Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

Matthew Sheffield

Lots of people want to change the world. But how does change happen? Join Matthew Sheffield and his guests as they explore larger trends and intersections in politics, religion, technology, and media. plus.flux.community

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Mar 3, 2026 • 1h 16min

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

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

Feb 13, 2026 • 1h 26min

Robert Kennedy’s MAHA cult is making America sicker

Episode Summary Amid the constant contradictions of Donald Trump’s second administration, some of his policies have been remarkably consistent, especially those out of the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert Kennedy Junior has been ripping up decades of scientific consensus on many areas, including vaccines, diet recommendations, and transgender care. But as a lifelong politician and lawyer with no actual experience as a doctor or medical administrator, he has needed to develop a staff of people with at least some medical experience in order to tear and destroy. What kind of doctor would want to work for a parasite-ridden lawyer who brags about eating roadkill, seems to not understand how viruses work, and advocates eating lots of saturated fats? The answer is: almost none of them. But, unfortunately, there are always a few people out there with enough personal grudges and crank beliefs to do the job.Our guest on today’s program, Jonathan Howard, knows all about the new medical establishment after having seen firsthand how they promoted anti-vaccine lies and dangerously underestimated the effects of Covid-19. We had him on the program in 2022 to discuss his first book, We Want Them Infected, and he’s out with a new one examining the policy insanity of Kennedy and his underlings called Everyone Else Is Lying to You.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--Covid contrarians want you to forget that they were much more wrong than the scientific consensus--How 1970s tobacco companies pioneered the deceitful marketing strategies used by today’s conspiracy peddlers--Why the “naturalistic fallacy” is the basis of so much anti-science thinking--Marianne Williamson’s ineffective self-help politics--How “post left” grifters use contrarianism and know-nothing socialist rhetoric to push people to the far rightAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:36 — Robert Kennedy Jr. and his allies are the medical establishment, and they are responsible for what happens16:26 — The “Great Barrington Declaration” was initiated by political activists, not scientistsc20:48 — After claiming to oppose censorship, the Trumpian medical establishment is conducting it at a massive scale25:57 — Anti-vax activists have had years to do their own studies, but they have basically nothing33:34 — The cowardice of Republicans like Bill Cassidy who know better37:54 — Other people in the MAHA conspiracist movement44:41 — MAHA figures have more conflicts of interest than the scientists they hate51:24 — The looming conflict between polluters and anti-vax Republicans01:03:20 — John Ioannidis and the perils of medical contrarianism01:08:08 — Why atheist activists teamed up with far-right Christians who hate medical science01:18:44 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, I literally just released an episode catching up with a previous guest who had been on the show who had marked a lot of the negative trends that we are now seeing. And unfortunately I’m in the same spot with you, my friend, that, there’s a lot of bad things that have happened. And there are so many things that I do wanna kind of summarize of them so that we can all keep track of what’s been going on for the conversation.And as we’re talking today on January 30th, the most recent kind of news headline of this awful medical establishment that is in installed itself thanks to Trump, is that, the measles in the United States are, they are what’s being made great, it looks like.JONATHAN HOWARD: Yeah, no, measles is spreading out of control.There’s the largest outbreak in 25 or 30 year, probably 26 years, actually in, South Carolina right now. Measles seems to be. Popping up in multiple other states as well. This is of course, [00:04:00] following a very large outbreak in Texas in the spring of 2025 that killed two children, and another adult.So these were the first measles deaths in the country in about 10 or 15 years, and the first children to die, I think since 1991. and our current medical establishment is trying to control it with vitamin a cod liver oil, and by spreading disinformation about the measles vaccine as was eminently predictable.SHEFFIELD: It was. And what we’re really seeing, I think, consistently is that, that these guys are kind of across the board are, they have these old fashioned medical viewpoints. Like that’s what really what they’re doing. And they have these ideas that really have been debunked for about 80 years roughly. but they want to try again on everything seems like.HOWARD: Yeah, I was gonna say, it depends how old fashioned you’re talking about because, the measles vaccine has been around since 1963 and, probably all current members of our medical establishment, except for maybe RFK would say that they think the MMR is a very important vaccine, but if they actually felt that way, they would not be working for RFK, who has spread more misinformation about the measles vaccine and all vaccines and probably any other American in the past 20 years.And what we are seeing is that. Disinformation about the COVID vaccine is very predictably bleeding into all vaccines. So all vaccines are kind of connected in, in that if you trust the doctors who recommend them people are more likely to get the measles vaccine if they’re also told accurate information about the COVID vaccine, which they weren’t.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And they weren’t. And this is part of when, if you look back at the history that there has always been suspicion about vaccines. People have always had it since they were first [00:06:00] invented. So it’s, I guess it’s understandable even though we don’t agree with those viewpoints for people to, it does seem on the face of it on the surface that a little bit counterintuitive.You mean you’re telling me that. Injecting diseases into myself is good for me? And it’s always been a challenge, right?HOWARD: Yeah. The history of the anti-vaccine movement is as old as vaccines themselves. Even preceding Edward Jenner, as far as I know, the first known vaccinator was an English farmer by the name of Benjamin Esti, who vaccinated his children against smallpox in the 1770s or something like that.And everyone can go read about him on Wikipedia. And he faced great backlash from his community. And then when a smallpox epidemic ripped through the community, his children were spared. But all, everything that we’re hearing about vaccines. Now, all I should say, all anti-vaccine disinformation, none of this is new.It, all goes back to this idea that vaccines are in pure in some way, whereas catching a virus is natural and therefore there’s no problem with it. Or that vaccines have never been properly tested or that they are just being given by pharmaceutical companies to pad their bottom line. So no, nothing that we’re hearing now is new.What’s changed is who it’s coming from, top government officials and top doctors who came from Harvard, Stanford, UCSF and Johns Hopkins. That’s what’s new.Robert Kennedy Jr. and his allies are the medical establishment, and they are responsible for what happensSHEFFIELD: It is. And they still constantly talk about the medical establishment and all that, but they are the medical establishment.They are the ones with the power. They are the ones with the money, and they are the ones who are responsible for the deaths of these children and the other people that will die.HOWARD: Absolutely. So our current [00:08:00] medical establishment, and I love that you called them that way, they, rose to power kind of portraying themselves as these outsiders who would have controlled COVID perfectly.So they became famous not for their on the ground accomplishments, but because of their social media content in which they said they would have protected the vulnerable, they would have kept schools open, or the fact that they proposed things and they argued for things and they called for things. But now that they are in power and have been given the opportunity to prove their re real world competency they’re failing.And it is, of course not just measles. Last year we had 28,000 cases of whooping cough in this country. We had a record number, not a record, but a very high number of pediatric flu death. And of course not all of this can be laid on the hands of our current medical establishment who had just been in power for a few weeks at this time.But they’re showing that they are totally inept at controlling viruses, and I shouldn’t say even inept, indifferent to controlling viruses. They’re not making any or bacteria in the case of whooping cough, but they’re not making any attempt to do that. And they are improving incompetent leaders at the agencies that they run, the NIH, the FDA, and to some degree the CDC as well.And I say only to, to some degree because I don’t think the current director is a doctor, but, they’re proving inept leaders who are loathed and mocked by the people who work for them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and you talked about this idea that it seems like a lot of them really actually do not want to do anything to mitigate disease.And that was the title of your previous book that We Want Them Infected. I mean, so what is this? I mean, I think the idea that doctors would want people to be infected with viruses, it seems so absurd that it’s almost [00:10:00] unbelievable that a doctor would say such a thing, but what is the idea behind this here?HOWARD: Yeah, so the title from the book, We Want Them Infected, came from a pretty low level, A person in public health in the Trump administration by the name of Paul Alexander who literally said that we want them infected. But this idea originated best. I can trace it back to in March, 2020, and it was really formalized in the Great Barrington Declaration, which was written in October 20, 2020 by three people, two of whom are now very high up in the Trump administration. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who leads the NIH and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who is a, vaccine advisor at the CDC and recently off the authored a, memo, actually both of them did to decimate the vaccine schedule, but. If you listen to what they have to say about their pandemic vision today they kind of just cherry pick the most unpopular mitigation measures and say, we were only against that.So they’ll say, we just wanted kids in school. We just cared so much about education of, poor children and minorities in the working class. We just didn’t want toddler horse to wear masks. But in reality what they wanted in 2020 was as many people to get infected as possible. At least if you were in what they.Considered the not vulnerable category, which was essentially everyone under age 60 or 70 who didn’t have some significant medical comorbidity. And their idea was that you could get rid of the virus by spreading the virus. So they proposed a world of zero COVID for vulnerable people, older people in nursing homes, and a world of pure COVID for basically everyone else.And they claimed that if you let the virus spread within three to six months, we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would end. This was brought to the White House by Dr. Scott Atlas, [00:12:00] who was one of Trump’s Coronavirus is ours at the time, who worked very hard to undo mitigations,SHEFFIELD: Who also, sorry, I, we should say, had no epidemiology background whatsoever. He was a, he is a radiologist.HOWARD: Correct. And, all of these doctors who I mentioned were, none of them saw what COVID could do with their own eyes. So they constantly said things that anyone who worked on a COVID unit would never say that the virus spared young people, or that death was the only bad outcome from COVID.Or even though it wasn’t really known, in the time of course, but they claimed that one COVID infection led to. Decades of immunity, even though the virus was just 1-year-old. So they were wrong, basically about everything. And all of them drastically underestimated COVID. So Dr. Jay Charia at the start of the pandemic predicted that COVID would kill 20 to 40,000 Americans.He will deny that he wrote that, but he did. And anyone can go read his essay in the Wall Street Journal is the coronavirus as deadly as they say in which he said that. He said that New York and Sweden had reached herd immunity by June, 2020. His co-author on this document, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, claimed that Stockholm and Sweden was, had almost reached herd immunity in April, 2020.So it was a very, so they drastically underestimated what COVID could do. But if you hear them talk today, they say that they will say that their pandemic vision has been vindicated and that it was everyone else who broke trust in public health, except for.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. and they were the ones who were the most wrong.I mean, let’s be clear about that. they, want to say. That, the original experts who are now dislodged in epidemiology and are not the establishment, the medical establishment they want to say that they were [00:14:00] wrong. And look, the reality is nobody was perfect in the predictions or the observations that they made.but ultimately it was the people who were saying, oh, it’s gonna be over. In two or three months. And not very many people would, I don’t know how you could be more wrong than that.HOWARD: Yeah. And it’s the, things that they were, right about weren’t things that were uniquely right to them.So they will say that school closures hurt children, for example. And I don’t know anyone who argues differently. I think what they did, however, is they portrayed every single mitigation measure as a choice. So what they did is they erased the virus and they essentially claimed that if only the people in charge had made smarter decisions, schools could have, remained open and functioned totally normally in this sort of thing.And again, we don’t have to speak about this in a hypothetical sense because we can look at what, again, what they are doing now that they are in charge and they’re. Failing to stop viruses and diseases from spreading. And when they helped run the show in Florida during 2021, especially during Florida’s Delta Wave, what happened?Schools closed and vulnerable people died in huge numbers and so did not vulnerable people. So we don’t have to speak about anything in the hypothetical sense. We can just look at what actually happened and they didn’t do a single thing that they claimed they would have done, and these guys are stuck in 2020.Dr. Jay Bhattacharya just gave a recent interview to the New York Times, I think just yesterday with Ross. Duch had, however he pronounce his name, one of their conservative columnists. And he spent the first half of the interview not talking about what he’s doing at the NIHA topic I’m sure he’s desperate to avoid but trying to re-litigate what was, what happened six years ago, the lockdowns of six years ago.he tries to answer every question by referencing, lockdowns. And this isn’t just something to laugh about because he is using this as a [00:16:00] pretext to help dismantle public health here in the United States. So if you ask him why did the United States withdraw from the World Health Organization, his answers is that they promoted lockdowns.So we’re really seeing this anger and this grievance over COVID manifest itself now by people whose aim was always to take a wrecking ball to everything.The “Great Barrington Declaration” was initiated by political activists, not scientistscSHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s right. And, this is a, the their viewpoint here also, it doesn’t it, it, was never supported by, any kind of logic.Like when they’re talking about, oh, well we, this, whole idea of we want them infected or, let, the virus rip. It was completely incoherent. This Great Barrington declaration that they signed, which was basically the, it was initiated by a right-wing libertarian group. Not anything to do with medical establishments or doctors, anything like that.they didn’t have any plan in place of, well, how do you know? About somebody who has a co comorbidity and they don’t know it. Like, what do you, what happens to them? And, that really was, I think one of the biggest headlines outta the Pandemic from what I saw is that, that there were so many people who had conditions and they didn’t know that they had conditions because they had not had, symptoms.But in fact they still had ‘em. And we have, we saw a lot of people that were becoming chronically ill or dying as a result of being infected. And that was never even addressed at all in the Great Barrington Declaration or subsequently by any of its advocates.HOWARD: Yeah, I’m glad you brought up the origins of the Great Barrington Declaration because it was organized by a man by the name of Jeffrey Tucker, who sounds like a cartoon villain.He is andSHEFFIELD: Looks like one.HOWARD: He does. He wears a cape in public crazy stuff. So [00:18:00] he is a proud child labor advocate. He wrote an article in 2016 called Let the Kids Work, which is exactly what it sounds like. So all of these guys who are so concerned about children in schools have nothing to say as child labor laws are being rolled back across the country now.He advocated teenage smoking because he thought it would cool. Kids could break the habit that it wasn’t truly addictive. And I encourage everyone, if they have any questions about the Great Barrington Declaration to go and read it. It’s just one page long. Because again, the 2020 revisionist history of this document is that it was just about poor kids in school.This sort of thing the, these almost le liberal and leftist ideas. But in reality, it was all about herd immunity via natural immunity, which again, they claimed would end the pandemic in three to six months. That comes from the frequently asked question section. And you say that they had no plan. I mean, they would say.That they had a great plan to protect the vulnerable. But again, if you go to the frequently asked question section and read it’s just the most bare bones outline.So, for example their plan, if you even wanna call it that, to protect older people living at home was four sentences long. And it contains suggestions that were already pretty obvious. Like, if you’re having guests over, you should meet outside or suggestions that were completely impractical, such as. the, government should set up a national delivery service for groceries and other essentials as if it was in the power of Fauci, for example, to set up a, national home grocery d delivery service for 60 million home bound seniors.And for what it’s worth, I recently wrote my own declaration. I called it the Murray Hill Declaration. And I published this on science-based Medicine a couple weeks ago, and it basically calls on all of these [00:20:00] guys to actually do everything that they said that they were going to do. So they now, I mean obviously it’s not 2020 anymore, thank God, but they still have an opportunity to protect the vulnerable they can now do.Everything that they previously called for and proposed and argued for and would have done but they refused to do it, which shows that it, that they can’t do it, they’re incompetent, or it never could have been done in the first place because it was entirely impossible to just protect the vulnerable.I mean, it’s one of these things that isn’t wrong. but I, kind of liken it to a coach telling his team, the game plan is to score more points than the other team. Well, that’s not the wrong plan. It’s the perfect plan, but it’s not a very good one.After claiming to oppose censorship, the Trumpian medical establishment is conducting it at a massive scaleSHEFFIELD: Yeah, and one of the other things that has been really inconsistent also now that they have the levers of power is that before the Trump second administration, they were constantly claiming to be against censorship and letting people say what they think at all times in all places.And yet now inside of NIH and, other, scientific research institutions of the federal government, employees are being fired constantly or being censored. and they even have a, a issued a list of words that are prohibited that if you put them in your grant proposal, including basic words like women it’s kind of hard to do medical research if you’re not doing it on women among many other absolutely neutral things that that, again, you can’t do medical research without, studying things in these different ways. I mean, this is there. I don’t, and I’m not a, I’m not a, doctor and I’m not involved in the medical field, but to me, the amount of censorship and control from the top down that [00:22:00] we’re seeing right now under Bhattacharya and other officials in the administration, there’s never been anything remotely like this.And there are cer and there was certainly, nothing like how it was during COVID.HOWARD: Yeah. So one of the ways that these guys rose to power helped rewrite the history of the pandemic was to portray themselves as the pandemic’s chief victims, because they were silenced and they were censored. And this is one of the ways also that they, kind of staved off any sort of criticisms that anytime anyone disagreed with them, they were trying to silence and trying to censor them. So what are the facts? I don’t know all of the details of this because it’s entirely about social media content, like the fate of a couple of tweets, for example.Or a single YouTube video that was removed-- in a pandemic where over a million Americans died. I just can’t really muster so much energy about the fate of a couple tweets and Jay Bhattacharya, and I think Martin Kulldorff as well, even took their case to the Supreme Court where they lost, they were slapped down because they were found not to have any standing.They were found, I think that no one has censored them. Essentially, they, weren’t harmed in any way. But if you listen to Jay Bhattacharya, for example, type his name, into YouTube, along with the word censorship or free speech, you’ll find an enormous amount of content devoted to his supposed censorship.A matter of fact, in the spring of 24 when Kennedy was still a presidential candidate, Jay Bhattacharya spoke at one of his rallies in front of a thousand people into a microphone, claiming that he had been silenced and censored. And he promised that when he got to the NIH, he would change things and silence, scientists would finally be able to free to speak their mind. In reality, as you alluded to, what happened is they’re being silenced and censored. So several NIH officials have resigned due to censorship. The most prominent being a food researcher by the name of Kevin Hall. [00:24:00] Several others have been purged.There was a signer of something called the Bethesda Declaration, which was a document written by. And signed by hundreds of NIH employees, essentially declined censorship at the beginning of summer 2025. And one of the leaders of that Jenna Norton, was recently put on administrative leave.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Who actually has been on the podcast. So we will link to that episode.HOWARD: Oh, great. Yeah. No, I’ll have to listen. And another high up FD NIH official g let me find her exact name. Gian Marrazzo, I think her name was. she, was actually purged for pushing back against yeah, Gian Marrazzo for, pushing back against some of RFK junior’s anti-vaccine disinformation.Just today actually, there is a MAHA Summit where Jay Bhattacharya is participating, and he kicked out several journalists from leading scientific, publications such as, nature and Science. Because they have been critical of him. So even though he claims to value free speech and to be against censorship and to value debate, that is the essence of science.He refuses to take questions from anyone who might answer, might ask him a hard question. He only goes to his safe space and is censoring science. and I, just read an article a few days ago that 10,000 scientists have been, lost their jobs at the federal government in the past year, as you alluded to with word bans.he is banning any kind of research that he considers DEI. It’s unclear who gets to define that and, how those decisions are made. But it’s a, it is sort of a vast scientific censorship regime, especially compared to the fact that, he got famous because he lost a single YouTube video in 2021.That was just a, that was censorship according to him, not what’s going on now.Anti-vax activists have had years to do their own studies, but they have basically nothingSHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, [00:26:00] and really what they’re I think if we kind of dig beneath their rhetoric, and their actions, what it seems to be is that the viewpoint, their viewpoint is, if I am criticized, that is censorship.And because I mean, the reality is they don’t have the research to support their ideas. I mean, that’s, they’re, they are not releasing studies of their own. And, several of them, not just, Bhattacharya, but others, they have had affiliations with very well funded institutions.They could have done studies to prove their viewpoints or, at least argue for them. And they don’t really have studies to, to put forward. All they have is their crank opinions, it seems like.HOWARD: Yeah. there, there’s one exception to that, which is actually Jay Bhattacharya did do one study at the very start of the pandemic.It’s kind of become infamous, in, in, in the fields. It’s called the Santa Clara Antibody Study. And yeah. Initially these guys argued that COVID wasn’t gonna spread that widely, that it wasn’t that contagious, so we didn’t have to worry about it. Then they did a study just a blood draw study of people in Santa Clara County, California and found something, and this is very early on in the pandemic.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.HOWARD: March, April, may, something like that. And they reportedly found that about 5% of people there had antibodies, even though maybe only one of them actually remembered having COVID or had symptoms consistent with COVID. And they used that to con collude kind of the opposite, that COVID was very widespread and that the vast majority of people who had COVID, didn’t even know that they were infected or they just had sniffles.they said at the beginning at that time that the virus is 50 to 80 times more common than we previously thought, which was also used. To [00:28:00] minimize COVID because if 90% of people hadn’t been infected, and we didn’t even know it yet, like, hey, maybe we were closer to the end of the pandemic in spring 2020 than towards the beginning as it turned out.so that’s an example of how, and, there were many flaws with the study ranging from the antibody tests themselves to how they recruited people this sort of thing. And it didn’t turn out to be the case that the vast majority of COVID infections are asymptomatic. Unfortunately, it would’ve been nice if that was the case.But they’ve been coasting on that study for the past six years almost. But as far as I know, it’s really the only. Potential, if you even wanna call it that research study that they did themselves. Other than that, it was just what we’re doing now, podcasts, YouTube videos, opinion pieces and they were content creators above all.Fox News appearances. So for doctors who were silenced and censored they wound up in a pretty good place. Head of the NIH, head of the FDA, head of the FDA are other very high ranking positions in the federal government right now.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I guess I was thinking about the non COVID research as well.Like they, they don’t really have much to point to on that regard either. AndHOWARD: yeah.SHEFFIELD: and we keep hearing from, Kennedy and others in his orbit that, oh, we’re gonna do these things. We’re gonna do these things. and they’ve had, they’ve already had a year, like you, they could have had something out by now.And or, and again, like even, but even before that, like, there are not studies that, again the anti-vax movement of which, Kennedy has, really been the leader of it for quite a long time. They’ve had a lot of time, decades. To come up with something that people can look at and, and, they do kind of sometimes point to a couple of things here and there, but the way that they’re reading it is just [00:30:00] not correct.but you want to talk about some of that.HOWARD: Yes. So they are in fact impairing research into vaccines. even though one of their biggest complaints is that vaccines haven’t been studied, and especially in randomized double-blind placebo controlled trials the head of the Moderna recently made a statement that they are not going to be doing nearly as many vaccine studies coming up because the US market won’t support it.They have proposed a couple of, at least one that I know of a double blind placebo controlled study, but this was of the Hepatitis B vaccine, a vaccine that has been in use for 30 to 40 years and been given to billion people over the world. They are trying to do a randomized double blind placebo controlled study of that vaccine in a small African country whose name I will probably mispronounce Guinea Basu.And this is basically Tuskegee Experiment 2.0 because there’s a very high rate of Hepatitis B there. And so they’re essentially condemning. A certain number of children to getting this chronic disease that can lead to liver failure and liver cancer. I do think that probably in 2026 they are going to produce several studies, which I say in air quotes proving that vaccines cause autism.Kennedy has brought in several of his right hand man and men and women, who have a history of doing cherry picking fraudulent, horrible research into vaccines. And invariably they’re going to scour some CDC data bank and they’re gonna find, the children named Billy, born on a Tuesday to mother’s named Lisa who got the MMR vaccine.On a Friday have doubled the rate of autism of some other group of children. but that’s not how science works. I’m afraid we’re gonna be having to rebut some very poorly done so-called studies very soon. And these are gonna be one can imagine RFK junior standing next to Trump, having a major [00:32:00] sort of press release about this sort of study and turning it into event.Hopefully I’m wrong about this, but so far all of my predictions have been off only in the other direction that I underestimated how bad things would get.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and I mean they, they pretty much did exactly what you said with regard to Tylenol and autism. Re release something that was not a study and we’re very confident about it.And when the entire rest of the world pushed back on it and said, this is junk, what you put out. They kind of had to sort of walk it back, but they still believe it. They still believe it.HOWARD: Yeah. I don’t know that they’ve walked it back. There was a major study,SHEFFIELD: well, trump did. I’m sorry, I should say.HOWARD: Oh, did he?I didn’t know, I didn’t know that. Good for him. I never saw that.SHEFFIELD: Well, I said he sort of walked it back. He didn’t fully, he was like, well, if you really need it, you should still take it.HOWARD: I see. Yeah. And they’ve also, the FDA is working on approving a quack treatment again in air quotes for autism leucovorin, which is probably harmless.but that’s not how medicine is done. And the FDA has taken off several of its previous pages that warned against quack autism treatments, which Kennedy has long favored. And some of these things are very nasty, like bleach enemas, for example. And one can imagine that this is what the future holds for us in 2026 and 2027, along with more measles and pertussis and flu and COVID.The cowardice of Republicans like Bill Cassidy who know betterSHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, it’s really awful. And a lot of the responsibility for this happening is on people who, outta partisan, I identification and loyalty have had decided to just go along with it. and, there’s the, worst offender by far, but there are many, is Bill Cassidy, [00:34:00] the Louisiana Senator, who very clearly did not like Bobby Kennedy Jr.When he was up for the for his post. And, but nonetheless, he’ll try to vote for him or voted for him anyway, presumably based on the idea that, well, if I vote for him to be the HHS secretary, that Trump will endorse me when I run for reelection. And Well, huh. Look at that. Trump has betrayed him. And, despite that betrayal I haven’t seen Cassidy, really go hard after. I mean, I mean the reality is just based on the measles outbreak that we’re seeing, Kennedy should be impeached just for that. And irrespective of all of the other horrible things that he is done like this guy is literally imperiling the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, probably more.And Bill Cassidy was fine with that because, I gotta support my party.HOWARD: Yeah, there should definitely be an annual award, the Bill Cassidy Award in cowardice. He was a doctor. He is a doctor a GI specialist who, spoke about treating patients who had liver failure due to hepatitis B and the success of that vaccine.And several children have died in Louisiana, his home state of pertussis. And yeah, he caved and gave us Kennedy and is now complaining about all of the things that he, enabled. I think he may have been fearing for more than just a Senate seat. I think a lot of these guys got death threats and maybe their families did too.I think there was a lot of pressure on Cassidy. I, don’t say that to excuse him. Nothing justifies putting Kennedy in charge, but he was just part of a massive support network that helped all of these guys gain power. They couldn’t have done it on their own, and it wasn’t just people like Cassidy.it’s an extremely long list of people who enabled MAHA doctors who [00:36:00] defended them. Who treated them as good faith actors who published their work and who supported them. So this includes top universities again, Harvard, Stanford. Actually Harvard was okay, but Stanford, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, for example, all promoted their disinformation spreading faculty publications such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Hill Stat News.I could just go on and on. Even several medical journals such as JAMA and the BMJ all promoted these guys, only to later realize. That, but after it was too late, what they really were, even though they didn’t hide their intentions to wreak havoc. So all of these guys openly campaigned for Trump.They openly campaigned for RFK, but they were treated as good faith actors by broad swaths of the medical community. I, think, my profession doctors showed more courage running into treat COVID patients six years ago with a lot of us paying for it, with our lives and, our health, than we did in calling out bad faith actors in, our own profession.And again, a lot of that is because if you tried to do this as I did, you were invariably called a censor and someone who doesn’t wanna hear other opinions and doesn’t wanna debate this sort of thing, or just called. The number of juvenile insults I received I was gonna say it, it could fill a, book chapter, but it did fill a, at least part of a book chapter.And, just the way that, that those of us who, warned about this were treated not to make this about me, but it was really unfortunate, but it had the effect of trying to stop people from speaking out. And if I was a little bit younger, my beard wasn’t quite so gray and had a little more hair like there, I might feel I probably would’ve been intimidated too, intimidated or unsure of myself to speak out.Other people in the MAHA conspiracist movementSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and there are a lot of people here. I mean, so we’ve [00:38:00] talked about Bhattacharya, but there are several other people that you discuss in the book. but let for people, let, can you just run through that? Some of them for people who don’t know who they are, ‘cause they definitely should know.HOWARD: So a couple other names. people who are prominent now. Marty McCarey, who is head of the FDA, who spread volumes of COVID disinformation. this time in 2021 he was claiming that the pandemic was. Basically over, he wrote an article in February, 2021 called We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April, and then when April came around and we didn’t quite have herd immunity, he went on Fox News and said in May, 2021, he said we had herd immunity to CID.Then when Delta came around. The Delta variant in the summer of 2021. He called that a, a flu-like illness. When the omicron variant came around a couple months later, he called it omic cold in nature’s vaccine. He claimed that one COVID infection led to decades of immunity or lifelong immunity.He vastly overhyped the vaccine in the spring of 2021, claiming that it would block transmission and offered perfect protection. He drastically minimized pediatric COVID falsely saying that zero healthy children had died of COVID I, and treating rare vaccine side effects is a fate worse than death. And now that he is at the FDA, it, it’s like a junior high school every week.There’s some sort of drama there. he is blending. Having all these sorts of conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies and wellness devices, he’s attacking trans people, of course. So it’s just kind of chaos. At the FDA, his right hand man, there is someone by the name of VNA Prasad, who was a very well respected oncologist.Before the pandemic, but also became attracted to Contrarianism in 2020 2021, he [00:40:00] also vastly overhyped the COVID vaccine at that time, claiming that it would end the pandemic and that it blocked transmission. He was also actively very anti-vaccine for children and in fact, it was pro infection.He wrote an article in Unheard Magazine in, I think it was published in February, 2022. This was right after the worst month of the pandemic for children January, 2022, when about six children were dying per day, and at the peak a thousand were going to the hospital every single day. In January, 2022, during the Omicron wave, he wrote his article called Should We Let Children Get Omicron, which was full of this pro infection rhetoric, that it was natural and healthy and it’s best to let children get this virus while they are young, and that infecting children would help protect vulnerable people, this sort of thing.and he is also now at the FDA where he is, People hate him. He is a horrible manager. Two months ago he leaked a memo that 10 children have died from the COVID vaccine and has still not produced a shred of evidence that’s the case. so these guys, rose to power just spreading disinformation and they were very emotionally manipulative.I think that’s a very important point to make is they weren’t neutral science communicators. They talked about any sort of mitigation measure as just this draconian government overreach, and they made it seem as if we tried to control COVID that we would have troops in the streets just attacking innocent civilians.Fast forward to today, they are part of an administration where there are troops in the streets attacking innocent civilians.