Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

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The Secrets of Humor Feb 25, 2026

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Chris Duffy is an award-winning comedian, television writer, and radio/podcast host. Chris currently hosts the hit podcast How to Be a Better Human. You can watch his comedic TED talk, “How to find laughter anywhere” online. He has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC News, NPR, and National Geographic Explorer. Chris wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas on HBO, executive produced by John Oliver. He’s the creator/host of the streaming game show Wrong Answers Only, where three comedians try to understand what a leading scientist does all day, in partnership with LabX at the National Academy of Sciences. Chris is both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student.

Big tech billionaires are trying to make dystopian science fiction into reality Feb 24, 2026

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Episode Summary Each day’s news events seem to reinforce the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, but the strangest thing of all is how so much of our current politics is quite literally based on fiction.That isn’t an exaggeration. The right-wing oligarch Peter Thiel has named his military surveillance company Palantir after the crystal balls featured in The Lord of the Rings, he’s also repeatedly told people to look to mid-20th century science fiction for business ideas—never mind that many of those stories were dystopias. Likewise, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk named his AI chatbot Grok after a term used in a novel by the authoritarian capitalist Robert Heinlein.Other Republican figures like fascist writer Curtis Yarvin, Vice President JD Vance, and activist Steve Bannon routinely reference The Lord of the Rings or even more explicitly reactionary novels like The Camp of the Saints. Why is it that so many of today’s far-right figures seem to get their political ideas from fiction? There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that some of the most influential novelists like Heinlein or editors like John W. Campbell wanted their readers to do just that. And who can forget Ayn Rand’s interminable political monologues?There is a lot to talk about here, and joining me to discuss is Jeet Heer, he’s a columnist at The Nation where he writes about politics and social issues, but he also tackles culture as well, including in his podcast, The Time of Monsters. One of the focal points of this episode is his 2014 book review of a Heinlein biography.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content* In an age of fictionalized reality, we need literary criticism more than ever* Why does ChatGPT lack consciousness? Because minds do not create experience, experience creates minds* Antichrist America: Trump, Nietzsche and post-modern Republicanism* To make a better technology future, we must first realize why we didn’t get the one we were promised* Mediocrity just might be the organizing principle of minds, biological and synthetic* What is ‘neo-reactionism’ and why is it so powerful within Trump 2.0?* AI is not the main problem—how we use it can be* The very strange intersection of Christian fundamentalism and techno-salvationism* Grok’s ‘Mecha Hitler’ meltdown was the natural product of xAI forcing it to have a right-wing biasAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction06:59 — Science fiction as a place for political experimentation12:17 — Why far-right libertarians turned away from philosophy toward science fiction21:34 — Editor John W. Campbell’s massive right-wing influence on sci-fi30:16 — Engineering versus research science kind of overlaps politically for speculative fiction authors37:47 — Is the political left missing the potential for AI as the perfect reason for a basic income?40:40 — Robert Heinlein’s evolution from socialist to authoritarian capitalist49:48 — Heinlein’s increasingly disturbing self-focused view of sexual liberation54:34 — Jeffrey Epstein as the pinnacle of authoritarian liberation01:04:11 — More humane sci-fi authorsAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Jeet Heer. Hey, Jeet, welcome to Theory of Change.JEET HEER: Oh, it’s great to be on.SHEFFIELD: Yes, it’s going to be a fun discussion today, I think. And we have the perfect news hook, which is that Elon Musk recently announced that he is basically abandoning his Mars focus with SpaceX to be focusing on a moon base. Which actually coincides with what he has said is one of his favorite novels of all time.And one that you yourself have written about as well. So maybe let’s kind of start there, if we could please.HEER: Yeah, no, I, think the novel was to is Robert Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress which is from the sixties, I think, 1966 very well regarded science fiction novel. Arguably I think one of Heinlein’s best, maybe his last great work Because he went into a long period of decline after that. It’s set in a future lunar colony, that is exploited by earth. And there’s a libertarian revolution modeled, largely on the American revolution. Although, interestingly, there are elements of the Russian revolution that are also alluded to. And the lunar colonists with the help of an AI, achieve liberation.And then their goal is an anarchist future, like a moon where there is no government. and in the novel, he has this slogan [00:04:00] TANSTAAFL, there is no such thing as a free lunch, which he got from his fellow science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle which became then a major slogan of the Libertarian Party.Milton Friedman’s son, David, used to walk around with a TANSTAAFL medallion kinda like a pimp outfit. So the novel has been very influential. And one the things in Heinlein’s work, both in that work and in other works, like The Man Who Sold the Moon, is the idea of space as a new frontier for capitalism.this is a where. business can finally be unshackled from the regulatory state, and achieve a free market utopia. Which always seemed like very ironic and unlikely because the of declaration of the 20th done through massive state intervention. First with the Soviet state, and then like, as along with NASA in the American state.But now it looks like, in our new century Elon and others are reviving this idea that space will be new frontier where capitalism can finally be liberated from earthly laws and regulations.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And Heinlein is, so for people who are really into the tropes of fiction, that he kind of was the originator in many ways of the libertarians in space trope.HEER: And we should say like, just in case aware, but Heinlein was one of the major American science fiction writers. I think among science fiction fans, there used to be idea of the big three or the big four. So it’s like Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. Like these were the major figures of Anglophone science fiction and it’s hard to overstate like his impact.I think like what Ernest Hemingway might’ve been to like American literature, Robert Heinlein was to science fiction. He was just a major figure [00:06:00] for like four decades, for the mid 20th century, and cast a huge shadow over the field.SHEFFIELD: Extremely prolific as well.HEER: Yeah. Huge. Yeah. Yeah. Hugely prolific. Often winning the top awards in the genre, and also spawning like a number of imitators. So like, the libertarian space, but also military science fiction comes out of Heinlein. A lot of—SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, we should say, yeah, Starship Troopers was his novel.HEER: Yeah. Yeah. He wrote Starship Troopers. Yeah. And so, Yeah. I mean, like, we’ll talk more about him we progress, just as a sort of signifier like one should think of him as of the major figures in this genre.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And one of the other things about him that he has in common with some of the other people we’ll be talking about is that especially, starting with Moon is a Harsh Mistress a lot of his novels are characterized by having a character that’s basically a stand-in for himself.HEER: Yeah.Science fiction as a place for political experimentationSHEFFIELD: And this character goes on and on for pages at a time. And it basically became a thing for right wing what, I call authoritarian capitalists, so post-libertarians, whatever you want to call them, that they abandoned the idea of philosophy and they turned to fiction instead to make the exposition of their ideas.HEER: Well, think about like science fiction has always been literature of ideas. And obviously the sort of like novel of ideas is something that has deep like one way I can think of like Voltaire, you know Candide, many other sort of classical works.And even like going, back to the Middle Ages like sort of religious works, like the sort of mystery plays. Like, a that explores concepts and which has characters that are sort of figureheads for different positions.SHEFFIELD: Pilgrim’s Progress.HEER: Now what happens in the, Yeah, exactly. Yeah.Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels.SHEFFIELD: Ben, Ben Hur. Yep.HEER: Yeah. But [00:08:00] what happens in the 19th century is that with the sort of rise of the novel, the realistic novel of family life business like novels of Jane Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, that becomes a kind of dominant literary form.The novel of ideas like heads off into genre. It becomes more associated with fiction that is like imaginative and, what we now call science fiction. Although that term is, really popularized in the 1920s. But like, I’m thinking of people like mary shelley’s, Frankenstein and she herself of like two greatSHEFFIELD: Mary WollstonecraftHEER: Yeah, absolutely. W Craft and a Good Goodwin. Their father was a philosophical liberal who wrote ideas.And Frankenstein is this idea of, using extrapolation. ideas. and tradition was carried through by people like Jules Verns and H.G. Wells. And the interesting thing is it’s overwhelmingly, tradition of liberalism and the left, the socialism. It is a tradition of people who are coming out of the Enlightenment, who believe that history is change, that humans can actually take control of history and make history, as against earlier ideas that like, reality is fated, is providential and destined.And then these novels of ideas are explorations. Well, what happens when we try to take control of history? What are the consequences good or bad? Obviously in Frankenstein, like it is, like this is like how the could go bad. it could actually like, lead to creations of monsters.One sees that as well in like huls. Invisible man. But combined with that, there’s also tradition ideas of like, whoa, what ways in which yeah. Control of reality to make it better? Like utopian fiction,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Edward Bellamy.HEER: Edward Bellamy but also at wells’ Shape of Things to Come.There’s a, long tradition of this. So, I mean, what’s interesting is that, [00:10:00] at some, I mean this show the to which libertarianism does come out of classical liberalism, what they call classical liberalism, but which is, this enlightenment project of amelioration and control of destiny that Heinlein I think is very that is a transitional figure.He came out of the sort of the thirties he was a very much in the of hs later moved to the right. and there’s, whole like science that comes out of that. And one can see if one is interested in ideas, that this is the type of literature that, one is interested in politics, this type of literature that would be appealing.Murray Rothbard, a major figure of the Austrian economics and very much an authoritarian libertarian, in his autobiography, he talks about how his mo mother loved uh Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and he could never understand why she loved them. And then in the 1950s, he read Ayn Rand’s the Fountain Head, and Atlas shrugged. And you realize, wait a minute, this is This is powerful. This is what literature can do.And so, it, this is the literature that is appealing. For like politically engaged, politically active, and, heinlein, tradition of sort of, increasingly, way science fiction people like Jerry Pournelle, Larry Nevins, and some ways, one could cynically very true of that one of the appeals that in ways this is, a way the future of and also as in dreams working out tensions that, you can’t work out in life. So in Heinlein, one often sees, in Starship Troopers, one sees war without pTSD because they’re just killing the, these there’s no moral cost to war.In his sort of sexual fantasies, like Stranger in a Strange Land, one sees the utopian dream of sexual liberation like, any of [00:12:00] consequences of s and in a Moon is a Harsh Mistress is imagining a sort of utopian libertarian, world on the moon like, the sort of ecological and class tensions that emerge in every existing historical capitalist society.Why far-right libertarians turned away from philosophy toward science fictionSHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and, it is it’s related, I think, so yeah, the, you have the emergence of the, novel of ideas. But, it became more important for authoritarian capitalism because well, because these ideas are not very coherent, frankly. And they don’t, they, they don’t, so they, can’t really work as philosophy, because if you’re writing a book of philosophy and you put it out there and have a big giant, volume and you’ve structured your argument and you’ve exposed what your true objectives are and where you want like. If they were to do that, people would be horrified, at what they want, right?And, like, and, Friedrich Nietzsche is the, example for that. But, and, I’ll come back to him in a second, but you know, like, so essentially we, but we saw this also with regard to economics as well, with this idea of Von Mises’s praxeology, that I don’t have to prove my arguments using data or historical instances, I just have to appeal to common sense because I can say, I can invent a scenario.And then that was literally what this guy largely did in his, work, is that he would invent scenarios and be like, okay, so we know this will happen because it’s obvious that this is what they would do.HEER: And like yeah,SHEFFIELD: that’s his work. And then, so of course this, a movement of that nature would, tend toward fiction, I would think.HEER: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And the science fiction writer Samuel Delaney, very different politics in Heinlein, but admires Heinlein, but did say that like I, one [00:14:00] thing Heinlein was doing was trying up with scenarios that would justify, right wing politics. That’s to say like, in what circumstances would it be justified to deny everyone except people who belong work military, and, also to carry on a war of extermination.Well, if you do have like, humanities has existential threat these space are bugs, who have like consciousness, no morality then kind of war of extermination carried up by authoritarian military regime might be what is necessary, right? So he’s constantly trying to up with scenarios whereby what he is politically desires. Makes sense?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and and that certainly is the case with regard to Ayn Rand aswell.HEER: Yeah,SHEFFIELD: So she, she called herself a philosopher, actually. And then, but no one that I know of who has any sort of respectability regarded her as a philosopher.Because she, wasn’t doing philosophy. She was just writing novels and, op-eds, like that was her output. She was not doing any kind of systematizing or and that’s significant because when you look to the politics of these people, their, descendants like Elon Musk and other people like them.They don’t, they hate debate. They don’t like it, they don’t like to be questioned. They don’t like it when you say that their ideas are dumb and here’s 20 reasons why they get angry at you. And, and like, or if the, even if you want to track their jet, like the Elon jet guy, he’s going to, he’s going to ban you for doing that.So they, they, can’t do this. Like, philosophy is based on argument. Like, you get two philosophers in the room, you get five opinions. and, so, they, can’t handle it, I think.HEER: Yeah. I should say like, with a novel of ideas though, like there are like, sort of, variations on it, I do think like the sort of [00:16:00] greater novels of ideas are the ones where there is some sort of actual philosophical debate where you have like, contestants that both kind of making, semi plausible or, treated with some degree of respect and then you have to some sort of like, difficult to res…

