Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory Of Change) podcast

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Who Gets to Choose Your Doctor? The Supreme Court Case That Could Reshape Medicaid 30:00

6 päivää sitten30:00

30:00

What happens when states gain the power to decide which healthcare providers Medicaid recipients can access? In this episode, host Jen Taylor-Skinner is joined by Elizabeth Taylor , Executive Director of the National Health Law Program , to break down the high-stakes Supreme Court case Medina v. South Atlantic . At its core, the case challenges whether individuals have the right to choose their own healthcare provider under Medicaid—a right that could be stripped away, with profound implications for reproductive health, gender-affirming care, and essential services for low-income, disabled, and LGBTQIA+ communities. Together, they explore how this case—and others like Health and Hospital Corp. v. Talevski —could reshape the legal tools individuals have to protect their healthcare rights, especially as conservative state leaders target clinics like Planned Parenthood. Elizabeth Taylor offers critical insight into the legal landscape, the political motivations behind these efforts, and why protecting Medicaid access is more urgent than ever. This episode is a must-listen for anyone concerned about reproductive justice, healthcare equity, and the future of Medicaid. Episode Chapters (00:00) Medicaid Recipients' Right to Choose Providers Medicaid recipients' right to choose health care providers, implications for access to care, and private enforcement of Medicaid rights. (10:56) Enforcing Medicaid Rights and Protections Supreme Court case impacts Medicaid rights enforcement, Section 1983 crucial for individual enforcement, potential threats to access to healthcare. (21:03) The Future of Medicaid and Healthcare Medicaid's critical role in providing sexual and reproductive health services, potential consequences of cutting funding, and the importance of treating healthcare as a public good. (27:53) Potential Impact of State Prevailing State's victory in legal case could lead to loss of healthcare rights for low-income individuals. Stay informed on timeline and thank Elizabeth Taylor for coverage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Economic Chaos, by Design: Why economic instability is a feature, not a bug, of Trump-era policy 32:51

20 päivää sitten32:51

32:51

Tariffs, Tax Cuts & the Corporate Scam Economy In this episode of The Electorette , host Jen Taylor-Skinner sits down with Lindsay Owens , Executive Director of Groundwork Collaborative , to dissect the chaos of Trump’s economic policies—and the hidden logic behind them. From erratic tariff announcements to the looming extension of the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy, Lindsay reveals how economic “whiplash” is not just confusing—it’s calculated. We explore how these policies are fueling inequality, harming working families, and creating fertile ground for corporate profiteering. Lindsay also explains how recession fears—some legitimate, others manufactured—are being used as cover for price gouging, layoffs, and cuts to essential services like Medicaid and food assistance. This episode also revisits the devastating legacy of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act , its role in pandemic-era profiteering, and why the American public never saw the promised benefits. With recession risks rising and the corporate safety net growing stronger while ours is being shredded, this is a must-listen for anyone trying to make sense of the headlines—and the high prices. (00:00) Tariffs and Economic Uncertainty Trump's tariffs create economic uncertainty, disproportionately affecting working and middle-class Americans while benefiting the wealthy and potentially causing a recession. (08:52) Effects of Economic Policies on Americans Trump's economic policies create uncertainty, risking recession and exploitation, with potential foreign policy motivations behind the trade war with China. (21:44) The Impact of Economic Policies Nature's impact on inflation in America and other countries, Biden's successful management, corporate price gouging, concerns about budget resolution's consequences. (30:49) Republican Tax Cuts Under Trump Presidency Republican trifecta focuses on tax breaks for the wealthy, with potential economic impacts and political motivations discussed by Lindsay Owens. #Tariffs #Shrinkflation #TaxCuts #TrumpEconomy #RecessionWatch #LindsayOwens #EconomicJustice #Electorette #GroundworkCollaborative #PriceGouging #BidenEconomy #ConsumerConfidence #PoliticalPodcast #FeministMedia #Medicaid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
The Digital Green Book: Fighting Disinformation and Reclaiming Our Digital Power 26:17

28 päivää sitten26:17

26:17

What happens when disinformation meets cutting-edge AI—and Black communities are caught in the crosshairs? In this powerful episode of The Electorette , host Jen Taylor-Skinner speaks with Esosa Osa , Founder and CEO of Onyx Impact , about the alarming rise in AI-generated political disinformation targeting Black voters. Together, they unpack how misinformation campaigns are designed to exploit emotions like anger and disappointment—sowing distrust and disengagement, especially during election cycles. Esosa introduces the Digital Green Book , a modern tool inspired by its historic namesake, built to help Black communities navigate digital spaces safely and find truth in an era of algorithmic manipulation. Backed by Black news and cultural sources, this AI-powered guide offers fact-checking, media literacy tools, and data privacy resources designed specifically for Black users. We explore the staggering reality that 42% of online content is generated by malicious bots, why tech billionaires profit from unsafe platforms, and how we can protect our kids, our communities, and our votes in this digital information war. 🎧 Learn more and explore the Digital Green Book: digitalgreenbook.org Episode Chapters (00:00) Disinformation's Impact on Black Communities Disinformation, fueled by AI, targets Black voters and influences broader culture; Digital Green Book helps navigate online harms. (06:16) Combatting Disinformation With Digital Green Book Digital Green Book combats misinformation with AI, emphasizing education and skepticism in online information for Black communities. (15:17) Navigating Disinformation in the Digital Age Digital privacy, disinformation, AI, and state-level privacy acts are discussed in the context of voter suppression and Black communities. (22:38) Navigating Misinformation With Empathy Empathy and understanding are needed to address misinformation and conspiracy beliefs within families, perpetuated by social media's profit-driven engagement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Power, Politics & the Grid: Kate Gordon on America’s Energy Crossroads 44:43

5 weeks sitten44:43

44:43

What if the clean energy revolution isn’t coming—it’s already here, quietly reshaping global power, American manufacturing, and the way we heat our homes? In this episode of The Electorette , host Jen Taylor-Skinner sits down with energy policy expert Kate Gordon to unpack the largest climate investment in U.S. history—and why most Americans barely noticed it. Together, they explore the ambitious trio of laws passed under the Biden administration—the Inflation Reduction Act , the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act , and the CHIPS and Science Act —which together form a bold, strategic roadmap for decarbonization, domestic manufacturing, and energy independence. Kate walks us through the rarely-discussed connections between AI, electrification, and rising energy demand, the geopolitical aftershocks of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and why our energy future hinges on the power grid, community investment, and supply chain resilience. We also confront the dangers ahead: environmental protections being rolled back, mass layoffs at the Department of Energy, and a growing political movement determined to unravel decades of climate progress. This is a conversation about what’s working, what’s under threat, and why the clean energy transition isn’t just about science—it’s about power, politics, and the future of democracy itself. Kate Gordon is an energy policy expert, and the CEO of California Forward , a statewide organization dedicated to a more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive economy across every region of the state. Episode Chapters/Timestamps (00:00) Investments in Climate Change Mitigation The Biden administration's IRA includes transformative bills for clean energy, grid resilience, EV infrastructure, and semiconductor technology. (07:17) Energy Dominance Fracking's impact on U.S. energy dominance, European demand for American gas, and balancing fossil fuels and renewables for future energy needs. (12:47) Climate Investment Rollbacks and Tax Cuts Rollback of environmental protections, tension in clean energy projects, contradictions in domestic manufacturing policies, and lack of coherence in climate action. (24:20) Strategic Manufacturing and Resource Economics Domestic manufacturing's complexities, strategic necessity of producing goods, geopolitical implications of resource economics, and challenges faced by Department of Energy. (29:24) Impact of Federal Job Cuts Recent staffing changes at DOE have led to loss of skilled professionals and highlight inefficiencies in federal hiring processes. (33:47) Energy Security and Strategic Relationships The Department of Energy's role in managing nuclear infrastructure, risks of operational missteps, cybersecurity for the power grid, energy independence, and challenges in communicating these concerns to the public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
The ‘cancel culture’ myth was always about censoring the center-to-left 1:01:50