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, and there are, I, guess in, [00:42:00] in recently the MAHA doctors are now trying to say that, well, if you resist our ideas, you are politicizing science not us, the ones who are the political appointees who are making scientificHOWARD: decisions, even though that has never been doneSHEFFIELD: in the history of these agencies.No. It is the people who criticize us. Again, going back to this idea, if you criticize me, that’s censorship. Not if I fire people who criticize me. That’s not such ship. Not if I ban people from grant proposals. No, it’s, if you say, put up, tell me your evidence, show me your ideas. That’s politicization.HOWARD: Yeah, they, were very good at doing that as well. Saying everyone but them was political or everyone but them was tribal. And the only reason that we objected to the mass infection was because we didn’t like Trump, this sort of thing. I will say that finally a little bit too late. It’s very good that people are standing up to them and their fate in some ways the best case scenario.Right now is that large swaths of the country are just going to ignore them. So a lot of states have banded together to form these public health consortiums, major medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, which they hate. And the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, for example, came up with their own vaccine guidelines.So it’s sad that the FDA, the CDC and the NIH can’t be trusted now when it comes to vaccines, but basically everyone is onto them. No. For example, they recently cut the vaccine schedule to make it look more like denmark’s. As if Denmark is the top of the evidence-based medicine period. They removed, I think, six or seven vaccines, the meningococcal vaccine, the flu, COVID, hepatitis A and B, vaccine, and [00:44:00] maybe, one more, the Rotavirus vaccine.But large swaths of the country and individual pediatricians are gonna correctly ignore them. And I, I hope that is the fate for the rest of their careers, is that they are permanently linked to everything that Kennedy does. And really everything that Trump does, these guys, again, openly campaigned for him.And it’s very possible that without the Union of Kennedy and Trump in August, 2024, Trump would never be in power. I mean, obviously we’ll never know, but if you kind of flash back to then Trump’s campaign was sagging and Kennedy really threw him a lifeline. And here we are with three more years to go.MAHA figures have more conflicts of interest than the scientists they hateSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and with this. And you touched on this a bit earlier, that the MAHA movement often tries to claim that people who have a science-based evidential view of medicine, that they have people like yourself or other, many other medical professionals that you have conflicts of interest.but the, then when we look at the people that are coming in the R-F-K-H-H-S and other agencies, the, I’ve never seen more extreme conflicts of interest. Like, I mean, just all down the line. Every single one of these people has massive conflicts of interest, including Kennedy himself. But I mean, these are people.That the reason that they are, they’re in that position in a very large degree, is to get you to buy things that they are personally invested in and have companies that.HOWARD: Yeah, so that’s one of the biggest myths about any doctor who promotes vaccines that we are just kinda shilling for big pharma when in reality vaccines save a lot of money by keeping people out of the hospital.You can [00:46:00] look up any doctor on this website, open CMS payments.gov. I think that’s the URL, but it lists all of the money. That doctors have received from the pharmaceutical industry. I think in the past, since 2018, as far back as it goes, I’ve received 788 from pharma all but 150 of that in the form of sandwiches that they deliver to my office once a month for like the whole office.And I just can’t resist. I’m, only human after all. but Dr. Marty McCarey took 130,000 from pharma in the two years before becoming FDA director an eye drop company of all things. He’s a pancreatic surgeon. Why? They had him on the board and we’re paying him, who knows? Jay Bhattacharya made about 12,000 from posting on Twitter, not a huge amount of money.Vina Psad also monetized to social media content and. Probably made oodles of money doing that. Kennedy himself made a lot of money as a trial lawyer, and that seems to be one of the things that he’s trying to do now, is make trial lawyers rich again, this is probably going to be his most serious attack on all vaccines, is if he tries to make them more vulnerable to lawsuits.The history of this is that in the 1980s vaccine makers were being sued out of existence. So they established this vaccine court, which isn’t perfect, but there’s a small tax on every vaccine to help pay for people who are injured by vaccines. The most common injuries being shoulder injuries due to the inject the needle itself.And this has always been our, it’s morphed into something that the anti-vaxxers have hated, but if they make, its. So that vaccine companies can be sued, which sounds like a reasonable thing. they’re just gonna be hit with a bunch of frivolous lawsuits and they’re gonna be sued out of existence. It’s not like anyone’s getting rich off of the polio and the diptheria and the HPV vaccine at this point.[00:48:00]So that is potentially the most dangerous threat to vaccines because it’ll be something that the states may have a very hard if no one’s making the vaccines, it doesn’t really matter what their vaccine schedule says.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and this, idea though, of these conflicts, I mean, it not just with those guys, I mean, like we, we see that, they have these conferences now that they’re doing and they’re just filled with grifter groups selling all kinds of random things.And, getting, paying people to make these. To promote them. And, the, these are scams. Like, I mean, when we think about it, like it, the biggest pushers of the anti-vax stuff are these supplement companies. Like ultimately that’s who’s doing it. Like, this idea, oh, we’re gonna treat it with vitamin D, or, or, and, fill in the blank vitamin, fill in the blank, herb and spice, whatever it is.Like, or bleach, like these guys are, they’re the ones who are the most incentivized because I mean, when you look at the, the insurance companies, those are the ones who really have the bottom line and they say, look, we’re still gonna cover these vaccines because it is cheaper for us to do that.So like you cannot get any possible better endorsement that vaccines are effective. Then the people who actually have to pay for n non-vaccinated people, like they, they, the, right wing often loves to talk about, oh, well show me the money. I’m all about the money. Well this is the money. And you can’t get any bigger of an endorsement than that.I thinkHOWARD: you’re absolutely right, about the supplement salesman as well. Probably the best example of this is Kennedy Advisor. Callie means, [00:50:00] he’s a pretty nasty guy and a conspiracy theorist, but also runs a company called Tru Me, where you can buy all sorts of supplements. And his sister Casey means, who was nominated for Surge in general, made a bunch of money selling these AI wellness wearable devices, which Marty McCarey, the head of the FDA was recently went to one of their trade shows and was kind of almost like an advertisement for those.He almost made an infomercial.SHEFFIELD: And Kennedy too himself, sorry. yeah. Also docs up.HOWARD: Yeah. Yeah. Right.SHEFFIELD: I want everyone to have a wearable, he says,HOWARD: right. And there may be some value in learning how many steps you take per day, but this idea that you can just put some device on you, even if it measures, your blood pressure and your heart rate, how do we use that to make people healthier?Certainly those devices have been tested less than vaccines, that’s for sure. And they’re probably gonna try to deregulate supplements even further. Actually, I don’t know if that’s even possible, but maybe by getting rid of what’s called the quack Miranda Warning, that a lot of these, supplements have to say something along the lines, this product has not been evaluated by the FDA for its safety and efficacy, this sort of thing.But or to see more examples of this treatment, leucovorin, which are quack treatments receiving, approval of the FDA. So that may be coming down the pike too.‌SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and they, talk about how they are against the pharmaceutical companies, but you know, if you really wanted to hit them where it hurt, you would ban the televised medical commercials.Like in most countries of the world, those are banned. you cannot advertise pharmaceutical products to consumers because they can be misleading. And you can have all sorts of, getting, people think, oh, this thing will help me. And, it doesn’t. And there’s no evidence that it would, but they want it really bad because they saw it on tv.[00:52:00] Like, if you really wanted to go after the pharmaceutical companies. That’s what you would do. But the Trump administration isn’t doing that. Yeah. And yeah, so go ahead.HOWARD: I mean, they’ve talked about that may be on their power because of free speech concerns. I don’t know. You’d have to speak to a, lawyer about that.I suppose to his credit, I think Marty McCart, the FDA has sent a lot of warning label or warning letters to companies that they’re overselling some of their products. I don’t know if those come with any sort of enforcement, for example, but they are making changes to make it easier to get drugs approved.And some of these things are of questionable legality. So they’ve come up with this voucher program where they are trying to just approve drugs in record time and speed up the process and use ai. And it all sounds very good. When you hear them talk about it again, kind of like the Great Barrington Declaration, it sounds perfect on paper.But a lot of people involved in that program are questioning its legality. A very high FDA official who worked there for 25 years. He was. Head of the CDR Center for Drugs Evaluation and Research for one month before he resigned in protest. A guy by the name of Rick Pader, not exactly a household name, and I’ll be honest with you, I hadn’t heard of him until a couple years ago, but he is a, legend in the field of, drug re regulation, especially in oncology.And he essentially said, this program is a disaster. It has it, it’s ripe for exploitation and for corruption, and decisions are being made by a small group of political appointees behind closed doors without any sort of transparency. So I think that the FDA and, actually it’s interesting because some of their rhetoric about getting drugs approved faster and easier.Hasn’t always matched some of their actions. Some of the drug companies are very frustrated with the FDA because the current version of the FDA has changed the rules as they go. I’m not super duper expert in this. I [00:54:00] only know what, FDA reporters tell me. But one thing that drug companies do have to have is stability in the FDA and some sort of predictability about whether their drug is gonna get approved or not, if they meet certain milestones.In other words, if I have a, an idea for a drug today, the earliest it might get approved is gonna be the year 2036. I mean, it takes a decade or 15 years to, for a drug to go from idea. To finish because it has to be, subject to all sorts of testing and this sort of thing. And one thing, the current version of the FDA seems to be doing is just changing this regulatory framework at a whim.It’s called regulatory whiplash. And so drug companies, they’re not perfect, but without them, I couldn’t do my job. And they’ve certainly transformed several fields of medicine, namely the one, the main one that I treat. Multiple sclerosis, a totally different disease than when I first started treating it in 2010, thanks to drug companies and basic researchers.but the, these drug companies are complaining that the current version of the FDA is, just totally rewriting the rules and upending a lot of what they’ve been working for, 10 years or more, this sort of thing. So there’s no predictability and stability there.SHEFFIELD: And there’s no consistency in the approach either, because like you have also Republicans are, look, looking to amend the Toxic Substances Control Act, which would literally allow companies to pollute much, more.And this is a big thing that they are, are preaching for. And they just had a, hearing about it. And so like, again, if that’s, if you are concerned about people having toxic things in their body, what’s, what is worse? an FDA branded, branded red dye or, FDA tested red dye or toxic chemicals [00:56:00] pumped into the drinking water.I wonder which one is worse.HOWARD: Yeah, no. You hit on an important point. I mean, there, there are a lot of tensions in the MAHA MAGA movement that are gonna come to a front at some point because, there’s a very sort of strong anti pharma streak to MAHA obviously. but there’s also a very sort of libertarian streak that people should be able to decide what they put in their body and take any sort of drug as long as they feel it has promise.So, for example, during Trump 1.0, he signed something called the right to try law. Again, I’m not an expert in this, but essentially said, if you have some sort of fatal disease and you wanna try some experimental treatment, the government shouldn’t stand in your way. So that’s, tension number one.Another, tension is regarding COVID vaccines. So. Pretty much everyone in the current administration is against COVID Vaccines for young healthy people. But I think some of the more senior leadership, some of the names who we’ve already mentioned recognize that the COVID vaccine is important for older, vulnerable people, and they don’t wanna take it away from that population.They don’t wanna take it away from every single grandmother and grandfather in this country. And, read about people dying next year because they couldn’t get a COVID shot. But there are parts of the MAHA Coalition and they feel very strongly that the FDA should take every single COVID vaccine off the market.And the third tension is gonna come up with this abortion pill, which I can also never pronounce. Ms. Tiff. Ms. Tiff Perone. We’ll just keep going it the abortion pill, because obviously a lot of MAGA folks are against anything that can help a woman get an abortion. Some of the more science-based medicine people at the FDA, and I’ll include VNA Psad in this rec, and I don’t think he is against abortion knows that this pill is safe and that’s an effective, and that’s his charge at the FDA is [00:58:00] to make sure that drugs that are approved or remain on the market are app appro are safe and effective, and not take them away for political reasons, but they’re gonna be facing a lot of pressure to do that.They already are actually, and they’re trying to postpone that until after the midterms for entirely political reasons. But there are all these sort of tensions that are, have already started sprouting themselves or showing themselves, revealing themselves that are probably gonna be, that in some ways I almost hope, yeah, that’s the phrase.Thank You hopefully we’ll pull the coalition apart in the next year.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and ultimately, I mean, these tensions arise because. They’re not believing in evidence-based medicine. I mean, that’s really what they’re believing in politicized medicine or, religious I, religious inflected medicine.Like if you can even call that medicine, it’s not like, and so once you’re removed the idea of science and empirical evidence as the standard, then anything really does go. And so whatever standards end up is just a matter of political power and, and, survival of the fittest, which sadly is also what they want to do to the rest of us.HOWARD: There definitely is a sort of survival of the fittest vibe with this. I mean, to circle sort of back to measles, one of the myths that they started promoting in 2025 was one of the myths that they used with COVID that only vulnerable children died of measles are only children with severe medical comorbidities died of COVID, which is both false and kind of gross.I’ve heard this described by, I think Derek Baris at the Cons Spirituality Podcast coined the phrase, soft eugenics to describe this, just this idea that we should let these viruses rip through the population and if you survive. Then by definition you were fit. And if you died, well, you had some sort of underlying medical [01:00:00] comorbidity and were there for, and you would’veSHEFFIELD: died anyway, so,HOWARD: Right.You expendable, But yeah, there’s gonna be a lot of political battles that are gonna be fought coming up, and it’s gonna be unclear, especially over this abortion pill. how our DA is gonna navigate that. I mean, I hope that they make decisions as they’re tasked to do, based only on science and data and evidence, and don’t take that pill away.but they may, the political pressure may get to them. I mean, we’ll see, they’re lucky that’s one thing that Trump and probably even Kennedy doesn’t care anything about. and Kennedy may even officially describe himself as pro-choice. We’ll see. But some of the true believers Mike Pence, for example, not that he has any political sway anymore, but is really gonna put a lot of pressure on them to get rid of that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and really what’s kind of shaping up is that I think we’re headed for this, I mean, we already see to some extent that, there is a lower life expectancy in the red states and a higher left life expectancy in the blue states. And I think that’s, that gap is going to grow further and further, as time goes by.Because, as Kennedy, or at least during this administration as they relax federal standards on various things, then these red states are gonna lower them. and they’re doing that with insurance as well. So, trying to push these, junk. Insurance policies that don’t cover things.And the, I mean, ultimately, like, that’s the, tragic irony of these PO positions is that the people who are going to be hurt the most by them or the people who like them, like that’s who’s being put at risk the very most here. But of course, a lot of other people, unfortunately, who didn’t vote for that.HOWARD: Yeah, no, we’re gonna have a, as I alluded to, previously, we’re gonna kind of have a civil public health civil war where [01:02:00] certain states are seceding essentially from the public health union. I think California, for example, recently joined the World Health Organization. meanwhile, states like Florida under the direction of.Awful. Ron DeSantis and even worse, Joseph Ladapo, who is their quack surgeon General, who kind of mixes, mysticism, religion and medicine, and even anti-vaccine data fraud. they’re celebrating trying to get rid of all sorts of vaccine mandates in Florida, which no matter how you fe and we’re talking about not COVID mandates, which have been gone for a long time, but that in order to send your child to school, they have to be vaccinated against measles and vaccinated against polio.and that’s a recipe for even more measles outbreaks. Although some of these things may take several years, if not decades, to manifest themselves. In other words, if we stopped vaccinating for polio today, it would probably take. Who knows, five to 10 years before polio would become widespread are other diseases like HPV and he, hepatitis B.Those viruses don’t cause harm until decades, after the initial infection. So we’re gonna be seeing these effects for the rest of my career, the rest of my life, unfortunately.John Ioannidis and the perils of medical contrarianismSHEFFIELD: How is it that these people with these, ID, the, these people with a public health policy of, well, let’s not do anything about pretty much everything. How is it that they have been able to be burrowed so long in the medical establishment even before Kennedy?and I think, the, longtime Stanford, medical professor John Ioannidis, he’s the kind of patient zero of this, in my view, but I, want to hear your thoughts.HOWARD: Yeah, so he’s not a quite a household name, but I would describe him as America’s potentially most famous scientist. After someone like, [01:04:00] Tony Fauci, he was a, and is a, giant of the field of evidence-based medicine.He didn’t do a, ton of what we would call primary research, meaning he wasn’t out there in the field or the laboratory collecting data himself. But he did what is called meta research, which is kind of researching how scientists do research and was constantly saying, we need to do better research.We need to do more research. And he was convinced very, strongly in the start of the pandemic starting in March, 2020 that COVID was overblown. He predicted that it would cause 10,000 deaths, that it would cause 40,000 deaths. that we were close to the end of the peak in in, in April, 2020 that the flu was gonna be worse, this sort of thing.He also, I think, was the person who originated the we want them infected movement. He wrote an article in Stat News in March, 2020, which contained the line. I’m gonna paraphrase it a little bit, but that school closures may also prevent children from getting COVID and developing herd immunity. So these guys objected to mitigation measures, not because they thought they didn’t work, but because they pr because they knew that they did work, that they knew that they slowed the virus, they just didn’t want the virus to be slowed.and he was a regular on Fox News at that time, saying that COVID was harmless for people under age 60. And while he talked in these very calm. Reassuring ways about COVID. He talked in this histrionic way about all sorts of measures to contain it, warning that they would lead to financial collapse and civil strife and civil war, the collapse of society, Yeah. Look if Lockdowns lasted five years, he would’ve been right about that. but he was saying this sort of thing in March, 2020, and nothing that [01:06:00] the virus did changed his mind. So he predicted COVID would kill 40,000 people in the Washington Post on April 8th. 2020. And, the death toll for COVID exceeded 40,000 people in the United States a week later.And he was still going on podcasts and Fox News appearances, saying that it’s over and the worst is over, and we’ve contained the virus. So the fact that mitigation measures were reasonably successful in large parts of the country in April, 2020 and March, 2020 was then used as evidence that they weren’t needed.And he is at Stanford, which is sort of the hotbed of COVID and disinformation, and now kind of MAHA disinformation. There’s a lot of good people at Stanford, don’t get me wrong, but they gave us John Ioannidis, Scott Atlas, who we’ve already mentioned, and Jay Bhattacharya, who we’ve already mentioned, and John Ioannidis was in regular contact with Scott Atlas when he was Trump’s coronavirus czar. He is apparently in regular contact with Jay Bhattacharya now, and is saying things along the lines of, yes, we have he, portrays himself as sort of this elder state, this elder statesman of science who just wants to protect it from being politicized. When of course every accusation is a confession, no one has politicized science more than people like John Ioannidis and the people he’s enabled, Scott Atlas and Jay Barria.So, hi. His legacy will, it’s, a sad way for him, I think to kind of end his career, wind down his career. but will, I think he will only be known and he only deserves to be known, in my opinion, for his wild COVID disinformation and for enabling all of the people who are now currently attacking science.but he says that if we don’t listen to them, he gave an interview to Science Magazine that if we’re not careful, and, let Jay [01:08:00] Bhattacharya make reforms at the NIH, then we risk science becoming politicized, which is just absurd.Why atheist activists teamed up with far-right Christians who hate medical scienceSHEFFIELD: It is. And let’s maybe end on kind of a not directly science related topic, but, so you do a, lot of writing at the Science-Based Medicine, blog, which is a great resource for people who are interested in these issues.And one of the things that I think is notable about it is the ownership that it’s owned by the New England Skeptical Society. And one of the unfortunate things during the pandemic is that some of the people who had made names for themselves as as, atheist or skeptics of religion, they became some of the worst disinformation spreaders that these are people who claim to believe in evidence, claim to believe in rationality.And yet they went completely off the deep end and promoted all sorts of ridiculous ideas and, got in, got in league with, religious delusional people like, Joseph Ladapo but not just him. Lots of these MAHA people, their, you go to their conferences, they’ve got, oh, you can get, you can heal your cancer from crystals, or if you pray away your, illness, you can, get a, I mean, like, I, myself, I have a brother that has a schizophrenia and, my parents for a long time, they resistedHOWARD: getting medical treatment for him becauseSHEFFIELD: they thought that they could heal it through religion.HOWARD: and these areSHEFFIELD: really harmful ideasHOWARD: andSHEFFIELD: unfortunately a lot of them are being supported by people who made a name for themselves as the atheists. It skeptics.HOWARD: Yeah, so I don’t know if you’re, bringing this up because of my article there today, which was about a very famous skeptic, Michael Shermer, who is editor of [01:10:00] Skeptics Magazine and, portrays himself, it’s.We all kind of like to do right as rational and reasonable and science-based and evidence-based. I mean, very few, probably no one, that we’ve talked about today. Maybe with the exception of Joseph Ladapo w would say that prayer and religion and crystals are their inspiration for their scientific views, for example.but yeah, a lot of these people started taking a very hard right turn even though they would deny that. but my article today was about how Michael Shermer has embraced all sorts of anti-trans views how he has just become obsessed with strangers gonads in their genitals. And the idea that someone.Might, might say the words men can get pregnant is just a huge catastrophe for him at this moment. but yeah, he interviewed Jay Bhattacharya, a very friendly interview. I didn’t listen to the whole thing, but the quips that I listened to with Jay Bhattacharya and this summer of 2024. so he was part of the, what I call, he was just a big player, but part of this MAHA support network, for example.He functioned as a MAHA public relations expert. And a lot of these guys actually got together and wrote a book called The War on Science, which sounds like it should a perfectly appropriately titled book for this moment. and this was edited by Lawrence Krauss, kind of a disgraced physicist who.I don’t wanna say got caught up in the Me Too movement, because that makes it seem like he was an innocent victim of it. But his, he wasSHEFFIELD: accused by a lot of women of harassment and assault.HOWARD: That’s right.SHEFFIELD: but he denies it. We have to say that.HOWARD: And was, good, friends with Jeffrey Epstein as well and defended his relationship with him.So he put together a book of, 39 sort of experts and scholars, who wrote about this war on science, which was just this [01:12:00] dispatch from this alternate universe where the woke mob. One and the woke mob is the one who is purging scientists today. And, because someone said pregnant women instead of pregnant people, ah, you’re fired.that’s how they kind of portray things and what these guys did. Is they numbed people to the real threat by crying wolf about a fake threat, and they rolled out the red carpet to the real threat. I mean, it’s very sad because a lot of these guys did very good work and they could have been allies in taking on the Trump administration.and a lot of them are now, horrified. They’re all so horrified by everything that’s been going on. When instead of joining us and devoting every single effort, piece of effort to, to fighting it and trying to prevent it, they lost their minds because some, 22-year-old adjunct teaching assistant at some small college that no one had ever heard of again said men can get pregnant, and that’s just a catastrophe in their opinion.So, very disappointing.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And and, it’s definitely a, a, warning for everybody that you know to make sure you keep your. Your epistemology clean, I think,HOWARD: and make sure that, you’re, you are,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, keep continuing to look at evidence and, not use your personal prejudices against people that you might not have personally known.I mean, like, that is one of the things that we saw a lot during the the battle to legalize same-sex marriage is that, people who were the most against it were people who didn’t know someone that to them was, lesbian or gay, and once people started coming out of the closet, they realized, oh, well look at that.They weren’t trying to convert me to [01:14:00] homosexuality. they, they weren’t gonna molest me. Or, like, ‘cause that was the myth that all of these things had. and the sad thing is that, a lot of these guys who, did support. Same sex marriage rights and decriminalization of homosexuality are, they’re just, they are falling into the exact same arguments, bad arguments that were made during the, that they’re doing the same thing now with, trans people.HOWARD: Yeah. And I think what these guys do is they prioritize their need to be heterodox and free thinkers. I’m not part of the woke mob. I think for myself, and they all sound the exact same way. They all say the exact same thing. They all say the exact same talking points. And the point that I made in my science-based medicine article today is that the question, can men get pregnant?It to me at least, the most, the only thing that matters about that question is that it’s asked by malicious people who have malicious intent, who are out to in danger. Trans people. Right. Any, I’ve never talked about trans issues before, before today actually, because, not that I don’t care, but it’s just that I try to reserve my words, at least in public, for things where I feel I have something unique to say and different to bring to the table.And until today, I, don’t think that I did. But every time that anyone. Every that I talk about trans issues I think I’m gonna have one goal in mind, which is, does it make trans people safer or not? Because trans people are being attacked from all sides at this, not all sides, but from all over the place at this point.Including obviously from the president and the vice president and all of the people who we mentioned, Marty McCarey and Jay Bhattacharya, because they are victims of tribalism and they have to do whatever their president and their tribe demands. And so anything that I say about trans people, is gonna be with that goal in mind.Does it make them safer or does it make them more [01:16:00] vulnerable? And if it makes them more vulnerable, I’m just gonna keep my mouth shut.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s,HOWARD: and that was the goal.SHEFFIELD: It’s really unfortunate.HOWARD: That was the goal of my Science-Based Medicine article today. I want all of these guys like Michael Shermer to stop talking about trans people, and I wanna show them I am a living model, that you can be like a sort of older, straight, white dude who doesn’t base your life around the genitals of 1% of the population who you’re probably never even gonna meet.You can do it, Michael. I can do it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they’re not affecting anyone, basically. Like,HOWARD: not in a good way. Oh, I’m sorry. Yes. Trans people are not affecting,SHEFFIELD: trans people are not, yeah. Like trans people are not affecting them, so leave them alone. Like in the same, yeah, there’s any number of small minority groups that, that you could say that about.And and, they’re really just picking on it because the right wing media, realize, oh, this is a small group that people don’t know, so we’re going to make them a scapegoat. Like, that’s, all this is. Like you could, there’s any number of, people with who seek medical treatments that are unconventional or, people might not have ever heard of.And people might think, oh that’s horrible. Why is this allowed? You could do that for any number of things. But the reason that we’re having to talk about this and talking about people who aren’t really affecting anyone is purely political. It’s all politics. It’s not about science. It’s not about concern for for reason or anything like that.It’s just you were manipulated into being obsessed with this subject and you should realize that.HOWARD: Right. And even when you talk about sports, I think the head of the NCAA testified that there were fewer last year at the end of 2024, that there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of something like half a million, athletes in general.So it was just this, [01:18:00] this fake panic. But Michael Shermer has a history of doing this. A lot of these guys have a history of doing this. Dating back over a decade ago, I found an article of his warning about attacks on the science from the far left, from, liberals and progressives.And again, ignoring the real threat. From the right wing in the GOP whose attacks on science filled cemeteries when it came to COVID. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people died because they refused a vaccine. But again, to Michael Shermer and all of these guys, none of it’s real because they don’t work in hospitals.To them, it’s just all, you know what brings them attention on social media. VerySHEFFIELD: disappointed.HOWARD: Yeah.‌SHEFFIELD: It is. All right. Well, so let me, just give you a, chance to plug your, book here real quick before we, wrap up here.HOWARD: Sounds good. Well, I’ve written two at this point. the first one was we Want Them Infected, which was published in 2023, and it told the story of.The purposeful movement for herd immunity via mass infection. And it explained how it warned about and showed how the anti-vaccine movement was making inroads in mainstream medicine. And then the follow up to that book, which was just published about six months ago, everyone Else’s to you, is about how the history of the pandemic has been rewritten so that the horrific scenes of March and April of 2020 and beyond were replaced only with people remembering the the unwanted mitigation measures and how academic medicine has now completely merged with some of the rank quackery.and really it’s about the propaganda techniques, the emotional techniques. And none of this is new. This was all done by the fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industries. To manufacture doubt. But that book, really explains kind of how MAHA [01:20:00] won. And both of my books are, very long. but they’re kind of half referenced books, half books that you can read, cover to cover, 25 pages of we Want them infected was just quotes of doctors like Dr.Idi declaring the pandemic over, starting in April of 2020. so, unfortunately I think the books have stood the test of time. Not that much time has passed, but in kind of the, in some ways the worst things get the more right I, have been proven which is unfortunate. I would’ve rather gone down in history or forgotten to history as some sort of guy who panicked and was hysterical, fear mongering.but that didn’t turn out to be the case, unfortunately.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is unfortunate, but, I’m glad that you did have, you’ve written it all down and that there is a record that, people can reference to understand the people who were and have been and continue to be the most wrong about medicine in this country are the people in the MAHA movement.There’s no doubt about it.HOWARD: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I’ll just say there’s one other kind of interesting resource that I have. I have a very small YouTube channel, I think it’s called, we Want Them Infected, which now has about 650 video clips of these guys, our current medical establishment, just saying one crazy wrong thing after another.I think I appear in about five of these videos, so it’s not even really my YouTube channel, and I haven’t made a new YouTube video with my face in it in probably a year and a half at this point. but it’s a real archive and it’s just a real collection of. Crazy, horrible things these doctors have said.So if anyone was, wants to just check it out and skip to a random YouTube video, you can see these guys saying we have herd immunity and vaccine side effects are the worst thing in the world. and on But it just really gives you a flavor of how the history of the pandemic has been [01:22:00] rewritten and how MAHA catapulted itself to power based on disinformation and emotional manipulation propaganda techniques.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, well, good to have you back.HOWARD: Thank you for having me. Let’s, do this again in a couple years or next year.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, sounds good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Feb 6, 2026 • 1h 14min