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Thinking outside Schrödinger’s cat box: Reality as quantum Feb 20, 2026

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Episode Summary A hundred years after quantum mechanics was invented, physics is still living with its consequences. Since Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, the theory has transformed science and technology, explaining atomic structure and enabling much of the modern world. But its success has never erased a deeper puzzle: how the quantum world relates to the classical one we actually experience.Quantum theory is notorious for its “weirdness,” which makes sense: Superposition, measurement, and uncertainty are real physical ideas—but they’ve also been repackaged into “quantum woo” that labels superstitions as profound science.Despite the mystical nonsense though, understanding how classical and quantum systems relate remains the biggest challenge of the physical sciences, but as my guest on today’s episode argues, some of those difficulties are caused by the famous “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum physics, which can overstate the observer’s role and understate the continuity of quantum dynamics.In his account, reality is quantum all the way down, and what we call objects are stable processes, not tiny building billiard balls.Vlatko Vedral is a professor of quantum information science at Oxford University. He’s out now with a book explaining his theories in a more popular format called Portals to a New Reality: Five Pathways to the Future of Physics.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction06:42 — An “observer” in quantum mechanics has nothing to do with a person15:28 — The confusion caused by the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation of quantum fundamentals 22:47 — Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment was a criticism of quantum duality views 28:08 — Eric Weinstein’s Geometric Unity speculations35:11 — How to test new quantum theories44:16 — Information theory and quantum computing50:43 — Q-numbers, C-numbers, and quantum logic56:51 — The advantages of a process physics over a thing physicsAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So normally we don’t cover physics on the show too much, I would say. But what you’re doing here is really important, I think, in a lot of ways. So essentially, what you’re trying to do is to say that, and we will get into the details more specifically, but just generically, would you say that you’re trying to say that what people conceive of as classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, they’re not in conflict the way that a lot of people often think?VLATKO VEDRAL: Yes, I think so. I think you hear all sorts of statements. I think it’s a very nice summary of the spirit of most of my writing, that of course, quantum mechanics was, was a big revolution and it surprised many people at that time. But if you look at it in terms of how big a departure this is from classical mechanics, then it’s very similar to the past revolutions that we had.So certainly you can recover all of the classical ideas in, in a very special limiting case and the two theories. So quantum mechanics in that sense can reproduce the classical world. And if you [00:04:00] see it like that, you see that there is a continuity going through all of these theories as they develop in the history of physics.SHEFFIELD: Exactly. And we’ll get further into that as we go along here. But so just to do some, a little bit basic table setting here. I think probably the biggest difference from how people conceive of chemistry or classical mechanics is that quantum objects are not like little tiny billiard balls.VEDRAL: Yes.SHEFFIELD: They are processes of things that exist in, in a flux, if you will. But can you just kind of explain that a little bit better than I did just there?VEDRAL: Yes. I think that’s the key feature actually the technical word is the superposition principle, which actually states that any quantum object, any quantum particle, like an electron or an atom, and we’ve tested it with much bigger objects than than that in the last a hundred years, can actually exist in many different states at the same time.So you, if you’re thinking about an electron. It could exist within an atom closer to the nucleus of the atom and further away from the nucleus simultaneously. And that’s called a quantum superposition. And that’s of course something that doesn’t have any analog in classical mechanics because in classical mechanics, objects have well-defined positions.They’re localized. They’re either here or there, but not simultaneously in two positions. And the same with all other properties. If they have an energy, they have a well-defined energy, they have a well-defined velocity. Motion is well-defined. Whereas in quantum mechanics, it seems that you have to acknowledge that actually, we need to deal with probabilities at the fundamental level.so we can never say for sure where particles are. Unless we make [00:06:00] a measurement to confirm where they are. But even then, very quickly after the measurement, the particle will spread across the space and we’ll assume, this state of superposition of being in many different locations at the same time.And that gives rise to all sorts of other things that I think are out there in the, public domain. Things like entanglement the effect that Schrödinger talked about a lot, how quantum systems jointly can be in a super position in a way that they’re super correlated to one another. So there, there are all sorts of interesting phenomena, but they can all be explained through this property of being in, many states at the same time.An “observer” in quantum mechanics has nothing to do with a personSHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And the idea also the superposition state and how it can be perceived in multiple different ways that gives rise, to the idea of the observer. yes, but a lot, of times, when people who are not physicists are thinking about an observer, they think of it as a person. And that’s not what an observer means in quantum mechanics. and I think that, that ambiguity causes a lot of confusion for people.VEDRAL: I think you’re absolutely right, and I love the fact that you’re, stressing this right at the beginning of the discussion.because it leads to all sorts of statements that, that really go well beyond physics. And in fact, they have no support in physics at all, statements. like, if you really observe something, you can change your reality. If you focus on something, you can really make it happen and things like that.Nothing like that exists in quantum mechanics. what does exist is simply, again, going back to Schrödinger, is that when you make an observation and you’re absolutely right to emphasize that, An observer could be any other physical system, and observation doesn’t need to involve human beings at all.[00:08:00]In fact, it doesn’t have to be a computer at all. It doesn’t have to be as sophisticated as what we would call, a computer. It could be simply an atom being observed by another atom. and so what happens during the observation is that the states of these atoms become entangled, in Schrödinger’s language, which means that for every position of one of these atoms, there is a corresponding position of the other atom.So they’re somehow locked in this perfect correlation that their positions perfectly mirror one another, and that’s where the measurement stops. As far as the quantum physicist is concerned, you would say, I’ve now demonstrated that one of these atoms has measured another one. Now, of course you can, and ultimately a physicist does get involved, in confirming this, which means that you will now measure one of these atoms.And what will happen is that you will see only one of these positions manifest itself. and this is the property that I think causes many people to, speculate and to become confused because quantum physics does not tell us, and in fact, it cannot tell us in advance which of these outcomes you will see when you observe a quantum system.So this is part, this is something that’s called a Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which means that if you’re in a position in a super position of different locations, but you insist on asking what location is the system at a given time, you will only get randomly one of these possible locations.and all we can calculate is the probability to obtain that. So that’s what quantum mechanics gives us. So if you repeat the same measurement many, times and you get an expected value. And then that’s the value that quantum mechanics predicts. But [00:10:00] each individual measurement, if you like, is as far as quantum formalism is concerned.And as far as all the experiments are con concerned, really random, you cannot predict this outcome. And so that’s what’s interesting. And I kind of developed this in my writings. What does this really mean for our reality? What kind of reality is that? and, I think, but that’s the crux of the question.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, it’s also it appears to be random, but whether it actually is, not known at the present moment.VEDRAL: Absolutely, and that’s another excellent point that in fact when we talk about two atoms it’s not random at all. the state that you get between two atoms when you make it so that through interaction, one of them measures the other atom is a completely deterministic state.It’s a well-defined state. It’s an entangle state, admittedly, so it doesn’t have any classical counterparts and shorting a cold entanglement, the characteristic trait, it’s really the trait of quantum mechanics that doesn’t exist in, in any Newtonian classical physics. But nevertheless. There is nothing random about that state at all.The state is deterministic. And so that’s what’s interesting that if you treat everything quantum mechanically at the level, at the highest level, at the level of including everything into your consideration, you do recover determinism. and that’s fascinating that at the highest level it’s, is deterministic, but at the level of these individual interactions and observations, it looks random.so this is in fact what most of our research is about to confirm this in, in, in more and more complicated scenarios.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and, and that non randomness though, but or indeterminacy like that is ultimately in your view, and I if I’m [00:12:00] summarizing it correctly here is you’re saying that you’re rejecting this idea that measurement is creating many realities it is rather a copying of the state to the local classical object, if you will. Yes. That’s from a observational standpoint.VEDRAL: That’s right. That’s right. And I think the consistent, the only consistent treatment, and you are right. Obviously physics is a very open-ended enterprise, and our story may well change, with the next revolution in physics. And in fact, my, my latest book is talking exactly about that, that I’m trying to anticipate which experiments we should be doing to probe, and go beyond the current, level of description.But the statement is that if you treat everything quantum mechanically, and this includes, the system you’re observing, the apparatus you’re using, if you like to use. Other computers, humans as observers, all of that is fine, so long as it’s included consistently into this formalism. And if you do that then you will not get any paradoxes in quantum mechanics is a perfectly consistent account, much like classic.It is different to classical physics, but it’s consistent in the same way the classical physics is consistent. Of course, it may be proven wrong ultimately that it’s not the ultimate description, but that doesn’t mean that, that it’s not useful in its own domain, which is the current domain.After all, we’ve had a hundred hundred odd, years, 120 years of experimentation and not a single deviation from quantum mechanics. So I think that gives us, a lot of confidence that that it will be certainly true at a certain level of of generality.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, part the, challenge that quantum mechanics has had in quantum physics, in extrapolating classicality from that is that because these objects are so small and the things that we have to measure them Yes. Are so big in [00:14:00] comparison, it’s, it’s like trying to say, well, I’m going to measure how a tennis ball behaves by smashing a, bowling ball into it.And that there, there’s fundamental limitations on how you can do that. and so the instrumentality is, really what has been our challenge in terms of extrapolating further from quantum mechanics asVEDRAL: Yes, extreme. You’re right. And, I think the major stumbling when we dis, when we discuss, for instance, these outstanding questions as I do gravity, you know what happens with gravity?It’s the only outstanding force that we haven’t managed somehow to quantize, we don’t really understand what it means to quantize gravity. And while many people would say that there are lots of mathematical problems with with these kind of theories, that it leads to all sorts of infinities, nonsensical probabilities, negative probabilities and things like that.The real big problem here is that we don’t have a single experiment to give us any clues as to what we should be doing in this direction. And it’s precisely because of what you said, this is a very challenging domain and controlling systems in a fully quantum mechanical way to stay in these super positions while making gravity relevant, is a huge challenge.And we are probably, at least five to 10 years away from being able to probe that. But we are getting closer, which is, exciting to, to a physicist.The confusion caused by the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation of quantum fundamentalsSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and then there’s also, as you’re, as you saying in the book that there’s the challenge of, the conceptualization of Yes. How quantum mechanics is the dominant perception.So, because of the instrumentality cha challenges a lot of the discussion. Perhaps most of it is tending to be philosophical oriented rather than empirical oriented. And then yes, further add upon that is the challenge that the Copenhagen. Interpretation is so dominant. So, but if you can maybe kind of [00:16:00] get, unpeel that a bit for the audience here.Yes.VEDRAL: I, think I think I can explain Copen, so That’s right. So Copenhagen interpretation is really due to Niels Bohr, I guess. He, he was from Copenhagen. And, the question, the way that he tried to understand quantum mechanics, and I think this evolved into an interpretation and, some of the early practitioners did subscribe to that.So people like Heisenberg is often quoted as being a member of and, of Copenhagen School of Thought. But it’s not clear. If you really read Heisenberg, I think you will see many differences with Bohr. So I think it’s probably fair to say no two physicists really agree with each other on any of these aspects.But, but, this interpretation of quantum mechanics. Emphasis is the notion of complementarity. So it takes this idea from classical mechanics that you either get particles or you have waves. And in classical mechanics, particles and waves were described by two completely different theories.We had Newton’s theories for particle, and we had Maxwell’s equations for waves, for electromagnetic waves, and for about 50 years or longer, they peacefully coexisted in, in, in this way. but then when with some of the early quantum experiments people realize that sometimes quantum objects can behave like particles.And they almost fully comply with Newtonian description. And sometimes they behave like waves. And in fact, you can almost use equations that look remarkably like Maxwell’s equatio…

