Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

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The Archaeologist of Intuitions Jan 19, 2026

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What is luck? How do we know when we’re destined for good or bad luck? What can our perceptions of luck tell us about ourselves? Author and law professor Bill Miller gives us answers to these questions and more.

Renee Good and the problem of other minds Jan 17, 2026

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Episode SummaryThe shocking murder of Renee Good at the hands of federal immigration shock troops in Minnesota earlier this month was part of a larger outrage, the Trump regime’s fascistic deployment of tens of thousands of violent and poorly trained, but very well-armed paramilitary troops against people across several major American cities, arresting people who look or sound Hispanic.Since Good’s murder, the Trump administration and numerous right-wing media figures have attacked Good and her wife as “domestic terrorists,” who were engaging in illegal speech—and thus she supposedly deserved to be killed for temporarily impeding ICE officials before trying to drive away.Of course, this is rhetoric is wildly hypocritical given that Trump and his supporters have claimed for years to be so very concerned about protecting girls and women from trans people in sports and public restrooms. Aside from that, however, the right-wing attempt to “other” Renee Good is in support of the larger reactionary campaign to deny the legal rights and humanity of immigrants living in America.But the belief that immigrants (and Hispanic-appearing people in general) deserve to be treated as less-than-human is itself part of a larger dilemma that philosophy has dealt with for centuries, the problem of other minds. Since no one has direct access to any other person’s experience, other people’s moral rights can, unfortunately, be difficult things for many of us to understand. Far too much of politics is about whether some people are real and whether they should have rights.Liberalism used to talk about things like this more, and so in this live collaboration between Flux and Magic + Loss, we decided to explore the topic from several different angles.Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction13:03 — Can alternative scripture interpretations save religion from fundamentalism?17:22 — Creating a list of books for deconstructing former fundamentalist Christians20:47 — Conservatism is not reactionism23:54 — Jeffrey Epstein and misogynist libertarianism37:04 — Theory of mind and empathy46:18 — Rene Girard and Nietzschean Christianity57:54 — Why reactionary Catholicism is becoming more popular in the U.S. far right01:06:31 — Somatic experience and a politics of determined loveAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Hello everyone. Well, I guess this is your live, Virginia, so maybe you can introduce it and then we can go from there. You want to do that?VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN: So this is a co-hosting and I’m on the back foot when it comes to a good introduction here, but, Matthew Sheffield and I are-- Matthew is a cherished interlocutor of mine. He’s a philosopher, and I am me, and just a random Gen Xer, trying to pick my feet up day after day. And, and I, think we want to talk among other things about Rene Gerard and empathy and and, trivia like that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. and there is just so much to talk about, but I guess I think maybe we can start with a news hook, which is the recent Texas A&M decision to tell a philosophy professor there that he could not teach Plato’s Symposium in a class about ethics and moral controversy.HEFFERNAN: Right.SHEFFIELD: And to me, like, not only is this the inevitable product, of course, of, this, right wing censorship, that we’ve had in this year, but it’s also that it shows just how completely incoherent they’re, because on the one hand they say, well, we are here for western, western values and that we value the, traditional ideas and morality and all that.And it’s like, well, you clearly haven’t read the Symposium of Plato.HEFFERNAN: Well, is Greece really the West though, Matthew? I mean come on!SHEFFIELD: I know, that Plato guy.HEFFERNAN: I think it’s, I think it’s Colorado, maybe the [00:02:00] California,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, hah. Well, and just to summarize it just a little bit though, for anybody who hasn’t read it, Plato’s Symposium, it’s a work that is one of his most famous ones within philosophy, but it’s not one that I would say the general public is probably very familiar with. And that’s because, well, the whole book is about sex and gender and love and philosophy, which, philosophy as a discipline of course has no problem, has always discussed these things.But in the right wing movement of today, they don’t read the books. Like they don’t even read the Bible like these people, that was one thing—I used to, I was, born and raised as a fundamentalist Mormon, and one of the things that I discovered about Christian fundamentalists is that almost none of them have read even one book of the Bible in its entirety. They don’t, they just literally show up to church and they listen to whatever the pastor tells them, and they might read, like five or six verses, or a chapter 10. That’s it.HEFFERNAN: So why take the trouble to ban something?SHEFFIELD: Well, and that’s the thing, like Plato as a philosopher, and of course, so many ancient authors like Aristophanes and, all, and, I mean just, like you could go down the line, you could pick almost any ancient classical author or the Bible itself, and there’s all kinds of stuff in there that would be considered inappropriate, for, by right-wing Christians. My, my favorite Bible story is the story of, Jephthah, who was a judge in the book of Judges, a prophet who, decided, well, I’m afraid I’m not going to win this battle that you’re telling me to fight God, so you gotta do something. You gotta promise me that you’ll do it. And if you, and if, you will, if I win this battle, [00:04:00] I will kill the first thing that I see when I come home.And lo and behold, the first thing that he sees is his daughter. And so, in the same text in which, Isaac, the human sacrifice of Isaac is, said, oh, isn’t it great that we didn’t have to, he didn’t have to kill Isaac.Well, here you have another text. Whoever was like, yeah, it was a good thing to kill your child for God. And like, right. But, most, of course, most Christians and most, super Orthodox Jews have never heard that story or have any idea.HEFFERNAN: Matthew, and one of, one of the things I think that makes you such an interesting philosopher is that you have done something that very few of us have done, which is grown up in a totalizing episteme, and questioned it, and pulled out the threads of it and done what evangelicals called deconstruction, right.Parenthetically, I love that deconstruction is now. I think if you put it into Google, into Gemini, it will explain deconstruction, not as an invention of Jacque Deida, but as a practice of evangelicals, not destroying their faith, but dividing it, separating it into its component parts and evaluating them-- and, and kind of coming to terms with how this thing was built around them, which is. Exact. I mean, I can’t imagine a better application of deconstruction as I understand it from Derrida. It’s, it’s, just beautiful. And I wish he’d lived to see it, in fact, because for Christianity to use the tools of literary criticism, it’s exactly right to find a way to understand what, anyway, you did this yourself.It with, with a, like a very esoteric system. The books of the testimony of the angel Moroni, the, oddities of the Book of Mormon, the, weird readings of a kind of weird 19th century, brought together theology. But that is [00:06:00] binding for so many people and interesting for so many people and literal for so many people.And just one by one, I mean, it’s. You must consider it one of the great philosophical achievements of your life that you were able to pull the wires out of your head. So dexterously, that you now, have managed to expose yourself to, so many other philosophies. You were your own gly. I mean, if to get back to the greats, you were Socrates to yourself.Why do I believe this? why would I possibly believe this? and I think that puts you in a, uniquely good spot to think about these things. But, and I also think that if you believe in literal truth of the Bible, and I’m, I, don’t know I, that I know what that means exactly. Like, it--SHEFFIELD: Well, they don’t know either.HEFFERNAN: Right? But I don’t even know what believing. I don’t think any of us knows exactly what it is to believe something. In some ways that means you don’t read it, right? Like I believe in, a geocentric, I accept on faith or I believe in that the, I’m sorry, the heliocentric. I believe that the sun’s at the center of the universe, but, so I don’t read it.I just don’t read a lot of astronomy because it’s there. It’s sat down. Why do I have to look at it? Right? And if you believe in little truth of the Bible, then interpretation doesn’t matter. Then why does your reading matter?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that is, I mean, that is functionally I think how they, get away with it.But it’s also the, it’s different from what you just said in, in your thought process, process about centrism, because. They don’t care about proof. Like that’s the thing that I think a lot of people who are,HEFFERNAN: But I don’t care about, but I don’t care about proof for other things that I just think are true like that.I don’t, I mean, you don’t have to. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone convince me, I’ve never looked up in a book why, what the actual proof is for the center of the universe. and that’s just an obvious one. Forget about everything else. I mean, a television working [00:08:00] or whatever else. the things that I believe in, the literal truth of, or a proposition that’s just been handed to me are the things I don’t read.Once you read, you’ve opened up the possibility of interpretation, exegesis, even if you’re simply committing to memory. I interviewed a, several months ago, a Chinese dissident who, grew up in China and the two things they had to do with the writings of Chairman Mao were memorize them and then memorized a reading of them, an interpretation of them.So they had to shield out any possibility that they, in any meaningful way, were reading. in addition to what they were. So lest you open up a slight possibility that you have a hermit, bring some hermeneutics to the occasion of reading, you now have something else to step in your brain in that place.And I guess to close the loop, you did this with the text you grew up on, and you did essentially what Nietzsche says, we have, again, Nietzche is someone you’ve written about. We, God’s dead. We’ve killed him, you and I, we killed him because we read and studied the universe with science and came to the conclusion that our, that this God didn’t exist.And you did the same, I think with the texts, I imagine with the texts of Mormonism, and the teachings of Mormonism. You read them closely and like lots of evangelicals, you probably came to elders and said, I don’t understand. Why would God have someone kill his daughter? And, and then you thought, well, I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, right?Read the books, ask the questions, and then the whole thing falls apart. I mean, is that how it went for you? Actually, I don’t want to, I don’t want to guess.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. that is how it went. And this is why I would say also that, when people have questions about, let’s say vaccines or something, or that they shouldn’t be told, oh, you can’t ask that.It’s fine to ask these questions. It’s fine to, [00:10:00] to, ask why. Like, that’s, that is the most fundamental idea. Like it basically all cognition devolves to “what is this?” And “what do I do with this?” And so if you can’t, if you forbid people from answering those, asking those questions, then you’re not going to be, you’re not going to be a viable political movement, I would say.But independent of that, yeah, like, so with Mormonism, I, I was, told, well, don’t worry about that. God will answer that in heaven. You don’t have to think about it. And there were some people that, so Brigham Young University used to have this academic pseudoscience department called the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormonism Studies. And basically it was like an apologetic organization. and I read some of their material and it was just so virulent and, nasty, and, just, saying, well, how anyone that would question these ideas, it’s just stupid and malignant and vicious and satanic and, et cetera, et cetera.And it had no, effect on me because, I was like, well, you’re telling me that you don’t have the answer, when you act like that. And then once I opened myself to the idea of, well, what if this isn’t true? And all of these doubts that I had clicked through in my mind, perfectly because then I realized, oh, if, it’s not true, then all of these things make sense.And that’s, that is the, dilemma that people who value science and value reason in our, time, we have to induce that kind of thought process for people. Because I, I had to do all this by myself, like there wasn’t anyone in my personal life that was helping me along the way or, [00:12:00] teaching me about introducing me to ideas.I was just following things on my own. And that’s, most people don’t have the time for that, or the inclination or whatever, whatever reason they’re not going to do it. And so we, so people who believe in sound thinking, we have to, be out there and then, and join the fray everywhere as much as we can.HEFFERNAN: Can, I ask you a question? What might, when you went to your parents or your, elders and, asked these questions, what might they have said? When you ask these questions, what might, some, wise person have said to you that would’ve kept you in the fold? In other words, could Mormonism have, sort of invented its own secularism, had it been able to accommodate, accommodate your answers instead of kind of killing off Socrates, the you person?right. So.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Can alternative scripture interpretations save religion from fundamentalism?HEFFERNAN: Yeah. could they have said, oh, let’s, I’ve, that one is, that’s a real, incongruity in the text. And what could that possibly mean, and why would that be included? Well, maybe let’s consider the possibility that the Bible’s a set of metaphors, or let’s consider the possibility that God is erratic, or let’s consider the possibility that there are a lot of texts, other texts, or as Sarah just said, that Mormonism is Satanism.there, if someone had said something like that to you, would there be a way that you would still be a, philosophical Mormon and you might’ve expanded the department at Brigham Young to include real science?SHEFFIELD: Well, I, there are people that are doing, trying to do that actually.. and so, and in fact the, for, there’s a, magazine that’s had a conference for decades, called Sunstone, in Mormonism, that, that has tried to do that. And, and I think [00:14:00] that they, have kind of also. because Mormonism, like many, high, demand religious traditions, places a lot of, they, they tell members to be afraid of, former members or people who question.. and so, and Sunstone has basically kind of been kind of the seed of, this idea that, well, these people who are former Mormons are not going to hurt you. They’re not evil, they’re not satanic. and so, yeah, if I, had been exposed to that a little bit earlier, perhaps I would’ve cha, been able to toughen out or figure some way.But, on the other hand, on the other hand, I just don’t know that would’ve been satisfying for me because, like in Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” she’s right about that. That when you do start getting into metaphorical interpretation of text, you are doing violence to it, epistemic violence to the text because you are imposing your reading of it over the author’s reading. And I don’t know that I could have really done that, in the, wellHEFFERNAN: I,SHEFFIELD: that would’ve satisfied.HEFFERNAN: I mean, I just, I don’t want to go it to go unsaid that I, starkly disagree with Sontag on that point. I mean,…