5 weeks sitten1:01:50

1:01:50

Episode Summary For decades, the American far-right has been screeching constantly that its activists and politicians are being censored by “cancel culture.” It’s nonsense, of course, because almost invariably everyone who supposed canceled ends up with a huge media following and a very profitable victim narrative. But the lies about mass censorship of reactionaries and conservatives aren’t just about manipulating the public into feeling sympathy for completely unsympathetic figures like Donald Trump. They’re also about power. In the so-called marketplace of ideas, right-wing ideas lost decades ago. Among many other things, well-educated people know that race is a social construct, that transgender people have existed for centuries, and that America’s most-influential founders were not Christian nationalists. Reactionaries have failed to make their case, and this is the main reason they don’t get hired by universities. You can’t have a credible biology department if “creation science” is the mandated policy. Anthropologists pushing discredited “race science” are regarded as disturbed freaks, and rightfully so. But instead of trying to come up with some better ideas, like they’d have to in an actual meritocracy, the American far right has decided to force them into the public square. This is what the cancel culture narrative is all about, establishing a false scenario to justify the gigantic censorship regime that the second Trump White House is establishing. Outside of the United States, right-wing parties have been envying the success Republicans have had, and they are applying the lessons to their own countries. Unfortunately, the mainstream media in other countries have not learned anything from the mistakes of American journalists in falling for these deceptions. Will the left in the United States and elsewhere ever be able to effectively counter these manipulations? And are the people at the top even aware of what’s going on? We discuss it on today’s episode with Adrian Daub, the author of a book on the subject called The Cancel Culture Panic . He’s also a professor of humanities at Stanford University and the host of the podcast “ In Bed With the Right .” The video of our December 3, 2024 discussion 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 page. Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe to stay in touch. Related Content —Trump targets ‘ improper ideology ’ at Smithsonian museums —How the Trump administration is attacking science and scholarly merit at the National Institutes of Health —The forgotten history of how Republican college students invented canceling people —Inside the right-wing plan to ‘ seize control of the administrative state ’ —University administrators are totally ill-equipped for Trump’s massive censorship regime —Trump, Nietzsche, and the collapse of the Republican mind —Inspired by Trump, reactionary comedians are the most popular media figures in the Republican party —Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA are building a reactionary cult for young people , does anyone on the center-left care? Audio Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 07:17 — Why 'cancel culture' rhetoric is more about affirmative action for illogical reactionary opinions 13:00 — Right-wing campus speakers are performance artists rather than academics 19:11 — Campus speech surveys rarely ask if people are afraid to disclose marginalized identities 22:39 — William F. Buckley Jr. and "God and Man at Yale" 28:12 — Insincere 'censorship' arguments as a hack of liberal epistemology 33:01 — Cancel culture narratives are about masking real power through fake populism 36:31 — Alan Bloom and "The Closing of the American Mind" 42:14 — Libertarianism and hierarchy in American politics 47:26 — Lies about cancel culture as permission structures for reactionary repression 57:39 — Conclusion Audio Transcript The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So let's focus our discussion here at the beginning about the premise of your book. Lay that out for us real quickly, if you could, please. ADRIAN DAUB: Yeah, so the idea is it's a story of or a history of the worry about cancel culture in U.S. media. And the argument is really threefold that one there is this longstanding discussion within the U.S. tends to start on the right, but then almost always makes its way to the center. That is that basically proposes that there is this rising tide of left wing liberalism or left wing censoriousness. And that cancel culture is basically the latest iteration of that. My book tries to show with what data we have available, that's very likely overstated. That is to say, that's not to say that there aren't people who have bad things happen to them on college campuses or in media based on what they say. It does mean that the picture, if you look closely is a lot less a lot less obvious and a lot less. Monolithic, then sort of narratives about cancel culture would make it seem right. That is to say, when you hear cancel culture, at least until recently, people would think, well, this is from the left. This is from young people. This has to do with online spaces. This has to do with wokeness, right? And that it does exist. But it turns out that kind of occludes much larger swaths of, things that we might, call cancellation, but we usually don't. That come from, state legislatures from Ron DeSantis, what have you, right? So that's the first part of the argument. The second part of the argument is that this debate really, unlike the earlier panic over political correctness, which [00:04:00] very much resembles, is something that didn't sort of get cooked up. In right wing spaces and then kind of jumped over this one traveled the opposite way it from the very beginning appeal to a kind of, I mean, some people might say reactionary centrist or, center right, kind of, SHEFFIELD: I call it conservative liberalism. DAUB: Yeah, exactly. Right. Like a, it started in the pages of the Atlantic and the New York times far more than it did on Breitbart or Fox News or whatever. And due to that fact, it sort of very quickly made its way across the globe and mostly as a print phenomenon, that is to say, before it's, not, it's a story about social media, but it's not a social, a story about social media that traveled through social media. It really is a story about social media that traveled. From the New York Times to Le Figaro in France, or to Die Welt in Germany, or to The Times in the UK, right? It becomes a kind of story about print journalism, and for a print magazine. Journalism audience, which is also to say that this is not really a freak out among people that we might think of as low information or might be in a kind of, or we sort of classically think are in a media bubble. These are people who are very interested, who are very well read, who consume media exactly the way, we're all supposed to consume media and none of us. Do any more right. By like picking up a paper in the morning. And yet I would argue that they're being fed something very close to disinformation when it comes to cancel culture stories. And then the third point is that what this really enables is a, bunch of breaking down barriers. There is a, it's a libertarian story. In an age where kind of libertarianism is making common cause with something far more authoritarian. It is a, as I say, a center, right? Panic. At an age when, especially in Europe, the center right is becoming more and [00:06:00] more curious towards the far right or the populist right. It is a panic for an age in which people not just on the right, but probably particularly on the right kind of have to, they wear two hats. They wear a hat, a populist hat and a institutionalist hat, right? On the one hand. Still have a residual respect for institutions that they nevertheless think have been degraded by You know the woke mind virus or whatever So it's it is this panic for an age in which A bunch of things that used to structure our politics rather clearly Are breaking down And it allows people to sort of not Have to make a decision. It's a sort of yes. And kind of panic a place where you can you don't have to pick whether you're a populist or an institutionalist. You can just be both. You don't have to pick whether you're libertarian or whether you really want those wokesters put in their place by some good old fashioned government intervention. You can do both, right? So it is a panic that catches a large segment of the population exactly where they're at. Where they would have to make some pretty troubling choices. Cancer culture is a way or yelling about cancer culture and about the young wokesters that promote it is a way to not have to make those choices. Why 'cancel culture' rhetoric is more about affirmative action for illogical reactionary opinions SHEFFIELD: I mean, you could call that a dual choice, but also you could call it hypocrisy. And I mean, that's that sort of, innate hypocrisy is, it is endemic ultimately to reactionary thought because it reactionary thought isn't full thinking. It is an epistemology, a self-centered epistemology in which things are, to quote Stephen Colbert, his character, ‘that things are true because I believe them.’ And and that was what he meant in the context of “truthiness.” I mean, it's deeply ironic and unfortunate that [00:08:00] he was absolutely correctly describing what you're talking about here, and people on the left just thought it was a joke. But he was like, seriously describing the problem that we were up against, and nobody paid attention other than to think it was funny. DAUB: I think that's right. I think that there is I know that in your work, you think a lot about the, what do you call the dual fundamentalisms of politics and faith, and I think that in some way, Cancel culture kind of, or the worry about cancel culture fits into that really nicely. It's sort of the latest attempt to feign dynamism where there is none, right? There's the, this, language game always proposes there's this conservative position that's not being allowed expression and not expressing it is sort of hampering, the progress of science, of free inquiry, et cetera, et cetera. But if you drill down, the conservative position really, Hasn't changed. Right? The ever evolving specter of the censorious left is sort of the correlate of the things you're supposedly no longer able to say but that are really never changing. Right? That, that basically, it, the newness of the threat. It's supposed to lend novelty to ideas that if you drill down, we're, the same in 1995 or 1985, even. Right. Like, I, was censored for saying the thing I wanted to say. What is the thing you wanted to say? Oh, it's basically the bell curve. And you're like, okay, wow. We're still doing this. Have you gotten new material? Right. Like it is a way to re to rejuvenate material that is on the verge of going stale. SHEFFIELD: Well, it is. Yeah. And it's it's like, and, but it is the only way that they can have their ideas even discussed at all, because I mean, that's, is the kind of root cause of this rhetorical technique is that they, and I can say this as a former religious [00:10:00] conservative and a former secular conservative myself, that, deep down all of them know. That their ideas are insupportable. They know that what they believe is not true. They know that, the, that they can have no, that they have no proof that the earth was created in 6, 000 years. They know that while they feel like that women are dumber than men they know that they don't really have any proof of that. And, like, and they know that when, when, they make, panics about transgender people. They know that there are basically no transgender athletes in the world. the, percentage, the number of people affected by a trans athlete, in their locker room is probably less than a hundred in the entire United States. They know that's true, but it's just, this is like, it is the ultimate kind of quota thinking. Like, that's the deep irony of their, posture is they want affirmative action for DAUB: Yeah, exactly. SHEFFIELD: Essentially what they're arguing is that our idea, we can't prove our ideas are true, so we're going to make them true politically through power of the state. DAUB: Yeah, I think that's right. I think there is a tendency to, want, there's this picture, especially around college campuses that all ideas ought to be, heard and that there's a good in having every idea heard out on a college campus. And like, it's one of those ideas that like has a kind of surface plausibility. You think like that, if there's something that's widely held in society, it ought to be, at least talked about on university campuses. So I don't have like a huge problem with that. At the same time, if you drill down to it, you think, well, no the university is in some way a huge selection machine, right? There are certain things that they study and that they, that things that they don't study. There are there are questions that are open, that [00:12:00] scholars Open up for debate and then that, that you and I, when we're not in that field, might think like, this is crazy. Why are they debating this? What, are strings? I'm sorry. And conversely things that you and I might find really interesting and that a specialist in that field might say like, oh, This is kind of settled. We've decided to, or we've even decided that the debate doesn't go anywhere and we Have moved on to other things, right? So universities are by and large selection machines when it comes to where they put their attention and scholarly inquiry and And again, like, as you say, like, the people who make these kind of bad faith attacks on the universities know that they just want their things to be in the mix, right? And so they said, like, well, everything, all positions should be reflected on college campuses, and they don't believe that. I can easily, SHEFFIELD: Well, and through their own behavior, they show they don't believe that. DAUB: But even the ones that, let's say, sure, you have the Ron DeSantis of the world who are like, everything needs to be taught except for gender studies. Like, well, okay, it feels like a mild inconsistency there, bucko. Right-wing campus speakers are performance artists rather than academics DAUB: But even the people who say like, who claim to take an absolutely libertarian stance on this, I think tend to not fully agree with that. Grapple with the fact that of course I could come up with a speaker invitation that they wouldn't want, right? Of course we could bring someone we could organize an event right now at you know Any University in the United States where an administrator would say like I feel like someone's gonna get killed I feel like I don't see the value in this like is this supposed to be funny? Is this performance art that you're even inviting this person, right? And, or where the framing is so off that, everyone's like, I don't feel like I need to go to this or support it. Right. There's a kind of, there's a, it's one of the, very frequently the cancel culture panic works when people who are not at certain institutions or in certain spaces apply a moral rigorism to them that crumbles. Once it comes into contact with reality. Right. Where basically you can sort of say like, well, I believe all, it should always be like [00:14:00] this. And you think like, yeah, that would be nice. Like come visit an actual place where this work happens. And you realize that no, like you, there are there are trade offs with all these things. There are, these are. Both universities and they are small communities, right? Like there are they are different stakeholders and their interests to be weighed against each other. There's a kind of, there's a kind of kind of, zero gravity element to a lot of these debates around quote, unquote, cancel culture. Where there's really no interest in kind of the world of, And the institutions that we're all operating. And that's what I meant when I said that it has this anti institutional edge, but then when you scratch below the surface, even there, it very often. Is there is a deep institutionalism, my deep fascination with established hierarchies behind a lot of it. Right. Think about the Claudine Gay fracas at, Harvard, where basically everyone decided that they suddenly cared a lot about plagiarism. Right. Who had like never thought about academic plagiarism and all the academics were like, ah, this is very complicated, actually probably shouldn't have done it, but it's, pretty complicated. But of course all these people were like ultimately extremely credulous against like what Harvard is supposed to mean, right? So there is this kind of like disrespect for, institutions as they are currently constituted, but then a deep and often almost childlike faith in what a university should be, right? The fact that it is. A bunch of individuals who are very smart and socially not very smart muddling through and a bunch of administrators who used to be chemistry professors, like three years ago, maybe not being like massively good at their jobs at all times. Like, that's the part that people are allergic to the fact that institutions are run by people for people and that they're messy, noisy and discordant entities. SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's also this critique. It [00:16:00] doesn't understand, the origins of the, idea of free speech. That the, that free speech was promoted as a principle, not. In and of itself, but for the, consequences that it produced. So in other words, like, so there was no, there, there's never been a jurisprudence of, well, we need to have, slander as, free speech that if I can't say 24 seven on Twitter, That, Donald Trump murders children in a pizza shop. If I can't say that, then, there's no free speech in America. Like, or whatever might happen. Like, that's the thing, none of these people, they never want to apply their rules to themselves. Like let's say Jonathan Haidt, should, somebody have their free speech to say that Jonathan Haidt rapes children? And that they want to dedicate their life to promoting that, that principle and that idea is should that be given free speech? And what if it's not is do have we lost America? Forever if I can't say that Jonathan Hyde rapes babies. Of course not because it's not true and In the same way that you know Expecting it. There's no difference from telling a I think these speakers that the right wing sets up, they're not there to actually promote inquiry, as you were saying, to, discuss ideas to, have a real legitimate debate. know what they're there is to troll and to deliberately offend. And as you said, there's any number of speakers, you could hire any, any number of, Marxist radicals out there that would say, we should burn this whole university to the ground. This is an oppression and all the administrators should be killed. Like of, that's not the point of what these discussions are, but there's this just, I don't know. I mean, why do you think people seem to be so completely. unable to know what the history of, why we have free speech. DAUB: over the [00:18:00] last 40 years, I mean, there's, really a multistage history here. Now, maybe it makes sense to go backwards rather than forwards, right? Over the last 40 years, we've had this this specific attention paid to university campuses basically claiming that the first amendment is imperiled. On them and very frequently this involved questions about minority populations as the subject of opinions, right? So this is where your somewhat drastic Jonathan Haidt example is kind of apropos because someone comes on a college campus and says, Leah Thomas should not be allowed in locker rooms. That person is basically saying the Thomas is at least potentially a rapist, right? that is, slander ultimately, but we've been taught for 40 years that this is. Actually speech that we have to