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

Episode Summary After months of chaos, censorship, violence, a deluge of Epstein files, and the untimely deaths of two American citizens, Donald Trump’s public approval ratings are at their lowest point ever. And though he’s loath to admit it in public, the president and his staff are having to make changes to try to stop the loss of support he’s seeing—including from within his own party.Despite the fact that Trump has never been more unpopular, Democrats in Congress are having internal struggles over how to oppose him, with newer members wanting to use anything possible to gum up the works that the leadership seems to generally dislike. There’s a rift among the Democratic voter base about their party as well. In a late-January poll, Marquette Law School found that 51 percent of Democrats and people who leaned that way approved of the Democrats in Congress, with 49 percent disapproving. By contrast, 80 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners said they approved of congressional Republicans. Only 20 percent disapproved. The poll also found that while respondents who said they were “somewhat liberal” were evenly split on their opinion of congressional Democrats, those who identified as “liberal” were more likely to disapprove, a 54-46 percent. Democratic voters seem to want their party to go much harder at opposing Trump, but this seems to go against the entire conception of politics that the party’s leaders understand, a viewpoint that has been largely fixed since the early 1990s—and has been shaped by conservative former Republicans who have not changed their viewpoints since becoming Democrats.Talking about all this today with me is Chris Lehmann, he’s the Washington bureau chief at The Nation magazine and a contributing editor at The Baffler.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content—Even Democrats who disagree with him should be paying attention to Zohran Mamdani—The ersatz data science telling Democrats to pursue mythical centrist voters—Confronting Trump relentlessly and telling the public about it is the best way to counter him—Joe Rogan and how Republicans and Democrats handle dissent differently—What Republicans know about politics that Democratic strategists haven’t learned yet—The endgame of Trump’s top advisers is far more extreme than Project 2025Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:37 — Despite Trump’s historic unpopularity, Democratic politicians aren’t unified on responding17:07 — Democrats haven’t figured out that the opposition’s strengths can still be attacked21:18 — The myth of informed centrism and Democratic elites’ failed rebuilding of the party’s electoral model24:43 — Trump’s instinctive understanding of how to weaponize anger30:17 — The top Democratic operatives and politicians are cut off from regular Americans’ experiences35:20 — Many ostensibly liberal institutions are filled with David Brooks conservatives who call themselves centrists40:06 — The radical right has been at war with modernity for decades, but rarely taken seriously44:14 — The lost lessons of the World War II generations52:43 — Epstein files reveal that the ultimate ‘globalists’ are right-wing56:29 — Nihilism and Tucker Carlson01:00:59 — Need for hope and transcendence in politics01:09:02 — Anti-ICE protests as a sign of hope for the futureAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Chris Layman. Hey Chris, welcome back to the show.CHRIS LEHMANN: Very happy to be here, Matt. How are you doing?SHEFFIELD: Good, good. Well, good enough, right? Minus the whole possible end of the country thing.LEHMANN: Yeah. That’s always the disclaimer. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well on, on the other hand though, there have been a number of positive developments recently. And that’s kind of what we’re here to talk about. And I think probably the biggest one is that, I mean, it’s for a very bad reason, but all of the violence and killing that the Trump regime has been doing against private citizens, the general public has finally started to notice it, it looks like.LEHMANN: Right.SHEFFIELD: And, but Trump himself, of course, is saying that he’s more popular than ever, but there is not a single poll that says that. And in fact, he also did [00:04:00] recently say that he has a, quote, silent majority. Like that to me is the biggest tale that, that he knows something is wrong with his PR approach.LEHMANN: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, it is yeah, the situation is a perfect kind of storm of as you say, they’re objectively losing ground with the general public. And particularly what’s been striking is the group he is doing worse at is now the biggest group of, registered voters independents.And, we are coming out of the 2024 cycle where everything was about the low information voter being mobilized by maga. And that’s when, you had these surges in support among Hispanic and black voters that were historic for a Republican candidate. But, but yeah, that has plummeted very dramatically to earth now. and, for instance, Latino voters say they oppose trump’s immigration policy by a 70 30 margin. So that is, there was all of this loose talk after last election day that, we are seeing the lineaments of a new Trump coalition akin to the, coalition that Reagan put together or that Nixon before him. and that was never true. And it’s become very clear that you, kind of live by the low information voter and die by the low information voter and one bad information penetrates, which is I think the most important thing out of this hellish period we’re living through.They have no answer, they, just continually double down. It’s been, quite striking throughout all, esp especially the murderous siege of, Minneapolis, there’s a very standard presidential playbook for something like this is, [00:06:00] you sort of offer up whoever ty no’s head on a pike, you sort of acknowledge, okay,SHEFFIELD: you feel their pain? Yeah.LEHMANN: we got a little carried away and now we’re going to do, kinder, gentler murderous sieges, which, sadly the Democratic party would go for. And, would, they’ve already, what’s, you can always count on me to bring the clouds in any silver lining situation.But, things that, Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate said they were going to go to the mat for and closed down the government over were things like having ICE and, CPB agents CBP rather agents wear cameras.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.LEHMANN: The administration has unilaterally done that anyway.And because among other things, this is the kind of criminal gangster administration that, they’re, anytime footage from one of these cams is, going to be sought in a legal proceeding, they’ll say, oh, we lost it. It was destroyed, whatever. It doesn’t, it’s not going to change anything fundamental about the, the mass deportation program that is now spilling over into assaults on dissenting US citizens.So, so yeah, the, administration has created all the conditions that have sunk, its standing in the polls and they’re just going to keep doing it. ThereSHEFFIELD: Because they don’t know anything else. I mean, that’s theLEHMANN: don’t know anything else. Right. AndSHEFFIELD: the Republican, sorry,Despite Trump’s historic unpopularity, Democratic politicians aren’t unified on respondingSHEFFIELD: The Republican rights sole PR strategy for the past 80 years has been, well, we just have to be more right wing and then it’ll work,LEHMANN: Yeah, which, it, has succeeded in getting them power. And and largely because of the, failure that Democrats to be an effective opposition party throughout this [00:08:00] whole long stretch of time you’re talking about. But yeah, we are now at this point where, I think ordinary voters who aren’t, that, certainly not ideologically driven and not, that informed about everything the Trump administration has been doing.You see the the murders of Renee Good and Andrew Prince in, in Minneapolis, and I think just as powerfully you see the, deportation of. Liam, the five-year-old, in the bunny hat. there’s nothing the right can do to make that seem defensible or palatable.it just, I think, triggers this deep human revulsion that I’m, glad that, American voters are experiencing ‘cause I was starting to have my doubts for a while there. But yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there’s a significant disadvantage that the American left has in that. The, far right Republican agenda is so monstrous that when you tell people what it is, if they’re not informed, they don’t believe you, that it’sLEHMANN: They won’t believe you. Right,SHEFFIELD: It’s unbelievable. And in fact, like people have done that in focus groups.They’ll say, okay, well, so here’s Donald Trump’s policy of x, and, the voters are like, no, that he doesn’t believe that.LEHMANN: That can’t be right. Yeah, no, it, it does militate against, and, that is the political challenge for, the opposition is, to, present it in these very stark ways and to Yeah. To have enough of a coalition behind you. And that’s what, that’s the other thing that’s happening right now is I think, the citizens of Minneapolis who are, being really heroic and standing up to this siege are, forcing the leaders of the Democratic party to pay [00:10:00] more attention.And it is striking, there was this long, in my view, extremely stupid interval where Matt Yglesias and the sort of popularist types of consultants and writers aligned with the Democrats were saying, we just can’t talk about immigration. It’s Trump’s greatest strength.We don’t have a good answer except, we also want to, crack down on illegal crossings and, heightened border control. But we want to do it in a more, notionally balanced procedural wave. And that again, it’s that old, I always go back to the, there’s an old onion headline where that was like, I think a representation of a Jimmy Carter Reagan debate and Jimmy Carter is saying something like, Must be reasonable and broker accords across the world, whatever. and Reagan’s line is, let’s kill the bastards. And, obviously the, Reagan slash Trump position is morally abhorrent, but it’s very clear and decisive and it makes a very clear point. And if you’re just kind of sitting on your hands the way that you know, Matt and glaciers and also this new think tank, the Searchlight Institute that promulgated this, again, stupid memo saying, we can’t have Democrats say abolish ice.They have to say reform ice, or better training, which I is especially insane because the, shooter who killed, murdered, Renee Goode was a firearms instructor. This is not inSHEFFIELD: is definitely a problem, but it’s far from the, it is not the main problem.LEHMANN: Right. And it’s not going to solve anything. You have, this is all under the, watch of Stephen Miller, who, is [00:12:00] a, fascist sadist, authoritarian goon, like, and it’s garbage in, garbage out. that is what you’re going to get as long as he is the defacto, sort of czar of immigration policy in this country.And so you have, I know Democrats don’t like politics. They think they’re above politics. We were talking earlier about, the, sort of scourge of credentialed knowledge elites atop the Democratic party. and that is the main symptom of it, in my view. They think because they’re, they have fancy degrees and they’ve, wade it through the pertinent policy papers and consultant, memos that they don’t have to bother persuading people, they, have a sort of quasi divine rights based on being part of the knowledge elite to, just administer policy. And, in something like immigration where you, absolutely need a forceful moral position that sort of addresses, everything about the Republican policy on I immigration is a lie that’s not, hyperbole on my part.Trump has, for a decade now, fallaciously claims that, there’s a, an out of control immigrant violent crime wave,SHEFFIELD: Invasion, as heLEHMANN: And invasion. And if you look at any statistics from, again, the past century really of, immigration. Immigrants commit violent crime at a significantly lower rate than the native born population.And all you have to do is think about their situation to understand like, yeah, you’re not going to want to draw attention to yourself by committing a violent crime if you’re not in the country legally, and you might be deported. Like it’s, just, it makes zero senseSHEFFIELD: And the stats show that too,LEHMANN: right? The STAs absolutely.Show that up and down Democrats don’t [00:14:00] effectivelySHEFFIELD: also they don’t draw on welfare.LEHMANN: Or you’re,SHEFFIELD: notLEHMANN: mySHEFFIELD: for it. they’re literally, they are paying into the economy and taking almost nothing out. ThatLEHMANN: it is the polar opposite of what the Republicans claim. You’re absolutely right. They pay into social security and, Medicare and welfare and they get nothing back. So it’s a net positive. This in 2024 the I’m forgetting the agency, but the major federal agency that tracks these things estimated the contribution of immigrant workers over the next decade at $10 trillion.So, like, if you just connect the dots here, and this is what I say when I’m in arguments with MAGA types, is like, what’s invading force gives you $10 trillion. Like there, sorry. You have to, find better words, to describe whatever it is. You’re, hallucinating. And on and on.And, people even forget the reason for this. Heinous mobilization in Minneapolis is ostensibly because of. Rampant welfare fraud on the part of Somali daycare centers and, which has all been promulgated by a right wing YouTuber and has been demonstrated to be total BS at the level he’s claiming.There was a little bit of,SHEFFIELD: seems to be remarkably stupid. Low IQ person.LEHMANN: yeah. No, I, that is all, true and taken as red. But and and again, just at the basic level of operational sensemaking, right, who mobilizes a paramilitary force to combat welfare fraud like you, the, if, it’s real, you get accountants, like none of this is, has anything to do with reality [00:16:00] and yet.You go back to when Abrego, Gar Garcia here in Maryland was wrongfully detained, and, the president of El Salvador said it openly. Everyone in the justice said it openly. Chris von Holland, my senator, who I’m very proud of on this issue went to visit him at Sea Cod and, made this an issue.And, reportedly Leonard Jeffries said, don’t do this again. It’s this whole idea, we can’t touch this issue. It’s, it’s Donald Trump’s, sacred source of popularity. And, that moment when, Van Holland sort of. Said, no, this is just wrong and I’m going to make it clear.I think that, is when you know the, Democrats were finally forced into a position of, like, okay, we can’t just pretend indefensible things can be wished away.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, or get away with just responding with angry press conferenceDemocrats haven’t figured out that the opposition’s strengths can still be attackedLEHMANN: yeah. Right. An angry letter like that’s going to do anything. So yeah, and it all, and again, going further back and, sort of the history and this is all stuff you know very well from coming up on the right, but you know, I often think when. I have been thinking whenever it is, I would come across Jefferies or Schumer or some other Democratic leader saying, or Matt Iglesia saying like, we have to just shut up about immigration. It’s, Donald Trump’s strongest issue. Think back to the 2004 election cycle, which you know very well, right? So, John, the Democrats and their infinite wisdom decided we’re going to nominate John Carey because he is, this strong military leader. It’s the best way to go After the militarist, Iraq invading Bush [00:18:00] administration and what did the Republicans do?They did not say, oh, John Kerry’s military record is so much superior to George w Bush’s, we’re just going to sit on our hands and hope this whole thing goes away. No, they invented the swift. Boaty where, you know, they, got these kind of under Carrie’s command who were high on, the, right wing supply to sort of confabulate all these things about Carrie’s record in Vietnam that wasn’t, that weren’t true.And they, made a big show at the convention of wearing band-aids. I, can’t even remember what that whole, I’m sure you do. But the larger point is like, and, by the way the architect of that whole strategy was Chris what’s his name? The co-chair of the, no, The co-chair of Trump’s 2024 campaign. But my point, yeah, my point is, that is the kind of raw street fighting mentality that the right has been bringing to, electoral politics over the past, all of my political lifetime and well before that. And the Democrats, again, are in that Jimmy Carter position of like, well, let’s, do nice things for nice professional people.It’s just not, it doesn’t work as politics.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and a lot of this mentality it comes from something that we have talked about a little bit on the show. Last night we were on, and as I recall the idea of who makes up. Politics. And on the Republican side they are, in terms of the workers in the Republican industry, if you will it’s a broad, obviously they’re funded overwhelmingly by billionaire oligarchs, but in terms of the people who actually poll the levers and [00:20:00] stamp the papers and, make the spam they come from all over the place.Like they, some of them were like me former trailer park kids and, and, some, like you a high school dropout. Like that’s, who’s running a lot of these Republicans, and especially in the Trump era, when basically Trump said to the existing Republican campaign professionals, get the hell out.And so the doors were opened for anyone who supported him essentially. AndLEHMANN: And, they have adapted well to this new media environment in a, a way that again, as, you have observed over and over again, the Democrats have not, they have, again, this anti-politics model of politics that, you know, if we just, fine tune the wording of the message in such a way per our consultants and per our focus groups, we will get, the, marginal outcomes we need and, X number of purple districts or whatever, and,SHEFFIELD: that they think people decide on issues. And again, that is the, class blind spot, right. That is like, I, think in terms of policy, I know the, kind of optimal policy solution for issue X, and I just have to tell voters and they will fall in line.and here’s the other thing. Here’sThe myth of informed centrism and Democratic elites’ failed rebuilding of the party’s electoral modelSHEFFIELD: the other thing that is so frustrating is so they’ve got this idea, well, we just have to be in the center because that’s where most of the voters are well informed. Centrism does not exist. It’s not real.No one is who actually knows about politics. It’s like, oh, I’m going to take my position exactly in between the parties. No one does that. Okay. Only people who are low information and don’t pay attention. But the other thing is, if that viewpoint were true, then Republicans would never win elections.LEHMANN: right, right. No,SHEFFIELD: a party that keeps getting more and more extremeeveryLEHMANN: I know right.SHEFFIELD: And so that alone should [00:22:00] disabuse democratic elites of this, cautionary nonsense because it’s not, it isn’t actually data-driven like the, these guys have. they’ve constructed a mirage of data and they’re chasing after it, like Don Quixote and his windmills. That’s what they’re doing.LEHMANN: I know. No, it’s absolutely true. And it is, it’s all, har harks back to, the, kind of, democratic Leadership Council, new Democrat model inaugurated in the Clinton years. And that was, after the crushing defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984, democratic elites decided, two things.One is like we need to. Re-engineer the entire Democratic party so that we can retake the White House. And, sort of the other thing is a subsidiary premise of that we have to, discard the existing activist base of the party. We have to be the kind of, culturally moderate pro business knowledge elite.this is the whole, the, literally the term yuppie derives from Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign where initially, pundits first tried to call this new style of, knowledge driven Democrat the Atari Democrat. And that didn’t really take, ‘cause I don’t think anyone really knew much about tech or tech brands back then.and then someone hit upon the term young, urban professional, and that was, Gary Hart’s kind of calling card in electoral terms. And no one bothered to notice that Gary Hart didn’t win or that Michael Dicus who adopted exactly the same model, he was going to be the, candidate of competence who presided over the tech miracle of Route 1 28 outside of [00:24:00] Boston.And he was going to be, again, this managerial guy who was going to, be reasonable on, the cultural issues that had divided the country over the sixties and beyond. But be, this kind of stable managerial guy. And then finally, Clinton hit on the, sort of combination of traits that worked.And it largely just stems from triangulation, which is Dick Morris’s contribution to the lexicon. Which is to say you take the issues that Republicans that belong to them and sort of soften the edges and, find again, as you were saying, this sort of mythic center point to sell a pro-business agenda.Trump’s instinctive understanding of how to weaponize angerLEHMANN: And what actually happened over that long recourse of, or recess, I should say, presidential campaigns is that, the Democratic party kicked its, working class base to the curb. The main legacy of Clinton in economic terms was NAFTA and gat and, the whole globalization agenda, which, a generation hence is the fodder for Donald Trump’s success.He ran against most successfully in 2016, the. The real harm that globalization had done to the manufacturing centers of the country. And he didn’t deliver anything as a result. But he was the first candidate to sort of say, because, globalization is very much the oligarchs, kind of sweet spot.And Democrats supported it, Republicans supported it. It was, Trump’s sort of genius at, that time to realize like, yeah actual voters feel really neglected and condescended to and harms by these policies. So I’m going to rhetorically speak to them and, continue to [00:26:00] govern as an oligarch.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the, yeah, the, thing is also that and this is another kind of inherent disadvantage that a party that is not, trying to destroy everything,LEHMANN: Right.SHEFFIELD: Is that, failure is actually good for Trump in some way because the worse things get, the more he can blame because his entire campaign, a approach and entire messaging approaches, those other people did this to you.They’re hurting you. And so the worse he makes things, the worse he makes the economy, the worse he makes education, the worse he makes healthcare, the worse he makes inflation and jobs, whatever it is. He can always say, no, they did it. They’re the ones that are doing this. I am standing up for you.LEHMANN: I am your retribution famously, right. And he can do that even in conditions like now where republicans, have a trifecta and of course the Supreme Court backing them up. So, yeah, it is, and it all goes long ago. Henry Adams said, politics is the organization of Hatreds.And, Kevin Phillips Nixon’s famous, sort of campaign guru who helps engineer the southern strategy, took that up as his mantra. And, that has been the story on the right, certainly ever since. And the democrats, again, even in this unbelievably target rich environment, I mean, if Steven Miller were a Marvel villain, he would not be believable.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.LEHMANN: and and, that’s just for starters. I mean, you have JD Vance who’s just an obvious, I would say empty suit, but you know, he’s full of internet lies and he is a complete he willSHEFFIELD: He is a four chan zombie, basically.LEHMANN: Exactly. Exactly. That’s a very good way of putting it.And Christina, all [00:28:00] of these, there is not a single con, I guess, maybe the interior guy is, I just don’t think he’s, gotten in enough trouble yet. But there’s, not a, and it’s all deliberately engineered this way. Pete Hegseth, all these people are just maga militant, I’m, I was about to curse, but,SHEFFIELD: Oh, can doLEHMANN: Oh, okay. That’s right. I’m, so used to being on the radio. I always catch myself. Yeah. But they’re just goons, I guess is the best term and, You can go after all of them. And somehow the Democrats, they don’t have any sort of unified theory of what’s happening right now. They don’t, I, it, is, I’m, I am, been very cynical for a very long time and I’m just kind of at a loss at this is the most advantageous set of, just leaving aside the horrific tragedy of it all and, and the massive corruption and abuse of power and, shredding of the Constitution and the rest of it.Like, you have all sorts of ways to organize. Hatreds is my point, and you need to do it. That is, it’s an ugly business. I am, I’m not saying, it’s, good for the soul or anything like that, but. You need to go hammer in tongs after these people and make the message that you know if, yeah, if, you’re feeling scared, to be on the street in your city.If you care about a five-year-old boy who’s been scooped up by this Gestapo operation, these are the people who are doing it to you. And that’s how you flip, the Trump reflex, which, you’re right, he is really good at always saying like, it isn’t me. It’s, enemy X. And again, and even outside the White House, like Elon Musk is, already a vastly hated figure.He’s the [00:30:00] most important donor on the Republican party. Like, yeah, I’m just, when, in the course of my day job where I’m covering this, I’m, just like, how can this, how have the Democrats made this so hard?The top Democratic operatives and politicians are cut off from regular Americans’ experiencesSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, okay. So, well, I would say, if we go back, just to the, so we talked about who comprises the Republican political class, but the Democratic political class is overwhelmingly wealthy. Overwhelmingly prep school kids overwhelmingly Ivy League educated.And so these are people who never experienced hardship. These are people who don’t have, raucous debates in their own families or communities. They don’t know how to do politics because their entire, in their world, where they came from. Politics is bad. Having arguments, having disputes is a bad thing.Like, let’s just sit down and be the adult in the room. Like that’s, and it works for that world. Like, if it, but this is not how the pol political world is, and especially in the age of Trump, you’ve got to, you have to change things up. But it’s, so difficult because they don’t, ever hire anybody who’s new.I mean, like, you, look at the list. I mean, hell, we got James Carville. They’re still taking advice from this guy who hasn’t won an electionLEHMANN: a, he ran one successful campaign. He then went global and he was advising like Israeli Prime Minister candidates who lost, he, advised people inside, he’s just, yeah. It’s, dumbfounding and it’s only the reason James CarVal has a platform right. Is he can coplay. As I’m in touch with the working people.I, I have a southern accent, even the, even though he lives in a mansion and he married a Republican political consultant, it’s all. Bullshit. But yeah, that he is like their spirit animal who can sort of,SHEFFIELD: it.LEHMANN: Say [00:32:00] that, oh, back in 1992, we, got all these, southern racist to, to fall in line behind Bill Clinton and I’m, I have this, mystic wisdom that no one else does.It is, yeah. And that’s another thing, again, in coming in Congress, you see, that you saw this long march. That the reason that literally at this point, I think the reason that Republicans still have the majority in the house is that so many Democrats have died in 109, a hundred 19th Congress to sustain their, margin.So, the, on the other side of the coin re the Republican caucus has a three term limit for anyone who’s chairman of a committee. Like three strikes you’re at, they’ll, there are some loopholes to potentially extend, but that’s the model that was Gingrich’s innovation and it was smart.Because, you have on the democratic side, all these people who are just again, like almost literal zombies like Diane Feinstein at the end of her, term. And the, all the,SHEFFIELD: Dick Durbin is,LEHMANN: Dick Durbin. Yeah. And Jerry Conway who got the, gavel O over a OC on, the oversight committee and then died, you, and again, that’s another feature of, it’s, I, had this, insight, I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I was writing about the DNC and David Hogg’s fight, to sort of run younger candidates and, and that predictably ended badly for him.And I was, sort of reviewing all of this. And it’s suddenly dawn on me, like the Democratic National Committee is run like a university. And that’s so what it should not be. I think it all had to do like hog was forced out. ‘cause there, and [00:34:00] there, there was a legitimate question at the bottom of this, there was a procedural question that, a female candidate didn’t get properly didn’t get a proper hearing for hogs, vice chair position and all that, but it, just, it became this recursive like, and I know it well from having dropped out of grad school, this, is, the kind of all language and posturing brand of politics that drives me insane.And predictably, every, everything about David Hogg’s substantive platform has been memory hold now. Right? The D NNC is just running on, autopilot. And they,SHEFFIELD: Well, and it’s disastrous. I mean, they’veLEHMANN: no.SHEFFIELD: nothing in the.LEHMANN: They alienated two major union leaders, which again goes back to the whole PMC, distortion of the Democrats. If you’re serious about making this party an effective answer to right wing pseudo populism, you need left wing economic populism. It is that simple. But that is a big problem ‘cause you, you have the donors, you have the, sort of credentialed elites in political leadership and in this consultant class, the Democratic party does need to be remade from the ground up.And I’m not sure how it happens.Many ostensibly liberal institutions are filled with David Brooks conservatives who call themselves centristsSHEFFIELD: I think, yeah, absolutely. And, one of the other big problems also is that the, American left institutions, such as they are they have opened their doors to lots of conservatives like David Brooks, who you recently wrote about it, but Barry Weiss and, Sam Harris and like all these people, but they call themselves centrist and, and it’s, and, but, and here’s what’s even more tragic.Yeah. I mean, here’s what’s even more tragic though, is that there are people who are progressives who don’t like them. But instead of saying, no, these guys are conservatives, they’re calling them [00:36:00] Reactionary, centrist. And I’m like, please don’t do that. They’re not on your, they’re not on our side. They are like, I know becauseLEHMANN: Right.SHEFFIELD: was on the right and I found my consider myself like them.I said, I was a conservative, a liberal conservative. That’s