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Pleasure, pain, and why religion and science have justified women’s suffering Dec 02, 2025

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Episode Summary Like people, ideas have histories, even when we’re not aware of them. Living in an age of uniquely advanced science and technology, we don’t always perceive how our allegedly most rational beliefs can actually be based on ancient legends and stories. That certainly appears to be the case with many Western medical and psychological beliefs about women’s health, sexuality, and pain.From the Garden of Eden myth casting childbirth as a curse to Greek philosophers describing women as inverted men, these cultural frameworks have deeply influenced how female bodies are perceived, researched, and treated. For generations, women’s pain was normalized, their pleasure dismissed, and their experiences left out of medicine altogether.My guest today, Suzannah Weiss, has been writing and speaking about these issues for years. In her first book Subjectified(which we discussed on Theory of Change last year), she explored how women are socialized to see their sexualities through the lens of shame and stigma. Now, in her new book Eve’s Blessing: Uncovering the Lost Pleasure Behind Female Pain, she takes on the cultural inheritance that tells women to expect suffering in their bodies, from menstruation to childbirth to sex itself.In our conversation, we trace how myths and religious teachings became medical dogma, how centuries of ignoring women’s health needs still show up in research gaps and dismissive doctors, and why ideas like the “orgasm gap” persist. We also talk about what happens when women push back—when they reclaim pleasure in childbirth, resist the narrative of inevitable period pain, or simply insist that their symptoms deserve serious attention.It’s a balancing act. Culture shapes the mind and how we live in our bodies. But it’s also true that how we think to our situation can affect how our bodies feel generally. Pain and suffering are real–and so is pleasure. If old ideas can teach us to expect suffering, then perhaps new ideas can help us find joy, intimacy, and freedom.The video of this episode 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—Women are discovering how to become a sexual subject rather than an object (Suzannah’s previous TOC appearance)—Why the right-wing freakouts about sorority dancing are about so much more—Reactionary gender messages are trying to poison kids’ minds, here’s what parents are doing in response—The ‘world’s oldest profession’ is attaining new relevance in the internet age—How Republicans became the party of misogynist online trolls—Science and sex are obviously different but what they have in common is why they’re both hated by reactionariesAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction09:53 — The one-sex and two-sex models13:36 — Medical dismissal of women’s pain20:50 — Suzannah’s personal health journey23:42 — Cognition as an embodied act34:39 — Contradictions in male attitudes toward female sexuality36:53 — Gender non-conformity and the myth of brokenness42:44 — Trauma and its physical manifestations50:17 — ‘Sexy but not sexual’58:10 — Mindfulness and body awarenessAudio 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 Suzannah Weiss. Hey, Suzannah. Welcome back to Theory of Change.SUZANNAH WEISS: Hi. Thanks so much. I’m so glad to be back.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So you’ve got another book out. The last time you were on, you were talking about your first book Subjectified, and this one is called Eve’s Blessing, which is about society and it’s particularly Western society, focusing on women’s pain and seeing it as sort of destination and inherent to women. Can you walk us through just kind of the origin of that belief in Western culture? Because that’s where you start the book off. And I think we should start off here with that.WEISS: Yeah, so my book is called Eve’s Blessing: Uncovering the Lost Pleasure Behind Female Pain [00:04:00]. And it’s about experiences of mine and other women of having their pain normalized, including period pain, childbirth, pain during sex, and even pain associated with chronic illness, along with what I call pleasure-lessness, meaning sex without an orgasm, sex without pleasure, even painful sex, and how this ties to different ideas, particularly the curse put on Eve in the Garden of Eden, and ‘thou shalt give birth in sorrow.’ And how in some religious communities, this is considered a curse, not just on childbirth, but on menstruation, even on first time sex. There, there’s, other parts of the Bible and I focus mainly on Judeo-Christian religions. like in Deuteronomy being, This passage about use blood on the sheets as a symbol of painful, of like virginity. the idea that sex for the first time is inherently painful and there’s a whole history behind that. The idea of the hymen, which is not actually like some medical professionals call it the vaginal corona because hymen is not.Really a, accurate term with the association we have with it is that it’s this seal that you need to break. And that’s not true. It’s just part of the vagina that naturally stretches. And yeah, there’s all these experiences women have had, I my own was dealing with various symptoms of chronic illness and being told that a lot of it was normal.Also, going on antidepressants and being told and having difficulty orgasming because of that. I’m being told a lot of women deal with that. Just use a vibrator. And, my book also shows how women are living the opposite life. That these ideas would suggest how women are [00:06:00] having pleasurable childbirth, pleasurable periods, pleasurable, orgasmic sex and pleasurable childbirth is a weird concept to many, but I interviewed a lot of women who indeed had this experience and, Yeah, just how we, underestimate like how good it can be to live in a female body, but thankfully women today are waking up to that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. And the idea though of women’s bodies as being somehow destined for pain obviously that’s, as you said, clearly a, genesis type, belief.But also, you talk about that there was that this belief was pretty common in, some, Greek cultural stories as well. in addition to the idea that, I, that women were sort of destined for pain the Eve, the Adam and Eve myth, it also is inherently blaming women for trying to get knowledge.Also, I think that’s worth talking about as well,WEISS: Yes, there’s actually, it’s really interesting today we have this idea that women are less sexual and more pure. And that actually arose around the 17 hundreds. And before that it was thought women are like lascivious and desirous because ate the apples.So women are hungry and curious and sin prone. So it is really interesting no matter what, we take from that story, we take something negative about women.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and then of course there is, and she’s not in the Bible, but of course there’s the, Lilith character as well within the Judaic legends as well.Right. You, review that for people who dunno the story. Yeah.WEISS: Well, our friend Kaitlyn Bailey talks about that in her show, Whore’s Eye View. She says Lilith was the one who wanted to fuck [00:08:00] Adam on top, and Adam was intimidated by her. So we went with Eve then. She represents the dark feminine, so she was the witch, the bitch and the whore.And, I think Jewish mythology and we, kind of cast out that aspect of women because we, demonize Lilith.SHEFFIELD: Well, literally in her case. And it’s hard for cultural historians to kind of pinpoint the amount of influence that her story had because she was cut out of the Bible.But there’s a lot of these extra-biblical characters who you see them crop up in art a fair amount over the Renaissance and even some medieval times. So these stories circulated even though they were not given canonical status.And, I think that there’s, that there’s reasons for that because they were meaningful.WEISS: I, I worked with a Jungian therapist last year who taught me something about Lilith because I kept telling her I was having psychedelic trips and dreams where I kept seeing a black snake. And she showed me this image, this painting of Lilith with a black snake wrapped around her, and it represented the dark feminine.And she suggested that was what I was accessing in the symbolic realm, was this dark, feminine figure that needed to be brought into the light.SHEFFIELD: I don’t know how much I buy into Jungian psychiatry, but that there is something there that, people do have these—there is something, I think to the idea that there, that ideas resonate because we do have common experiences as human beings and, I mean, that’s what this book is about.The one-sex and two-sex modelsBut you also do talk about just the idea [00:10:00] within Greek philosophy proper that that women were not quite even the same species. It seems like, when you look at as you do, talking about, some of the, ancient, the original doctors and things like that.Right. Tell us about that, if you would.WEISS: Yeah, so there’s a famous book called Making Sex by Thomas Laur that tracks, and some historians have challenged it because it’s not this simple, but what he argues basically is that from the time of the ancient Greeks, until around the 17 hundreds, scientists followed what’s called the One Sex Model where male and female bodies are considered basically the same.So the ancient Greek philosophers. Said things like, women are like, men turn inward, and women are like, women’s genitals are like mole’s eyes. They, they’re there but they don’t really have a function like mole’s. Eyes didn’t see. And so there was this idea that women were smaller men, or inferior men, or like inverted men.And it caused this gap in research where research. Was done primarily on men, and it was assumed to apply to women also. And we see this today, we see, for instance, certain health trends like intermittent fasting or high intensity interval training don’t work as well for women. And all the research is done on men and it doesn’t factor in things like the menstrual cycle in women’s hormones.And then on the flip side, around the 17 hundreds, due to a variety of political forces, specifically the Victorian era in England, saying that women were pure and Medford domesticity and also the, French Revolution saying, that women, [00:12:00] there was sort of a feminist movement, but then there was backlash saying women need to stay at home while the men are revolutionaries.And so all of these sort of, these factors, and then there were scientific discoveries, like the idea that actually women did not need to orgasm to have a child, which was actually not, widely believed around, the 16 or 17 hundreds that was discovered, that used to be believed that women like needed to orgasm, to conceive, and actually the clitoris was more valued.And so all these different factors led to what’s called the two sex model, where women and men are seen as opposites. And basically that contributes to ideas like the normalization of the orgasm gap that men can orgasm so easily and women cannot, or basically that men are made for pleasure and women are made for pain.So right now we, we see both of. The influence of both of these ideas. We see this research gap between, male and female bodies, and we also see where like women are assumed to be exactly like men. And we also see, this idea that men and women are opposites. And like, testosterone is this hormone that causes you to be really horny and angry, and estrogen causes you to be warm and nurturing, which isn’t the case.They both have many roles. And we also erase people outside the gender binary, intersex people, two-spirit people, et cetera. And that’s all tied in with colonialism. That’s my, like, that’s my two minute version of that whole story. Mm-hmm.Medical dismissal of women’s painSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and yeah, and, absolutely like within the medical context it, it did, it was also that, that, as you talk about that, women’s.Pain was not believed to be real in some sense because, well, all the doctors were men. And so, when women were talking about, period pain or, various, [00:14:00] complications with pregnancy, they were not believed in some sense, right? Or just assumed, well, this is how it is. And, as, and as you talk about the pregnancy for at least for, for some women, not, we can’t say for everybody obviously, but for some women, they, they don’t see it as that way, as something, inherently or obviously destined to be painful.Right.WEISS: Yeah, there was a tension in writing this book between acknowledging women’s pain as real and also as not natural or inevitable. Because it is a reality today that many women live with period pain, that for most people giving birth, it is painful. And so I definitely don’t aim to invalidate that pain.My goal is to explore where it comes from and for instance, period pain. There’s not a ton of research, but there is some research tying it to things like household chemicals, things like the modern American diet. Things we kind of take for granted in society. Overworking, sedentary lifestyle stress.It’s kind of a, society-wide problem that is contributing to certain forms of pain, women experience, and of course un undiagnosed illnesses, misdiagnosed illnesses, lack of research on women, and, even childbirth. There is a lot of pain that is connected to childbirth, trauma to deprivation of choice, to unnecessary interventions, and to a medical system that prioritizes doctors’ interests that wants you to give birth as quickly as possible so the doctor can leave their shift, et cetera.And so, we need to both take women’s pain more seriously and also question where it comes from and whether it’s natural and whether we can do something so that it is not so common.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and you do talk about, in that regard about how many doctors will push for women to [00:16:00] have, cesarean sections.Much more than they used to. And that, that, that does seem to be driven not necessarily by medical needs of the women, right? Or the people. Mm-hmm.WEISS: Yeah. Not just cesarean sections, but a lot of, inducing labor, for instance, Pitocin, which actually makes contractions more painful. episiotomies where there’s a cut made between the vagina and the anus are still sometimes done without consent, though less so now there are a lot of interventions that are done, like to prioritize the hospital’s interests or even they might, may not see it that way.It may be to be very careful. And, just, but the thing is, there is some research showing if a hospital has more than a 15% C-section rate, like there’s actually more maternal deaths and more complications. So there is this. Almost this patronizing view, like that women can’t give birth on their own or that they can’t give birth with just the amount of interventions that they decide on.And that actually backfires because like our bodies do have an innate wisdom and there is a lot of overprotection, excessive interventions that it can actually lead to more pain.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I mean it, but it is a balancing act as you’re saying earlier, that that pain is real. but, it doesn’t perhaps always necessarily have to be something that happens.Sometimes people cause it. And yeah, I mean, so there, there’s, now you, talk about, some of your own experiences in other women in regards to pain that, that. had been sort of forced on you and, others. So maybe talk about one of the [00:18:00] experiences of your own first, if you would please.And then maybe we can talk about some of the other ones.WEISS: So, I have not had. The experien…