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As Trump’s authoritarian moves increase, establishment media face a time for choosing Jan 12, 2026

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Episode Summary Donald Trump has been on the national political scene for more than 10 years, but in a lot of ways, it seems that America’s top news organizations have yet to figure out how to cover him properly. That’s a serious problem because during his second term, Trump is encountering much less resistance from within the Republican party, and as a result, is breaking domestic and international laws much more frequently and blatantly.In 2015, the national media were not prepared for a politician who lied as easily as he breathed, and who viciously attacked anyone for telling hard truths about him. A year into his second presidential term, they still have not been able to adjust.Despite the many failures of America’s media with regard to Trump, however, it is also the case that in 2025, some journalists, like the Pentagon press corps, showed courage and alacrity in dealing with the bullying and the deception—including from corporate executives eager to show fealty to an administration that loves to deploy government power against independent media.But Trump himself is not the only one assaulting American journalism. It is coming under attack from within thanks to billionaire oligarchs like Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos who have bought up marquee journalism institutions and corrupted them through paying off Trump’s nuisance lawsuits and hiring Republican spinmeisters like newly installed CBS editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, who has made a career out of passing off conservative dogma as moderate pragmatism.There’s a lot that happened in 2025 with Trump and the media, and so in this episode I wanted to unpack some of it with Margaret Sullivan, she’s the executive director of the Journalism School at Columbia University, the former public editor of the New York Times, and a former columnist at the Washington Post. She also writes for the Guardian and for her newsletter, American Crisis. Be sure to check out the series she wrote on journalism ethics at Columbia Journalism Review as well.The video of our December 22, 2025 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 his second term, Trump’s lawsuit threats against the media are getting real results—America needs to hear what Republicans think, but that should be through reporting, not platforming lying commentators—Flashback: Far-right media channels were previewing Trump’s radical second term agenda —How reactionary media outlets are radicalizing conservative Christians—Trump and the radical right are utilizing the same disinformation playbook developed by tobacco companies in the 1970s—For nearly a century, Republicans have been pretending to be the ‘real liberals,’ Bari Weiss was only too happy to helpAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:12 — What Trump could have done with a Fairness Doctrine12:15 — Bari Weiss and the myth of the moderate conservative TV audience21:22 — Media organizations pushing back on presidents36:03 — Journalism as public philosophy40:38 — Rethinking objectivity in journalism45:16 — Democracy cannot function properly without a public that thinks soundlyAudio 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 it’s been the first year of the second Trump administration and I thought it would be good to do a retrospective of how things were in this first year in the media, from your standpoint and whether you see things changing for the better or for the worse. There’s a lot to talk about, so why don’t we just start overall with what are the main differences in the way that Trump is being covered this first year versus the previous term?MARGARET SULLIVAN: Right. Well, I wish I could say that I saw a dramatic difference in the way he’s being covered in this second time around, but I don’t really think that’s the case. My feeling is that the mainstream press never really learned how to cover him to begin with. And I don’t really see a huge change in that. You have to deal with the fact that he has a lot of lies and misstatements in what he says. But they’re so constant that I don’t think that the mainstream press has sort of ever—there’s fact checking, there’s an effort to say, oh, well, that wasn’t true. But there’s still there’s still a lot of the same stuff that I think beveled the press and the public, [00:04:00] frankly, in his first term.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s right in terms of the coverage. In terms of the owners though—SULLIVAN: Oh, that’s, that is different.Yeah, that is different. I mean, we’re seeing in big media just this really very fast consolidation of ownership that is continuing to progress. So these media conglomerates are getting bigger and and they, and then the decisions, this is particularly true. But not only, but particularly true in the world of, TV news. So, ABC is owned by Disney, CBS is now owned and controlled by Paramount Global, and that too is probably going to grow and get, bigger or different. CNN is in the mix because of because of their ownership and, it kind of. Goes on and on like that. So, I think what happens is that the priorities are less coming from the journalists. Not entirely, I don’t want to overstate it, but certainly there have been decisions that have been made about settling lawsuits. That Trump has has begun that seem pretty clearly to be coming from corporate concerns rather than journalistic values.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. One definitely with ABC, that was the case. And CBS as well. And yeah, the, I think what, a lot of this has shown though is that really, what we, what the media had in terms of, standards and things like that, they were norms. there was no real mechanism by which the public could hold them accountable or the staff could hold them accountable or something, organization professional associations or whatever.These didn’t exist, and [00:06:00] that’s, I think is the kind of biggest thing about the 10 years that we’ve had of Trump on the scene is that norms are nothing. Ultimately they exist only in your mind, they’re enactments, they’re not actual, real things to stop problems.SULLIVAN: No, there’s no, it’s not as if there are media cops out there who are going to say, let’s consult the, society of profession or professional journalist, code of ethics and issue tickets. it’s, and this, as you say, a lot of what’s happened. During both of these Trump administrations is that we found out that people were acting out of norms that had developed for a long time and that the norms have been smashed. And oh, I guess, oh, that can happen and not, and there’s no consequence for it. And maybe the norms weren’t so great anyway, but in some cases they at least sort of, There were some good things about them. So, but we find out that, in a way, this is, again, a little bit overstated or maybe a little falsely stated, but it’s like, it’s like we were all on the honor system and now we find out that’s, oh, there’s no consequences for doing things another way.What Trump could have done with a Fairness DoctrineSHEFFIELD: and there’s an interesting paradox to that topic more generally though, that when we look outside of the United States. Some countries, like the UK for instance, have agencies, government agencies like Ofcom, and these agencies exist in many different nations, that do have regulatory power on media.And I, it, I think a lot of times people have said, well, that would be nice if there was something that could administer accountability. But gosh, can you imagine what Donald Trump would have done with an Ofcom under his control?SULLIVAN: I mean, i’m always very nervous about the idea of the government, whatever, government having, direct regulatory or funding power [00:08:00] over the press. So, I mean with, the funding piece of it, I, think about this in terms of the demise of local news, which has really, continued at a really fast downward pace. And people say, oh, well, certainly you wouldn’t want to see direct funding of news organizations. And there was a long time in my many decade career where I’ve said definitely not. and now I am like, well, I don’t know. Would it mean the difference between keeping. Some local newspapers coming operational or not.And maybe in some cases if there could be some guardrails built in, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But, and people always, the public likes to remind me that there once was a thing called the fairness doctrine, which had some which had some power over, kind of. Kinds of issues for, broadcast news and that, went away long time ago.And people, I think it’s more that they like the idea of it. I’m not sure they would really like the reality of it too much, but.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s right. And when you look at Brendan Carr, FCC i, it’s obvious that this would be something that, that, Trump and his cronies would a hundred percent abuse in ways that would be appalling to even the most ardentSULLIVAN: Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah, that’s true.SHEFFIELD: The other thing also is and of course this is, I can say this as a former member of the liberal bias industry is that, the, Trump administrations, especially in the second one here, is this is the apotheosis of the liberal media bias complex. Since Reed Irvine and Richard Nixon in the seventies had spent basically 50 years completely undermining and attacking the, national press and saying that it was [00:10:00] hopelessly, permanently irrevocably biased and must be de-legitimized.Trump is, this is the fulfillment of that Nixon project. And in a way that I think a lot of people, that’s not something that I think, has been remarked upon enough.SULLIVAN: Right, Right, And I think another thing that came out of that era was, the birth of Fox News. You know that, oh, we can’t kind of Roger Ailes, Nixon, the idea that we can never let this happen again. We can never let a Republican president be drummed out of office again. this is the, thinking on it.I’m not saying I subscribe to this, but so we need to have our own media and now, and then, Fox is born. I think 1996. And, we see what a profound impact it has had. And then of course, everything that’s kind of cropped up around that. But Fox itself is still, powerful in its own way, influential. Influential, I guess I’ll say.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it’s, yeah, it still remains the biggest node in the right wing mediaSULLIVAN: Right, right, right. sure.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I mean it, and that, that, project that you, that we’re talking about here, it is. I mean, they, literally did Roger Ailes and other people wrote a memo for Nixon, to, create television news Incorporated which launched as a proto, CNN, actually, that’s actually where CNN came from. I just a, I don’t, I’ll link to I think it was Gabriel Sherman that wrote, about that with regard to Roger Hales in that end. That’s it’s a little bit of history that’s, it like, I, and it’s, it, created satellite television in, in a large way for news integrated in, into a that way.SULLIVAN: That Was a time too, when basically social media didn’t exist. And so we really are living in a very, different world [00:12:00] now in the world of podcasters. She said, well, on a podcast and, very powerful media figures who aren’t traditional journalists, but rather, influential voices, whether we like them or not, they’re very influential.Bari Weiss and the myth of the moderate conservative TV audienceSHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and one to that to that point, one of the other. Kind of dynamics of the first year of Trump from the corporate standpoint is that it does seem like, especially when we look over at Skydance and Paramount and the installation of Bari Weiss at CBS News that there seems to be this thought that there’s just this massive audience out there of, of right wing voters who want a staid broadcast news that it has more Republican talking points in it. And I don’t think thatSULLIVAN: Right. Right, I mean, I guess I would tweak what you said a little bit. I think the thinking is that there’s this that there’s this huge demand for some sort of center-right kind of mostly centrist, but also kind of right-leaning like the, Scott Jennings, Scott Jennings, who as your listeners probably know is, on CNN for the most part.And, is a defender of Trump’s, and, has been recruited as I understand it, by Bari Weiss at CBS as he’s oh yeah, if we could only have more of that. And I agree with you, Matthew, that I, don’t think there’s a huge demand for that. CNN tried a version of that a year or two, I can’t remember now, a couple years ago where they tried to go very, very sort of center, right?I think and, it wasn’t successful. In fact, it failed pretty badly. So, I mean, CNN always [00:14:00] struggles, so who knows? Who knows what, what can work there. But yeah, the, this sort of thinking that, yeah, the Bari, that Bari Weiss is the answer because she’s anti woke and she won’t be like the rest of these liberal media, people. And in fact, she’s, that is turning out to be the case. But whether it’s a successful formula, I have my doubts, especially when you. Do things that alienate your newsroom pretty badly, like she’s doing.We’re recording this. The day after we find out that Bari quite unilaterally has with, held back an already reported, already vetted, already lawyered piece. On 60 Minutes about these El Salvador prison that would make the Trump administration, attempts to hold them to account and they tried very hard to get comment from different heads of agencies and departments and so on and, probably from the White House and, this happens. You don’t get comment. Well, you, run the piece anyway, and you say they wouldn’t comment. But what she’s saying is, no, we’re not going to run it because it’s lacking in that comment and it needs more reporting. Well, the, that reporting piece of it has already been done. And when you have. When you have a staff like you have at 60 Minutes, that’s very experienced. They, don’t like that. And I think that, you don’t really want to lose your newsroom, which I would imagine she’s in the process of doing just that right now. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and a lot of them have already quit. And I have to imagine that, people are, looking, are the people who are still there are, looking for the exit and trying to find a place to land. I have no doubt about that. Now with, yeah, with regard to her though, one of the other initiatives that she has put into place which will be launching in 2026 is a, debate series, which [00:16:00] seems to be trying to recapitulate the, the debates of a b, c news filed in the, 1960s with or I think it was, or was it the seventies? I forget the, whatever that was with William F. Buckley Jr. And Gore Vidal.I think that’s what they’re trying to do, because I mean, for ABC they were the, and also ran at that time, they were new network. And they use them to get more ratings. So I think that’s what she’s trying to do.But the problem is she doesn’t know how to have debates and she doesn’t have relationships with people who can actually have a meaningful debate. so she’s booked basically a bunch of Alan Combs, liberals.Or, people who are conservatives like stephen Pinker to represent the left. And it’s like, well, this is not, this is a Potemkin debate. and, the topics that she wants people to debate are tired and boring. And one of them being, has feminism failed women? Well, the fact that a a woman is allowed to be the editor in chief of CBS News and also one who is not straight that would seem to be kind of a, an indicatorSULLIVAN: Yeah. And also one who’s never, and also o…