Full show notes at the publisher

Financially struggling Americans have no interest in participating in a political system that’s failed them Feb 17, 2026

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityEpisode SummaryWe’ve talked a lot on this program about how Donald Trump won the 2024 election due to people who were less engaged in the political process, and the evidence keeps piling up in that regard, including a study released last June by the Pew Research Center.Before Trump came along, however, so-called “unlikely voters” had strongly Democratic voting preferences, at least according to surveys by Suffolk University in 2012 and 2018.Figuring out what low-engagement people are thinking about politics is going to become increasingly important as both major parties are trying to move beyond just maximizing their most dedicated supporters.But understanding why people are choosing not to participate is difficult because Americans with these opinions are often unlikely to answer phone calls from strangers and are less likely to want to take a phone or online survey. That’s why in this episode we’ll be featuring Daniel Laurison, a sociologist at Swarthmore College who just released a new study based on detailed interviews with 144 lower-income Pennsylvanians who do not vote regularly.The full video of our conversation is available to paid subscribers. You can get unlimited access to this and every other episode on Patreon or Substack. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content* Flashback: How ‘unlikely voters’ could be the key to the 2024 presidential election* Flashback: Donald Trump’s bet on non-voters is high-risk, high-reward* Americans are deeply dissatisfied with society, Democrats must speak to their rightful concerns* Republicans built an infrastructure to attack democracy, Democrats must build one to protect it* The decline of black churches and media has indirectly increased black support for Republicans* How the American left became post-political, and how to change thatAudio Chapters (full episode)00:00 — Introduction06:57 — Non-voters feel the political system is for the rich; they’re not wrong15:50 — Trump constantly takes credit and shifts blame; Democrats don’t21:07 — Non-voters are choosing not to participate, not being driven away by barriers28:44 — Republicans stay in touch with voters between elections through advocacy media36:21 — The loss of third spaces and ways to meet friends and network44:13 — Democrats have redirected local engagement funds to advertising, and it hasn’t worked49:01 — Trump’s love of self-promotion matches today’s political need for constant communicationAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So this is a really important report, I think, especially given the recent trends we’re seeing in Donald Trump’s approval rating from people—there’s a lot of people out there saying, well, I didn’t vote for this. And they didn’t.But in fact, he was actually saying what he was going to do in a lot of ways, but they didn’t know. Let’s start though, from the beginning what the larger purpose, behind the report here. And then we’ll start getting into the details.DANIEL LAURISON: Great. Yeah, I mean, for me, the, the purpose is really to, to first of all highlight the real problem we have in our democracy, which is a lot of people don’t feel, feel included, don’t believe that they’re represented, don’t see anything in electoral politics that reflects what’s going on for them. And that means that a lot of them choose to stay home on election days. And a lot of what we what, what campaigns, what parties, what even civic organizations tend to do to try to bring them out is not necessarily effective. So for me, the most important thing about the report and about what’s going on is that we can’t have an effective democracy if a bunch of people don’t believe that democracy is doing anything for them, him.SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, so I mean, with that regard though, I mean, yeah, people, overwhelmingly a lot of people do feel like the, the American political system doesn’t represent them. And they’re not wrong to feel that way. But how, how people are responding to that is very different. And you, you’re looking at the people [00:04:00] who, they’re kind of opting out in a lot of ways, it seems like.LAURISON: Yeah, I mean, this study is based on interviewing, especially exclusively poor and working class people, or low income and working class people. People who don’t have college degrees and or are earning under $45,000 a year and or are in, manual service, routine working class type jobs, jobs that don’t require college degrees. And so for them, I think part of the. What we call the disconnect is really the class composition of who runs politics, who they see in politics, who they see caring about politics, the volunteers, the politicians, all of that. And so that disconnect as we call it, is, is, is an important way as a class to disconnect.And that’s something that I think doesn’t get as much attention as we maybe need to give it.SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and one of the things that I think is Im important here is that within, within politics, a lot of people that, that are trying to bring a data-driven approach, quote unquote, to it.They rely on polls and polls, they’re not as much of a science as people often imagine them to be. And I can say that as somebody who used to be a pollster. And so I’m not hating on it. It’s just that you have only one interaction. It’s a one shot interaction with the person on that topic.And you don’t know if you phrased it in a way that they understand in the same way. And but then at the same time, people also are doing focus groups and those also have problems as well. And you guys are doing something else.LAURISON: Yeah, so we did in-depth qualitative interviews. We talked to people for usually about an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. A couple of interviews went up to two hours. And so we could really get a sense in a conversation what, what they meant. if they said something and we weren’t sure what they meant, we could say, what do you mean by that? And we could follow up on stories they told us, or when they said, you. I just don’t like that guy. We could ask what they meant, et cetera. So I think there’s really something to be said for this kind of qualitative research. It’s not something that, that I would expect [00:06:00] a campaign in its final 40 days to be able to do.But it is something that that makes people feel heard and understood and listened to, and that’s really worthwhile. And for our purposes for research, you just get a different sense of, of. What people are thinking and feeling and what they believe. Then you can with other methods, especially polls.I’m a person who does both qualitative and quantitative research. I love surveys. I love survey data. But the fundamental feature of a survey is you give people a set of options to take boxes on. And if you’re not asking the right questions, you’re not going to find out what’s going on for them. That’s one piece. And then the other piece is a lot of people just tick the box that sort of seems right in the moment and you don’t have any sense of whether that’s something they believe really deeply, whether that’s something they care really a lot about, whether that’s something that motivates them or if it’s just like the box that appealed in the moment. So again, while I use surveys. I like surveys. I think polls are real information, but there’s some things you just can’t capture unless you’re having conversations with people.Non-voters feel the political system is for the rich; they’re not wrongSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and especially I think with regard to disengagement and dissatisfaction because everybody has their own things that they’re dissatisfied about. Because, ultimately people who are deciding to vote for someone, there’s, they’re deciding, they’re unifying on that thing of this is who I’m going to vote for, whereas somebody who is not voting. They can have a, a variety, a wide variety of reasons for not participating. Although one of the consistent themes in the research is that people that you guys talk to are, they feel like that politics is for rich people and for people who are, are world apart fromthem. and, and you guys have several different case studies in that regard. There.LAURISON: Yeah, absolutely. And just to go back to the methodology for a second, the other piece that I think is really important is that polls and surveys increasingly just can’t be representative. And qualitative data is never even attempting to be representative because you’re almost never doing random [00:08:00] samples or that sort of thing. But the people who are least likely to respond to polls and surveys are also the people who are least likely to vote. And so you don’t get a good set sample of people who are non voters necessarily, unless you’re really making an effort. And you don’t get a good sample of people who are, who don’t have college degrees, who are low income, who are poor, who are struggling and waiting can take care of some of that, but it can’t take care of all of that.So one thing we were able to do is use community-based researchers who were from the communities where we were trying to talk to people to bring in their friends and family, to bring in people that they had connections to so that we were reaching people who would never, you know, if a pollster calls you and says, do you want to answer some questions about politics? These are people who would never do that. And they were, some of them were in fact, quite hard to recruit, even with an incentive, even by a friend or family member to talk about politics in an inter interview for an hour. So I think that’s, part of what’s going on for a lot of people is, again, just the sense that politics is not something they’re entitled or qualified to participate in.Not in the sense of they don’t genuinely know what they need to know, but in the sense of, if it seems like the kind of thing you have to watch the right news, or you have to know the right people or et cetera, then you’re, you’re not going to feel like it’s something you want to talk about for an hour.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and also the way that the economy is increasingly structured for a lot of people what we’re seeing in this research, but also a lot of other research is that a lot of people are having to work multiple jobs. They’re having to they don’t have time to look at this stuff.And even as early as Aristotle, he was saying politics is something that people who have leisure can participate in. But if you are scraping by constantly, where are you going to have that time? Especially if you have no habit of doing that.LAURISON: I think that’s part of it, and, and certainly, the efforts that people are making to make voting easier are. [00:10:00] a hundred percent worthwhile. The ma efforts that people are making to, on the other side, mostly to make voting more difficult, I think are, a real problem. But most people we talked to when they were talking about their own reasons for not getting to the polls, it wasn’t about the time that they had or, how convenient it was or finding a car, that sort of thing.It really was just a sense that either, either there was no point or why would they give their vote to people who don’t care about them or, this is, this is just, I sometimes make the analogy to who’s a football fan and who’s not. Some people, pay a lot of attention to football, love football, talk about football all the time.Some people, and I’m one of them. Didn’t grow up in a football family. People start talking about football, my eyes glaze over. I don’t have any idea what the thing is that I should say, and I just don’t want to be in that conversation. And I think that politics feels to a lot of people we talk to, the way football feels to me, right?It’s something that they know other people care about. They know is something that maybe as a good American, they ought to engage with, but they just don’t feel like it’s something that, that they have access to.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, that’s, yeah, that’s true. And that is an important thing to note because there have been people that have, have been trying to talk about this and, and they focus on only on, well, let’s make voting easier, not, well, why don’t you vote? And that’s, it is a serious issue because, especially if you are somebody who is trying to work on behalf of democracy and you don’t like a lot of the tyrannical things that Donald Trump has been doing.I mean, the reality is his campaign was trying to find these people in 2024 and there were numerous studies that showed that the less that people were paying attention to the news or followed it the more they were likely to support Donald Trump because he was trying to talk to him. He was there in the places that they did watch.So he was there in the Ultimate Fighting Championship places. And he [00:12:00] was going to football games, and going on lifestyle podcasts talking about just any random thing that they wanted to ask him about. And, and that’s not what you see a lot of Democratic people doing.What they seem to do is, they’ll do a interview with Morning Joe and they’ll, they’ll have a New York Times op-ed, and then they’ll say, okay, well I’m done. And that’s, that’s just not where these people are. They’re not looking at that media and they never will. And they have the right to. This is a job for people like you and I, but we’re a minority and the people who are political junkies and, really interested in, in these topics, they’re also a minority also.LAURISON: Yeah, absolutely. And they’re usually also from, not always, but usually from educated families from upper middle class families, more likely to be white, more likely to be men. Here we all are.And so they’re not as likely to have organic connections to regular poor and working class people across race.And that’s really, I think, a problem, especially, especially for the Democrats. Trump also in the last election, his campaign not only in terms of media, but also in terms of campaign strategy was knocking doors of people who had very low voter propensity scores. The kind of the kind of doors that don’t tend to get knocked in most standard Democratic campaigns these days.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s true. But it’s, and I want to just go back related to that. So there’s something I asked earlier where you had to address something else, which was good. But you know, just this idea that politics. Is not it, it’s for people who are rich. And when we look at the research of, of compared to, this is the public opinion on X and this is the law that comes from X, that opinion to say that politics is is not about me and that not about people like me, that’s a true opinionLAURISON: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could, I think there are many politicians who are very interested in making the lives of low income and working class people better. And there are many policies that have been passed, o often by Democrats [00:14:00] that do in fact make people’s lives better in, in some ways, but they’re so often hard for people to see those effects.You pass a law that results in block grants to the states that results in grants to nonprofits that results in services that people might not otherwise get. But no one receiving those services has any way to see. In fact, even the people working in the organizations often don’t have any way to see that, that, that funding came from a federal grant that was part of a bill that was passed by Democrats a year or two or three ago. And so that, I think you’re, I, I say all that because I, on the one hand, I think you’re right that by and large politics is by and for the wealthy. There are, the people who, politicians are dispr…