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How the American left became post-political, and how to change that Nov 11, 2025

Show notes

Episode Summary One year after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats are still trying to figure out what to do for the next time around and what to do in the 2026 midterm elections as control of Congress is once again at stake.There were a lot of people offering advice to the Democrats in this regard, and certainly the most well-funded of those people are the ones who say that the party has become too liberal and has to modify its stances to become more popular and resonant with public opinion.And at the same time, there are people on the further left side of the coalition arguing that the Democrats have become too conservative and that they have alienated people who want a more radical change in society to fix things that are broken, and not to step back at all on defending abortion access or trans rights.Each side of this intra-left debate offers worthy points, but both groups tend to understate the immense effect that media have on people’s political opinions. That is the central topic of my new e-book, What Republicans Know, so please do help me out and purchase it if you haven’t yet.Someone else’s work you should consider in this regard is our guest on today’s program: Dave Karpf is an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, and he’s written several books on the role of media and public opinion.Last week, he wrote an article in the New Republic about a new report from a group called WelcomePAC, which argued that Democrats need to become more moderate, but which also largely ignored how many people don’t know about candidates’ policy views.The video of this episode 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--Free excerpt from “What Republicans Know”--How much do political party elites know about their own voters?--Reactionaries built an infrastructure to attack democracy, their opponents must do the same to defend it--Americans want big ideas, but Trump’s opponents aren’t providing them--Democratic losses stem from their failure to communicate--Trump’s insult comic shtick and the right’s new media shock troopsAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction11:01 — Policies are far from the only thing that matters to voters17:03 — Democrats created their gigantic media disadvantage through inaction22:11 — Political parties need permanent infrastructure34:55 — Is the U.S. left too obsessed with internal debate?43:20 — The perils of thinking that polling alone is political science53:11 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.Matthew Sheffield: And joining me now is Dave Karp. Hey Dave. Welcome back to Theory of Change.Dave Karpf: Okay. Thanks. Having me again.Matthew Sheffield: So, you had a great thread on the WelcomePAC report, which I have to say is when I read that, I instantly was like, oh man, these people like “Welcome Back, Kotter,” the seventies TV series.Dave Karpf: It does.Matthew Sheffield: So, but you know, in fairness to them, I, do want to say that there are some things, there’s a bunch of stuff in this report that’s high-quality and that does match established, well-confirmed political science. And this is, in my view, the highest-quality, more centrist-leaning document that we’ve seen since 2024.Do you agree with that?Dave Karpf: Yeah, I mean the, when I opened this, the first thing that I noticed, they, they have a list of people that they’re thinking and it includes a number of political scientists who I know and deeply respect. It also includes a [00:04:00] number of people who are immediate red flags for me, Nate Silver is on this thing, like Nate Silver was a great person to talk to five, 10 years ago. Lately he’s mostly seems to be playing poker.So there were a couple of immediate red flags, but also there were a number of people who I was like, okay, if you are, like, if you’re talking to Aaron Strauss and Chris Warshaw. I’m interested in what you have to say. And I think they took seriously that they wanted to gather the data and see what it told them.I have some things we can get into about what data they decided to look at and what they didn’t decide to gather. But I think they, at least took it seriously.Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Absolutely. And, and there were a couple of other red flags for me with a, like they cited James Carville and their title page and a Republican pollster. How does that make you look better? I, don’t think that it does guys.But nonetheless there are some points in here that are true and like one of the, things that I try to do with my writing and podcast [00:05:00] is to, show the various factions of the, left that, nobody is a hundred percent correct in, understanding elections.Like each side actually has viewpoints that are true and each one has ideas that are false. And so one of the, there are a couple of things that are true in this report is that irregular voters are not ideologically committed compared to people who are regular voters. And, that’s, I, that’s, something that I think people on the progressive side might struggle with that concept or accepting That seems like.Dave Karpf: Yeah. And I, the thing that I tell my students at the beginning of every semester is, the answer to any question worth asking is, well, it’s complicated. And as political scientist, that’s where I feel comfortable sort of exploring the complication as a pragmatic strategist, well, it’s complicated isn’t a good answer, right?So the hard questions of things like, should the Democrats try to nominate more centrist or more progressive candidates, [00:06:00] what people would really like is there to be a clean, easy answer to that. And that includes progressives. Who would really like to think that, when you nominate a bold progressive, they’re likely to win.And what the data shows is, well, it’s complicated. There are scenarios where you’re better off with a centrist. There are scenarios where you’re better off with a bold progressive. In either case, it would kind of be nice to have somebody just dripping with charisma and lacking in scandals. But those people are few and far between, and so it’s all complicated and that like that is, I think some of the use of a report like this is sort of reminding us that the simple story you’d like to tell yourself is also not quite true.Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the other things that they noted in here that is true is that political donors or activists tend to have more polarized opinions than the general public or even their own co partisans in their party. Now the Democrats have a much wider range of opinions compared to Republicans.And so that makes things a little more difficult as well, in [00:07:00] particular for them. And, and so the, these are real challenges that the Democratic Party, there are unique challenges that the Democratic party has that do make things harder for them compared to Republicans and I, think that’s fair. We have to say that.Dave Karpf: we do the, bit that I want to quibble on there, because when I read that passage from them, I was annoyed. Is.If we start from the premise that politics is complicated and the answer to everything is, well, it’s complicated. Part of what that sets up is like, I think it’s okay for your party elites to be more interested in some issue portfolios than the mass public. If the reason they’re more interested in them, I’m thinking particularly with climate change, isn’t because they’re, died in the wool I ideologues, but because they’re looking at it and having spent a lot of time wrestling with it, they say, well, no, this is really bad and we as policymakers really need to care.Right. Historically, foreign policy is something that the masses [00:08:00] mostly don’t pay attention to. And so it’s really important to have people in government who do pay attention to it, even if they’re going to be out of step with the masses. Because the masses aren’t tuning in. So to the ex, like when you have elites that are out of step with the party base or the mass public that they want to get to vote for them, we’re not out out of step with them.Because they have sort of different ide, ideological priors. That’s a thing that we want to remind ourselves of and sort of, sort of check our instincts. But when they’re out of step, because they’re more well informed, because they’re the people who are actually paid to develop expertise and wrestle with the complications.Like I, I think it’s important to remember that like we run elections and, win elections in order to govern, and a lot of the stuff that goes into governing is in fact going to be unpopular just because governance is complicated and a lot of it sucks.Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. And, another issue where that’s very relevant what you just said is, the, the issue of democracy, quote unquote. So, the average person, I don’t [00:09:00] expect them to care about political systems and, the, Overton window and, political theory like, oh, that’s, they have better things to do in their lives than obsess over those types of things that you and I are thinking about.And, so, but yeah, like it, the doesn’t mean that they don’t matter and in fact, argue, I think we could say that climate change and democracy are probably the the most. Important issues from an objective standpoint because they determine whether you have a future of the polity.Dave Karpf: Right.And also if, the party, I’m particularly annoyed on climate both because I come out of the environmental movement, but also because Matt Yglesias keeps on beating this drum and I just think he’s wrong. Like Yglesias seems to have concluded that climate is a loser issue. Democrats should stop talking about it.Just assume that some technology will save us. because it, it’s a loser, so don’t do it. And A, I disagree with him that’s a, the route that they should take. [00:10:00] But B, I would also say pragmatically, if you just let climate change keep getting worse in order to hopefully win some more elections in the near term, you’re also going to end up living in a hotter, less safe, less stable world in the future.Where it is difficult as the governing party to keep on getting reelected. Like the inattentive public is just going to blame you when things go wrong. So you should take governance choices that in the medium and long term, hopefully make it less likely for things to go wrong. Otherwise, what’s the point of democracy to begin with?And I like, I just think some of these elector editorialists or the, like, they’re calling the missiles populists now, like I, I think they seem to have forgotten that like, you don’t need to, you don’t need to campaign in, prose. You can campaign in poetry, but if you’re going to be trying to win elections, you then actually need to do the policy work that leads to a more stable and hopefully prosperous nation.Otherwise when you do win, you’re going to be living, you’re going to be governing in such a manner that like they kick you [00:11:00] out next time.Policies are far from the only thing that matters to votersMatthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. And that I think was one of the critical flaws in this report is that they, have a absurd viewpoint about that the public knows about issues and cares about them. And, and, the reality is, I mean, Kamala Harris, she, she ran her campaign and her policy positions to be maximally popular,Dave Karpf: Yeah.Matthew Sheffield: Like the people who’ve, some of the people who were financing this report were also financing and directing the Kamala Harris campaign. And so like we tried their idea and we’ve tried their idea for the past several decades and, it actually hasn’t worked. And, like the thing with Joe Biden in 2020, the, problem with this, popularist approach to me is that it’s not actually popularist, it’s not popular.And like, and Trump won [00:12:00] because people, oh, sorry. Biden beat Trump in 2020 because Trump was really horrible and, we had a, he was a disaster. Like it wasn’t that people thought Joe Biden was great, and his policies were awesome.And that’s the problem with these guys is that they don’t like, they, it’s Bill Clinton won because of Ross Perot. Obama won not because of his strategies, but because he was a really good candidate who spoke really well. And so the, problem that Democrats have is that you’ve got this consultant class that sort of glommed onto these two candidates. Like, what, happened to Organizing for America?Nothing. What happened to all of this local movement that they had built that had arose around him? Nothing.Dave Karpf: Yeah, though I, one thing I would add in is. Obama also won because he was running against a Republican after two Republican terms when things were like, we both had foreign wars that had gotten unpopular and the economy imploded. Right? So like there is [00:13:00] historically, there’s what we call sort of like a like a thermostatic or a sort of a back and forth phenomenon where people tend to vote in presidential elections based on their opinion of the incumbent president or incumbent party.And it tends to go back and forth. there’s, no world in which the Democrats win normal elections for the ne for the next like 40 years, like eventually Republican wins. And that it particularly happens once people decide, like in political science we call it, they, call it I think the time for change model.I haven’t looked at thisMatthew Sheffield: Yeah, I was just going to say that. Yeah.Dave Karpf: Yeah. But like, part of why Obama wins, like it helps that he is historically charismatic, but it also helps that he is running against the Republicans after George w Bush’s, like, I think Republican party approval was at like 20 something percent at that point.And John McCain like,Matthew Sheffield: too. Yeah.Dave Karpf: yeah. Like, and you had Hurricane Katrina and then also the great financial crisis. Like, like of course Bane didn’t win that election. I’m pretty sure Kamala Harris could have won under those circumstances too. Like there’s some candidate quality, [00:14:00] but a lot of it’s actually the broader circumstances, which again is why there like, sure go ahead and campaign in poetry, but you need to govern in a manner that makes it less likely that objective conditions suck.Because when objective conditions suck, then inattentive voters will just cast your party out. Assuming we have normal elections, which I hope we have those in 2028, but yh I had another thought. It’s coming back to me. Yeah. Oh, here’s the other thought. There, there’s a turn of phrase that I coined for when I’m cri criticizing the, tech barons, but it’s useful here, I think which is the, reverse Scooby-Doo.Now the reverse Scooby-Doo is when you sort of imagine yourself as the villain in Scooby-Doo and say like, we would’ve gotten away with it, if not for, insert thing. And we see this from the tech barons a lot where like, like crypto, like, Ava for a long time has like insisted that the entire economic system is about to collapse in six months and Bitcoin will rise.If it doesn’t happen, then it is, [00:15:00] the government’s fault for interfering. And so it’s like his, it, creates sort of a pressure release valve where he can loudly predict this and people can listen to him. Then when it doesn’t happen, he is like, well, no, it was, I like included a reason why, like, I’m not wrong, even though it didn’t happen.And, with these centrist consultants, like they talk a lot in this report about how Democrats need to talk about kitchen table issues. And if they just talk about it, then t…