what these people are. They’re not centrist. There’s no such thing as informed centrism. So please stop calling these people centrist.LEHMANN: Yeah, absolutely. No, I, it’s, it is funny, like I, remember way back when David Brooks was just starting to break. When the Bobo’s book was published, I was on some panel that he was also on, and I didn’t, obviously didn’t have any sense of the menace he would subsequently become. So, we all went collegially out for drinks after the, panel.And, he asked me about like, my background at the time I was working at Newsday, but I’d come before, weirdly I was hired away from, in these times a socialist magazine in Chicago. and, Brooks got this varied sort of sober look and he said, well, I don’t, I generally don’t credit the, right wing, media bias claim.But, I can’t imagine someone from say the National Review getting hired. Newsday and I was just like, dude, you came from the Washington Times. You, came from like a, literally a Mooney funded hard, right. Published Sam Francis, all these like, raging racists. And, you’re going to say like, I’m beyond the pale.So everSHEFFIELD: Wesley Pruden. Yeah, they’re yeah, it was out and out Confederate.LEHMANN: Yeah, absolutely. So like we, from that point on, we never got along. Let’s just saythe thing is like, I, again, like you, I, actually really relish robust political debate at Newsday. [00:38:00] I. These are things that I, probably, in retrospect, again, didn’t see any of this coming.But, I published Tucker Carlson, I published Ann Coulter. Like all of these people who are I now acknowledge are monsters. But this was the nineties and they were, Tucker was a quasi libertarian back then, and Coulter was insane. I grant you, I, didn’t have a good excuse at that moment.But the point is, like, I, was supposed to be this like OT automaton of the left, right? Who was going to like, I don’t know, published Edward Herman and Nome Chomsky over and over again. And, A, that’s boring. And B like, come on, whatever else you want to say about my beliefs, like I, I am a good editor, like, and that’s, what the job was. Anyway, I don’t mean to harp so much on how thoroughly I find David Brooks, butSHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. No, but I mean, they’re, the people like him though, they, are just suffused all over publications that, present themselves to the public as liberal.LEHMANN: No, that, I mean, that’s, the, what that reasonable conservative shtick, right.SHEFFIELD: What is And look, and, I think we need people like that, but they should be over in the right wing media, not in our media.LEHMANN: Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine. Or yeah, or, I, like, I get along with the, bul work, people just fine.SHEFFIELD: mm-hmm.LEHMANN: think they, I don’t know. I don’t know how they would characterize. I mean, they’re never Trumpers. But I don’tSHEFFIELD: I think some of them have moved further left than others, but,LEHMANN: No, it’s striking that Bill Crystal, I often observe that Bill Crystal, this makes me feel all kinds of uncomfortable, but is much better on strategy than the Democratic party’s leadership.he is [00:40:00] definitely for, going hammering tongs after ice, and he is, yeah. And again, because he knows politics, right?The radical right has been at war with modernity for decades, but rarely taken seriouslySHEFFIELD: Well, it’s, yeah, it’s, that, but it’s also that when, I think about it, that and, again, having been born and raised as a Mormon fundamentalist, so much of what drives pretty much every right-wing elite, even without religion, the non-religious ones, is they hate modernity.LEHMANN: Oh yeah.SHEFFIELD: it, and they, hate, they hate international institutions. They hate successful government. They hate any kind of order of, democratic system. They want everything to be done through the private sector in terms of like forcing social welfare to be done through religious organizations or, and then letting businesses have complete untrammeled, ability to destroy countries or, exploit citizens.So no minimum wage like this is, so, they all want this. And the order that was built up through centuries or let’s say a century of effort, the people, once it was made, the people who ran it had no idea why they, what it, why it was good. Or how it could be better. And so then you, but then at the same time, you had this movement that started roughly around, during FDRs time in the us that, had and was like, no, we’re, this is all evil.This is terrible. This is, satanic, this is socialist, this, and, we’re going to destroy everything. And, the, center left elite, they just, they’re the, ah, that’s not serious. They don’t really believe that it’s all nonsense. Like you, we don’t have to pay attention to Alex Jones.We don’t have to pay attention to Donald Trump. InLEHMANN: I dunno. Or yeah. No, that there was this [00:42:00] moment, these are, people have been, I feel like I’ve been tilted against my whole adult life, but like, when Richard Hofstetter and Daniel Bell, sort of came forward to declare, in this confident Cold War. Liberal moment, that ideology was a dead letter.That you know what, the real scent strain of nativism and bigotry in American politics was populism, which was embodied by, at the time Joe McCarthy. And once McCarthy had been defeated, all of these, cold War liberal intellectuals, tookSHEFFIELD: The fever will break. That’sLEHMANN: Right, Right, right, right, No, I mean, Arthur Schlesinger wrote a terrible book called The Vital Center, in which he endorses a lot of McCarthyism idea.Is he, is, came out in support of loyalty os which is, it’s kind of like the Cold War version of like, let’s not say anything about immigration. Right. Like, we’ll, we’ll. be able to posture, as, heroic anti commie patriots and push everyone to the left out of the picture. So that, yeah, that whole dispensation, the, kind of Hs host, I guess you would say idea that, liberalism is just, and and Louis Harts famously wrote a book that argued there is no conservative intellectual tradition in America.It, has always been liberal, it will always be liberal. And it’s, it is stunning to go back and read that, body of work now, because it is just so clearly delusional, and all of these things were, still happening. You had the virtue movement, which was getting a lot of momentum at the time.You had. This sort of nascent Sunbelt Repub conservative movement that would ripen into the Goldwater campaign. And after that, the, Reagan campaign. And yeah, confident, complacent liberals just kept [00:44:00] saying, oh, that’s, that’s a maladaptive strain. It’s not going to, overtake a, a America’s rational body politic.And that’s why we don’t, we still don’t have the weapons to fight it because, no one ever took it seriously.SHEFFIELD: No, they didn’t.The lost lessons of the World War II generationsSHEFFIELD: So one of the other things though is that, so liberalism, early liberalism did have to argue for itself and it developed the chops to do it and to make the case, and to have the interest and the passion to take talk to the public. But the only time that liberalism since then has, engaged directly with fascism and authoritarianism is militarily really in this country or in the anglophone world.and so they, have no muscles memory to fall back onto that this is what we did last time and then this is why it worked, or this is why it didn’t work. There’s nothing there. I think.LEHMANN: right. And you know it, FDR was very good at messaging around this issue. He depicted our entry into World War II as a battle between slavery and freedom, and it’s very stark. And, it’s, it is striking a while ago, I rewatched just passingly on cable, part of the best years of our lives, this 1948.Movie about the demobilization of World War II veterans into American post-war society. And there’s this scene where one of the soldiers who can’t find a a better job is working as a soda jerk in a, drugstore chain. And this guy comes in who’s a fascist, who, finds out he was, he fought in the war.And and he says something like, well, it’s too bad. You are on the wrong side. And Dana Andrews the actor who, plays this character just. Punches the living daylights outta the sky. It was, and it was just like, it, wasn’t that [00:46:00] shocking, I don’t think to viewers at the time. ‘cause that message had penetrated, like, fascists are, bad.They’re, anti-American. They’re, not patriots. And this guy happened to be defaming a veteran, so he, got what for? But it is striking that coming out of World War ii, that message was unambiguous. Right. And after, the sort of long URA of the post Cold War era, we’ve, as you say, we’ve, lost the language.We’ve lost the, ability to effectively conceptualize and, instead we’ve had this tedious, in my view, debate on among liberals and leftists about, when is it right to call Trumpism fascist? And, clearly that moment has come and gone. I don’t think anyone can look at the events in Minneapolis and say like, this is not the behavior of a fascist regime.To say nothing of arresting Don Lemon like that, that I am missed. I’m a career journalist. I’ve worked in this industry for so long, and the deafening silence around the arrest of three African American journalists in Minneapolis for the simple crime of doing their jobs, that scares me as much as anything else.Like we, our, media industry has long been corrupted by money and intellectual inertia and decline. But when you are unable to see that moment for what it is we are in, serious troubleSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and a lot of that I think also, so the left lost the ability to, argue, to make the case, but also conservatives. I think also they, through generational attrition, they, [00:48:00] because the, conservative Americans, during World War II and afterward, they had the personal knowledge that fascism is not conservatism also. and, that. And so that’s why when people like William F. Buckley and, his ilk came along, people were disgusted by it. It was appalling. And Barry Goldwater, had that massive blowout loss in 1964. And so people had, ‘cause they knew, as you were saying, they had the memory, well, this is what fascism gets you, it gets you, disaster, death and chaos.and, they knew it because they had seen it with their own eyes. They had lived that memory and, now their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they have no knowledge of any of those things. And so conservatives now are, they’re, starting to think, oh, well, maybe we, should align with these fascists because gosh, if we don’t then, my belief that I shouldn’t have to pay any taxes or my belief that.My, the children should be forced to read my religious views like that. That won’t be the law of the land. And that would be awful if I couldn’t make people live that way. And, so they don’t have a commitment to democracy a per and, that’s, the unfortunate thing. When you look at, and the cognitive psychology on this is absolutely unanimous that people who are conservatively conservative politically ha they come to that way of belief through their psychological orientation and their cognitive style.It isn’t because of the issues. It’s not because of,LEHMANN: right.SHEFFIELD: It is simply, I like simple ideas. and, as Roger Scru called them the the unthinking people and he said that they were great. They weren’t necessary for society. And, and like that’s who elected Donald Trump. These were not [00:50:00] people. Overwhelmingly, the people that the demographics that flipped for Trump in 2024 to 2020 were younger people who had no memory of his first term and no idea what he was, what hadLEHMANN: Whereas what was laying in late. Right, right. No, and it’s yeah, it’s also just true that this, cohort of people, the people who don’t think if, they’re not giving, I mean, you can say the fascist, the anti-fascist impulse was also an unthinking reflex at, the time.So if you’re not given. A strong sense of what’s at stake. And this has, been my frustration with another frustration with the Democratic Party is you’ve had these successive presidential campaigns that have run on what is objectively the case that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are a mortal threat to our democracy.But the sad truth is that most especially younger people have no meaningful experience of, living in a democracy. Right. They, certainly don’t have it. When it comes to organizing their working lives it’s, become an incredibly adverse environment for union organization, even though there are a lot of, there is a lot of really powerful organizing going on.And they don’t have any sense of, democracy as something that is, meaningful in a atmosphere of sort of total civic corruption. If democracy means anything, it means powerful people are held to the same legal, moral, ethical standards as the rest of us. And that has not been the case for a very long time.And the Epstein files are such an object demonstration of that. Right. And [00:52:00] it’s, very interesting. It’s. All, very close to a, confirmation of Q Anon. There is a global pedophilic conspiracy, but guess what a lot of your team is, part of it. And that’s why, there’s been the, there, there was this great righteous Q Anon slash MAGA push to get the Epstein files released.And even now with them heavily redacted and I’m, convinced, like the most damaging Trump stuff is still being held in reserve. But there’s still enough there that, yeah, you people are going quiet a about it who were like, this was so central to their identities, right?Epstein files reveal that the ultimate ‘globalists’ are right-wingSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s. Well, and these people, I mean, in the files, I mean, this, it, with the sole exception of Noam Chomsky, who has always been morally problematic in my view overwhelmingly this was people who were the conservative Democrats and Republicans. That’s it. Like there, there aren’t any other leftist people in these Epstein files as far as I’ve seen.AndLEHMANN: So, yeah, that’s the thing is like the, it’s, like the reverse photographic negative of Q Anon.SHEFFIELD: yeah, what’s, like Q Anon was invented and promulgated as the defense mechanism basicallyalmost and because, and I don’t know, but, it’s also that, when you’re reading these files, and I, one thing that struck me was this conversation, these conversations that Peter Thiel.Jeffrey Epstein were having, and and they were both, I mean, what it shows very clearly is that Epstein was very friendly to, toward Trump and, solicitous for him, and concerned that he would win. And so when he was talking with Teal, he, one of the things he said was that Epstein said, well, Rexi is just the beginning.[00:54:00]And, then, and Teal was like a beginning of what?LEHMANN: What? Right, right,SHEFFIELD: and Epstein then proceeded to quote back Peter Thiel to himself, essentially the beginning of tribalism, the destruction of the old institutions. So that, basically, I mean, this is you, this is super villain stuff, Chris. That’s reallyLEHMANN: No, that’s what I’m saying. Right,right.SHEFFIELD: people, won’t, wouldn’t believe that it was real. If you, wrote it as even as nonfiction, like, and that’s, that is the thing that as a reporter who’s reported on extremism for a long time, and I’m sure you’ve seen this as well, that when you tell people, this is what these guys are doing, this is their agenda.They don’t believe you. They don’t believe you.LEHMANN: I, when I, shortly after I started at the Nation, I wrote a cover story on Q Anon, circuit whatever, 2022 coming out of the pandemic. And I did a couple of radio interviews where, you know or podcasts where people flat out refused, when I would trot out, the, basic stats at that point, which is that more than 30% of Americans endorse some version of the, Q anon, fantasy.And, people just flat. I said to me like, that can’t be right. I’m just like, I’m not making this up, which is, yeah.SHEFFIELD: That’s, and that really is the, cardinal or the original sin of, American, broader left is they don’t take these, the far right. Seriously enough. And they, and you see it also, in terms of like when you turn on Ms now as it’s called, it’s always the same people on the shows.Like, you don’t, hear any new speakers. You don’t hear any new thoughts, new strategies. No. It’s like, let’s hear what these people already told you for the hundredthLEHMANN: right, right. And their version of sort of viewpoint diversity is like Joe Scarborough and Nicole Wallace, [00:56:00] you know who I, both, I sort of knew them both when they were actual Republicans and they weren’t interesting people then. that’s, a Yeah, it is this, I mean, and obviously Fox News does the same thing, but they’ve, got, this more, no one is under any illusion that they’re presenting a balanced picture of anything. I think they’ve even retired the, fair and balanced slogan at this point.Nihilism and Tucker CarlsonSHEFFIELD: Did. Yeah. Yeah. But, and then but then we have also on the other side that on the further left that I think that there’s just a lot of nihilism, and like I used to, do some work with the Young Turks, like that channel just nihilists, everyone on there is anihilist and they monetize nihilism and thinking, oh, what if we, teamed up with Tucker Carlson to go after the government?And it’s like, Tucker Carlson hates capitalism because he’s a feudalist.LEHMANN: Right.SHEFFIELD: that’s not,LEHMANN: Talk about your fault against modernity. Right.SHEFFIELD: That is not your ally under any circumstance now. And it is true, but it is true. On the other hand that the, people who are his audience, a lot of them, have potential to be converted or at least to stay home and, stop, listening to these assholes because they’re not listening to them because the, because they’re presenting ideas.like, right this week as we’re chatting Christopher Ruffo, the right wing activist, it was complaining about how all the most red Substack are left wing. And so therefore, Substack has a left wing bias. And it’s like, no, your side doesn’t read. You guys don’t like to read. You like to listen to a a, guy in a chair talk for three hours to tell you what to think about everything.That’s what your [00:58:00] model is. You don’t want to read a concise essay. You don’t want to read an academic paper. You don’t want to read a researched magazine cover story. You don’t want that. Your audience doesn’t want that, and they never have,LEHMANN: Yeah. Yeah. AndYeah, it’s funny, I just reviewed this new Tuck Tucker biography by Jason Ley. And again, it’s striking just like, and again, I, knew tr Tucker and the before times. And he’s just an uninteresting person. Like, and he, he figured out, the real pivot point in his career wasn’t an ideological conversion moment.It wasn’t like he suddenly decided Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis or whoever are my, new, idols it, he decided he wanted to be on tv. That was it. And, people forget all this, but you know, he tried, he, he was on Dancing With the Stars. He auditioned to be a host of A NBC game show and didn’t get it.And,SHEFFIELD: sNBC host also.LEHMANN: he was also an M-S-N-B-C host. Yeah. And that flatlined and, and when he came to Fox Roger Ailes openly professed hatred for him. Again, I think in sort of class terms, he’s just obnoxious, preppy asshole. And, Roger was a, son of a hardware store owner in Ohio. And and so Tucker would get these sort of gigs where he would, he was like a, stunt weekend anchor.He would like play cowbell for Blue Oyster Cult and, do stupid. It’s the same sort of idiocy that Pete Hex has used to do when he was a weekend host. So,SHEFFIELD: Before he was our de defense secretary.LEHMANN: Yeah. Right. And before Tucker Carlson was a kingmaker who’s, now being speculated about is Donald Trump’s successor. And it was on, it was only, because Trump got elected a and Bill O’Reilly succumbed to his massive sex pest scandal that Tucker got [01:00:00] the primetime spot on, Fox.So it’s less, sort of the origin story of, a right wing, super villain than what makes Sammy run, in my view. Like he just, he figured out, how do I stay famous? And, this is his ticket.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and yeah, and that there’s gotta be something in between just letting any schlub have a job and only letting people who, worked for Bill Clinton 30 years ago have a job. Like there’s gotta be somewhere in between. I.LEHMANN: Yeah. I mean, I think for that to happen, again, it’s like with the Democratic Party, you need to, and it’s like the commercial model of mainstream media, especially television is flatlining right now. So there people do have to approach it from a fundamentally different standpoint. But you know, it’s the same problem.You have entrenched money, you have entrenched, sort of a professional cast above it all.Need for hope and transcendence in politicsSHEFFIELD: The other thing also, besides having a more oppositional left and that is really willing to go to the mat left, there also has to be a more open and hopeful left. and that actually was something that was different about the 2008 Barack Obama campaign and, people didn’t learn that lesson.And I would tie it back to, in this post-war consensus that existed Also, that when we look at authors like, ha Aand or where from, like they talked, a very well about the, and, had lengthened several, like a lot of books, about this real psychological origins of fascism.And, it is an ideology of despair. There’s an ideology of loss of death. And you can’t, you cannot defeat that unless you offer the opposite of that toLEHMANN: right, right. And which again, like I, I think FDR [01:02:00] was really a, great model for that. had, A kind of messaging that was sort of, formally encapsulated in like the fireside chats where, you know, he. This was like the most Patricia person on the planet, basically. I think his mother moved with him to Harvard for his freshman year.Like, but you know, he, was able to sort of tap into this sort of wellspring of, a shared national identity, a shared national purpose that was, expansive and, was targeted at, coming out of the depression, the, forgotten man, the the need,SHEFFIELD: Yeah.LEHMANN: And, the four freedoms, which was, sort of in my view, the unfulfilled legacy of modern American liberalism.So, and, and part of the hopeful element. It is some a subject that we, both have an abiding interest in, which is religion. And it’s been striking to me, the, showing of sort of, clergy and pastors in Minnesota that recalls very vividly to me, the civil rights era, which people don’t adequately understand.This is another problem of historical memory. The civil rights movement was basically a reli religious revival. That you don’t get the level of heroic commitment on the part of ordinary people to literally put your body on the line to tilt against this, century long, unjust system of racial oppression. That was not, it was not going to go away by virtue of conventional interest group politics. we knew all of that.SHEFFIELD: OrLEHMANN: D’s sins was striking, right? Right. You need moral imagination. You need a sense of a higher justice. You need all of that to galvanize people under the most adverse imaginable conditions who actually did overthrow Jim [01:04:00] Crow, who created a second reconstruction in this country.So yeah, I absolutely agree. And I do think, religion is one of the things that people on the left again, reflexively dismiss or don’t understand or think they don’t have to, it’s, regarded as a, an aism. And you know what’s happens over all this time is it has become. Almost, it’s the largest, as you well know, evangelicals are the largest voting block for Trump.And you have to ask yourself. Yeah, there, you’re right. This is fascism is an ideology of despair and nihilism and, lust and, ultimately self-destruction, I think. And but how does it get harnessed to the evangelical movement? Right? That is a huge question that I think needs serious unpacking.And no one on the left can be bothered. That’s again, to go back to the Q Anon thing, like, I think in the lead of that piece, I talked to this very good Matthew Sutton this great historian of American Evangelicalism, and he said, the first time I saw one of these Q anon, sort of fever charts of all the, kind of alleged, lines of transmission in this global pedophile conspiracy, I thought to myself, I’ve seen this before. And it was, the sort of dispensationalist flow chart of human history.And it was all this, it’s structurally identical. And he, was right. I looked it up after I interviewed him. That’s a very deep, and I would argue like a universal human longing, people need history to make sense. And they will, in the absence of anything else, they were glam into the most improbable, bizarre, paranoid, delusional, conspiratorial nonsense.But it makes sense to them, and it gives them a sense. I interviewed someone else, another [01:06:00] student of the movement who said like, Q anon it works like a religion in the sense that it give, it gives you a sense of purpose. It gives you a, like, you get up every day and you think, I’m going to go track the global pedophile conspiracy online.It gives you something to do. I,SHEFFIELD: And it gives you community tooLEHMANN: Right. A community of like-minded people, all that, Trump rallies,SHEFFIELD: and purpose andLEHMANN: right? Yeah.SHEFFIELD: andthat’s, yeah, go ahead.LEHMANN: I was just going to say, Trump rally rallies also function as religious revivals. That way, you’re, among the elects, everyone understands what the project is.You’re going to ritually denounce the enemy who is satanic all the rest of it. It’s, very powerful. And there’s nothing on the left that comes close to it in, my opinion.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, there isn’t. And it’s, it’s that so like the, early American reactionaries, like, they, they were big fans of this German philosopher named Eric Vogel.LEHMANN: I know, well I’ve read widelySHEFFIELD: and like, and he was obsessed, but notLEHMANN: kind of, I, kind, I like his gnosticism book.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Although that what, that, what do you call narcissism was not narcissism, but but, I will say, yeah, like the thing that, that was kind of his overarching idea was that people must have transcendence and that they have to see themselves, they have to see the bigger picture, and that this is a innate human longing.LEHMANN: right.SHEFFIELD: And I think he was right about that. Like his history was crap and he was an authoritarianLEHMANN: no.SHEFFIELD: scholar.LEHMANN: all true. Yes, all true.SHEFFIELD: but you know, the, larger idea that people, they want something outside of themselves. Because, the, this is the, this world is a, is an unforgiving and cruel place.LEHMANN: It’s harshSHEFFIELD: so if weLEHMANN: and it’s, also,SHEFFIELD: something else, toLEHMANN: alienating and [01:08:00] atomizing, so if you can come together like. And what Martin Luther King famously called the beloved community. Right. The, and the power of, that moment, I think was kind of the high watermark of certainly the moral imagination of American liberalism.And and I do think, yeah, you’re right. The, early, sort of flush times of the O Obama campaign were called that. But again, the problem there, I would argue, was a structural one with the Democratic party. Like Obama was not going to do what FDR did. He wasn’t going to found a pecora commission to go after the bad actors in the banking industry that brought about the 2008 meltdown.He famously told the bankers when he summoned them, that I am, I’m all that stands between you and the pitchforks like. Yeah, that was the thing. You had a, sort of civil rights, veneer over the same product. Which it was neoliberal, finance industry, centrismAnti-ICE protests as a sign of hope for the futureSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, I would say though that, I guess on a more hopeful note, it’s hard, Chris but, but you know, the, like the protests that we are seeing in, Minnesota and the various No Kings rallies, the, these are, this is a, recapturing of that. But ultimately, the people who will, solve these problems are not in, they’re the ones who are just the regular marchers right now.LEHMANN: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Ultimately and, when, and to put their bodies on the line. Like people can see the regular non-political public as you were saying earlier, when, they see just regular normal people like Alex pre or like Renee Goode, being mercilessly killed and abused and gassed.That, that has an effect in the same way that, the civil rights marchers of the [01:10:00] 1960s and the anti-war marchers of theLEHMANN: Bull O’Connor. I’ve thought of Bull Connor all throughout this. Yeah. And I think they are also, these are the people who are creating pressure on the Democratic party to, at long last, do something. And we’ll see how, far that goes. And if the Democratic Party doesn’t do something, we need a new Democratic party.SHEFFIELD: I think so. All right. Well, let’s see. So you got anything coming out in the next little bit for people to, keep an eye out for or that, you wantLEHMANN: oh God. Oh me. I I’ve been doing a bit more editing, so I’m, I haven’t been writing at my usual frequency. The, last thing I did was this David Brooks thing you mentioned, and I got I think I was surprised actually at the response that got, ‘cause I’ve, been attacking David Brooks literally for decades.But yeah, other, apart from that, I’m just, waiting for the next catastrophe. We’ll, seeSHEFFIELD: Well, so what social media do you want people to follow you on? How about that?LEHMANN: well, I deactivated my Twitter account finally, when I, speaking of editing, I edited a piece about, how gr has become the world’s most popular, I guess, source of pedophilic imagery. And I was just like, okay, I’m out. So yeah, I am. What is I, what is my blue sky? Monitor moniker. I can never remember.I guess it’s, yeah, it’s @chrislehmann.bsky.social.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. All right. And then of course, people can always read you at the Nation as well,LEHMANN: Exactly, yes. Thank you.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. Appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more, if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video audio transcript of all the episodes. And if you are liking what we’re doing here, we have paid and free subscription options.You can subscribe on patreon.com/discoverflux, [01:12:00] or you can subscribe on flux.community on Substack. And if you can do a paid subscription, that would be great. I would really appreciate that. This is a hard time for media and for journalists who are not funded by oligarchs like Elon Musk or any of these other people like Jeff Bezos.So that would be great. But I’d still like to stay in touch anyway, if you can’t afford that right now. and if you can forward the show to your social media or something like that, and if you’re watching on YouTube, you please do click like and subscribe so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode.Thanks a lot. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Jan 30, 2026 • 55min