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Robert Kennedy’s MAHA cult is making America sicker Feb 13, 2026

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Episode Summary Amid the constant contradictions of Donald Trump’s second administration, some of his policies have been remarkably consistent, especially those out of the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert Kennedy Junior has been ripping up decades of scientific consensus on many areas, including vaccines, diet recommendations, and transgender care. But as a lifelong politician and lawyer with no actual experience as a doctor or medical administrator, he has needed to develop a staff of people with at least some medical experience in order to tear and destroy. What kind of doctor would want to work for a parasite-ridden lawyer who brags about eating roadkill, seems to not understand how viruses work, and advocates eating lots of saturated fats? The answer is: almost none of them. But, unfortunately, there are always a few people out there with enough personal grudges and crank beliefs to do the job.Our guest on today’s program, Jonathan Howard, knows all about the new medical establishment after having seen firsthand how they promoted anti-vaccine lies and dangerously underestimated the effects of Covid-19. We had him on the program in 2022 to discuss his first book, We Want Them Infected, and he’s out with a new one examining the policy insanity of Kennedy and his underlings called Everyone Else Is Lying to You.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--Covid contrarians want you to forget that they were much more wrong than the scientific consensus--How 1970s tobacco companies pioneered the deceitful marketing strategies used by today’s conspiracy peddlers--Why the “naturalistic fallacy” is the basis of so much anti-science thinking--Marianne Williamson’s ineffective self-help politics--How “post left” grifters use contrarianism and know-nothing socialist rhetoric to push people to the far rightAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:36 — Robert Kennedy Jr. and his allies are the medical establishment, and they are responsible for what happens16:26 — The “Great Barrington Declaration” was initiated by political activists, not scientistsc20:48 — After claiming to oppose censorship, the Trumpian medical establishment is conducting it at a massive scale25:57 — Anti-vax activists have had years to do their own studies, but they have basically nothing33:34 — The cowardice of Republicans like Bill Cassidy who know better37:54 — Other people in the MAHA conspiracist movement44:41 — MAHA figures have more conflicts of interest than the scientists they hate51:24 — The looming conflict between polluters and anti-vax Republicans01:03:20 — John Ioannidis and the perils of medical contrarianism01:08:08 — Why atheist activists teamed up with far-right Christians who hate medical science01:18:44 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, I literally just released an episode catching up with a previous guest who had been on the show who had marked a lot of the negative trends that we are now seeing. And unfortunately I’m in the same spot with you, my friend, that, there’s a lot of bad things that have happened. And there are so many things that I do wanna kind of summarize of them so that we can all keep track of what’s been going on for the conversation.And as we’re talking today on January 30th, the most recent kind of news headline of this awful medical establishment that is in installed itself thanks to Trump, is that, the measles in the United States are, they are what’s being made great, it looks like.JONATHAN HOWARD: Yeah, no, measles is spreading out of control.There’s the largest outbreak in 25 or 30 year, probably 26 years, actually in, South Carolina right now. Measles seems to be. Popping up in multiple other states as well. This is of course, [00:04:00] following a very large outbreak in Texas in the spring of 2025 that killed two children, and another adult.So these were the first measles deaths in the country in about 10 or 15 years, and the first children to die, I think since 1991. and our current medical establishment is trying to control it with vitamin a cod liver oil, and by spreading disinformation about the measles vaccine as was eminently predictable.SHEFFIELD: It was. And what we’re really seeing, I think, consistently is that, that these guys are kind of across the board are, they have these old fashioned medical viewpoints. Like that’s what really what they’re doing. And they have these ideas that really have been debunked for about 80 years roughly. but they want to try again on everything seems like.HOWARD: Yeah, I was gonna say, it depends how old fashioned you’re talking about because, the measles vaccine has been around since 1963 and, probably all current members of our medical establishment, except for maybe RFK would say that they think the MMR is a very important vaccine, but if they actually felt that way, they would not be working for RFK, who has spread more misinformation about the measles vaccine and all vaccines and probably any other American in the past 20 years.And what we are seeing is that. Disinformation about the COVID vaccine is very predictably bleeding into all vaccines. So all vaccines are kind of connected in, in that if you trust the doctors who recommend them people are more likely to get the measles vaccine if they’re also told accurate information about the COVID vaccine, which they weren’t.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And they weren’t. And this is part of when, if you look back at the history that there has always been suspicion about vaccines. People have always had it since they were first [00:06:00] invented. So it’s, I guess it’s understandable even though we don’t agree with those viewpoints for people to, it does seem on the face of it on the surface that a little bit counterintuitive.You mean you’re telling me that. Injecting diseases into myself is good for me? And it’s always been a challenge, right?HOWARD: Yeah. The history of the anti-vaccine movement is as old as vaccines themselves. Even preceding Edward Jenner, as far as I know, the first known vaccinator was an English farmer by the name of Benjamin Esti, who vaccinated his children against smallpox in the 1770s or something like that.And everyone can go read about him on Wikipedia. And he faced great backlash from his community. And then when a smallpox epidemic ripped through the community, his children were spared. But all, everything that we’re hearing about vaccines. Now, all I should say, all anti-vaccine disinformation, none of this is new.It, all goes back to this idea that vaccines are in pure in some way, whereas catching a virus is natural and therefore there’s no problem with it. Or that vaccines have never been properly tested or that they are just being given by pharmaceutical companies to pad their bottom line. So no, nothing that we’re hearing now is new.What’s changed is who it’s coming from, top government officials and top doctors who came from Harvard, Stanford, UCSF and Johns Hopkins. That’s what’s new.Robert Kennedy Jr. and his allies are the medical establishment, and they are responsible for what happensSHEFFIELD: It is. And they still constantly talk about the medical establishment and all that, but they are the medical establishment.They are the ones with the power. They are the ones with the money, and they are the ones who are responsible for the deaths of these children and the other people that will die.HOWARD: Absolutely. So our current [00:08:00] medical establishment, and I love that you called them that way, they, rose to power kind of portraying themselves as these outsiders who would have controlled COVID perfectly.So they became famous not for their on the ground accomplishments, but because of their social media content in which they said they would have protected the vulnerable, they would have kept schools open, or the fact that they proposed things and they argued for things and they called for things. But now that they are in power and have been given the opportunity to prove their re real world competency they’re failing.And it is, of course not just measles. Last year we had 28,000 cases of whooping cough in this country. We had a record number, not a record, but a very high number of pediatric flu death. And of course not all of this can be laid on the hands of our current medical establishment who had just been in power for a few weeks at this time.But they’re showing that they are totally inept at controlling viruses, and I shouldn’t say even inept, indifferent to controlling viruses. They’re not making any or bacteria in the case of whooping cough, but they’re not making any attempt to do that. And they are improving incompetent leaders at the agencies that they run, the NIH, the FDA, and to some degree the CDC as well.And I say only to, to some degree because I don’t think the current director is a doctor, but, they’re proving inept leaders who are loathed and mocked by the people who work for them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and you talked about this idea that it seems like a lot of them really actually do not want to do anything to mitigate disease.And that was the title of your previous book that We Want Them Infected. I mean, so what is this? I mean, I think the idea that doctors would want people to be infected with viruses, it seems so absurd that it’s almost [00:10:00] unbelievable that a doctor would say such a thing, but what is the idea behind this here?HOWARD: Yeah, so the title from the book, We Want Them Infected, came from a pretty low level, A person in public health in the Trump administration by the name of Paul Alexander who literally said that we want them infected. But this idea originated best. I can trace it back to in March, 2020, and it was really formalized in the Great Barrington Declaration, which was written in October 20, 2020 by three people, two of whom are now very high up in the Trump administration. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who leads the NIH and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who is a, vaccine advisor at the CDC and recently off the authored a, memo, actually both of them did to decimate the vaccine schedule, but. If you listen to what they have to say about their pandemic vision today they kind of just cherry pick the most unpopular mitigation measures and say, we were only against that.So they’ll say, we just wanted kids in school. We just cared so much about education of, poor children and minorities in the working class. We just didn’t want toddler horse to wear masks. But in reality what they wanted in 2020 was as many people to get infected as possible. At least if you were in what they.Considered the not vulnerable category, which was essentially everyone under age 60 or 70 who didn’t have some significant medical comorbidity. And their idea was that you could get rid of the virus by spreading the virus. So they proposed a world of zero COVID for vulnerable people, older people in nursing homes, and a world of pure COVID for basically everyone else.And they claimed that if you let the virus spread within three to six months, we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would end. This was brought to the White House by Dr. Scott Atlas, [00:12:00] who was one of Trump’s Coronavirus is ours at the time, who worked very hard to undo mitigations,SHEFFIELD: Who also, sorry, I, we should say, had no epidemiology background whatsoever. He was a, he is a radiologist.HOWARD: Correct. And, all of these doctors who I mentioned were, none of them saw what COVID could do with their own eyes. So they constantly said things that anyone who worked on a COVID unit would never say that the virus spared young people, or that death was the only bad outcome from COVID.Or even though it wasn’t really known, in the time of course, but they claimed that one COVID infection led to. Decades of immunity, even though the virus was just 1-year-old. So they were wrong, basically about everything. And all of them drastically underestimated COVID. So Dr. Jay Charia at the start of the pandemic predicted that COVID would kill 20 to 40,000 Americans.He will deny that he wrote that, but he did. And anyone can go read his essay in the Wall Street Journal is the coronavirus as deadly as they say in which he said that. He said that New York and Sweden had reached herd immunity by June, 2020. His co-author on this document, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, claimed that Stockholm and Sweden was, had almost reached herd immunity in April, 2020.So it was a very, so they drastically underestimated what COVID could do. But if you hear them talk today, they say that they will say that their pandemic vision has been vindicated and that it was everyone else who broke trust in public health, except for.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. and they were the ones who were the most wrong.I mean, let’s be clear about that. they, want to say. That, the original experts who are now dislodged in epidemiology and are not the establishment, the medical establishment they want to say that they were [00:14:00] wrong. And look, the reality is nobody was perfect in the predictions or the observations that they made.but ultimately it was the people who were saying, oh, it’s gonna be over. In two or three months. And not very many people would, I don’t know how you could be more wrong than that.HOWARD: Yeah. And it’s the, things that they were, right about weren’t things that were uniquely right to them.So they will say that school closures hurt children, for example. And I don’t know anyone who argues differently. I think what they did, however, is they portrayed every single mitigation measure as a choice. So what they did is they erased the virus and they essentially claimed that if only the people in charge had made smarter decisions, schools could have, remained open and functioned totally normally in this sort of thing.And again, we don’t have to speak about this in a hypothetical sense because we can look at what, again, what they are doing now that they are in charge and they’re. Failing to stop viruses and diseases from spreading. And when they helped run the show in Florida during 2021, especially during Florida’s Delta Wave, what happened?Schools closed and vulnerable people died in huge numbers and so did not vulnerable people. So we don’t have to speak about anything in the hypothetical sense. We can just look at what actually happened and they didn’t do a single thing that they claimed they would have done, and these guys are stuck in 2020.Dr. Jay Bhattacharya just gave a recent interview to the New York Times, I think just yesterday with Ross. Duch had, however he pronounce his name, one of their conservative columnists. And he spent the first half of the interview not talking about what he’s doing at the NIHA topic I’m sure he’s desperate to avoid but trying to re-litigate what was, what happened six years ago, the lockdowns of six years ago.he tries to answer every question by referencing, lockdowns. And this isn’t just something to laugh about because he is using this as a [00:16:00] pretext to help dismantle public health here in the United States. So if you ask him why did the United States withdraw from the World Health Organization, his answers is that they promoted lockdowns.So we’re really seeing this anger and this grievance over COVID manifest itself now by people whose aim was always to take a wrecking ball to everything.The “Great Barrington Declaration” was initiated by political activists, not scientistscSHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s right. And, this is a, the their viewpoint here also, it doesn’t it, it…