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Science and democracy need each other Oct 28, 2025

Show notes

Episode Summary

After language, the scientific method is probably humanity’s greatest achievement; it’s a veritable engine of invention that has allowed us to bend rivers to our will, split the atom and cure many diseases. But while scientific progress has given us the tools to reshape the world and even change our bodies, we haven’t yet figured out how to rewire our mental hardware. The same cognitive instincts that helped our ancestors survive in the wild are now making many of us vulnerable.

Although we think of them as separate today, science and superstition were one and the same. For the vast majority of human history, astronomy and astrology were together. Alchemy and chemistry were coeval.

Over the centuries, however, science separated itself from pseudoscience, but the old beliefs never went away; they just went underground. As science became increasingly specialized and isolated from the general public, however, these “undead sciences” began gathering political power, a development that far too many advocates of progress did not perceive.

In the second Trump administration, superstition has seized control of America’s executive branch in the person of Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist extremist who has been manically destroying as much of America’s scientific achievements as he possibly can, assisted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a deranged lawyer who has been slashing and burning medical research and treatment.

Let’s not sugarcoat it. There are a lot of terrible things happening in science today. But there are also a lot of courageous people standing up to tell the world what’s happening, and standing up for the reality that science and democracy depend upon each other.

I have two guests joining me in this episode to discuss: Jenna Norton is a program director at the National Institutes of Health, where she studies the disparities in urology and kidney health, and Mark Histed. He also works at NIH, where he is a senior investigator studying neural computation and behavior. Each is here in their personal capacity, and as members of the Science and Freedom Alliance.

The video of this episode is available, the transcript is available. 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.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

12:16 — The importance of science communication and community-participation science

23:01 — Politics as the master science

27:54 — Jay Bhattacharya and the weaponization of objectivity

32:51 — Scientific truth and the Great Barrington Declaration

42:30 — Open versus closed epistemologies

47:53 — The destruction of American scientific leadership

52:59 — The value of curiosity-driven research

57:00 — The false promise of AI replacing human scientists

01:00:41 — Organizing scientists and the Bethesda Declaration

01:03:59 — Science and Freedom Alliance mission

01:07:12 — Building institutions for public engagement

Audio Transcript

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Trumpism isn’t conservative, and saying this is still important Oct 15, 2025

Show notes

Episode Summary Even though they don’t intend to, many people who oppose Donald Trump are unintentionally helping him by saying that his authoritarian policies are actually conservative.It’s obviously true that both reactionary authoritarianism and conservatism are right-of-center political philosophies, but they are definitely not the same thing: Conservatives want to keep things how they are; authoritarians want to centralize power and destroy dissent. That means then that when you label them as the same, you’re engaging in the exact same kind of error that Joe McCarthy did when he equated communism and liberalism.But it’s not just promoting inaccuracy to say that conservatism and authoritarianism are the same. It’s making the job of the authoritarians much easier. That’s because extremist movements throughout history, including Islamists, have frequently used a propaganda technique called “entryism” to disguise their radical agenda in the rhetoric of more mainstream political ideologies.Robert O. Paxton is one of many historians who have noted that 20th century fascist regimes relied upon conservative voters and parties to open the gates to power to them because they didn’t have enough votes on their own.In this episode, I’m joined by former conservative radio host Charlie Sykes to talk about all of this in the current moment. We also discuss the right wing’s free speech ruse, how authoritarianism has always been present within the modern American right, and how Republican consultants promoted extremism within their party until it became a monster that they could no longer control.There’s no doubt whatsoever that the pre-Trump Republican elites bear responsibility for encouraging the growth of authoritarianism within their party, but it’s still important that we avoid telling conservative Americans that Trump’s dictatorial policies are the same as theirs. Joe Manchin is a conservative. Donald Trump is an authoritarian.You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--Poll finds most Trump voters don’t support his big cuts to medical care--Far-right pastor brags that his Bible study class led to millions of Americans losing health insurance--How Trump’s censorship efforts are giving extremist Republicans what they’ve always wanted--Trump’s war on statisticians and the ‘liberal bias’ of reality--The ‘cancel culture’ myth was always about censoring the center-to-left--How Trumpian Republicans rebuilt Christian nationalism in the philosophical image of the atheist Friedrich Nietzsche 🔒Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction08:23 — Two political strands within the Republican party13:26 — How extremist groups hide themselves within mainstream ones using ‘entryism’18:28 — Private actors versus government censorship23:05 — Did liberals give up on persuasion after same-sex marriage rightfully won?26:10 — Charlie’s and Matt’s encounters with right-wing extremism during their Republican years31:44 — How Republican campaign operatives encouraged racism and conspiracism37:34 — The criminalization of Christianity narrative41:24 — Final thoughtsAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, today’s topic that we are going to be discussing is, what I’m calling the rate Republican free speech hoax.And it is something that has been going on for many decades now. And both you and I came out of the world of right wing media. and so we’re going to get a little bit inside baseball today in a way that you don’t typically get to do on MSNBC or other places, I think, right? But I want to go behind the curtain a bit because one of the, key points about Trumpism and the far right tradition of reaction that he comes out of is that.They also lied to people like you and me, like, oh, just as much as the [00:04:00] voters who will vote for Trump and have no idea what he stands for. They also lied to the talk show hosts like you and the conservative bloggers, former conservative bloggers like me. CHARLIE SYKES: Well, you know what, I’ve been thinking a lot about, the, argument that you will sometimes hear that, that Trump, that Trumpism is somehow a logical extension of American conservatism. which of course is not. It is a radical break. We, it is not conservative in any sense. It is in fact a radical right wing ideology.But to your point, for years, and it really peaked, I think in the last couple of years, Republicans and the MAGA world dawned the cloak of being free speech absolutist, that they were the champions of it. Now, this was a reaction I think to some of the excesses that we saw in recent years, on academic university campuses. And one of the through lines, even though I described myself as a conservative, one of the through lines of a lot of [00:05:00] what I did and what you did as well, was to try to revivify classical liberalism that classical liberalism that was deeply invested in academic freedom and free speech.And you had people know the absolutist like Elon Musk, who decided that this was going to be the banner that they were going to, go into the 2024 election with. That I think has been exposed as a complete and total hoax. It is one of the biggest bait and switches ever. Doesn’t mean they’re not still principal conservatives who are part of that classical liberal tradition, but people like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, JD Vance have completely abandoned that.And I know we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but they have embraced. A, rather ranked illiberalism, and I think you and I have talked about this before there have been illiberal attacks on free speech from [00:06:00] the left and from the right, but right now, you are seeing the most aggressive illiberal use of state power to suppress speech that we have seen in decades, if ever in this country.SHEFFIELD: I mean I would say that the closest analog that we’ve had was the Japanese internment. And Trump, he’s saying he wants to lock up people who are-- who he accuses of being part of Antifa, quote unquote. But Antifa doesn’t exist, it’s not an organization nobody can get. Like no one can give them money. It’s literally not possible to give antifa money because they’re anarchists. You cannot have an organization of anarchists, and antifa hates the Democrats. So the idea that the Democrats are somehow setting up this little puppet of antifa super soldiers like it, it is just complete garbage.And it’s an obvious lie. But it’s, they don’t want you to think that through.SYKES: Yeah. But they, but it’s convenient for them. To take some of [00:07:00] the protestors and, obviously there’s a certain symbolism about Portland, there is no such thing as an organized antifa, but there are people who go under that banner and they’ll often wear masks and, they will behave badly.But you know, what Trump has done is he has inflated them because he needs an enemy, right? He needs a pretext for the deployment of truths and for the suppression of various kinds of, speech. And so this has become his pretext. If that doesn’t work, he will simply shift some other target because again, it’s all a pretext.So it may be antifa today it will be somebody else tomorrow, but it’s all a pretext to go after George Sorrows, to go after other critics and to declare various kinds of emergencies to gave him super presidential powers, which by the way, speaking of non-conservative, I mean, are you old enough to remember when conservatives were in favor of small government and they emphasized constitutional protections [00:08:00] and it was all about individual liberty, and the Second Amendment was all about people being able to resist tyranny.Now it’s like, bring it on. Bring on the super state, right? Bring on the dictator, who one day for one one term. It’s a tremendous abandonment of everything they said they were for 10 minutes ago.Two political strands within the Republican partySHEFFIELD: Absolutely. And and, I think we do in historical accuracy, standpoint that this tradition, it was always there.Some of these people were into authoritarianism from the very beginning, including William F. Buckley in his early years. In the beginning he wrote a book explicitly saying, look, there should be no free speech on college campuses.SYKES: Yes.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, God and Man at Yale. And that professors who don’t believe in Jesus should be fired, and professors who are atheists or professors who are Jewish and want to-- he wasn’t even saying that they were [00:09:00] promulgating their specific beliefs. He was just saying they don’t believe in the resurrection and so they need to be fired. Like that was, and then he wrote a book defending Joe McCarthy and saying he was great, and that you should leave him alone. Like it was, in many ways, Buckley was kind of the. With McCarthy, he was like an anti McCarthy.That’s essentially what he was doing. And a lot of people, they, it wasn’t just him like that this whole idea of Dwight Eisenhower as a communist. And that we have to stop him. Like that was a, very big thing. And the whole paranoia about United Nations, which Trump, of course is buying into as well.SYKES: Right.SHEFFIELD: So, so that stuff was always there. And, I’m curious though, from your personal experience as a former conservative talk show host like how often did you see that facet of, this authoritarian reactionism when you, when your callers and the people that you dealt with?SYKES: Well, it was always there. And I’ve described this as the recessive [00:10:00] gene of conservatism, that it was always there beneath the surface.And you can go back even further than that. So, I would encounter it, although, the conservative movement that I was part of was, I think, more aligned with classical liberalism. So let’s talk about, I want to go back to your comments about Buckley, because you’re absolutely right. But Buckley grew, he went through evolutions on race, on speech, on a variety of things.And eventually, a decade after of defending Joe McCarthy, he is playing a crucial role in expelling and excommunicating some of the far right you to some of the John Birch Society, the Robert Welch’s, the KKK, the antisemites, et cetera. He also played a significant role in exiling, at least temporarily, people like Pat Buchanan from the conservative movement because of their antisemitism.But, as you point out, there’s a long tradition of this in American culture. In fact, we can go back [00:11:00] you were mentioning McCarthy era as one of the worst areas. Keep in mind that Joe McCarthy was not president of the United States. We talked about this is the worst sinces McCarthy, well, let’s talk about that, because Dwight Eisenhower was the president, not Joe McCarthy. Imagine Joe McCarthy with the power of the presidency, the power of the FBI, the power of the Department of Justice. What, the would have looked like. We’d gone through a previous red scare, believe it or not, under Woodrow Wilson, kind of forgotten about that American nightmare where we had the Palmer raids, where we had a, an extremely weaponized department of justice that we now and suppressed free speech, particularly socialist speech in some of the most aggressive ways. For some reason, that’s all been memory hole.But I always think going back with your question, there was always a push and pull on the right. Where some of the people, and again, you’re seeing the same thing right now where you have this sort of nationalist nativist right [00:12:00] versus what I thought was the ascendant part of conservatism, and this is what I got wrong. I thought the, reformist, wing of the party that embraced classical liberalism, that brace Cree speech, academic freedom inclusiveness was in fact the future of the party.You look back on that now, and it was clearly a delusion. Donald Trump and MAGA decided that, no, that’s a dead end. We’re going to go with blood and soil. And blood. And soil also means that we’re going to use the state to shape the culture in our own image as opposed to what conservatives had argued for a half a century.That government has a very limited role, and what’s crucial about small government. Is that the smaller government is the greater the sphere for individual freedom. The larger government was the more that sphere of individual freedom [00:13:00] is truken. Well look at Trump and JD Vance and the FCC right now. They are expanding government power and ly every corner of American life and culture, which again, is so diametrically opposed to what we were told.Conservatism was back in well again from, since the end of World War II.How extremist groups hide themselves within mainstream ones using ‘entryism’SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. So you have these two ideologies, conservatism and reactionism, and, a lot of people I think don’t understand that there are, that these are different things.And from a historical standpoint, the analog is looking at the Soviet Union and liberalism. So with McCarthy both, he was saying that everyone who was a liberal was a communist. Right. But also the communists were saying that they were just good liberals.SYKES: Liberals in a hurry, right?SHEFFIELD: Liberals in a hurry. Yeah. That was their catch phrase. That was [00:14:00] this phenomenon of extremist groups trying to label themselves as part of a mainstream, nonviolent, free speech associated movement. This is called entryism political science, where that’s what they do, is that they wrap and this happens across the world, across ideologies.This also happens in, in Islamic dominated countries where Islamism is an ideology which says there should be no democracy. There should only be religious authoritarianism. And, but I’m just a regular Muslim. This just happens over and that’s what the key to Trump’s continued support is. That he’s lied to conservatives and told them I’m one of you.But he is a reactionary authoritarian who as you said wants a, gigantic government and he literally is taking pieces of private businesses like Intel and and doing everything that they said Joe [00:15:00] Biden was tiring for. Donald Trump is doing it. And then the same thing with, all of these I conspiracies like of Alex Jones, about all the globalists are taking over the world.They’re trying to get rid of American sovereignty. Well, you know what? There are people that are doing it, and it’s people like Peter Thiel. It’s people like Bellagio, Serena Bassan. It’s like, these tech oligarchs, they’re the ones that are doing it. And the same thing with the NRA. And the government’s coming after you and wants to round you up as a citizen.Well, yeah, they are. And it’s your side that’s doing it. Like that. What they, that’s what they tell you.SYKES: Well, I radically agree with you. I think this is an important point for, progressives to realize because, and again, I am frustrated with the people who are saying that there is this straight line through all conservatism that you know, that, if you supported MIT Romney, supported John McCain or any of the Bushes or wild Reagans that you created Donald Trump, this plays into.the Trumpian hands because it normalizes what’s happening now. [00:16:00] It says that it’s just a continuation it, that it’s just the same old, and I think you and I are arguing here. I think this is very important that. It is a big mistake. I think this is the same old, or that this is normal or that this is a continue.It is a very radical break. Now, again, there were these recessive genes. They were always there, but it was not the whole story. And I think the distinctions that you know, that are so important, it is important to make a distinction between say Hubert Humph…