Censorship proponents have nationalized their earlier library obsessions

Episode Summary There’s so much news going on nowadays that it’s impossible to keep up with everything—in Minnesota, DC, and elsewhere. But authoritarianism is on the march in many places, including possibly in your city or state, where extremists haven’t just continued their interest in censoring schools and public libraries, they have expanded them to include universities, museums, and scientific research.This is extremely un-American stuff, and yet sadly, it is being marketed in just the opposite way. Censorship advocates are weaponizing patriotism, concern for children, and political fairness to crack down on the free speech of people they don’t like.Back on the show to discuss how and why this is happening, and to provide some arguments for free expression that activists can utilize is Jonathan Friedman, he’s the Managing Director of the Free Expression program at PEN America, a wonderful organization that promotes free speech and literacy which just released a new report about government censorship of college professors and students.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--America’s libraries and schools are facing an epidemic of censorship (Friedman’s previous TOC appearance)--Censorship was always a core demand of early reactionary activists like William F. Buckley--The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the false equivalence of criticism and censorship--How misinformation against ‘cancel culture’ was used to build an opposing politics of censorshipAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction11:22 — Censorship laws are deliberately vague to maximize fear and compliance13:22 — Living in fear of non-compliance17:48 — Supposed advocates for ‘Western values’ are now censoring classic authors23:42 — Does censorship actually work though?27:11 — Fake free speech absolutism33:44 — Responding to the ‘parents rights’ canard40:32 — America’s declining global reputation under Trump43:38 — Responding to false ‘patriotism’ arguments48:51 — The value of literacy and readingAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So lot has happened since you were on the program in 2022. And not a lot of good things in terms of free speech and free expression. Let’s, and I, think, and there’s been challenges both last time it was challenges at the state level primarily.But now we have federal issues as well. What are some of the biggest things ongoing right now that maybe that have been passed in the past several years in your view? And then we’ll go from there.JONATHAN FRIEDMAN: Sure. Well, I think starting in 2021 we saw, something new. Which were what we called at the time, educational gag orders. There were these proposals being passed into law in a few states that sub to constrain how it is that teachers could talk about certain issues.And a lot of the language that was originally in these laws a few years ago was very vague, but. was also vague in its implications. So they would say, here’s a list of concepts that teachers can’t talk about. And, in a lot of states it was unclear to what extent it would apply, for example, to professors at colleges and universities as compared to K to 12 teachers, which is more clear.And from that, moment in time, what we’ve seen is, a lot of activity. Kinda build on that idea. The idea being that the government should extend new control in one way or another over public education. Some of that has taken new shape in higher education proposals to [00:04:00] not just exert control over what academics might teach college age students, but for example, to kind of undermine the entire operation of colleges and universities, for example, weakening the power of faculty to set curriculum or setting new rules like we’ve seen in Texas about certain topics that can’t be taught in an college level class at all.And then in K to 12, what we’ve seen is an ongoing effort to apply these restrictions, not just to classrooms, but to school libraries and to also come up with new mechanisms that essentially may not be forms of direct. Prohibitions telling people what they can’t teach, but they function as such.For example, empowering parents to have rights over what their own students might be able to access in a school, but thereby. And this is key, thereby censoring that material for everyone. And this is a very, I mean, it’s, it reflects a really challenging aspect of public education in this country that, that doesn’t necessarily have easy answers.what is the role of public education vis-a-vis parents and students. But I think when you step back and you see, The whole picture, the effort to control higher education, the effort to, restrict K to 12 education.It’s inevitable to come to the conclusion that at a very baseline, we are at an unprecedented moment for what we might think of as. The freedom to learn in public schooling, public universities, the freedom to ask questions, the freedom to talk about current events, the freedom to recommend books, the freedom to relate to students about things that are current topics in their lives. All of this is being narrowed. All of it is being undermined.All of it is being chilled so that now, if a teacher is thinking [00:06:00] about going to see a, theater play, a performance, they’re gonna be much more nervous about. any possible content that might upset anybody, and what that means is it’s all driving toward this kind of lowest common denominator, meaning, the thing that everybody can agree on, and if nobody can agree on much, then suddenly you can’t teach anything anymore.And so if to start to recognize that as uncomfortable as freedom can be, at times, it is a better alternative than sort of continuing to narrow and restrict. What it is that we can talk and think about all the time.SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. And we’re also seeing a lot of restrictions and censorship on museums and government employees, particularly scientists as well, like a list of, words that are going to get you flagged if you have them in your grant proposal for scientific research. And extensive.Censorship of museum exhibits, including one just recently where they ordered the removal of information about the fact that it was George Washington, I think, wasn’t it, that hehadFRIEDMAN: in Philadelphia? Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, like there are these efforts over many years too. Improve, improve the story of. History in this country and prove the narrative of what people think they, what people, can grasp about the past to make that information more accessible. And what we are seeing is an effort to roll that back, to say that, that those narratives ought to be essentially erased even if they are true. if, they don’t make us feel good, let’s say whoever that us is, us being people in power, and that’s a very, that’s a very particular idea and approach to history and to the nation and its role in history, right?To say that the purpose is the purpose, truth is the purpose is deeper understanding. Is the purpose to [00:08:00] ask questions or is the purpose. Well indoctrination or to have to propagandize to narrow what it is that people have access to. So yeah, we’re seeing this go way beyond schools and universities where I think it began, and it’s been happening also in all kinds of institutions, cultural, artistic institutions for years, museums will tell you they’ve been more and more nervous actually about. School visits because of, what parents might complain about in a museum. And if you think about like, art in a museum and you have a parent who wants to ban books that have anything to do with nudity, well they’re probably gonna find something to complain about in a museum.So this kind of sense of, that every cultural or artistic institution should operate on eggshells, that every educator should operate with that mindset, it’s really gonna be damaging long term.SHEFFIELD: It really is. And I mean, effectively this. Is kind of the, they’re, trying to institutionalize the heckler’s veto. Can you talk us about that for people who haven’t heard that term, tell, us what that is.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, that’s a, it’s a really useful way of thinking about this. The heckler’s veto is the idea that. If you have maybe someone who’s giving a speech to an audience and one person in the audience heckles, they will interrupt, take down the event, heckle it to such an extent that they veto the experience of everybody else who came and who wanted to participate in.And we’re seeing that kind of veto exercised in a lot of different ways. On the one hand, we’ve seen that. On campuses for many years with speakers, across the political spectrum. This idea that someone’s speech or what they’ve said in the past or what they might say now is so offensive that, we should make the decision for everybody that no one should be able to hear it.We should stop and shut down the event from happening. And, turns out nobody across the political spectrum, has an exclusive right to that tactic. ‘cause we’re seeing it all over the place. But the [00:10:00] other thing is that we are seeing government, adopt that kind of heckler’s, veto, government enabling it, government encouraging it in a lot of places.And so, that’s what I was referring to before with the school library. and what we’ve seen with book bans all over the country is that sometimes you just have one individual who may have challenged. A thousand books or a hundred books or whatever it is. And especially when school districts adopt rules that they will remove books from circulation when and if they are challenged, what it means is it’s very easy to get a whole lot of books removed just by challenging them. And the more you dig into that phenomenon, you discover that the challenge forms are sometimes half filled out. They’re filled out with falsehoods, they’re filled out with things that don’t make sense. I, one of my favorite examples was a. A book which contained the poem by Amanda Gorman, which she read at President Biden’s inauguration.And like, I don’t know at what age someone should be able necessarily to read that poem, but the point is it was in a school library, but the person who challenged it said the book was by Oprah Winfrey. I mean, it just like, not, you’re not even really accurately filling out this form in a very sensible, straightforward manner.So. The more the more the phenomenon has been excavated, the more clear it’s been that it has been replicated across state lines and that often you see those kinds of mistakes repeated.Censorship laws are deliberately vague to maximize fear and complianceSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And another key, component to this, which these people who are challenging books are, some of the many people who were doing this. Is that these laws, in many cases are deliberately vague in a way that is designed to chill speech that is that they get more of an effect than, they could legally get.Because they know that if they’re too detailed, then it would get struck down as an explicit violation of the First Amendment. But if they make it vague, then it will stand a [00:12:00] chance.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, in some ways there’s been this embrace of the vagueness, and we see that time and again that state legislators for example, when given the opportunities to make laws more clear prefer not to. So, one that I’m reading today in Florida is a new bill that would ban the phrase the West Bank from all official government materials.I think that’s the phrasing and. You have to replace that with other, words to refer to the land in the Middle East that is so contested and, it’s, really astonishing because not only is the rationale for this change, sort of unclear, but what are official government materials also becomes. really vague. So would that include like something being created for a classroom, a college classroom, a school library, et cetera? It’s not clear. But also there’s a desire not to clarify it when it could be clear so that it will have the necessary chilling and censoring effect.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and teachers are seeing this over and over as you were saying, like. They’re like, well, I don’t know if I can say this. And that’s the idea, is to get everyone to live in fear of non-compliance. Ultimately. I think that’s what we’re talking about here.Living in fear of non-complianceFRIEDMAN: Yeah, I mean, and this, is like, it’s exactly the same phenomenon that’s now afflicting universities and college teaching that I saw years ago with school libraries. I remember, a vague rule in Missouri, it was a few years ago, that led some school librarians to sweep through their districts and pull any book off the shelf. That might that might run afoul of one of those rules. And I’m actually remembering I have some of these books behind me still from the, I’m just gonna grab ‘em for a sec here. Just coincidentally, I know these are on that shelf. Like they, they pulled, this is a this is a graphic adaptation of the [00:14:00] Gettysburg Address, and you can flip through this book.I have you tell me what it was in this book that somebody objected to. I’m not sure. The closest that I’ve seen is that the law. Band nudity and there’s like pictures of, slaves here who are, dressed for African weather rather than whatever it is, the middle passage, et cetera.So, I guess those are people who are not wearing shirts. Okay. If you are told though, that as a librarian you might go to jail and get a criminal record. If you give a certain kind of material to a student and that material might be designated as any kind of nudity and this Gettysburg Address graphic novel, like a book literally written to make this accessible to young people, and you’re saying you might go to jail for it, you’re gonna take that risk. And so Well, apparently not. And so what happens is, people are made to feel like the stakes of this are so high that they ought to air on the side of. Removing materials. And in fact, that phrase err on the side of caution in quotes there, that’s actually a phrase that was popularized in Florida as a way to ban books that school districts should err on the side of caution.And if you, if we all err on the side of caution when we’re talking about intellectual access to books, I mean, do you know how many books are not cautious when you think about like, books that you actually wanna read? They, you have exciting things that happen in them, unexpected things, topics that you may not encounter in your life, and that you can only come to understand through the, through an impactful story that, that, makes that kind of information or experience accessible to you.So inevitably. That leads to limiting, the bounds of what people might learn about in a library. And the other book I had here, I pulled off the shelf was, this is a graphic novel adaptation of The Odyssey. That was another one in MIS in Missouri too. And there was a whole bunch of others as well.[00:16:00] Something like 50 50 or so. Art history books, books like, the works of Picasso. Again. It gets pretty limitless if you are taking that kind of cautious approach. And so now we’re also seeing that in higher education with Texas University professors being told they can’t put things on their syllabus.one of them most, in the news recently was told that he couldn’t teach. Plato works by Plato and you think, oh, how could you be tellinga university? How could you tell a Philosophy professor not to teach Plato? I still, it’s a philosophical question I don’t have the answer to yet, except to say that’s what it’s like to live under these laws.that’s the that’s the fundamental contradictions of ‘em actually to what we think of when we think of public education and what it’s supposed to do for people. Critical thinking, open minds.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and, that is another kind of weapon, weaponization of the vagueness is, trying to classify everything as pornography and pornographic. And so that’s obviously what the Gettysburg address challenge presumably was. But they also even did it with Anne Frank. And illustrated, Anne Frank diaryFRIEDMAN: Yeah, that that’s another one that’s been attacked. And one of the supposedly controversial parts of that book involves Anne imagining herself among a field of Greek nude statues of sort of Greek goddesses. And, the artists and the illustrator who talk about that, say, they were trying to honor actually. What Anne was interested in and what she was talking about in that passage from her diary, and the idea that would be somehow pornographic or driven by an illicit intention. I mean, that’s offensive, so unfortunately that’s just what we’ve seen all over.Supposed advocates for ‘Western values’ are now censoring classic authorsSHEFFIELD: Yeah, and, there’s a huge. Terrible irony also in that while these censorship advocates are, trying to censor [00:18:00] these major historical figures and, books, they’re also at the same time claiming to be, we’re the defenders of western culture from these, evil. woke pornographers or whatever they’re, fill in the blank insult.But they’re, literally attacking the foundations of the very things that they claim to believe it.FRIEDMAN: I mean, ironically the irony of ironies here, right? and we’ve seen also many universities now start to set up these civic centers on campuses, but they aren’t what they seem, And there are all these norms around. How universities are supposed to work. Like, sometimes we can blur the distinction.We talk about public education at large in K to 12 versus in higher education, but certainly we understand that like college level education is supposed to be about, the unfettered exploration of ideasin its truest sense. They’re adults. And so, what’s, been. But there’s also a tradition surrounding how faculty as experts play a role in setting curriculum in determining syllabi and the like.And what’s happening on a lot of campuses is now this new tactic of. Mandating through public funding, the creation of a civic center for maybe the study of like Western traditional culture or something like that. But then not actually trusting experts in these fields to run these centers. Instead mandating, in some cases through law what students would have to read and how they would have to encounter the topics. And again, like it’s not to say that this is all necessarily. Bad or would not achieve some positive outcomes. But fundamentally, the principle of political control in that direct manner of, excuse me, of college education, the, it’s fundamentally college education was meant to be insulated from that kind of direct political control.And that’s something that university [00:20:00] leaders certainly in the United States have embraced as part of what has made the American academic system. So strong in the envy of the world is the academic freedom that has led to discoveries, to provocative teaching, to taking up difficult issues. Now, I’m not saying this already wasn’t challenged by other cultural forces.For a decade it was, but now what we’re seeing is something different. We’re seeing the weaponization of that through direct government censorship, which, unfortunately is just gonna make it even harder to ever right the ship when it comes to these issues.SHEFFIELD: It does, and, they really are not considering how they would feel if they’re if they’re, the, opposing political party was in charge of these civic centers, because guess what, then according to their, definition of what’s true and what’s right, then. They would say, well, we’re gonna tear out all this curriculum that you guys put in and we’re gonna put in curriculum that supports our party.AndThey wouldn’t like that.FRIEDMAN: You can imagine the sort of perpetual cycle we might get into where every four years we just, swap everything that’s taught in public schools, one curriculum for the other. And so, yeah, I don’t think, like, I don’t think the answer is either political party or either partisan ideologues dictating the bounds of what we’re able to know, and we’ve seen. We look, we’ve seen efforts to do that in of all kinds across the political spectrum. The issue we’re seeing right now in particular is a kind of weaponization of that government control at a level and sort of scale we’ve really never seen in the United States before. And like people will make comparisons when I talk to ‘em about, the censorship of schools today and universities and how it compares to oh, book bands in the 1970s and eighties, or McCarthyism or, the Comstock era, which is, even earlier or bans on teaching evolution in the 1920s, which led to the famous Scopes Monkey trial.And the reality is that [00:22:00] actually the combined efforts today in 2026 that include individual universities, individual school districts, municipal bodies, governing boards, state legislators, and now the federal government all working more or less in one way or another to exert this kind of political and ideological control over our public educational institutions.That is actually all of those other moments in one way or another, combined. It is actually unprecedented and it is at a scale. That this country has never reckoned with. I mean, this is different, And I don’t think, I don’t think people appreciate enough, for example, that some of the federal governments, and directives in the past year, particularly concerning things like patriotic education, quote unquote, or remaking the Smithsonian or insisting that any public funding for libraries or monuments or other public cultural and arts installations needs to support a patriotic notion of the United States.And it has a set of, very particular definition. I don’t think people understand that actually has its closest parallel in laws that have been passed in Russia and in China. That’s where that comes from. That’s the language. It’s almost verbatim. So that’s the kind of thing that United States has actually historically been against.Now, that isn’t to say that there couldn’t be different priorities, when we think about federal investment in, in the arts and the culture and the history and, memorials and things like that. But there has been a kind of understanding that there should be. Openness to diversity of views rather than rigid restrictions on how people are allowed to think about this and how they’re supposed to allowed to represent it.Does censorship actually work though?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, there’s this, i, this extreme naivete also, I think in that, especially in regard to school libraries or public libraries that, they, have this idea of what if we remove [00:24:00] these books from the libraries? Then the students will not know about these things.And it’s like, well, guess what? teenagers are going to be looking up stuff about sex. Guess what? Teenagers are going to be looking up about, gender identity. Teenagers are going to, want to read about atheism or, whatever. We know, whatever topic you can imagine as an adult.Teenagers are going to be interested in it because they’re a lot smarter than a lot of adults realize. I think.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I, I think there, there is this question, I’m often asked, well, doesn’t the book banning just. Drive people towards it or make it more attractive in a way. And I do think on some level, the bands are not totally effective for a time. When we think about the scale of this, we’re not just talking about like one taboo book.We’re talking about like whole libraries being utterly censored. So now that’s a lot of material that some teenagers may not have any. Means to access whatsoever. if you are talking about, people who still have access to Amazon and other opportunities to access books, sure there they have other means, but that’s by no means universal.In fact, the very purpose of the public library is to ensure that there is a kind of universal access to those materials.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there is, that’s ultimately who these laws really do end up hurting the most is people who can’t afford to buy a book on Amazon or tea or, kids who don’t have access to somebody who they can talk to and trust about their sexuality or whatever. Like that’s who is being is being harmed by these, repressions ultimately.And and I would say that. I mean, if they feel their ideas are true, then argue for them. Put them, show why they’re right, [00:26:00] instead of trying to censor the other ideas you don’t like. I mean, ultimately that’s, and that works for anybody, I would say.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I often say, when people want to shut something down, that it would be much more powerful to speak out against it. It’d be much more powerful to debate it, to debunk its ideas, to make a persuasive argument about why those ideas are wrong. snuffing out, an opponent or a different ideology when you use, the power of the state or other sort of, mechanisms. in the long run you’re not testing your arguments, you’re not gonna build up the ability to. I think make a compelling case. And so, yeah, I think it’s always just much more important to encourage people to lean in and engage. And maybe that’s uncomfortable. Maybe disagreement is uncomfortable, but we have to remember that censorship is always gonna be worse and it always spreads.one said, one group censoring another, it’s gonna red down, and it’s just sort of a ping pong of censorship. And then, what are you left with? Nothing.Fake free speech absolutismSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and we even saw this during the COVID Pandemic where people were calling for, harmful ideas to be removed from the internet. And look, those ideas were bad and they were incorrect, but. And they shouldn’t have, and, the companies shouldn’t have promoted them which is really what they were ended were doing ultimately.But, trying to get them blocked and banned, like that’s, unless people are committing fraud or, committing a, some sort of illegal act. The government really can’t be involved in the, in things like that. Whereas, of course, if private actors want to do something, say, well, that’s not allowed on my platform.That’s up to them. But like, the government has no place in this regard.FRIEDMAN: one of the, [00:28:00] surprising ironies, I would say of the past year under the Trump administration in particular touches on that very question of public and private with regard to private universities where, certainly the First Amendment is something that protects speech at public universities, but it’s been all these private universities who have been put under tremendous pressure concerning their federal research funding and other sort of threats of, department of Justice investigations and, threats of losing that funding, et cetera. And, it’s been, again, time and again the private universities who are being brought to heal in one way or another, and targeted. And so interestingly, they have actually greater freedom to resist in some sense. Government dictates because they’re not public institutions, they don’t have to be neutral to, with regard to speech.But nonetheless, we’re seeing that, they’re the ones that the administration has been targeting. Less so with private schools. Only occasionally have I seen. Proposals for state laws that would seek to restrict teaching in public schools compared to, sorry, excuse me. In, private schools at the K to 12 level.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, to be fair, I mean, some of the private universities have definitely stood up for their rights at Harvard University being, one of the biggest ones. And, but yeah, Columbia University definitely has not. And you, the thing that they haven’t realized, the ones who have knuckled under is that.Giving these concessions against your, free speech. That isn’t, it just invites more attacks on your freedom. It doesn’t protect you in any way.FRIEDMAN: Well, no, and you’re, I mean, it goes around, comes around karma. We can think about it different ways, but also, today’s book Bans are going to create and teach a generation that what they should do with ideas they don’t like is censor them. They were already getting [00:30:00] that idea. That idea was already spreading. Now it’s getting worse. Maybe you could even say that elements on the right took that from elements on the left, you know that ideas can be harmful and therefore speakers can be harmful, and therefore books can be harmful, et cetera. I mean, to a certain extent, sure, you can read a book and it can affect you, but I always hesitate to suggest that these things are so harmful that the answer ought to be, erasure, banning, prohibitions, et cetera.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the, and, it’s gotten worse in the sense that so after, trying to say, well, the social media companies were mean to us with regard to our misinformation on vaccines or whatever. Now the administration is also trying to say, well, and and they had some lawsuits about it, which they, lost thankfully.Trying to say that. Well, the social media companies are public utilities, and so therefore they should not be allowed to have any free speech rights.They’re of their own to prohibit content which is, that’s ultimately. that’s, another way of doing censorship by saying, it’s like saying if you have a a club, you know that you’ve set up with your friends.And you have no right to, disinvite people if it’s open to the public and, that’s just not, that’s not right. And, it’s, just a perversion of this. It’s like they’ve created a fake free speech absolutism, I think. And you see that a lot.FRIEDMAN: You, you do. And maybe it’s not fake, but it’s also very inconsistent. So in the wake of, Charlie Kirk, being murdered. A university campus, that’s an opportunity for a real conversation about violence and ideological disagreement in this country getting out of control. And, to a certain extent, you saw a lot of praise for Kirk from across the political spectrum for his willingness to at least try and debate people.Now, people would say he was never really, I don’t know whether he was authentic, whether he was really debating, I’m, not even [00:32:00] gonna get into that. I’m just gonna say that in the wake of it, you saw all these politicians who started to try to crack down on. Things that professors, teachers and other people in all kinds of professions were saying, in tweets on Facebook, sometimes I was putting, maybe their Facebook settings were private, but somebody screenshotted it.And there were groups who were collating this information and trying to get basically as many people fired for speaking their minds as possible. Now, in another moment, that would’ve been the precise kind of thing that many of the politicians who were involved in amplifying this. Their party was known and basically making a name of themselves as being the ones who, believe in free speech and don’t wanna be snowflakes and, wanna make sure that, freedom of speech is our most, most cherished liberty. And yet, here was this effort to punish people for things that they thought and said as opposed to saying, look, this was a heightened emotional moment in the country. And look, I think it’s hard. It’s just hard for someone to remember that actually if people are engaging and leaning in and disagreeing fiercely, that’s actually a robust democratic public square. It’s hard to get excited about that anymore. I know. But yet that’s actually, it’s meant to be raucous. That’s how change happens. Jostling forces speaking passionately, who would want, like. Inevitably, the more we, wiggle away those freedoms and kind of soften everyone’s speech, we’re losing something really important. And I, I, think about those impacts not just about on like democracy or political argument, but like those impacts on art, on culture, on feeling, on emotion, on storytelling. And I don’t wanna lose that.Responding to the ‘parents rights’ canardSHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so let’s, so I, think a lot of people who were watching or listening are, they have a, to this show, they have a, commitment to free speech and, sending up for. People’s ability to, write [00:34:00] and to say what they think. So, but I, wanna if just kind of go through some of the arguments that they might hear if they are trying to stand up in, for their local library or stand up in the school district.So, let’s just maybe go through a couple of these arguments. So I guess one of the, probably the biggest one that, that we often hear is, well, you’re saying parents don’t have any rights. About how their children are educated. Is that what you’re saying?FRIEDMAN: Well, no.I think that’s, absolutely a caricature. There is a notion that has been pedaled that like. Parents must, I don’t know, have full and total control over their children and what they can learn in schools. Or any, anything less, like parents are losing their quote unquote rights. I, resist any notion that says that one person has rights that, include control of somebody else.like there’s autonomy of the individual. And it’s not to say that parents don’t have an important role in like steering the upbringing of their children being involved in schools of contributing to how a group of young people in a community learn. But this notion around parents’ rights, it just takes us down this. very difficult road where like more and more, I guess the idea is that the students and the young person has like less and less rights and no rights at all. what about the rights of the individual to learn and to explore and to, figure out who they wanna be in the world.All of those things are also important in any notion of a liberal democracy, and at the same time. We do have to recognize that there is something valuable about what we call like a public education, a shared public education. when people come to a common understanding and have a common foundation of, information about something in the world, that’s what we think about when we think about like, history is something that, people may not have learned together yet.They, [00:36:00] share. Similarly when you think about it with like regard to different identities, there has to be some baseline understanding of, that people of different identities. Ought to be free to express them and ought to be free to, be represented in schools and other venues. And so, I, just fear that sometimes this notion of parents’ rights is being taken to such an extreme where there’s almost like nothing left of the notion of. The public rights, the civic rights of everyone to learn together, to, meet people who are different and look like. I don’t think things in K 12 or higher education are perfect with regard to like the freedom to learn by any means. But at the same time, there is something valuable in having curriculum set by experts that everybody gets to learn. And I’ll say just, I’ve seen this parent’s rights rhetoric. Also be extended to meaning that a parent should essentially get like a list of, every topic that ever might come up in schools and almost be able to tick off, that which they, don’t want their kid learning like, Timmy and CA doesn’t wanna learn about slavery, but Billy and CB doesn’t wanna learn about the Holocaust or in CC, they don’t wanna learn about L-G-B-T-Q people and in cd Well, they don’t wanna learn anything about, I don’t know communism. Well, how is the teacher possibly supposed to like, answer a kid’s question that touches on a, f kid asks a question of a general nature and the teacher’s not allowed to answer it. Not allowed to provide a book direct someone to the dictionary or an encyclopedia. I mean, it just becomes completely unworkable.And so it sows the seeds for the unworkability of public education as a concept when we open the door this wide. And again, for a long time. Individual parents have had ways to engage where, let’s say there’s like a common read in a classroom of a group of students and a parent really doesn’t want their [00:38:00] kid, they meet with the teacher, they come up with an alternative.Maybe it’s not the best solution from a freedom to learn perspective, but it protects the, freedom and the opportunity for everyone else in the class to learn. Without that being interrupted. But right now all the solutions that are being put out are essentially since Censorious ones for everybody.It’s like, well, some parents don’t like that book, so now that book can’t be in the classroom. some parents didn’t like that lesson, so now that lesson can’t be in the curriculum. That kind of thing.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it’s, I mean, yeah, taken to the extreme, this is basically saying some parents have more rights than others, is essentially what they’re trying to do. That this, because it is always a tiny handful of people. And, in many cases these are not even parents of students in the district who are challenging materials.And they’re basically saying, well, if I don’t like a book, then, if one person out of a hundred doesn’t like a book. Then the 99 can never be exposed to it and that’s a violation of those parents’ rights.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, and, apparently. I mean, apparently everybody else’s parents’ rights, so to speak, don’t matter anymore. And my colleagues a group I work with in Florida, the Florida Freedom to Read project has make been making this point. In that state we’ve seen all sorts of books removed from schools, and they have made the case that the removal of the books might, serve some parents’ interests, but it’s against theirs.Well, how do you resolve that? I mean, if you have a community where 49% want a book and 51% don’t. Does that mean those 49% shouldn’t get it? Now let’s flip it. Let’s say 1% don’t and 99% do, or something like that. Well, does that mean that 99% should, get it? What about that one? How do you honor that?I mean, there’s always a balance to these. It’s, not easy to come up with solutions that are going to appease everyone, but I just want to sort of urge everyone to step back from the intense edge of this and recognize that. In the United [00:40:00] States today, most of us are gonna learn about things. Most young people are going to have moments where they, see a television show or read a book or read a newspaper, and this is a good thing to be sort of curious about the world and have opportunities to pursue that curiosity and all these efforts to try and control that and cabinet it in.Not only do I think that in the long term they’re going to backfire, but I think they’re really damaging. For what we might think of as like the study habits, the culture of freedom that we want to instill in young people, that’s what’s at jeopardy here.America’s declining global reputation under TrumpSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, we’re seeing that with regard to the United States’, standing in the world in surveys now, that there was one that I just saw recently that showed thatthe US had kind of moved from the middle of the pack in terms of, reputation from 30 down to the very lowest tier in just one year.and this, chilling effect, it, really does make people who are going to be the future, bestselling novelists, bestselling, children’s book authors or scientists or, whatever the future leaders of the world who might have wanted to come here. Now are not going to want to come here.And, ones who were born here, a lot of them might feel like, well, I don’t feel welcome here anymore because I’m trans or, and so, I’m gonna go move to this other country and invent a way to, cure cancer or whatever. Like that’s really what we’re talking about. when we are cutting off the, marketplace of ideas.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I mean, and, we see that kind of anti the anti internationalist. Trend is also, something that’s been impacting higher education and is bound to trickle down to K to 12 as well, which is this idea that the country should in fact, make it much harder for foreign scholars to come to the United States for students to study at universities.And there’s been all sorts of ways in which, the federal administration [00:42:00] in the past year has tried to do this. Complicating visa processes undermining research by, many international scholars. Even things like the destruction of U-S-A-I-D. They used to fund research in this sort of partnership manner where the federal money went to American universities to do projects with partners in other countries doing research into things like agricultural and, global, global health. And all of that has been decimated in the past year. All of the good standing of the United States and the world and all frankly, like the progress on a lot of research projects a lot of which, run on a timeline. So let’s say you had a, cancer trial or something like that, or something else that you were planning over multiple years.Well, what happens if you’re in year three of five of expected funding and all of a sudden the government changes the rules and violates the contracts? Where they were gonna give you more funding. I mean, it is just disrupted a tremendous amount of activity, intellectual activity, teaching, training research, just that search for knowledge.And so it’s had this massive effect and there is this kind of, America first, let’s call it mentality that, just seems totally it seems interested and totally disregarding the fact that like a lot of American culture. Thrives on its exchange around the world. When a, German, symphony comes to the United States, or a play produced in Namibia, and you can see it in New York City, whatever it is, this is what makes the United States enriched and ha, it’s the diversity of that culture enriches the country. And it’s being, yeah, it’s being just significantly decimated this year.Responding to false ‘patriotism’ argumentsSHEFFIELD: Yeah. I wanna circle back to one of the other arguments that we hear also sometimes from censorship proponents, which is in, the educational realm that, they say they want to, that they’re trying to have patriotic education and that, having, and so removing authors that criticize historic figures, particularly some [00:44:00] of the founders of America or whatever, that, they’re saying that authors that tr cite true facts about.Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or whatever, that they are anti-American by, and that they want students to hate America and hate themselves. Like that’s a thing I often hear. What do you what would you respond to that?FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I mean, I think it sort of gets back to that question from earlier about how we reckon with truth. and if a truth is uncomfortable, does that mean we shouldn’t teach it? Or it’s important to teach, to move forward? I think there is an entire history of this country, which has been suppressed for a long time, and efforts like, whether you agree with every aspect of it or not, there have been these efforts to. Confront that things like the efforts in Tulsa related to the race massacre from the 1920s, are an effort to tell that story. And again, it may make people feel differently about the country, but it doesn’t have to. You could, you can be just as, you can be just as upset about the censorship of these stories or just as proud of. The reckoning with them and learning about them, it’s not a given that, stories about the past are gonna make you feel a certain kind of way. And I certainly, don’t think that’s a reason to well lie to kids or hide, the complexities of, information that they might encounter.So, I think a lot of that also just seems to tread on. I don’t know assumptions about how people are going to feel when they learn things that are not actually reflective of how young people may actually feel, but how, I don’t know, adults feel about it. And again, like how I feel about history doesn’t mean. Something did or didn’t happen, it, the idea that would be the metric for how we conduct research or how we teach people about the world and how it came to be, what it is, it just doesn’t seem, it doesn’t make sense to me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it doesn’t and, there’s no right. [00:46:00] Not to be offended. I mean, like that’s the other kind of terrible ironies of this current moment is that, as you were saying earlier, that they had spent decades railing against snowflakes and political correctness and, all these things that they said were bad.and, there were, in fact some over reaches in that regard. And some people that were that their speech was wrongfully terminated. But. This idea that you don’t, you have the right to not be offended at hearing somebody saying their own personal experience. Like you don’t have that right?They have the, right to say what they want, and if you don’t like it, then you know, don’t watch it.FRIEDMAN: I mean, it is always like this, notion that if you don’t like a book, you should never have been, I don’t know, started reading it at all. Like how do you learn, I mean, puzzle this one for me. How do you learn to I. How do you learn to dislike something? How do you learn like your own taste in a book or a movie or a TV show? It’s ‘cause you start, engaging with it and then you don’t like it and you turn it off. So like, that’s not a reason to suppress, your opportunity to have encountered a thing that you didn’t like. And in fact, many popular things. There’s someone who doesn’t like, for everyone who like loves, I don’t know, show popular right now, heated rivalry, there’s someone who will tell you, yeah, well, it’s not really that great a show. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t wanna finish it, whatever it is. So, I always say like, okay, you don’t like the books, close the books. You don’t like the books. Don’t take the books outta the library. But don’t stop the library from stalking the books for other people who might wanna read them. A lot of books aren’t so great. That’s okay. A lot of books, people differ in, their own taste in what they think is excellent, in what they think is a great book. What they, are moved by when they read. We should be embracing that diversity of experience with regard to reading materials.[00:48:00] CertainlySHEFFIELD: Yeah, it’s if you don’t like Indian food, you’re, you’re not gonna call for it to be banned, the Indian restaurants to be banned. Nobody does that. and, the, thisFRIEDMAN: not yet.SHEFFIELD: for your mind?FRIEDMAN: Yeah. I mean, Not yet.Well, and I think like that’s important to recognize too, is that, similarly, literally in the way that we might embrace like the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of food, the marketplace of books. The, point of a library is to serve a diverse community, in particular the point of a even a university, with its wide range of courses, yes, certainly there’s, required courses and electives and all that. But on the whole, it has evolved to serve a wide range of professions, a wide range of fields, and just the way in which that’s being constrained and narrowed by political agendas is very concert.The value of literacy and readingSHEFFIELD: It is. Well, and now aside from some of the censorship though, issues that, which you guys do a great job at one of the other things that. Penn America also is very good on, is trying to teach people about just the general value of literacy and of reading. Because I think that’s, under, its own threat in and of its, independently of people trying to censor it.Is that, just this idea that, well I should, I should only watch little YouTube shorts or Instagram stories or, whatever. And like, that’s. That’s a serious issue. the decline of literacy. And I’ve heard a lot of teachers and professors who have been in that business for a long time, and they, say that the students are, not reading as much and they’re, not able to pay attention as much.And that’s a, that’s really bad thing.FRIEDMAN: Yeah, you would think, that’s a thing that people could, agree on and get behind and say, yeah, literacy and the freedom to read is a good thing. And, it’s known that if students are, motivated to be interested. In [00:50:00] their own reading material, then they’re gonna be more likely to read it.If you have this is one of the key things with like graphic novels is understanding that for librarians, why do they have graphic novels in a high school library? It’s ‘cause a lot of ninth graders are actually still reluctant readers. a lot of them haven’t developed the skills to read a long book, and they are interested in reading graphic novels that speak to them. And there’s also this idea that comes from like a stereotype about comics, which has been carried over, which is the idea that reading a book, you know. A paragraph of text page after page is better than something with pictures. The pictures are juvenile in some way, but I can tell you reading contemporary graphic novels. A lot of times what you are decoding on a page is actually much more complicated. There, there are ways in which information storytelling can happen in a graphic novel that can’t happen when all you have is sentences on a page. It’s just, it’s a very different experience. I’m not trying to say that one is absolutely better than the other, but there’re different.And why should we be trying to ban something that a group of artists and writers have gotten really skilled at. A group of publishers are putting their, creative energy out in the world with, and a group of writers and audiences are interested, sorry, a group of readers and audiences are interested in accessing that.Like, why would we interrupt in that, circuit, so sort of some moral standards about how we ought to control the circulation of a thing that through that sort of free market Okay. Of creativity and what people are interested in. It is working fine. And so again, you see that kind of effort to clog it up, to intervene, to exert control of a political and ideological nature.And we could see the same thing about, education, the freedoms learned, access to graphic novels, what the Smithsonian got out there on a, in plaques and other things. And, in each case, it’s an opportunity for us as citizens to [00:52:00] recognize. What we’re at risk of losing and what we can stand, against in, in, in standing against censorship.SHEFFIELD: And ultimately, standing against government censorship and control. I think that is the ultimate pro-American act. I mean, and let’s be clear about that.FRIEDMAN: Certainly that is one of the things that animated, motivated, the original revolutionaries who were rebelling against that. Absolutely. And and that notion, that spirit, let’s call it, of critical thinking, that has been a key part of what people around the world think makes American education. We’re talking about public schools or universities, good and unique and what we’re known for. Why do we sacrifice that and, try and ruin it?SHEFFIELD: Exactly. All right. Yeah, so this has been a great conversation, John. So for people that want to keep up with your stuff and you guys have any recent reports you wanna plug or something like that?FRIEDMAN: Sure, yeah. This month in January, we released a few weeks ago a new report called America’s Censored Campuses 2025. It the subtitle is Expanding the Web of Control, and it’s a comprehensive report on the 2025. Censorship of universities. We look at the growth of state laws and where that’s at in terms of controlling academic curriculum and other measures in universities.And we look at the rise of efforts to control universities from the federal government, which have, reached, as I said earlier, unprecedented levels. And you can find that at pen.org.SHEFFIELD: Alright. Sounds good. Good to have you back.FRIEDMAN: Great. Thanks for the conversation. Take care.SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your [00:54:00] support.And if you’re watching on YouTube, please click the like and subscribe button where so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode. Thanks for joining me. I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Jan 28, 2026 • 11min

The Liminal States of America

Minds are not things, they are processes. Who we are is what we’re doing. That is especially true of minds in societies. The news we see daily during the second Trump administration is proof of this, not just in the monstrous and inhumane policies but also in how these ideas are being opposed.What America is and will be is undetermined right now. We are in a liminal state, a time of transition.Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984 broke the Democratic Party’s leadership class. Ever since then, most of the party’s elites have operated on the principle that the American public is far more conservative than it actually is. Instead of forcefully stating what they stand for and why, most national Democrats are deathly afraid of becoming the next Michael Dukakis or Howard Dean. This is a global problem: left party leaders consistently overstate the conservatism of their constituents, as multiple political science studies have shown.The mainstream media has been similarly feckless; the executives, editors, and anchors have been unwilling to consistently tell the public the larger vision of what the Trump regime is trying to do: completely repeal modernity and replace it with a techno-feudalism in which the American Colossus is torn down and replaced by regional “patchwork states” that are ruled by authoritarian corporations and religious cults.As Trump, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem and the rest of the regime have been illegally impounding allocated funds, arresting anyone looking suspiciously foreign, and posting on social media about their goal of deporting 100 million residents (roughly the same number of Americans who are non-white), the Americans who elected the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have had to come to realization that most of our purported “leaders” were not going to do much of anything to stop Trump from destroying the country. No one is coming to save us but ourselves.(Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have been welcome exceptions, forcefully speaking out and utilizing legal maneuvers to block Trump’s deployment of military troops in their states.)After a full year of Trump’s disastrous leadership, the economy is hobbling into a tariff-driven recession, America’s international standing is in tatters, and the president’s popularity is at record lows. To district from all the failure, de facto president Miller decided to jump on a misleading viral video about daycare centers run by Somali immigrants living in Minnesota. Trump almost immediately was on the case, lashed out at them with a racist attack that included Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar:“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” he said in December. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”Shortly thereafter, the regime launched what it called Operation Metro Surge, a massive influx of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents that began in Minneapolis, Minnesota and later expanded to the entire state. Thousands of heavily armed paramilitary thugs began swarming into neighborhoods, shopping centers, and even places of worship as they arrested thousands of people, including many who were American citizens, legal immigrants, and even babies and small children like 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.Faced with a paramilitary invasion that the judiciary was unwilling or unable to stop, Minnesotans took to the wintry streets, braving sub-freezing temperatures to attend massive protests and to track and report the activities of ICE and CBP thugs in neighborhoods everywhere. And unlike in other states targeted by the Trump regime, thousands of Minnesotans have extensive experience coordinating protests against his first administration after the murder of George Floyd, a black Minneapolis resident killed by police in 2020.“Our community groups, our unions have never ceased to continue to try to work together and create inflection points,” union organizer Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou told France 24. “So we have a high level of trust. We don’t all agree on everything that we’re working on together here, but we know we cannot be fractured – and that we have to do this together.”That is exactly what Renee Good and Alex Pretti did. They were two regular people who stepped forward to help their community and nation while the Republican-controlled Congress and judiciary are refusing to do anything to stand up for their supposed beliefs. Working tirelessly for days on end, they were mercilessly killed at point-blank by Trump’s thugs.Despite the Trump regime’s efforts to smear Good and Pretti as “terrorists” and “assassins,” the public is increasingly able to see through the lies, and it’s sent the president’s approval rating on his top issue of immigration to an all-time low of just 39 percent. The backlash has been so pronounced that the administration announced that it had demoted Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol “commander at large” who had helmed the operation that led to the Pretti shooting.Trump also announced that the government would be investigating the incident, and there have been multiple reports that Miller and/or Noem may lose their jobs. And there’s more good news: A judge has temporarily blocked Liam Ramos and his father, a legal asylum applicant, from being deported. Even the tech industry, which has been so eager to lick the Trumpian boot, finally has some prominent leaders speaking out against his totalitarianism.And, at last, the majority of congressional Democrats have stepped forward to demand the impeachment of Noem and the de-funding of ICE.These are wonderful victories worth savoring. They are proof that standing up to tyranny works. The peoples of Greenland and Europe also demonstrated this as well, as they pushed back aggressively against Trump’s totalitarian threats to invade and colonize the frozen northern island, discovering what investors had figured out long ago: Trump Always Chickens Out. Because he’s a bully.We can do this. But it will not be easy. Even if all goes well, we still have three more years of Trump in the White House. And there’s no guarantee that it will. But whether American fascism triumphs is not a foregone conclusion either.That’s because dictatorship is a state of mind, not just for the demented criminal who is currently the president of the United States, but also in the minds of the citizens.Some of us, like the beanie-bearing Russian asset Tim Pool, yearn desperately to submit to tyranny. The rest of us are learning that freedom only exists if you believe in it—and fight for it together.This is the Liminal States of America.Membership BenefitsThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.About the ShowTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Social MediaMastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldTwitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffieldBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/matthew.flux.communityThreads: https://www.threads.net/@realmattsheffield This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Jan 23, 2026 • 13min