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Even Democrats who disagree can learn from Zohran Mamdani Jan 07, 2026

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Episode Summary It’s a new year and while so much is going wrong in the country and the world right now, there are actually some signs of hope. President Donald Trump’s abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro could certainly be the beginning of a period of prolong violence in that country, but the fact that Trump is engaging in foreign policy adventurism is actually proof of his political insecurity here at home. Trump’s weakness is easy to see: Democratic candidates vastly over-performed polls last November. Trump’s approval ratings in general and on the economy are near record lows. The administration’s cover-up of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes has deeply conflicted many of his supporters. Congressional Republicans just scheduled their first-ever votes to override Trump vetoes.Of course, we have no idea what else 2026 will bring, but a big part of ensuring better outcomes is envisioning how they can be made. And in that regard, the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is very much worth discussing. In the first place, his policy positions are much more in line with Americans’ desire for massive social changes. But it’s not just the policy. As a candidate, Mamdani is a great example of a Democrat who has adapted to the current media and political environment, and he was someone willing to put in the grueling work of rallies and on-the-ground campaigning—just like Trump was in 2024.Talking about all of this with me today is Elizabeth Spiers, she’s a contributing writer at the New York Times, a podcaster at Slate, and a former editor of the New York Observer.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* MAGA and Trump are much less popular after his first year back in the White House, can Democrats seal the deal with the public?* By failing to challenge Trump on immigration, Democrats are ceding the critical issue of American identity* The civic institutions and cultural pillars of our country must be strengthened* Since Democrats are hiding their 2024 autopsy, here’s ours* As Republicans have radicalized, Democrats have become more passive—and less successful electorally* Why Democratic establishment consultants aren’t doing political science* Flashback: Trump’s big 2024 bet on low-engagement AmericansAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction03:16 — Trump is stuck in the 80s, Democrats are stuck in the 90s14:03 — How voters actually make decisions22:47 — Democgraphic identities and economic issues are linked28:03 — Trump’s appeal across demographics32:23 — Democrats playing defense on trans issues38:20 — Trump and Mamdani put in the personal ground work that their rivals did not52:50 — Curtis Sliwa as an example of a Republican who likes an anti-oligarch message and agenda01:02:13 — Democrats have to aim for gigantic majorities, not just ‘wins above replacement’Audio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: We were just talking before our recording here, that in a lot of ways it’s like Donald Trump is stuck in the 1980s and Democrats are stuck in the 1990s.ELIZABETH SPIERS: Yeah, I believe that, I think with Trump, you know how when people peak in high school, they can’t really think about anything else except through the lens of that, that was sort of their high moment and they want to go back there? That’s Donald Trump. B ecause in late eighties, 80, 88, 89 in particular, was kind of his peak in New York society—which is still a place that he wants to be on top of and has always kind of rejected him, but they probably rejected him the least during the late eighties. [00:04:00]And so I think he has done everything in his power to try to be accepted by New York elites. And it’s just never worked for him for a variety of reasons. But you see it in kind of the way that he makes decisions now, the way he views the world. The stuff that’s going on in Venezuela right now, I think.I was joking with somebody yesterday that part of it was that he wanted his own Manuel Noriega and that Maduro wasn’t cooperative, so he just went in and abducted him. But the more I think about it, the more I think that’s actually part of it. He, he has this sort of memory of US activities in Latin America and cooperating with, dictators and using them as assets and then it, when they, when they start to be uncooperative, just arresting them and charging them with drug trafficking.And but it’s, you see it more in his sort of day-to-day, his aesthetic the things that he talks about, the things that he values. And, and I think he, he would happily doom all of us living in 1988 if he could snap his fingers and do it.SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah. And I mean, hell, he is trying to bring back the Star Wars program of Ronald Reagan.SPIERS: Yeah, it’s amazing. I feel like he read a kid’s book about Reagan and took the top lines and said, well, alright, I’m just going to take all of the Reaganism that I think conservatives during that period liked and then replicate them without actually understanding anything about them. He sort of like took the slogan, make America Great Again. He has a very superficial understanding of both history and Reaganism.SHEFFIELD: Well, he does, and, and even with regard to Russia as well, because like if you’re kind of dumb and you look at eighties history You it’s easy to see, wow. He was doing all these deals with the Russians and cooperating with them, and helping them build a better country and make our country safer by making deals with them. Like even though it was the opposite of what Reagan’s intentions were.SPIERS: Well, he [00:06:00] thinks that all of foreign policy, in fact all of his job is really, analogous to being in business. And so, another thing I used to work in finance and one of the things that I, I sort of observed then was that there were so many Wall Street people who saw the movie, wall Street did not understand it as a satire.They thought of it as a playbook. And Gordon Gecko as a kind of hero. And that is precisely the kind of person that Donald Trump admires. And, these strongmen that he sucks up to are, are sort of gecko types. I mean, that, that describes Putin perfectly. And he admires them. So it’s hard for him to sort of wrap his head around the idea that, the Cold War happened for a reason.Democrats stuck in the 1990sSPIERS: He thinks it was all just a big misunderstanding that we can just talk past and he’d rather be friends with the Gecko figure than, and, and, and any kind of antagonism.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then on the democratic side of the aisle looks like the powers that be continue to be stuck in a time warp in that regard. Just one decadeSPIERS: yeah, so my theory about that is that a lot of the people who still retain a lot of influence and power are people who came out of these campaigns in the nineties, where this sort of centrist model that had some libertarian characteristics that wasn’t as hostile to neoliberalism was electorally successful.That was a long time ago. Every time I see James CarVal being trotted out on a stage to explain what Democrats should be doing, now I want to slip my wrist because I, I don’t think that that model is relevant to the electorate we have now, or the times or, or anything that we’re dealing with. But when you have these entrenched.An entrenched class of people who are responsible for determining how Democrats talk to their voters. And they still consist of mostly those people. We do have a gerontocracy problem. We end up with that kind of rhetoric and I, I, I think it’s just very out of touch with where [00:08:00] people are now.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And here’s, here’s another further irony about this viewpoint though, is that given the state of the economy in 1992 and the, the, the long lag between the, because, there were like GDP numbers had actually recovered by the election of 92, but, had not, and there were a bunch of other things that had not so.This was effectively an election in which, and then you had Ross Perot, coming in, siphoning away a lot of the people who might not have liked the Republican abortion policies or things like that. because he was pro choice. And so basically it’s almost like I have to say that I think almost any Democrat who ran a reasonably competent campaign would’ve won in 1992.And it had almost nothing to do with their strategy.SPIERS: I, I think I, I definitely think that the secular factors were at work there. I, I wouldn’t go so far as to say, to say any Democrat.SHEFFIELD: I mean, it’s hard. I said, well, I said they had to be competent!SPIERS: Yeah. Fair.SHEFFIELD: And then the same thing also by the way, is true about. Barack Obama in 2008, I would say, because like if you look at polls about, what is the public opinion about what’s your, what is your view of the economy, like the state of the economy and how it’s going, 1992, it was like a, it had a steep slide sorry 2008 had a, it was a steep slide. And so like, again, uh, and then you had the, the Katrina disaster and the Iraq disaster. Like any of those Democrats that were running that year that had a, that were in the top tier candidates, they would’ve won.Now I think Obama himself as a candidate would, was a very good candidate. But the strategy and the positioning they were not as important as his qualities as a candidate and then the overall environment.SPIERS: He wasn’t a progressive, he was, he was a fairly centrist candidate [00:10:00] on, on most levels. So I, I don’t think that Democrats were making a radically different choice, except in the sense that they elected the first, black man as president. I, I think on a policy basis, Obama was not, a radical departure from prior Democrats.SHEFFIELD: But I’m just saying as in that the, like this idea of lionizing presidential strategists because they took part in a campaign that largely would’ve won without them,SPIERS: Yeah. Well, I think it’s Carvile and the war room did a lot to sort of turn those people into quasi celebrities and as much as you can be one, and, and, the tiny sphere, political world. So I, I think that that’s sort of like an an x-factor that, I wrote a column for the Times about how I thought people of that generation had also been brainwashed by the West Wing.And, and for similar reasons. And, and I think sometimes there’s a culture that evolves that, or sometimes devolves a around the way political operatives think about the world that’s really driven by outside portrayals of what happened. And, and I think that’s why we’re, we’re all stuck with Carville.SHEFFIELD: Yeah,SPIERS: About everything.SHEFFIELD: I, yeah, I think that’s a really good point. But, so for, I think a lot of people, they maybe have been too young to have watched that show though, so maybe why don’t you give us a little summary for those who are not familiar.SPIERS: So people who are obsessed with the West Wing would dispute my characterization of this, but that’s because I, I find the West Wing kind of catchy and sometimes insufferable, uh, and, and it’s basically the paradigm of the West Wing is that you have. Essentially, well-meaning President and Jed Bartlett, who is ostensibly a Democrat.Uh, but Bartlett is continually reaching across the aisle to equally well-meaning, but wrongheaded Republicans. And fundamentally, everybody at the end of the day wants America to be, [00:12:00] unified and not divided. And, uh, it, it’s this sort of it, it’s a sort of chorus that you hear a lot in Democratic messaging that talks about bipartisan cooperation, uh, or, you know, the idea that really, you know, we just need to talk to each other, that we have a, a sort of dialogue problem and not political problems.Uh, and that’s not to say that, the West Wing never got into the weeds, but there would be, there were a lot of kind of saccharin moments where theSHEFFIELD: And we should say it’s, and I’m sorry, I should say it’s Aaron Sorkin.SPIERS: Yes. And this sort of idea that there’s some vast homogenous middle that really wants all the same thing is, is something that the show kind of really is sort of built on, and the idea that there’s fundamentally not very much difference between the parties at, at the center.So I wrote this column for the Times about Democrats being brainwashed by the West Wing, and then a couple weeks later, Aaron Sor, Aaron Sorkin wrote a column for the time suggesting that if Democrats wanted to bring the country together, they should nominate MIT Romney as the candidate and the primary.And, and, I, I, I couldn’t ask for a better validation of my thesis, but that that mentality is still there. You, you hear it. And I mean, not just CarVal, but you know, a lot of people of his generation who have worked on that generation of campaigns. Talk about particularly a kind of fictionalized swing voter that always looks the same, and if, if you’re working in modern politics, you, and you have a lot of interaction with people who are actual swing voters, one thing that will become apparent to you very quickly is that not only are they not homogenous, they often vote for erratic and esoteric reasons. And that, ideology isn’t a linear continuum.It’s, it’s more like a 3D plot. You can be highly conservative on certain issues and highly liberal and others, or vice versa. And it doesn’t necessarily wholly [00:14:00] determine where you line up in a partisan lineup.How voters actually make decisionsSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and also that people change their opinions a lot. In terms, especially in terms of candidates. If, if they’re, if they don’t have, as you said, if they don’t have a consistent ideology and you know that that’s what you would expect them to be doing, and that they are choosing in part based on personality.I mean, that’s or their personal vibe of a candidate. So like one, one thing in political science that is a, I mean, the, like, here’s the irony. I think the sad, sad irony of, of uh, democratic politics is that, the vast majority of political science professors are Democrats or for even further left.And yet the Democratic Party listens to them almost not at all doesn’tSPIERS: Well here, here’sSHEFFIELD: that they have to say. And sorry. Well, sorry. And just, and then like, and they, but.like,one of the things that they’ve said is that and studies have consistently shown that when you have a woman candidate voters are more likely to think that she’s more liberal and she actually is.And so, and so then that was true with Hillary, It’s true outside of the US also, that they assign liberalism to female candidates automatically subconsciously a lot of people do. And, and,andso I don’t, I, they didn’t really play into that at all or do anything about it as far as I saw it.Or very much, or, or, or at least, I don’t know. So like people, in other words, this is my long-winded way of saying that people vote based on their comfort. A lot of people just vote on their personal vibe. And, and if you can’t accept that and that they’re not voting on the issues, they’re just voting on, well, who, who makes me feel comfortable?SPIERS: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s very often true. I think that’s part of the reason why a lot of our messaging falls. We talk to people like they are the embodiment of, the platonic economic man who’s making a rational choice between different policies. And that’s just not the way most people think about it.[00:16:00]But, to, to your point about academic research, we don’t have a huge body of academic research around voter behavior that I think is enormously relevant in modern elections. Partly because in order…