Full show notes at the publisher

What Charlie Kirk knew Oct 10, 2025

Show notes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community

Episode Summary

If you pay any attention at all to American politics, you have heard by now about the death of Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist who was killed at one of his events. No one deserves to die for their political views, of course, but there is no question that Kirk was a complex figure and far from the saint that reactionary media and activists have been portraying him as.

There is one thing, however, that everybody agrees on, and that is that Charlie Kirk had a phenomenal grasp of how to organize and fund-raise for his beliefs. He was able to turn his group Turning point USA into a political behemoth with tentacles that reach into all major political issues.

For years here at Flux, we’ve been trying to warn people about what Kirk was up to and how he was growing his groups. And so I thought it would be good at this point to catch up with a friend of the show, Matthew Boedy, to do an update about his reporting on Turning Point and what he found out since he appeared on the show in 2022.

Matthew is also out with a new book that describes the Christian supremacist movement that Kirk was part of called The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy, and it’s very much worth checking out.

In our discussion, we talk about Kirk’s organizational prowess—and his split presentation to the public as a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist while also working tirelessly to censor and suppress the speech of people he didn’t like, including Matthew himself.

We also talk about the future and what left-leaning people can learn from Kirk and the organizations that he created.

The video of this episode 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!

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

05:52 — The Seven Mountains Mandate explained

09:56 — Kirk’s evolution from free speech to militancy

11:20 — Democrats’ failure to respond to reactionary organizing

14:05 — The power of events and community building

17:20 — Evangelical zeal and political colonization

19:25 — Kirk’s rivalry with Nick Fuentes

22:46 — TPUSA’s “Professor Watch List” censorship and Kirk’s hypocrisy

29:28 — Kirk as martyr, not thought leader

34:48 — International expansion to South Korea and Japan

36:33 — Kirk’s bizarre fear of imaginary witches

43:57 — The irony of gun violence and asymmetrical rhetoric

49:06 — The future of Turning Point and American politics

Audio Transcript

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Trump’s shutdown strategy is far more radical than you know Oct 02, 2025