The dark philosophy animating Trump’s chaotic second term

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityEpisode Summary It’s now one year into Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, and while it’s been just as chaotic as the first, this term’s chaos has been so much worse.But invading Greenland, burning down NATO, partially taking over Venezuela, and slashing science budgets for no stated reason might seem random in many ways.But in fact, it isn’t. If you’ve read a lot of right-wing political theory and religious theology, you can actually see what his top aides like Stephen Miller or Russell Vought are up to. The larger goal is to literally destroy modernity and replace it with an undefined form of Christian techno-feudalism.Luckily, our guest on today’s program, Matt McManus, has done the reading. A longtime friend of the show, he’s the author of the book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. He’s also an assistant professor at Spelman College. In this discussion we talk about how Trump and Trumpism fit into the bigger picture of fascism, authoritarianism, and right wing epistemology.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--Trump, Nietzsche, and Antichrist America--Inside the bizarre and hateful ideology of JD Vance--Why atheist libertarians and Christian fundamentalists actually have a lot in common--Trump is trying to destroy America’s world-class scientific leadership--Why far-right Republicans are going after universities--The social science revealing why Trump loves the poorly educated so much--Why ancient Greek Skepticism has become surprisingly relevant--Renee Good and the problem of other mindsAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction05:45 — Non-religious anti-intellectualism in right-wing thought09:07 — Nietzsche as the canonical far-right thinker13:19 — Trump’s domestic policies are basically the re-institution of serfdom15:43 — The importance of sci-fi authors in anti-democratic political thought21:33 — Utopias as political lodestars25:20 — Horseshoe theory and its limitations29:44 — The historic relationships between 20th century fascism, conservatism, and left-wing ideologies34:47 — The folly of leftists who team up with reactionaries38:38 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: One of the things about the second Trump term that I think that a lot of people are observing is just how much more insane he is—or at least this presidency is, I’m sorry, I should say. People are seeing all these policies like tearing down various scientific funding, or education, or foreign policy organizations, et cetera, et cetera. And people are like, why the hell is this? Why is he doing this? This makes absolutely no sense.But it actually does make sense, if you have done your reading, I think you would agree, right?MATT MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I’ve recurringly pointed out is there’s a long anti-intellectual bias in the history of conservative thought including intellectualized bias that’s been articulated by conservative intellectuals. Right? And you don’t have to take my word for it. you can just go back and read Joseph de Maistre, for example, who’s been a major influence on a lot of MAGA intellectualism, movers and shakers, people like, Curtis Yarvin, who everyone seems to know right now, or Oran McIntyre, who’s his disciple.De Maistre says, flat out, that look, what people ignorantly call philosophy is fundamentally a destructive force. Why? Because it encourages people to think critically for themselves. It gets a society that’s filled with all kinds of intellectuals are coming up with new ideas about how government and society to be organized.We don’t want that, right? That says we’re way better off having everyone instilled with their belief system from the cradle to the grave, what he calls, dogmas, right? People should approach [00:04:00] their beliefs and especially approach existing systems of authority, dogmatically and by and large he says, society will run better that way.And if that seems a little anachronistic, you can flash forward to Roger Scruton, who I would argue is, the greatest English speaking conservative philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century. In his book, the Meaning of Conservatism Scruton used to say that there’s something deeply commendable about what he called, and I quote, “unthinking people who accept the burdens that life imposes upon them without trying to politicize them or without looking for recourse from existing systems of authority.”And the reason that Scruton thought unthinking people were better than thinking people, is unthinking people are far likely, more likely, again, to show allegiance to their betters, and to pay deference to existing authorities, right. I would frame it as they’re more likely to be willing to accept their subordination to those that conservatives think they should subordinate themselves too, right?So all that you see with this Trump administration is in many ways a very virulent form of this anti-intellectualism. Casting a very, wide net where for decades, American conservatives has seen as JD Vance was put it, professors as being the enemies, the media being the enemies, because professors in the media have a bad habit of saying, ‘Is that exactly true? Probably isn’t.’And now they just have the power to act upon that, by, at the very least, stripping the resources from the media and academics that they need to do their job and actually try to ascertain the real world. And in the worst case scenario, as we’ve seen in the Trump administration, is actively trying to censor and chill the speech, those who tried to decide against it.SHEFFIELD: They are. And, they’re also in, in particular, going after science quite a bit.MCMANUS: Oh yeah.SHEFFIELD: I mean there’s just so much chaos and whatnot.Non-religious anti-intellectualism in right-wing thoughtSHEFFIELD: And there’s a particular animus that these people have, and it isn’t only just the religious either, I think. And we’ve talked a lot on this show about the religious animus towards science. But it’s not just religion that is motivating [00:06:00] this.MCMANUS: No, absolutely not. Right. I mean, look Joseph de Maistre was an arch reactionary Catholic. And a lot of the anti-intellectual in the Trump administration right now are clearly come from a religious evangelist perspective. but you know, Roger Scruton was by and large a secular philosopher, even if he had certain things that he wanted to intimate about the sacred, again, the anti-intellectual—SHEFFIELD: And Stephen Miller is not religious either, so we should say that too.MCMANUS: Yeah, exactly right. And Curtis Yarvin, describes himself as a militant atheist as well. And so does Bronze Age pervert and many of the other intellectuals and movers and shakers that are kind of ideologically inspiring Trump administration. Again, what animates them about intellectuals isn’t that intellectuals are espousing this or that idea that’s contrary to what they want people to hear, that’s part of it. The big thing is that intellectuals are doing their job at all in whatever field, right? Because the problem with having too much discourse, too much discussion too many controversies is it leaves open to question who’s supposed to be in charge and who gets to call the shots in society?And fundamentally, conservatives just don’t really want that. Right? They prefer, again, a society where people know and understand their place. Right? As a conservative author, James, Steven once put it they want people to think that to acknowledge and affirm a real superior is a great social virtue.And sometimes this can take pretty fear form. One of the more. Under examined intellectuals of the pre-Trump era as a figure called Wilmore Kendall who I wish everyone would read. So Wilmore Kendall was a major conservative intellectual in the 20th century. Very smart guy. Don’t want to deny that, right?Very learned, very thoughtful. But he wrote a quite a thoughtful essay called, was Athens Right? To Kill Socrates? For those who don’t know Athens put Socrates on trial for the crime of philosophizing and asking probing questions and most thinking people. Since, the BC has said Athens was wrong to execute Socrates, right?Socrates, as he articulates, was doing something valuable by raising these kinds of probing questions, getting people to think more deeply about what is [00:08:00] justice, what we should do, et cetera. Kendall disagrees, right? Kendall says, actually the conservative elite who are running Athens were absolutely right to execute Socrates.Because even if they weren’t always able to answer his questions, and even if Socrates was right that Athens wasn’t a perfectly just society. His form of questioning posed a serious threat to the established social order. So of course, elites were entitled to get rid of him. They did not want the social order change and it was not in their interest to see the social order change.So Socrates should have drank the hemlock for the sake at least, of the conservative elites that were running at the country or accordion to the conservative elites that were running Athens at the time. And Kendall’s idea is not, or Kendall’s are the. The insight of Kendall’s piece is not hard to extrapolate, right?He’s directly targeting what he calls the John Stewart Mill School of Thought that sees society as better organized if there’s open discussion, open debate, free rights to liberal expression, et cetera, et cetera where everyone can weigh in. And everyone should feel free to criticize society.Kendall didn’t want that because he thought it was disruptive of respect for authority and conservatives today, really, again, ibi very deeply of that spirit.Nietzsche as the canonical far-right thinkerSHEFFIELD: They do. And. It’s notable with that Kendall piece that it’s actually a direct echo of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, where he has an entire section in there called the Problem of Socrates. and, I think that is one of the, I mean, there, there’s so many leftist French misreadings of Nietzsche that are just so moronic, frankly, in my view. And they only read the early part of Nietzsche where he was a bit more libertarian, don’t read any of his middle or later output. And he says, I mean, in his essays that yes, I don’t like Christianity, but actually, the real problem with Christianity is Socrates.And that Socrates is the one who got this whole slave morality thing started, in the Greco-Roman world, and then that [00:10:00] infected Judaism. And so he’s the real villain here. Jesus was just, kind of a a Buddhist guy out there, saying, do your own thing and leave everyone else alone.That reading of Nietzche, which is the correct reading if you read his later books, it seemed a lot of people on the left don’t seem to have done that reading, I would say.MCMANUS: No, absolutely. Although I’d like to point out in defense to the left that there’s been a serious effort to reevaluate our addiction to vulgar Nietzscheanism, which I think has undermined our effectiveness for a very long time right now. And you don’t have to take my word for it.SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah. Well, Domenico Losurdo, yeah. Great book.MCMANUS: Domenico Losurdo are more recent and Daniel Touch, right? No, I don’t agree with tu and Losurdo about everything they say about Nietzche, but they’re pretty clear, right? That he is a reactionary aristocrat, at his very core. So, whether or not there’s, some insights that you can glean from him that are important, Nietzche is a brilliant thinker. I don’t want to vulgarize him in that way. Right. And there are insights you can glean from him. But you should be very clear about what he himself was committed to.And just to kind of connect this to Trumpism a little bit, I think that’s not only leftists who’ve made the mistake of reading Nietzsche as a kind of proto-libertarian many on the American right did for a long time also. Think about people like Ayn Rand and a lot of her disciples. They saw him as a, fundamentally an individualist at heart. Somebody who was pushing against bourgeois, petite bourgeois moralism with its evangelical tendencies and creating more space for free inquiry.The expression of various forms of individual identity. Well, Nietzche himself actually repudiates that reading of his work pretty emphatically in an unpublished work called The Will to Power, right, which was organized by his sister and is somewhat problematic, but does consist of stuff that he himself wrote in the world of power, Niet says, I am not an individualist, right? My philosophy is not about individualism. It’s about what you call orders of rank, right? So some people are indeed entitled to expressions of their individuality to be free of the shackles of good and evil.But those are the people that Nietzsche thinks are worthy [00:12:00] of that kind of liberty. Namely the kind of superior persons the new aristocrats of the future that he thinks society should be organized around breeding. But he is very clear and beyond good and evil, for example that for most of the rest of us what we deserve is, as he puts it, slavery, right?Because he says the only kind of society that has ever been able to culturally produce anything of value that has been able to resist the kind of sirens call of nihilism is a aristocratic society. And no, a Socratic society can function. As he puts it without a slave class. Right. There’s a very good researcher who pointed out that Nietzche talks about slavery hundreds of times over the course of his ure.And there’s almost not a single instance where he’s not describing it in. Positive even rap sodic terms, he thinks it’s absolutely necessary for any good society. And given that you shouldn’t be surprised again when you see people like Braun’s age pervert or God help me, raw ag nationalists, all these MAGA influencers coming out of the woodwork, espousing a kind of vulgar tism and saying horrible things about how most people in the world are bug men.Or how women are just roasty who are only fit to, be sexually assaulted by these powerful individuals. Nietzche himself would never be so crass or so stupid. But you know, there’s an instinct there towards suggesting that there are better kinds of people or higher kinds of people and lower kinds of people.The better kinds of people are entitled to do whatever they want to the lower kinds of people in the pursuit of their allegedly grand projects.Trump’s domestic policies are basically the reinstitution of serfdomSHEFFIELD: Yeah, and you see it also with their, domestic policy as well, because, the, domestic policy of the Trump administration is to eliminate. All social welfare, payments or organizations. And then at the same time to bring back menial labor jobs and make those proliferate.But you will, they will be private sector jobs and they will not be unionized. And so, this is basically. They are trying to bring back a serf class. I mean, that is essentially what they’re doing. and you see that also in particular in the, writing and, speeches of Peter thi, like he’s pretty almost [00:14:00] explicit in saying this.MCMANUS: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, changes his orientation. Anytime, he’s on camera, right? He’s a pretty well read guy. But, one day he identifies with a kind of vulgar Nietzscheanism. The other day he has nice things to say about post liberalism. The next day, he re identifies as a libertarian.And then all of a sudden, he’s financing Curtis Yarvin, who’s, secular atheist monarchist. Right. What I think the common thread though is, that Thiel has always been attracted to anti-democratic forms of politics. And this goes all the way back to his essay from 2009, I believe, the Education of a Libertarian where he says, look, Barack Obama has now become president.This is disaster, right. For those of us in, let’s call it the yacht class, right? The reason it’s a disaster for those of us in the yacht class is Barack Obama, mainly supported by women, minorities and welfare recipients is promising to tax the productive creative class in order to redistribute to the unworthy.We can’t have this and the education of a libertarian is fundamentally about how he’s realized that. If there’s a cont that there’s a fundamental contest as he understands it between democracy and liberty and, These circumstances, he chooses liberty over democracy. Now, of course, the liberty that Thiel is talking about is the right of people like him to exploit all the rest of us with the rest of us having no political agency to actually do anything meaningful about it.Right? And I don’t see that as being meaningful liberty at all. But you know, even though he shifted the tone and the tune a little bit the fundamental messages remain the same. Right? Democracy is dangerous to people like Thiel, who want to have all the money in the world to spend on rocket ships, to send them themselves to space and those that consider worthy.And consequently, we need to undo democracy by any means necessary.The importance of sci-fi authors in anti-democratic political thoughtSHEFFIELD: And one of the interesting things also about Thiel in this context is that he was asked one time, by somebody, a young person that was seeking advice from him. They said, well, where should I be looking at to get ideas about startups, to have a [00:16:00] new company? And, he said, you should read mid 20th century science fiction. And that’s, I thought that was extremely notable because there was a tradition, like a real tradition of reactionary intellectualism, beginning with de Maistre and Nietzsche, but Scruton was basically the last of that line. And he was a lonely fellow for most of his life. Didn’t have any peers I would say in his milieu.And, which is, and it’s notable that this sort of post-libertarian, post-democratic framework that we did see that came out later, it began with Ayn Rand. So there’s a reason why Thiel recommended these 20th century sci-fi authors like Robert Heinlein and for instance, like his The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is, Elon Musk said that’s one of his favorite books. And for those not familiar with it, that book is a story of people who are living on the moon and they are never contacted basically by the Earth government, but they have to send them all their money and so they, have a revolt and kill all the Earth people and declare their independence and have rugged individualism in space. And that’s basically the plot line of pretty much all of these authors like they, they genuinely have no concept—there’s a famous meme that argues that libertarians are like cats, that they are sustained by a system which they have no understanding of, and also disdain.And I think that’s notable that they really, their intellectual tradition did in fact shift to fiction. And so, that’s why instead of having long explications of arguments and responses to critics, instead of that, we just have these endless monologues of Ayn Rand characters and Robert Heinlein characters, in particular, and they’re not responding to critics.Like one could say that [00:18:00] Robert Nozik for instance, was somebody who was right-leaning, but this guy was not a reactionary like these people. And so he was capable of reading others and responding to them. And like you see that with the second Trump administration. Like they are literally, as we’re recording this today, the FCC Chairman announced that he’s going to enforce equal time rules against late night comedians. Like they literally cannot respond to the arguments of the opposition because they don’t understand them. I would say.MCMANUS: No, absolutely. I mean, look, you don’t have to take my word for it. Just read the take downs of the left by authors like Jordan Peterson or Gabby Sad. And, these aren’t random YouTube influencers. These are academics who should know better. Most of ‘em are of no value whatsoever, right?I’m not even convinced that they’ve actually read Fuco, let alone Marx, let alone, have an understanding of the kind of nuanced arguments that appear in those traditions. But we’re talking about Thiel in this, at this Thiel and this attraction to science fiction. There’s a really good book by a Marxist author called Frederick Jameson who some of your listeners might be familiar with. Dense author, so take him a piece at a time. But it’s called Archeology of the Future which is his analysis of the role, a political role that science fiction has played in different social imaginaries. And one of the things that he points out that’s very sharp, and I don’t agree with Jameson about everything is that science fiction has often been a source of utopian speculation for different political actors about the futures that they want to see brought into being.And I think this choice of the word utopian is. Done thoughtfully by Jameson. Because when it comes to things like the Libertarians who talks about quite a bit libertarian sci-fi authors he points out that they did have a utopian vision for what the future was going to look at. And this should make us extremely wary of the insistence of some conservatives or some on the right.That fundamentally it’s the leftist who only have a monopoly on utopian ideas or speculative ideas about how the future should be organized. And that conservatives standeth, wart history, young stop are at the very least, slowed down. To these [00:20:00] utopian reformers, right? Jameson pointed out, if you read Ayn Rand or Heinlein, who you mentioned, they very clearly want a radical change to the status quo.Even if they frame this in nostalgic terms, right? We need to go back to these older kind of warrior or individualistic ethics. The idea is that fundamentally the future needs to look very different from the president. And that’s going to mean undoing a lot of what liberals and progressives have achieved, right?And Thiel is very imbibed an awful lot of that, right? He really does seem to think that he is a John Gault type figure that the present is so decayed because of woke leftism, democracy, et cetera. That the only thing to be done is for the truly productive class to take over and rebuild society the way that it should be organized or should have been organized from the very beginning.And in these kinds of circumstances, the kind of irony is that a lot of the old, truly conservative critiques of the left actually pertain to the speculations that they’re making. And particularly, the kind of policies that figures like the maga movement are trying to put forward.They’re really trying to break systems that they don’t fully understand in order to bring about a new world that exists only in their head. And that is going to be an absolute disaster, if they try to realize it in practice.The difference I think between left wing utopias and right wing utopias is that I think that sometimes left wing utopias are actually attractive at the level of theory, even if they break down in practice.For the utopias speculated upon by people like Thiel or Heinlein, or Rand, I think are just unattractive right from the get go. And they look even worse when you try to put them into practice.Utopias as political lodestarsSHEFFIELD: They do. And one of the sad ironies of our current politics though, is that this utopianism that absolutely does drive this reactionary-- and, I do distinguish it from conservative that this reactionary activism they, work tirelessly for it. And they see it as, and we are going to destroy modernity and replace it with our utopian vision.And [00:22:00] by contrast, when you look at the institutional leaders that are in the center left, or we’ll say conservative to the left they seem to, have no utopian impulse whatsoever, generally speaking. And, they think that this is the best of all possible worlds. And the, and it’s why I would say that, the, that you do see, I mean, you did see for instance, in the 2024 election, the, a massive shift in support among young people toward Donald Trump.A guy who is, you couldn’t depict, you couldn’t imagine a, more stereotypical boomer person, bloated. Rich, selfish lazy, stupid. I mean, he’s literally every caricature of a boomer. And yet he has had the highest support (among Republicans) of young people in the United States in, since 1984, Ronald Reagan.So like there, there’s a serious, serious problem among people who are against reactionary ideas that they have no interest in inspiring people or realizing that there are a lot of things wrong with the current system.MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just to your point about Trump being like the Ultimate Boomer I went to one rallies in 2022 with a buddy of mine who’s a documentary. And I don’t think I heard a single song that was, anywhere newer than from 1986. You know what I mean? I remember, yeah, there was something from born in the USA.It was the most modern song at the Trump rally. So that’ll really give you an indication of his. So we say somewhat dated taste right. But you know, on the kind of point about utopianism and the left I, think that Juda Slar has a really very sharp point to make. Right. Juda Slar, for those who don’t know is the author of a seminal essay called The Liberalism of Fear.And it’s famous for being a liberal critic of utopianism. Well, even sclera said, look. It’s very, there’s a longstanding tendency for center right liberals to say utopianism has only led to bad effects over the course of the 20th century. We’re better off without it. And she said, look, any movement that is entirely [00:24:00] devoid of any utopian aspirations isn’t long for this world.Because then you don’t really have any energy, you don’t have any creativity, you don’t have any drive. All you’re there to do is to sit there and offer intellectual apology for the status quo. And inevitably when somebody, people become dissatisfied with the status quo, they’re going to turn to your enemies who do have ideas about how things should change.Right? So this is where I think that. Liberals need to recognize that this defensive attitude that we sometimes take, even if understandable is not enough in the contemporary era, right? People are clearly dissatisfied, they’re turning to alternatives. And I think that what we need to do is have ‘em turn to liberal alternatives to a neoliberal status quo that is clearly run as course and is no longer sustainable.Now, I put forward. Liberal socialism as, one possible alternative that we could move towards inspired by people like Thomas Payne and Rawls and John Stewart Mill, et cetera. But there are others out there as well. But you know, you don’t need to kind of side with me on this. What I just encourage my fellow liberals to do is to be open-minded.About the fact that a little utopian energy and a little creativity about how the future can be better from the past is not only intellectually a sustainable project to engage in. I think it’s very much politically needed right now. because you’ve seen across the world, right? Politicians with a couple of exceptions that just come forward and say, I stand for what we’ve been doing for the last 20, 20, 30 years.Have, by and large not done particularly well.Horseshoe theory and its limitationsSHEFFIELD: No they haven’t. And one of the more unfortunate things I would say though with people who maybe want to have an alternative to. Neoliberalism is something that you you have written about recently, which is this idea that that some people have that well, maybe we can make co common cause with these far right people.And there’s something, a, there’s something that, there, there dissatisfaction with the status quo is something that perhaps we could leverage. And that’s has been a very common and dangerous mistake of further left movements. And you talked about some of that history, so if you could maybe just briefly recite about that.Obviously we’ll have a link to your, [00:26:00] piece as well.MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. Right. So, during the Cold War, there was a very common theory, that sometimes called horseshoe theory, that became popular, particularly amongst, center right, liberal commentators. Right. And, the idea is that. Fundamentally, fascism and communism, are just two sides of the same coin, right?they’re cosmetically different, but fundamentally they’re both species of a closed society or a collectivist society, whereas liberal stand for an open individualistic society, right? and I think that by and large horseshoe theory, is a very lazy way of looking at the world because it kind of divests you from any responsibility to understand.The opposition in any kind of brand, any other way. And to recognize that even on the far right there are very substantial differences in terms of regimes, ideologies, et cetera. and Lord knows there are bajillion different flavors of Marxism out there, right? Everything from statism to anarchism to, a narco cynicism, right?And they all look at and aspire to very different things, right? Now saying that I do think there is a kind of intellectual out there, that fundamentally understand themselves or, has become politically agitated or animated, by opposition to liberalism and liberal centrism. And in these kinds of circumstances, if your fundamental opposition is to liberalism, sometimes you do see figures switch from the far left to the far right or vice versa, right?a very good example of this, in MAGA world right now would be somebody like, say Nick Land, for example, right? Nick Land began his career as a, critical theorist, very influenced by deli beard, all those postmodern types that you mentioned before. And gradually he moved away from the left end of the spectrum towards, a dark enlightenment perspective.That’s very proven, very amenable. Two people like the Elon Musk and Peter Thiels of the world, right? since long story short, he essentially says that the world will be better off if we have these kind of tech bros in charge of everything. and if we militate against democracy. but these figures are by and large, fairly rare, right?And again they only really emerge if the primary [00:28:00] motivating force behind the projects is anti-liberal. in which case they kind of shift from one end of the spectrum to the other, depending on what they think is the other geology that. Most equipped, are more likely to get rid of the liberal order.Right. Overall though, I’d say look liberalism, socialism, and progressivism have a lot more in common with each other, than either do with, political, right, right. Liberalism, socialism, progressivism all of us believe fundamentally that all people are at least morally equal. Even if we different our capacities, interests, et cetera, and that we’re entitled on the basis of our moral quality.Quite a lot of leeway in terms of how we want to live our life because we should be allowed to make choices about how we’re going to live our life without interference from the states, other people, et cetera. Even if those choices might end up taking us to some pretty bad places, right. as they so often do.Right. the political right has a very different kind of philosophy about how. Society should be organized. I think actually no one captured this better than Fa Hayek where he said the unifying feature behind conservatism, and I’d say this is true of the right generally, is this conviction that there are recognizably superior people in society.And these recognizably superior people are entitled to more respect for their agency, their wealth, their political power, you name it, right? They’re the superiors in society. They get to call the shots and all people on the right. Whether, the more moderates or the more extreme, are committed to this idea in some way, shape or form.And I think once you recognize that ideolog ideologically, you can realize that if there’s going to be a dialogue and if there’s going to be conciliation, it’s far more likely if you’re liberal to happen with your left wing peers. And if you’re on the left, is far more likely to happen with your liberal peers, than with those on the right who just hold a fundamentally different worldview to either of us.The historic relationships between 20th century fascism, conservatism, and left-wing ideologiesSHEFFIELD: yeah. And then also the actual history as you were talking about in your Current Affairs piece, shows that the very first people that Adolf Hitler and Mussolini went after were the leftists, like the people who thought that they were doing something [00:30:00] tricky and conniving to collaborate with them.MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So, this is, there’s a famous poem by Martin Nie Moler, that actually had the first section of bridge very often when it was translated into the United States. And it goes, first they came for the communist and then I did nothing because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialist and I did nothing because I wasn’t a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionist and I did nothing because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did nothing because I’m not a Jew and You get the picture right. And there’s a reason for this, right? so, the fa fascism in Italy without a doubt, was influenced in its very early stages by some species of, socialism.Particularly things like, so surrealism, right? this idea that there was going to be a general strike and that we were going to go break the shackles, of the status quo. But, that was very, quickly abandoned after the fascist came to power. Often with the support of center right liberals.Big business, the church eventually, of course, the monarchy, all the kind of conservative factions within Italy. And the reason why all these conservative factions liked fascism, is because they thought the fascists were extremely effective, at breaking communist skulls and attracting large segments of world population through populist rhetoric away from the appeals, of working class agitation, a Mussolini in power.Often awe implanted various austerity programs that were intended to discipline, the workforce in addition to smashing trade unions independent, workers, movements, you name it. Right? and this one, an awful lot of applause from people like, Winston Churchill, for example, in the 1920s.or the famous right wing economist, Ludwig von Misa, right? in his book, liberalism describe fascism as fundamentally having saved Western civilization for at least the moment, right? In Germany, the circumstances are actually even more brutal, right? in Mont Comp. Hitler makes no doubt or no, hey, about the fact that he considers Marxism to be, as he put it, a Jewish doctrine, that rejects what he calls the aristocratic principle of nature.because he says fundamentally, socialist and Marxist and communist [00:32:00] believe in a world where all men and women will be brothers and sisters and will cooperate for the social. Even if they think that you need a class revolution in order to achieve this. and Hitler says, the Ariss Socratic principle of nature holds that there will always be conflict between races, and one race.Of course, the Aryan race is destined to rule overall after it’s defeated. Its, Jewish and other enemies, right? Ly racist kind of philosophy and beyond just, the kind of ideological anti Marxism, anti socialism, anti-communism hither, much like Mussolini. Found that on his route to power, it was very easy, and necessary indeed to cooperate with conservatives, big business, the military, especially, who had the same interest in Germany, as conservative forces did in Italy, namely quashing the communists and socialists, who were very popular in Germany at the time.So Robert Paxton, the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, points out that. It’s quite like that, that Hitler would’ve been a footnote in history if it wasn’t for the cooperation of so many conservative forces in Germany, to bring him to power, expecting that once he was there, he was going to crush the communists and the socialists, and bring about, kind of restoration, of the vi ha mine conservative empire, which of course, Hitler had no intention of doing.and Richard Evans, the author of, The third, the rise of the third, or sorry, the third Reich in power. Right. Makes exactly the same point. Evans is a professor of history at Cambridge, probably the world’s leading expert in Nazism. and he is emphatic about saying it was actually conservatives that brought Hitler to power, right?Without the conservative forces in the country, Hitler would never have taken power. and that’s because they thought. By and large, he shares a lot of our say our aspirations, right? He wants a restoration of the traditional family. He wants to re-arm Germany. He wants to make Germany great again, right?and undo, the tragedy of Versailles. And, putting him into power and financing him is going to help us achieve a lot of our shared goals, right? even if, many German conservative had a certain contempt, for Hitler’s populism and his youth and [00:34:00] strange ideas, right? and once in power, Hitler.Absolutely erected many conservative figures not to mention big business to positions of enormous suspicion in the new European order that he was going to create. Right? and the result was, of course, sending tens of thousands of members of the KPD, the Communist Party and, the SPD, the social Democratic Party of Germany into concentration camps, in many circumstances.They were the first victims of Nazi aggression. So this kind of claim, that I see people like Dinesh DEA make sometimes, that the Nazis were socialists or the Nazis were liberals, right? he tries to make that suggestion also. it’s just absolutely bogus. And, the people who are trying to make the claim are either willfully, distorting history, for ideological reasons, or they’re just stupid to be quite blunt.The folly of leftists who team up with reactionariesSHEFFIELD: yeah, they are. And well, and, but it’s also stupid on the part of people who are leftists, kind of ilian mentality as you reference, like to think that teaming up with fascists to destroy liberalism. Is not going to create communism. Like they don’t understand that like this will never happen.And that while perhaps you can rhetorically, work with some of the voters or people who are in the grassroots that are sympathetic to some of these ideas, the elites themselves. So like people like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz, or. JD Vance, who, they do in fact hate capitalism. But they hate it for a very different reason than you do.And what they want to create in its place is monstrous.MCMANUS: Oh, absolutely. And look, I don’t want to deny that there are leftists again who gravitate towards the right, and the far right. a very good book on this written by a friend of mine is called, against Fascist Creep by Alex Reed Ross. and he talks about how, Starting in, the mid 2010s, many on the far right, especially in digital spaces, have actually tried to, brand far right politics and leftist sounding language consciously.[00:36:00] Right. to try to entice progressives to kind of side with them. a good example of this would be, eco fascist movements, right. Who are yeah, we should get back to nature, right? Getting back to nature will mean getting back to the law of the jungle where the strong prey upon the weak.So actually there’s an ecological dimension to fascism that, they. Play up in order to try to solicit, sympathy from various environmentalist movements. Right? or another good example that I’ve personally seen, to my enormous dismay, has been, the efforts of, various Dugan Knights, followers of Alexander Dugan, right?Alexander Dugan, up until quite recently when he started chumming around with people like Tucker Carlson, was militantly anti-American, right? for pretty obvious reasons, right? You saw America as a Russia’s fundamental geopolitical ally. And, consequently, Dugan has been very willing to espouse, militant anti-Western rhetoric characterizing the West as an imperialist force that is, traversing the globe invading countries like Iraq and Afghanistan to kind of expand American power.And Ross, I think quite convincingly suggests that Dugan does this knowing, that even if ma, his main audience is always going to be the far right, you might be able to entice a couple of anti-Western. Leftists into his coalition. if their fundamental convictions are, the West is just responsible for all the problems of the world.America is all the great Satan, and we’re willing to align ourself with anyone in order to kind of undermine it. So it is a real process. Right? but I’d also like to point out, that if we are going to talk about the proportion of figures who kind of. Made their peace with MAGA or moved over to maga.leftists I would not say are the major members of that coalition, right? Even if they don’t, there are a couple of Bernie Trump voters, I mean, think about, the sheer volume of right wing libertarians. People like Rand Paul, for example. who started out being tri critics of Trump, critics of the MAGA movement, and just completely conceded to a lot of his calls for.tariffs stronger borders, et cetera, et cetera. because they thought it was to their political advantage. there’s even a term, that’s been developed in libertarian circles. [00:38:00] genuinely libertarian circles describe it, border Arian, which I quite like, people in the von Misa, s.Factions are often characterized as boards, right because they’re committed to freedom for all, but not for, migrants. Right? So I think that, we should recognize that there are a lot of different reasons why people will gravitate towards far right politics. And there are a lot of different ways that the far right will try to reach out to different constituencies.While the left definitely needs to inoculate itself against any of those kind of temptations, insist that there are plenty of classical liberals and libertarians that should take a good, hard look in the mirror. If they made to think that. While Trump was passing some tax cuts, so really he’s a classical liberal at heart.ConclusionSHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. All right, well, we’re coming up on the end here, so, if people want to keep up with your stuff besides buying liberal socialism. What else? Do you have advice for that?MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. so we have a, myself and Dr. Ben Burgess have a new essay collection coming out soon on Gia Cohen, which people can check out for Paul Gray McMinn. GIA Cohen was a Democratic socialist author who taught at Oxford for a long time. And has some very interesting ideas that I’m quite critical of, but nonetheless are worth looking at.And I also have a new essay collection coming out in July actually which includes contributions from liberal currents editor Paul Kreider and Florian Maywell, and another academic. it’s called what is Liberal Socialism. and it’s only 11 bucks. I organize it because people used to point out how the academic book that I released, the Political Theory of Liberal socialism is a little pricey and a little scholarly.this is a much cheaper, much more kind of accessible kind of guide to some of the main themes of liberal socialism for people are interested.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. All right, well, good to have you back again.MCMANUS: Yeah. Thanks Matt. Great to talk to you.SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to flux.community where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.And if you are a paid, subscribing member of the show, you have unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support. It really means a [00:40:00] lot. This media economy is very bad right now. and so I really need people to support the show. We don’t have any connections to right wing billionaires or left-wing billionaires or any other billionaires, so we need your support to keep doing this; and I am really grateful for everybody who is one. And you can also support the show over on Patreon as well. Just go to patreon.com/discoverflux, and if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button and do the notifications thing so you can get notified when we do have a new episode or a new clip.Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time.