live with, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So, and it often is about black people, about Mexicans, about, about trans people, about gay people, right. Like as subjects of conversation, not as the subjects of speech themselves. Right. They're, the objects that we talk SHEFFIELD: Oh, not as, non DAUB: Yeah. It's not participants. Exactly. And, yeah. Right. Campus speech surveys rarely ask if people are afraid to disclose marginalized identities DAUB: And like, there's all these, there are all these interesting sort of surveys where people get asked, like, how free do you feel you're allowed, like, how free do you feel you're able to speak about homosexuality at work, right? And they never asked, like, also, are you gay? Right. That feels like those are two separate kinds of censorship. One is self censorship. One is self censorship around someone else's identity. But they're clearly only interested in the latter and not in the former, right? So that's, been going on for quite some time, but what's been going on even longer, of course, is this selective focus on how speakers are treated on college campuses, right? These kind of weirder anecdotes where like, the speakers was shouted at. Dartmouth in 1987. And now he's, now there's someone being shouted out at Harvard and, 2004, and then, it's a conservative [00:20:00] judge at Stanford in 2022. Right. There, there's been a, there's a huge infrastructure from mostly right wing foundations that, that really distribute these, make sure that like, if two dreadlock wearing, kids in, in, in in, Che Guevara t shirts, like disrupt the speaker, like you're going to hear about it. It's going to be, it's going to be somewhere. It may not make it to the times, but it's going to make it onto, a campus watch or campus report or something or other. Right. And if you're lucky, maybe it'll make it even into the wall street journal. So that has been exist. That's existed for quite some time. These foundations are some of them are started during World War Two. But I think the real infrastructure sort of came in the 60s and 70s. And then what's also been going on is this focus on on freedom of expression on college campuses at the exclusion of that, that, this really starts with Ronald Reagan. that somehow in a strange way always seemed to involve a crackdown on student speech. You're like, okay, feels a little contradictory, but okay. But what I mean by that is, right, the 1960s has two things happening. There's student activism, great student activism. And there is a question About how universities are going to respond to that. And it also brings in the, end of in loco parentis, right? The idea that universities that students are the charges of universities and universities have to some extent, parental rights over their students. And the funny thing is people started worrying about free expression on college campuses around that time. Which is hilarious because right up to that time right up to that point in time, college students had no freedom of expression. There were, there, there were court precedents that said you could be forced by a university to go to prayer, for instance. Your attire could lead to expulsion. Right? Things around sex, right? Like, these are all forms of self expression that, universities routinely policed. And yet The whole college campuses are imperiling freedom of expression really starts only once the college kids [00:22:00] actually sees the mic with the free speech movement at Berkeley and sort of say, like, stop bombing Vietnamese peasants, please. Right? It's a very, it's a long. Kind of switcheroo that's been pulled on us, but it is it's a switcheroo. Nonetheless, it, it, directs attention. It creates these fables that give us a sense of like when campus speech matters and when it really doesn't, when, it maybe is actually smarter to crack down on it. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no. And well, and they certainly do. As we've said, are enjoying cracking down on campus speech quite a bit. William F. Buckley Jr. and "God and Man at Yale" SHEFFIELD: But yeah, just to set back maybe a little bit, this what you were saying about, that center right parties in Europe are becoming increasingly discriminatory. Increasingly curious and interested in authoritarian right-wing parties. That is kind of the story of the Republican party in the United States. Like this is one that played out here first. And and obviously one person who kind of was the most pivotal pi pivotal in getting this started was William F. Buckley Jr. With his book, God and Man at Yale. It's, it is an absolutely loathsome book and I encourage everybody to read it, actually, like, if you think, like, it's, it is deeply unfortunate how there is a number of, left wing intellectuals who think that, Buckley was some sort of patron saint that has been thrown into the mud by the Trumpers and have no idea of who this man actually was, but you, do talk about him quite a bit. DAUB: Yeah, I do. I mean, and I have to say that there are some Buckley texts that are It's that I can read with some profit, if not pleasure, but God and Maynard Yale is not one of them. My Lord, bad book, but it is. SHEFFIELD: just tattletailing, Yeah, DAUB: but it but in some way it models, I think. This is why I started with [00:24:00] it. I mean, there are some earlier examples of this kind of genre, but so, granular and he has this myopia, right? Like he's clearly just going through like courses he took and fights he picked while at Yale and you think, Bill, I don't know, like, what does it mean for my weekend? do to do this? I'm, sorry. You had a hard time at Yale. I'm not even sure you did, but like, it feels like you, you're just kind of making it my problem now and there is that of course is sort of the principle of a lot of stories about political correctness and cancel culture. This kind of loss of relation, a fact that like, or the loss of perspective, right? That we end up with these stories where like, well, wait, why do I care about this? Like, okay. These two professors were mean to each other. Okay. This one student filed a complaint. Okay. Why does it matter? And Buckley, I think is one of the first to really pioneer this mode of paying obsessive attention to like, well, for listeners who haven't read it, right? Like it'll be like, so there is a big Christian fellowship, but did you know that the guy who runs it is a Methodist and like this, and sure, there is a Catholic student union, but they're not very doctrinally sound and you're like, okay. It feels like. Like, this could have been a bunch of emails to these people. If you're, if you have a bone to pick with the Christian Fellowship, like, Just join the listserv, I guess, harshly worded letter. Not sure. This is the book that, that needed to be written here. but but the, way these minuscule kind of relationships on campus, these kind of, yeah community dustups basically become amplified into this. Diagnosis of what is true of, God and man really, it became, made, he popularized that. And I think it became absolutely became our number one way of relating to colleges, honestly, [00:26:00] intervening 70 years. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I did. And I mean, and I think of what, I mean, the other reason why the book is, important to look at is that he was actually honest about what he wanted to do. And that was not something that today's right does like, they will still claim to Elon Musk, probably the best example of that most prominent, it's claiming he's a free speech absolutist, but in fact, He throttles everybody else's tweets compared to his own. He has a list of, news websites that he hates and he down ranks their content. And and, then bans various people who, report critically on him. There, like several of these people are still banned permanently from Twitter. Um, DAUB: a mob on them. I mean, I don't know. Is this, that's literally what cancel culture is supposed to be professes to hate it. Allegedly. SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So whereas, Buckley, in the book, and maybe you can talk about that, at the end of the book, he talks about what, it is that he wants. What did he want in the book? DAUB: Yeah. So the book, I'm trying to remember exactly how he phrases it, but basic idea was that American society and universities had drifted apart and that in some way they had to be a reintegration. I don't quite remember whether he calls explicitly for the state to kind of intervene. Then, but definitely it's, he wants to empower, what is happening right now, he wants to empower donors and the people who control the purse strings, thinks that the university really ought to be left to the stewardship of, yeah, of the adults, right. Of the, of the wealthy families who fund it. I'm guessing that also means. It might mean state legislatures. We don't know cause he's only talking about Yale, which doesn't get, didn't get that much federal funding back then. So, but it is the people with the money control are supposed to control what an education is. SHEFFIELD: [00:28:00] Yeah, but he, and he tells the donors, if they won't give you that control, then you should not give them any money. Like, you should cancel Yale University. Like, that's essentially what the point of the book is. Insincere 'censorship' arguments as a hack of liberal epistemology SHEFFIELD: And but at the same time, this, idea is deeply, it is deeply appealing to this kind of shallow, unphilosophical liberalism because in a way, saying, well, all voices should be heard, even ones that you disagree with, like it does, it fits into this, dollar store Voltaire that, that pretty much every journalist imagines themselves to be although I guess they would omit the dollar store part you know, like it, it fits into that self concept and, but ultimately what it is, a hack of their epistemology, I think, and they can't even see it. DAUB: That's a really good point. There is a, right. Doesn't Corey Robin in that book, the reactionary mind make the point that like a lot of these reactionary movements. Are they use a lot. They use the tools of liberation against liberation. Basically, I think I forget how he puts it, idea that, they're using the tools fought for by student activists, for instance, in the 60s. In order to roll back the advances of student activists in the 60s, basically, it's it's using the logic kind of insurgent logic people who have been disenfranchised in universities, in the media, in society, against people who've been traditionally sexist. Basically. disenfranchised in those places, right? Which also, this is another big part of the cancer culture panic and this PC panic before it, which always involves positioning them as dominant, right? Like the idea that, wokesters now control the university, right? Like you can't be a man anymore on the university campus. You can't be straight on the university campus. You can't be white on the university campuses. It's all dominated by, right? This [00:30:00] is another thing that, that Buckley, I think prefigured for us. That's maybe a little hard to even notice is there, that there's a bunch of sort of overlapping parse prototypes, right? Like where you take the part for the whole, right? A lot of campus freak out texts, whether they're books or articles or whatever, focus on a tiny sliver of the curriculum, right? Historically, this has been history courses or English classes, maybe not even much more than that. Today, it'll be like African American studies, gender studies, but also probably still English. I mean, there's a French person in there somewhere because that's always us. And then and then, likewise, it takes the humanities to stand in for the entire university. Right. talk about sort of like endlessly about the ideological blinders of kind of humanities departments. And I'm like, well, we have a business school right here. I kind of feel like they have a couple of ideological priors too. Like no, no hate, but like, it feels like. There, you're like, I don't think capitalism is the way you guys, I think you're going to have a hard time getting hired by any business school in the country. Sounds to me like there's a little bit of activism going on there too, but like, that's not what they yell about. They yell about, the women's studies prof goes on about the patriarchy then it's a focus on as with Buckley on our elite institutions, right? The same period that saw this kind of development of the campus freak out discourse also saw of course, a massive expansion of our state Institutions of our of, community colleges of, private colleges, et cetera, et cetera. yet we still focus on sort of like the Ivy plus when it comes to any of these issues. Right. And then we're completely blind and often do not honestly give a collective crap at all about when things happen to, these important state university systems that educate. Much larger swaths of the population than your Yale, Princeton, Harvard, or Stanford, right? [00:32:00] So this is another thing that, that I think that Buckley really pioneered for us, that like, it's not just that we have to pay attention to like small s**t that happens at universities. It's that we have to pay attention to small s**t that happens at a very select number of universities and then pretend that the university, right? We have to yell about a course that a. Queer theorist at Duke is teaching in 1991 and act like that represents the university as though the most common university course in 1991 was probably Chem 101 or intro to psych or, astrology, astronomy for jocks or whatever it is like, these that have way more impact, right at Stanford, the top 10 courses don't even, there are no humanities courses in the top 10 enrolled courses as far as I know. Right. And yet you're never going to hear about something that someone said. computer science class is always going to be, this adjunct who teaches four core, four people in his seminar, said something that, that someone didn't like. Cancel culture narratives are about masking real power through fake populism SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's also the focus on, the, Students or and usually a lot of these people who are the professors being attacked or like adjunct or, instructors, so they don't have tenure as well. But it's, to displace the attention from. Actual hierarchies and actual power wielders like that's, to go back to what you were saying about this, distinction of trying to be populist, but also be elitist at the same time, these, a college student complaining about, some course that they don't like, or a grade they didn't like organizing five or six other people with them, to yell at a speaker or whatever. Those students have no power on the campus and have certainly have no power in the society. And, when you compare them to, let's say, well, the president of the United States or the world's richest person, like those people have nothing in comparison to what [00:34:00] Elon Musk or Donald Trump or any of these other people have. DAUB: Yeah. And I mean, like, think also of these kinds of language games that have been with us for quite some time. I mean, it used to be the gay agenda and that now is the trans lobby, right? Like that are just basically these locutions. Yeah. People use to impute power where none exists, right? Like, Oh, well, the trans lobby put you up to this. Like, are you kidding me with this? They and what army, right? Like would that it were so that there was a robust trans lobby in this country. There isn't right. The gay agenda was basically code for, gays are trying to our kids, but like, a thing you could utter. And what it did was it suggested that people that. Over whom you were at that moment, lording power were actually had their boot on your neck, right? You didn't get to say the thing that you then said repeatedly and that a whole political party in this country agreed with you on, but you got to feel like the oppressed minority for a second, right? There's since the 1990s, there's been of, shibboleth of like, Or this kind of meme of these days it's harder to come out as Republican on university campuses than it is to come out as gay. Right. I remember like going back in my research, a lot of my book is archivally based. I found these things from like 1984 and five. I'm like, I'm going to go, I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you there. It feels like coming out as the party currently controlling all three branches of government. Might be, it might be slightly easier to align with them than a minority that's currently dying, a, a plague that government can't even bother to acknowledge. Right. desire. To feel victimized when you're, in fact, gearing up often enough to victimize others is, is central, I think, to this discourse. And it is also, I mean, you know this better than I do, it is, I think, a place where the uniquely American extraction of this discourse comes out because I do think it is [00:36:00] ultimately. A position pioneered by the Christian right right. The idea that you can become dominant and experience yourself as marginal. Nonetheless that is something that I think seeps into Republican politics, not so much through Reagan, but through the Christian right. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and talk radio DAUB: Right. Right. That's true. Yeah. I guess I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah. SHEFFIELD: But that was who the audience of talk radio was. Alan Bloom and "The Closing of the American Mind" SHEFFIELD: so, before we go back to the international aspect of this one other person who you do discuss who I think was probably, I don't think has, there has been anybody since who has made more of a intellectual or philosophical case for, on these matters is the political philosopher, Alan Bloom. And Bloom, I think, and, me, I'm interested in your opinion, but I think that he was kind of the apotheosis of this argument. So why don't you tell the audience what, what he was talking about and what you DAUB: Yeah. So Alan Bloom's closing of the American mind probably apogee of this, of, or it's the, it's, living in the shadow of bloom basically. And this has two reasons. One, he really. He really brings to a head the kind of neoconservative discontentment with the university, disaffection from the university in the book comes out in 1987. He provides generations of talking points for, kind of how to Harumph about the campus. But the other thing that I think one has to grant him is it's just a very well written book. It's a very well written book, and it's a enjoyable book. Unlike Buckley, I think Bloom really knew write and had a was many ways of man. think [00:38:00] has cemented its reputation, though, is that in some way, There isn't some way that the closing of the American mind that you can pick up at a bookstore today. And then there's the closing of the American mind that was. That was received and that was sort of percolated down in the culture. And the book that he wrote, I think it's far more Socratic and far more ironic and far more self contradictory than what ended up becoming of it. Right. When, once he, the book became a mega bestseller, I forget exactly the numbers, but they're numbers that like no philosophy book since other than. SHEFFIELD: Millions DAUB: I mean, other than pretty or Jordan Peterson's, clean your room books. But you, but reception, a bunch of blooms, Let's say less Republican aligned or less culture war aligned opinions observations kind of dropped out. I mean, just to pick a random example, I'm pretty sure he goes after business schools and says like, this is not an education. What is this? We shouldn't be doing this. No one ever talks about that. They're like, well, let's talk about black activists, right? So what the feminists, right? So there is, along with it. One has to say, like, it's not, I'm not saying like, oh, poor Alan Bloom. He was misunderstood. Like he. He knew how to what to accentuate where right and definitely but is this funny thing where like it. It has a probably more credible claim than any of the campus freak out books that came out in its wake from Dinesh D'Souza's Liberal Education to, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals to Charlie Sykes's book that he rewrites every two years with a new title and that where the university is still fucked and but got a lot, it's a lot more as a much better claim to, Actually being fairly liberal not sort of liberal the way we often understand it, but like he does seem to take a he does seem to take a kind of, he a [00:40:00] kind of both sides like he didn't mean to make anyone particularly happy with that book, but then the reception I would say a lot more. Yeah. SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I'm sorry. It also, I think what's different from that book compared to its, imitators in the years after is that he wasn't intending to be Part of this larger message, like he was just writing something to get it off his chest that he really believed. And he did actually, talk about how there was a need to, discuss and debate Marxism on the campus. If I remember, it's been a while since I read it, but like, like, so he, actually was sincere in his beliefs and he, whereas all these other books that subsequently came out and, Charlie Kirk and others are, I mean, this is a genre that basically was created after, the closing of the American mind came out and it was, but they were, these books were instrumental books. His book was an intellectual book. I think maybe it might DAUB: Well, it's possible, right? They, it could also have been both, right? Both a personal book a instrumental book right. Bloom was a Straussian and I do think that the Straussians are very interested in this idea of exotericism and esotericism, right? That there's a outward facing. Kind of way you communicate political ideas to the public. And then there's the way you talk to the cognoscenti, you talk to the other people who have your, philosopher king background essentially. the book, I think always was supposed to have an institutional and a populist side to it. And I think that it's quite possible that that Boom did that deliberately, but you're absolutely right that some way it was, if you knew how to read you, you wouldn't have noticed back then, even that, like, it wasn't exactly the kind of, the instrumentality didn't exhaust what the book was and was doing, right? And absolutely right about that. