country [00:16:00] decriminalized, it wasn't country concentrated in one city or area.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess I just meant in the sense that that for instance, with drugs marijuana legalization, that in California, when, when we decriminalized marijuana out here, it led to an increase both in the legal sale of marijuana, but also the illegal sale of marijuana in some, in some ways.And so, and like, but it's important, I think, the Rhode Island experiment, if you will, it, it shows that. You, you really need to stick to a policy for a while because there are effects that may exist in the short term but are going to go away once the pressure is off, or something like that.And but you mentioned the violence against women. I remember reading about the, the rape rates in the various counties in Nevada where prostitution is legal, [00:17:00] and there's one of them, Elko County, where there are no rapes and there were literally no rapes in that, in that, in the years that they were looking at.BAILEY: I think some context here is really important because you're only allowed to have a legally licensed brothel in a county with less than 700,000 people in it. So, there's no way to work legally in Vegas or Reno, where the highest demand is. And so, the overwhelming majority of sex work that's happening in Nevada is happening outside of these legally licensed brothels. And these brothels came into existence in the 1970s and were very much a compromise sort of between the mafia and local law enforcement.And these brothels are beloved in the communities that they're in. It's a huge source of tax revenue. There are a lot of counties in Nevada that wouldn't have adequate healthcare service, but for the revenue that these brothels provide. But it's not a model that we want to replicate nationally because it really doesn't increase the negotiating power of the people who work there in order [00:18:00] to work as a legally licensed prostitute in Nevada, you have to register with the local sheriff's department.This becomes a subpoenable fact about you for the rest of your life. You can imagine how th…

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Marty 'DoktorZoom' Kelley on Idaho #InTheStates Aug 21, 2023

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Episode SummaryThis episode is the first in an occasional Theory of Change series of in-depth discussions about the politics of different states and how, unfortunately, right-wing extremism is becoming more common in many areas.The first state we're going to be discussing is Idaho. It’s one of America's most beautiful states with amazing mountains and lakes, lush forests, and gorgeous fields and plains. Unfortunately, it is also home to many of America's most insane people as well.Our guide to the politics of the Gem State is Marty Kelley. He is a senior editor with the Wonkette humor blog, and a long-term resident of Idaho since 2001.You can watch the video of this episode, continue reading below for a rush transcript, or read it on the web.Membership BenefitsThis is a free episode of Theory of Change but the deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.About the ShowTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffieldTranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Marty.MARTY KELLEY: Good to be here.SHEFFIELD: All right, great. So Idaho obviously has a very long history, and we'll get into that.But let's maybe start off with, I think it's fair to say that Idaho kind of has sort of three basic political divisions. Political regions. The northern part tends to be extremely radical and filled with white nationalists and all assorted. religious extremists as well.The central part of Idaho, which is kind of the Sun Valley area, which includes Boise, which is where you live and other areas around there. That is basically the area I'm calling the business and Berkeley section of Idaho, where all the money's made and all where all the godless commies like yourself live.And then in the southeast part of Idaho, that is the heavily Mormon region of the state.[00:03:00] And there's when we'll get into that, but Mormonism in Idaho also has some very interesting divisions of its own.So you moved to Idaho in 2001 after getting a PhD in rhetoric and composition at the University of Arizona. So, what brought you to Idaho?KELLEY: Well, my now ex got a job at Boise State University where she is still teaching and tenured and doing amazing things with ESL composition and writing.And I've stayed because we have a kid together who's now 26. And I can't believe that that happened. And since 2012, I've been writing for the political humor blog Wonkette, my dream job.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well--KELLEY: I can do that anywhere and Boise is a good affordable place to stay.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it certainly is definitely a lot cheaper than many parts of the country for sure.And you know, all kinds of great outdoor activities as I was mentioning. Boise itself also is actually. Pretty nice place to be I have to say it to anybody who hasn't checked it out And you should definitely put it on your bucket list.KELLEY: I like it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so, but now you're You were not born in the region, but for you were born nearby in Washington, right?KELLEY: No, in Oregon.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, all right. And it should be noted, in the recent past couple of years Idaho has unfortunately gotten some attention for a lot of different right-wing extremist stuff.KELLEY: Oh, yes.[00:04:30]SHEFFIELD: Especially with different people trying to move in and ban books and etc. But there's unfortunately a longer history than that.And I mean, I guess probably, you know, probably the, the... At least we'll, we'll start with the 20th century, I guess, kind of the most famous Idaho right wing extremist was Ezra Taft Benson, who was a native son from Rexburg, I believe and he was, rose to become the agriculture secretary of Dwight Eisenhower and then was a big conduit for people into the John Birch Society and, and also was a big publicizer of another guy.Now he was Cleon Skousen, I believe he was from Utah but, you know, they were both part of this fringe sect of, you know, extremely right-wing Mormons and those people have always had a home in, unfortunately, all parts of Idaho, but particularly in the, in the Southeast. But, you know, as we kind of move toward More times when people watching or listening or have been alive.Because I believe Benson was born in 1899. So I need to say that was a while ago, but more contemporaneously Idaho became the focus of national attention in 1992 with Randy Weaver. Tell us about who Randy Weaver was.KELLEY: Well, Randy Weaver was a very extreme. Survivalist right wing fellow who showed [00:06:00] up from time to time at the Aryan Nations compound in Northern Idaho.And thank goodness they eventually got shot down in a lawsuit with the SPLC. But in 92, Weaver was I think the feds were trying to arrest him on charges of selling a sawed-off shotgun illegally. And there was the siege at Ruby Ridge and during that his wife and son were killed. You can go to the Idaho state historical society and at their museum, they have the front door with the bullet hole in the glass, which is something to see.And then of course, after that siege was over, the charges fell apart and it became a rallying point for the entire right wing led to the Waco occupation and siege. And then that led to Timothy McVeigh. Then shortly after we had Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage, who was already very, very popular with the militia folks in supporting them.Who said that Oklahoma City was, was the wrong thing to do, but it was certainly understandable. And that was kind of the end of her career. Thank goodness. You can still see cars around Boise with bumper stickers that say, 'Can Helen, not salmon.'SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess she kind of has a [00:07:30] spiritual successor nowadays in Janice McGeachin. Tell us about who she is. There's a lot of stories.KELLEY: Oh, she has lots of spiritual successors now. Janice McGeachin was the Lieutenant Governor of Idaho when Butch Otter was governor and the two in Idaho, the Lieutenant Governor and governor are elected separately.And so they are not a ticket. So she was constantly trying to do weird right-wing things whenever he would leave the state. And at 1 point during the coven, emergency, he went to a conference somewhere while she was acting governor for a day, she tried to rescind all COVID measures, all mask mandates, and it was she, she got a talking to when he came back and then she did it again the next time he was out of the state.SHEFFIELD: Yep. And she also became famous for her campaign ads featuring flags and Bibles and, and--KELLEY: Right, she was in a notorious video sponsored by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which we'll mention again. Soon after they sang a little, I think it was the Idaho anthem. I honestly don't know. They sang a song together and in her part of it she was seen in a camouflaged four by four [00:09:00] holding a gun and a Bible.SHEFFIELD: Which has, you know, quite a lot of visual similarities to ISIS videos.KELLEY: Very much so. Everyone noted that at the time.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, although, you know, there was another woman who had been featured in this photographed herself in a similar way, a younger woman. Oh, right. And I forget what her name was, but people she posted it somewhere and, and she soon became a meme.And then she actually said, ‘I don't know why people are doing this.’KELLEY: Because it's totally different, different flag, different holy book, different guns.SHEFFIELD: That's right. Yeah. And, you know, and one other person who may not quite be as nationally infamous as, as McGeehan, is Bo Gritz. He was a guy who actually ran for president as an independent candidate.He was another one of these Utah, Idaho Mormons. And he was involved, he... Had his own compound kind of, I believe, not too far away from where Randy Weaver had his, you know,KELLEY: If you live in Idaho, you have to have a compound.SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, apparently everybody's either in Boise or in a compound.KELLEY: Mine's rented, so--SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well and you know, and I think I think it's and this is a subject we'll come back to at the end But I think you know part of the kind of divide for a [00:10:30] lot of people is that because there are so many vast open areas of Idaho where just nobody's there. You can drive for maybe an hour and not see another car on the road depending on where you're at, and then at the same time, they are not, you know, if you drive a little bit further, you'll come into a you know, modern Western city like Boise, and it can be kind of jarring.I think to some of these people. It seems like you know, I it's one thing about right wing extremism that I think people who haven't don't have a first-hand exposure to it is that you know So much of it is psychological It's not political. It's just seeing that other people have a different way of living and it's wrong.KELLEY: That's right.SHEFFIELD: And it's wrong. I mean, and that's kind of, I mean, that's kind of a, I mean, a large part of what you guys write about it at Wonkette is highlighting that type of behavior from these right-wing figures.And it's unfortunate because, I'll let you speak to it, but it seems to me that the national Republican party is basically, and not just with Trump, over time becoming ever more like these people who were like Bo Gritz who were kind of laughing stocks in the nineties. Somebody like him, like, another Idahoan, Ammon Bundy you know, they have a constituency their constituency.KELLEY: Yeah, very much so. We've it's, it's a small, radical, annoying, [00:12:00] strangely powerful sometimes bunch of crazies.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and I mentioned Ammon Bundy.So he comes from a whole family. Let's talk about them. You want to get the background on those guys?KELLEY: Well, the Bundys are some Mormon fundamentalists who have a vision of the coming apocalypse. What is the white horse something or other?SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, yeah. So somewhere there's a Mormon prophecy from Joseph Smith that the, that the male priesthood holders of Mormonism are going to save the United States and that there will be someone will emerge as if riding on a white horse. And he will sweep in to become the president and save America right before the destruction of the wicked.KELLEY: Yes. Yes. And Cliven was into that, and I think Ammon even more so. I honestly don't know Cliven being the father, Cliven being the father who had the standoff in Nevada and then Ammon ran the standoff in Oregon at the wildlife refuge and escaped excuse me, escaped criminal charges in both of those.In Nevada, because the FBI completely screwed up at the prosecution and didn't share I, as I recall, [00:13:30] didn't share important information during discovery. So it got thrown out and then in the Oregon case, they were all basically let off because the jury, as if you ask me, the jury just nullified the case, they didn't want to prosecute them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, which, you know, and it's funny considering how much they claim to be upset at writing and looting by Black Lives Matter. Well, you know, here's some law-and-order you guys could have done and didn't exactly do it,KELLEY: But it's still, you know, it's still okay to shoot federal cops because they're wrong.They don't have the right to, to enforce laws. And in fact, no parts of the Federal, the federal government isn't allowed to have land outside of Washington, D. C. and military bases. It's a special copy of the constitution that belongs to the Bundy's.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah well, and I guess, yeah, that, you know, that's, those ideas kind of come out of this sovereign citizen.KELLEY: Right, right, combination of the sovereign citizen and the, the sagebrush rebellion stuff.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, yeah, and, and basically, they had this idea that they don't have to pay taxes as well because the United States as a government was ended secretly, and I always forget the year of the thing.KELLEY: I believe it was with the 14th amendment in 1865, 1867, whatever that was.SHEFFIELD: Of course it has something to [00:15:00] do with slavery, right?KELLEY: Yeah, and then we, and then the U. S. became a corporation, and we were all owned by the government until we put a legal notice up that we are now free persons, and we don't belong to the government anymore.And that's never held up in court and they keep doing it year after year.SHEFFIELD: But it makes a lot of money for the people who, who tell you.KELLEY: It's a great scam!It is. If I didn't have a, if I didn't have any sense of ethics at all, I could make a lot of money.SHEFFIELD: Yeah well, I guess, you know what though, you guys do have at least one, another positive thing, a positive thing that you guys are known for, which is Napoleon Dynamite.KELLEY: That's true. That's true. We have the shots.SHEFFIELD: That's right. And when, you know, they, they should have, they should have said what high school Uncle Rico had his football career.But yeah, as somebody who grew up in, in Utah, which has a lot of the same geography and. And characteristics. I was just like, Oh man, this was my childhood on the silver screen. At least the minus the, the fundamentalist Mormonism parts.But yeah, so, all right. So with the, so that's kind of, I don't know, like a rose gallery, if you will, of, of famous right-wing Idahoans.but I guess before we get into, get beyond that though, let's I did want to mention, so, we, we've talked about Mormonism [00:16:30] in the Idaho context a little bit and it's kind of interesting for people who are not from Idaho or, or not Mormon is that Idaho kind of, it's got the, the Mormons on Idaho are kind of split with each other that so for instance there is the, the Brigham Young University, which most people know of is in Provo, Utah but then there's also one in Rexburg, Idaho called Brigham Young University, Idaho formerly known as Ricks College.And Ricks/BYUI has always been kind of like the more fundamentalist version of Brigham Young University. So like, for instance, you're not allowed to wear shorts on campus if you go to Brigham Young University, Idaho. Whereas, in fact, you can have the distinct pleasure of wearing shorts if you go to Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University.KELLEY: Provo sounds like it's a little weak on doctrine there.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, although I've never seen them where they claim what book of scripture says you can wear shorts. I don't know that one. And last I heard, I believe they also don't allow open toed sandals at BYU Idaho.KELLEY: As is only correct.SHEFFIELD: Th…