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To understand the Christian right, learn the history of the postwar Christian left Jan 02, 2026

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Episode SummaryThe middle part of the twentieth century wasn’t that long ago, and yet in some ways, it seems like it was an eternity. That’s particularly true in regards to the public branding of American Christianity, which nowadays is often associated with right-wing evangelicalism.In the mid-20th century, however, American Christian public discourse was very different, and it was dominated by Protestants who were theologically liberal. Public intellectuals and leaders like John Foster Dulles, G. Bromley Oxnam, and William Ernest Hocking are mostly unknown to people today, but in their time, they were nationally famous.In the conversations they had with each other over the decades, they often disagreed on the particulars. But overwhelmingly, this group of ecumenical Protestants wanted a more just world, and were among the earliest white supporters of racial equality. They also worked for the creation of global systems that they hoped would protect human rights and religious freedom, such as the United Nations.Nowadays, the only people who use the term “new world order” are far-right conspiracy theorists, but it’s worth understanding just what they are seeking to destroy.Joining me to talk about the religious left and how it came to play a major role in the creation of the political order of the 20th century and what came afterward with the religious right is Gene Zubovich. He is the author of Before the Religious Right, Liberal Protestants, Human Rights and the Polarization of the United States. He’s also an assistant professor of history at the University at Buffalo.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.This episode previously aired in full on June 17, 2023.Related Content* The Christian Right was a theological rebellion against the idea of improving society* Why the decline of unions and moderate religious communities has led to political radicalization* How many low-engagement liberals became post-political and what to do about it* Government support for religious organizations seems to make citizens less devout* Despite Trump’s extremism, societal tolerance has actually increased dramatically and we shouldn’t forget that* How Christian fundamentalists rebuilt their faith using the tools of the world’s most famous atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche* Across the globe, Pentecostalism is spiriting away the membership of other Christian churchesAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction11:53 — Ecumenical organizations and the birth of international organizations like the United Nations17:30 — The birth of the USSR and the American Christian left28:13 — John Foster Dulles: from religious lawyer to secretary of state38:48 — Building the kingdom of God on earth40:55 — The invention of the term “Judeo-Christian”46:21 — Political struggles within Roman Catholicism54:14 — Liberal Protestantism’s failure to defend its own intellectual tradition01:05:35 — The clergy-laity gap in mainline ProtestantismAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It’s nice to have you here today, Gene.GENE ZUBOVICH: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, let’s maybe just start with kind of the overview in what, who is this book about?ZUBOVICH: So this book is about a group of folks that are not [00:04:00] particularly prominent, familiar to most people. If you were like me and you grew up in the wake of the religious right, you forget that in the middle of the 20th century if you were to turn on a radio or a television set and you were to hear a religious voice, odds are it would be a liberal religious voice. So my book is about the liberal Protestants who dominated the American public sphere from about World War I until the 1960s.And it’s so, it’s a particularly prominent religious community at the time, these were folks who represented maybe a between a quarter and a third of the American population. But their power over American religious life and over American politics was much greater than that because in the middle of the 20th century, if you came from if you were, in charge of something big in American life, if you were an American president a Supreme Court Justice senator corporate executive, odds are you came from the liberal mainline community.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and that’s a really important point to understand is that these people, they were everywhere. They were, in some of their cases, world famous. Certainly nationally famous and yeah, nowadays, pretty much no one knows who they were. And it’s really kind of a stunning thing to contemplate.So let’s maybe talk about who specifically are some of your main figures in the book here?ZUBOVICH: Yeah, yeah. It’s hard to define any group with a religious group with specificity. For liberal Protestants, we talk about Protestants today, we’re talking about over 30,000 different denominations.Liberal Protestants were liberal theologically. They believed in the compatibility between science and religion. They believed in a kind of historical approach to the Bible. And they constituted themselves around the Federal Council of Churches nationally and the World Council of Churches internationally.Most of them came from about 30 different [00:06:00] denominations, the most important of which were the seven sister denominations. These are denominations like the United Methodists, American Baptists, Northern Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and so on. And so these were the major denominations from which people came from.But the book talks about people with kind of funny names. G. Bromley Oxnam, key Methodist leader social gospel and a kind of world traveler. John Foster Dulles, the longtime kind of religious Presbyterian layman before he became Eisenhower’s hawkish Secretary of State. Thelma Stevens, an underappreciated figure who was central to the Civil Rights Movement.So, my cast of characters in this book really revolve around the three things, three political movements that I trace in the book, which is the efforts to diminish racism in the middle of the 20th century, to make the economy more fair and more just, and to get the United States to engage more internationally and to diminish colonialism and the nefarious actions of the American state overseas.So the folks that I discuss are kind of central to those three movements of race, the economy, and foreign relations.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And one figure that I noticed you did not mention, and maybe he’s kind of more out earlier than your timeframe were the Bellamy brothers. (cousins) Maybe if you could talk about who they were for people who don’t know who they were?ZUBOVICH: Sure. Yeah. So, Richard Bellamy is the author of Looking Backwards, a kind of, utopian novel.SHEFFIELD: It’s Edward, I believe.ZUBOVICH: Sorry. Yeah. Excuse me. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Edward Bellamy was the author of Looking Backward, a kind of late 19th century utopian novel, imagining Boston in the year 2000, and the kind of solutions to all the social urban unrest. These guys were social gospel guys. It’s kind of a complicated story, but they probably authored the Pledge of Allegiance or some version thereof.And they [00:08:00] believed in a kind of strong state kind of government intervention in order to better the world. You’re right that my book kind of picks up at the end of World War I and so their most kind of creative moments came in the late 19th and early 20th century. So that kind of Progressive Era, social and gospel era spirit of ambition and reform that continues all the way into the 20th century.So that social gospel heritage of the Bellamys and many other folks who promoted that idea. What’s new after World War I is that the social gospel heritage meets kind of Wilsonian internationalism. So what happens for people like G. Bromley Oxnam as they are influenced by the Bellamys, they’re influenced by the social gospel, but they’re also taking the social gospel internationally, they’re traveling abroad to places like the United Kingdom, Germany, the Soviet Union, and they’re transforming and reforming these inherited ideas and making them a new in the 1920s and 1930s.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it’s important to kind of also think about in that framework is that they were, as you were saying, they were very internationally engaged and they were responding to the scholarship trends like the documentary hypothesis and things like that, that had been emerging in Europe. And you kind of talk about to some degree that they gradually became, I don’t know what, maybe less theologically oriented perhaps? Is that an accurate way of saying it?ZUBOVICH: Yeah. I wouldn’t say that in those exact terms. I think that there’s a lot of theological substance to what liberal Protestants are doing. I think they get knocked for essentially not being orthodox enough. And the people who believe that are the kind of the religious enemies or religious rivals of liberal Protestants.So if you are an Orthodox Catholic [00:10:00] or a conservative evangelical, what liberal Protestants are doing and saying theologically doesn’t make any sense, it just sounds kind of secular, but they had strong, coherent belief systems that just looked different from the kinds of theological systems that, say, evangelicals subscribe to.But it was important to them. What I would say is that professional theologians, that sort of like small sliver of folks who are in seminaries who are talking about Carl Bart and people like that, those don’t feature us prominently. What I found is that anybody but theologians became activists.So social ethicists, missionaries, denominational executives. These were the folks who were really on the front lines of the political initiatives of liberal Protestants in the mid-20th century. So I will say that sort of professional theologians who are not particularly central to the political story, but they did have clear theological commitments and they followed through on them to try to make the world into the kind of place they thought, they were commanded to create, right?They were, they wanted to create the kingdom of God on Earth. And they tried to do that.SHEFFIELD: What I’m saying theological, they’re less interested in sort of the controversies of doctrine or history and more thinking more about values and sort of: ‘We say we believe these things. So, how do we put them into practice?’ Kind of–ZUBOVICH: They’re concerned about lived theology.One of the innovations of liberal Protestantism is they start paying attention to the body as much as the spirit, right? They come to believe that, taking care of people’s bodies is a prerequisite to taking care of their souls. And so for them, making sure that people are fed and clothed and are thriving physically, economically, that’s a necessary part of them thriving spiritually.So, what you see is the work that they’re doing, right? The political work, the activism, the social welfare stuff that they’re [00:12:00] doing, but there is a kind of deeper theological basis for that work that’s maybe not as evident, maybe not as central. They’re not as concerned about, the nitty-gritty debate, theologically debates, but it’s there, nonetheless.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then, so let’s maybe just go to the different organizations that they started creating at this time period. So you mentioned what later became the National Council of Churches. Tell us about that organization and what was the impetus behind it.ZUBOVICH: Yeah. The Federal Council of Churches, which was renamed the National Council of Churches in 1950, the Federal Council of Churches, the predecessor organization, was founded in 1908. It was this kind of social gospel moment. It was a kind of a combination of a kind of a think tank and a political action committee on behalf of mainline Protestant groups.So sometimes it’s kind of, described as a bulldozer. It kind of clears the way for denominations to engage socially and politically. So it came about in 1908 at this moment when there was a lot of enthusiasm for the social gospel and social reform and trying to make the lives of working-class folks better.By World War I, it became really engaged in anti-racist initiatives as well. In the wake of the race riots that took place during World War I, it became engaged on that issue as well, and it really was part of the ecumenical movement. It’s kind of an old-fashioned word, but what ecumenical Protestants thought they were doing was bringing different denominations that had split apart over the course of history for various reasons, Northern Presbyterians and Southern Presbyterians, Northern Methodists and Southern Methodists, all these various kinds of German reformed denominations.Liberal Protestants came to conclude that these were all kind of accidents of history and that Christianity demanded unity. And so this was a kind of theological commandment that they were trying to live out is to bring Christians [00:14:00] across denominational boundaries together.So that began with the Federal Council of Churches, but by the 1930s, they were working to create the World Council of Churches, which was doing the same thing on an international scale, bringing Protestants and Orthodox denominations. Catholics were kind of kept out until the 1960s. They brought together Protestant and Orthodox denominations across national and racial boundaries into some kind of world community and world communion.So that was the goal, was to unite Protestants and other kinds of Christians together, both nationally and internationally. And as they were doing so, they found that, even though they had lots of theological disagreements, the one thing they could mostly agree on is social work, political action, right?It’s the kind of activist stuff that really brought them together.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I think it’s important to note and I do want to discuss the Catholic context as well. But you know, during that time period, the United States was overwhelmingly Protestant. I mean, people who live today and don’t really have a knowledge of that, of the religious history of that moment.I mean, it was, what was it, like 75% or something like that, Protestant. Catholicism was obviously there as a minority, but there was nothing else. Like there were no Muslims, there were no “Nones,” as they’re called now, non-religious people. America was overwhelmingly Protestant, and they really did kind of see what they were doing as almost the fulfillment of the Protestant mission that ‘we fixed Christianity and now we’re going to fix the world.’ Something like that, right?ZUBOVICH: I think that’s right. I should point out that, in the United States, there were Muslims in what is now the United States before there were Protestants. And so there were lots of religious minorities present in the United States.But they weren’t recognized in the way that maybe they are today. So even though there was lots of [00:16:00] religious diversity, the key power figures in the United States in, say, the 19th and early 20th century really believed that the United States was essentially a Protestant nation. And okay, you have these kinds of minor groups off to the side, the Catholics being the largest, Jews and maybe Muslims as well. Maybe a couple of Buddhists here and there.But essentially, the United Nations belongs to Protestants. The United States was founded without an established church. But as historians have pointed out, there was a kind of moral establishment, a Protestant moral establishment that kind of acted like an established church for much of the 19th and…