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, [00:42:00] well, I mean, wasn't intending it like I remember reading something from him later that he was interviewed or something. And yet he was no, I had no idea that it would become a bestseller. And he just thought it was, you know, going to be an obscure book and that no one would ever read. Libertarianism and hierarchy in American politics SHEFFIELD: But I guess to some degree that does kind of, the. The post Coldwell area or post, lemme say that again. The post Cold War era. It is, in many ways the story of the dissolution of libertarianism, I think, and its disaffection within the larger Republican power structure of the coalition that they had during the Cold War, that it and people who had self-described as a libertarian never really were. But at the same time, there was, I mean, that's. There is a lot of people who have these impulses, but they're always, like that's kind of the debate in politics is, are they going to go for their more individual liberation, ideas, or are they going to go for their authority ideas? Because libertarianism has both of these ideas, which is, that the people with the money should control society. That is, in many ways, the core of American libertarianism. But at the same time, there, there are liberationists Aspects of it. So, I mean, let's maybe get into that. I mean, how do you think that's relevant to this cancel culture discussion? DAUB: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it cuts to of it. Right. I think Jason Stanley in his book fascism makes this point that like of how American libertarianism relates to hierarchy is a really interesting one on the one hand, right? There's a surface. enmity or opposition any kind of hierarchies. But at the same time, there is, of course, often a so, subtle tendency to think that there's a natural order that will [00:44:00] emerge if the state and if society just kind of butt out a little bit, right? And money is one, Way of make that natural, to naturalize that, to sort of say like, is the people who have and the have nots that is natural, right? Like if you think about Im Rand's idea about the, the makers and the takers, she doesn't sort of think that you become that in your life. It's basically, this is who you are. Like you, you reveal your inner core. And so there, there are. blunt kind of hierarchies of value behind the veneer of like, well, we should treat everyone the same. Right. And I think that the cancer culture panic speaks to that. And this is why it was so easy to export. Right. On the one hand, it's saying. Are. Universities are hopelessly woke, our, our armed forces are no longer good, our corporations have been captured by DEI our politics has been poisoned by, left wing neo pronouns, whatever, like, is for they, them, Trump is for you kind of thing. But if you look closely, of course, Cancel culture stories are not, as you say, usually about contingent faculty members. They're not usually about, about the freelancer who doesn't get asked to write again after a piece he wrote pissed off the wrong people. No, it's about people at the top of hierarchies. You have to have, in order to be a good tragic cancel story, you have to start at a certain level. You have to be at a certain at a certain height in your own. In your own career in order to then fall from that meaning ultimately these are fables about how people with power and attention deserve power and attention, right? They tend to kind of suppose that there is a natural hierarchy in our workplaces, in our society, at our universities that wokeness, identity politics, DEI, et cetera, seek to distort, right? So it's a very funny [00:46:00] thing. SHEFFIELD: Meritocracy DAUB: Right. a, funny. Way in which if you scratch just a little bit, you notice below the surface of these cancel stories that appear to be all about, well, everyone should just have the same fair shot. A great deal of fealty and a great deal of credulity vis a vis. Established hierarchies, right? artists who got canceled, think of all the beautiful poems you could have written or the beautiful films you could have made, right? Like all the movies that Kevin Spacey didn't get to make whatever, right? Like that, says like Kevin Spacey deserves to make movies, right? Like, and these other people who, whose lives were derailed by these me too men, right? Like don't deserve that necessarily. Right. It is their lot in life to have been derailed by these men. Right. And I think that's a really Once you notice that, you realize that like, yes, it is a libertarianism, but it is, as you say, it is exactly a kind of a result of the decomposition of a certain libertarianism where like suddenly, as as certain pressures come to bear, especially in this kind of alliance, through fusionism movement conservatism, I would say where it becomes clear that a, very clear, often biologized hierarchy behind these claims to yeah, to personal freedom for everyone. Lies about cancel culture as permission structures for reactionary repression SHEFFIELD: yeah, and that's kind of at the I do feel like that's That sense of crisis that these arguments tend to develop. They become the justification for right wing authoritarianism because, it's, this idea, well, they're going to silence you. So we need to silence them first. DAUB: no, exactly. I mean, thing. If you look at these books, we've been saying, like, there's this, book where we can go back to Buckley, but [00:48:00] really it starts with Bloom. Until sort of their books that have their books that have come out since my book came out that I had to order from Amazon because they're clearly they're relevant to this topic, they fall into two camps. There are those that describe a. Well, if you, there's, a Buckley writes, right. Which says, as you say, like cancel Yale, right. Just flat out. And then there are these books that basically say like, there's a new McCarthyism coming from the left. It's like Stalinism. It's like Nazi Germany. It's et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then at the end, they're like, here are my prescriptions. And they're like, Hire a few more conservatives, like, don't be so mean online, like, I'm sorry, kind of feels like if you genuinely believe your premise that this is a new Stalinism, then you're not telling me all your prescriptions because surely hire two more conservators on the faculty can't be it, right? Like, sure, you also want it. Want a job for yourself, fair play to you, but that cannot be all right. And then it, what you Ron DeSantis saying like, well, obviously what we need to do is crack down on college campuses. And then you often have the same author saying, well, well, that's not what I was saying at all. It's like, well, No, but like, if you're saying that it's, that this, that it's this kind of a crisis, right? This bad, like Stalinism, right? Like, you think that some kind of repressive measures are justified in order right? SHEFFIELD: Yeah. These people are going to make a dictatorship. You've got to stop them. DAUB: Yeah, like, okay, like the, what's the, like what's the next sentence? And like, it's very interesting that very few of them, very few of them ever go there, but it's perfectly obvious what what the next steps would be. And. The books kind of don't have to spell it out because politicians will do it for him because, especially I think after, Reagan is sort of still on the Buckley [00:50:00] line. Reagan. I feel like Reagan yeah, but he perfected even as president, I think perfected the art of. Expressing moral disapproval by just not by just taking money away from you right like by starving you right basically government cuts are a form of saying who we value in our society, and who we don't it feels like that version of conservatism is kind of dying now. I think that, Trump's promise wasn't to defund certain things. Trump's promise is to fund the suppression of certain things. And that's, I think that's what's coming. And that's what's already happening in Florida. It's not about, for years, state legislatures could say like, Oh, well, our all our students learn at our state university is Eskimo poetry. And, all this PC nonsense, let's cut their funding, right? That was the obvious thing. I don't think that's sufficient anymore. I think I don't think that's what they call for anymore. It is now more than that. It is. Let's. See some heads roll. Let's throw some people out. Let's throw, make it easier to remove students. Let's tell them what to teach. Right. and I SHEFFIELD: And faculty tenure. That's another one of their things. Yeah. now with these people who have been writing these books, though, like in your observation, what do they have to say about Ron DeSantis? Are they, concerned about DAUB: So it, it depends. There are the only, these books are written very quickly and they're not written they're, Not always very up on things, right? they tend to not take cognizance of what, what's actually happening on the ground. One thing that I've definitely noticed is that the more sort of liberal coded among them will say, well, that's bad too. And they'll often have as a habit as like a chapter for unlike cancel culture from the right. Right. But then the entire book will be about left wing cancel culture. And so you're like, Oh, so you're saying that Ron DeSantis. Okay. So this also [00:52:00] happens to sometimes exist on the right. But really the problem are the kids with the blue hair and the they, them pronouns, like, okay, feels like that's still quite distortive. So you do get that. And then you get people, I would say, like Chris Rufo, who very clearly SHEFFIELD: yeah, Mm hmm. DAUB: are leading and are pushing it. Right. So, so I think there of a split, but I think I have yet to see someone genuinely grapple with the fact that they might well, have made this happen, might have allowed this to happen, might have promoted the talking points that people like Ron DeSantis can now use to, yeah, to basically synchronize education in the state of Florida. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, and it's, and maybe let's end here with that. I'm just, in, in my observation from outside the academy, it seems like that almost nobody in there is aware of what's coming for them. And they think that well, if we, if I just keep my head down and focus on my work, then I'll be fine. And they have no idea that, There is nothing that you can do that will make them not come for you, unless you're completely on their program. Like, unless you agree with them, they will come for you. And I think a lot of faculty and administrators they think that these right wing reactionary radicals can be mollified somehow. DAUB: right. It's this, and it is exactly the logic of these moral panics, right? That people think, oh, gee, if only our students hadn't said that slogan, only that teacher hadn't said that, right? It's like, no, there are millions of college teachers in the United States. There are tens of millions of college students in the United States. Someone's going to say something that they don't like, right? after the election and after Trump won, there was this [00:54:00] article that went around like about like, liberal colleges and college instructors who said about Trump after the election. And the examples are so few and far between. And you're like, Like, you can tell that they were like, desperately trying to find these. Right. And SHEFFIELD: And of course you could have written one with just as many people, maybe even more, that were saying positive DAUB: yeah, exactly. SHEFFIELD: They never bother with DAUB: Yeah. or yeah, I mean, like, and also like the absence of a story would itself be a story. Right. But it is this interesting thing where. Where, there is, and I think you're absolutely right among certain, especially administrators, this that if we do the right thing and say the right thing these attacks will pass us by. Right. Right. and I it's a little problem they are, right. Because they still, I think, picture themselves in the faculty lounge debating a colleague where this may well be true, right. Like, people have, individuals have, Have limited energy. They might literally just like not bother with you. Okay. But those of us who know how lives of Tik TOK work, I think it's very credit that right. Lives of Tik TOK is a content mill. It will find something. It will find an LGBT person somewhere. All you have to do is be LGBT in public and you could be in lives on lives of Tik TOK. That is the point, right? SHEFFIELD: you DAUB: think about, what it would take for a. Forget a university, say a department for department to be able to exert control over and make sure that no one says anything untoward in all your classes, all the invited speakers who have, by the way, free speech, very important, right? Add faculty meetings at this, at that, right? Without anyone ever. Pushing that out to, to an interested party. Like it's, fantastical, right? my my to this is if they want to find it, they'll find it. Say what you're going to say and yeah, hope [00:56:00] cross your fingers and hope it doesn't happen. But like, it is not. It is deliberately not something that is that is dependent on left wing accesses. It creates the perception of left wing access, whether it exists or not. It's not to say that there aren't ever left wing accesses, but this machine works whether there are or not. keffiyeh wearing blue haired students can hide in their dorms for two months. We're still going to get stories, right? Like they're going to find these. SHEFFIELD: will. And like, and even like, Bret Weinstein, his exit strip, tale of being of why he quit as a professor at Evergreen State in Oregon, the story that people were told about it was a lie. Like, the students did not do anything against him. They were protesting a a racist incident on the campus. It was nothing to do with him. But, that was not what you were told. And so, yeah, your point is exactly right about this. And, faculty and administrators need to understand, you are facing a movement that wants the university to not DAUB: Yeah. Or not in the shape that it does right now. Exactly. Yeah. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that they want it to be a religious propaganda meal and, and all you can, just look at what they're doing in Oklahoma with forcing the, but the Bible in the classroom or Louisiana forcing the 10 commandments, even on the college. Like they're going to put the mandate, the 10 commandments in university classrooms. In every university, state university in Louisiana, this is what you're up against. And if you can't stand up for yourself, well, why are you DAUB: Yeah. Conclusion and final thoughts SHEFFIELD: well, all right. It's I hope people will get up, with that. And so, and part of that is going to be reading your book, Adrian, hopefully. So for DAUB: do. Yeah. And write to me if you agree, disagree. I'm always to have that you didn't see [00:58:00] in there. Have questions. I'd love to hear from you. SHEFFIELD: Okay. Awesome. And so for people who want to keep up with your things that you're doing what's what tell, us, Your social media handles and other DAUB: Yeah. So I'm off Twitter now or X I'm on blue sky at adriandaub dot whatever it is, like blue sky dot social or whatever it's called. But yeah, you'll be able to me. I'm under my own name with a picture of me. I also have a sub stack, although currently I'm on a kick writing about cars rather than about politics. This was my. This was my attempt to not go crazy over in the fall of 2024. Yeah. And then please check out my podcasts especially in bed with the right. I think it's going to be very, salient and very relevant to listeners of this podcast, which I host with more at Donagan and where we very much hope to have you on soon, Matt. I think it's it's a wonderful, it's, A difficult time, but it's also a wonderful time for like us doing this kind of work. Because it's, it, it feels like, um, people are becoming sensitized and people are becoming. I'm becoming savvy to a lot of these dynamics that, during the years so far have been a little bit slumbering or because of being consigned to marginality. And I think in a very dark time. It's been real lifeline to have. The podcast have the Patreon have our discord and just be able to talk with other people and be like, am I crazy for thinking that? And then they're like, no, that's definitely there. So, I really that people can can connect with me on those channels. SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. Uh, thanks for being here. DAUB: Thank you. SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where you can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And my thanks to everybody who is supporting us on Patreon or on Substack. We also [01:00:00] do have free subscriptions as well, if you can't afford to help out at this time. And if you're watching on YouTube, please make sure to click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post a new episode. And 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…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Special Coverage: Is Dr. Oz Qualified to Lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services? A Conversation with Nourbese Flint 18:50