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Rather than persuade new potential voters, reactionary elites are inventing a new Satanic panic Aug 07, 2023

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Ever since the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the Republican party has been in a radicalization loop in which successive generations of leaders overthrew their predecessors by claiming they were not reactionary enough. But since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Republican radicalization has increased at a level never before seen.And there’s a reason for this. Older, white fundamentalist Christians over 50 years old are the overwhelming majority of Republican voters. According to a recent Pew Research survey, 70% of people who voted Republican in 2022 were older than 49 years of age. Unfortunately for Republicans, their reliable core of loyal voters is slowly dying off and the number of people who aren’t religious has increased dramatically since the internet became commonplace.Trump and other Republican leaders have realized the only way they can win elections without having to become more moderate is to whip fundamentalist Christians into a frenzy by merging DC Republican rhetoric with the previously fringe movement of QAnon, which is itself an outgrowth of the “Satanic Panic” that started in the 1970s and has never really stopped, even though it faded away from mainstream media in the 90s.As you’ll see in today’s episode, right-wing media figures are telling their fan bases that progressives and transgender people are literally possessed by demons. The rhetoric we’ll be playing today is so extreme and so disturbing that it’s not often covered in mainstream media, which is a problem of its own as well.Joining me to talk about all of these very concerning media and political developments is Julie Millican, she is a vice president at Media Matters for America where she’s worked for more than 15 years. Currently she oversees partner programs and media accountability efforts.Also here today is Olivia Little, who is also at Media Matters as a senior investigative researcher. She’s written about many different right-wing media figures and most recently has been doing some incredible research about the new Christian extremist group that calls itself Moms for Liberty.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thank you for being here today, ladies.OLIVIA LITTLE: Thank you.JULIE MILLICAN: Yeah. Thank you.SHEFFIELD: All right. So, let's just start off with you, Julie, you've been looking at right-wing media for 15 years. Things have gotten worse in recent years. These fringe figures, well, formerly fringe figures, were always there at the margins. Is that right?MILLICAN: Yes, that's definitely right. Yeah. Many years ago during the Obama administration, for instance, you would start to see some inklings of these more fringe figures or just internet figures, internet websites, like the Gateway Pundit, for instance, starting to have a little bit more influence over how the conservative media infrastructure at large was talking about issues.We saw back then that this type of commentary was intentionally kept in the background, but that it was obviously gaining some influence and in certain circles what we saw at the time was say, some early inklings of conspiracy theories that were being floated around Barack Obama's birth certificate, for [00:04:30] instance, is one of the first instances that I saw some of these conversations that were happening in more fringe communities start to be a little bit more embraced by more traditional media outlets on the right as well as the Republican infrastructure as a whole.It's where Donald Trump actually was able to gain a foothold. I think a lot of people maybe aren't aware of the fact that he used to have a weekly call-in segment on Fox and Friends which is Fox News's morning talk show. And he would call in every week, talking about the birth certificate.He at one point, if I'm remembering correctly, had a bounty out for it. He was going to pay people to find his original birth certificate, but this was something that was really embraced the fringes and then started to kind of build a little bit of momentum, I think for where we.See both the media infrastructure and the Republican Party today. A lot of it has been fueled by the increased prominence of social media. Particularly as a news outlet, it is allowed for more and more filter bubbles to form people to get pushed to more and more extreme content. And what this is kind of ultimately led to the Trump presidency that was then staffed by the very people who had been pushing some of the more extreme elements before. And then it fully became off to the races from there. Just like a race to the bottom, both within the right-wing media infrastructure and the Republican political apparatus that followed it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's also the case Olivia, that, the Republican, Donald Trump in [00:06:00] particular, his White House and political advisors, they saw when the QAnon movement began, they saw that as a useful tool for them and really kind of, tried to speak in code to it over the years.And, it's gradually become much more prevalent in, in their rhetoric. Would you say that?LITTLE: Okay. Oh, absolutely. They understand that it appeals to the masses and it's sort of this easy explanation for a complex problem. So of course they're embracing it because it's useful.MILLICAN: Yeah, to jump in if you don't mind it's one of those things going back to your point about the satanic panic. It's always about the children, right? It is something that the right has. Successfully weaponized for decades. And it's appealing to people because nobody wants to hear about children being harmed.Everybody wants to protect children from being harmed. And it's not, it's a gateway, I think, to kind of push people into more extreme positions. Because once you get them, I'm bored with the fact that or this belief that there's these global elite somewhere that are, in cahoots to harm children, like you can then start pointing the fingers at well, it's these groups of people and they're the ones that are doing it.And they're not just doing that. They're doing all of these other terrible things. And it's a way to really push people to both embrace a political ideology that they may not have been involved with. previously. But also just to embrace, more and more extreme beliefs and [00:07:30] more and more extreme rhetoric and action that comes from that.SHEFFIELD: Well, it's also that, the QAnon movement is kind of the final form of a lot of this Christian right rhetoric that we had seen earlier in Republican politics. And that it's easy to get people to focus on these fantastical, phantasmagoric conspiracies and Satan, imaginary stuff.The way that they're doing things, currently with QAnon and some of this stuff is a continuation of how things were—I mean, like you look at Pat Robertson, he kind of really got this started in Republican politics by mainstreaming things like the New World Order conspiracy theory. He actually wrote a book by that title and was trying to push this extreme paranoia and as he got older and had more media under his own control, the mainstream media kind of forgot some of those aspects of him.But things have just gotten so much worse in terms of the level of extremism that you see in large-scale Republican and right-wing media outlets.So we've got a bunch of different clips here to get through. I want to get started with some of those. Basically the discussion here, we're going to organize it around these packages of clips. And what I want the audience to see in this first package is that Republican political elites, many of whom are not even religious themselves, necessarily, or [00:09:00] Christians for that matter, basically, they're telling the right-wing voter base and evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Christians, that there is a war against them. And that they need to think of themselves as at war with modernity. And they actually use that verbiage, you'll see in one of the figures here.So the first one is an opening prayer that was given at the recent Moms for Liberty convention. And we'll play that. And then Olivia, maybe you can give us some more details on Moms for Liberty and what they're up to.(Begin clip)PAT BLACKBURN, Moms for Liberty: We have one father, and he's our God. He has called each of us here for such a time as this.Nothing you've experienced this week has been a coincidence. I don't believe in coincidences. Because for months, the leadership team at Moms for Liberty met every morning at 9:15 in the morning for our daily fortification. We read scripture and we pray. And we gave this summit to God, and we said, God, you make it yours. And so [00:10:30] we have had a wonderful week. And no matter what our enemy tried to do to stop us, we've had a very successful summit. (Cut in video)Lord, we celebrate every win and every success because you gave it to us. And we thank you.And so some of us are going carry home some awards tonight, but most importantly, each and every one of us are in this because you called us, and because we're being a willing vessel.So that we can walk in the spiritual walk that you would have us to walk in. And so our rewards are truly laid up in heaven. And no one and nothing can take that away.(End clip)SHEFFIELD: Tell us about Moms for Liberty, Olivia. How did they get started? What were their initial issues and what have they kind of gravitated toward and are known for today?LITTLE: Right. So Moms for Liberty began in early 2021 in Florida. And they initially went all in on. Like anti covid mitigation policies. And they did that in order to cast this sort of like wide net and recruit new followers in a way that they knew wouldn't work if they went all in on like critical race theory.Because they initially tried to, you go back on their archives you'll see that they tried to fundraise based off of anti-CRT advocacy [00:12:00] and they tried to, they had information pages about CRT and but so, so from there they shifted, went all in on anti-COVID mitigation policies.And once those policies, like masks lifted and once schools were reopening, they did a 180 and they went back pursuing anti-CRT advocacy, anti-LGBT advocacy, and they made that pivot, but they were able to channel this parental frustration about the pandemic into pushing their own political agenda that wouldn't have happened without the pandemic.So they really took advantage of parental frustrations during COVID to push their own agenda. And so from there, they grew, they started in Florida in early 2021 and really didn't have many followers or like much of a structure. But early on, we see that they had massive right wing media support and massive right wing political support as well.And they have since moved across the country with the help of these right-wing politicians and right-wing media. They moved across the country harassing or strategically harassing school boards and teachers throughout the country and, now I was just at their summit in Philadelphia.But we've seen a very consistent increase in radicalization or open extremism from the group that at first, they tried to at least mask it, but now it's completely mask-off [00:13:30] in terms of how extreme the group has become.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It was worth talking about some of the rhetoric that was in that prayer, specifically in the context for it.So it was at the recent conference that they had, which you attended and reported from. And the prayer was given at their award ceremony on the final night of the conference. The name of the awards were called “For Such a Time as This.”And that phrase might not mean anything to most people, but in the fundamentalist Christian circles in the United States, it is a very important meme in right-wing Christian circles.It refers to a verse in the story of Esther in the Hebrew Bible in which a character tells Esther, who was this Jewish woman who was captured along with many other Jews and made to become the sex slave of this foreign ruler. And her Jewish friend tells her, ‘maybe God has raised you up for such a time as this.’And in the right-wing evangelical culture, they've kind of made that their mantra that they are God's personal servants. And you saw that also in the prayer that, God's, her repeatedly saying, God has designated us. And she used the phrase again “for such a time as this.”I mean, this is some rhetoric I think that maybe a lot of times, Julie, maybe you can jump in about the fact that a lot of mainstream reporters don't seem to be aware of a lot of these code words that are being used?MILLICAN: Yeah, I would say that's right. If they are aware of it, it's [00:15:00] certainly not being included in the coverage. I don't think the context of the religious extremism that's underlying a lot of the advocacy that we're seeing on the right these days is really being spelled out to people.I don't know, sometimes it seems like there's an aspect of it where the media is just generally reluctant to talk about religious extremism, especially when it comes to Christianity, especially when it comes to religious extremism on the right, they certainly didn't have a problem talking about religious extremism when it was coming from other religious groups.And we see the same type of reluctance when it comes to talking about acts of terror that are committed by people on the right or like that are inspired by issues on the right that not being described as acts of terrorism, whereas they would have been if they were religiously motivated from Islam, for instance.So I think that there has been this general reluctance to either see the signs or at least contextualize the signs to a more mainstream audience. That is doing a disservice to people fully kind of understanding, the different codes that are being spoken, but also, it's not like we're really so much in code anymore.I mean, pretty explicitly embracing a very right wing and work stream that I think, most would realize version of Christianity these days than they used to in the past. Like Fox News, for instance, I mean, their Fox Nation platform has an entire prayer show. They've had segments on their weekend [00:16:30] programming.They have a Faith and Friends concert series that was sponsored by the Museum for the Bible. They have on Fox Business; they'll sell airtime to like Christian nationalist pastors to give sermons on the weekends.They've been pretty open, I think, in a way that I don't think you have to worry about being accused of being biased or anti-religion by reporting on what these people are actually saying and doing. But I do think that this aspect is being lost.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it is important for the people who are outside of that worldview to understand this is what's coming for you, especially if you are somebody who is LGBTQ, or somebody in your family or your friends who are, that these are people that are being directly viciously attacked, pretty much 24/7 by right wing media now and—MILLICAN: By demonic forces, as you would say. It's like they're literally being compared to demons. And it’s not just fringe people who are saying this, like we have Donald Trump himself, like regularly appears on the Victory Channel, for instance, as do many other mainstream Republican politicians.And this is a network that openly embraces Christian nationalism. And this is the type of thing that they have a plan for what they will do when they retake control of the government, and they're pretty open about it.And for some reason, this just doesn't get covered and people, broadly, I would say who don't live their [00:18:00] lives paying attention to what these r…