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Robert Kennedy’s bizarre obsession with ‘natural’ isn’t going to make Americans healthier Dec 31, 2025

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Episode Summary The United States is the world’s most obese major nation, but it’s also the homebase for most of the global health and fitness industry. These two seemingly contradictory facts intersect in a number of ways in our popular culture, but they also are related to our political culture as well: Donald Trump’s obesity is one of his most famous attributes, but at the same time, his cabinet officials like Robert F. Kennedy Junior and Sean Duffy have become memes for saying that they’re going to install pull-up bars in America’s airports to encourage fitness. The fact that Kennedy, a former Democratic presidential candidate, is even serving within a Republican political administration is another example of this juxtaposition at work.All of this may seem like blatant hypocrisy or craven opportunism—which it surely is—but there are some larger trends at work here as well, and they point to a deep and often ignored fact that bodies and fitness have always been politicized, especially in regards to what people consider to be “natural.”There’s a lot to talk about here, which is why I wanted to bring back a friend of the show, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, she’s a professor of history at The New School, and also the author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, which is a historical look at how fitness and wellness cultures emerged within the country, and what it means for our politics.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--Fitness has always been political (Natalia’s first TOC appearance)--How a silly video of women dancing to a rap song caused a nationwide Republican freak-out--How MAGA is becoming a sexual fetish--Marianne Williamson’s ineffective self-help politics--The hidden history of gay Republicans and the far right’s worship of the male body--Why tradwife baking videos are actually fetish contentAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction09:03 — Robert Kennedy Junior and the “naturalistic fallacy”13:43 — Opposing unhealthy food additives is still a good idea, even if Kennedy backs it16:19 — Glenn Beck’s moralizing AI George Washington 23:47 — The irony of Donald Trump’s party talking about fitness and the natural27:29 — “Mar-a-Lago face” and weight-loss drugs33:36 — Vaccine fears and Trump’s boasts about Covid immunizations38:08 — Politics of emotion and media environment42:41 — Gender norms and workplace dynamics48:20 — Body positivity versus health advocacyAudio 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 a lot has happened since our previous conversation, needless to say, and I have to say, your work is just becoming increasingly relevant. You you nailed all this stuff, Natalia.NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: Thanks!SHEFFIELD: And probably when you started people were like, what the hell are you doing? Am I wrong to say that?PETRZELA: Oh, you are right to say that. Although it’s that sort of doubtful thing where you’re happy your work is relevant, but also it suggests some pretty disturbing things going on in our political culture. But yeah, to put it in a nutshell, when I first work at, started working on fitness culture as a historian of political culture, and I was like, these things are connected actually.People were like, oh no, you’re making all of these kind of farfetched things, fitness is just the body or just the gym. And now we can’t turn anywhere without there being this sort of like very political use of fitness in the body. So I guess I’m glad I was right to make those connections, but also it’s too bad for our republic.SHEFFIELD: yeah. Yeah. Well, no, exactly. And so, but if you could just give us a. For people who missed the first discussion or [00:04:00] haven’t bought your book yet just give us a little recap. I want to give, you a chance to plug it right in the beginning here.PETRZELA: Yeah, thanks for the yet on, haven’t bought your book yet. So my book is called Fit Nation, the Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession. And essentially what it does is it charts the history of the idea that exercise is good for you, and that we should all be exercising more. That’s actually a relatively recent idea in American history, and as it shows that intellectual history, to a point of consensus, which is actually surprising today. Like I always say, we disagree on everything in America, but we all kind of agree exercise is good for you and that we should be exercising more. Despite that consensus, only 20% of Americans actually exercise regularly. And so this book tells the story about the emergence of that consensus, but also it’s the unequal participation or actualization of it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and trying to increase the participation that is, seems to be one of the biggest initiatives of RFK Junior as people may have seen recently, he was showed up in the airport and attempted to do some pull-ups. Did, they didn’t go very well for him.PETRZELA: Yeah. Yeah, the pull up police was really commenting on his form and lack of extension. I do have to say for he’s 71 years old, right? The fact that he can get even three quarters or half pull ups are not, are, is not terrible. But I think the bigger import, of course, of that initiative is that people were very frustrated because there’s so many problems with, forget fitness, with our transportation infrastructure. And the idea that the response of this re administration is, oh, we’re, upgrading airports by putting in pull-up bars. That, that feels really just surface and really cosmetic. and also very finger wagging. Like, oh, what would need, what needs to happen to make your travel experience better?You need to, be doing more pull-ups. And so that just feels, I [00:06:00] think, incomplete on a lot of levels. I will say for any of you listeners who go out and dig through my social media, I actually think having pull up bars and other exercise in a airport is not a terrible idea. Like I’m all for it. I would love to be able to be a little bit more active and to have that free, especially when so many perks and airports are now, in luxury lounges.But the idea that this is a federal priority especially at the expense of others, I get it. That is not great.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it isn’t. And, but it, is really illustrative of their overall approach though, in that they see everything in terms of, personal moral feelings by the public. And, in that regard just, and just pack it into this particular context, the Trump administration when they, when he first became president, one of the first things that he did with regard to airline travel was to remove regulations that the Biden administration had put in that required airlines to pay customers whose flights they had delayed for no reason, no mechanical or weather related reason, just for monetarily reasons, because they thought, well, this flight doesn’t have enough people, so we’re going to delay it.That’s so, like, that’s an immediate thing that Trump did to make airline travel much worse. And then also, of course, he’s come after air traffic controllers. But according to them, the reason air travel is bad is because you are not doing pull-ups in the airport.PETRZELA: Right. No, I absolutely, I am a hundred percent on board with those critiques. I mean, it is so crazy. It’s so individualizing, it’s so condescending, honestly. And I think that’s indicative of something much larger, as you say, with this administration of constantly blaming the victim, and particularly with RFK Junior in this position of kind of suggesting that like individual bodily management technologies, I guess, are the answer. What is so frustrating to me is that exercise actually is so good for you. So many more [00:08:00] Americans should be exercising. We should have the federal government be on board with making this an urgent national priority. By the way, that is what Michelle Obama was trying to do. Right?SHEFFIELD: I was going to say that, yeah.PETRZELA: Like I guess we’re going to get there. I mean, Trump administration I, wanted nothing to do with any of this stuff. But I just find it so frustrating that the way that this administration is framing like a very positive promotion of exercise, which I’m always going to be on board with, but it’s all about you’re lazy. Like let’s compete with each other. And like I say, most importantly, to the exclusion of actual things that would probably make your travel better or actual things more relevantly that would make your health better. Right? Like regulation on healthy food, like food stamps, like all kinds of federal programs that are being cut back, like vaccines, by the way, that are being cut back that actually damage our health.And so the idea that you’re being encouraged to go do pushups, even though I’m all about pushups by the federal government when they’re taking away these critical things, is really insulting.Robert Kennedy Junior and the “naturalistic fallacy”SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it really is. At the same time. And I guess one of the things that has happened, obviously Trump won since the last time we talked on the show. One of the other things that did happen is that RFK Jr had, formally transitioned to from being a, sort of a, I guess we’ll say a granola left winger asterisk. We’ll put an asterisk on there for everybody. But, as a nominal, as an, as a identified Democrat to becoming a member of the Trump cabinet.Now I would say, and we did ki we touched about this in the general sense that this was inevitable. That this was going to happen, that he would join up with them.So, and a lot of that has to do with the idea of what is natural, I think and that the naturalistic fallacy is the common thing that he, didn’t change his thinking.PETRZELA: right. right. I’ve always said that, I mean, I think, a lot of what’s at play is the unique opportunism of RFK [00:10:00] Junior, and that’s maybe, we can talk about that specifically. But I think in terms of my work, the thing that’s more interesting about that is the kind of ideological and philosophical and political flexibility and malleability of wellness culture, exercise culture, writ large. And I think this notion of the natural that you point out is a very good example of that.I mean, RFK Jr comes out of a world in the sixties and seventies where resisting chemicals, resisting pollution, resisting like Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Food, was very much a left wing consideration.Right? This was about back to the land, about naturalness, about resisting big business in a lot of ways, right? Now we have seen that discourse really migrate to the right with him being like a key figure in that, that now you see that kind of same invocation of the natural in some ways being targeted at the same places, right?Big Pharma remains very much a target. Big Food remains very much a target, but I think being invoked. Have a very backwards looking, kind of championing of the natural order of things.The, part of that I pay most attention to, which I think is a very powerful part of it, is around gender in particular, right? Men are supposed to be this way. Women are supposed to be this way. It’s. Physically, biologically encoded. It’s natural for a man and a woman to be together, for a man to be stronger and a woman to be, cooking the whole trad wife thing as part of this as well. And so I see, you see that kind of malleability of wellness culture, and particularly this idea of the natural migrating, at least in our discourse, much more from the left to the right.SHEFFIELD: Exactly, and, and, it has to do with the fact that, these people who may have kind of had their origins in, left on the, on, in, in opposing corporate factory farming or, chemicals and food or whatnot, they didn’t actually understand the broader liberal [00:12:00] context.They, were only purely about the natural. You know that, which is really the naturalistic fallacy, which, and I’m going to just read from, Edmund Burke. and this is why I think, there, there’s just gravitational pull of, conservative and reactionary party. So in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, he wrote that: “In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. And the levelers, [i.e. people who want equality,] therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things.”And so, if, naturalism becomes the thing that’s your priority, then you’re going to be gravitationally attracted toward right wing politics. I think that’s what we’re talking about.PETRZELA: I think at its essence that’s true. and I, that’s a helpful quote from Burke. I say that though while try, like, as an intellectual, I say that, but then as a citizen living in the world and trying to raise a healthy family and like live a long time and have healthy joints. It’s hard sometimes to disaggregate these specific policy positions.I don’t want red dye 40 in all my kids’ food. I think ultra processed foods are a scourge, I really do on our society, and so I know that’s not exactly what you’re asking, but I do think in terms of your listenership and being an informed citizenry trying to act responsibly, it’s really important to keep these intellectual trajectories top of mind before you go whole hog into whatever you’re going whole hog into, while also realizing each policy issue might involve some sort of, I don’t know, accommodation’s the wrong word, but kind of thinking pragmatically, I guess.Opposing unhealthy food additives is still a good idea, even if Kenney backs itSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, and I, am glad you said that because this, me saying that the naturalistic fallacy is bad doesn’t mean I want people, to, have all kinds of franken foods and what. Not like I’m, that’s not what I’m saying.PETRZELA: No, I know you’re not. Yeah. You, are far too [00:14:00] sophisticated for such things. But like, for example, something that I’ve seen is like, when this thing about the dyes was in the news, it was like a few months ago and there were people being like, I don’t care about the dyes. Like, vaccine policies, the real problem.And I’m like, of course, I would rather have my children have access to vaccines, than not have artificial diets in their foods. But guess what? Not having those dyes is also a good thing. So I think that there’s something hard there. That’s very much where I am with the pull up bars in the airports, more exercise equipment in airports.That’s great. We should be able to say that. That’s great. But we should also be able to point out these much larger issues, both with the administration and as you’re saying, the kind of logical extension of some of these ideas when you think about them as ideas.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, when you look outside of the United States, they don’t allow these chemicals additives in food either. So, and they also have vaccines as well. So like, we can, like more than one thing. It’s okay.PETRZELA: Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. It’s very, I don’t know if it’s peculiar to American politics, but we do like to gravitate towards the extreme view of everything it seems.SHEFFIELD: Well, it’s, and I think that’s, it’s a function of negative partisanship. So if, somebody who has a lot of really stupid ideas picks up an idea that is actually one of ours, we can still like that idea.PETRZELA: Right. Right, right. It does not pollute it at its core. That’s a very good point.SHEFFIELD: But at the same time, it is still important to understand that the, reason why we are in favor of vaccines and the reason why we don’t like potentially carcinogenic food addi…

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Knowing What Matters Most Dec 29, 2025

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How do we know what matters? Is mattering hardwired into our biology or simply a byproduct of culture? Eric speaks with philosopher and author Rebecca Goldstein about her new book, The Mattering Instinct.