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What's Wrong with Mindfulness? Feb 06, 2026

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What’s is wrong with mindfulness? Where does the idea of mindfulness even come from? How can we best use eastern ideas around meditation in our western lives?

R. John Williams is a professor of English and film and media studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (2014), and of the forthcoming volume Out of Mind: A Media-Theoretical Critique of Meditation.

Donald Trump is more unpopular than ever, but congressional Democrats are divided on how to push back Feb 06, 2026

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Episode Summary After months of chaos, censorship, violence, a deluge of Epstein files, and the untimely deaths of two American citizens, Donald Trump’s public approval ratings are at their lowest point ever. And though he’s loath to admit it in public, the president and his staff are having to make changes to try to stop the loss of support he’s seeing—including from within his own party.Despite the fact that Trump has never been more unpopular, Democrats in Congress are having internal struggles over how to oppose him, with newer members wanting to use anything possible to gum up the works that the leadership seems to generally dislike. There’s a rift among the Democratic voter base about their party as well. In a late-January poll, Marquette Law School found that 51 percent of Democrats and people who leaned that way approved of the Democrats in Congress, with 49 percent disapproving. By contrast, 80 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners said they approved of congressional Republicans. Only 20 percent disapproved. The poll also found that while respondents who said they were “somewhat liberal” were evenly split on their opinion of congressional Democrats, those who identified as “liberal” were more likely to disapprove, a 54-46 percent. Democratic voters seem to want their party to go much harder at opposing Trump, but this seems to go against the entire conception of politics that the party’s leaders understand, a viewpoint that has been largely fixed since the early 1990s—and has been shaped by conservative former Republicans who have not changed their viewpoints since becoming Democrats.Talking about all this today with me is Chris Lehmann, he’s the Washington bureau chief at The Nation magazine and a contributing editor at The Baffler.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content—Even Democrats who disagree with him should be paying attention to Zohran Mamdani—The ersatz data science telling Democrats to pursue mythical centrist voters—Confronting Trump relentlessly and telling the public about it is the best way to counter him—Joe Rogan and how Republicans and Democrats handle dissent differently—What Republicans know about politics that Democratic strategists haven’t learned yet—The endgame of Trump’s top advisers is far more extreme than Project 2025Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:37 — Despite Trump’s historic unpopularity, Democratic politicians aren’t unified on responding17:07 — Democrats haven’t figured out that the opposition’s strengths can still be attacked21:18 — The myth of informed centrism and Democratic elites’ failed rebuilding of the party’s electoral model24:43 — Trump’s instinctive understanding of how to weaponize anger30:17 — The top Democratic operatives and politicians are cut off from regular Americans’ experiences35:20 — Many ostensibly liberal institutions are filled with David Brooks conservatives who call themselves centrists40:06 — The radical right has been at war with modernity for decades, but rarely taken seriously44:14 — The lost lessons of the World War II generations52:43 — Epstein files reveal that the ultimate ‘globalists’ are right-wing56:29 — Nihilism and Tucker Carlson01:00:59 — Need for hope and transcendence in politics01:09:02 — Anti-ICE protests as a sign of hope for the futureAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Chris Layman. Hey Chris, welcome back to the show.CHRIS LEHMANN: Very happy to be here, Matt. How are you doing?SHEFFIELD: Good, good. Well, good enough, right? Minus the whole possible end of the country thing.LEHMANN: Yeah. That’s always the disclaimer. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well on, on the other hand though, there have been a number of positive developments recently. And that’s kind of what we’re here to talk about. And I think probably the biggest one is that, I mean, it’s for a very bad reason, but all of the violence and killing that the Trump regime has been doing against private citizens, the general public has finally started to notice it, it looks like.LEHMANN: Right.SHEFFIELD: And, but Trump himself, of course, is saying that he’s more popular than ever, but there is not a single poll that says that. And in fact, he also did [00:04:00] recently say that he has a, quote, silent majority. Like that to me is the biggest tale that, that he knows something is wrong with his PR approach.LEHMANN: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, it is yeah, the situation is a perfect kind of storm of as you say, they’re objectively losing ground with the general public. And particularly what’s been striking is the group he is doing worse at is now the biggest group of, registered voters independents.And, we are coming out of the 2024 cycle where everything was about the low information voter being mobilized by maga. And that’s when, you had these surges in support among Hispanic and black voters that were historic for a Republican candidate. But, but yeah, that has plummeted very dramatically to earth now. and, for instance, Latino voters say they oppose trump’s immigration policy by a 70 30 margin. So that is, there was all of this loose talk after last election day that, we are seeing the lineaments of a new Trump coalition akin to the, coalition that Reagan put together or that Nixon before him. and that was never true. And it’s become very clear that you, kind of live by the low information voter and die by the low information voter and one bad information penetrates, which is I think the most important thing out of this hellish period we’re living through.They have no answer, they, just continually double down. It’s been, quite striking throughout all, esp especially the murderous siege of, Minneapolis, there’s a very standard presidential playbook for something like this is, [00:06:00] you sort of offer up whoever ty no’s head on a pike, you sort of acknowledge, okay,SHEFFIELD: you feel their pain? Yeah.LEHMANN: we got a little carried away and now we’re going to do, kinder, gentler murderous sieges, which, sadly the Democratic party would go for. And, would, they’ve already, what’s, you can always count on me to bring the clouds in any silver lining situation.But, things that, Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate said they were going to go to the mat for and closed down the government over were things like having ICE and, CPB agents CBP rather agents wear cameras.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.LEHMANN: The administration has unilaterally done that anyway.And because among other things, this is the kind of criminal gangster administration that, they’re, anytime footage from one of these cams is, going to be sought in a legal proceeding, they’ll say, oh, we lost it. It was destroyed, whatever. It doesn’t, it’s not going to change anything fundamental about the, the mass deportation program that is now spilling over into assaults on dissenting US citizens.So, so yeah, the, administration has created all the conditions that have sunk, its standing in the polls and they’re just going to keep doing it. ThereSHEFFIELD: Because they don’t know anything else. I mean, that’s theLEHMANN: don’t know anything else. Right. AndSHEFFIELD: the Republican, sorry,Despite Trump’s historic unpopularity, Democratic politicians aren’t unified on respondingSHEFFIELD: The Republican rights sole PR strategy for the past 80 years has been, well, we just have to be more right wing and then it’ll work,LEHMANN: Yeah, which, it, has succeeded in getting them power. And and largely because of the, failure that Democrats to be an effective opposition party throughout this [00:08:00] whole long stretch of time you’re talking about. But yeah, we are now at this point where, I think ordinary voters who aren’t, that, certainly not ideologically driven and not, that informed about everything the Trump administration has been doing.You see the the murders of Renee Good and Andrew Prince in, in Minneapolis, and I think just as powerfully you see the, deportation of. Liam, the five-year-old, in the bunny hat. there’s nothing the right can do to make that seem defensible or palatable.it just, I think, triggers this deep human revulsion that I’m, glad that, American voters are experiencing ‘cause I was starting to have my doubts for a while there. But yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there’s a significant disadvantage that the American left has in that. The, far right Republican agenda is so monstrous that when you tell people what it is, if they’re not informed, they don’t believe you, that it’sLEHMANN: They won’t believe you. Right,SHEFFIELD: It’s unbelievable. And in fact, like people have done that in focus groups.They’ll say, okay, well, so here’s Donald Trump’s policy of x, and, the voters are like, no, that he doesn’t believe that.LEHMANN: That can’t be right. Yeah, no, it, it does militate against, and, that is the political challenge for, the opposition is, to, present it in these very stark ways and to Yeah. To have enough of a coalition behind you. And that’s what, that’s the other thing that’s happening right now is I think, the citizens of Minneapolis who are, being really heroic and standing up to this siege are, forcing the leaders of the Democratic party to pay [00:10:00] more attention.And it is striking, there was this long, in my view, extremely stupid interval where Matt Yglesias and the sort of popularist types of consultants and writers aligned with the Democrats were saying, we just can’t talk about immigration. It’s Trump’s greatest strength.We don’t have a good answer except, we also want to, crack down on illegal crossings and, heightened border control. But we want to do it in a more, notionally balanced procedural wave. And that again, it’s that old, I always go back to the, there’s an old onion headline where that was like, I think a representation of a Jimmy Carter Reagan debate and Jimmy Carter is saying something like, Must be reasonable and broker accords across the world, whatever. and Reagan’s line is, let’s kill the bastards. And, obviously the, Reagan slash Trump position is morally abhorrent, but it’s very clear and decisive and it makes a very clear point. And if you’re just kind of sitting on your hands the way that you know, Matt and glaciers and also this new think tank, the Searchlight Institute that promulgated this, again, stupid memo saying, we can’t have Democrats say abolish ice.They have to say reform ice, or better training, which I is especially insane because the, shooter who killed, murdered, Renee Goode was a firearms instructor. This is not inSHEFFIELD: is definitely a problem, but it’s far from the, it is not the main problem.LEHMANN: Right. And it’s not going to solve anything. You have, this is all under the, watch of Stephen Miller, who, is [00:12:00] a, fascist sadist, authoritarian goon, like, and it’s garbage in, garbage out. that is what you’re going to get as long as he is the defacto, sort of czar of immigration policy in this country.And so you have, I know Democrats don’t like politics. They think they’re above politics. We were talking earlier about, the, sort of scourge of credentialed knowledge elites atop the Democratic party. and that is the main symptom of it, in my view. They think because they’re, they have fancy degrees and they’ve, wade it through the pertinent policy papers and consultant, memos that they don’t have to bother persuading people, they, have a sort of quasi divine rights based on being part of the knowledge elite to, just administer policy. And, in something like immigration where you, absolutely need a forceful moral position that sort of addresses, everything about the Republican policy on I immigration is a lie that’s not, hyperbole on my part.Trump has, for a decade now, fallaciously claims that, there’s a, an out of control immigrant violent crime wave,SHEFFIELD: Invasion, as heLEHMANN: And invasion. And if you look at any statistics from, again, the past century really of, immigration. Immigrants commit violent crime at a significantly lower rate than the native born population.And all you have to do is think about their situation to understand like, yeah, you’re not going to want to draw attention to yourself by committing a violent crime if you’re not in the country legally, and you might be deported. Like it’s, just, it makes zero senseSHEFFIELD: And the stats show that too,LEHMANN: right? The STAs absolutely.Show that up and down Democrats don’t [00:14:00] effectivelySHEFFIELD: also they don’t draw on welfare.LEHMANN: Or you’re,SHEFFIELD: notLEHMANN: mySHEFFIELD: for it. they’re literally, they are paying into the economy and taking almost nothing out. ThatLEHMANN: it is the polar opposite of what the Republicans claim. You’re absolutely right. They pay into social security and, Medicare and welfare and they get nothing back. So it’s a net positive. This in 2024 the I’m forgetting the agency, but the major federal agency that tracks these things estimated the contribution of immigrant workers over the next decade at $10 trillion.So, like, if you just connect the dots here, and this is what I say when I’m in arguments with MAGA types, is like, what’s invading force gives you $10 trillion. Like there, sorry. You have to, find better words, to describe whatever it is. You’re, hallucinating. And on and on.And, people even forget the reason for this. Heinous mobilization in Minneapolis is ostensibly because of. Rampant welfare fraud on the part of Somali daycare centers and, which has all been promulgated by a right wing YouTuber and has been demonstrated to be total BS at the level he’s claiming.There was a little bit of,SHEFFIELD: seems to be remarkably stupid. Low IQ person.LEHMANN: yeah. No, I, that is all, true and taken as red. But and and again, just at the basic level of operational sensemaking, right, who mobilizes a paramilitary force to combat welfare fraud like you, the, if, it’s real, you get accountants, like none of this is, has anything to do with reality [00:16:00] and yet.You go back to when Abrego, Gar Garcia here in Maryland was wrongfully detained, and, the president of El Salvador said it openly. Everyone in the justice said it openly. Chris von Holland, my senator, who I’m very proud of on this issue went to visit him at Sea Cod and, made this an issue.And, reportedly Leonard Jeffries said, don’t do this again. It’s this whole idea, we can’t touch this issue. It’s, it’s Donald Trump’s, sacred source of popularity. And, that moment when, Van Holland sort of. Said, no, this is just wrong and I’m going to make it clear.I think that, is when you know the, Democrats were finally forced into a position of, like, okay, we can’t just pretend indefensible things can be wished away.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, or get away with just responding with angry press conferenceDemocrats haven’t figured out that the opposition’s strengths can still be attackedLEHMANN: yeah. Right. An angry letter like that’s going to do anything. So yeah, and it all, and again, going further back and, sort of the history and this is all stuff you know very well from coming up on the right, but you know, I often think when. I have been thinking whenever it is, I would come across Jefferies or Schumer or some other Democratic leader saying, or Matt Iglesia saying like, we have to just shut up about immigration. It’s, Donald Trump’s strongest issue. Think back to the 2004 election cycle, which you know very well, right? So, John, the Democrats and their infinite wisdom decided we’re going to nominate John Carey because he is, this strong military leader. It’s th…