6 weeks sitten18:50

18:50

The Senate Finance Committee just advanced the nomination of Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) , bringing his confirmation one step closer to reality. In this bonus episode, Jen Taylor-Skinner is joined by Nourbese Flint , president of All* Above All , for a critical conversation about what’s at stake. CMS oversees vital programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act —making its leadership role one of the most powerful in shaping national healthcare policy. Dr. Oz, widely known for promoting unscientific treatments and holding controversial views, raises serious concerns—particularly for reproductive justice and the health of marginalized communities. Nourbese shares her perspective on the qualifications this role demands and reflects on the legacy of past CMS leaders, such as Chiquita Brooks-LaSure. We discuss the broader implications of Dr. Oz’s potential confirmation, including its impact on maternal health and the risks posed to vulnerable populations. Our conversation also explores the importance of grassroots resistance and political engagement in holding policymakers accountable. Nourbese offers strategies for community action and underscores why staying informed and involved is more important than ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
What Does Rural America Want? A Conversation with Sarah Jaynes of the Rural Democracy Initiative 39:50

7 weeks sitten39:50

39:50

How can we combat disinformation in rural communities and empower voters with accurate information? In this episode, host Jen Taylor-Skinner sits down with Sarah Jaynes , Executive Director of the Rural Democracy Initiative , to explore how grassroots efforts, local media, and community influencers are pushing back against misinformation and mobilizing civic engagement in small towns across America. They discuss the shifting political landscape in rural areas, the economic consequences of recent policy decisions—such as cuts to USAID and Medicaid —and the power of local elections in reshaping the future. Sarah also dispels common myths about rural communities, highlighting their diversity and the often-overlooked support for progressive policies, LGBTQ rights, and workers' issues . With democracy at a crossroads, Sarah and Jen examine what it will take for Democratic leaders to show real strength, the impact of rural organizing in key swing districts , and why rural voices are essential in shaping national policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
She Waited 20 Hours for Care—The Abortion Ban Cost Her Life | Amber Thurman's Mother Speaks Out 43:56

9 weeks sitten43:56

43:56

Amber Nicole Thurman was a 28-year-old medical assistant, devoted mother from Georgia, and one of the first women to die following the Dobbs decision . In August 2022, she sought a medication abortion due to an unplanned pregnancy. Following the procedure, she experienced severe complications, including a grave infection. Despite her critical condition, medical staff at Piedmont Henry Hospital delayed performing a necessary dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure for over 20 hours, reportedly due to concerns about Georgia's restrictive abortion laws. In this episode, Amber Thurman's mother, Shanette Williams , speaks with Jen Taylor-Skinner about her daughter's death, the delayed care, and the urgency to restore reproductive rights across the country. Episode Resources: ProPublica : Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable Free & Just is fighting to stop attacks on reproductive freedom and rights. We’re working with people across the country to share real stories to show the devastating consequences of attacks on our reproductive freedom. We all deserve the right to control our bodies and lives. That’s why we’re sharing our stories, raising our voices, and fighting for our future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
The SAVE Act: The Biggest Voter Suppression Bill in U.S. History? | A Deep Dive with Eliza Sweren-Becker from the Brennan Center for Justice 29:47

10 weeks sitten29:47

29:47

Congressional Republicans have fast-tracked the SAVE Act ( Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act)—legislation that could disenfranchise tens of millions of American voters by imposing strict new citizenship verification requirements. Is this bill really about election integrity, or is it an unprecedented voter suppression effort? Host Jen Taylor-Skinner sits down with Eliza Sweren-Becker from the Brennan Center for Justice to break down the dangers of the SAVE Act, who it targets, and how it could reshape American democracy. From hidden costs to criminal penalties for election workers, this bill is more than just restrictive—it’s a direct attack on voting rights. This episode of The Electorette explores what’s at stake, why it’s happening now, and how you can take action before it’s too late. Learn more about the SAVE Act from The Brennan Center for Justice: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/house-bill-would-hurt-american-voters 📢 Call your representatives and tell them to vote NO on the SAVE Act. ✉️ Subscribe for more in-depth discussions on voting rights, democracy, and justice. #SAVEAct #VotingRights #ElectionIntegrity #ElectorettePodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Transforming Postpartum Care: Addressing America's Maternal Health Crisis | Natalie Davis of United States of Care 37:12

11 weeks sitten37:12

37:12

Natalie Davis , CEO of United States of Care , joins The Electorette host Jen Taylor-Skinner to examine the critical postpartum care crisis in the United States. Despite being a high-income nation, America’s maternal mortality rates highlight significant gaps in postpartum support. Davis discusses The 100 Weeks Project , a groundbreaking initiative designed to transform postpartum care by providing comprehensive, personalized support from conception through the first year postpartum. This initiative addresses the physical, mental, and social needs of mothers, fathers, and partners alike. The conversation shifts to the challenges of healthcare access for families , focusing on insurance disparities that disproportionately affect mothers. Davis and Taylor-Skinner explore cultural and societal barriers that hinder progress and discuss the need for a reimagined healthcare system —one that recognizes diverse family structures and guarantees essential care for all mothers. The discussion also highlights the emotional toll of navigating the healthcare system , particularly for mothers facing early motherhood struggles and NICU experiences . With the Supreme Court case Braidwood v. Becerra threatening to dismantle free preventive healthcare services under the Affordable Care Act , Davis underscores the urgent need for advocacy and systemic change . This episode offers an insightful and urgent call to action, emphasizing the importance of healthcare advocacy and the need for accessible, equitable postpartum care nationwide. 📢 Subscribe for more insightful conversations. Timestamps: (00:01) - Postpartum Care Crisis in America (14:06) - Reimagining Healthcare for Postpartum Mothers (24:47) - Threat to Free Preventive Health Services (34:59) - Healthcare Advocacy and Resources Episode Chapters: (00:01) Postpartum Care Crisis in America Maternal mortality rates and lack of support in postpartum care addressed through innovative 100 Weeks Project. (14:06) Reimagining Healthcare for Postpartum Mothers Insurance disparities and societal expectations hinder mothers' access to adequate postpartum care and highlight systemic issues in healthcare. (24:47) Threat to Free Preventive Health Services Mothers face emotional challenges in postpartum care, while a Supreme Court case threatens women's healthcare accessibility. (34:59) Healthcare Advocacy and Resources United States of Care addresses healthcare issues such as the 100 Weeks Project and the Preventive Services Court Case. #PostpartumCare #MaternalHealth #UnitedStatesofCare #NatalieDavis #HealthEquity #AffordableCareAct #BraidwoodvBecerra #HealthcareAdvocacy #Electorette #ReproductiveRights In this Episode United States of Care 100 Days of Care Listen to All Electorette Episodes https://www.electorette.com/podcast Support the Electorette Rate & Review on iTunes : https://apple.co/2GsfQj4 Also, if you enjoy the Electorette , please subscribe and leave a 5-star review on iTunes . And please spread the word by telling your friends, family, and colleagues about The Electorette ! WANT MORE ELECTORETTE? Follow the Electorette on social media. Electorette Facebook Electorette Instagram Electorette Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
The NAACP’s Fight for Democracy: Patrice Willoughby on 2024, Project 2025 & Black Voter Power 43:37

11 weeks sitten43:37

43:37

For over a century, the NAACP has been a driving force in the fight for civil rights, shaping American democracy through groundbreaking legal victories, grassroots activism, and political advocacy. From dismantling segregation in Brown v. Board of Education to championing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the NAACP’s impact is undeniable. And today, their fight continues. In this episode, I sit down with Patrice Willoughby , Chief of Policy and Legislative Affairs at the NAACP , for a powerful conversation about the organization's modern-day advocacy. We discuss their efforts to protect democracy during the 2024 presidential cycle , their response to Project 2025 , and their strategy to mobilize Black voters. We also dive into the Kamala Harris campaign , the evolving role of Black women in politics, and how future campaigns can authentically engage with Black communities. In this Episode NAACP Our 2025 NAACP Our 2025 Toolkit NAACP Black Consumer Advisory Listen to All Electorette Episodes https://www.electorette.com/podcast Support the Electorette Rate & Review on iTunes : https://apple.co/2GsfQj4 Also, if you enjoy the Electorette , please subscribe and leave a 5-star review on iTunes . And please spread the word by telling your friends, family, and colleagues about The Electorette ! WANT MORE ELECTORETTE? Follow the Electorette on social media. Electorette Facebook Electorette Instagram Electorette Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Liberalism’s epistemic crisis enabled Donald Trump’s victories 1:04:55