Democrats won’t release their 2024 election autopsy, here is ours Dec 19, 2025

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Episode Summary This episode is a bit different than usual because it’s a collaboration that I did with my friends at Liberal Currents on their podcast, Half the Answer, about my book, What Republicans Know, which is, as you may already realize, about what Democrats fail to understand about politics, and how Republican consultants and politicians have a much better grasp of things.As it happens, our conversation is incredibly relevant this week after the new Republic’s Greg Sargent reported that the Democratic National Committee is refusing to release to the public an autopsy report that it commissioned about what went wrong in the 2024 presidential election.That’s a huge mistake since millions of people want to see the party acknowledge its failures, so that political leaders can be held accountable now and in the future.My personal expectation is that this outrageous decision will be reversed once enough people realize what’s happened. In the meantime, though, I hope you’ll enjoy the autopsy that Caitlyn Green, Trent Nelson, and I conducted.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--Why Democratic establishment consultants aren’t doing political science--Democrats failed to create an advocacy ecosystem, and Kamala Harris suffered for it--As Republicans have radicalized, Democrats have become more passive--Americans want big ideas, but Trump’s opponents aren’t providing them--Politics has changed drastically since the advent of social media, Democrats have not--Flashback: Trump’s big bet on low-engagement Americans--The science of why the ‘poorly educated’ prefer RepublicansAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction08:47 — Democrats are actually funding right-wing media through ineffective TV advertising15:40 — Republican recruitment tactics and Democratic gate-keeping19:38 — Public opinion is malleable, but Democratic strategists don’t realize this27:08 — The undead ‘triangulation’ strategy of Bill Clinton is behind many contemporary Democratic messaging failures35:19 — The filibuster and governance obstruction38:06 — You can’t run from your positions, so you should learn to argue for them40:10 — How liberals can speak more effectively in favor of trans rights43:10 — Democrats failed to include pro-Gaza voices, and it did matter45:41 — Republicans love funding unprofitable media, Democrats hate it50:00 — Thermostatic public opinion and why Democrats have to actually present strong affirmative cases53:04 — Trump’s somatic politics worked very well for less-informed voters01:03:53 — Kamala Harris’s positions were more popular, but it wasn’t enough01:12:00 — Trump’s much more effective pop-culture media appearance strategies01:24:38 — Howard Dean was right, you have to meet voters01:30:02 — Progressive vision and community valuesAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.TRENT R. NELSON: Well, happy days are here again. And understanding a question is half of an answer. And this is of course half the answer. Your host, Trent R. Nelson, and Caitlin M. Green. And, well, I’m a historian, philosopher—I write, I edit, I do a whole bunch of stuff. I talk to you guys every week it seems. And we have Caitlin as well. And she also talks, [00:02:00] she’s a mom, she’s a linguist, she’s a writer, she’s an editor. She’s a guest getter. Watch out. She’s everywhere. You might even see her overseas.CAITLIN M. GREEN: And an amateur doll maker. Right now I’ve made three dolls that are all terrible and I’m going to be making a fourth one, and maybe that one will be less terrible. We’ll see.NELSON: Piano player, she’s everywhere. It’s a lot. Well, Caitlin every single week, whether it’s once, twice, or thrice, we’re having fun chatting with wonderful folks.We’re learning so much, hard to schedule, so much learning, but we manage. Who are we learning with today and what are we talking about, Caitlin?GREEN: Oh, Trent, we’re getting a peek behind enemy lines today. I have brought with me, Matthew Sheffield, who is a former media and campaign consultant for the Republican Party, and who is now using his knowledge for good.He is the host of the Theory of Change podcast, author of what Republicans Know and his work has been in Vanity Fair, Washington Post, and The Daily Beast and more. We are so excited to welcome you, Matt. How are you today?MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Hey, good to be here. It is a sunny day finally in Southern California where I live.GREEN: So yes. A sunny day. Yes, it’s a cloudy day in Portland. How’s your weather, Trent?NELSON: It is cloudy, but we don’t mind. it is sunny. It’s cloudy. We manage either way. Matt, it’s such a pleasure to have you behind enemy lines. Well, we’d love to get into your story as well, but we know you have a wonderful offering for us today.GREEN: Yeah. You’ve been working hard, right? Yeah. Tell us about your project.SHEFFIELD: Sure. Yeah. Well, so What Republicans Know is basically the culmination of years of, so I worked in the Republican world of things for about 15 years, [00:04:00] as a blogger, as a consultant, as an editor, entrepreneur, project manager, website and campaign person.And basically, after I switched sides, and we can get into that later, what I realized was that the left does not understand just how much these Republican consultants have figured out. The consultants who work for Democratic candidates, or further left candidates, whatever your stripe might be, they don’t really understand how politics works. They have this kind of antiquated worldview.And so I wanted to put down in a book to let people know what exactly Republicans are knowing. Because, I think as everybody who, as you guys certainly know, the policy positions of the Republican party are not popular. And, but they still manage to win elections a lot.And so that is one of the things that I set out to explore in the book, and explain how are they doing this? How can they win elections despite the fact that everyone hates their ideas?GREEN: Right. So there’s been a lot of conversation online in the last couple of days actually, between people whose position is, well, they keep winning because of cheating, because of things like gerrymandering and vote suppression.And these kind of like technical things that could be fixed by procedural means versus people who say like, actually there are human people that are attracted. To the candidates of these, of this party and that they are being won over by messaging not just that, like they’re outnumbered by people whose votes are being suppressed.And so where do you fall on that conversation?SHEFFIELD: Well, so what I usually say to people is that most criticisms of the Democrats are correct. I think that there’s a problem that people who might have more centrist [00:06:00] inclinations or people who might have more democratic socialist inclinations, they think that only their critiques are correct.But the reality is that most of the things that people say are wrong with the Democrats actually are true. And I’ll give you an example from each side of the debate on that. So like Republicans obviously are using gerrymandering to win elections and whatnot, but the reality is they cannot gerrymander Senate seats.And so the Republicans have-- well, I, let me step back first to say that, so the Republican Party as presently constituted, is not a conservative party. It’s a reactionary party.GREEN: Right.SHEFFIELD: And it’s important for people on the left to make that distinction, because not only is it accurate for historical reasons, but it’s also so you can use those, that, that division between conservative and reactionary for divisive purposes, which you must do.And so the, when the reactionaries took over the Republican party they basically did it by tricking conservatives who disagreed with them into feeling like: ’Oh, if you don’t vote for us, you’re going to die! Hillary Clinton is literally going to murder you!’Like it’s, this is not an exaggeration when I say that, but they have multiple podcasters going out there, and saying that Republicans will be hunted if Hillary Clinton won the election, which of course is ludicrous and stupid.But if you don’t know a lot about politics, then you might just a little bit think that maybe that might possibly be true. So gerrymandering is important, but it’s not the only thing.And then, with regard to various other isms that the Republican right uses to manipulate people. They use all of them. They don’t just use one. Like that’s one of the things that I want to make sure that people understand as a takeaway from this, is that they use racism, they use sexism, they use [00:08:00] poverty hatred. They, they, they use all of these things, and, and they use religious bigotry.So they have many tools in their toolbox and we have to recognize what they are.NELSON: Yeah. And again, I think, Matt, what you just said in the beginning, we talk about it all the time, seemingly here, each and every episode. It seems as though we get back to the fact that Republicans are better at staying on message and hammering home messages.And the people respond to that and they don’t respond to what they perceive to be the wishy washyness of the Democratic party. What is the remedy for for a party that seems to, to not message well and to lack a spine to some degree?Democrats are actually funding right-wing media through ineffective TV advertisingSHEFFIELD: Well, I think ultimately the, the most effective things that’s going to have to happen is that, so the Republican Party is, there’s a real split between the political professionals and the ideologues.And people who have strong ideologies on the left have to make a similar distinction within the party. Because if you, if you want the party to do the right thing, you have to make them terrified of you. That’s really what it comes down to. And so, we have to build power and build our own ecosystems. And so like, stop giving money to the Atlantic.Stop giving money to the New York Times. Stop paying these mainstream institutions that, that have no interest or belief in what we do. Right? And so don’t, don’t give them your subscription money, like use archive.is to bypass their paywalls. You can do that. And, uh that’s, that’s, we, we, we’ve got to start funding people who actually agree with us.And that’s one of the central points in the book because like the Democratic party literally funds right wing media. And I’ve got a graph of, of how it works. [00:10:00] Basically, Kamala Harris and her Super pacs. They actually had more money than Donald Trump and his Super pacs, including when you factor in Elon Musk dumping that money in the, in Pennsylvania and, Wisconsin.But they wasted it on TV ads. Because TV ads-- so here, here’s this interesting paradox is that political scientists the, the, the right wingers are, are correct about this one thing, which is that academia is predominantly, comprised of people who lean leftward. And that’s certainly true with regard to political science.But the really sad thing is that, that we’ve got a ton of amazing and learned political scientists, and nobody listens to them in the Democratic Party. they were, the party is dominated by these consultants who they don’t actually know very much about political science. They know almost nothing about cognitive psychology.And so they’ve got this idea in their head, well, we’ll just run a lot of TV ads, but political science has shown for decades now that in presidential races they don’t do almost anything. And so Kamala Harris spent almost the entire Trump campaign budget just on TV ads, and then she had more money on top of that.And here’s the thing that’s even more outrageous, is that because of these right-wing companies like Sinclair or Nexstar, or Rupert Murdoch’s, Fox, the Democratic Party has literally been paying for right wing media over a billion dollars over the decades. That’s fucking up.GREEN: Okay. This is something that I wanted to really get into because, one of your kind of tenets or one of your like, main points in this, in, in What Republicans Know is about, [00:12:00] you know, buying TV ads on Sinclair stations, on Fox News stations, on on, on all of these, kind of, these entities that are owned by extreme right wing people is simply just putting money into their wallets that they will then use to create more propaganda against you.And that, I think, coupled with your point that TV ads are simply not that effective, means that it’s like only lost no gain. Is that what you’re saying?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, basically, I mean, they, they, they get a small, tiny, tiny amount of gain from these ads. You know, and, and they’re, they are more effective excuse me, they are more effective in like local races because most people don’t know who the candidates are.But at the presidential level, this is Pepsi versus Coke. So yeah, if you see an ad, if you’re a Pepsi drinker and you see a Coke ad, you’re not going to drink Coke. You, you’re just not, because it’s not persuasive to you. And so, Pepsi guy, you know. That’s right. And so the same thing, that’s how it is in the presidential campaign. So essentially, yeah, the, the money that the, the Democratic campaigns and they send a thousand of these Trent, will you help us? We’re about to die here. I need your help there. Need your $5. Even though I have a billion in the bank,NELSON: The text messages, the emails, do something, do something first. I’ll give you $5 later. Right? Like, do something for us. NoGREEN: help. I’m dying. Help. I’m so weak. Trent, your $5 will bring me back from the brink.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, yeah. And so basically so they have all this money and then they are renting media assets instead of buying and owning and developing them. And, and that’s really true with regard to, these, these newer ones that have come along as, as the popularity of YouTube really skyrocketed.It’s by far the number one website on the internet now. [00:14:00] And we’ve got you’ve got TikTok and and podcasts these are, and these are all things that, that people are turning to, especially younger people. The, the left is not there.GREEN: Larry Ellison wants TikTok. He would like to own it, and that means it’s another oneSHEFFIELD: Yeah.GREEN: In, in the right wing bucket.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And he just bought CBS and so and put Barry Weiss in there. So, they are, are really going out there to, to fund and buy up as much media as they can and mm-hmm. You know, this is not something that, I, again, like these consultants tend to be either extremely old, like James Carville is one of these people.I mean, like, why would you ask for advice from a guy who hasn’t won a, a presidential campaign since 1996? What the hell does this guy know? Nothing.GREEN: No, that’s right.SHEFFIELD: he’s irrelevant. And the interesting thing also is that the Republican party, so, and I can say this because I was, there rubbing shoulders with these people.Like they were, they had the same problem of these defunct consultants dominating the party. When you look at the campaigns of McCain or, or, Mitt Romney but when Trump came in, they hated Trump because they thought he was a liberal. And so they hated him, and he hated them in return, and so he kicked them out of the party and brought in new blood, new voices, new ideas, and they’re just wiping the floor with the establishment Democrats, who don’t know what’s going on.Republican recruitment tactics and Democratic gatekeepingGREEN: Yeah. I would say the Democrats have a reputation for rejecting new voices, right? And for keeping people ou…