Show notes

The U.S. federal government shut down on Wednesday morning with both parties unable to come to a budget agreement. It’s the fourth budgetary shutdown of Donald Trump’s presidencies as he and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought are trying to aggregate as much power as possible to rebuild the administrative state in their image as they unilaterally seize funds allocated by Congress and try to circumvent civil service laws to fire public employees.Being mostly a con artist and grifter, Trump is primarily interested in being praised and using the public treasury as his personal piggy-bank. But Vought has much larger ambitions, ones that are far more dangerous.In a 2023 interview with a far-right Christian podcast, Vought said that his public policy was motivated out of a desire to force America to “understand the reality that it has to obey God.” New York Times reporter Coral Davenport profiled earlier this week the many ways in which Vought is implementing this fanatical vision, even as she (unfortunately) downplayed its religious origin.While Vought is historically talented as a Republican administrator, his larger vision of a government that focuses its spending on military and policing rather than public service is very much in line with decades of reactionary Republican tradition. In this podcast discussion, we give an overview of what Vought and Trump are doing and how it fits within the “unitary executive theory” which was developed within the Reagan Administration during the 1980s.We also discuss how shutting down the government seems to have been forced upon Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as his popularity among the Democratic base has plummeted to such a degree that more of his voters disapprove of him than approve. It’s clear that the American people need and want a real opposition party to manifest as Trump and Vought are assaulting American liberty and public administration.Please visit Matthew’s website, Flux, and Don’s website Can We Still Govern, if you would like to hear more from us individually in the future.Audio TranscriptYou can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. this is another Live Theory of Change episode. Thanks for being here and, thank you to Don for being here. so, Don, just if you can, for let’s maybe give a little brief introduction of ourselves to our respective audiences, just to let people know. so why don’t you go ahead and go first.DON MOYNIHAN: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. I’m Don Moynihan, I am a professor of public policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I study government, I study public administration, and so I’m very interested in what’s happening right now.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, this is definitely a time for your field of research, no question.Hey everybody, I am Matthew Sheffield, and I am a, podcaster and writer, and I write about the, psychology of politics and the history of religious authoritarianism. And so, Intersects well with, who Russ Vought is, and we will talk about that, as we get into it. so, but why don’t we, kick off here as we’re getting started with, let’s just do a bit of a lay of the land.So, today’s Thursday, October 2nd, and the government was shut down as of midnight on Wednesday Eastern time. So, where do things stand right now, Don?MOYNIHAN: So, a shutdown has commenced, what is standard at, this point is that some percentage of federal employees are deemed as essential and they continue working, but without pay.Some federal employees are deemed non-essential, and they are basically told to go home. Do not open their computer, do not perform any tasks until the shutdown is resolved.SHEFFIELD: Yes, that’s right. And, are they being paid during this shutdown or.MOYNIHAN: They are not being paid. [00:02:00] And typically we assume that federal employees will get back pay, after the shutdown ends.So Congress will usually pass some sort of legislation to ensure that they do not lose out financially as a result of it being unable to pass, appropriations bills on time. But currently, if you’re a federal employee, you are not getting paid.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. and, during the, or leading up to the shutdown and as it’s been continuing, the, Trump regime has been saying that they’re going to use the, shutdown as an opportunity to engage in massive layoffs, as a threat to kind of attempt to force Democrats to, reopen the government, at their, with the Republican demands and.It’s a, it looks like at least as of now, that the, Senate Democrats, and this is the Senate Democrats who we’re talking about here because the house already passed the continuing resolution, the de Democrats have said that they believe that Trump was going to do these layoffs anyway. And that’s a very good surmise, I would say.MOYNIHAN: Yeah. and this is where we start to move from what is typical with shutdowns to what is now, I think, pretty unprecedented. so we don’t have any previous shutdown where one of the negotiation tactics on the part of the president was to say, if you don’t go along with me, I’m gonna fire a bunch of employees.Like that is completely new. And from a legal perspective, there is nothing happening with the shutdown that requires Russ Foul or Trump to fire employees or reduce services in, in that way. Right? There’s no legal mandate. And I think this is an important point because there’s gonna be a lot of disagreement about this in the coming days.You heard [00:04:00] Trump, I think yesterday saying If, there’s a shutdown, there has to be layoffs. Not true. The layoffs are a choice. They are not required by law, and we certainly don’t see them in precedent. and so this moves the ball much further of away from what we’ve seen in the past. Senate Democrats are the only actors here with a real opportunity to negotiate because they are the only ones who can filibuster continuing resolution at this point.And they’ve chosen to make healthcare subsidies. the thing that they’re going to argue over, whether that’s a good strategy or not, we’ll find out. but that, as of a week ago, the dynamics were basically, you have Senate Democrats saying. Extent healthcare subsidies, they’re very popular.You cut them during the summer. and Republicans say no. And now we have Democrats saying the same thing and Republicans saying, not just no, but the longer this goes on, the more we’re gonna fire public employees and increasingly the more we’re gonna cut money going to blue states. So this is another thing that is new vote is also, impounding spending going to blue states, billions of dollars in infrastructure to New York City, billions of dollars in environmental spending going to eight blue states. and so this sort of aggressive one ups one upmanship is really a break from the past.SHEFFIELD: It is, yeah. And one of the other aspects of in which they’re doing that is that they are forcing, or I guess they’re not forcing yet.But they are advising employees and administration officials to put up anti-democratic messages on their websites or in their auto out of office replies. and that is unprecedented. And, it’s, it is using the gover, the machinery of [00:06:00] government to, for explicitly partisan ends.And, everybody often talks about the Hatch Act, quote unquote. but that’s, it’s obviously dead, but, to be in, in, all honesty, it was never really enforced, the way that it should have been. And this is one of the results of it, I would say.MOYNIHAN: I think it, it can be selectively enforced.I mean, there was a period not so long ago where it was sort of enforced, but imagine if you were a federal employee and you posted on the government website that Trump was to blame for the shutdown. You would probably be investigated for Hatch Act violations. You’d probably be fired first, and then maybe investigative for that, or imagine that your emails contained anti-Trump messaging.And that was deemed to be a violation of the, norm and legal expectation that federal employees don’t use resources for campaign purposes. you could expect to be investigated. And so partly it feels like the Hatch Act is a, like a sort of dead letter, not because the law has been repealed, but the Office of Special Counsel is just not going to implement it any longer.We saw numerous violations in the first Trump administration, and it became clear that Trump political appointees could basically. Do whatever they wanted. but if I was a federal employee, I would still be very worried that saying anything negative about Trump would get me fired. And we know, for example, before the election, tens of thousands of federal employees had foer requests for their emails from a heritage funded, set of actors.So the Heritage Foundation wanted to go through these emails, wanted to see if someone had said something negative about Trump, and then I think convey that information to the administration to help fire these employees. what we’re seeing now is sort of a step beyond that, which is where, if you go to government [00:08:00] websites, there’s explicit language blaming Democrats.So it’s very partisan. These government websites are public resources. You also have the administration telling employees in your communication with the public, please use this language that blames the Democrats. And so it feels a lot like coerced speech. it’s, putting words in the mouth of these public employees that is intended to help Trump in his negotiations with Democrats.and so it goes beyond, I think, even Hatch act violations to really weaponizing the administration. So they become this sort of partisan set of soldiers in Trump’s army.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And, and it is, yeah. And it is unprecedented. And, and I, and it goes to something that, we’ll get into a bit later, but I wanna kind of preview it here first is that, the, rank partisanship, the vicious hatred.of fellow Americans, to weaponize government directly against them in a way that deprives some of their livelihood, of forces them to say certain things. these are all things that, republicans have imagined, has been going on to them, for many decades, when in fact it never did.that, and, but they’ve been imagining this for many, years, because, well, I guess we can get into it a bit more. So, so on your, on your site, you published a, piece from two authors that really did, talk about this from a governing standpoint that, that, talked about that the, two parties have fundamentally different viewpoints of government.And so, we’ll, get into the sort of philosophical and moral one later, but let’s talk about the, governance side first, if you would. It may not be.MOYNIHAN: Yeah, so [00:10:00] you’re talking about a piece by, Terry Mo at Sanford University Hoover Institution. He’s written a lot of critical work about public sector unions, for example, so not a died in the Will progressive by any means.I think more center right as a writer and a Will Howell, who’s the dean of the Policy School at Johns Hopkins University. They have a new book about the presidency. They’ve written about that topic for a long time, and typically they’ve, written the argument that presidents should have somewhat more authority, and in this book they’re saying, let’s revisit that argument and see, why Now that has become sort of a dangerous topic when you have a proto authoritarian like Trump saying, if you give me this authority, I’m going to use it in really abusive ways.And they make basically. One big point about how the parties think about government. The presidents that come from a Democratic or Republican party have a shared interest in accumulating power to achieve certain goals like that. you want more authority, you want more political appointees, you want more control over policy implementation, and that’s been true of both parties.Clearly since the 1970s, like both parties have been centralized in authority in the White House, adding more political appointees. So that’s the symmetric symmetrical part of how Democrats and Republicans think about government. The asymmetrical part is Republicans have become, especially since Nixon, just deeply suspicious of the administrative state, assume that the administrative state is there to undermine their authority.So have built up sort of theoretical frameworks and legal frameworks to try and work around that suspicion. and so if you think about something [00:12:00] like the unitary executive theory, which maybe you haven’t heard of before, but, and certainly 10 years ago, none of us were talking about this is this novel theory about the constitution that, effectively the presidents have king like power over the executive branch.And so the Republican solution to this problem of distrust of the bureaucracy is to put more and more power into the person of the president, at least when it’s a Republican president. when Joe Biden is in power, then maybe that’s a different story. The risk of that is that it’s also a recipe for authoritarianism.If you put immense power into the hands of a single individual, that is going to lend itself very much to centralizing authority in the way that an authoritarian would want. And so this theory of government is coinciding with the arrival of Trump on the world stage and in particular in the presidency, and taking control in a way that I think is quite dangerous for democracy.And one thing I want to point out, you mentioned the weaponization, argument. so Rual, Rusal will talk about him a lot. I think about shutdowns when he finishes first. Oh,SHEFFIELD: and I’m sorry, we should say he’s the office of management and budget director. Just for people who don’t know.MOYNIHAN: Yeah. he is again, in a normal administration, a person you would never hear about, right.And he was in that position at the end of Trump’s first term, left government, created the center for Renewing America. and basically articulated a lot of the blueprint for Trump’s second term in documents he published there. And also, as part of project 2025, but the weaponization of government. trope really comes from votes, like if you can see [00:14:00] that language in his center for Renewing America publications and documents.You can see him push that language into Congress. You can see Jim Jordan then taking it when he’s creating the weaponization committee. and so there’s this incredible irony. I think Vol has done more to weaponize government than almost anyone with the possible exception of, Pam Bondi. but he’s also the person who’s probably most responsible for creating the, nomenclature around this idea of victimization of Republicans that the government has been weaponized against us in the last few years.SHEFFIELD: yeah, exactly. And that is an, important point. And, this, what he’s doing, there is a historical parallel, in the, well, the Nazi Germany government. They had this concept that they called, glide, she toon, which, was for them, that was, that they needed to take control of the administrative state, and so they were going to fire as many people as they could fire.and they were going to seize control of the bureaucracy and use it to their end. And, this was a systematic, approach that they followed. and, and I think that’s, it’s a, critical thing to know that historical parallel because again, like, and this is why I wanted to do this space with you, because you understand this institutional history and the power politics of administration in a way that I think most, American Center left people really don’t pay attention to the p…

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Trump’s mass censorship is what far-right Republicans have always wanted Oct 01, 2025