12 weeks sitten1:04:55

1:04:55

Episode Summary Donald Trump is now once again the president of the United States, but his victory in 2024 was more than just a victory for himself or the Republican Party, it actually is part of a larger advancement that is happening across many different countries around the globe for right-wing reactionary parties who are sometimes incorrectly referred to as populist. (These parties are not populist, in fact, because their policies that they pursue have no material benefit to the people who vote for them. But instead they use vulgarian rhetoric to pretend to be populist.) Despite the fact that these far-right parties have policies that are hurtful to their own voters and to their countries that have elected them, they have been able to win because the center-left and the further-left are caught up in a philosophical crisis of liberalism itself. And that's because liberalism as a philosophy has never actually been able to fight successfully against reactionary philosophy in the political realm in the English-speaking world. Instead, the last time that it won was 200 years ago when it defeated monarchism, which was an explicitly king-based approach. But reactionaries like Donald Trump and his henchmen are not explicitly pro-monarch—at least to the public. They certainly are that way in private, as many of their political theorists like Curtis Yarvin and JD Vance have freely admitted. That is why understanding how to defeat a form of monarchism that argues through democratic means is proving to be an incredible challenge for liberalism and socialism. On today's episode, I talk about some of these challenges and the historical origins of them with Matthew McManus. He’s a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan, a previous guest on the show, and he’s got a new book out now called The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism . The video of our January 21, 2025 discussion 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 page. Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe to stay in touch. Related Content Inside the extremist ideology of JD Vance (McManus’s previous appearance on Theory of Change) The ‘ post-left ’ is the latest right-wing scam How Republicans became the party of the John Birch Society The Christian right was a theological rebellion before it became a political cause The disinformation techniques used by Trump and today’s Republicans were invented by tobacco companies in the 1970s How 90s libertarian billionaires transmogrified into the neo-reactionary extremists of the 2020s Audio Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 11:30 — How liberalism and the left grew apart during the Cold War 17:52 — Nietzsche and liberalism's meaning crisis 23:21 — Socialist traditions' better understanding of marginalization 30:49 — Charles Mills and critical race theory extend rather than reject Western philosophy 32:33 — Thomas Paine vs. Edmund Burke 36:54 — How socialists failed to build institutions 41:37 — Radical leftists haven't realized the necessity of persuasion 47:56 — Democrats also refuse to explain or persuade 53:12 — Liberalism has never developed the ability to politically defeat reactionism Audio Transcript The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I think before we get too far afield into that into the actual contents of the book, let's talk about what do you mean by liberal socialism as distinct from liberalism and as distinct from socialism. MATT McMANUS: Sure. Well, there are a couple of different things to say about that just being very simply. I follow people like Alan Ryan or Michael Friedan or Peter Lam on the socialist end of things who point out that it's very easy to take narrow understandings of what liberalism and socialism entail. And to say that they just are one thing or, you know, whatever flavor of liberalism or socialism I happen to be committed to that's the real flavor. And what all the authors I mentioned stress is that these are big ideologies that have a lot of different permutations, members attitudes that you can see within them. And that's reflective of the fact that they've been around for hundreds of years now. So there are a lot of different people who have identified as liberals and socialists [00:04:00] at event calls. quite different things about that. Now that doesn't mean that just anybody can be a liberal or anybody can be a socialist because they say the odd liberal or they say the odd socialist thing. You know, think about the people's public of North Korea, right? Nobody would exactly call North Korea either a people's republic or any kind of. Republic, really or, you know, National Socialism, right? For example, you know, Fascism is quite a different ideology to certainly Democratic Socialism or even Authoritarian Marxism but these groups have, these different philosophies and ideologies have family resemblances to one another and in the book I point out that, broadly speaking we can say that All different liberals regardless of their specific convictions tend to be beholden to principles like liberty for all, equality for all, certainly formal legal equality for all and certainly in the European tradition solidarity for all would also be another important liberal principle. Now what I point out in the book is that liberals have understood this commitment to liberty and equality and potentially solidarity and fraternity for all in very different ways. Just to give one example Ludwig von Mise, the great Austrian economist fierce defender of capitalism said, look, all that equality should mean is equality under the law. All right. We don't take this kind of old aristocratic approach suggesting that some people should be entitled to more rights, more opportunities More, you know economic advantages than others because that's not exactly conducive to the kind of market society that we want to see instantiated but beyond that, you know von Mises and many more right wing liberals would follow him in this would say once you kind of allow market functions to play themselves out. Obviously you're going to see extraordinary forms of inequality emerge. And that's a okay as long as, you know, we've established this initial respect for each individual by ensuring that they have equality under the law, but, you know, Von Mises perspective is by no means the only one that you see in the liberal tradition and I would say in many ways it's not even particularly representative as a lot of historians of liberalism will tell you. Going all the way back to John Locke, but certainly when you look at people like Mary Wollstonecraft or Thomas Paine let alone John Stuart Mill, who I write a lot about in the book [00:06:00] they'd all insist that being a liberal means that you have to be committed to a much deeper kind of equality than just pure formal equality under the law. So And we can get into a lot of the reasons for this but these kinds of liberals, obviously historically and down to the present day have been a lot more friendly to the suggestions or arguments of figures in the socialist tradition who also have stressed that formal equality under the law is restraining for an awful lot of people, not least And then just to move on the other end we can say very similar things about socialism. Socialism is a mature enlightenment doctrine very much like liberalism in that respect. Socialists saw themselves as trying to carry on in many ways the enterprise of liberalism by ensuring that Equality and freedom weren't just formally achieved but were achieved in material practice for all. And socialists understood what that was going to mean in very, very different ways also, right? Obviously some extremely brutal socialists like, say, Stalin understood this to mean, well, we're gonna have a command economy where everyone's behavior is gonna be very tightly restricted because that's gonna be the only way for us to secure a sufficiently high level of economic growth in one country to save socialism from the imperialism and imperialism. Of the Western powers. And we all know how that story ended up, right? Ah, there's absolutely nothing liberal you can really cause to say about the Soviet union or other authoritarian command economies. Ah, but there are other kinds of socialists Democratic socialists Social Democrats, etc. etc. Who are much more insistent that, no, to be a socialist means to be committed to the basic canon of liberal rights, indeed, many socialists would insist that, them. One of the good things about socialism is that they could take liberal rights more seriously than many liberals did, particularly things like the right to freedom of assembly which many socialists emphasize should mean that if you want to form a union, for example you should be able to do so without the state stepping in to crush that and These figures are obviously, of course, much more friendly to liberalism and the institutions of representative democracy than the kind of command economy socialists that [00:08:00] more people are probably more familiar with at least in in the United States. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and as you discuss in the introduction that in the, in the current moment there, there's really neither side of this, you know, dialogue that's now been going on for more than almost 200 years between liberalism and socialism. Neither side really fully understands how to deal with a politicized, non explicitly, know political system. Street violence filled right, you know, so, so reactionism, as we have it today is a different, it's, it's a different flavor compared to how it was from and Hitler. and it's more democratic flavored, or at least, you know, is less overtly you know, violent so far. and it's presented a real challenge because neither side. Seems to understand how to generate meaning in the population or even to be aware that they need to do so. And let's talk about that or how you see that first and then get further. McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So There's a lot of things to be said about that. I think I'll start from a conceptual level and then move to a bit more of a concrete one. So my argument in the book and in my previous book, which you were actually also gracious enough to interview me on the political right and inequality is that the political right is quite different as a tradition from either the liberal or the socialist tradition. And anyone who explores its canonical authors will see this come through very, very, very clearly, I think. Starting with people like Joseph de Maistre moving down through Hayek Heidegger, you know, down to Curtis Yarvin you know, and you name it. And I tend to agree, actually with F. A. Hayek's definition. This is his definition of conservatism, but I think it applies to the broader right which is that to be right wing is to hold that there are recognizably superior people or for that matter, recognizably superior groups in [00:10:00] society and they're entitled to more, right? More agency, more power, more wealth more affluence more opportunities for political participation you name it. And this has given way to a vast array of right wing ideologies all of whom understand recognizable superiority in extremely different ways, right? Some people like Randians think that while recognizable superiority is demonstrated when you prove yourself in this almost quasi Nietzschean way in the testing ground of the market and you demonstrate that you're a John Galt type figure rather than a second hander who, for the most part just benefits from what better men than you have been able to produce. Other people As we see now tend to understand recognizable superiority along much more ethno-chauvinist or even religious lines, right? You know, our religion is superior to others and consequently it should be given more weight in political and social structures than Judaism, than Islam, etc, etc. Our, our country is being Superior to all others so there's nothing wrong with us threatening Panama or Greenland of all places with annexation if it's going to expand our imperial horizons and strengthen our country's hand in the world. And I think that once you understand the right in terms of this commitment to recognizable superiority you can grasp the distance between a lot of versions of right wing thought and the traditions of liberalism and socialism which both in their own respective way emerged out of this enlightenment commitment to the idea that all people are equal and should be treated as free as consequence of this initial moral commitment. How liberalism and the left grew apart during the Cold War McMANUS: Now, in terms of the struggles that liberals and leftists, I mean the left generally now, not just socialists have been facing today, I think there are an awful lot of different reasons for that. But I'm just going to give one that I think is germane to the thesis of the book. So, I was really inspired by Samuel Moyne Yale professor who some people might be familiar with He's written some very interesting books on human rights, international humanitarian law, but he wrote a very good book recently Liberalism Against Itself talking about Cold War liberalism as he frames it. [00:12:00] And what he stresses is that, well, liberalism in its birth was fundamentally a very progressive revolutionary creed and he says there's really no other way to understand it, right? In the European continent liberalism was widely associated with the French Revolution which as the name suggests was a gigantic revolution that upended the Ancien Regimes and tried to establish a relatively egalitarian republic and also inspired sister revolutions in places like Haiti. Important to always foreground the Haitian revolution, which undid slavery on the island, not often appreciated by many or even look at the American revolutionaries, right? There's sometimes been this effort to kind of paint the American revolutionaries as kind of Burkean conservatives in some way. Russell Kirk, for example, tried to do that. But I think that Sheldon Wolin is correct in saying without a doubt, they had many conservative inclinations. But we also need to recognize that they legitimated their revolution on enlightenment principles. They knew that only about a third of the American population at the time supported what they were doing. Another third were loyalists or Tories as they called them or were indifferent And they still thought that what they were doing was right. And not only did they initiate that revolution Wolin points out that they actually initiated a second revolution in America when they dropped the country's first constitution and decided to replace it with an entirely new constitution through deliberative and representative processes. So, these kinds of revolutionary creeds according to Moyn really were quite hopeful and optimistic in their orientation, which is why they're mature Enlightenment doctrines. They felt that it was possible. exercising human reason to build societies that would more integrally instantiate this commitment to freedom of all for all and equality for all. Now, of course, SHEFFIELD: oh, and I'm sorry, just to interrupt a sec but somebody that you do talk about in the book extensively, who does fit into that argument, that it wasn't just a, it wasn't a conservative project, it was obviously Thomas Paine, the guy who, who popularized the idea of revolution against the crown you know, was very, very influential, even [00:14:00] though operationally, he, he wasn't as involved with the government, creating it but, you know, his project and the people who supported him, they, it was extremely democratic. McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely, and I always encourage people, like, look, go read Common Sense, right it's a short read, it's only, you know, 50 or so pages. It was so popular that they used to read it to American revolutionaries just to inspire them before battle, and, you know, he makes very clear that he thinks the equality of all human beings is just prima facie obvious aristocracy is a ridiculous system of government and only a fool in the 18th century would be naïve enough to buy into any of this kind of mystical reasoning about the divine right of kings, et cetera, et cetera. And as you point out in the book, I point out that Paine even went further than this later on arguing for something like a proto welfare state, which we can get into later if you want. But just to kind of return to why liberals and socialists are struggling I'll try to be a bit more brief, you know, I'm a professor, I, I like to kind of give all the facts about things to access, probably. Anyway, you know, Moyn points out, look, these were all liberalisms of hope, right? They said that, look, human beings are clearly flawed and have many, many, many flaws, problems, right? I don't think anybody would argue against that. But by and large the concentrated exercise of human reason can improve society. And what he argues is that starting in the 1950s but really coming to the fore in the 1970s you saw, you know, Many liberals, Cold War liberals, start to, in fact, internalize a lot more conservative arguments from people like, for instance, Edmund Burke and say, no, actually, we need to really constrain the aspirations of liberalism because too much hope and too much ambition is potentially going to lead to the same kind of disasters that we're seeing in the Soviet Union right now, and they really want to kind of rein in both the democratic and the egalitarian thrusts of a lot of liberal policy and were quite successful in doing so, right? Moyne associates, for example, this kind of Cold War liberal ideology with the eventual support on the part of both parties for at least a long time with neoliberalism, neoconservatism, et cetera. And I think that this was fundamentally a massive mistake and I'll explain why. [00:16:00] By and large, the number one critique that the right has always made of liberals and liberalism has been that it is a kind of boring, pedantic politics that is fit only for shopkeepers. It's relativistic and nihilistic and it doesn't kind of aim our politics at anything that's higher than the material gratification of people's basic needs. This is the objection that you see, you know, Edmund Burke make, where he says, you know, French revolutionaries don't seem to understand that a society is a lot more. Than just a compact in the sale of Pepper, right? It's, you know, this kind of gothic grand alignment between the living, the dead, and those yet to be be born, right? Or, again Nietzsche, right? Who used to call John Stuart Mill a blockhead because, you know, he's committed to this idea that we should maximize utility for all. And Nietzsche thinks, you know, how foolish and boring and oriented around producing last men. Now I think there are ways for liberals to respond to every single one of those objections. I wouldn't be a liberal or a liberal socialist if I didn't think they could. But by limiting the aspirations of liberalism the way that the Cold War liberals insisted upon, right? We really, really double down into the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that make us a lot more vulnerable. to these accusations, right? They're suggesting that, you know, we're nihilists, materialists, don't think that there's really much improvement to society that can take place. And consequently, liberalism lost a lot of its reason for being by ceasing to be a liberalism of hope and becoming a liberalism of constraint. narrowness I think there are good reasons to be moderate, but excessively anxious, let's say about the potential to improve the world. And until liberals can inspire hope in people once again in a better kind of society than they have right now to use Moyn's term, we shouldn't expect to see our creed last into the 21st century and besides, you know, survival is not good enough, as he puts it I think very eloquently at the close of the book. Nietzsche and liberalism's meaning crisis SHEFFIELD: Well, and one person who you mentioned in this context is Friedrich Nietzsche, who did talk about some of this, and his [00:18:00] analysis in terms of where the ideas for civil rights and liberalism come from, he believed that they came from Christianity, and that was obviously false. I mean, obviously, clearly, the ancient Greek sophists and, you know, Socrates and even Plato, with his idea that morality was independent of divine command theory, clearly contradict what Nietzsche was saying, but nonetheless, obviously, there were some public trappings of Christianity in regards to liberalism, and so he was right in that sense. So he's wrong about the origins of liberalism, but he is correct in a certain sense that for a lot of people, they do want to have a higher sense of purpose to be a part of something larger than themselves and to derive internal inspiration from external meaning. And that to me is what the epistemic crisis that liberalism is having as well. Did you want to get into that? McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So Nietzsche is a fascinating thinker. I think this is as good a place as any to say that there are a few different motivations behind writing this book and a lot of them were agonistic, right? A great deal of the motivation behind the book was what I was just gesturing to, right, this deep concern on my part that liberalism has lost its ability to inspire a sense of hope on the part of the broader population. Which is one of the reasons why we're seeing liberal regimes really struggle with trying to contain or frankly at this point, even hold back the kind of ascendancy of right wing populism in the United States and elsewhere. But another big motivation for writing this was I spent a lot of time reading authors on the political right for the previous book and various other works that I'm that I was doing. I'm writing a new book on the right right now. And one of the crude accusations that you'll see in online right wing spaces today is precisely that, you know, Liberalism and Socialism and Communism and Communofascism, they're all one and the same thing, right? You know, James Lindsay makes that kind of accusation, you know, a billion times a day, right? Kamala Harris is a communist Joe Biden is a communist, you know, and all that's kind of bullshit, and I want to make that very, very clear, right? However, right, [00:20:00] if you read more insightful right wing thinkers, people like Nietzsche or Heidegger who I think Anybody would say are profound philosophers and social commentators even though I emphatically disagree with their work or even consider them to be, frankly, evil men and certainly in the latter case since Heidegger supported the Nazi regime, right? And they also insisted, actually, look if you look deep enough into Western history and the canons of our most profound thoughts. What you'll recognize is there is this deep affinity, according to both of them, between liberalism and socialism. To use the kind of Nietzschean expression you gave, Nietzsche said look liberalism and socialism and democracy and feminism, you know, can't forget that one they're all, as you put it just secularized iterations of this Christian slave morality. And They have continued in spite of the metaphysical collapse of belief in a kind of Christian ontological worldview, but nonetheless, the kind of ethical impetus for egalitarian persist. You know, his famous discussion of liberalism in various books was again, as a nation, as, you know, a kind of orientation fit for shopkeepers, women, Christians, cows, etc, etc. And in The Will to Power and other books like The Antichrist, he used to say, Socialism is also just nothing but Christianity with the residue of Rousseau, right? This idea that, you know, the wretched of the earth you know, will know that God is on their side. That kind of thing. And here's Heidegger's expression. He puts it in a somewhat different way. He says, look Post Descartes there has emerged this very technical attitude about the world that he associates with scientific rationalism that holds that the world is just a collection of things and human beings are the source of all value and we should organize the world of things using scientific and technical expertise to try to gratify as many as possible. Human desires as possible, and he says, Look, understood from that point. This is from his introduction to metaphysics. Liberalism and socialism are [00:22:00] metaphysically the same or Russia and America are metaphysically the same, right? All that liberals and socialists are arguing about. Despite all the hoopla about how important this distinction is, is what's the best way to build a refrigerator and what's the best way to distribute a refrigerator. But we do know that we want refrigerators and we want as many refrigerators as possible and as many people should get refrigerators as possible. That's it, right? And he had no time for this because he thought it was, again, spirit, spiritually decadent and kind of constituted, as he put it in the same book the ascendancy of the reign of the mediocre, right? Rather than the most kind of spiritually attuned people Which, of course, he associated with the German Volk and, of course, the Nazi regime, right? Now, I do not think that either of these two critiques of liberalism or socialism have nearly the weight to them that Nietzsche and Heidegger think they do. I think there are very, very good ways to answer this. We don't need to get too much into this. But I think that they are saying something true. When they point out that there is this affinity between liberalism and socialism in the sense that they are humanistic, egalitarian doctrines committed to the rational organization of society and the world for the betterment of all. I would just cut out their gloomy ending to that and say, well, what's wrong with that? Right? Actually, I think that that's, that's pretty good. And once you understand that the distance between the two traditions narrows quite a lot. And I would say that there's an awful lot that they can learn from one another. If people take the time to listen. Socialist traditions' better understanding of marginalization SHEFFIELD: yeah, and that is kind of the, the latter proposition of the, of the book. And one of those is that the socialist tradition has things to learn from the liberal tradition, but it also does have a better understanding of. The rights of groups that had been historically marginalized by liberal regimes, so, and you have a whole chapter on feminism and liberalism, so let's let's get into that. McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. Right. So there are a few authors that I talk about in the book that really foreground this. One is Mary Wollstonecraft. And then the other is a self described black radical liberal Charles Mill. So I'll just run through their thinking briefly. So [00:24:00] Mary Wollstonecraft as many people know is famous as the author of a vindication of the rights of women Understandably so, right? It's a heroic work in many respects and one of the main criticisms of that, that's leveled in that book is precisely that, look Male liberals at the time of the French Revolution insist very importantly and very understandably on the rights of man. But they never seem to be all that disturbed that one full half of the human race is bound by constraints that are far more fundamental than any that have been imposed upon men historically. And they also don't seem to be all that bothered for, for doing anything about that. Right? And Wilson Craft, of course, insisted very strongly that if we take seriously the idea that men should get rights under a Republican regime, then she also insisted that women should also get those rights, precisely because women have the same potential for rationality as men. Although it needs, of course, to be cultivated by education. And she had some very interesting and advanced thoughts on that, inspired by people like Adam Smith and and I suppose, you know, her intellectual foil Jean Jacques Rousseau, with whom she had a complicated relationship. But what I point out in the book is that Wilson Craft was also quite notably a fierce critic of economic inequality. In a vindication of the rights of women she insists that it's actually from This reverence for property that almost all the moral defects in our society flow. She's very emphatic about this. And this is the point that she actually takes from Adam Smith, of all people in the theory of moral sentiments when he says this propensity to reverence the rich or describe onto them these almost mythical qualities is the source of almost all the Corrosion of our moral sentiments and our moral virtues. SHEFFIELD: certainly see that now with the Donald Trump inauguration, Which just took place as we're recording this. McMANUS: Well, that's one of the reasons I decided to bring up that point, but yes, exactly, right? you see people just you know, bowing down before our new billionaire class. And then, you know, there are more billionaires in this administration than any other time in U. S. history. It's very hard not to think that [00:26:00] she has a point, right? And Wollstonecraft was not a socialist yet, right? And In part because that term hadn't been invented, but she insists emphatically that, look, a society with a more equal distribution of property will be a more liberal society in the same way that a society that grants rights to women will also be a more liberal society. Why? Well, because when you take away these stark economic inequalities, A, you ensure that the poor have an opportunity to benefit from it. develop their rational capacities in the same way that the rich do now which would be a very valuable thing. And also because, and here she John Stuart Mill follows the same point. She says there's something extremely illiberal about this kind of slavish attitude of subordination that appears in very economically unequal societies. You know, the people that people have to bow and scrape before the aristocrats or bow and scrape before their bosses. And she says, you know, good liberals shouldn't want that, right? They should want to greet each other. Almost in this kind of masculine way, you know, she was accused sometimes of being kind of almost macho in her writing you know, where you treat each other as dignified equals and you show respect for one another and nobody's required to brown nose or submit themselves to another person and I think that there's quite a bit to this argument, right? And again, John Stuart Mill picks that up later on. Now in terms of Charles Mills, this is really where the point about how liberal societies have treated people quite unequally, contrary to their rhetoric, comes to the fore. So Mills is the author of a very interesting book, The Racial Contract, which everyone should read. It's very short, it's only about, you know, 150 pages. And one of the things that he points out is, look, Liberal regimes, by and large have done quite a bad job in terms of securing racial equality or sometimes they've actually been at the forefront of systems of racial inequality. A very good example of this would be you know, the United States, right, which had an apartheid regime in the American South from the 1870s, moving all the way up into the 1960s. Some people like Alexander Casar, author of The Right to Vote in America, [00:28:00] have even pointed out it's hard to call America a mature democracy, in the ultimate part because most people weren't even able to vote, or sorry, many black people weren't even able to vote in American elections prior to the 1960s, right? Pretty distinctive. And what's interesting about Mill is he makes these accusations not just about existing or long standing liberal regimes. He points out that many liberal theorists of note, people like Immanuel Kant, John Locke, etc., obviously the American Founding Fathers, also developed these very complicated but very self serving kind of intellectual mechanisms to justify various forms of racial subordination, right? By suggesting that, well, we said that all men are created equal. You know, slaves are three fifths of a person, so, you know, they don't really get the benefit of that. SHEFFIELD: mean those people. McMANUS: Yes, we didn't mean those people, because they're not, SHEFFIELD: to. McMANUS: yeah, because they're not really people at all, right? SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And Emmanuel, yeah, as you said, it's kind of repugnant on some of that stuff. McMANUS: yeah, yeah, which is real shame, because you know, I love Kant. I'm just gonna be really overt about that, right? I think he's a brilliant thinker. And I've learned a lot from him and there's a lot to learn from him. But yeah, you read some of his comments in his anthropology and you're like, boy, that's not even a little racist. Like that's moving on to like you know, Southern planter levels of of racism. Right. But what I really like mill for mills, excuse me is that he says, look just because liberalism. In practice and in theory had these very fundamental flaws doesn't mean we should abandon our commitment to liberal principles. The principles understood the right way are extremely sound and extremely attractive including Kantian principles, right? He was deeply influenced by Kant. So he said, what we need to do is engage in a kind of imminent critique, you know, to try to make Or to develop a kind of liberalism, what he called black radical liberalism that would be sufficiently attentive to racial inequality and that would actually instantiate these principles of, again liberty for all and equality for all in a way that was meaningful for everyone rather than just for the white majority or in some places like South Africa, the white minority. I [00:30:00] say that, you know, because now that we're basically ruled by Elon Musk, it's something to, to consider a little bit about, right? And Mills also aligned this with support for a kind of market socialism saying, look obviously, you know, any kind of radical liberalism is, can have no truck with a command economy of the sort that you saw in the Soviet Union. That's just incompatible with freedom. But a society that, you know, kind of looks like Sweden, Norway, or Denmark you know, there's a very robust safety net, high levels of unionization worker co ops, etc., etc. That's, there's nothing incompatible between liberalism and these kinds of mechanisms, you know, what he called market socialism. Now sadly he died before he was able to develop any of these ideas at great length And it just kind of leaves you tantalizingly kind of invested in this project or interested in this project. So, you know, other people are going to have to fill in the blanks about what that might mean in practice in terms of a Millesium project, but it's very attractive, I think. Charles Mills and critical race theory extend rather than reject Western philosophy SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and that's, I think, in part why these far right activists and politicians don't want people to actually read him, you know, all this stuff about critical race theory McMANUS: Yeah. SHEFFIELD: Well, Charles Mills was kind of the epicenter of a lot of that and his work. It's not at all the way that the far right characterizes that he's, you know, very clearly in favor of racial equalities, not trying to, you know, create some sort of black supremacist or, you know, whatever kind of thing that they like to say. So, yeah, I'll underscore your point there that it's definitely worth checking out. McMANUS: Yeah, and I just wanted to add to that, right just take a dig at the far right you know, there's sometimes this rhetoric I still hear, sounds a bit like Alan Bloom from the 1980s bullshit where people are like, oh, you know, these critical race theorists just don't appreciate American history, or they don't appreciate Western history, I'm like, no, if you go and you read Mills, what's very, very clear throughout all of his work is the enduring respect he has for people Like Immanuel Kant, like John Stuart Mill like John Rawls, right, the great American philosopher he wrote a great length about them and was very overt about his own intellectual debts to their genius, right? But he said, you know just [00:32:00] like you should appreciate that family member of yours who also has some very serious flaws and knowing them well means knowing their good sides and their bad sides. There's nothing wrong with saying, you know, Immanuel Kant was a great genius and who had extraordinary things to say about epistemology and metaphysics and moral theory and also a horrible racist, right? And if we want to redeem what's best in the Kantian project or the liberal project, and Mill thinks, Mills thinks there's an awful lot that's there then we need to get rid of these flaws. And that's not being disrespectful to Western or liberal history, it's being respectful enough to carry on the story. Thomas Paine vs. Edmund Burke SHEFFIELD: Well, it is, and it's also, you know, the, the other kind of approach that the modern reactionaries have toward history is that they actually don't want to study it. They don't want to actually know the arguments. They just want to have this, you know, kind of, version than what they imagined that it was. So, in other words, they don't want people to actually look at what Thomas Paine had to say. They lie about, you know, most of the American founders religious viewpoints, which were decidedly Christian at least in terms of you know, their, the Christian theological claims even though they tended to not be against it for, for the population. So you know, it's, it's, it is this, you. It's this fake version of history that they're selling people. And this, you know, hagiography, viewpoint of, of a lot of these founders, because you know, it doesn't, it doesn't detract from their good ideas. The fact that they had some bad ones, because frankly, that's everybody. Everybody has some good ideas and some bad ones, and that's up to someone else to decide where, where they think, you know, INR or Euros or anyone else. McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. And actually, this is germane to one of the important debates in the book that I talk about just kind of plug the early chapters a bit. You know, we talked a bit about Thomas Paine, right? So Thomas Paine engaged in a a fierce and very acrimonious debate with Edmund Burke who's widely regarded as one of the founders of Anglo American [00:34:00] conservatism. Now Burke is a complicated figure. A lot of people point out that throughout most of his career he was undeniably a moderate liberal, right? Supported reforms had some very nice things to say about the American Revolution, although it's widely debated whether he supported it or just said it's understandable why they are revolting, but they probably shouldn't do it. But as my friend Ronald Beaner puts it in his book on civil religion he seems to have been scared by the French revolution into thinking that liberalism was moving into excessive a direction. And there's certainly some good reasons to believe that with regard to the Jacobins, right? And started supporting more conventionally or clearly kind of Tory principles. Now the reason that this applies is in the Reflections on Revolution in France and also some of his letters Burke really insists time and again, and also in a speech to Parliament, that it's extremely problematic when people look too closely at the origins of nations. And this isn't just an idle observation of his. The reason he says it's too bad when people look at the origins of nations is because it means they're starting to inquire into. First principles about what legitimates the state and the social order, right? Like, well, how do we wind up where we are right now and should we obey existing authorities? And Burke said, by and large, you know, we should treat these as settled issues, right? We don't need to look too much into this. And we certainly shouldn't be asking questions about whether we should obey existing authorities. Whether we can approve them or not is a different question, right? But obedience, that's something you should take for granted. Paine was