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Covid contrarianism was a much bigger failure than the scientific consensus Jul 25, 2023

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Episode SummaryAfter two years of a global pandemic, most people have no interest whatsoever in COVID-19. And that's completely understandable, given all the hardships and inconveniences that everyone faced as a result of the pandemic.Almost everyone is ready to move on from covid, but there is one subset of people who are obsessed with still talking about it. And that is the same paranoid activists and politicians whose weaponized ignorance prolonged and exacerbated the pandemic to begin with, making it so much worse for everyone even as they insisted it was no big deal.How the pandemic was prolonged by ignorant and wishful thinking public policy is a story that still deserves to be told, even as almost everyone would just like to get back with our regularly scheduled lives. And it especially deserves to be told because the covid contrarians who made things so much worse are trying to rewrite the history of what happened.And for that reason, I was very pleased to learn about the new book of today's guest. His name is Jonathan Howard, and he is an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York University. And the book that he has written is called “We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace Anti-Vaccine Movement.”He's also a blogger at the great medical blog, Science Based Medicine.Transcript MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Jonathan.HOWARD: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Matthew. I sure appreciate it.SHEFFIELD: All right. So before we get into the book, let's maybe discuss there's kind of two different categories of people here that I think you're correct to sort of differentiate [00:03:00] between each other on some of this wishful thinking, public policy and covid.Tell us what these two groups are and what your focus is here.HOWARD: Yeah. So I have been studying the anti-vaccine movement for about a decade. And the first group of people were, and I've always been fascinated by anti-vaccine doctors in particular, to me they're sort of like arsonist firefighters spreading the very thing that they're supposed to prevent.And the first group of doctors would be anti-vaccine doctors. In 2019, for example, these would be doctors who were opposed to the polio, measles, HPV vaccine, all of the routine childhood vaccines. Some of these names became a little bit famous during the pandemic.You may have heard of some of them. Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, for example claimed that vaccines made people magnetic. The only doctor in the book who I know, my old friend, Dr. Kelly Brogan, who morphed into one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors during well before the pandemic and during the pandemic. And these people are for the most part [00:04:00] doctors who you and all of your Now, for those of you who of recognize as not trustworthy sources.They are germ theory deniers. They do not believe that HIV causes AIDS, for example, in all sorts of crazy stuff. And you will not find them in hospitals treating sick people. The second group of doctors, these are the doctors who I talk about the most and call them contrarian doctors. These are doctors who were widely respected, some of them before the pandemic as paragons of evidence-based medicine.I even discussed a Nobel prize winner. So these are people who are definitely not quacks before the pandemic, and they mixed good advice with bad advice. So the good advice would be covid is very dangerous for grandma and very dangerous for someone with obesity and a lot of medical problems, but it's harmless for the vast majority of young people, for example.And these doctors were very famous and influential during the pandemic. They advised President Trump. They advised Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. They advised [00:05:00] Ron DeSantis in Florida. They were ubiquitous in the media. They have very large social media presences. They were in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the Atlantic, really just downplaying the pandemic and spreading misinformation about it in a way that was very hard for people to pick up, again, because they mixed good advice with bad advice, and they didn't say obviously crazy things that covid is all a 5G hoax, for example.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it is important to note that, because the mainstream media, it wasn't just the right-wing media that was platforming some of these people. So let's, for some of these mixed advice doctors, maybe let's talk about some specific people that you do discuss their work and some of the things that they were doing.HOWARD: Yeah. So one of the doctors who I talk about the most and start the book with is a man by the name of Dr. John Ioannidis, [00:06:00] who is a world-famous researcher. He works out of Stanford University. He's an epidemiologist, and he wrote a paper called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, about 15, 20 years ago, which is one of the most famous papers in the history of medicine.And he really made a name for himself, calling out bad science and promoting better science, wanting medicine and doctors to do better, so that we make the right decisions for our patients.And he's someone who I famous favorably quoted in some of my earlier writing. And during the pandemic, starting in March 2020, he really underestimated the virus saying that it would cause many fewer fatalities than the flu, for example, and he was a ubiquitous media presence, and he made all sorts of statements that three years later turned out to be wildly underestimating the virus, but they were obviously wrong at the time.I will give you an example. On April 9th, 2020, he gave an interview [00:07:00] to the Washington Post in which he predicted that 40,000 Americans would die of covid this season. By April 9th, 2020, 20,000 Americans had already died and 2,000 Americans were dying every day. So unless covid vanished, his prediction was going to age very poorly, very quickly, which tragically is what happened within eight days. His estimate of 40,000 deaths this season was surpassed.And what did he do? Was he chastened? Did he revise his estimates? He did not.He gave an interview to right wing Fox News firebrand Mark Levin, in which he said that the fatality rate of covid was one out of a thousand Americans. Or one out of thousand people who contracted it.And that too was pretty obviously false. By that point in the pandemic, 10,000 people here in New York City had died.If the fatality rate was one in a thousand, that would require 10 million New Yorkers to have already been [00:08:00] infected with the virus when in fact only 8. 3 million people live here in my city, New York City. So it was just this obviously mathematically impossible claim. And how did he get around this?Well, he started spreading what I can only describe as conspiracy theories that have become gospel truth amongst the QAnon set that people were dying with covid, not of covid. That it was the lockdowns that killed people. That doctors killed patients through premature intubations, that death certificates couldn't be trusted.And the people who did die of covid, they were just 80-year-olds with multiple medical problems who were just about to die anyway. So it's really not that big of a deal. And rather than admit that he underestimated the virus, he just started spreading these conspiracy theories, and these became very popular, and his ideas were taken to the White House by probably the most famous of all the doctors I write about, Scott Atlas.And the title of the book, We Want Them Infected, comes from the plan [00:09:00] that some of these doctors developed to purposefully infect hundreds of millions of unvaccinated young Americans in the hopes that spreading the virus would get rid of the virus.And obviously that didn't turn out to be the case, unfortunately.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and Ioannidis, he also was involved with this controversial antibodies study that was done very early on in the pandemic, which claimed that many thousands of people had already, or tens of thousands, had already contracted the disease in the San Francisco area. And that turned out to be completely bogus research.And it's important to note also, though, that people at the time were questioning this research. So it isn't that people got it-- because here's this, we're in this kind of strange after effect, which I did talk about in the introduction here, where that the people who had said [00:10:00] it was no big deal, that they want everyone who was engaging in a more scientific approach to the pandemic, they want them to be liable for every mistake that they made. But the let's do nothing or we want them infected crowd, they don't want to have accountability for their own mistakes.And I guess that's part of what got you interested in this, right?HOWARD: Yeah, what got me interested in this is, as I said, I've been interested in the anti-vaccine movement for a decade after my old friend, Dr. Kelly Brogan, the only doctor who I mention in the book, who I know personally, or knew personally, I haven't spoken to her in 10 years morphed into one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors, and it was a real shock. It took me a while to realize this, but it was a real shock to realize that everything she said about the HPV vaccine and the MMR vaccine, for example, was being plagiarized by famous doctors from UCSF, from Stanford, from Harvard, from Johns Hopkins, top universities in [00:11:00] order to discourage young people from getting the vaccine.And let me just, I'll defend Dr. Ioannidis a little bit in that he didn't completely downplay the pandemic. He recognized that it was a big threat to nursing homes and to older, vulnerable people. But in some ways, in my opinion, that made him a little bit more dangerous is because he was mixing the good advice, we have to protect nursing homes, with the bad advice, which is for everyone else it's no more dangerous than driving to work back and forth. And one infection will lead to permanent immunity.But yeah, these doctors who declared the pandemic over from day one, essentially are very, very eager to beat up on Fauci and all of his mistakes.Any one of his mistakes, any one of his misstatements. The man who spoke thousands and thousands of words on the pandemic got a few things wrong, and he shouldn't be given a free pass. But you're absolutely right that they feel they want to be absolved of their mistakes and they don't really, don't seem to feel that they've made any.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it is [00:12:00] important though, I think to acknowledge that a lot of the people who are criticizing a sound medical approach to dealing with the pandemic, that they don't understand that science, the literal process of it is trial and error and that it's inevitable that you will have some things which might not end up proving very effective. Was it weird to see so many people who did have scientific training kind of forget this basic tenant of scientific reasoning?HOWARD: It was weird again precisely because of the doctors who I write about who I had heard of I admired them all and I, they have excellent pedigrees and some of them are famous, and it took me a while to realize that they were kind of just making it up as they went along. I didn't really consider the fact that they were just kind of.How do I say this in a non-vulgar way, but you know, just. Talking out of their ass, essentially. And I'll tell you why, because one, one thing that I have that [00:13:00] basically none of the doctors who I write about have is experience working with covid patients. I worked throughout New York city's covid experience.And during the first three months of the pandemic, we probably had it worse than just about anywhere else in the world. I think the next three years after that, we had it relatively. Easy compared to a lot of the rest of the country. But as I was witnessing our hospitals being deluged and overwhelmed with covid patients, and as I was witnessing more people dying a single day than in my entire career, I was simultaneously reading these smart doctors from Stanford and Johns Hopkins and other places, essentially saying that the whole thing was overblown, and I couldn't quite put two and two together because I figured that these smart.World famous scientists and epidemiologists must know something I don't. And I remember when that Santa Clara antibody study came out enthusiastically telling my wife that, hey, we might be closer to the end of this pandemic than the beginning and wouldn't that be wonderful. So [00:14:00] I certainly wanted. Everything that they had to say to be correct.And it was only after a few months passed that I really began to revisit some of their earlier work and try to meld it with what I had seen in front of my own eyes and realized these things were totally incompatible. And they were just making these statements based on their own wishes, not reality.The Santa Clara antibody study that you talk about was led by researchers from Stanford. John Ioannidis being one of them, another one, Jay Bhattacharya, and. They used that to claim that covid was 50 to 80 times more prevalent than was already known, and they spoke about covid as a disease that was mild for the vast majority of people.They said that the vast majority of people probably don't even know that they had been infected. This is what they were saying in April 2020. Yet these same doctors in March 2020 we're saying that the virus wasn't going to spread very quickly, very far because it was only spread [00:15:00] by close conduct. Post contact.So whether they thought the virus was not going to spread very far or that it had already spread very far. They were very consistent. Don't worry about it.Doctors preaching a "do-nothing" about covid message got richSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I do want to get into the kind of larger framework that a lot of them seem to have been operating from. But let's before we get to that, go focus on your earlier research about anti-vaccine advocates.How did you get interested in that as a topic, and what was, I guess, what were some of the you, you mentioned Kelly Brogan,HOWARD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Matthew Remski discussed her too, a few weeks ago on your show. It was interesting.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, and so you mentioned her as somebody who you had known, but you've seen this up close from both a sort of research perspective, but also a personal perspective.There seems to be a very large demand, a market for a doctor who [00:16:00] will tell people that vaccines are terrible and evil. I mean, let's talk about that.HOWARD: Oh, yeah. No, I absolutely could have gotten world famous this pandemic and probably been flown all over the country and the world giving speeches and my social media profile would have exploded had I come out against vaccines.But there's always been a small number of doctors who have been opposed to vaccines. This is hundreds of years old, as old as vaccines, and I never really thought about vaccines much until my old friend, Dr Brogan, started posting messages on Facebook shortly after she left NYU where we trained together against vaccines, and I've never really been interested in vaccines per se as much as I have the anti-vaccine movement, and this actually goes back to my fascination with how people think with neurology and psychiatry, what could lead a doctor to take medicine's most amazing achievement and trash it.And Kelly Brogan is not stupid. She went to MIT. She went to Cornell. She trained with me. [00:17:00] So, so what fundamentally went wrong with her after she no longer had to care for sick patients in the…