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Episode Summary Since he became president for the second time, Donald Trump has launched the largest assault on free speech that we’ve seen since Japanese Americans were interned because of their family origins. Among many other things, Trump signed an executive order classifying “antifa” as a terrorist organization, even though there are no actual antifa organizations. The regime has also launched investigations against private citizen organizations like the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundation. Trump has stolen billions of dollars from private universities like Harvard and Columbia because they dared to tolerate student protests against Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.Trump has even demanded that all late night television comedians be fired for making jokes about him, and his FCC chairman’s threats against broadcast television companies have led to the cancellation of the number-one host, CBS’s Stephen Colbert, and the suspension of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel until public outcry forced Disney to bring him back.All of these attacks against free speech—and this is only just a short listing—must be fought tooth and nail. But censorship opponents must also realize that Trump’s censorship agenda is actually the fulfillment of what far-right Republicans have wanted for 70 years, as exemplified by the infamous Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, and his number-one defender and proponent, William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review magazine.Buckley’s love of censorship and his contemporary allies’ love of it as well should be more widely known, especially because the anti-freedom agenda that they had for America is now being enacted by Donald Trump today. Joining me to discuss this and a lot more is Seth Cotlar. He’s a professor of history at Willamette University, where he teaches and writes about the American right and early American history. He’s also writing a book on a white nationalist activist who became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party.The video of this episode 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—William F. Buckley fought for control over the American far right rather than trying to exorcise it—How Fictitious Republicans hide right-wing extremism from the media and the public—The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of Republicans pretending to be the real liberals—How right-wing college students invented canceling professors—Trumpy cultural products are horrible, here’s why—The mainstream media were ‘sanewashing’ far-right Republicans long before Donald Trump—Big Tobacco pioneered many of the propaganda techniques used today in the 1970s—Fitness has always been politicized, even if you didn’t realize itAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:52 — The Republican party’s entwined relationship with reactionaries11:05 — Do reactionaries distinguish between private criticism and state censorship?15:45 — William F. Buckley’s legacy of censorship22:33 — Antisemitism and conspiracy theories in reactionary thought25:15 — Ben Shapiro’s appearance on a white supremacist podcast30:29 — Taking Trump seriously and literally35:45 — The Antifa terrorist designation and its origins40:10 — Ezra Klein and the problem of engaging with bad faith actors47:02 — Thomas West and the absolute poverty of reactionary historiography54:45 — PragerU’s bizarre AI history videos01:00:58 — The anti-Americanism of the reactionary right01:06:32 — Trump’s declining poll numbers and the informed electorate01:10:37 — The pleasure some take in illiberalism and cruelty01:18:29 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So I wish we were talking under better circumstances, but the long and short of it is that the the recent assault on free speech and civil liberties that Donald Trump has been conducting, it’s come as a surprise to a lot of people. But for historians like yourself, this is actually the fulfillment of what the reactionary right in America has wanted since the very beginning.SETH COTLAR: Yeah, no, there’s a long history of this on the right, not necessarily inside the Republican party. But you know, as the Republican Party has moved rightward, it has kind of moved closer to those voices on the right. [00:04:00]They usually, at least since World War II, justified it in terms of anti-communism, was the way they understood it. So they, they thought, that communism was an existential threat to the United States, and hence communists should not have free speech rights in the U.S. And so, that’s how they justified their various efforts to run the kind of McCarthyite movement in the fifties, but then it continues on into the sixties and so on.And so, this is why when contemporary politicians refer to center-left American politicians as communists, it’s simultaneously kind of laughable, but it’s also kind of ominous. Because that it is the rationale that historically was used by people on the right to justify squelching free speech.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, It really has. And and I mean, and I guess we could say that it kind of started with the Red Scare, in the early 20th century. And they’ve never really gotten a different tactic since then, which is especially ironic considering that the Democratic party, economically speaking, has moved quite a bit to the right. And only recently, maybe has had some kind of pushback from their own voters against that.But you know, like the idea of Democrats being communists is just laughably stupid, but it’s effective, I think, for a lot of people.COTLAR: It is. Well, and, this is part of the deal with kind kind of right-wing propagandists, the charge of communism never really had to have much legitimacy to it, or heft. The John Birch Society famously regarded Dwight Eisenhower as a communist. Robert Welch claimed that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist, which at the time most people were like: Wait, seriously, you’re, kidding, right? And he wasn’t kidding.Like he really meant it. Yeah, he did. And somehow, I mean, at the time they were an object of great ridicule. But [00:06:00] enough people were kind of willing to plausibly believe it. And in the the late fifties and early sixties, reason why that charge sometimes stuck with some, particularly kind of deranged people, often it it had to do with the Little Rock Nine.And that Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to integrate the Little Rock School 1957. And And so by communism. Communism is is like a great floating signifier, right? And what, what, people meant by communism was like the integration of schools, for example, is one thing people associated with communism or that that Dwight Eisenhower might be, slightly okay with the existence of labor because of this, therefore obviously he was a communist, right? Because he was willing treat labor unions as if they have a right to exist. And so the charge of communism on the part of these right-wing activists has nothing to do with the actual understanding of the. They haven’t read Marx and they don’t understand communism is.It’s, a, it’s just a a smear that they can then link to other causes that they know maybe their audience isn’t happy about, doesn’t agree with. Common charge is that the L-G-B-T-Q movement is part of a communist effort demoralize and undermine the morality of Americans. Right? So communism just becomes this kind of catchall term that you use to explain why particular group or this particular movement is not just other Americans who are maybe different from you, but rather there are other Americans who are your existential enemy who must be silenced crushed in order to save America.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.The Republican party’s intertwined relationship with reactionariesSHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And, Trump, I mean, he’s made that viewpoint very explicit. It in the elite circles of the Republican party, [00:08:00] these types of expressions, they were, they tended. And you’ve done a lot of research on your own scholarship about how the, Republican party in Oregon and elsewhere had kind of, they relied on these reactionaries for votes and for money.But they always tried to keep them from having power and from the public knowing fully who they were. It was like they were the crazy wealthy aunt in the attic who owned the house, but they didn’t ever want to let her out. And that’s kind of the model that they followed for a long time, I think.COTLAR: Yeah, no, for sure. And there was a real so it’s been interesting to see people like Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz and Carl Rove speak out against what happened with Jimmy and I don’t know how much credence to give this, I don’t know how much faith actually making these arguments, but, they are saying what is the the right thing to say, which is that the FCC putting pressure on private companies to fire people because of their speech is, it’s like the low hanging fruit of Civics 1 0 1, right.That every educated American should know. And so, Princeton educated Ted Cruz, and I don’t know where Tucker Carlson college, but you know these are not unintelligent people—SHEFFIELD: Somewhere expensive.COTLAR: —So, yeah. yeah. So, so, and they’re now saying the right thing. Who knows? Why they’re saying it or what the impact will be But but, this is where having someone who is the head of your party who either doesn’t know or just doesn’t care, right. That, like, as the president, you don’t issue a statement telling NBC who who they’re supposed to hire and fire for their late night shows. I, believe according to the tenets of originalism that was in article two, that the president gets to decide on those late night shows.It’s so just facially, ludicrous, and authoritarian. But the GOP used to be dominated by [00:10:00] people who would immediately clock that and call it out and say, no, this is not the role of the president to do this. But now the party is comprised of a large number of people who are perfectly fine with the president doing this apparently.And then a couple people who are willing their neck out and say, this is bad, but who obviously are not going to do anything about it. And let alone. Criticize the president and the head of their party for doing it. So it’s the political culture of the party isn’t a really bad authoritarian place.And I, my worry is that, if we congratulate Ted Cruz too much right now for saying the right things can imagine a future, a few months down the road where Cruz is is like, well, I, this isn’t good, but, these people are communists. And so, free speech is a difficult issue.And so, we need to, in hard times, we need to rethink our principles. I hope he doesn’t do that. But as we’ve, the, past track record Republican politicians over the last 10 years should not give us great hope that they’re actually going to, stand up for principle.Do reactionaries distinguish between private criticism and state censorship?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it should not.The other thing also in the right wing reactions to Jimmy Kimmo getting suspended indefinitely by a, b, C it’s also been kind of fascinating in that I think a lot of them do not distinguish between private actors criticizing somebody and a government official with force of law power criticizing someone and ordering someone to be fired.they don’t seem to like, they, make no distinction. So like I often I’ll see them say, oh, well, you guys got Gina Carrano, the actor, fired from Star Wars. And it was like, well actually those were private citizens expressing their opinions. Right. And the government had nothing to do with her being fired, But they, genuinely seem to place no distinction between, private media actors or [00:12:00] private citizens and the Democratic Party. Like, and this is also why, for instance, they impute any violence done at a left wing protest. that’s actually the Democratic party. The highest people in the party are responsible for that violence, even if they condemn it and don’t support it.It’s really astonishing. And, it’s not, I don’t think it’s an act though, which is weird. I don’t know. What do you think?COTLAR: Yeah, no, no, and it, right, it’s the distinction between civil society actors mean, there’s a long history of boycotts in the US right? I mean, yeah. Saying of course on the American Revolution right now.I mean, that was basically how the mobilization for the American Revolution worked, is that organized boycotts. They ostracized people who broke the boycotts. If you were caught drinking tea, your neighbors would tut at you and tell you shouldn’t do it. And sometimes if you refused, could get a little ugly, So, the history of civil society functioning in such a way as to persuade slash encourage people to alter their behavior in the name of contributing to a kind of broader project is hundreds and hundreds of years old. It’s like the most common thing in the world. And. Yes. That is a very different thing than someone with political power who has the ability to revoke an FCC license for a multi-billion dollar company telling you, telling that company what they should do.Right. are are completely things. The other thing thing that I will point out is that, back in, I think 20 18, 20 19 McKay Coppins wrote this great article for The Atlantic that was was all about this coordinated network of cancellation organized by Donald Trump Jr. And coordinated with Breitbart and, eventually lives of TikTok, I think was involved with this, where they collect all of this data on journalists and other a activists who they don’t in preparation for the time when they might have to cancel them.[00:14:00]So the the idea that like, this is such a terrible thing, is is like this is exactly their modus operandi, right? This is what they do in terms of their approach towards trying to use intimidation, et cetera. And oftentimes the information that they select is sometimes wrong, sometimes very like decontextualized, et cetera.But the, the idea that like they’re opposed to the cancellation of private citizens for what they say is just. Ludicrous. I mean, that’s basically, so, that is one of the main things that they do in as part of their, I mean, that’s what they’re doing now with like, people who said things they don’t like about Charlie Kirk online, they’re collecting, names of and trying to get them fired.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also government officials saying that as well, JD Vance telling people call and inform on your coworkers and your friends family if they criticize St. Charlie the beloved,COTLAR: right?Yeah. And like, and there is a difference between the president’s son coordinating these networks with the owners of some of the largest, right-wing outlets in order to coordinate their messaging in order to target people.That’s a bit different than just some citizens on Blue Sky being like, man, I don’t Disney. I’m going to cancel my Disney subscription because I don’t like that they made this, decision. So, the the dynamics of power at play here, both economic power, but more importantly political power when the president does it or the vice does it, or the FCC chair does it. Yeah, completely different different things.William F. Buckley’s legacy of censorshipSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and then going back further in the history. I think a lot of people who are educated today have this false concept of William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. That they, often, I [00:16:00] oftentimes people say, gosh, I wish the Republican Party was like, it was when Buckley was alive.And it’s like. You guys have paid attention to his actual life and the things that he did. I mean, his first book, God and Man at Yale, is literally him saying:…

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‘Abundance’ is neoliberalism redux Sep 27, 2025

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community

Episode Summary

Whether it’s the SwiftBoat Veterans or Moms for Tyranny, right-wing groups are notorious for popping up overnight in American politics, but this past year saw something very unexpected, an organization and collection of people saying they support a politics of “abundance” headed by people who are often perceived as being on the leftward side of the political spectrum, writers Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein.

With its unhealthy obsession with bipartisanship, abundance politics is yet another example of pathological liberalism, but unfortunately, it’s worse than that. Scratch even a bit beneath the surface and you’ll realize that this endeavor is nothing more than neoliberalism rebranded—and paid for by the same reactionary billionaires who are bankrolling Donald Trump’s fascistic policies.

Even worse, far-right activists are using the “abundance” branding as an attempt to market policies that harm Americans and democracy. The guest list at the Abundance Conference in DC earlier in September made this clear, featuring a speaker calling for “deportation abundance,” a governor who banned fluoride in public water, and a talk from an advocate of Trump’s illegal “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant prison.

Warmed-over libertarianism is not the answer to what ails America, but it is nonetheless the case that governments at the federal, state, and local levels are failing to serve the public in many ways. It’s too difficult to start businesses, it’s too difficult to receive public assistance, and it’s far too expensive to get college degrees.

Kate Willett, my guest on today’s episode, has done the hard work of digging into the funding and the origins of the Abundance movement. She’s also a standup comedian and the co-host of the Dystopia Now podcast.