Jan 17, 2026 • 1h 20min

Renee Good and the problem of other minds

Episode SummaryThe shocking murder of Renee Good at the hands of federal immigration shock troops in Minnesota earlier this month was part of a larger outrage, the Trump regime’s fascistic deployment of tens of thousands of violent and poorly trained, but very well-armed paramilitary troops against people across several major American cities, arresting people who look or sound Hispanic.Since Good’s murder, the Trump administration and numerous right-wing media figures have attacked Good and her wife as “domestic terrorists,” who were engaging in illegal speech—and thus she supposedly deserved to be killed for temporarily impeding ICE officials before trying to drive away.Of course, this is rhetoric is wildly hypocritical given that Trump and his supporters have claimed for years to be so very concerned about protecting girls and women from trans people in sports and public restrooms. Aside from that, however, the right-wing attempt to “other” Renee Good is in support of the larger reactionary campaign to deny the legal rights and humanity of immigrants living in America.But the belief that immigrants (and Hispanic-appearing people in general) deserve to be treated as less-than-human is itself part of a larger dilemma that philosophy has dealt with for centuries, the problem of other minds. Since no one has direct access to any other person’s experience, other people’s moral rights can, unfortunately, be difficult things for many of us to understand. Far too much of politics is about whether some people are real and whether they should have rights.Liberalism used to talk about things like this more, and so in this live collaboration between Flux and Magic + Loss, we decided to explore the topic from several different angles.Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction13:03 — Can alternative scripture interpretations save religion from fundamentalism?17:22 — Creating a list of books for deconstructing former fundamentalist Christians20:47 — Conservatism is not reactionism23:54 — Jeffrey Epstein and misogynist libertarianism37:04 — Theory of mind and empathy46:18 — Rene Girard and Nietzschean Christianity57:54 — Why reactionary Catholicism is becoming more popular in the U.S. far right01:06:31 — Somatic experience and a politics of determined loveAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Hello everyone. Well, I guess this is your live, Virginia, so maybe you can introduce it and then we can go from there. You want to do that?VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN: So this is a co-hosting and I’m on the back foot when it comes to a good introduction here, but, Matthew Sheffield and I are-- Matthew is a cherished interlocutor of mine. He’s a philosopher, and I am me, and just a random Gen Xer, trying to pick my feet up day after day. And, and I, think we want to talk among other things about Rene Gerard and empathy and and, trivia like that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. and there is just so much to talk about, but I guess I think maybe we can start with a news hook, which is the recent Texas A&M decision to tell a philosophy professor there that he could not teach Plato’s Symposium in a class about ethics and moral controversy.HEFFERNAN: Right.SHEFFIELD: And to me, like, not only is this the inevitable product, of course, of, this, right wing censorship, that we’ve had in this year, but it’s also that it shows just how completely incoherent they’re, because on the one hand they say, well, we are here for western, western values and that we value the, traditional ideas and morality and all that.And it’s like, well, you clearly haven’t read the Symposium of Plato.HEFFERNAN: Well, is Greece really the West though, Matthew? I mean come on!SHEFFIELD: I know, that Plato guy.HEFFERNAN: I think it’s, I think it’s Colorado, maybe the [00:02:00] California,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, hah. Well, and just to summarize it just a little bit though, for anybody who hasn’t read it, Plato’s Symposium, it’s a work that is one of his most famous ones within philosophy, but it’s not one that I would say the general public is probably very familiar with. And that’s because, well, the whole book is about sex and gender and love and philosophy, which, philosophy as a discipline of course has no problem, has always discussed these things.But in the right wing movement of today, they don’t read the books. Like they don’t even read the Bible like these people, that was one thing—I used to, I was, born and raised as a fundamentalist Mormon, and one of the things that I discovered about Christian fundamentalists is that almost none of them have read even one book of the Bible in its entirety. They don’t, they just literally show up to church and they listen to whatever the pastor tells them, and they might read, like five or six verses, or a chapter 10. That’s it.HEFFERNAN: So why take the trouble to ban something?SHEFFIELD: Well, and that’s the thing, like Plato as a philosopher, and of course, so many ancient authors like Aristophanes and, all, and, I mean just, like you could go down the line, you could pick almost any ancient classical author or the Bible itself, and there’s all kinds of stuff in there that would be considered inappropriate, for, by right-wing Christians. My, my favorite Bible story is the story of, Jephthah, who was a judge in the book of Judges, a prophet who, decided, well, I’m afraid I’m not going to win this battle that you’re telling me to fight God, so you gotta do something. You gotta promise me that you’ll do it. And if you, and if, you will, if I win this battle, [00:04:00] I will kill the first thing that I see when I come home.And lo and behold, the first thing that he sees is his daughter. And so, in the same text in which, Isaac, the human sacrifice of Isaac is, said, oh, isn’t it great that we didn’t have to, he didn’t have to kill Isaac.Well, here you have another text. Whoever was like, yeah, it was a good thing to kill your child for God. And like, right. But, most, of course, most Christians and most, super Orthodox Jews have never heard that story or have any idea.HEFFERNAN: Matthew, and one of, one of the things I think that makes you such an interesting philosopher is that you have done something that very few of us have done, which is grown up in a totalizing episteme, and questioned it, and pulled out the threads of it and done what evangelicals called deconstruction, right.Parenthetically, I love that deconstruction is now. I think if you put it into Google, into Gemini, it will explain deconstruction, not as an invention of Jacque Deida, but as a practice of evangelicals, not destroying their faith, but dividing it, separating it into its component parts and evaluating them-- and, and kind of coming to terms with how this thing was built around them, which is. Exact. I mean, I can’t imagine a better application of deconstruction as I understand it from Derrida. It’s, it’s, just beautiful. And I wish he’d lived to see it, in fact, because for Christianity to use the tools of literary criticism, it’s exactly right to find a way to understand what, anyway, you did this yourself.It with, with a, like a very esoteric system. The books of the testimony of the angel Moroni, the, oddities of the Book of Mormon, the, weird readings of a kind of weird 19th century, brought together theology. But that is [00:06:00] binding for so many people and interesting for so many people and literal for so many people.And just one by one, I mean, it’s. You must consider it one of the great philosophical achievements of your life that you were able to pull the wires out of your head. So dexterously, that you now, have managed to expose yourself to, so many other philosophies. You were your own gly. I mean, if to get back to the greats, you were Socrates to yourself.Why do I believe this? why would I possibly believe this? and I think that puts you in a, uniquely good spot to think about these things. But, and I also think that if you believe in literal truth of the Bible, and I’m, I, don’t know I, that I know what that means exactly. Like, it--SHEFFIELD: Well, they don’t know either.HEFFERNAN: Right? But I don’t even know what believing. I don’t think any of us knows exactly what it is to believe something. In some ways that means you don’t read it, right? Like I believe in, a geocentric, I accept on faith or I believe in that the, I’m sorry, the heliocentric. I believe that the sun’s at the center of the universe, but, so I don’t read it.I just don’t read a lot of astronomy because it’s there. It’s sat down. Why do I have to look at it? Right? And if you believe in little truth of the Bible, then interpretation doesn’t matter. Then why does your reading matter?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that is, I mean, that is functionally I think how they, get away with it.But it’s also the, it’s different from what you just said in, in your thought process, process about centrism, because. They don’t care about proof. Like that’s the thing that I think a lot of people who are,HEFFERNAN: But I don’t care about, but I don’t care about proof for other things that I just think are true like that.I don’t, I mean, you don’t have to. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone convince me, I’ve never looked up in a book why, what the actual proof is for the center of the universe. and that’s just an obvious one. Forget about everything else. I mean, a television working [00:08:00] or whatever else. the things that I believe in, the literal truth of, or a proposition that’s just been handed to me are the things I don’t read.Once you read, you’ve opened up the possibility of interpretation, exegesis, even if you’re simply committing to memory. I interviewed a, several months ago, a Chinese dissident who, grew up in China and the two things they had to do with the writings of Chairman Mao were memorize them and then memorized a reading of them, an interpretation of them.So they had to shield out any possibility that they, in any meaningful way, were reading. in addition to what they were. So lest you open up a slight possibility that you have a hermit, bring some hermeneutics to the occasion of reading, you now have something else to step in your brain in that place.And I guess to close the loop, you did this with the text you grew up on, and you did essentially what Nietzsche says, we have, again, Nietzche is someone you’ve written about. We, God’s dead. We’ve killed him, you and I, we killed him because we read and studied the universe with science and came to the conclusion that our, that this God didn’t exist.And you did the same, I think with the texts, I imagine with the texts of Mormonism, and the teachings of Mormonism. You read them closely and like lots of evangelicals, you probably came to elders and said, I don’t understand. Why would God have someone kill his daughter? And, and then you thought, well, I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, right?Read the books, ask the questions, and then the whole thing falls apart. I mean, is that how it went for you? Actually, I don’t want to, I don’t want to guess.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. that is how it went. And this is why I would say also that, when people have questions about, let’s say vaccines or something, or that they shouldn’t be told, oh, you can’t ask that.It’s fine to ask these questions. It’s fine to, [00:10:00] to, ask why. Like, that’s, that is the most fundamental idea. Like it basically all cognition devolves to “what is this?” And “what do I do with this?” And so if you can’t, if you forbid people from answering those, asking those questions, then you’re not going to be, you’re not going to be a viable political movement, I would say.But independent of that, yeah, like, so with Mormonism, I, I was, told, well, don’t worry about that. God will answer that in heaven. You don’t have to think about it. And there were some people that, so Brigham Young University used to have this academic pseudoscience department called the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormonism Studies. And basically it was like an apologetic organization. and I read some of their material and it was just so virulent and, nasty, and, just, saying, well, how anyone that would question these ideas, it’s just stupid and malignant and vicious and satanic and, et cetera, et cetera.And it had no, effect on me because, I was like, well, you’re telling me that you don’t have the answer, when you act like that. And then once I opened myself to the idea of, well, what if this isn’t true? And all of these doubts that I had clicked through in my mind, perfectly because then I realized, oh, if, it’s not true, then all of these things make sense.And that’s, that is the, dilemma that people who value science and value reason in our, time, we have to induce that kind of thought process for people. Because I, I had to do all this by myself, like there wasn’t anyone in my personal life that was helping me along the way or, [00:12:00] teaching me about introducing me to ideas.I was just following things on my own. And that’s, most people don’t have the time for that, or the inclination or whatever, whatever reason they’re not going to do it. And so we, so people who believe in sound thinking, we have to, be out there and then, and join the fray everywhere as much as we can.HEFFERNAN: Can, I ask you a question? What might, when you went to your parents or your, elders and, asked these questions, what might they have said? When you ask these questions, what might, some, wise person have said to you that would’ve kept you in the fold? In other words, could Mormonism have, sort of invented its own secularism, had it been able to accommodate, accommodate your answers instead of kind of killing off Socrates, the you person?right. So.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Can alternative scripture interpretations save religion from fundamentalism?HEFFERNAN: Yeah. could they have said, oh, let’s, I’ve, that one is, that’s a real, incongruity in the text. And what could that possibly mean, and why would that be included? Well, maybe let’s consider the possibility that the Bible’s a set of metaphors, or let’s consider the possibility that God is erratic, or let’s consider the possibility that there are a lot of texts, other texts, or as Sarah just said, that Mormonism is Satanism.there, if someone had said something like that to you, would there be a way that you would still be a, philosophical Mormon and you might’ve expanded the department at Brigham Young to include real science?SHEFFIELD: Well, I, there are people that are doing, trying to do that actually.. and so, and in fact the, for, there’s a, magazine that’s had a conference for decades, called Sunstone, in Mormonism, that, that has tried to do that. And, and I think [00:14:00] that they, have kind of also. because Mormonism, like many, high, demand religious traditions, places a lot of, they, they tell members to be afraid of, former members or people who question.. and so, and Sunstone has basically kind of been kind of the seed of, this idea that, well, these people who are former Mormons are not going to hurt you. They’re not evil, they’re not satanic. and so, yeah, if I, had been exposed to that a little bit earlier, perhaps I would’ve cha, been able to toughen out or figure some way.But, on the other hand, on the other hand, I just don’t know that would’ve been satisfying for me because, like in Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” she’s right about that. That when you do start getting into metaphorical interpretation of text, you are doing violence to it, epistemic violence to the text because you are imposing your reading of it over the author’s reading. And I don’t know that I could have really done that, in the, wellHEFFERNAN: I,SHEFFIELD: that would’ve satisfied.HEFFERNAN: I mean, I just, I don’t want to go it to go unsaid that I, starkly disagree with Sontag on that point. I mean, ISHEFFIELD: Oh, you do? Okay.HEFFERNAN: Well, I don’t know who the author is in the equation and the author seems as dead to me as God.I mean, when you’re talking about you’re superseding and by interpreting the Bible, say you’re superseding what the authorial intention is that God’s intention. That would seem to be a, the case for the literal truth of the Bible or the maybe not meaning of the Bible. yeah. and, Also the words belong to all of us.There are no private languages. And so we are always making meaning of words that we, [00:16:00] that we share. But I guess, the reason I ask that is I don’t, I’m not sure there would be a Mormonism that allowed that kind of open inquiry. and one of the reasons I’m thinking aboutSHEFFIELD: it’s of hard for people.Yeah. Because like actually they get kicked out. Some people get kicked out for,HEFFERNAN: yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It’s like Mormonism, for instance, has an idea, has a doctrine. They don’t talk about it very often, and most of the non-MS don’t know it is that Mor in Mormonism, God is married and is a post-human.HEFFERNAN: Oh. ah.SHEFFIELD: And so, and God is a polygamous.HEFFERNAN: oh yeah. Interesting.SHEFFIELD: And so, actually, so even though they, currently do not practice multiple, marriages in, to living people. They actually still believe in it. And in fact, the guy who is the current president of the Mormon church, so they, they believe in eternal marriage as they call it.He’s actually married to two women. but one of them, one of them is deceased. so he has two wives.HEFFERNAN: But one of them is deceased. Yeah. but Right. Oh, I see. Eternal marriage. yeah.SHEFFIELD: So he’ll have two when, they’re all dead.Creating a list of books for deconstructing former fundamentalist ChristiansHEFFERNAN: Yeah, so probably I’m thinking about this because I’ve run into some deconstructing Christians, on tick on social media who are looking for just actively in search of tutors to, because they’ve been homeschooled, they’ve, their education’s gone awry in many ways or is non-existent. I think they started questioning the existence of hell.They started questioning some of MAGA policies and, and that was the thread they pulled and things started to unravel from there. but now they find themselves not knowing what the Federalist papers are [00:18:00] or, what their constitutional commitments are, if any, even really the difference between the private and public sectors.so you know why? A OC and Jeff Bezos are in different positions vis-a-vis the rest of us, right? Like how people get elected is versus how they get rich. and and it occurred to me maybe like in this fanciful way, but an overly optimistic way that we should do what, we did, like when I was a kid, which is, write letters to our counterpart Soviet school children and say like, we all have the same human heart.We can learn from each other, but maybe put together, people that create a syllabus about secularism, a short syllabus, essays, even if they’re, if no one’s going to read books, and do these kind of zoom. Conversations with people leaving and wanting to embrace because they’re so excited about socialism.they’ve shifted like, 180 degrees and are now, have decided that they are all in for the, left and, but they don’t quite know what capitalism is.So, and it, like that hunger to learn, that. Some religious kids have, ‘cause they want their big questions answered and, familiarity at least with the idea that they’ve gotta go back and study and what just seems like something that would make a, for a great student.But also, I mean, I would even ask listeners and readers to think about this. What would you do if you were going to give someone five essays, or documentary fragment of film, whatever, to, to try to move someone from, reactionary, evangelical Christianity and maga to, something closer to secular and liberal humanism, .Democracy. I think it’s a really interesting question. Like, [00:20:00] if you could build a little enlightenment, in, in the soul of someone and do it for yourself at the same time, because why don’t we believe those things, right? Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Like, yeah. yeah, That’s a, it’s a great idea. I mean. We, I, think that has been kind of the biggest failing of the broader non-conservative, or we’ll say non-reaction rate because, ‘cause like an actual conservative supports the enlightenment at this point now, right? And, you look at even people, in the beginning, like, like, Edmund Berger, he was, he supported reason and ideas. He was not a religious fundamental.Conservatism is not reactionismHEFFERNAN: I feel somewhat sad for conservatives because you, it always has to return to, the very first conservative you only have like hundreds of years ago. Well, if you go past William Buckley,SHEFFIELD: Well, Buckley was horrible. I mean, he wasn’t a conservative, I would say. he was a reactionary. I mean, that, that’s the difference. like when you, so in the 20th century, there were basically two figures in, in, in Britain and the us, that the right had to choose between effectively.And, one was, was Michael Oakeshott, who was, British, and he advocated for a processual view of everything. So, the cognition is a process. State craft is a process. There is no destination. There is only the responsible stewardship of the public trust.And so, he supported things like national healthcare. He, was, against, reli. He was not religious at all, in fact. And then you had, this other guy who was German [00:22:00] emigre into the United States named Eric Voegelin. And, have you ever heard of him? I don’t.I don’t. I, he’s,HEFFERNAN: no,SHEFFIELD: Basically the Americans chose him. Buckley chose him, and Buckley, in fact basically stole, Vogel’s, one of his signature phrases, “don’t immanentize the eschaton.” That was a, catchphrase that Buckley used a lot and they had on bumper stickers even, to try to make him seem like he was smart, but he actually stole it from, and soHEFFERNAN: the Escha that’s, that is the, afterlife?Yes. No. What does it mean?SHEFFIELD: No, it wasn’t so in Oh, okay. In the sense that Gellin meant it, what he meant was that he was an anti utopian. and, so the point of politics as he saw it was to well basically support, Christian dualism effectively. . and to make it be anti utopian. So make people think, well, things can’t get better, so you should just keep, give up about trying to improve things because they can’t ever be good. Humanity’s fallen, we’re stupid, we’re lazy, we’re worthless. And just accept that and get over it.And, like that, and that was basically the, idea of Voegelin. But, he dressed it up in, he was just, I mean, he was a horrible guy, frankly, and, just as one example, his, core thesis was, he was railing against what he called Gnosticism. Except Eric Voegelin couldn’t read classical, Hebrew. And then, he also had not even read any Gnostic texts because they hadn’t been discovered when he started doing his research. So,HEFFERNAN: I mean, I feelSHEFFIELD: it’s insane.Jeffrey Epstein and libertarian conservatismHEFFERNAN: It makes me, it’s sort of, it sort of feels like we shouldn’t give quarters of our brain [00:24:00] left to lately in going through the Epstein files, as they’re turned out, I think of all the intellectuals who I took seriously, who were in Epstein circle and and whose names will be forgotten, including God willing, John Searle and other people that we, that were in the group that I was in with Epstein Edge,SHEFFIELD: Oh, you were in on that, I did not realize that.HEFFERNAN: I was in edge.Yeah. and and. the fact that they, that we’re like fast finding out that for five decades, the American ruling class was depraved in the extreme and extracting everything from, women, children, and had a eugenics plan. I mean, you, it’s, like sort of more polished Q anon.I mean, it’s just, bizarre. What, or, it’s, and it’s so overwhelming to read the files. I don’t blame anyone for not looking at them, but the victims who are parsing them, especially quickly, especially keenly are finding, just example upon example of how of.All the kind of domains and spaces and idioms that were captured. And, and that includes b******t Ry departments, like evolutionary psychology, like, like all kinds of neuroscience. The new atheists, the, certain kinds of Christians that, Peter Thiel Christianity, which we, we’ve talked about Rene Gerard, some of Steve Bannon was obviously School of Epstein, right around Epstein.Journalists like Michael Wolf. and, and then, if you take the whole, just like, I think I said this in a recent piece in the New Republic, but you take the Victoria’s Secret aesthetic, right? So it’s like affecting people, whether they know it or not, a whole. Sort of way of knowing and understanding the world [00:26:00] paradigm that affects you.If you step into a mall, into a bath and body works certain sense, the way that the images of girls look, the, very, very useful girls, on the one hand, the evolutionary, that’s all Leslie Wexner program. He is Jeffrey Epstein’s biggest client, benefactor. There’d be no Jeffrey Epstein without the owner of, the, of L brands.And then at the high level, you have Harvard students in the evolutionary psychology department, much of which sponsor Pinker by Epstein, Steven Pinker. learning that, that rape is a male prerogative because something to do with wolf packs and our ancestors and lions or whatever. And so you, I just, I saw some historian, some just like white historian at, Princeton or something saying we should have listened to critical race theory and gender studies. I mean, they were really calling it, and, I mean, in some ways it’s, so vivid that we now have an actual stories and communication between and among people who were pulling the strings for conferences that introduced, David Brooks and, and Sergey Brinn and, all these masters of the universe and Uber mentioned who really did style themselves and how could you not beaded with your power in the world and see yourself as, as, opposed to slave morality as the nietzche.Perfect. Nietzsche and Overman. If you were, if you had Ehud Barack in your inbox and Leslie Wexner and Deepak Chopra and no Chomsky and Steve Bannon, and you were. You, must have felt, and any girl you ever wanted, more than a sultan, and, Hamms bin Almon. and and on and if, you were Jeffrey Epstein, you looked at your dumb Yahoo inbox and you saw one name after another like that. Some of them are asking for advice on girls. The former [00:28:00] secretary, treasury secretary, some of them are former presidents like Bill Clinton. You’re making plans to go to your special Lolita Island, pedophile island on the Lolita Express.How in the world do you not think that you are a God among men? And this is like, you’re the, yeah. And by the way, in terms of real world power, you had a lot of, they had a lot of power over us. extractive power take, like if you, just for men who wonder, can’t imagine identifying with Virginia Giuffre, just think about all the jobs you didn’t get at Harvard and MIT.think about like the books you didn’t publish while Edge was publishing every year. it’s big Question book and even publishing the works of Jeffrey Epstein in some cases. or, if you’re not intellectual, think about, any number of domains about private equity, about, about politics.I mean, geopolitics were being discussed in the same breath as Lolita.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, I think, yeah, the thing about the Epstein crimes that, yeah, it did really reveal that I think probably more than anything else is that, there was this class of people who were doctrinated, libertarian, right?Wingers, and they had been burrowed inside of liberalism. That’s essentially what we’re talking about. . and, you know, so that, and you just go and you go down the line like that. I mean, one of the things about Trumpism that’s been good in a sense is that he’s taken the mask off and encouraged, these people to let their freak flag fly and they are .you know, and then these Epstein emails, that’s, that is where they’re doing it the most. So, like Larry Summers is not a progressive. Larry Summers is not, he’s a conservative. and and like, and, that’s why I do think it’s, it is very important to [00:30:00] delineate between conservatism and reaction, but they’re not the same.A conservative and then centrist are actually, most of them are just conservative. That’s what they’re,Jeffrey Epstein’s crass statements as illustrative of right-wing epistemologyHEFFERNAN: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I think about with Edge and, and by the way, the reason that I brought that up-- through my own fault didn’t finish that thought. The reason I don’t want to talk about those like European philosophers like Voegelin, whose names will disappear, is that I fear that they are like the cadre of people at Edge who were considered these great thinkers and that, and now that we know that they were at tables, Jeffrey Epstein would ask when philosophy came up, what has this got to do with pussy?That, that was the what passed for conversation among them. I really have started to think that there are a lot of Ted talk Davos sophistry that we genuflected before in the form of airport books and even Harvard lectures and then forget about, financial policy, at the Treasury Department or foreign policy.Anyway, I could go on and on, but that we thought were important thinkers and that we’re actually in this circle. Buckley, it seems kind of quaint, it seems like this cocktail party and, in fact included sometimes people like James Baldwin. but the Epstein one is like, when they really get to be on their own, and, they don’t even have to sort of cheat out for the cameras and make it look like they’ve invite, they, they have, they invite women.so. I guess that’s the way, that’s like how, influential are these philosophers as philosophers? Like they had, this bordia power, they had power to like, make things seem obscurity wrong when you were places and you saw, as I did recently at or not long ago, at a conference, John Searle was there with someone 65 years, his junior, who didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak her language Korean.[00:32:00]And and then was quickly fired, at, quickly fired after for showing porn to students, at the Sterl department or whatever it’s called. This his own particular department. for showing porn. Yeah, showing porn to students. that guy was at the conference I met him at, with the woman that he was with.maybe, I think she was more than a teenager, but I. But not much. at that conference, he was the keynote. He had managed to get, first class E for him and for his traveling companion. and yeah, that’s five decades, he’s in his eighties. yeah. And so I, that makes me wonder, what do you do with something that the, what do you do with the Chinese room theory or whatever his legacy is?I just don’t even want to parse it anymore.SHEFFIELD: Well, we don’t, I mean, we don’t need his particular formulation of that question, to, to discuss, the, problems of ai, in our large language models as currently constituted.HEFFERNAN: But maybe we’re asking the wrong question.If the question that that, Jeffrey Epstein wanted to thought everything came down to is what has this got to do with pussy? I think it’s fair to say like, maybe he’s maybe Epstein’s gloss on their philosophical questions is pretty much the right one. And that, like even s’s question, and I don’t want to go into AI ‘cause obviously it’s not our focus today, but that maybe even URL’s way of looking at things, which incidentally, I heard him give the same talk he gave in 1980 in 2016 and .It hasn’t aged well. But but maybe he was just asking the wrong questions. Maybe the pe critical race theory people were right, but, dicing up the world of ideas into these tiny, It restricting the domain from which you can speak. And you and I have really [00:34:00] bonded over economics doing this.Parel saying there’s only one trumping vocabulary in that vocabulary . Is economics. and, the 20th century is filled with people trying to close the argument by, just pointing to something to do with the circulation of money and laws that they keep violating and changing on us, and saying, there has to be structural unemployment and this and that.Like, why did we even learn those things? They just seem out the window now. Yeah. and, and, that was a per perfect one economics as my, my, co-host at, what Rafi says that, econ, they introduce a Nobel Prize in economics. I’m not sure if Epstein’s Circle ever got that, prize, but they got a, so there’s a physicist who got a Nobel Prize in his circle in 1969.And from then on. Economists have physics envy and finance bros have economics envy. And anyone who just wants to make a dollar has, finance envy. And so everyone just like economics is just another name for Garage quick. Like it’s just people just who want to make money, who then think the most important thing to do is study economics.And I think people who want to get laid think that the most important thing to do is study surl. Actually, I can, connect that loop even more if you like to touch on your libertarian point.This might entrust you. Okay. Sort of came to prominence in the free speech, free love movement in Berkeley.And he did that. The free speech, free love, movement crystallized over panty raids, which were, a response to co-education. So you have women on campus and, men are amazed and delighted and delirious, or everyone is delighted and delirious and, and they go and start stealing brass and underwear from women’s drawers.And most women feel somewhat violated by this, but some of them feel like it’s all game, [00:36:00] all fair game. And then is this like a, is this a expellable offense and suddenly it’s a politics around? No, it’s just like expressive high spirits and hijinks and wonderful. And the, some of the girls say like, well, we’re modern women and we think that’s free speech, and we think it’s fine.Some of them say, no, I should be protected. And that seems prudish and and anyway, we’re off and running on free speech and free love, right. But it’s like this weird violation that in retrospect, you don’t have to be a prude to think someone shouldn’t come and steal your property. And then also has an element of what we’d call revenge porn now, where they’re like wearing the underwear and showing that they, taking it as a trophy and it’s not inconsistent with what has that got to do with pussy?The whole like reduction of philosophy of a certain kind to that. and you’re right, that libertarianism, right? It’s like personal freedoms comes down often to the freedom to dominate women and children.Theory of mind and empathySHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. and that’s why, so yeah, I mean your recent series that you’ve been writing about, the, problem of other minds,HEFFERNAN: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Like that ultimately is actually. All politics is about it, is about what are other people and do they have the same rights as me? That’s basically what politics is about. And of course the reason why it’s such a perpetual disputation is that we do not have direct proof of anyone else’s mind.And, so, and so because of that then the moral conclusions then follow that are always, can never be objective. They are always inherently subjective. And so with libertarianism and the 1960s and 1970s, that movement was born [00:38:00] at that same time as kind of a alternative conservatism. That’s really what it’s, and. It is, I like generally speaking, it’s, I would much rather have people be a libertarian than be a reactionary. But, like I would, I probably, if you, some people, some people seem to be either genetically or, socially prone to these types of, beliefs, because they, come