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Fundamentalist Christianity is a totalitarian mental experience, but how many people realize this? Jul 22, 2023

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Episode SummaryThis episode of Theory of Change is the second in our "Why I Left" series featuring Lance Aksamit. He is an associate editor at Flux, and the author of a new autobiography about life in the missionizing evangelical sub-culture called Youth Group: Coming of Age in the Church of Christian Nationalism.Beyond telling his story of being born and raised in a homeschooling evangelical family that preached the gospel in Latin America, Lance also talks about how the beliefs he was taught derived from the larger far-right Christian supremacist tradition which began in the former Confederacy.It's a very necessary book because it shows just how mentally and emotionally dominating extreme Christian viewpoints can be, so it's worth reading, especially for those who don't have direct experience with totalitarian Christianity.You can watch the video of the conversation or continue reading below for the transcript or read it on the web.Membership BenefitsThis is a free episode of Theory of Change but the deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.About the ShowTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffieldTranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here, Lance.LANCE AKSAMIT: Thanks for having me, Matt.SHEFFIELD: All right. So, your book is a memoir about your time growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical environment. Tell us where the setting begins and let's maybe go from there.AKSAMIT: Yeah, so it starts a little bit with me already deeply entrenched in evangelicalism in youth group, but as far as me personally and my interaction inside of, Evangelical, very strict evangelicalism.My parents were missionaries in Panama in Central America. We were in the depths of the Davian jungle when my parents were deported during the war with Noriega. From there we moved all the way over to [00:03:00] Wisconsin where my parents started training other missionaries in getting them ready for going to the field.We worked for an organization called, at the time it was called New Tribes Mission, which the whole point was to put as many people in as remote of locations as possible. And it was a non-denominational organization, which is just pretty much codenamed for strict evangelical organization.And from there, we kind of moved back and forth between being, missionaries on the mission field in Panama and Nebraska, eventually, where I ended up and where my youth group years really started.SHEFFIELD: For a lot of Americans or people living in the more industrialized world. They don't see a lot of missionaries from evangelicals running around the place. You basically see Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses.AKSAMIT: Yeah, yeah, the evangelical missions generally don't spend too much time in the United States except for on like reservations as well as to the Amish. I actually have had a few friends who were missionaries to the [00:04:00] Amish, which is an interesting endeavor, if you ask me, but yeah, so NTM, New Tribes Mission, was I think still is the second largest missionary organization from the United States and they, like I said, specialize in sending into remote locations but interestingly enough, primarily they were sending people to Already evangelized locations so, for example, where we were, the Catholics had already come through, almost a hundred years prior, and a lot of the people were already Catholic, so we were being, we were evangelizing to Christians, ostensibly except for at that time Catholics were not considered Christians by our organization so, from all across the world.Tricking locals into ChristianityAKSAMIT: I think a good example that I have in the book is in Papua New Guinea, where there is a small group of people, and they were being evangelized to by New Tribes Mission. They had been Catholics for a very long time, but some missionaries showed up and [00:05:00] essentially kind of, kind of tricked the people into becoming Christians, but they wouldn't even call themselves Christians.They would call themselves followers of the New Tribes Mission, which is I think a good indicator of how that went. They show up with a Bible, and in this culture, they had a local deity called if I'm pronouncing it right, Tiki Loko. And this local deity was a god that had many different personas, many different faces.And during World War II, one of those personas Ended up being one that came from America because it kind of transitioned into a bit of a cargo cult. And when the New Tribes mission showed up, they used that history and saying, oh, look, your God is just, this is the same God, but he goes by the name Jesus here.And look, he's in this book, he's in this book and pointing to the Bible. And they're like, Oh, our God's in your books. That must be, how we that must be the right book. And then they essentially became followers of the New Tribes mission via that kind of persuasion.SHEFFIELD: And that, and that's an interesting tactic because [00:06:00] it is like, it is, if you actually look at the history of missionizing Christianity, like it was a very common technique.Yeah. They did. I mean, it's in the Bible. Paul, Paul does it in the book of Acts. And curiously enough there's a parallel with Mormonism because they actually have done that with an Aztec god called Quetzalcoatl. Yes. Who they claim is Jesus because in the Book of Mormon there is a story of Jesus after he's resurrected coming and visiting the ancient Jews who lived in America.And according, and then, so basically, they use the Quetzalcoatl. Story to tell people, see, this was our guy, you should join up. So it's an interesting it's, sometimes people, so the term for this, the scholarly term for this is syncretism where you take a piece of one religion and stick it into another one, and sometimes people who are in the culture we're talking about here, they don't— [00:07:00] I don't like to think that that's what they're doing when it comes to their more basic beliefs, but, in terms of their evangelizing, they absolutely are doing this.AKSAMIT: Yeah, absolutely. And I, it's so disingenuous on the part of a lot of the missionaries because I'm not speaking for Mormonism here, but I do know for a fact inside of our mission field, they did not believe that was the same God at all. Like, they did not believe that this This person was Jesus.In fact, it was something that was, is actively discouraged by the mission. I must give them that. They say, don't do this thing that these missionaries that did. The interesting part is that my later after, about maybe 40 years after that whole incident took place, my father, who he actually worked on video productions for a while, he created a video about the evangelizing to this people group and I grew up watching this video.And when I was researching for this book I came to mind and I was able to reach out to an anthropologist Who like the only anthropologist who worked with this group of people and talked to him about it and getting those two viewpoints Between the anthropologist and what you know [00:08:00] My viewpoint of watching this video and my dad's for making this video and a few other missionaries and it was You know kind of a fascinating personal connection to that group of people all the way across the worldSHEFFIELD: And so now the name New Tribes, what's the derivation of that?AKSAMIT: Yeah, so New Tribes Mission was essentially the idea, like I said, to send people into the most remote locations. It was essentially, when a man, when someone accepts Jesus to become a new creation. Just that with tribes. So New Tribes Mission. And they have changed their name to Ethnos 360, which is I guess trendy branding. Also because New Tribes Mission has in the last 20 years found itself in a lot of scandals sexual abuse, scandals, physical abuse, scandals, all sorts of things across the globe as mission organizations are what to do.SHEFFIELD: And we'll talk about some of that a little bit later. But what age were you when your parents [00:09:00] decided to go and do that?Father Deported from Panama to FloridaAKSAMIT: I was born in Panama. So I've you know got dual citizenship, which is nice, but I was born there. I was about one and a half years old. I don't remember the whole deportation that's recounted in the book. That was from interviewing my parents. Essentially, they my, during that time, anyone who was kind of in a sensitive area for Noriega, the dictator of Panama at the time was suspect for being an American spy, especially if you were American.And so they kind of showed up at our house and said that we had an illegal radio, which we didn't at the time. I mean, we did have one, but not then. And then they took my dad, left the rest of us there in the jungle. And We heard back from him a week later. He was in Florida. Apparently they had questioned him thoroughly and were either too afraid that he might actually be a spy or that he wasn't a spy and either way, they didn't want to just make him disappear because it might, they were kind of in a precarious position with the United States at the [00:10:00] time.So they decided the best thing apparently was just to put him on a plane to Florida. And then he called us called the mission and the mission told us that we, he was alive in Florida. Then we've gotten a plane in the following week.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so the time frame here. What was this?AKSAMIT: The yeah, that would have been that would have been in 1989.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah, so just for people who don't know who Manuel Noriega was, maybe you can tell us?AKSAMIT: Noriega was a dictator that was a CIA puppet for the majority of his career. He ran afoul of George. H. W. Bush when his name kept coming up inside of some kind of clandestine files so anyone who knows anything about Bush senior knows that he was the head of the CIA, but apparently, he was the head of the CIA.Just spontaneously. He had no affiliation with the CIA before he led it, which is a little bit irregular. It's come out more recently that he was likely part of the [00:11:00] CIA before that point. But yeah, so when that started coming out, it was a little bit embarrassing connections to Noriega. Noriega had a lot of drug dealing, a lot of different, he was essentially a thug of Panama.He had come into power. Via his CIA connections and also writing a r of kind of a wave of popularity from his predecessor Omar Tor Torrio. Torrio was a, not necessarily a Democratic hero, but he definitely was a hero of Panama. He represented the people in ways that no other leader at that time had, and he died in suspicious ways and, The CIA was indicated in that.So, Noriega, when he came into power, and then his CIA connections kind of came out into Panama, the Panamanian citizens didn't really like him, and then the U. S. didn't really like him, and it kind of ended with his ousting in 1989.Living in missionary compounds and going to church-run schoolsSHEFFIELD: so your father's sent back to Florida. What happens after that?AKSAMIT: Yeah, so at that point they were trying to sort out what's they [00:12:00] could do, they didn't, they were still inside the mission the mission placed them inside of a missionary training boot camp, is what they called it, up in Wisconsin.It was a compound, essentially a commune, a Christian commune, everybody worked, they had gardens, it was self-sustaining. And my parents helped train other missionaries to go to, did they call it a commune? No, they did not. They did not. It was a bootcamp, very militaristic, it was a bootcamp.And yeah, so they had classes teaching theology, all these things. Women were not allowed to teach any of the classes. Women weren't allowed to wear jeans for the first part. It finally switched over towards the end. They're able to wear. pants. They had to wear dresses at first. You weren't allowed to play cards.We weren't allowed to go to the movies. Very much, strict fundamentalism ideology and theology. As a kid, I grew up, being taught about the end of the world from like a very strangely young age, right? I remember my sister and I—I write [00:13:00] about this in the book—we were convinced that my dad might be the Antichrist.Because our kindergarten teacher had told us that the Antichrist would be somebody that everybody liked, who was really nice, and, but then turns out to be evil. And so I'm like, wait a second. The nicest person we know right now is our dad. He's probably the antichrist. So yeah, there was a lot of those sort of things I would wake up every morning and like go down to the window to look out the window to see if Jesus had come back yet Because that was, the thing that we were all supposed to be looking forward to I would, I was constantly terrified of Going to hell because like I didn't fully understand, it's impossible to explain Theology to a child and I didn't understand any of it.I just knew that hell existed, and it was a terrible place. I didn't want to go there. And so like, I would have like panic attacks as a child, like for years being like, I don't know. This is a bad place. I don't want to go there. And my mom would have to explain it. We don't believe you will like that kind of stuff.So it was it was an interesting upbringing in that area, but we were there until [00:14:00] 95. And in 95, we were able to go back to Panama because all my dad. Apparently, his records had been, had disappeared.Seeing Satan everywhere as a childSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and so to just go back to what you were saying about this end of the world obsessions I think, having had some of those same things inculcated to me when I was born in fundamentalist Mormonism.I think a lot of people haven't really seen that up close, and that's part of why I was glad to do a blurb for your book and to support you here because I think a lot of people, they don't really understand like this is a totaling worldview. Yeah, yeah. Talk about that a little bit if you could.AKSAMIT: Yeah. Yeah. There's It's something I think that I was definitely on the more extreme end of what children received inside of, evangelicalism, the more fundamentalist not everybody inside of, who went to Sunday school where [00:15:00] it was taught about the antichrist or that demons could possess anything.That's one. Another fear that we had was that our stuffed animals were possessed by demons because, they could possess anything. So, we had lots of fears, all entirely based upon things we were taught inside of our Sunday schools and preschools and kindergartens, because we, they were all inside…