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Censorship proponents have nationalized their earlier library obsessions Jan 30, 2026

Show notes

Episode Summary There’s so much news going on nowadays that it’s impossible to keep up with everything—in Minnesota, DC, and elsewhere. But authoritarianism is on the march in many places, including possibly in your city or state, where extremists haven’t just continued their interest in censoring schools and public libraries, they have expanded them to include universities, museums, and scientific research.This is extremely un-American stuff, and yet sadly, it is being marketed in just the opposite way. Censorship advocates are weaponizing patriotism, concern for children, and political fairness to crack down on the free speech of people they don’t like.Back on the show to discuss how and why this is happening, and to provide some arguments for free expression that activists can utilize is Jonathan Friedman, he’s the Managing Director of the Free Expression program at PEN America, a wonderful organization that promotes free speech and literacy which just released a new report about government censorship of college professors and students.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--America’s libraries and schools are facing an epidemic of censorship (Friedman’s previous TOC appearance)--Censorship was always a core demand of early reactionary activists like William F. Buckley--The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the false equivalence of criticism and censorship--How misinformation against ‘cancel culture’ was used to build an opposing politics of censorshipAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction11:22 — Censorship laws are deliberately vague to maximize fear and compliance13:22 — Living in fear of non-compliance17:48 — Supposed advocates for ‘Western values’ are now censoring classic authors23:42 — Does censorship actually work though?27:11 — Fake free speech absolutism33:44 — Responding to the ‘parents rights’ canard40:32 — America’s declining global reputation under Trump43:38 — Responding to false ‘patriotism’ arguments48:51 — The value of literacy and readingAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So lot has happened since you were on the program in 2022. And not a lot of good things in terms of free speech and free expression. Let’s, and I, think, and there’s been challenges both last time it was challenges at the state level primarily.But now we have federal issues as well. What are some of the biggest things ongoing right now that maybe that have been passed in the past several years in your view? And then we’ll go from there.JONATHAN FRIEDMAN: Sure. Well, I think starting in 2021 we saw, something new. Which were what we called at the time, educational gag orders. There were these proposals being passed into law in a few states that sub to constrain how it is that teachers could talk about certain issues.And a lot of the language that was originally in these laws a few years ago was very vague, but. was also vague in its implications. So they would say, here’s a list of concepts that teachers can’t talk about. And, in a lot of states it was unclear to what extent it would apply, for example, to professors at colleges and universities as compared to K to 12 teachers, which is more clear.And from that, moment in time, what we’ve seen is, a lot of activity. Kinda build on that idea. The idea being that the government should extend new control in one way or another over public education. Some of that has taken new shape in higher education proposals to [00:04:00] not just exert control over what academics might teach college age students, but for example, to kind of undermine the entire operation of colleges and universities, for example, weakening the power of faculty to set curriculum or setting new rules like we’ve seen in Texas about certain topics that can’t be taught in an college level class at all.And then in K to 12, what we’ve seen is an ongoing effort to apply these restrictions, not just to classrooms, but to school libraries and to also come up with new mechanisms that essentially may not be forms of direct. Prohibitions telling people what they can’t teach, but they function as such.For example, empowering parents to have rights over what their own students might be able to access in a school, but thereby. And this is key, thereby censoring that material for everyone. And this is a very, I mean, it’s, it reflects a really challenging aspect of public education in this country that, that doesn’t necessarily have easy answers.what is the role of public education vis-a-vis parents and students. But I think when you step back and you see, The whole picture, the effort to control higher education, the effort to, restrict K to 12 education.It’s inevitable to come to the conclusion that at a very baseline, we are at an unprecedented moment for what we might think of as. The freedom to learn in public schooling, public universities, the freedom to ask questions, the freedom to talk about current events, the freedom to recommend books, the freedom to relate to students about things that are current topics in their lives. All of this is being narrowed. All of it is being undermined.All of it is being chilled so that now, if a teacher is thinking [00:06:00] about going to see a, theater play, a performance, they’re gonna be much more nervous about. any possible content that might upset anybody, and what that means is it’s all driving toward this kind of lowest common denominator, meaning, the thing that everybody can agree on, and if nobody can agree on much, then suddenly you can’t teach anything anymore.And so if to start to recognize that as uncomfortable as freedom can be, at times, it is a better alternative than sort of continuing to narrow and restrict. What it is that we can talk and think about all the time.SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. And we’re also seeing a lot of restrictions and censorship on museums and government employees, particularly scientists as well, like a list of, words that are going to get you flagged if you have them in your grant proposal for scientific research. And extensive.Censorship of museum exhibits, including one just recently where they ordered the removal of information about the fact that it was George Washington, I think, wasn’t it, that hehadFRIEDMAN: in Philadelphia? Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, like there are these efforts over many years too. Improve, improve the story of. History in this country and prove the narrative of what people think they, what people, can grasp about the past to make that information more accessible. And what we are seeing is an effort to roll that back, to say that, that those narratives ought to be essentially erased even if they are true. if, they don’t make us feel good, let’s say whoever that us is, us being people in power, and that’s a very, that’s a very particular idea and approach to history and to the nation and its role in history, right?To say that the purpose is the purpose, truth is the purpose is deeper understanding. Is the purpose to [00:08:00] ask questions or is the purpose. Well indoctrination or to have to propagandize to narrow what it is that people have access to. So yeah, we’re seeing this go way beyond schools and universities where I think it began, and it’s been happening also in all kinds of institutions, cultural, artistic institutions for years, museums will tell you they’ve been more and more nervous actually about. School visits because of, what parents might complain about in a museum. And if you think about like, art in a museum and you have a parent who wants to ban books that have anything to do with nudity, well they’re probably gonna find something to complain about in a museum.So this kind of sense of, that every cultural or artistic institution should operate on eggshells, that every educator should operate with that mindset, it’s really gonna be damaging long term.SHEFFIELD: It really is. And I mean, effectively this. Is kind of the, they’re, trying to institutionalize the heckler’s veto. Can you talk us about that for people who haven’t heard that term, tell, us what that is.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, that’s a, it’s a really useful way of thinking about this. The heckler’s veto is the idea that. If you have maybe someone who’s giving a speech to an audience and one person in the audience heckles, they will interrupt, take down the event, heckle it to such an extent that they veto the experience of everybody else who came and who wanted to participate in.And we’re seeing that kind of veto exercised in a lot of different ways. On the one hand, we’ve seen that. On campuses for many years with speakers, across the political spectrum. This idea that someone’s speech or what they’ve said in the past or what they might say now is so offensive that, we should make the decision for everybody that no one should be able to hear it.We should stop and shut down the event from happening. And, turns out nobody across the political spectrum, has an exclusive right to that tactic. ‘cause we’re seeing it all over the place. But the [00:10:00] other thing is that we are seeing government, adopt that kind of heckler’s, veto, government enabling it, government encouraging it in a lot of places.And so, that’s what I was referring to before with the school library. and what we’ve seen with book bans all over the country is that sometimes you just have one individual who may have challenged. A thousand books or a hundred books or whatever it is. And especially when school districts adopt rules that they will remove books from circulation when and if they are challenged, what it means is it’s very easy to get a whole lot of books removed just by challenging them. And the more you dig into that phenomenon, you discover that the challenge forms are sometimes half filled out. They’re filled out with falsehoods, they’re filled out with things that don’t make sense. I, one of my favorite examples was a. A book which contained the poem by Amanda Gorman, which she read at President Biden’s inauguration.And like, I don’t know at what age someone should be able necessarily to read that poem, but the point is it was in a school library, but the person who challenged it said the book was by Oprah Winfrey. I mean, it just like, not, you’re not even really accurately filling out this form in a very sensible, straightforward manner.So. The more the more the phenomenon has been excavated, the more clear it’s been that it has been replicated across state lines and that often you see those kinds of mistakes repeated.Censorship laws are deliberately vague to maximize fear and complianceSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And another key, component to this, which these people who are challenging books are, some of the many people who were doing this. Is that these laws, in many cases are deliberately vague in a way that is designed to chill speech that is that they get more of an effect than, they could legally get.Because they know that if they’re too detailed, then it would get struck down as an explicit violation of the First Amendment. But if they make it vague, then it will stand a [00:12:00] chance.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, in some ways there’s been this embrace of the vagueness, and we see that time and again that state legislators for example, when given the opportunities to make laws more clear prefer not to. So, one that I’m reading today in Florida is a new bill that would ban the phrase the West Bank from all official government materials.I think that’s the phrasing and. You have to replace that with other, words to refer to the land in the Middle East that is so contested and, it’s, really astonishing because not only is the rationale for this change, sort of unclear, but what are official government materials also becomes. really vague. So would that include like something being created for a classroom, a college classroom, a school library, et cetera? It’s not clear. But also there’s a desire not to clarify it when it could be clear so that it will have the necessary chilling and censoring effect.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and teachers are seeing this over and over as you were saying, like. They’re like, well, I don’t know if I can say this. And that’s the idea, is to get everyone to live in fear of non-compliance. Ultimately. I think that’s what we’re talking about here.Living in fear of non-complianceFRIEDMAN: Yeah, I mean, and this, is like, it’s exactly the same phenomenon that’s now afflicting universities and college teaching that I saw years ago with school libraries. I remember, a vague rule in Missouri, it was a few years ago, that led some school librarians to sweep through their districts and pull any book off the shelf. That might that might run afoul of one of those rules. And I’m actually remembering I have some of these books behind me still from the, I’m just gonna grab ‘em for a sec here. Just coincidentally, I know these are on that shelf. Like they, they pulled, this is a this is a graphic adaptation of the [00:14:00] Gettysburg Address, and you can flip through this book.I have you tell me what it was in this book that somebody objected to. I’m not sure. The closest that I’ve seen is that the law. Band nudity and there’s like pictures of, slaves here who are, dressed for African weather rather than whatever it is, the middle passage, et cetera.So, I guess those are people who are not wearing shirts. Okay. If you are told though, that as a librarian you might go to jail and get a criminal record. If you give a certain kind of material to a student and that material might be designated as any kind of nudity and this Gettysburg Address graphic novel, like a book literally written to make this accessible to young people, and you’re saying you might go to jail for it, you’re gonna take that risk. And so Well, apparently not. And so what happens is, people are made to feel like the stakes of this are so high that they ought to air on the side of. Removing materials. And in fact, that phrase err on the side of caution in quotes there, that’s actually a phrase that was popularized in Florida as a way to ban books that school districts should err on the side of caution.And if you, if we all err on the side of caution when we’re talking about intellectual access to books, I mean, do you know how many books are not cautious when you think about like, books that you actually wanna read? They, you have exciting things that happen in them, unexpected things, topics that you may not encounter in your life, and that you can only come to understand through the, through an impactful story that, that, makes that kind of information or experience accessible to you.So inevitably. That leads to limiting, the bounds of what people might learn about in a library. And the other book I had here, I pulled off the shelf was, this is a graphic novel adaptation of The Odyssey. That was another one in MIS in Missouri too. And there was a whole bunch of others as well.[00:16:00] Something like 50 50 or so. Art history books, books like, the works of Picasso. Again. It gets pretty limitless if you are taking that kind of cautious approach. And so now we’re also seeing that in higher education with Texas University professors being told they can’t put things on their syllabus.one of them most, in the news recently was told that he couldn’t teach. Plato works by Plato and you think, oh, how could you be tellinga university? How could you tell a Philosophy professor not to teach Plato? I still, it’s a philosophical question I don’t have the answer to yet, except to say that’s what it’s like to live under these laws.that’s the that’s th…