This audio-only episode is for paid Flux subscribers only. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere. Paid subscriptions are available only on Patreon and Substack.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:14 — Major ‘abundance’ figures and the perpetual influence of libertarianism

11:49 — Abundance is the libertarian attempt to re-brand neoliberalism

15:41 — Silicon Valley billionaires have rejected ‘small government’ approach

18:55 — The religious nature of techno-post-libertarianism

24:31 — Peter Thiel’s Antichrist obsession and René Girard

29:21 — ‘Dark Abundance,’ an explicit attempt to include fascism in the movement

39:24 — How corporate interests hijack positive YIMBY movements

43:43 — Building effective political coalitions

48:59 — Toward a fusionist left policies

Audio Transcript

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To stop Trump’s authoritarianism, his opponents must understand and wield power Sep 23, 2025

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Episode Summary In a generic sense, everyone knows that politics is about power. But when you look at how America’s two major parties use the power that they have, there’s no question whatsoever that Republicans understand power politics while Democrats have a much more passive attitude toward it.This has been true since at least 1964 when a dedicated group of reactionaries took over the Republican party and installed their extremist candidate Barry Goldwater and proceeded to systematically cancel and remove anyone who stood in their way. Now during the second administration of Donald Trump, his extremist administration is pulling all the levers of power it can to cancel budgets, cancel people, and threaten anyone who stands in its way.In response, congressional Democratic leaders have mostly resorted to writing strongly worded letters which obviously isn’t cutting it. But what can be done?Karen Attiah, my guest on today’s episode has been thinking and writing a lot about power and why it’s necessary to protect freedom. And she has direct experience at what actual canceling looks like, having been fired from the Washington Post for accurately quoting the late Charlie Kirk. This came after she had a course canceled by Columbia University following her speaking out against Israel's genocide in Gaza and in favor of racial equality.Since the Columbia incident, Karen has started Resistance Summer School, a new effort to teach the history of democratic rights movements which she started after Columbia University canceled a course she was teaching after the university was targeted by dishonest attacks from far-right activists trying to censor students and instructors.And since being fired by the Post, Karen will be redoubling her writing efforts on Substack, so be sure to subscribe. This is the exactly correct response to authoritarianism. Dictatorship is not inevitable, but it wants you to think that it is. The American people did not stand for Disney’s suspension of its late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, and after millions of people canceled their subscriptions, it had to reinstate him.Important Note: Our conversation was recorded September 10, 2025, before Kirk was shot at a public event in Utah so we do not discuss her reaction to it.The video of this episode 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—After centuries of intellectual dominance, liberalism has become uninterested in defending itself—Far-right media will attack the broader left for any reason, even completely fabricated ones—Trump beat Harris because Republicans have an ecosystem while Democrats have a coalition—JB Pritzker’s tough response to Trump’s authoritarian acts and his progressive policies are pointing a better way for Democrats—Americans want big ideas, even if they’re terrible ones—Republicans treat politics like viral marketing, Democrats don’t—History shows that right-wing activists never believed in free speech and that ‘cancel culture’ panic was only about seizing powerAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction10:30 — Universities' lost touch with the people is why many keep folding to authoritarianism16:48 — The political right understands what power can do much better than the political left22:01 — How living in Texas made Karen not suppose that reactionaries were serious about their ideas31:01 — Liberals stopped explaining their ideas in an easy to understand way39:18 — Democratic and other left leaders underestimate the power of religious community and knowing47:09 — The personal, cult magnetism of Donald Trump52:23 — There's little need to reach out to right-wing leaders, but some of their followers can be persuaded59:56 — Fascism isn't inevitable, but you have to have a vision and a realization that power mattersAudio 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've got a number of interesting things you are doing lately, but one of them is you've got a class that was canceled by the actual cancel culture of Donald Trump from Columbia University that you are teaching independently now. So why don't we start off with you telling us about that.KAREN ATTIAH: Sure. Yeah. It's been such a wild time on so many, in so many levels. Yeah, probably most people might know me as a journalist and a columnist and editor for, the Washington Post, but deep down inside have always wanted to teach. I've always wanted to be an academic. Actually, I ended up a journalist, but but yeah, most people might not know.My background is actually in international affairs, so I went to Columbia as a graduate student and wanted to basically like work in the UN or World Bank or maybe, diplomatic service, that sort of thing. But that experience really made me question a lot about our systems, particularly our international affairs development systems.And while I was a grad student at Columbia School [00:04:00] for International and Public Affairs, I definitely questioned like, wait a second. Why aren't we learning anything about how race intersects with development and how we see the world, how people relate to one another?And I definitely was aware that what we were being taught was a very, very, very, not only Western centric, but a very kind of American centric view of the world. And I was going to school with people from all over the world. So I just saw that as a gap. And so ever since then, I was like, man, I would love to be able to teach.What I didn't get taught as a student, so probably in the pandemic. Yeah. Columbia was like, Hey would you teach specifically with the School of International Public Affairs was like, Hey, would you like to come teach? And I, I kind of did the Heisman on him, kept them at arms distance for a little bit because I, I was like, I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready.But I was working on a syllabus on race and journalism. So I developed a syllabus for about two years or so before I finally said yes. Before I said yes to the dress, I guess, and decided to teach in 2020 for the spring of 2024. So a bit of context to that. I decided to come up with a course that explicitly looked at the development of kind of our ideas about race. Like all the way from. So 12th and 13th centuries to today, right? And looking at how this has always been a mediated process. So part of how, at a very basic level, how we develop ideas about who is us and who is them, who is like us and who is not, is through what we read, what we watch through photographs, all that stuff.So I basically explained to my students particularly when it comes to American media development of American media, that there's always been a link [00:06:00] between the relationship particularly of white colonists and European colonists and settlers with writing about non-whites without including them.And there's, there's evidence and, and really great work done about how. These early colonial papers actually made a lot of money pedaling stereotypes basically. So I ask a lot of my students, I'm like, huh, this sounds familiar, right? So fast forward a couple of months, of course went well and over-enrolled great reviews.And then I got a text message saying that my class was not going to be renewed for 2025. And obviously I was crushed. I mean, I never quite got a reason actually, whether it was. I mean, my costs over enrolled. I was also quite vocal about what I saw as Israel's assault on Palestinians during the time of the encampments and the protests that were happening at Columbia.So, and just in general, Matthew, I mean, I, I think I knew I, I cover race, I write about race. I've written about the attacks on critical white race theory and anti DEI, all of these sort of bogeyman attacks on anyone teaching about, and in particular the history of different racial groups. So I think I always kind of had a, I don't know, a bit of a, a, a, not a cloud per se, but just an, an awareness of the political climate, even at a place like Columbia.Right. I'd covered. Anti CRT efforts in Texas, in Oklahoma. And in my, the back of my mind, I think I always knew they're going to try to push this campaign all the way to the [00:08:00] top. And of course, as we've seen, it's reached the Ivys, right? So I think yeah, they canceled the costs. I was told to be quiet about it basically.So I sat on it for a couple of months, didn't say anything. People were like, you're going to hurt your career. Do you want to teach again? Don't, just wait, wait it out. And, then I saw, after Trump's victory and then I saw the attacks on DEI, I saw the, the pressure on campuses to basically, stop any programs on diversity, on DEI stop, anything that could be considered anti-white, basically, if we're going to be--SHEFFIELD: Or pro Palestinian. Yeah.ATTIAH: Or pro-Palestinian. All of that to me is connected. I don't see these things as, separate issues at all. So yeah, earlier this spring, I just was like, wait, why am I sitting around waiting for permission to basically do, at the heart of what teaching is, me talking to a group of people, like at the heart of it, it's like we all teaching and education is, is just gathering a group of listeners, having a speaker and transmitting, communicating to them.And I'm like, I don't need telling me to do that. I, I can gather people under a tree, like, like, so yeah, I put it on in Bluesky., Would anybody be interested in, in taking this version of this course? And honestly, I would've been happy with 20 people. I would've been happy with 30 people.And something like. Two or 3000 people responded. So I was like, okay, we're onto something. And just kept pulling, on the threads, put out an interest form. People were really willing to actually sign up, willing to actually, and, and what I did was offered on a sliding scale because part of the, I think injustice of what I saw even teaching is just not only are people going into crushing debt, right, to be able to [00:10:00] afford an Ivy League education, particularly in a shaky job market.But then adjuncts or a lot of people may not know is a lot of them are paid basically poverty wages and have no protections, no sort of, benefits, right? I've met adjuncts who can barely pay their rents, but they're teaching at these elite institutions that are trading off of their. Knowledge and their labor in order to power the whole thing.So for me, I was--SHEFFIELD: They can certainly afford to pay better.Universities' lost touch with the people is why many keep folding to authoritarianismATTIAH: Yeah. Right. I mean, and that's, the thing. I mean, a lot of people have probably seen the news about how big the endowments of these universities are and and how much they have in real estate. And it's just like, this doesn't make sense. At the heart of it is people who want to share knowledge and other people who want to receive it.But it's, as I said before, it's, it's almost like. And these institutions have become credentialist institutions that are hedge funds with a side of education. Right. So for me, I think it was an interesting experiment in jailbreaking that and saying, well, what if people didn't have to go into lifelong debt?And what if, as an instructor you could actually support yourself by going outside and kind of cutting out the middleman to an extent. And yeah. So we did our first class. 500 people sold out in 48 hours. We were able to do, we were able to give people scholarships and stuff. And yeah, it's been such a cool, such a cool experience.And I guess for me it's been freeing that I don't have to worry about. Some, administrator getting a chilling letter from the Department of Education or the Department of Justice and being investigated for teaching wokeness or that I can freely teach and provide a space for people about Israel Palestine because people are really hungry for that sort of, not only knowledge, but a space to be able to ask questions.So yeah, it's been [00:12:00] such a, it's birthing something out of, community outta cancellation has been, has been my thought. And, for me, like I said, I just. Seeing people? Well, it's cool that people actually really want to go back to school. I have readings of a syllabus, I have guest speakers and everything.But it's also just really cool to see people make friends, make connections, make like, just like in school, like meet new people. It's so hard to do that after you've left school. So many of us have, we're busy with our jobs and busy with our family. So I do this on Zoom, right? And I let people either watch on Zoom and then watch the recordings when they can.So I try to just make it as easy and accessible to people as possible. So. Yeah, it's been a lot of work, that's for sure. But it's definitely, I'd hope, provide a model of that. We don't have to take a lot of this lying down, and that there's no reason that, we should be banned from speaking to one another.And about history and about telling people, particularly when it comes to media, and particularly when it comes to, race. I tell my students a lot of times, I'm like, look, like I didn't learn this in school. Some of this stuff I did not learn until I was a journalist. So you shouldn't feel ashamed or guilty.You didn't, we're all taking remedial history. Yeah. So, and it doesn't matter how many degrees you have, I have PhDs in my class, I have people with master's degrees. The youngest student is 17, the oldest student is almost 80. Right. So, this is just something that everyone, everyone should know. I, I teach about the league of Nations in Woodrow Wilson and the attempt by Japan to introduce a racial equality clause at the beginning of the League of Nations, and how that was rejected actually in 1919.And for a lot of people, they're like, how do we [00:14:00] not know this? How do we not know that, that there was this effort that this was, actually a huge, huge deal for the quote unquote colored peoples of the worlds and the west just ignored it. Right. So it's a lot of that, it's a lot of unearthing history that we all, I think, should have known.But if I get the chance to reach more people this way before I was teaching 20 people, now I'm teaching 500. Then to me that's a win. So,Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, and that's, it is a, great way to, to get, make something good out of something bad that was done and, and there's a, have you ever thought about that there's a, bit of a parallel, although talk about structural inequality between what you are doing and what Barry Wes is doing?ATTIAH: I, it's so funny you said that. I think I just posted on Bluesky about her not only Free Press, but they're setting up, what is it? The, the, setup of the University of Austin, that kind of weirdo university, which is not too far from me, two and a half hours away from me. And I, I, I did think about that, right?Like, to an extent it was cool that the announcement that I made went viral to an extent about creating this out of Columbia. But I, I think, and I write and I speak all the time about the asymmetries of resources and funding when it comes to the right and the left or liberals and stuff. So, Barry Weiss being able to corral millions upon millions of dollars.me not so much. Literal millionaires. And s…

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Why everyone wants a piece of ancient Egypt Sep 19, 2025