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#WhyILeft: How racism and personal trauma made a black Republican Jul 15, 2023

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Episode SummaryThis episode is the first of a new ongoing series called “Why I Left,” which is going to be based on conversations with people who left political or religious movements. And the first are going to be free to everyone, but going forward, most of this series is going to be an extra benefit for paid subscribers.We're going to start the Why I Left series with a conversation with my good friend Ty Ross, she is an author and journalist and podcaster who is the cohost of the “Pardon the Insurrection” podcast, and she also wrote a book called The Power of Perspective under the pen name T. R. Armstrong.More importantly for this conversation, however, Ty was born and raised as a Black Republican and has a lot of personal insights on that experience and how, at least in her case, her political identity was just as much a matter of psychology as it was ideology.The video of our conversation is available. A machine-generated transcript of the edited audio follows the show information. You can access the transcript via this episode's webpage as well.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, Ty.TY ROSS: Hi, thank you for having me, Matt.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so let's [00:02:00] get started at the beginning here. So you're originally from North Carolina.And your father was a preacher, but I'll let you take the story from there. Tell us, how did your parents meet and what was their background and all that?ROSS: Well, my parents, they met when they were young.They were both teenagers when my mother had me. They didn't stay together. My father got together with my stepmother shortly after. My grandfather was a pastor in Charlotte. So he had founded two churches. And at that point, my father had, was born again and got saved and went into, into the profession and married my stepmother.So his views were separate from my mother's in that instance, because my father was so involved in the church.SHEFFIELD: And what denomination was this?ROSS: Pentecostal. Pentecostal.SHEFFIELD: Okay, just non-denominational Pentecostal?ROSS: Pentecostal is it's like Baptist, but a bit more extreme. This was just straight up Pentecostal. I guess maybe the closest would be what they consider to be a holiness church. Similar to COGIC [Church of God in Christ] kind of, but it was church almost seven days a week in a sense.There was Bible study, there was children's church, there was regular church, there were revivals. When we weren't at our home church, we visited churches or other churches were visiting us. So it was just everything revolved around the Bible, the church-- very strict, we couldn't listen to secular music, so popular.As I got older, popular bands and groups, I had no idea when my friends were going to concerts or singing popular songs. I'd never heard of them, so I was kind of looked at a little bit as a freak, because I had no idea of what was going on in popular culture.SHEFFIELD: Now, did you know that yourself that people thought you were weird because you didn't know that stuff?ROSS: Well, yeah, because kids [00:04:00] are cruel and kids don't really hold back.And I did have other friends whose fathers were pastors, but they weren't extreme. Like they, they drove flashy cars and they were, they kind of had everything that they wanted. And I, in my mind, I remember thinking, well, like. They worship God. So like, what's the, what's the difference? Her father's a pastor. Like, why is it that, women shouldn't wear pants? Or why is it that listening to this song and, and they weren't songs that were explicit or anything like that. Just, they just weren't singing the gospel.It was under the reasoning that if you're going to sing, it needs to be to praise the Lord. If you're going to dance, it needs to be dancing for the Lord. So that was the whole, everything revolved around God. Your life was not your own. It belonged to serving the Lord. Everything that you, everything that you do.SHEFFIELD: And that was on your, with your dad's environment. Now, how was your mom? What was her sort of viewpoint on all that stuff?ROSS: My mother she was Methodist. So there was church and there was service on Sundays. There was, you pray before you eat, you pray before you say your prayers before you go to bed.And I was thinking about the prayer the other day. I don't know why it was just going through my head. And I was like, why am I thinking about this? But. That, but that was the extent of it because they love to listen to music and have a good time and, mingle with people have people over.So it wasn't, it was strange because I couldn't really understand, there was no one to explain to me the difference between Methodist and Pentecostal. And if you all believe in God, Islam. And you're a good person, then everyone should be going to heaven. It shouldn't matter what pants I'm wearing and what, and just kind of my questioning that didn't make my dad very happy.And it was rough when [00:06:00] I had to live with my father. It was really, it was hard, but it left a really big impression on me.SHEFFIELD: Because how old were you when you did for that time,ROSS: Was I eight or nine, eight or nine years old? And, for myself, I didn't have a lot of friends. I think I had like one, one friend, like I said, everything revolved around the church, but I did have questions because I did have two different influences in my life.So I had something to compare it to. And I've always been kind of inquisitive and just kind of wanted to know, but also as a child. You want to please your parents and you want to be accepted. So I found myself going through the motions of things when I was with my father, learning when they would do things like altar calls.And that's when they would say, okay, if you're a sinner and you're ready to give your, come on up here to the altar. And they would put their hands on your forehead and tears streaming down people's faces and falling to their knees. And I was the daughter, the granddaughter at that time, my father was then just a minister in the church.So every week I felt obligated to go up there, and pretty much put myself up there in front of the church. And I remember once trying to just sit and see what happens. Like maybe they'll just kind of forget about me. And my stepmother was in the choir. So she's looking down and then, my father's sitting up on the men's side I was like, yeah, I've got to get up.I've got to get out. But that was my way of just kind of staying in the family's good graces and being the good, the good daughter, so to speak, because I mean, literally my father, my stepmother, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, everyone was in that church. So there was really no [00:08:00] nowhere to go, nowhere for me to kind of voice my concerns or just really ask questions without being chastised because it was basically, if you're asking questions, you're going to hell because you don't have faith in that, that was it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. Well, so that was your childhood kind of being torn in both directions in some ways and a lot of confusion sounds like, right?ROSS: Yeah, absolutely.SHEFFIELD: So, okay. So once you became an adult, what happened next with that?ROSS: Well, when I became an adult, I, well, my stepfather was Catholic.And I found solace in the Catholic church. It wasn't as crazy and wild. And I, it's so I clung to the Catholic church, and I'd still consider myself a Catholic, but. It was like I was running away from the extreme nature of my father's church. And I felt some, a more forgiving church in the Catholic church.So I held onto that. And at one time I was actually very devout as an adult. I went to daily mass in the mornings. I went to mass on Sundays. I went to retreats. I would do all of the high Holy days. I wanted to be the best Catholic that I. Could be. And I threw myself full, full force into that.It was kind of also a part of like where I was with my political views at the time. Just starting in high school was where I started to formulate more opinions about things going on in the world. Like, Ronald Reagan had a profound impact when he was elected as somebody who's been in debate and student council.As an orator, he draws me in, and he was a brilliant [00:10:00] speaker. He had a way of speaking and it felt like he was speaking to me. And we didn't have social media at the time. We just saw what we saw on our non-cable, TV news and whatever came on. And he seemed to be someone that wanted to continue to move this country forward, and I wanted to be a part of that.And I was not impressed with the Jesse Jacksons and the Al Sharptons. I felt, they felt clownish to me. Now, I had a tremendous amount of respect for Thurgood Marshall. I was very proud that he sat on our, on our Supreme Court. And I know that he was a, an advocate for social justice, but I also know that he was a conservative man.He wasn't some crazy, crazy liberal. And I know that my mother went to see Reagan speak. So that validated my following and him like, okay, my mom supports him and her not being very extreme. It was easy, easier for me to kind of slip into that. And then I just kind of found myself gravitating towards conservative views.And just kind of mixing my background, all of it, just all of it kind of coming together. Just kind of mixing my background and. I didn't realize that I was a Republican, but I knew that I liked certain people and certain what certain people said more than others. And they tended to be of a particular, and then that was just, yeah.SHEFFIELD: Now, did you have any political discussions with your high school friends or anything like that? Or not really?ROSS: When I got into high school and I got into student council and debate, I did, and I would.SHEFFIELD: And was your school like, what was it primarily White or primarily Black or kind of a mix?ROSS: Well, I was here in El Paso, [00:12:00] which is predominantly Hispanic, but I did have the school that I went to because of a lot of military parents, there were more Black people there.And I found myself not agreeing with a lot of what the Black people had to say about things. And I would just kind of listen to them. I was a supporter of the Second Amendment, and I really spent a lot of time focusing on the Second Amendment. Looking back now, I was probably a bit irrational about it, how I clung to it.And I don't even know why I've never held a gun. Never seen one in person, but for some reason I felt like to be a good American and I needed to support that, that the Second Amendment, it was like, I was indoctrinated that you had to support that above. Every other amendment to be a good American, if that makes any sense.And not as extreme as the GOP is today but was a part of who I was. And I don't want to say branding, but I did in a sense, brand myself, I guess you can say for lack of a better word, I had branded myself, this is what I feel. This is what I believe, but I had conviction in the things that I was saying.I would read about them. I would read about people in history, and I wanted to know, and I wanted to be firm when I was having discussions with people. And when I was on the debate team, there was a girl who was really militant, like Black militants. And we were partners when we did cross sex debate.So that was interesting because she was completely opposite of me. And she was like the person that introduced me to Nikki Giovanni. And she, she was really, really like Black Panther, but looking back, she was really fascinating, but, [00:14:00] like I said, I was very strong in what I believed in I believed in the right to life, I believed in the Second Amendment, I followed the guidelines for what I thought was going to be the path that was going to separate me so that I wasn't lumped in with every other Black person at that time.I remember wanting to run as far away as I could from Jesse Jackson and a lot of it. Also, my father couldn't stand him. My father hated him, and he never had anything nice to say about him. And though I was not as extreme as my father, I still wanted to have something. That was something that we had in common.So my father and I, as I got older, we would talk about politics, if there was a speech when I remember when Jesse Jackson was running for president my father and I would have conversations and whatnot. And so it really, it shaped me more my political than my religious with my father in that aspect, because that was something I couldn't join him on the religious thing because it was just too, too much for me.But on the political aspect, we bonded and that was something that I wasn't able to have with him when I really couldn't understand. It felt fake when I lived with him because, like I said, I was going through the motions. But not really feeling it in his church. So, there wasn't really the kind of connection that I wanted to have with him.So, with the politics thing, we had a real true something in com truly something in common. A real bond, and I clung to that as well. And that could also be, me not, living with my mother most of my life. And her moving around, and we moved around. So that was my way of being my father's daughter, [00:16:00] something he could be proud of,SHEFFIELD: know, connection with him.Yeah,ROSS: yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so the idea though of kind of being different or differentiating yourself from the other Black people that you knew, like that was a, there was an impulse, something you felt very strongly. Why did you feel that way, do you think?ROSS: It was, I think it also had to do with, I was bullied a lot, when we were growing up and we lived in, of course, at that time there, I mean, there's still segregation, but you know, I went to a predominantly White school, but I live in a predominantly Black neighborhood.And my grandfather had a third-grade education. He grew up in the tobacco fields in North Carolina. So for him, reading was really important. And I like dinosaurs, as a kid, and he said, for every book you bring home on what you like, you need to bring home a book on like Black history. And I learned about Jim Crow and for me, I saw how far we'd…

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CNN and Fox are having very different identity crises Jul 08, 2023