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Web3 has been great for Republican billionaires—and awful for almost everyone else Dec 12, 2025

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityEpisode Summary From a policy standpoint, probably the biggest difference between Donald Trump’s first and second administrations has been his total allegiance to the cryptocurrency industry. It was a huge shift from 2021 when he argued that Bitcoin “seems like a scam” that was “not money” and could be used for narcotics transactions.All of that is out the window now. In addition to pardoning drug kingpins like Juan Orlando Hernández, Trump, his wife, and his sons have been rolling out numerous cryptocurrencies of their own. And as you might expect, every single one of these virtual assets have declined massively in value since their initial hype cycle.If you think about the history of cryptocurrency, however, the fact that Trump and his cronies have changed their views about them makes a lot of sense. Not only was Bitcoin initially marketed using anarchist libertarianism, but the industry it inspired has become completely dominated by the exact sort of plutocrats that have always bankrolled the reactionary conservatism that cemented its control of the Republican Party after the Tea Party movement of the 2010s.Joining me today to discuss what’s happened with all this is Molly White, a bane of crypto scammers everywhere. She’s the creator of Web3 is Going Just Great, a project that tracks the crypto industry. She’s also got a separate interest in Wikipedia, which has recently come under massive attack by some of crypto’s biggest schemers like Elon Musk. These two episodes are linked in my opinion, as you’ll see in our discussion.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--Exploring the far-right origins of Bitcoin and crypto--Why tech billionaires stopped imagining themselves as libertarian centrists--After ruining the global economy, Silicon Valley elites are plotting their escapes from society--The Trumpy oligarchs are different from their predecessors--How “futurism,” an obscure form of Italian fascism, became a blueprint for 21st century tech barons--Big finance and tech monopolies denied us the internet we were promised--The “network state” movement is a post-libertarian political cultAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction03:10 — A brief history of cryptocurrencies08:46 — How Wikipedia’s volunteer system works11:37 — Why Elon Musk and far-right Republicans hate Wikipedia15:47 — The emotional worldview of crypto advocates18:22 — White’s backstory 22:45 — Bizarre crypto stories and celebrity rug pulls25:43 — The two-class structure of crypto: sellers and victims34:11 — Why crypto whales hate Wikipedia’s more realized decentralization38:17 — Talking with crypto advocates45:52 — Analyzing Trump’s about-face on crypto51:50 — Does crypto have a legitimate purpose?54:54 — Network states and the billionaire escape fantasyAudio 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 Molly White. Hey, Molly, welcome to the show.MOLLY WHITE: Thanks for having me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so we got two big topics on deck here for today. And in a lot of ways the culture of Wikipedia and the particulars of crypto, I think it’s safe to say that most people are not particularly enmeshed in these things. Why don’t we just start with, if you could give us an overview of the history of cryptocurrency, where it came from and why are there always so many proliferating cryptocurrencies since Bitcoin, the supposedly master currency?WHITE: Yeah. So I mean, cryptocurrency really came about in 2008 to 2009 with the advent of Bitcoin which was the first cryptocurrency and remains one of the most dominant cryptocurrencies. And it was created with the idea of changing how people transact digitally financially. The idea was that, unlike a cash transaction where you can hand someone $20 and there’s no record of that ever happening and it’s completely private, there’s not really a great way to do that digitally.And [00:04:00] so the idea was that Bitcoin would be this peer-to-peer cash system. And, there was sort of this ideological belief behind it that it would help to eliminate the government’s role in surveilling financial transactions or even interfering with financial transactions. This all came about sort of in the wake of the great financial crisis where there was a lot of distrust in the government and anger at how that whole situation had happened.And so, it sort of emerged as this sort of “cipher punk” way of transacting money using the internet. But over the years it has really evolved into something quite a bit different, I would say, where there’s now this entire realm of cryptocurrencies, thousands upon thousands of them.Many of them are based on Bitcoin, but many of them are based on different systems. And, pretty much anyone can create a cryptocurrency and therefore people have in great numbers. And they have really transformed, or I’m not sure if they ever were really the, digital cash that Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin had written about. They’ve sort of never really, especially Bitcoin has never really functioned in that way. But now, the primary use case I would say for cryptocurrency is speculation. Where people are speculating that the price of this token will go up or down, and making trades based on that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the idea of these assets going up or down, like they’re not tied to anything [the creators actually control] in particular. So it is entirely speculation. I mean, like that’s, that is a fundamental difference between current, actual currencies issued by nation states. That they’re at least based on some approximation to reality, whether, depending on how, even the most inflationary currencies are still at least [00:06:00] issued by something that is accountable in some way, shape, or form. Whereas, like the inherent idea of buying a cryptocurrency as an investment vehicle, it, makes no sense at all. Except if you can get suckers, that’s what it seems like.WHITE: Well, I mean, yeah, if, if you believe that you can buy an asset and then later sell it for more than you’ve purchased it for, I think a lot of people are willing to make trades based on that, regardless of whether there are sort of fundamentals that cause a currency or an asset to, to go up or down in price.People are willing to speculate on just about anything I would say. And Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have certainly enjoyed quite a lot of popularity in that sense, even though they’re not issued by a government or a company or any sort of centralized entity.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, the currencies themselves are centrally issued.WHITE: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: But at the same time, that is, I think also why hype is so endemic to these ecosystems, because that is literally all they have to determine evaluation. It isn’t that some new mineral was discovered in the country, or that they developed some new manufacturing plan or something like that. The worth of a cryptocurrency is entirely dependent on the feelings of the people that buy it. Am I just making that up?WHITE: No, I mean, I think that’s absolutely true. I mean, obviously, especially now that there are so many cryptocurrencies, there are different versions that you could say, oh, well this one’s tied to this company that’s trying to do this thing, or, a stable coin that’s tied to, it’s pegged to some other asset.But I think you’re right, especially when you’re talking about, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, some of the major cryptocurrencies that are really not tied to anything in particular. It is based on hype, and [00:08:00] certainly that’s the case with meme coins and other sorts of tokens which are basically intended to be completely dependent on hype, and therefore subject to these massive swings in price as people either pay attention to them or forget about them, usually forget about them.But, that is really the goal is to attract as much attention and as much interest as possible so that people, early buyers can profit from those who learn about the token somewhat later.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s, that’s probably why a lot of people hate you, Molly, I would guess! That you are a hype deflator. And that’s the only thing that they really have. And we’ll circle back to that. How Wikipedia’s volunteer community worksBut okay, so then the other thing though, the other main research interest that you have is in the culture of Wikipedia.So, obviously everybody knows what Wikipedia is, but maybe just give us a little brief overview of the site and how it works and just how few people actually are editing it.WHITE: Yeah, so Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. It is maintained by a community of volunteers who edit the articles they write them, but also just sort of improve them gradually over time. And it’s a very collaborative project, it’s that the tagline is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.And the idea is that anyone, you or me or anyone, can begin contributing to the project as this free and open source of knowledge that is ideally covering, any topic that people might be interested about that, fits the notability criteria and, is suitable for an encyclopedia.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And but, and not very many people actually do it though, which is the interesting thing about Wikipedia is that every, everyone uses it. But no, almost no one edits it.WHITE: Yeah, the number of readers is, far, larger than the number of editors, [00:10:00] especially if you look at, active long-term editors versus, people who come by and fix a typo and then never edit again. It is a relatively small community of editors that, that maintain the site.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And what’s interesting, I think also about that community is that I mean, Elon Musk, I think has crystallized, I think that a lot of people on the political right strongly hate Wikipedia. Actually and that’s something that right wingers have, been kind of concerned about for, I mean, since the origin of this site, when it first launched in, what was it, 2005, I think or maybe a little earlier, but whenever it was.WHITE: I think 2001.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, whenever it was like the, I remember, and I wrote what I wrote about it when I was a columnist at the conservative Washington Times that there was a “Conservapedia” that was started. And it still exists now to this day because they argued that Wikipedia has a liberal bias. And that’s something that Elon Musk has been really hammering quite a bit recently. And in fact, he launched his own Republican flavored sort of, I guess that’s what he kind of is. Well, he’s claiming that it’s neutral.WHITE: Right.SHEFFIELD: And of course it is! But when you look at it the Grokipedia as he calls it, which God, that sounds like something that you would vomit up after a hangover or something. But it’s largely, basically is flattering to his personal obsessions—and otherwise it’s just kind of a regurgitation of Wikipedia.WHITE: Right.Why Elon Musk and far-right Republicans hate WikipediaSHEFFIELD: But it’s interesting though that-- and I think it’s probably fair to say, and, you can correct me if I kind of wrong, but you know, I think that it is fair to say that because Wikipedia is often, has lots of articles about science and about history and things like that, that the people who are contributing to it tend to be people that are more, let’s say, [00:12:00] extrinsically oriented that actually have to be concerned about facts and coherency and structure and be able to write well in, an understandable way.And, that might if Stephen Colbert was right, that probably is going to make some people who are religious fundamentalists or market fundamentalists feel excluded. I think that might be fair to say. What do you think?WHITE: Yeah, perhaps. I mean the, sort of the fundamental principle of Wikipedia is that editors who are contributing to articles are not writing their own knowledge or their own research or their own beliefs. They are collating reliable sources. And what those sources have to say on a topic. And those sources don’t necessarily all have to agree.there can be multiple viewpoints on any given topic that are all represented, in due weight to, the prominence of those viewpoints. Which I think theoretically should allow people of very different perspectives and backgrounds and viewpoints, and ideologies to collaborate on the encyclopedia in a fairly productive way.And I would say generally it, it does, I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia, and I’ve worked pretty regularly with people who have stated that, their viewpoints are very different from mine or they come from a very different background. But because we all agree on the way that articles should be written and the process by which disputes should be resolved, it actually works fairly well.I think the problem is that there are people, Elon Musk included, who really disagree with that approach to writing an encyclopedia. The idea of neutrality as Wikipedia treats it, that basically, treating all reliable sources in, in, in, [00:14:00] weighted as, due to their prominence of those viewpoints really does not seem to jbe well with, Elon Musk and others who essentially have redefined the idea of reliability for a source or who have decided that various sources should be considered reliable if Wikipedia does not consider them to be, they have very strong opinions on bias in sources that they think should preclude a source from being used or, change how it’s treated.And so, rather than come in and join Wikipedia as editors or contribute to this editorial process, they’ve decided essentially that Wikipedia is a lost cause. We can’t. Save it or we don’t want to. So we’re going to create this replacement of it that has, no real clear editorial structure.for example, Wikipedia does not have the very transparent policies and guidelines that Wikipedia has. But that can be shaped to reflect viewpoints that they prefer, whether it’s about topics that relate to them personally. I know Elon Musk has had sort of longstanding issues with how the article on him on Wikipedia has been written.And sort of the, he seems to have decided that Wikipedia will be the solution to that and he’ll just make it say what he wants it to say. Or whether it’s, political beliefs that they have that they think Wikipedia is not reflecting honestly. The solution has really been to just replace Wikipedia with a version of it.And, it is really a version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has sourced many of its articles directly from Wikipedia and reused them and then sort of shaped them in the way that they wish Wikipedia would.The emotional worldview of crypto advocatesSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. And it is interesting to me because I, think that there is a, common epistemic orientation between that motivation of Musk and people like him and [00:16:00] why they also like cryptocurrency. These are people that, I mean, there, there is this tremendous irony I think, in that their worldview is extremely emotional. And, it is entirely intuition driven almost. And that they, proceed from their beliefs first and then go to, well, what facts should be discussed, should be allowed to be discussed, rather than saying, well, let’s figure out what facts are and then shape our worldview.And so that, I think is, why they hate Wikipedia so much. And also why they love crypto so much. I mean, what do you think?WHITE: Yeah, I mean, I do think that, crypto is very attractive to people who have very strong ideological beliefs, whether it’s about cu…

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In his second term, Trump’s threats against media and tech companies have gotten real results Dec 05, 2025