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Episode Summary I don't get to do a lot of ancient history episodes on this show, but I always love it when I get the chance, and that's because history is a mirror of the present. Not because we judge or even fully understand the people who lived in ancient times, but because they were humans just like we are now.Ancient Egypt has always had a magnetic pull. In ancient times, people were very interested in what the Egyptians were doing, and with good reason. In more recent times, Egypt has developed an aura of mystery, especially for followers of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-day Saint movement.But there’s something even deeper than the hidden tombs and eternal life legends: A lesson of what makes us human, and what justice means.I'm pleased to be joined on this episode by Kara Cooney. She is a professor of Egyptology at the University of California Los Angeles, and she's written a number of interesting books on its history.We’ll be talking about some of the themes in one of these books in particular called The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. She's also the host of the podcast Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, which will soon be appearing in the Flux podcast feed.The video of this episode 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--Kara’s “Out of Egypt” mini-series--The ancient Greek Skeptic traditions have renewed relevance in an age of misinformation and propaganda--Why pluralism was the biggest Renaissance invention--Inside the demon-haunted world of Christian fundamentalism--The desire to submit to authority is as old as humanity itself 🔒--Susan Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation”Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction04:40 — Ancient Egyptians were regular people, even though it's easy to forget14:11 — A brief overview of ancient Egyptian history20:35 — The Exodus narrative and historical evidence28:33 — The fall of civilizations and modern parallels32:11 — Mormonism's Book of Abraham and Egyptian lore38:53 — Religious neo-orthodoxy and Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"45:08 — Akhenaten's religious revolution52:16 — The Ma'at goddess and wisdom traditions01:02:17 — Universal human understanding of fairness01:05:55 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It's great to have you, but for people who don't know you, Kara, tell us give us a little background on some of the research that you've done. What do you do in Egyptology?KARA COONEY: I've been in the field now for 30 years, which is terrifying, but I started my PhD work in 1994. So there we are. My work started with Social competition and rich people competing with each other. And I did that through the lens of coffin research. So I will forever be associated with coffins and I call myself ‘Coffin Girl’ sometimes, which is strange.But, it's amazing what you can learn from a coffin as a social document. And that's been the gift that keeps on giving because I now am embedded in coffin reuse research. So I look at how rich people would take other rich dead people out of their coffins, and they might have been related to them, they might not have been, but they will reuse those coffins for—SHEFFIELD: Oh my God.COONEY: —freshly rich dead people. And it's very much associated with collapse and crisis and ripping up social contracts and, drought and collapse, which I think are very much on the mines. Of people today. And so that work on coffin reuse has been very topical and helped me to see what we're going through, what it means, how long such collapses last, when they're the worst, things like that.[00:04:00] And then the more—I won't say it's happy and fuzzy because it's not—but the more popular side of my work is on women in power. I teach a very popular class at UCLA called Women in Power in the Ancient World. And that has driven me to work on a number of books. One on Hatshepsut, another on six queens of the ancient world, five of whom became king.And then I'm working on a book about Nefertiti right now, which is damn is it hard to get through all of that scholarship and try to determine what my story shall be. I feel the weight of that book as I'm working on it now. So that's me in a nutshell.Ancient Egyptians were regular people, even though it's easy to forgetSHEFFIELD: Okay. And then, so all, if you could also talk about just like some of the challenges that are kind of unique about studying Egyptian history compared to some of the more well,COONEY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Longer known historical please.COONEY: There, there are so many I, shall start with the over idealizing of Ancient Egypt. By us, by them, by everyone. It's a place that Herodotus said was more religious than any other, that the Egyptians were more religious than any other people. It's a place that perfected political propaganda through religious means.And because of that, we're, it's hard for us to then pull the veil aside and see authoritarianism instead of religious belief and freedom of religion and or to see a more cynical, brutal patriarchal taking rather than a fatherly guidance. And that is indeed why I wrote the book, the Good Kings, which annoyed many of my colleagues.But that book is about how we egyptologists and really the public at large, particularly in the western world, since the discovery of Alman and before that, since [00:06:00] Napoleon entered Egypt and created the description on do we really feel like we, we are connected to these people. But to have me come along and then say, you're drinking the Kool-Aid, you're becoming an apologist for these ancient kings.It's, a problem. So, I am exposing something. That is our positivism of this history at the same time, then what do you do? This is what people will say. Students will say it to me. Other colleagues will say, well, we have all of this documentation, we have these written records. How do you then parse them if what you've been given is not necessarily something that you can trust?and I say to that, well, what do you do with the Romans when they give you, you know that they're lying to you half the time? You know that every speech that somebody is giving, whether it's Mark Antony, or Cicero, has an alternative agenda. So how do you deal with that? And we need to deal with the Egyptians more in that way, but not with the politics we understand in our gut, but with a religious politics that really tries to transcend any sort of worldly grappling.And I think that's been something that I'm very much drawn to working through. But it's not easy. It's not easy to do. It demands a lot of hypothesizing from me, which means. Other scholars are like, well, now you're just making stuff up. And I have to say, well, what do you think you're going to get from King Kim Jong-Un's regime?what do you think you're going to get from a closed authoritarian regime where things happen seriously in a back smoky incense filled room? What do you, how are you going to solve this? And so that has been the really, the purpose of my career, revealing power that does not want to be revealed in a way that breaks many of the rules of scholarly training.And I, take joy in doing that. So,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And let's talk about this a little bit more though, because, I, I think an [00:08:00] unsophisticated critique of what you're doing, Kara, is that you're engaging in presentism, but in fact, not what you're doing.COONEY: No, it's not. no. I've been, accused of being universalist. And one, it was a very important book review written by Christina Riggs in the Times Literary Supplement of my first popular book on Hot. She, and she even quotes the scene that made her think that I was being universalist, where I talk about Hatshepsut's birth of her daughter.And, I made it a human visceral experience. And I talked about the blood and the shit and the screams and what any birth is like. And tried to imagine hot shep's, it's emotional state when she gave birth to a girl. I can't know any of these things. I say in the text that I don't know any of these things, but I was accused of being universalist, which you take to heart because it means that you're imposing your own scholarly ideals on or present way of living upon the ancient world.And what it instead I am trying to do is to un-fetishize The ancient Egyptians have been wholly separated from us as these people, as Zhi Haas would say. The, most famous egyptologists right now are people of magic and mystery. And, if you're a people of magic and mystery, then you've set them aside and you, don't treat them as we are. They are somehow different.And we do this with the ancient world quite a bit, but particularly with the ancient world, we feel less connected to. We particularize them. We, make the work about that particularism and we demand it. We say that, oh, you can't compare this and that because this is within this space.And these people were of their time and thinking of their time. And then I come up around and say. No, I can use the word harem. I understand it's an oriental imposition. I understand it was created by the Ottoman regime to explain their collection of young women for one man and the intensification of his birth [00:10:00] regime.But I think that the ancient Egyptians had a similar system. Was it different in particularities? Yes. Should I compare it? Yes. Because the same thing is happening to women in both places. and I'm going to take it further because I have a book contracted with Rutledge that I'll be working on later in 2026.That will compare all of these harems to what Epstein created to a, serial monogamy of Donald Trump going from one woman to another to this idea that, or Elon Musk gives us a great example too, right? Where he is creating all of these children, with different women and it is a kind of harem in a sense, and they present their masculine power in late stage patriarchy in that way. I think all of these things can and should be compared.And one of my main points when people accuse me of Presentism is to say that we are them and they are us. That they gave us this patriarchal system. They help create it. There are some of the primary foundational creators of it. We are, it's last recipients. Is it more complicated? Do we have computers now and phones we carry around in our hands, yes, but it's the same system, and if people reject that and think that they have this modern exceptionalism, one would hope that COVID would school them on that one would hope that the difficulties that we're dealing with right now in terms of women's rights and freedoms and, job security and payment would school people on that.But it doesn't, one would think that the way we treat the foreigner, the, nation state boundaries, I mean the, all of these things are in the ancient records. You could compare the Book of Exodus to ice kidnappings and, people saying, oh, they will replace us and white supremacy. There's too many of them, so let's move them aside.And, other people are saying, we need to return to our place of origin. I mean, it's all, there is what I'm saying. The ancient world gave us all of the stories, and we can learn from the past to deal with the extraordinary problems that we're going through. They're not [00:12:00] different. They're not separate. That's, my main point.SHEFFIELD: Other thing is that, saying that ancient people had the same emotions and many of the same social structures or biological needs, it's saying that they were human. That's what it is.COONEY: Yes, it's, that's what it's saying and people, their heads explode. They're like, how dare you? I'm like, so I can't say Egyptians are human. I can't say ancient people are human. That's what they're saying. Yeah. They had shorter lifespans. Yeah. They had diseases we don't have, but I think we're going back to those shorter lifespans in those diseases that we used to not have, and maybe it's time to learn from those things too.SHEFFIELD: And you can see a lot of the mentality, in with regard to diseases or, medicine, with a lot of people's approaches to COVID or vaccines, like they have a genuine mystical worldview of health that it is a spiritual thing rather than a, medical or scientificCOONEY: Interestingly,SHEFFIELD: so it's fair to say, to draw theseCOONEY: It is, but Well, but you're, saying that we don't have that spiritual worldview now, or they knowSHEFFIELD: No, I'm saying someCOONEY: itself. That we do Ah, yes.SHEFFIELD: that some people have it and you can see it, that there's an innate, be, because I mean, the, reality is that, how the brain works or why it works is still a mystery. And so therefore, there's always going to be some inherent there's the, temptation to say, well, there's something magical about us.And then the further back in history you get, the more magical people become. And, this is not helpful.COONEY: No, it's not. And the distrust of the modern medical community, I think is. Real right now for a variety of reasons. That's a different podcast. so it's, it would be good to talk about these things and make ourselves more human and less robotic, less, having to fall into certain parameters.Everyone will lose weight by following this diet or that diet. It's, we're, we need, by looking at the ancient [00:14:00] people as people, I think we can find our own, humanity better that I think we've lost in the modern age, that of the last a hundred years that we have lived through.A brief overview of ancient Egyptian historySHEFFIELD: I think that's a fair point. Yeah. Well, okay, so for people who haven't really read much Egyptian history, tell us, the, major periods here for, so for people, I just want to give them a quick overview so they can have some reference point in what we're talking about here.COONEY: Yeah. We're talking about a land that became the first regional state on the globe about 5,000 years ago, so around 3000 BCE Before Current Era. You can still use BC if you like. I don't really care. They're all arbitrary times. We saw Egypt coalesce into a centralized state with one man ruling it one and that became the first dynasty.You have a proto dynasties before that. You have a pre dynastic. It's a long history before it's complicated. But where I start and where my work starts is really with the centralization of power and with that creation of patriarchal structures in a state capacity. However you define the state, that's also super interesting question to ask because it changes through time.And then you go from that early dynastic period to what we know is the old kingdom, the, time period when the pyramids were built. Third pyramid, third dynasty of the step pyramid built by Djoser fourth dynasty. You have Khufu building the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau, old Kingdom Falls. And you have the First Intermediate Period, which is the first time of civil war crisis collapse economically, socially, environmentally…

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