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Episode SummaryThe cable news industry is in crisis. It is part of a larger crisis known as cord cutting, which is a phenomenon of people realizing that they really don't need to pay for 500 channels when they only watch 3 or 4. Across the country, millions of people have decided they don't want to pay for cable or satellite TV. That has made a crisis in the cable news industry as well, where CNN, Fox, and MSNBC have faced a number of years of declining ratings.Even though there have been some blips here and there with the 2020 election or the initial election of Donald Trump in 2016, the long-term ratings trend is downward. As a result, there is a perpetual need for the executives of the companies that own the major cable news channels to manage the decline.How they do that has been very interesting to watch over time. Recently, there have been big changeups within CNN, which was bought by a larger company called Discovery which subsequently brought in a new CEO named Chris Licht, who drove away much of the audience and created friction with staff by trying to make the network more pro-Republican.On the Fox side of the dial, the network is in turmoil after choosing to settle a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems over false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election publicized by then-president Donald Trump and many Fox personalities.Despite settling the Dominion lawsuit for $787 million, the network is still facing another case from a voting company called Smartmatic. On top of that, Fox just settled a lawsuit by a former producer of Tucker Carlson for $12 million who had alleged she'd witnessed racism, antisemitism, sexism, and claimed that she had been forced to lie in the Dominion lawsuit before it was settled.In response to losing all this money, Fox has completely overhauled its primetime evening lineup. Tucker Carlson, who was the centerpiece of the schedule at 8 PM Eastern time was fired.Some people have argued that the firing of Carlson is going to permanently offend the Fox viewership base, and it is true, no doubt, that the ratings have been lower after all this turmoil, but there are indications that Fox is back on the upward path now.Will CNN ever figure out what it wants to be? Will the far-right return to watching Fox? How much more money can Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch afford to lose?There's a lot to talk about here. In this episode, we're featuring Colby Hall, he is the founding editor of Mediaite.com and a longtime observer and participant in television news.The video of our conversation is below. The transcript of the edited audio follows.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It's good to have you here. Welcome to Theory of Change, Colby.COLBY HALL: Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to chat with you.SHEFFIELD: All right. So let's kind of set the table here with some larger context. I think when people have discussions about cable news ratings, a lot of times they don't really understand how the industry works, how it's measured, and also how cable news fits in the larger rubric of cable paid for television. So, overall, I think the number one thing for people to understand about this is that cable news just actually isn't that popular.People like any given show that somebody is watching, even the most popular one, like we have a country of 330 million people and the top-rated show, if they're lucky, is 3 million.HALL: Right. Right. I'd say on a good day, maybe over 3 million. And if you look at the target demographic from which sponsors actually pay for which cable news gets paid, it's much, much smaller.So, you're really talking to less than 1% of citizens are actually watching any given show, but I would say their influence far outweighs that. Because. Really? I'm old enough to remember when there were three channels plus PBS, and it was a big deal when cable came to town and Hutchinson, Kansas, where I lived at the time, we had 13 channels and now, [00:06:00] there's endless numbers of television channels but more importantly, there's.social media, there's smartphones, there's streaming services. But still, even though cable news viewers are declining in size to the degree that I'm not sure I would say it's crisis, but that's not an unfair word to use. They're still making a lot of money off of subscribers from cable set top boxes, 80% of the revenue comes from subscribers.And only 20% comes from advertising. But it's still the loudest voice in the room to steal a phrase. Cable news is the most concentrated political media outlet. And so if you are a politician and you want to speak to your constituents, if you're left of center, you most likely go on MSNBC. If you're right of center, you definitely go on Fox News and or Newsmax.And. What's happened over the last 10 years or so is it's not just the people that are watching the linear viewing of that cable news. It's that which is excerpted the aggregation of third-party video content, which has been shared by websites like Mediaite, or clipped and put on Twitter, or shared on Reddit, or any number of outlets, right?So, these two things can be true. Cable news viewers as much smaller than people think. Yeah. There is something self-selected about the audience, but its influence, I think, has never been more powerful in part because politicians have sort of, I don't know, lessened their voice. I guess the best metaphor I'd say with regard to Fox News is there was a time where it looked like Fox News was working for the GOP, per Roger Ailes design, and suddenly over the last five years [00:08:00] that dynamic seemed to switch, whereas it seems like very often, Republicans are working for Fox News.And I think that's not just a hit on Fox News or Republicans, the same dynamic exists on the left, just it's less efficient. It works less effectively. So cable news is declining in viewers, but at the same time, its current influence on the national dialogue, I would argue, has never been stronger.I think a lot of these talking heads, the Tucker Carlsons and the Sean Hannitys, those people have sort of filled a vacuum created by political figures who are more into getting deals done and promoting their brand than they are in actual leadership or policy. So it's a very complicated idea summed up as pitifully as possible.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and I guess maybe the analogy I would use for this is before television times and before radio, it was a huge thing in the American South to do what they called a tent revival. And so basically cable news is sort of the tent revival of the political scene. But not very many people can fit into these tents or watch whoever is showing up to speak in that given moment. But on the other hand, they're part of a larger culture than ours. They're sort of like the main event in any given moment.HALL: It's a perfect metaphor, because a lot of times, the people are preaching to the gospel, right? So the viewers of cable news, opinion driven cable news, primetime, Fox and MSNBC are going there. They're tuning in to have their preexisting beliefs reaffirmed, right? So, and the talking heads are literally preaching to the choir.And it's not just that the, what the broadcast programs are, [00:10:00] the impact isn't limited to just what's being said at that moment. There, people that view it, then cite this stuff and literally spread the gospel. So your revivalist tent metaphor is, I think, very, it's perfect. So kudos. Well, well done.Oh, thanks.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, and we talked about it a little bit, just briefly for a second there about the industry itself. Cable paid for television subscriptions that actually is in a crisis the larger cable industry and through what, what people have now called cord cutting, where they just don't feel the need to pay for.Constant stream of shows they'd never watch, channels they're not interested in. And so as a result, a lot of people are taking that money that they were spending and they were, they're spending it on things like Netflix or Hulu and, those are not news and sports services.So, and people are finding also. You know that there, I mean, there just has been a declining interest in sports and sort of, and news itself has inter, people who are interested in news have gone online, as you were saying, that if you, are interested in, let's say, what a given host has to say about something, chances are you can watch that on Twitter or somewhere else.Somebody has put it there in part to say that it was notable to them, and I mean, hell, there's people on YouTube who literally specialize on taking the full shows from, TV news and just plopping the entire thing out there and getting ad dollars from other people's stuff.So it is, yeah, it's, I mean, that's it's been kind of a bifurcation that on the low interest viewers in news have kind of drifted away entirely. And then high interest viewers have been like, well. This is, I already knew about this stuff yesterday or,HALL: yeah. And I think one of the things that doesn't really get talked about enough [00:12:00] is because we're sort of living through it as we speak, but it wasn't that long ago that we had a shared experience as a society either through reading articles in newspapers or watching one of three broadcast news.Or a miniseries. I mean, I'm old enough that when Roots was a miniseries on TV, a broadcast TV, everyone watched it, and everyone talked about it. Cut to today and everyone has their own custom interests and views, either through streaming service or Twitter or social media or online. It's very difficult to find people that sort of align with you.And when you do you tend to sort of circle around that community. So we have these much smaller and yet more passionate. Affinity groups, and some of which is, I think you referenced there, a line around political media, whether it be, right of center or left of center. And these are people who feel a sense of community by consuming nonstop coverage of that's focused on how bad it is.and pernicious Trump was to America or how bad and pernicious and what a horrible president Biden is to America, depending upon the network that you choose to watch. So the size of the viewers has become smaller, but it's become a lot more intense, a lot finer cut. And I think that's part of the reason why we as a society are kind of.divided in the way that we are. And these cable news outlets, many of them know where their bread is buttered. And so they, the red meat that they throw, typically appeals to the fringiest elements of either side of that [00:14:00] dynamic of news or traditional journalism as we grew up with, like the capital J journalistic schools standards isn't supposed to be entertaining, right?It's typically pretty boring and that's not what cable news is. Yes, there's, CNN has arguably one of the best news gathering teams in the world. Like they really have a good news gathering team, but much of their programming isn't just news. It's nonstop analysis. Same with Fox news. It's an entertainment program that really sells outrage and anger packaged in a news format, but particularly prime time, it's all opinion analysis and people. I think a lot of viewers do not necessarily think critically enough about what they're consuming to realize that what they're getting on either side across the board is the propagation of political jargon.A lot of it is propaganda, and I don't mean in a fascist sense, but it's political-speak that is less about informing. And more about angering or fear and creating passionate viewers that will tune in for the next breaking news alert, which half these networks have breaking news banners up as a default.And rarely is it truly breaking news.SHEFFIELD: Oh, sorry, I was going to say just before you got into another point that, one of the you had mentioned the constant. Idea of analysis but in many cases, it's also featuring the exact same people who told you what they thought, an hour ago about the same topic and so it's almost, and, like in the case of Fox, they have some people who are on their show, the five, who also have other shows.So Dana Perino being one, Jesse Waters being another one, Greg Gutfeld being one. So like literally you've already heard [00:16:00] what these people had to say about the news of the day, right? In enormous detail. And CNN is, does the same thing that they will, in 2020, I think they, they became infamous for basically only almost showing like 10 people.Ever only interviewing like 10 people across their entire network for months on end, in Brady Bunch style format where no one could actually hear what anyone really thought for more than five seconds. And so it is, it's not, it isn't about news as much and, but it isn't even about analysis either.It's almost more like a soap opera in some sense.HALL: I think it's tribalism. I think it's people I mean, what are the genius? The genius, Roger Ailes genius in The Five is the way he casts that with specific archetypes. Like, you have, Jesse Watters plays the part of the smug, frat bro who cracks wise.Dana Perino is sort of a, Smart, calm, big sister slash mother type. Then you have the liberal who is just Tarlov. You have the firebrand in, in, sort of older woman in Jean Pirro. And Gutfeld, you have kind of the snarky, jerky, New Yorker and people watch because they can identify with that.And that show is the top rated, it's the most successful show on cable news. And when it launched, people mocked it because people forget that Greg Glenn Beck was. Was the original Tucker Carlson. He was the original bad boy of Fox News. He said crazy things. He got pushed out and replaced by the five and people laughed and thought it was going to be like a horrible, get canceled and it's now the most influential show.And it, it created stars that like Jesse Waters is going to be the 8 PM host replacing Bill O'Reilly, who was his mentor and Greg Gutfeld has his own show as well. So, yeah, [00:18:00] I think people tend to, and by the way, getting back to what we said earlier, between total viewers and demo, demo is much, much smaller.So the majority of viewers That are logged on to cable news are much older. They're over 55, right?SHEFFIELD: And that's true. And by the way, a lot of people lefties will rag on Fox about that. That's also true about MSNBC as well. It is an older audience. Sorry. They have the oldest audience. But everybody's audience is old.HALL: Well, that's why Tucker Carlson was such a goldmine for Fox News when Tucker Carlson replaced Bill O'Reilly. And his ratings initially weren't that great. And that was at the time when Alex Jones and Infowars It was getting a lot of attention and a lot of negative attention and deservedly so.He was saying like over the top crazy kind of like outlandish conspiratorial things that were really offensive. And good journalism, all of it, Oliver Darcy and CNN basically ruined his career by getting him deplatformed because he was saying crazy stuff by—SHEFFIELD: Actually telling people what this guy was saying.HALL: Right.People who weren't regular viewers of Jones, they had no idea what this guy was talking about, right? It's like he's a nut job. I don't care. I don't listen to him. He's irrelevant.HALL: So but what Tucker Carlson did is when his ratings weren't so great when he initially replaced O'Reilly He clearly my reporting tells me that he decided to Turn harder right and go more conspiratorial and sort of chase the,…

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An ancient Greek philosophical tradition is surprisingly relevant in today's world of instant information Jul 01, 2023