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The Liminal States of America Jan 28, 2026

Show notes

Minds are not things, they are processes. Who we are is what we’re doing. That is especially true of minds in societies. The news we see daily during the second Trump administration is proof of this, not just in the monstrous and inhumane policies but also in how these ideas are being opposed.

What America is and will be is undetermined right now. We are in a liminal state, a time of transition.

Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984 broke the Democratic Party’s leadership class. Ever since then, most of the party’s elites have operated on the principle that the American public is far more conservative than it actually is. Instead of forcefully stating what they stand for and why, most national Democrats are deathly afraid of becoming the next Michael Dukakis or Howard Dean. This is a global problem: left party leaders consistently overstate the conservatism of their constituents, as multiple political science studies have shown.

The mainstream media has been similarly feckless; the executives, editors, and anchors have been unwilling to consistently tell the public the larger vision of what the Trump regime is trying to do: completely repeal modernity and replace it with a techno-feudalism in which the American Colossus is torn down and replaced by regional “patchwork states” that are ruled by authoritarian corporations and religious cults.

As Trump, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem and the rest of the regime have been illegally impounding allocated funds, arresting anyone looking suspiciously foreign, and posting on social media about their goal of deporting 100 million residents (roughly the same number of Americans who are non-white), the Americans who elected the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have had to come to realization that most of our purported “leaders” were not going to do much of anything to stop Trump from destroying the country. No one is coming to save us but ourselves.

(Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have been welcome exceptions, forcefully speaking out and utilizing legal maneuvers to block Trump’s deployment of military troops in their states.)

After a full year of Trump’s disastrous leadership, the economy is hobbling into a tariff-driven recession, America’s international standing is in tatters, and the president’s popularity is at record lows. To district from all the failure, de facto president Miller decided to jump on a misleading viral video about daycare centers run by Somali immigrants living in Minnesota. Trump almost immediately was on the case, lashed out at them with a racist attack that included Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar:

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” he said in December. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

Shortly thereafter, the regime launched what it called Operation Metro Surge, a massive influx of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents that began in Minneapolis, Minnesota and later expanded to the entire state. Thousands of heavily armed paramilitary thugs began swarming into neighborhoods, shopping centers, and even places of worship as they arrested thousands of people, including many who were American citizens, legal immigrants, and even babies and small children like 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.

Faced with a paramilitary invasion that the judiciary was unwilling or unable to stop, Minnesotans took to the wintry streets, braving sub-freezing temperatures to attend massive protests and to track and report the activities of ICE and CBP thugs in neighborhoods everywhere. And unlike in other states targeted by the Trump regime, thousands of Minnesotans have extensive experience coordinating protests against his first administration after the murder of George Floyd, a black Minneapolis resident killed by police in 2020.

“Our community groups, our unions have never ceased to continue to try to work together and create inflection points,” union organizer Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou told France 24. “So we have a high level of trust. We don’t all agree on everything that we’re working on together here, but we know we cannot be fractured – and that we have to do this together.”

That is exactly what Renee Good and Alex Pretti did. They were two regular people who stepped forward to help their community and nation while the Republican-controlled Congress and judiciary are refusing to do anything to stand up for their supposed beliefs. Working tirelessly for days on end, they were mercilessly killed at point-blank by Trump’s thugs.

Despite the Trump regime’s efforts to smear Good and Pretti as “terrorists” and “assassins,” the public is increasingly able to see through the lies, and it’s sent the president’s approval rating on his top issue of immigration to an all-time low of just 39 percent. The backlash has been so pronounced that the administration announced that it had demoted Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol “commander at large” who had helmed the operation that led to the Pretti shooting.

Trump also announced that the government would be investigating the incident, and there have been multiple reports that Miller and/or Noem may lose their jobs. And there’s more good news: A judge has temporarily blocked Liam Ramos and his father, a legal asylum applicant, from being deported. Even the tech industry, which has been so eager to lick the Trumpian boot, finally has some prominent leaders speaking out against his totalitarianism.

And, at last, the majority of congressional Democrats have stepped forward to demand the impeachment of Noem and the de-funding of ICE.

These are wonderful victories worth savoring. They are proof that standing up to tyranny works. The peoples of Greenland and Europe also demonstrated this as well, as they pushed back aggressively against Trump’s totalitarian threats to invade and colonize the frozen northern island, discovering what investors had figured out long ago: Trump Always Chickens Out. Because he’s a bully.

We can do this. But it will not be easy. Even if all goes well, we still have three more years of Trump in the White House. And there’s no guarantee that it will. But whether American fascism triumphs is not a foregone conclusion either.

That’s because dictatorship is a state of mind, not just for the demented criminal who is currently the president of the United States, but also in the minds of the citizens.

Some of us, like the beanie-bearing Russian asset Tim Pool, yearn desperately to submit to tyranny. The rest of us are learning that freedom only exists if you believe in it—and fight for it together.

This is the Liminal States of America.