from cognition, and they come from, deep seated psychological impulses, like fear of death or fear of change, or, unfamiliarity.So these are things that, that, are beyond politics, beyond religion, that they, the religion and, politics come from them. yeah.And in, in essence, most of human history, we have, to think back that again, all cognition is about what is this and what do I do with it?That is literally what microbes are doing. Also, like your cells and your body. before they can do anything, they have to say, well, this is here, Whatever this is, and that cognition is built on that question, what is this? And, do what with this? And so, with regard to philosophy, this is just all, everything comes from that.So, like in the, original history of humanity, all questions were philosophy. They literally were like, that’s what, pla Plato’s Academy, that’s what, the, the Lyceum of Aristotle was doing. and they were studying all of, they were studying science, biology, they were studying physics, they were studying, ethics.They were studying, all of these history. It was all there. It was all one thing. and they were studying religion as well. And so, and so, over time as [00:40:00] religion became more institutionalized. It started to say, well, some things are inappropriate, supernatural, so that’s magic. And we’re going to be against magic.And magic is bad. And so, so you had, so then everything began to be separated into, religion, magic, and science. and essentially science and religion kind of teamed up to get rid of magic. But magic isn’t inherently wrong. It is a belief in a personal contact with, with physical phenomenon. In other words like that famous phrase of Arthur C. Clark, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So, the two dilemmas that we have right now are “what is the role of magic,” and “what are other minds?” That’s really what our two big questions in society are.HEFFERNAN: Yeah. I mean, so one of the, in this, so I, I say in this very short series about, about empathy and ultimately about religious tolerance. that, and, other minds. So empathy, so tolerance, That I talk a little bit about, and I don’t know very much, but about, William Penn who, founded the state of the Holy Experiment, the state of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as a place where there would be religious tolerance and freedom of conscience.And he did this in a partnership with Tom and the affable. I think actually Tom and end, his name Chief Dom, Tom End meant the affable one. and somewhere in that [00:42:00] conversation, untranslated, right, like somewhere in, in the, somehow in the way that they communicated, they made a decision to do something, I think was very, I think maybe very radical not to debate, persuade each other, come to terms, discover that they had the same human heart, find things they had in common.And maybe, and because. Penn did not want to be proselytized to. And I think one thing when we think about education in the US is that we think about two, two, what I’m realizing about Christians doing deconstruction is that they believe that the only model for education is conversion so that someone is, that it’s sort of violence by another name.So it’s like some kind of imperialism. When you take a class at an elite university, they’re trying to indoctrinate you to sort of capture you and own your mind. And there’s not a spirit of, Socratic inquiry or other forms of dialectic or dialogue or other kinds of inquiry that where, just out of curiosity, as a curious kid, you get to say as you did, what is it with this Bible passage?Right? And then the other person can say. Damn if I know, I’ve never noticed that before. Let’s look at it in another translation. Let’s do Right. There is only, and Erika Kirk talks often about how much she loves dialogue. I know exactly what she means. She means I am totally, and Charlie Kirk was completely open to talking to the unenlightened savages and just hearing what they had to say, namely, please save me because I know nothing and then you can come and bless and save and convert me.Anyway, Penn and Tamin and agreed that they held completely, they had spoke in different idioms, they had completely different cultures. They were practically all but illegible to each other. But the one thing in common is they just wanted to be left alone to speak their language and have their lives.And so they made this wonderful agreement in retrospect, we don’t have that much of the [00:44:00] documents and pens. Sam Penn’s children actually betrayed the contract they signed, but the contract was live and let live and it was a little bit.The religious tolerance seems like such a low bar. Liberals especially want to make it something other than that, like ble, a blending of souls or great empathy, or we’re somehow all the same or that, everyone needs to learn every language so they can participate without appropriation, without exoticizing in every other culture somehow. But I think it was both more and less ambitious when Pen and Tamin said, what about you do your thing even if you believe I’m going to hell.Even if you believe your God is the true God, even if you believe you know that you know by rights, the world belongs to you. And only temporarily am I inhabiting this part of it, and I will likewise believe that mine is the utopia. Mine’s the true God. You’re going to hell, you’re a barbarian. But it doesn’t matter.We’re never going to try to persuade each other. We’re not going to try to have a circular argument about this. If we haven’t get along or trade this or that with each other, fine. But in general, we’re going to do the thing of knowing that you believe. Things that could be abhorrent to me. I eat knowing you have your own mind and anything could be going on in there.And it’s a universe. My mind is galactic to me. Your mind’s galactic to you, but, and guess what? I am just not going to come and punch you in the face because of it. That’s it. Yeah. The only restraint today is just that you are, you can sit in your house and think, God, I can’t believe how much those maga people just hate liberals.They’re just sitting there thinking, wishing Virginia Heffernan goes to hell. I think, I think Tucker Carlson has actually said that with my name, but Tucker Carlson has his mind. It is a whole universe. And just today I’m going to let Tucker Crosson have all his beliefs, and I’m going to tolerate the fact that other people believe something other than mine because how else can we oppose the violence they [00:46:00] do, except by accepting that they have other minds and then.It doesn’t matter what Jonathan Ross thought. He doesn’t get a full subjectivity that, that Renee Goode doesn’t have that. I don’t have that. You don’t have, we it, he, but we object to the violence that he did.Rene Girard and Nietzschean ChristianitySHEFFIELD: Yeah. yeah, no, and that’s, and I think that is the right framework. And this is where I think Rene Gerard comes into the picture becauseHEFFERNAN: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: He essentially rebuilt Christianity on Nietzsche. That is essentially what has happened. So, that, basically even to, sorryHEFFERNAN: Matthew, do you want to just tell our pals, why, we’re talking about Rene Gerard?SHEFFIELD: Oh, sure. Yeah, so, Rene Gerard, he was a French literary critic. Most people haven’t really heard of him. because he didn’t have a lot of prominence while he was alive. But he’s much more influential now. His star pupil was Peter Thiel. And basically Thiel has dedicated his life to, sort of forcing the ideas of Gerard onto the entire world.So, so Gerard, he was a con, a convert to Catholicism. he started off as a, non-religious postmodern French intellectual, so very steep in the, the French Nietzche tradition, which I think is very badly misreading Nietzche and his project. And so, but basically he took his Nietzschean inclinations, and merged them with his new Christian faith.and then essentially kind of rewrote Nietzche, but for a Christian audience. So, one of Nietzsche’s, [00:48:00] core ideas being that all, all of society is organized around resentment or using, he, I mean, he borrowed the French word ressentiment, and that he re he recoded that to be saying it’s mimetic desire.And so all of Girard is basically kind of our rebadged Nietzsche. And of course, I’m sure anybody who’s a ARD fan will be absolutely aghast in me saying that. but nonetheless, it’s true. And, and so, so basically they’ve taken the, core idea of Nietzsche, which is, there are everything is perspective and then moved it to, so therefore we can believe any false objectively, non-scientific belief. Everything is, so basically truth is a function of power rather than a function of, a, of, proof. And, and that is, I mean, essentially what post-structuralism argues, but they are trying to do it from a point of liberating people from that. Whereas this postmodernism that we have today is essentially saying, yes, truth is power and we’re going to take it and we’re going to make you believe our power. And you really see that in this second Trump administration. I mean, basically, Stephen Miller had said, recently, yes, we live in a world of power and that everything is, it comes down to that.And, it, essentially kind of restating with Thucydides said about foreign policy, that it’s all about the strong do what they will and, the weak suffer what they must.HEFFERNAN: Yeah, I mean, there’s no, I think, Rorty, Richard Rorty, so my mentors as Rene Gerard was Peter Thiel’s, said that [00:50:00] a liberal, and Rorty was the liberal who uniquely took his own side or say in an argument, right? He believed in actual just liberalism, which has religious tolerance as a key component. But anyway, he said a liberal is a person who thinks just this, the cruelty is the worst thing you can do.So any, anything that ends in cruelty is something that liberals must oppose. So, whatever immigration policy ends in the shooting of a innocent woman in the face the other night is a policy to oppose whatever your theory of immigration or state boundary state borders or nationalism. it doesn’t matter that po there’s something inhumane about that policy and that’s it.We just take it from there. But as you point out, Stephen Miller and, and, and Nietzsche, actually believed that the aversion to cruelty was the worst thing you could do. I think you quote in that, the essay you showed me about Gerard, and we should link it ‘cause it’s really was really interesting, great passages from Nietzsche that you pulled out.But one of them that said, God, I can’t even, he’s just such a terrific diabolically good writer. but something about these men that. Can’t re but respond to suffering in this feminine way by wanting to alleviate it. something like that. I don’t have it. which is like, yeah, there’s something, the terrible weakness in you, if you, if you, shy away from doing cruelty or if you, or, if you want, leave morale to under or soothe suffering.Right, right. I think I, I saw something by a, I saw an interview with a former, border guard, ice border guard, and, she was talking about all the ways that you [00:52:00] license cruelty in yourself. And mostly it’s, I mean on a mass scale, she’s repenting right now, but, they called, I guess the people, coming over the border.She was on the sa at the southern border that she called. They call them tonks ‘cause it’s the sound. Flashlight makes when you hit the person on the head to knock them out, but also call them bodies. So only bodies. And she said she was able with some conditioning to see them as not human. And without being able to see them as not human, she never would’ve been able to, gotten over her impulse to care for them, that she felt like was there.And, we could argue, and I’m not sure it’s worth arguing whether there is a natural instinct to oppose cruelty, but what I like about Rorty is he says, A liberal is a person who thinks the cruelty is the worst thing you can do. So if you, for whatever reason, you do not need to believe in God or Marx or Mao or anything, but if just out in your kind of.I don’t know, just it like in your infinite possibilities of how you can look at the world like the, microorganism that you just brought up, who like sees a thing and thinks, what should you do with it? If you see an act of cruelty like in Minneapolis the other night and you think that’s the worst thing a human can do, then you sort of know what you’re supposed to do politically.You don’t then need to derive any of your beliefs from philosophers of the Enlightenment or anywhere else in your private life. You can believe in all the superstitions you want. You’re totally allowed to think that, or actually find that praying for a parking place gets to your parking place.But it’s not a good basis for policy. In the, public sphere, your beliefs in magic or the Bible or revelation or the fact that we all need to get to Israel for the second coming, that’s not how you [00:54:00] design policy, foreign or otherwise. what you use that your beliefs for are to make your private life beautiful.And what you use your commitments to ending cruelty for is to make your public life humane. and that’s the best I think I can do to summarize Rty. when you get to Gerard and Nietzsche, you get to kind of. Crazy metaphysics that is essentially science fiction, right? Like at the end of Girard’s life.a and Teal at times has talked about, really lunatic, end time stuff. They believe in all kinds of sin and they just believe in well, andSHEFFIELD: They say that liberals are the antichrist. Literally they say,HEFFERNAN: That’s right.SHEFFIELD: It’s what they say.HEFFERNAN: That’s right. Liberals are the antichrist. So they believe that’s right.Yeah, right. So Thiel has been lecturing on the antichrist. So that’s the kind of world building that they ultimately are doing. And one of the things that comes with their world is a willingness, as in many video games and other sci-fi worlds, a willingness to do countenance, cruelty, to do cruelty, to encourage cruelty.and and then you see that in Steven Miller. So just a whole world designed to inverting. Not just the principles of, kind of Christlike Christianity or something that seems a little more jesusy than some of this other weird stuff. And, or, but the enlightenment too, but just standard liberalism.Don’t hit your kids, don’t hit your kids.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.HEFFERNAN: There.SHEFFIELD: Exactly. yeah. And, the, and that’s why it does go back to the, problem of other minds that, other people have the right to their beliefs and they have the right to their thoughts and they have the right to different thoughts than you do.HEFFERNAN: Yes.yes.SHEFFIELD: And that’s, and, that, and going into [00:56:00] psychology, I mean, developmental psychology, there’s just this enormous corpus of literature about both, developmental psychology in terms of, people have to progress through different cognitive abilities.And because everybody in our original earliest states, we’re entirely egocentric. And we, we are not able to perceive, the world and pay attention to it and understand it. And you see that just as simply as that, little, Susie doesn’t want to share her toys with her baby brother, because he doesn’t have a right to toys. Only she does.And that problem unfortunately scales up because a lot of parents don’t impart proper theory of mind into their kids. And then you see it also, this kind of-- so what starts from an egocentric frame of mind also eventually devolves into a fear of other minds.and I think that’s. That is kind of the core of the appeal of a lot of these reactionary, conservatism in that, because it’s like ostensibly they are Christians and supposedly they care about, society having more Christians in it. But so, so if you’re getting immigrants from illegal or otherwise from Latin America or whatever, these people are Christians and in fact, they’re probably more devout, and more Bible reading and believing than most of their American haters are.But it doesn’t matter because they’re not full people, because they’re not, they’re not American, they’re not white, or whatever.HEFFERNAN: Let, okay, first it’s 2 0 4, so I don’t know if we are supposed to meant to keep it to a certain.SHEFFIELD: We don’t have to, butWhy reactionary Catholicism is becoming more popular in the U.S. far rightHEFFERNAN: Okay. If we can, go on for, 10 more minutes or so.I, I [00:58:00] hope this doesn’t bring us too far field, although what field are we in to start with? I, when you talk about the Christianity of many of the people, especially, coming over from South America, it, I think one thing we’ve seen since Trump took office a year ago is, a split among Christians.And that is into see if you agree with me, but I think we’re starting to see a split between Protestants and Catholics assert itself or reassert itself that’s been papered over for a long time and so much that, Martin Luther Kings, I think. Even before he said he imagined had a dream of a world where white and black children would be together.He thought a world where Protestants and Catholics would be together. now we have, I don’t, I still don’t quite understand where Mormons now fit into the scheme. I know they’re not Catholics. but there’s a different word, right. For Mormon church.SHEFFIELD: I mean, people would classify them as generically speaking.HEFFERNAN: Right. Okay. So, but Know it’s Catholics coming over the border. Nick Fuentes is a Catholic, Catholic, Candace Owens is a recent Catholic convert. JD Vance is a Catholic convert. Peter Thiel is, I don’t know if he’s a cradle Catholic, but he certainly became more ardent about it. Like Rene Gerard, who isn’t, was a con, was a, convert.they have, they’re like in Opus Day there are people who think the current pope and the Pope that preceded him are too far to the left. and, so more Catholic than the Pope put it that way. and they, Tucker Carlson is Catholic Curious. He’s an Episcopalian, but he is talked a lot about how he maybe should be a Catholic and they have a very different relationship to Christian Zionism.[01:00:00]And this comes to theology than do Protestants who grew up with it. especially evangelicals who grew up with Christian Zionism. And are not quite sure that there is a Judeo-Christian world, right? They think that the church superseded, the people of Israel or Israel, instead of fulfilled a prophecy or that the Jews have still a chosen place, or that the state of Israel under Netanyahu, fulfills some particular thing.So this is really loud on the right, right now it’s sort of Charlie Kirk, the way that Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes used to show down before Charlie Kirk died. was along some of these lines. and the Catholics in this equation, the reactionary Catholics are much more anti-Semitic. they, they tilt me a Nazi.They’re isolationist, they’re anti-Israel. they are pro-Palestine in ways that like ominously means that some on the left approve periodically of the things they say. a lot of them. So, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was victim of priest abuse, or at least witnessed pre priest abuse when she was a young Catholic.And that influenced her obsession with the Epstein case and Q Anon. the sort of idea of a cabal of pedophiles was, actually something she was familiar with. and and I think all that is informing the conversation even around policy issues like Israel. Oh yeah, like support for Israel, and, yeah, and also how to accept immigrants, because Catholics have a giant empire and they have Catholics everywhere, and they, and Nick Fuentes has a Mexican, mother, a grandmother, and, and so a grandfather.And so, I think there’s a like a little [01:02:00] more hospitality to, to Catholic immigrants also. anyway.SHEFFIELD: Well, and yeah, and actually, yeah, as far as, and even like with regard to race, I think that’s true as well, that, generally speaking. I mean, if you look at the people who show up to Nick Fuentes events, a lot of them are black, a lot of them areHEFFERNAN: Hispanic.SHEFFIELD: Yeah,HEFFERNAN: That’s right. That’s right. It’s, he’s, can be less of a white nationalist. He’s a Christian nationalist, but, he, yeah. And objects to Trump now, just as Candace Owens does along the lines that he’s like a globalist who’s aligned with Jews. I mean, who knows? Although they do believe that there’s some philosophical reason for this, and Catholics and Protestants haven’t always, you paper over those differences long enough and, yeah.. And I think the difference between traditional Zionists and Christian Zionists has also been papered over and is splintering, yeah. Right now in interesting ways. This is all just to talk, get more to talk about the right and also talk about Stephen Miller as I think quite a secular figure.I mean, he, his wife will say any criticism of him is antisemitism, but I think as you point out, it’s straight, it’s doctrinaire, might mix right. Sort of I don’tSHEFFIELD: Nietzschean.HEFFERNAN: Very Nietzschean. Yeah. I guess Nietzschean. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. well, so there, yeah, the Catholic point is one that I, think doesn’t get covered in the media as much as it should because within Catholicism, there has, from its very beginning, been an anti-democratic elitist, tradition and that was something that was regnant within the church up until, roughly Vatican two, just a little bit before that. Probably one of the most influential reactionary documents, that has ever been published is the Syllabus of [01:04:00] Errors. and that was, published, by, Pius, 12th, I think. I’m sorry, I might not get the number wrong, so don’t, crucify me guys.This idea that modernity, is evil and it’s satanic and it has to be stopped. . you know, it, it’s, that is something that they have in common with, far right Protestants, but the far right protestants just do not have any sort of intellectualism, and they don’t have a history.So, so like, one of the fascinating things about, besides the fact that all that science, magic and, religion, were all together. That’s also the case within the artistic, world as well, that, all political traditions were kind of mixing up, for, centuries.And you just really saw that, in a lot of the Christian art and literary traditions that existed. like Michelangelo, you obviously was, anyway, that’s it. That bit far afield.So, but essentially, they right wing anti-modern people have figured out, that Catholicism does have this rich well of monarchists or fascists beliefs that they can draw upon. And so that’s why people like JD Vance have kind of gravitated toward that. I mean, JD Vance is someone, who has always craved stability and obeying authority. that’s what he is done his whole life. He’s not a guy that, wants to think for himself.He wants the thinking to be done for him more powerful people. And so that Catholic tradition does, it has a lot of appeal and that’s why you are seeing a lot of people, go into it. But that trend existed even before the recent influencer trend. Like when you look at the Federalist Society, [01:06:00] or right-wing judges overwhelmingly historically, they came from, they were either Catholics or Jews.They were not evangelical. Because evangelicals, their tradition is against intellectualism. It’s against trying to figure things out and use your . . whereas, at least with reactionary Judaism or Catholicism, they, don’t, they’re not against using your mind and just want it for intolerant purposes.Somatic experience and a politics of determined loveHEFFERNAN: Yeah, I mean, it also should be pointed out that, just as white supremacy and anti-racism or civil rights c grow together, there is also the pope himself, the first American pope who is quite progressive. And, and then the re new interest in liberation theology. It’s really my domain. But, the fact that I’m in New York, we have a democratic socialist, mayor at Democratic socialism was founded in part by Michael Harrington, the great liberation theologian.and, and the, sort of activist wing of it, I think John Fugelsang, whose parents are a former monk and a former nun who fell in love. When both of them had just taken vows of celibacy, and left and married and had John, and now he’s written separate separation of church and hate about the, the fundamentals of ju of Jesus’s radicalism.which is something I think of interest to some Catholics. and, and, and, South America has been a, a, site of kind of some liberatory practices. And so with Venezuela and the news and so on, who knows what will happen. But, and obvi and o OBAs day, he has been like really shunted out of the Vatican and, and, JD Vance is, I mean, it seems like the current pope.Has no trouble [01:08:00] trolling him and subtweeting JD Vance and, otherwise dunking on him. you, he’s pretty explicitly, critical in a, good Chicago, black Hawks way, I dunno. Yeah, Of JD Vance and that, and that, that’s been interesting to see too. But there, there’s life yet in these ancient religions.and, and, I think one of the things I once again get from Rorty is that there is no real strain of Christianity that points you to policy decisions in the present moment. I mean, I don’t know if you saw this, but a Tucker Carlson interview with Ted Cruz and, he, and, this is before.I’m not sure if it was before October 7th or not. It must not have been. But Tucker was asking him with his usual antisemitism, but, so I’ll caveat to that, but asking Ted Cruz why he is such a strong supporter of Israel. And Ted Cruz said, well, somewhere in the Bible it says, he who blesses Israel be blessed and he curses Israel be cursed.And Tucker Crosson says, well, where is that? and Ted Cruz is embarrassed and shuffles around and doesn’t know. And then, tuck Tucker, kind of zings him and tells him where it is, and then, says, well, but is this the Israel in Genesis that’s mentioned in Genesis? Is that the Israel that’s like run by Netanyahu?and it’s Tucker’s show, but you know, Ted Cruz is in the hot seat the whole time and can’t keep it together and can’t make any point. But the kind of overarching, like, why are we down here in the nuts and bolts of what God said to do about Israel? And someone’s point about some one passage in somewhere in some translation of the Bible that no one can remember, and they’re talking about it.And these two are debating, like they’re really important theologians and Ted Cruz has a real education, but we’re not seeing any of it because a passage about being blessed and cursed, which are, what are those things? They have no like correlates in the physical world that is determining Israel [01:10:00] policy, that kind of thing is determining Israel policy.This is a US senator making decisions about whether to further arm, a nation involved in genocide. And what is your grounding for doing that, sir? A passage in the Bible that has unfalsifiable claims about blessing and cursing to do with the word, can’t even remember Israel, that has something to do with something and he can’t even remember it.Yeah. So like that’s where we are. And and that’s what happens when you take religious reasoning and turn it into guns and violence. so that’s why according to Rorty, you don’t purify your religious thinking so that it’s so great that it immediately leads to perfect policy and moral decisions and ethical decisions in your life.‘cause you never will do that. You will not refine Bible stories such that you know exactly how to share your toys or not cheat on your wife. It’s just not going to happen. You do these things happen in different lanes. Politics, your political self is a much, well much simpler, but apparently harder thing that it can, you can be too smart for it.You can’t be too dumb for trying to. Oppose cruelty and prevent cruelty. it’s why things like the video the other night or the images of Gaza, that, Hillary Clinton and what’s her name, Horowitz, would have us never watch because they could cloud our thinking to see videos of Gaza. But those are the things that drive political action.The same thing happened with Vietnam, with images. Just, it’s very simple. When you’re making a good political decision, you just want to be on the side against cruelty. yeah. And, and then in your personal life, you can dream up as many lizard people and private life as you want. and, our tradition in America of religious tolerance of sort of respect and for other minds of, we don’t have a single religion, we don’t have a single language as much as Trump would have.It otherwise [01:12:00] means that, within the confines of your brain and your person and maybe your community. You can have all those beliefs, but one thing does not have to inform the other. And listening to William Penn have a whole idea about how the world should be run, or tamin have a whole idea about how the, lenape, were to live their lives.He was our, he was a leader, right? But just having no interest in telling Penn how to lead his life and vice versa. So what I don’t get is why like Ted Cruz can sit home with his kink about being blessed and cursed and blah, blah, blah, and Israel, and reread the Bible and look things up and pray on his knees and ask for forgiveness and do whatever is little, Christian heart desires, but please don’t go and, please don’t go and continue to vote for a genocide, and then cite the Bible as if that closes the case for anyone but you.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. well, that’s right. And, and, the. and that illustrates, this dichotomy with regard to, blessing Israel or whatnot. that does illustrate kind of the poverty of the evangelical tradition becauseHEFFERNAN: Yeah,SHEFFIELD: what they’ve done is essentially based a vast series of i policies and ideas based on one verse, that, they have taken outta context.so the, context.HEFFERNAN: But let’s say they took it, let’s say they took it in context because Nick Fuentes has talked about this too, and he says, well, no, because that is real, is the, as the sym Jews, and later they are the church, sorry, the church supersedes them or what it’s called, like replacement or something.It’s got the same replacement, whatever.SHEFFIELD: Supersessionism. Yeah,HEFFERNAN: supersessionism and, yeah. Excuse me.SHEFFIELD: I mean, yeah, I mean,HEFFERNAN: yeah, I mean, all of this sounds, even if it was sounds like Lord of the Rings, like I, okay, the orcs took over. They’re no longer the thing of [01:14:00] the S and the whatever. I am fine to listen to them, I guess.No, I’m not. I’m impatient listening to sci-fi. I just don’t care. I don’t care about Ted Cruz’s. I mean, Peter Thiel’s Antichrist or Nick Fuentes says thing. Yeah. They lead to neo-Nazis and they lead to whatever. And it’s toy thinking that way lays the rest of us. And like our good brains that could be like, to this exact point of we have ICE in the streets.So if like you have good strategic ideas about opposing ICE, then that is a very good thing to bring to the table. If you want to talk angels dancing on heads of pins and ENTs and orcs, then you know, there are definitely Reddit boards for that. And I, so in other words, I don’t think that a good biblical scholar, maybe John Fugalsang, or you or, a better reader than all these people should come along and say, well, actually what Jesus wanted was this, and that’s why we should oppose cruelty. or, if you read this carefully, you’ll find out that Israel is or isn’t prophesied as the contemporary state of Israel.all of that analysis is kind of nothing as opposed to, and again, I get this from Rorty, but, one or two photographs or one or two images of the, Renee Good being shot in the face, for making decisions about what to do.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, so I mean, ultimately, cognitive psychology, it does, basically, I’d say there’s a general consensus, not everybody buys it. The, cognition, there’s basically two types of partnership. There’s what I, call the somatic reasoning, which is the reasoning that comes from your body. It’s your instinct, it’s your intuition. And that’s good enough for most, most things in your life, but it is, [01:16:00] egocentric.It’s based on your stuff. But, that’s the thing. It is actually the basis for abstract reason, the other kind, because abstract reasoning always has, and this is the problem with large language models, is that they don’t have a somatic core to, to pull from. and so, but the thing is, so, so your somatic intuition’s about your own experience, nobody can falsify that, like .It’s objectively true that you’ve felt something when you experience something. And so like that’s, that’s the phenomenological basis of all truths. and, so, but the problem is that’s not. That cannot work as a basis for someone else. So in other words, I felt something is not a justification-- somatic experience is not a, it cannot be a source of truth for anyone else.And so we have to be able to think outside of our own body, in order to, and that’s the basis of society is to say that, our personal experience, it is valid from a civil rights perspective. And it means we have civil rights.But basically, what you’re describing, like that’s, that was the basis of the enlightenment also, but, and, Penn’s experience of, doing that fits within that larger project, but we just, we haven’t explained it.So like a lot of people don’t know the history. They don’t, know why this stuff works and why we believe it, and that’s really what it comes down.HEFFERNAN: Well, I mean if you count as somatic experience the evidence of your eyes and ears, right? I think So we’re now talking somatically about the body.So the eyes and ears just take a look at the videos about, of the, of the murder the other night and the other day and, and. Whatever your intuition and sense of it [01:18:00] is probably pretty right. they’re definitely, and by the way, that intuition does not have to be whose fault it was, or, it just that gut feeling that you get from photographs and fiction and and works of art, where you know what to do.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.HEFFERNAN: And the thing to do is to make sure that never happens again.SHEFFIELD: Exactly right.HEFFERNAN: AndSHEFFIELD: yeah. So,HEFFERNAN: and that’ss theSHEFFIELD: truth. Yeah.HEFFERNAN: And everyone who doesn’t want that to happen again, is on our side. They don’t, it doesn’t matter if they, it doesn’t, it truly doesn’t matter what they believe about immigration reform or if they’re socialists or Antifa or right wingers, or never Trumpers or maga.If you look at that and think, that should never happen again, then then I want to be in solidarity.SHEFFIELD: Exactly. And whatever your other beliefs are, we can work it out. That’s it. We believe it.HEFFERNAN: Your other mind is, your mind is your own place. Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: That’s right. Yeah. So like, ultimately the best way to defeat this fascistic, monarchist impulse is a politics of determined love. Like that’s really what we’re talking about here.HEFFERNAN: Yeah. Rorty says, so told Jurgen Habermas, right before he died, and it’s this like rare, very sincere moment that he just wanted to live in a world where the only law was love.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And yeah. And and we have to do that in our own lives and, promote that as a way of life for everyone else. And we did.HEFFERNAN: We have to end there. there’s no way. Matthew, thank you so much. I always love talking to you.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, this was great. now, do we know how to end the stream? I don’t know. Can you I see X button.HEFFERNAN: I see it. I see an X. I’m going to push it. Thank you so much everyone for joining us.SHEFFIELD: Thank you [01:20:00] everybody. Thank you Virginia! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

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