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Episode SummaryHistory, as the old saying goes, repeats itself. There are many reasons why, but one of them is that philosophy is actually far more important than many people may realize.We live during a time in which search engines and AI have made it so that anyone has access to information on any field of human knowledge. But having knowledge available to you does not mean you understand it.Where we think knowledge originates impacts our ability to perceive the world. And we can't make sound conclusions about reality if our process of thinking is unsound. Unfortunately, a lot of people have broken epistemologies and as a result they practice a counterfeit form of skepticism in which they question everyone--except for themselves.Believe it or not, our current moment in which everyone claims to know everything about the world has some commonalities with the intellectual climate of ancient Greece. Then as now, lots of people called themselves experts on biology, astronomy, medicine, and a whole lot more—and many of their theories were simply incorrect.During a times of uncertainty, learning how to distinguish between ignorance and skepticism is a tremendous skill to develop.In this episode, we're featuring Richard Bett, a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and the author of a number of books on Greco-Roman skepticism, including "How to Keep an Open Mind: An Ancient Guide to Thinking Like a Skeptic," which is an edited translation of the works of Sextus Empiricus, one of the most famous members of the ancient Skeptic traditions.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. If you’re not a member, please join today on Substack or Patreon to get full access.The video of this episode is available. A machine-generated transcript of the audio is provided below.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Richard.RICHARD BETT: Thanks very much.SHEFFIELD: So I think a lot of the history that we're going to be talking about here today, it may be unfamiliar to a lot of people because, unfortunately, most universities and high schools do not require students to learn about ancient philosophy.So let's maybe start the discussion here with Socrates and the Sophists. Who were they and what were they about?BETT: Okay, well, so, the Sophists were a group of well, higher educators in some sense. They were the first people who taught grown men, it was only men in those days, and they taught beyond the kinds of basic subjects that you might learn just as a normal member of society. And they taught effective public speaking.But they also had a number of what you might call theoretical interests, especially about the nature of human society, often the origins of human society. And so in many ways, I think you can think of them as a kind of early kind of social scientist.And yeah, they are clearly interested in being able to make an effective case on either side of an argument. And thinking about opposing sides of arguments. That's an important part of what the Sophists are about.Socrates is around the same time. This is the late 400s BCE. And possibly stretching a little beyond that, which is a period before Plato. And Plato had a lot of opposition to the Sophists, but yes [00:04:00] Socrates was engaged in a lot of discussion of what things are good, what a good human life might be like, and so for him, a lot of discussion of a variety of different points of view. That was also part of what he was up to.Socrates seems to have been suspicious of the Sophists in certain respects, but he also had some things in common with them, I think it's fair to say.SHEFFIELD: Okay. And the signature form of discussion that Socrates engaged in is now known as Socratic dialogue. Tell us what that was.BETT: Well, I mean, this is as presented by Plato, mostly. And we have other sources of information about Socrates, but Plato's by far the most compelling. And in his version, it's questioning people about their assumptions, especially their assumptions about how a human life ought to be lived. What a good human life would be like.And, yeah, as we see it in many of the dialogues with Plato, it involves getting people to see that they don't really know about the things they claim to know about. And it seems like that's a kind of starting point for search for, better answers than one had before.Now Socrates in many of Plato's dialogues makes clear he doesn't know the answers to these things either. But he's interested in getting people into a in an attempt to figure that out. And so yeah, it's a kind of painstaking inquiry which more often than not leads to Inconclusive results but at least you've cleared away some kind of mistaken ideas that you might have had beforehand.That seems to be the method as depicted in much of what Plato gives us about Socrates.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and a lot of people had seen value in that type of instruction ever since that point.BETT: Sure.SHEFFIELD: And now, a lot of people who are [00:06:00] professors in a variety of fields be engaged in that themselves, right?BETT: That's right. I mean, that's always my attempt is to pose questions rather than, just lecturing. And with a larger class, you have to do some lecturing. But yeah, with a small seminar, it's great if you can, if most of what comes out of your mouth is a question, and getting the students talking and maybe getting them to reconsider some ideas that they were attached to before.So yeah, the Socratic method is much applauded. It's not always so easy to actually enact unless you're dealing with a small group.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, but I guess in a sense you could say that it's sort of an attempt to begin reasoning to come to higher, more well-formed conclusions about the world.BETT: That sounds right.SHEFFIELD: And ourselves. So that was the framework.But not everybody, of course, who was a contemporary of Socrates was fond of that type of inquiry. And as most people probably know, Socrates was sentenced to death for impiety, as he was alleged to be promoting unbelief and irreligion among the young men, right?BETT: Well, well, supposedly new kinds of divinity. It's different from the standardly recognized ones; that's the charge. But then yeah as it goes on in detail in the description it turns out some people think he doesn't believe in gods at all.SHEFFIELD: Before we get into sort of the rub of the charge against him, I think it's worth discussing a little bit how in polytheism, ethics and religion are not necessarily intertwined as they are in modern-day monotheism, right?BETT: That's right. Yeah. I mean, it's not that there's no kind of directives that you might think you get from the gods, but yeah, there's certainly no, there's no moral code that's written down in some equivalent of the [00:08:00] Bible, that there is no equivalent to the Bible. There are things you better not do against the gods; you better not get on the wrong side of them. But that has nothing much to do with how you treat your fellow human beings in society.I mean, of course, there are very highly developed ethical codes, but yeah, the connection between those and Greek religion was pretty loose, certainly.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I think if you look at a lot of other polytheistic traditions around the world, that seems to generally be the case with a lot of them.BETT: I think that's right. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Maybe some exception on ancient Egyptian religion, depending on what time period you're looking at, but maybe that's a little--BETT: I'll take your word for that. I can't speak with authority about that.SHEFFIELD: Okay, so Socrates, though, he was accused of saying that he had within him what he called a daemon or people might nowadays pronounce a “demon” if they're British. And Americans, we, we would say, I don't know, a “dai-mone” probably, I guess. But this inner sort of soul or conscience of his, and he believed that that was the source of how he knew what was right. And that was not what some people agreed with or wanted to hear.BETT: Right. Yeah, I mean, it was not, it didn't speak to him all that often, but yes it gave him guidance on certain occasions as he understood it. And yeah, that, I mean, that seems to have been the source of the notion that he had nonstandard religious ideas or one of the sources anyway.So yeah, I mean, he took it quite seriously, as far as we can tell, according to Plato. Plato's version, it only ever told him not to do things that he was, considering doing. In another version, the author Xenophon, sometimes it told him to do things in a positive sense.But yeah, there was, it's not clear how it worked. I mean, was it a voice? Was it just a sort of a beep? (laughter) Who knows? But yeah, it was some [00:10:00] sort of guidance that he interpreted as having a divine origin. But yes, it was a voice, an inner voice that spoke to him in some way or another. And yeah, he was quite serious about it, but yes, that it, it seems likely that was, and there's several places in Plato more or less say that that was one of the origins of this charge of impiety or believing in nonstandard religious ideas.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And somebody who lived around the same time as Socrates doesn't appear to have any sort of connection, as far as we know. We don't know a lot about him, was another philosopher named Pyrrho.BETT: Yeah, a few generations later, but yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I mean, yeah, so, but I mean in terms of like, we don't know what he thought about Socrates, generally speaking. So give us a background on who Pyrrho was and how his ideas sort of became dormant after and then were revived multiple times.BETT: Right. Yeah. Okay. So Pyrrho yes, as I said, two or three generations later than Socrates, probably. And yeah he is the origin of the school of skepticism known as Pyrrhonism and yeah we are told that he went he was contemporary with Alexander the Great, and he went on Alexander's expedition to India and there encountered some Indian philosophers we don't know who they were, but they're just called "naked wise men" in the source that we're given on this, and supposedly came back from India with a philosophy that we now call skepticism.Now, I mean, the exact nature of Pyrrho's ideas is very hard to pin down given the lack of evidence. But in the later Pyrrhonism tradition, which, yeah, as you said, there's a gap. He had some immediate followers, and then the Pyrrhonist tradition, appealing to Pyrrho, was not started until the first century BCE, and then lasted for a few centuries after that.The one author in the Pyrrhonist tradition who has written extensive works that have survived, is a guy named Sextus Empiricus. And for him, [00:12:00] skepticism consists in suspending judgment. So you don't lay down the law about anything. You don't claim to have figured out the ultimate truth of things. Instead you contemplate all the opposing views on things and come to suspension of judgment because they all have equal credibility to you. And that is supposed to produce tranquility.And yeah, some version of those ideas or related ideas seems to have been what Pyrrho put forward. But exactly how similar is not so clear. But in any case, Pyrrho's ideas served as inspiration for some people later in antiquity who picked up that general strand of thought and promoted a philosophy making suspension of judgment central. So that's sort of a very short thumbnail sketch of one strand of Greek Skepticism. Now I should say another strand was in Plato's Academy, and they did explicitly appeal to Socrates as a kind of forerunner.But yeah, as you say, there’s no evidence to connect Pyrrho with Socrates, and I'm trying to remember if his disciple Timon wrote about quite a few other philosophers, mostly in a scathing negative way. I'm trying to remember if he ever refers to Socrates, but I'm sorry, I cannot remember right now, and I'd have to go do some research to figure it out.But in any case, yeah, there's no reason to think Pyrrho was identified himself as a follower of Socrates or a follower of anyone else for that reason, except for that matter, except perhaps these Indian thinkers that he encountered on his expedition with Alexander.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I remember reading a long time ago a book about Sophists, and there was some discussion that perhaps there was some connections between sort of pre-Hindu thought in that tradition, those traditions as well, but it's not, it's so poorly documented, it's really hard to say so, okay, so, but, and I guess one of the other sort of And this is an interesting parallel, I think, between the ancient [00:14:00] Greco Roman world and today is that in those days, the realm of human knowledge was much smaller, and so places like the Academy or places like the various houses, the Pythagoreans and other schools of thought, they dealt with enormous breadth of the subjects that they talked about.So, and we're talking here kind of, we're going to be focusing, moving the focus to Pyrrho and Sextus, but in the case of Sextus Empiricus, he was part of-- the Empirical school was primarily a medical school of thought.BETT: That's right.SHEFFIELD: And so, but on the other hand, like when you look at the Academy founded by Plato and Aristotle’s Lyceum as well, and the Pythagoreans, they were doing things on mathematics, they were doing things on history, they were doing things on astronomy.And here's where I think it's interesting as a parallel to the present day, because we're now at this moment in human history where knowledge has actually collapsed back in on itself in a sense. Because of the creation of search engines, anyone can actually get true information and begin forming ideas about any particular subject because of the internet. You don't have to have a background in astrophysics or surgery to begin looking at these topics.And so in that sense, I think it's a really fascinating development that really is kind of, unparalleled in except for at that very moment that we're talking about here with the ancient skeptic environment. What's your thought on that?BETT: I'm not quite sure I see the parallel here.SHEFFIELD: In other words, anybody can sort of make a foray into a field of knowledge now.BETT: Oh, I see.SHEFFIELD: So the parallel that I would say between these ancient times that we're talking about here and the present day is that in both [00:16:00] cases, people are able to venture into fields of knowledge with which they had no direct experience and are able to begin forming conclusions.And in the same way, there were a lot of really stupid and terrible ideas about how things worked in the ancient world. And we're now kind of seeing that again, during COVID, everybody was an expert in biochemistry and public health, and in the same way that Aristotle thought he knew how women thought and--BETT: Right. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that parallel, but as you describe it, I see the point. Yeah, yeah, that's right.SHEFFIELD: And there's that phrase of, I think it was Karl Marx, that history repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce. Whether that of course is only once or twice, he's playing off Hegel there. But it is, I think it is the case that a lot of good ideas or modes of thinking also kind of have analogs in bad forms of thinking.And we're seeing that nowadays, especially with people like Joe Rogan and others who are pr…

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Theory of Change #076: Tim Whitaker on 'The New Evangelicals' Jun 24, 2023