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The dark philosophy animating Trump’s chaotic second term Jan 23, 2026

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityEpisode Summary It’s now one year into Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, and while it’s been just as chaotic as the first, this term’s chaos has been so much worse.But invading Greenland, burning down NATO, partially taking over Venezuela, and slashing science budgets for no stated reason might seem random in many ways.But in fact, it isn’t. If you’ve read a lot of right-wing political theory and religious theology, you can actually see what his top aides like Stephen Miller or Russell Vought are up to. The larger goal is to literally destroy modernity and replace it with an undefined form of Christian techno-feudalism.Luckily, our guest on today’s program, Matt McManus, has done the reading. A longtime friend of the show, he’s the author of the book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. He’s also an assistant professor at Spelman College. In this discussion we talk about how Trump and Trumpism fit into the bigger picture of fascism, authoritarianism, and right wing epistemology.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--Trump, Nietzsche, and Antichrist America--Inside the bizarre and hateful ideology of JD Vance--Why atheist libertarians and Christian fundamentalists actually have a lot in common--Trump is trying to destroy America’s world-class scientific leadership--Why far-right Republicans are going after universities--The social science revealing why Trump loves the poorly educated so much--Why ancient Greek Skepticism has become surprisingly relevant--Renee Good and the problem of other mindsAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction05:45 — Non-religious anti-intellectualism in right-wing thought09:07 — Nietzsche as the canonical far-right thinker13:19 — Trump’s domestic policies are basically the re-institution of serfdom15:43 — The importance of sci-fi authors in anti-democratic political thought21:33 — Utopias as political lodestars25:20 — Horseshoe theory and its limitations29:44 — The historic relationships between 20th century fascism, conservatism, and left-wing ideologies34:47 — The folly of leftists who team up with reactionaries38:38 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: One of the things about the second Trump term that I think that a lot of people are observing is just how much more insane he is—or at least this presidency is, I’m sorry, I should say. People are seeing all these policies like tearing down various scientific funding, or education, or foreign policy organizations, et cetera, et cetera. And people are like, why the hell is this? Why is he doing this? This makes absolutely no sense.But it actually does make sense, if you have done your reading, I think you would agree, right?MATT MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I’ve recurringly pointed out is there’s a long anti-intellectual bias in the history of conservative thought including intellectualized bias that’s been articulated by conservative intellectuals. Right? And you don’t have to take my word for it. you can just go back and read Joseph de Maistre, for example, who’s been a major influence on a lot of MAGA intellectualism, movers and shakers, people like, Curtis Yarvin, who everyone seems to know right now, or Oran McIntyre, who’s his disciple.De Maistre says, flat out, that look, what people ignorantly call philosophy is fundamentally a destructive force. Why? Because it encourages people to think critically for themselves. It gets a society that’s filled with all kinds of intellectuals are coming up with new ideas about how government and society to be organized.We don’t want that, right? That says we’re way better off having everyone instilled with their belief system from the cradle to the grave, what he calls, dogmas, right? People should approach [00:04:00] their beliefs and especially approach existing systems of authority, dogmatically and by and large he says, society will run better that way.And if that seems a little anachronistic, you can flash forward to Roger Scruton, who I would argue is, the greatest English speaking conservative philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century. In his book, the Meaning of Conservatism Scruton used to say that there’s something deeply commendable about what he called, and I quote, “unthinking people who accept the burdens that life imposes upon them without trying to politicize them or without looking for recourse from existing systems of authority.”And the reason that Scruton thought unthinking people were better than thinking people, is unthinking people are far likely, more likely, again, to show allegiance to their betters, and to pay deference to existing authorities, right. I would frame it as they’re more likely to be willing to accept their subordination to those that conservatives think they should subordinate themselves too, right?So all that you see with this Trump administration is in many ways a very virulent form of this anti-intellectualism. Casting a very, wide net where for decades, American conservatives has seen as JD Vance was put it, professors as being the enemies, the media being the enemies, because professors in the media have a bad habit of saying, ‘Is that exactly true? Probably isn’t.’And now they just have the power to act upon that, by, at the very least, stripping the resources from the media and academics that they need to do their job and actually try to ascertain the real world. And in the worst case scenario, as we’ve seen in the Trump administration, is actively trying to censor and chill the speech, those who tried to decide against it.SHEFFIELD: They are. And, they’re also in, in particular, going after science quite a bit.MCMANUS: Oh yeah.SHEFFIELD: I mean there’s just so much chaos and whatnot.Non-religious anti-intellectualism in right-wing thoughtSHEFFIELD: And there’s a particular animus that these people have, and it isn’t only just the religious either, I think. And we’ve talked a lot on this show about the religious animus towards science. But it’s not just religion that is motivating [00:06:00] this.MCMANUS: No, absolutely not. Right. I mean, look Joseph de Maistre was an arch reactionary Catholic. And a lot of the anti-intellectual in the Trump administration right now are clearly come from a religious evangelist perspective. but you know, Roger Scruton was by and large a secular philosopher, even if he had certain things that he wanted to intimate about the sacred, again, the anti-intellectual—SHEFFIELD: And Stephen Miller is not religious either, so we should say that too.MCMANUS: Yeah, exactly right. And Curtis Yarvin, describes himself as a militant atheist as well. And so does Bronze Age pervert and many of the other intellectuals and movers and shakers that are kind of ideologically inspiring Trump administration. Again, what animates them about intellectuals isn’t that intellectuals are espousing this or that idea that’s contrary to what they want people to hear, that’s part of it. The big thing is that intellectuals are doing their job at all in whatever field, right? Because the problem with having too much discourse, too much discussion too many controversies is it leaves open to question who’s supposed to be in charge and who gets to call the shots in society?And fundamentally, conservatives just don’t really want that. Right? They prefer, again, a society where people know and understand their place. Right? As a conservative author, James, Steven once put it they want people to think that to acknowledge and affirm a real superior is a great social virtue.And sometimes this can take pretty fear form. One of the more. Under examined intellectuals of the pre-Trump era as a figure called Wilmore Kendall who I wish everyone would read. So Wilmore Kendall was a major conservative intellectual in the 20th century. Very smart guy. Don’t want to deny that, right?Very learned, very thoughtful. But he wrote a quite a thoughtful essay called, was Athens Right? To Kill Socrates? For those who don’t know Athens put Socrates on trial for the crime of philosophizing and asking probing questions and most thinking people. Since, the BC has said Athens was wrong to execute Socrates, right?Socrates, as he articulates, was doing something valuable by raising these kinds of probing questions, getting people to think more deeply about what is [00:08:00] justice, what we should do, et cetera. Kendall disagrees, right? Kendall says, actually the conservative elite who are running Athens were absolutely right to execute Socrates.Because even if they weren’t always able to answer his questions, and even if Socrates was right that Athens wasn’t a perfectly just society. His form of questioning posed a serious threat to the established social order. So of course, elites were entitled to get rid of him. They did not want the social order change and it was not in their interest to see the social order change.So Socrates should have drank the hemlock for the sake at least, of the conservative elites that were running at the country or accordion to the conservative elites that were running Athens at the time. And Kendall’s idea is not, or Kendall’s are the. The insight of Kendall’s piece is not hard to extrapolate, right?He’s directly targeting what he calls the John Stewart Mill School of Thought that sees society as better organized if there’s open discussion, open debate, free rights to liberal expression, et cetera, et cetera where everyone can weigh in. And everyone should feel free to criticize society.Kendall didn’t want that because he thought it was disruptive of respect for authority and conservatives today, really, again, ibi very deeply of that spirit.Nietzsche as the canonical far-right thinkerSHEFFIELD: They do. And. It’s notable with that Kendall piece that it’s actually a direct echo of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, where he has an entire section in there called the Problem of Socrates. and, I think that is one of the, I mean, there, there’s so many leftist French misreadings of Nietzsche that are just so moronic, frankly, in my view. And they only read the early part of Nietzsche where he was a bit more libertarian, don’t read any of his middle or later output. And he says, I mean, in his essays that yes, I don’t like Christianity, but actually, the real problem with Christianity is Socrates.And that Socrates is the one who got this whole slave morality thing started, in the Greco-Roman world, and then that [00:10:00] infected Judaism. And so he’s the real villain here. Jesus was just, kind of a a Buddhist guy out there, saying, do your own thing and leave everyone else alone.That reading of Nietzche, which is the correct reading if you read his later books, it seemed a lot of people on the left don’t seem to have done that reading, I would say.MCMANUS: No, absolutely. Although I’d like to point out in defense to the left that there’s been a serious effort to reevaluate our addiction to vulgar Nietzscheanism, which I think has undermined our effectiveness for a very long time right now. And you don’t have to take my word for it.SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah. Well, Domenico Losurdo, yeah. Great book.MCMANUS: Domenico Losurdo are more recent and Daniel Touch, right? No, I don’t agree with tu and Losurdo about everything they say about Nietzche, but they’re pretty clear, right? That he is a reactionary aristocrat, at his very core. So, whether or not there’s, some insights that you can glean from him that are important, Nietzche is a brilliant thinker. I don’t want to vulgarize him in that way. Right. And there are insights you can glean from him. But you should be very clear about what he himself was committed to.And just to kind of connect this to Trumpism a little bit, I think that’s not only leftists who’ve made the mistake of reading Nietzsche as a kind of proto-libertarian many on the American right did for a long time also. Think about people like Ayn Rand and a lot of her disciples. They saw him as a, fundamentally an individualist at heart. Somebody who was pushing against bourgeois, petite bourgeois moralism with its evangelical tendencies and creating more space for free inquiry.The expression of various forms of individual identity. Well, Nietzche himself actually repudiates that reading of his work pretty emphatically in an unpublished work called The Will to Power, right, which was organized by his sister and is somewhat problematic, but does consist of stuff that he himself wrote in the world of power, Niet says, I am not an individualist, right? My philosophy is not about individualism. It’s about what you call orders of rank, right? So some people are indeed entitled to expressions of their individuality to be free of the shackles of good and evil.But those are the people that Nietzsche thinks are worthy [00:12:00] of that kind of liberty. Namely the kind of superior persons the new aristocrats of the future that he thinks society should be organized around breeding. But he is very clear and beyond good and evil, for example that for most of the rest of us what we deserve is, as he puts it, slavery, right?Because he says the only kind of society that has ever been able to culturally produce anything of value that has been able to resist the kind of sirens call of nihilism is a aristocratic society. And no, a Socratic society can function. As he puts it without a slave class. Right. There’s a very good researcher who pointed out that Nietzche talks about slavery hundreds of times over the course of his ure.And there’s almost not a single instance where he’s not describing it in. Positive even rap sodic terms, he thinks it’s absolutely necessary for any good society. And given that you shouldn’t be surprised again when you see people like Braun’s age pervert or God help me, raw ag nationalists, all these MAGA influencers coming out of the woodwork, espousing a kind of vulgar tism and saying horrible things about how most people in the world are bug men.Or how women are just roasty who are only fit to, be sexually assaulted by these powerful individuals. Nietzche himself would never be so crass or so stupid. But you know, there’s an instinct there towards suggesting that there are better kinds of people or higher kinds of people and lower kinds of people.The better kinds of people are entitled to do whatever they want to the lower kinds of people in the pursuit of their allegedly grand projects.Trump’s domestic policies are basically the reinstitution of serfdomSHEFFIELD: Yeah, and you see it also with their, domestic policy as well, because, the, domestic policy of the Trump administration is to eliminate. All social welfare, payments or organizations. And then at the same time to bring back menial labor jobs and make those proliferate.But you will, they will be private sector jobs and they will not be unionized. And so, this is basically. They are trying to bring back a serf class. I mean, that is essentially what they’re doing. and you see that also in particular in the, writing and, speeches of Peter thi, like he’s pretty almost [00:14:00] explicit in saying this.MCMANUS: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, changes his orientation. Anytime, he’s on camera, right? He’s a pretty well read guy. But, one day he identifies with a kind of vulgar Nietzscheanism. The other day he has nice things to say about post liberalism. The next day, he re identifies as a libertarian.And then all of a sudden, he’s financing Curtis Yarvin, who’s, secular atheist monarchist. Ri…

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