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Episode Summary Besides Donald Trump’s adoption of a more extreme agenda, perhaps the most significant difference between his first and second administrations has been the degree to which some of America’s most elite institutions have decided to kiss the presidential ring. It’s a trend that’s been evident in many places, but perhaps no more so than in elite media. Even before the 2024 election, billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Patrick Soon-Shiong prohibited their newspaper staffs from endorsing Trump’s opponent, and since then, places like CNN and elsewhere have bent over backwards to avoid upsetting the tender sensibilities of the president and his supporters.More recently, CBS News decided to bend the knee at the behest of its new owners (and huge Trump donors) David and Larry Ellison by installing conservative activist Bari Weiss, a writer with no television experience, as its top editor. The mainstream media’s Republican turn under Trump II comes after a massive expansion of explicitly partisan opinion podcasts and talk programs as well which began shortly before Trump launched his first campaign in 2015.There’s a lot to discuss about all these developments and so for this episode, I wanted to bring in Arthur MacMillan, he’s a veteran political reporter who built the fact-checking division of AFP, the Paris-based news wire service. Right now he’s a newsletter writer at Axios, but for purposes of this discussion we’ll be talking about an essay he wrote for British Journalism Review that talks about the media and the second Trump administration.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.Theory of Change and Flux are listener supported. We need your help to keep going. Please subscribe to stay in touch!Related Content—How Trump’s second-term policies were previewed in full by reactionary media outlets in 2024—How hedge funds stripped America’s local newspapers for parts—Far-right Christian group bullies Politico reporter for filing accurate stories—False demands for bias are leading to extremist pundits being hired for America’s cable news debates—As elite complicity with Trumpism grows, a revival of democracy will require a social reckoning—Right-wing comedians have been the secret to Republicans’ growth with younger people and racial minoritiesAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction04:34 — CBS parent company CEO David Ellison’s commercial imperatives08:25 — Left vs right approaches to media investment12:26 — MSNBC’s damaged franchise and rebrand16:08 — Declining trust in media20:28 — Bari Weiss and the Free Press24:52 — Challenges of controlling newsrooms30:35 — The shift away from quality local content35:09 — Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post39:25 — Meta abandons fact-checking program44:36 — Newsrooms worried about upsetting owners52:38 — The future of media is small and targetedAudio 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 you have an article that came out that I summarized in our introduction a bit, but walk us through a bit more about your thesis within the article, and then we’ll go from there.ARTHUR MACMILLAN: Well, basically victory back in we’ve seen a fairly consistent pattern of, a chill where either news organizations, via litigation or via perception, do not wish to suffer any further than they already are at the hands of new administration.And we’re obviously almost a year in now, we’ve seen a succession of legal settlements from media organizations A, B, CBS. And the article was using the case study of Weiss going CBS as the head of in an obvious sweetheart deal involving David Ellison of Skydance, who has now bought CBS.And [00:04:00] my point was to draw a parallel between something that happened in British politics in the 1980s when Rupert Murdoch used newspapers. To exert political And I think what we’re seeing in the United States now at Skydance and CBS is a very particular example, is the power of tech via David Ellison and his father Larry, exert influence in the media, whether it’s for commercial ends or forDavid Ellison’s commercial imperativesSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, what’s interesting is that David Ellison, for a long time he had been a donor to the Democratic so. That to me does, raise the question of, well, what is it that, that he’s trying to it an ideological thing? Is it just purely about money? Or what was does he, would he still support Bill Clinton if Bill transported back into politics?To me, or is it just that this guy actually wanted a more party a Democratic but it’s, not just, it isn’t just the Ellison family either that’s really kind of trying to get in bed or pay off Donald Trump either,MACMILLAN: Ab absolutely not. I mean, I can’t look inside David Ellison’s head but I can look at his actions and his actions imply a commercial imperative, which to buy paramount CBS and a whole load of other franchisees he’s not really. Arguing day in, day out that he believes in conservative politics.What he is doing is taking measures that are curing favor with the present administration that is responsible for pushing [00:06:00] through any such media sale via the FCC. So I don’t think it’s a change in politics. I think it’s simply he may have supported Democratic candidates in the past, but that’s not at all unusual in this country.Donald Trump gave money bizarrely to Bill or Hillary Clinton. I mean, it’s so long ago now. It almost seems this is almost pointless to mention, but in some ways it isn’t. We’ve had Rupert Murdoch give money to Democratic, Candidates, he said very nasty things about Donald Trump. But Fox News, his most purposeful vehicle in terms of influence, apart from the odd little setback such as calling, Arizona for Joe Biden, Fox News has always been pretty supportive of Donald Trump and possibly never more so than now.So all I think is happening is we’re seeing an intensification where money, and in this case tech is exerting itself through buying up businesses that once where dominant, but the media is no way dominant. CBS and Paramount, is a big Yes. But CBS News is a very small division within it.Regardless. Larry Ellison, I would imagine and David Ellison, see it as another lever which they can pull in order to exert some kind of commercial influence or reach further their businessSHEFFIELD: Well, and it’s, yeah, it, is interesting when you look at [00:08:00] the way that the US right and left, have an approach to media. I think that, this, second, Trump and administration really has kind of highlighted the difference. So, you mentioned Rupert Murdoch I mean, Rupert Murdoch has been the owner of the New York Post, many decades now, and it’s never been profitable at any point in time for him.Left vs right approaches to media investmentSHEFFIELD: and you note in your piece that there was a similar dynamic for many years with his times of London as well, which was not profitable for most of its duration of his ownership until recently when it threw up the paywall. But you know, whereas on the, US left and. Maybe, I don’t know, you, you can discuss it in the UK context if you want.But you know, on the US left there, there has been investment in media, but generally it is ironically much more profit driven. So where, whereas you had something or current tv or the recently divested M-S-N-B-C to ms. Now, there is this complete lack of interest seemingly in having media outlets that might not be insanely profitable which is odd considering that you hear people constantly say, oh, democracy’s at risk.There’s this terrible threat. But you know, if we can’t make money doing media, then oh, well, let’s get rid of it.MACMILLAN: I think M-S-N-B-C is a very, is the best case in point you’re absolutely right, makes plenty of money. But I think on a fundamental level, it got a lot of stuff wrong in the last few I think as cable audiences across all political demographics, even in recent years, Fox it’s not reaching the same number of [00:10:00] people via domestic cable as it once That’s a threat to the business model. However, it does reach key which drives advertising dollars. So there’s still money to be made, like you see, but. I hadn’t even thought about it until you raised when it comes to M-S-N-B-C and now changing to ms. Now, that to me is a very direct business rebrand because the MSNB franchise had become extremely damaged as a some people say it’s all because we wanted Comcast. We want to spin off our cable assets from our television assets and everything else. Great, good for you. But in terms of the product and what I see, M-S-N-B-C to me had become also a very damaged franchise, and I think there’s no better example of that.Then, the host of Morning Joe and his partner Mika Brozinsky Joe Scarborough going down to malago days after the election to basically kiss the rink. Trump. I watched Morning Joe for the entire, past administration and years before that. And to say that it was, how can I put it, A vote fast is not going far enough.It clearly was a capitulation and an effort to preserve business and the pro program, as far as I’m concerned, lost all credibility that. Maybe some of their hosts, sorry, maybe some of their viewers don’t really care about the complete hypocrisy of such an act. But in terms of credibility, it speaks volumes the lack of and I don’t care what, I don’t know what advertisers make of it, but that franchise to me [00:12:00] as an M-S-N-B-C program.Was not going in the right direction when this political change happened. And a rebrand, I think is what they wanted. So I think M-S-N-B-C, which no longer exists, really is a symptom of the media’s lack of influence rather than anyMSNBC’s damaged franchise and rebrandSHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and what about the idea of, these like Ru Rupert Murdoch and his. And it isn’t just him either. I should say that, the, Washington Times newspaper, for instance, was started in 1982 and at no point has been profitable. And there are, a host of other right wing media enterprises that their owners they run them either through donations from the public or from themselves.Whereas on the left, I, there seems to be more of a sense that people, well, people will just figure it out the truth and we don’t have to invest in telling them and reaching them and finding them and talking to them and listening because they can figure it out.and I think that’s a very naive for people who are allegedlyMACMILLAN: I think it’s incredibly naive because most people now, and I don’t really, in fact, let me reverse that. I wouldn’t say most I would say a majority of get their news from non-traditional And by that not a print newspaper and not a, television screen. Radio still does surprisingly well.I think that’s a, separate, which I haven’t concentrated on. However, I have concentrated very heavily on traditional print media and [00:14:00] television. In my past as a media correspondent, I dealt with all sorts of And when it comes to non-profitable ventures, yes, here in Washington, DC for example, there’s the Washington Times, there’s the Washington Examiner.I can’t really speak for their finances, but they are not regarded, and I’m sorry if this offends them, but they are not regarded as prime sites. However, they are vehicles for news commentary, at the behest of their editor whoever’s boss, whoever is that person’s boss is, this is very traditional, and I don’t think that has changed what I would question is their power to exert because as I’ve said, they are reaching fewer and fewer And through a polluted political narrative when it comes to media credibility, only one expression that’s defined the last 10 years and it’s fake news over time, that message really has struck home. And you only have to look at any pure research document or Reuters research document about trust in the Gallup, I refer to it in the article, gave out, did their latest results, very recently. but the bottom line is less than one third. Of the audience has a high level of trust That’s a pretty damning narrative. And so what I would say there is desire to exert influence remains the results far harder to measure than, being called a media [00:16:00] mogul or what have ‘cause the industry itself has stratified to such a degree that news brands are not as recognizable any longer.Declining trust in mediaMACMILLAN: And a lot of people have just moved on and gotten their news and opinion from different sources, whether it be Substack, whether it be podcasts such as yours, whether it be traditional media to a degree, whether it be NPR, whether it be BBC, which. Continues try and expand its footprint in the United States and they’ve, suffered a setback because of the fact that Donald Trump may soon be suing them.We will see continued change and upheaval in the and for sure, I think, the Ms. NBC to MS now change was a sign of a business trying to insulate itself from that because it’s easier to talk about a new product than it is about one that has a bad reputation or it’s not really bad reputation, shall we say, has a bad relationship with the existingSHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and, definitely Trump has been, very repetitive in saying his hatred for it and his, associating that with its parent company, Comcast NBC, universal. So yeah, no, I think that’s right. And. One. But one of the other things about the idea of bringing Bari Weiss CBS which, on its faces completely farcical because this is somebody who has no of any and also no experience as a reporter no experience, actually producing actually producing content that matches the market.the market that CVS seeks, which is [00:18:00] a non-ideological and broad mainstream audience. She has no experience at any of that. But there is, that is something that’s interesting. So you have somebody like Weiss who is a conservative, denies that she is, although she gets all her money from conservatives, so one wonders.But nonetheless, she is somebody who is. Not a reactionary, like famous Donald Trump media people like Matt Walsh and, she’s not a a religious zealot. is lesbian herself, is not anti anti lesbian or gay, although seems to be very anti-trans, so this is somebody who is, a conservative rather than a reactionary.And I just, I don’t know that there is even much of an audience for that for that perspective in, in the US because the people who are voting for Republicans either don’t really care or know anything about politics, or they tend to be people who are reactionary and the people who kind of this, more conservative educated persona.That persona that Bari Weiss has. They don’t seem to be very numerous in my What do youMACMILLAN: Well long and the short of it. So the short answer would be, do I think installing Bari Weiss will be a, recipe success for CBS? I would say it depends how you measure success. the long answer into now her appointment I think is fortuitous timing rather than any.Systemic planning. She launched a vehicle, the Free Press, [00:20:00] which came out during, a post pandemic era. The precise timing eludes me, but it certainly rose in the last few years did generate paying audience as well as a tenfold larger non-paying audience. But in the, market that the media become, it is undoubtedly a success.Bari Weiss and the Free PressMACMILLAN: She has managed to sell it to the same aforementioned David Ellison for $150 million, which is a very significant sum. The move to CBS, we only really know. The agreement that exists well in our heads, we do not in any substantive way the agreement that exists between, Bari Weiss and, David Ellison on what she’ll…

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