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Episode SummaryAcross America, and across the world, radical movements of far-right Christians are trying desperately to seize the levers of political power to force their religious opinions onto everyone else. And in many cases, particularly the 2016 election of Donald Trump, they have succeeded.Seeing the rise of reactionary Christianity has made some non-religious people recoil in horror to the idea that religion itself is the problem. But that’s not going to work, because not only is religion not going anywhere, religion is also like philosophy or politics. They’re tools that can be used for great evil, but also for great good as well. Just ask the thousands of Christian activists who have been mobilizing for racial justice and to end gun violence right now. Or ask the Christians who worked to mobilize to end slavery in the United States and Great Britain and other countries.The reality is that whatever your viewpoints are about religion or theology, it’s past time for people who oppose the fascistic politics that is emerging in the United States and elsewhere to come together in a shared purpose, not just to preserve democracy, but to expand it as well. I was pleased to talk about what that means with Tim Whitaker. He is a podcaster and founder of a non-profit organization called The New Evangelicals which works tirelessly to promote inclusive and affirming Christianity.VideoTranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I’m glad to have you here today, Tim.TIM WHITAKER: Hello, Matthew. Thank you for having me. It’s awesome to talk to you again. We’ve been chatting for a while behind the scenes, so glad to have a conversation.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Alright, well, so, for people who haven’t listened to your podcast, just give us an overview of what is it, and how often does it come out, and what are you doing on it?WHITAKER: Yeah, sure. The podcast is called the New Evangelicals Podcast. It comes out at least once a week, sometimes twice, depending on what’s happening in current events.Most of it is me interviewing all different kinds of guests coming from some kind of like Christian perspective, but usually more liberal or progressive or scholars who are focusing on certain like focuses like Christian nationalism and just trying to unpack that for our audience. Most of the people that listen to us are people who have a history of growing up in Evangelical fundamentalist spaces. So, someone like John MacArthur might’ve been a leader that they were exposed to. That’s who I was exposed to as a kid. So as we kind of walked away from that, we still want to follow Jesus, but we’re not really sure how.So our [00:04:00] podcast helps introduce people to scholars and theologians and people like that who are thinking about and living in ways that are different than how we were brought up to think about the Christian tradition but are still faithful to Jesus.So that’s like the main crux of it. But we also do episodes where I’ll bring on someone who disagrees with me, like an actual Christian nationalist, or my podcast producer Noah will come on sometimes and we’ll just have a conversation.So it’s a pretty wide podcast, but usually it’s in some kind of interview form.SHEFFIELD: And how did you get into doing it or why did you decide to do it?WHITAKER: Well, I started it because I started the New Evangelicals on Instagram first. It was an Instagram page, and when that kind of exploded almost three years ago now I said to myself, I already have a podcast that wasn’t part of this work I was doing.And I said, I think I have to switch over and make a new podcast called the New Evangelicals podcast to have these more long-form conversations because this stuff is so complicated. So that’s why we started it, trying to get people a more long-form content than just Instagram stories or short posts or reels, because again, theology or social issues are really complicated and take a lot of nuance to unpack.So that was kind of the motivation behind it to give people something more long form than just that short 60 second hot take or, short tweet.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and of course you can’t even make a freaking link on Instagram.WHITAKER: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, you would have to post it in the stories as a link and it’s a whole thing, but exactly right.So, so we just knew that long term, I wanted to have conversation with people. I mean, I like conversations. I like discovering different ways of thinking. And so it’s been really cool. We’re about 144 episodes in now, and we’ve had all kinds of amazing guests on the podcast, and it’s been really cool to be a part of it.SHEFFIELD: And all right. What’s so tell us about your background. You grew up Evangelical, obviously, but tell us.WHITAKER: Oh, yes. I grew up in the belly of the beast. So I did grow up in New Jersey, which people think is liberal, which overall it [00:06:00] is, but there’s still very many pockets of conservative, fundamentalist Christianity.And I grew up in one of them. I was homeschooled for nine years. Like I said earlier, John MacArthur’s style of teaching, he’s someone who would be considered very conservative and reformed. So the belief that God is predestining people to go to heaven or hell. The Bible’s absolutely inherently God’s objective truth. Just read it, that kind of perspective.That’s how I grew up my entire life. And I was committed to being a Christian in that worldview, because that’s all I knew. I was serving in church at age eight, handing out bulletins as an usher. So I’m someone who was fully inoculated in Evangelical culture, both in the church level and that like subculture level of just the Evangelical ethos, of the music, of the merch, of the conferences of the parachurch ministries. So organizations that did missions work in their local towns.I was someone who was part of all of that all the way in. So that’s kind of my background. And then over time, what I tell people is I took my faith seriously, like my leaders told me to do, they would often tell me, ‘Hey, don’t take my word for it. Read the Bible for yourself. Hey, don’t take this person’s word for it. See what the scriptures say.’So I did. They told me to follow Jesus wherever Jesus would take me. So I did. And it took me, long story short, out eventually of what I called the basement of Evangelical fundamentalism and into the broader tradition of Christian thought.So there’s a lot there obviously, but that’s the short form version.SHEFFIELD: Huh. And what was the, what’s been the reaction from some of the people that you’ve That you knew?WHITAKER: Well, I mean my church kicked me out when I started new Evangelicals, they–SHEFFIELD: Cancel culture.WHITAKER: You said it not me. But yeah, I mean they pretty much gave me an ultimatum, stop serving quote unquote, which means volunteering as a worship drummer.That’s what I was doing. I was playing drums in the church. I could either stop doing that and just attend services, which is [00:08:00] pretty much a death sentence because all of my relationships were built around music and being part of that team. Or I could stop doing the work I was doing online. So, I had to leave.So overall the reaction by a lot of people has not been great. I did lose a lot of friendships. A few of them still stuck around, and they’re great friends to this day, and they’ve made room for me. I made room for them, but I think overall, the general view– and it’s hard to know because people that I know don’t message me telling me this, but the perception I have is, Tim has just gone liberal. He’s just gone. He’s just not a real Christian anymore because A, B, C, D, and E. He’s changed his views on these things, or he can’t, he’s not going to vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020.Those kinds of things that I bucked against, I think, for those people were signs that I was giving, I was being handed over to the world, so to speak.SHEFFIELD: You began actually taking the faith seriously and reading it. Tell us more about that process, how it worked for you.WHITAKER: Yeah. I mean, so one example of this would be 2016, right? So I am someone who, again, like I grew up and believed that being a Christian was the quote unquote, best way to live. And I wanted to follow Jesus and my church tradition.I’ve been part of more conservative reform churches. I’ve been part of more charismatic spaces. So I’ve kind of been involved in all different flavors of the Evangelical tradition and there are some consistent themes, hey, Christians have integrity, and Christians don’t compromise, and Christians have this particular sexual ethic where essentially, you’re told don’t touch yourself or anyone else until you’re married. Right?So I’m like 21 like, okay, I believe this. I mean, I want to have integrity. I don’t want to compromise my faith. I don’t want to move closer to where the world is. I want the world to move closer to where I was. That’s kind of the perspective that you’re taught.And in 2016, when Trump comes on the scene, I’m like, okay, this is strange. And then when I see more and more Evangelical support and I’m still serving, I’m still conservative. Pretty much at this [00:10:00] point, I’m still serving at my Evangelical church. I’m still all in. I’m like, I don’t get it. This isn’t making a lot of sense.And then those “Access Hollywood” tapes came out. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh, this is a slam dunk full rejection of Trump by Evangelicals.’Because I knew how serious they took sexual ethics, let alone bragging on a hot mic crassly, by the way, about sexually assaulting women. So I, for a minute, I almost got giddy.I’m like, well, I know people can’t vote for Hillary. I wasn’t going to vote for Hillary. So maybe a third party, maybe like a legitimate Christian third party way is going to be birthed out of this because Trump is obviously so bad.And to hear so many people, both that I knew personally, or that I saw on the public stage say: ‘Oh, well, this is just locker room talk. We just need a commander in chief, not a pastor in chief.’And then seeing them mad at me for calling this out. I was like, guys, you taught me, you taught me these core values that apparently God was objectively resolute on, right? Like this is God’s objective truth. And all of a sudden, you’re throwing that out because this guy might give you more political power.And so that’s, that was for me the moment when I said, ‘Something, I don’t know what it is, but something is way wrong here.’ I didn’t have categories for a lot of what I know now. I just knew that something stunk to high heaven, and it made no sense to me because I wanted to be a Jesus follower.So that’s one example of like, I felt like I was forced to choose between compromising the way of Jesus, right? Compromising a way that advocates for honesty and truth and goodness.And the fruits of the spirit for your audience who knows that, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, all those things.I had to throw those away and say, yeah, Trump is sticking it to the media. Yeah. Trump’s our Goliath.And I’m like, I just can’t do that. So that was one out of many, a series of things that happened that made me say, I got to find better paths forward [00:12:00] here than whatever I’m a part of, because it’s no longer making sense anymore to call myself a Christian, but also be part of a culture that is increasingly advocating for more and more dehumanizing, cruel positions on the political spectrum.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. And what about the idea which is kind of articulated a bunch of times in the New Testament that Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world. Was that something that you thought of as well in that process?WHITAKER: Yeah, I think I definitely did. I think there’s a tension for me at least of I think it’s a fool’s errand to think that somehow, we can bring God’s quote unquote kingdom to earth necessarily a hundred percent at the same time.I do think that humans have a responsibility and have the ability to create heaven on earth or hell on earth. And I feel like Christians are, should be part of that conversation, trying to promote human flourishing, and empowering perspectives that lead to human flourishing.So I was always in this spot of like: ‘Hey guys, I don’t think that we have to become the empire. In fact, I think that’s a really bad idea, but we should be advocating for policies and for positions that hopefully help out all of our neighbors, not just the White Evangelicals.’So I kind of live in that tension of, yeah, I don’t think that I’m bringing quote unquote God’s kingdom to earth, but I still believe that as a representative of Jesus, I have a responsibility to advocate for things and for ways forward that, that give glimpses of a better world that’s possible.SHEFFIELD: What’s some of the pushback that you get from kind of the more right-wing Evangelicals? Like, what do they say?WHITAKER: Oh, well, I mean,SHEFFIELD: To the extent they make arguments at all. And I mean the actual argument, because, yeah, I’m sure they’re just triggered by you.WHITAKER: I mean, and we definitely take some, we definitely take shots on Twitter at them.I mean, we don’t believe in dehumanization, so we don’t name call. We don’t call people idiots. So we definitely kind of point out some of these blatant contradictions in their [00:14:00] own theology.I think one of the biggest themes I see is that it’s very evident to me that, for Evangelicals in particular, anything that can even be minutely interpreted as liberal is automatically a sign that you’re a godless Marxist who wants to destroy the country.And what is frustrating to me is that some of these things, I don’t know why they’re so devout. I don’t know why they’re so polarized. Like the fact that I would say anywhere: ‘Hey, as Christians, if we believe that God has given us the charge to steward the earth, we should be concerned about pollution and global warming.I mean, that should be a very, it’s a very easy connection, okay, for Christians to make. For Christians to make. For them to say like, Oh, that’s just liberalism. That’s just government control. That’s just a hoax. It’s like, where is this coming from? Because it’s not coming from the scriptures. It’s not coming from any kind of Christian ethic.Where is this coming from? So oftentimes I’m usually met with just rhetoric that is, I think, programmed into them by the people that disciple them, which is really far right media pundits. I mean, I grew up on Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh my entire life.I know, I know how damaging 3 hours, 6 hours a day of talk radio can be on the human mind, okay? But I do think that it seems to me that a lot of the arguments are very weak. They rely on rhetoric that has a hard stop.And then what it does is it loops itself, right? So like it doesn’t matter how much data you share with someone about global warming with that kind of like circular logic.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I mean, basically it is an intellectual framework which is anti-intellectual.WHITAKER: Yes.SHEFFIELD: And that’s how it’s able to be self-sustaining, because basically they’re telling people that we have created this idea set for you. And any other idea, any other ideas that are outside of it are false and you can know they’re false because we told you.WHITAKER: Right.SHEFFIELD: And they can’t prove it. That’s the thing that [00:16:00] these guys don’t get, is that they are actually destroying Christianity with their dogmatism, with their political activism. Most people who are religious, they want to go to church and feel uplifted, and they want to think about doctrines in their lives and how to improve themselves.That’s what they’re there for. Emotionally, from an emotional standpoint. They’re not there to try to become a political pawn for somebody. That’s not what, they didn’t sign up for that.WHITAKER: Yeah, and I think what’s so frustrating is that I think that inherently politics and religion, they are always kind of intermingling in s…

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