really emphatically different where he said, no, we should actually. Treat history seriously and go back and look at the origins of states and he said there are a few different reasons for this. One of them is just intellectual accuracy, right? We want to actually know how these countries were founded, but he also had a political and polemical point where he said Part of the reason Burke doesn't want you to look too deeply into this, or people like Burke, he didn't say this directly about him is because when you look at the origins of, say, the United Kingdom well, how did the existing regime come about? It came about because William the Conqueror crossed, you know the English Channel with a few thousand mercenaries defeated, you know, Edward Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings, butchered most of the people in the [00:36:00] country and said, I'm the king now. That's the way it's going to be. And of course, Payne's point is when you understand the origins of the English monarchy this way as steeped in blood and violence, all of a sudden, you know, this, these calls to be supplicatory to the King look a lot less attractive because you're like, well, he's just a man who's the descendant of a butcher, right? And in the same way, I think you see similar kind of valences in these debates around things like critical race theory today, right? A lot of conservatives take this kind of Burkean line of, it would just be better if we forgot all this kinds of stuff and moved on. Whereas, you know, critical race theorists Or critical theorists who focus on race like Mills would say, no, no, no, we should actually look at some of that bad shit that happened because it does bear upon the kinds of approaches we should take to things today. And it explains a lot about, for instance, why there's so much economic stratification on the basis of race in the United States in 2025. How socialists failed to build institutions SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, but at the same time, so these are, these are critiques that are made of liberalism by the more, we'll say, socialistically inclined people but you also do, you know, talk throughout in different places about how the traditional socialists, they don't know how to advocate. well, especially in the current day that they, you know, and you can certainly see this. I think anytime you look on social media or on you know, lots of socialist publications or, or multimedia products is that, you know, they, they, they will point to opinion polls and they'll say: 'well, look, people support our viewpoints so therefore all we have to do is just talk about them a lot and then we'll win.' And that's not, how democracies work because people don't actually, a lot of people don't vote on the issues. They don't even know what the issues are. In fact, I think the state of Missouri is perhaps, which is where I graduated from high school is the, one of the worst examples of this, because they [00:38:00] keep passing ballot initiatives that are very progressive. In a number of ways, whether it's protecting abortion rights or raising the minimum wage banning gerrymandering, things like that and then they also vote for Republican legislators and governors who are to repeal these things and, and to restrict them. And there's just this paradox and you know, the, the further left perspective doesn't seem to understand you can't just, you can't just talk about the issues only, that's not enough. McMANUS: No, absolutely right. And I mean, to your point about support for universal health care for all. I'm a zealot for universal public health care for all in the United States, right? I want to make that very clear. So I have my own orientation about this. Indeed, you know to paraphrase George Orwell about democratic socialism it seems like such a common sense measure to me that I'm, you know, quite surprised it hasn't instantiated itself already, or I would be surprised if I wasn't aware of some of the kind of powers that be that inhibit its instantiation. But we, you know, when people point to opinion polls and say, well, 67 percent of Americans want the government to provide something like public healthcare or healthcare for all, it's always important. And I will say this as a social scientist, right, or a political scientist. Yeah, you know, people will support that until, you You pair it with would you be willing to pay X, Y, or Z more in taxes or enact these kinds of transitions which will mean there'll be alterations in the way your insurance scheme work as we kind of transition to this new model, all of a sudden that support will just crater or change. So, you know, it's, it's a more difficult case to make to the public than, you know, what some of these figures are, are making out. Right. Now in terms of what the left can do in the United States in order to try to win a broader audience I don't know, you know, I'm you know, I've done my fair share of like practical political activism, you know, I've marched in I've knocked on doors, you know, I worked for the New Democratic Party in Canada on a few different occasions. And you know, but I'm not, you know, somebody who's really focused on things like political optics, etc. What I could say from a theoretical perspective, which is what I'm [00:40:00] most familiar with, is a lot of the left rhetoric that I see in the media, intellectuals make in the United States is subject to two flaws, right? The first flaw is a lot of people seem to try to outdo themselves in what Richard Rorty once called the kind of America sucks kind of contest, right? You know, just pointing out all the ways in which this country is bad. And look, I think America has done a lot of bad things like my own country, Canada, like a lot of countries in the world, right? But I think if you start by asserting that, you know, this country sucks right? A, a lot of people aren't going to listen to you. And B, even people who might be inclined to be sympathetic to you probably won't listen to you because this induces a kind of pessimistic attitude about where you live. And if you start to say things like, well this country has just always been bad and it's incapable of improvement, then a lot of people are just going to wonder like, well, why should I even bother trying, right? You know, your own kind of rhetoric suggests that things aren't going to get better or that people are inclined to make things better. So I might as well just stay home vote Republican. SHEFFIELD: That is what happened in the 2024 election that Trump, you know, got basically the same number of votes as he did in 2020 and Kamala Harris did not because a lot of Biden voters stayed home. They were not interested McMANUS: Exactly, right? SHEFFIELD: Reason. McMANUS: and this is where I actually do agree with Edmund Burke about this one issue. I don't think he has other things that he's right about. But he says that he doesn't use this term, but I will. You know, leftists have this propensity sometimes to love humanity in the abstract too much and particular people too little, right? And I think that to a certain extent you need to kind of See the redeeming features of wherever you live and certainly the people that live within it if you're going to engage in a convincing kind of progressive activism. So I think that's one problem that a lot of people indulge in, right? Radical leftists haven't realized the necessity of persuasion McMANUS: Um, and then the second main problem that I've noticed with a lot of left theorizing, which is related to the first problem, is very often there's something that intellectuals like to do, because it seems very fashionable we keep calling for radical transformations of the status quo that are understood as we need to adopt fundamentally different principles than what we have here and kind of carte blanche everything just because our foundational principles, our foundational institutions they suck so much [00:42:00] that they can't be redeemed, right? Now, I think that there is more substance to some of these critiques than others, but I tend to agree with Michael Walzer, who's problematic in other ways, right? But when he says, look, if you're going to engage in critique, the most useful and almost invariably the most convincing kind of critique is what he calls imminent critique. And what he means by that is he says, Look if you can show someone that the principles they claim to be beholden to lead in a direction that is other than the one they've been going thus far, they are way more likely to buy into your project than if you come to them and say you need to drop everything that you've believed in your life thus far and embrace a whole new set of principles, because what you believe so far is just really shit, right? Some people might be responsive to that, you know, I've met them, but most people will just be like, you know, well, fuck you, right? You know, go somewhere else. And this lights back to the liberal socialist idea that I bring up because I say look, if you read something like Gary Dorian's Democratic Socialism in America, what he points out is A lot of the ideals that I argue for in the book, and Dorian argues throughout his various work, aren't foreign to America. They're very much American ideals, right? It was MLK Day yesterday. MLK proudly identified as a democratic socialist and said look, whether you call it democracy or you call it democratic socialism there needs to be a more equitable distribution of wealth in this country for all of God's children, right? And I think that when you say, look, if you really believe in equality and you really believe in liberty the way that almost every American I know does then you should want A society that is much less governed by plutocrats and oligarchs than it is right now. And a society where freedom and liberty also means that you have certain kind of rights in the workplace and in the economy. That many people don't right now because they often go to work and all of a sudden they enter into spaces that look an awful lot like what Elizabeth Anderson calls Private governments or private dictatorships where people can't speak their mind, have no rights and more or less, again need to [00:44:00] scrape and subordinate themselves to their bosses in order to get by. So this imminent critique, I think of the way people understand principles in a more narrowly conservative way, I think is the best way to go forward. Say, look, if you believe in these kinds of American ideals of freedom for all equality for all, basic rights it should lead in this more leftward direction rather than again saying you should drop all your principles and adopt these entirely different ones instead. Yeah, SHEFFIELD: yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, to that end, it's also it's relevant that to me, at least further left political rhetoric tends to no. Experience or desire to appeal to anyone who is not a liberal, so they have no ability to speak to centrists or understand how to verbalize, you know, terms in their, in their preferred meanings. And then, of course, have no ability to you know, to correspond, well against reactionary radicalism, because you know that, and I think you keep seeing that over and over why this is why there is a lot of you know, movement from the, from these far right, far left figures who were originally far left, like Jimmy door coming over to the far right, because they share that hatred of America. They share this hatred that, you know, that, that ultimately their antagonism is what motivates them more than anything else. Because they don't have an affirmative vision, or at least one that they understand, they have no, well, they have no theory of change, frankly, if I may say. McMANUS: absolutely, right? I mean I always point this out, right? One of the reasons why the Civil Rights Movement was as successful as it was, with all the qualifications that are entailed by that, and, you know, the Civil Rights Movement was, I think, undoubtedly, the most successful left movement in the country's history, certainly on race issues, although, as mentioned, MLK also had an economic program that we've fallen well short of, is that it appeals to, like, this very broad, basic religious terminology and a religious set of values that many Americans, certainly religious [00:46:00] Americans, find very attractive, right? And MLK, I don't want to read too much into this, was very good at this kind of eminent critique although from the standpoint of an activist and a A religious preacher rather than a theorist, although he's very learned in people like Paul Tillich, important to note that. Where he'd say things like, look, if you really believe in Christian principles the way that I know a lot of Americans do, or you believe in rights the way that every American does, why is it that we don't really seem to be taking those nearly as seriously? as, you know, we should be. It sounds a lot better coming from you know, MLK, right? But I think that that's just a very hard argument for a lot of people to resist the allure of because many of us, deep down, want to feel like we're people of integrity, and we want to feel like our country, our communities are living up to their stated principles. And when somebody points out to us just very blatant examples of instances where we're not doing that. It's hard to deny this push to want to actually be the kind of people that we say that we are and, you know, to go back to the kind of liberal socialist theme again, it's mostly a scholarly book in a lot of ways, you know, a retrieval of a political tradition that I think is thoughtful. It has some extraordinary authors within it including close, ordinary American authors like the philosopher John Rawls, or the great liberal thinker John Stuart Mill the two Johns, as I'm taken to, to calling them, right? But, you know, it was also an effort to kind of restore a sense of hope to the liberal tradition by saying, look we are past the time where liberals can afford to be, you know cautious, anxious or to suggest just very minor kind of majorist approaches to the reformation of society. People very clearly are adopting these kind of nihilistic attitudes across the United States and much of the Western world right now, where they don't think that things can be better. So a cynical project that says we can't make things better for everyone, but we might be able to make them better for you if you look like us or you believe like us. That has very attractive and liberals need to have the kind of ambition and vision to say no, we can make a world that is better for you and the best way to do that is to make a world that is going to be better for everyone. Democrats also refuse to explain or persuade SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and also [00:48:00] to articulate why things haven't better. So, you know, and I think the recently concluded Joe Biden administration is a good example of that, because there were a number of initiatives that he wanted to do but were thwarted by members of his own party, like Joe Biden. Here's the cinema or the Supreme Court. And he never, and he never really spoke up about that, that this was, that his plans were being flouted. And that is such a dramatic contrast when you look at Donald Trump's rhetoric, that when people stop Donald Trump from doing something, you know, he will. Blast them for, you know, every single day for weeks. And then, you know, thereafter he will repeat that narrative at least a couple of times every week from then on. And, you know, whether, and I think the best example of that was with the COVID 19 pandemic. So, I mean, objectively speaking, Donald Trump. that did one of the worst jobs among any major, you know, industrialized country in the world as a chief executive to respond to the pandemic. We had the most deaths per capita of any major country yet. You know, a lot of people just gave him a free pass on that because he was constantly providing them a, a a blame, a blame deflection narrative to say, look, this is my fault. I didn't do this. This is a Chinese virus. This is, you know McMANUS: flu, right? SHEFFIELD: or what I'm saying. McMANUS: The Wuhan flu, I remember, yeah. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're that. Yeah. So he's always giving an explanation for why he's not accomplishing and that's something that it seems like that left wing politicians generally are not interested in doing because they assume that the public will know why things didn't happen. And, you know, and that's, that's a very dangerous delusional assumption, if you ask me. McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely, right? And for me One of the key indicators of the disconnect of the Democratic Party with not every [00:50:00] ordinary voter, I mean, they still won a lot of votes, but enough ordinary voters was this kind of paternalistic technocratic attitude you saw some of the senior figures adopt. I'll just give a couple, well, I'll give a kind of glaring example of this. So, in an early 2024 interview Hillary Clinton was asked what She would say to voters who were hesitant about voting for Joe Biden a second time, this is before Kamala Harris became the candidate. And Clinton's attitude was get over yourself, I think is the term she used, right? You know, Donald Trump is a lot worse. We're a lot better. So the choice is just very clear. And. I agree that Donald Trump was worse than any of the Democratic candidates. I want to be very clear about that, right? But I thought to myself, what a condescending and patronizing kind of attitude to take towards voters, since the implication is kind of that they owe you their vote, because you're the least bad option. There's no sense that it is your job as a politician to constantly make the case to the voters as to why they should put their faith in you, right? Which it should be a very natural kind of idiom for progressives who believe in democracy, believe in representative government, and accountability. I don't think that this kind of autocratic mindset is one that should be a natural fit to our value system, right? And I saw a rhetoric like that Not all throughout the campaign, but pretty consistently throughout the campaign and every time it did I would talk to some conservatives and they would be outraged by it and I would talk to swim voters who would also be outraged for it because they felt that it demonstrated how disconnected the Democratic Party was from the concerns of ordinary people contrast that, right, with FDR and 1936 when he would say things like all the financial overlords of our country, I'm paraphrasing, right? Absolutely despised me and I welcome their contempt, right? Because he felt that he's, you know, working for ordinary people. Or think about Bernie Sanders today. There was a poll that came out the other week that showed that he was far and away the most popular senator in the United States. And even people on Fox have nice things to say about him. I think part of that is because [00:52:00] regardless of your commitment to The principles that FDR or Bernie Sanders stand for there's this sense that they are speaking in a candid way to voters about what they believe in they recognize who their opponents are, and they're not afraid to call them out On behalf of their constituents. Right. And to your point about Joe Biden, never really pushing back against some of these constraints on his first term imagine if Biden, you know, had been more militant and saying you know, the reason why, you know, a lot of people in my own party don't want this to pass is because we're beholden to very, very big donors and they don't want the kind of foundational change that I and other people think we should fucking have, and that Americans are entitled to because they're long overdue. Not sure exactly that's the way they would express it, but you get the gist of it, right? And I think that this more, if not agonistic at least solidaristic approach to politics that is democratic in its kind of ethos and rhetoric is a much more powerful way to go forward than this kind of nebbish technocratic aloofness that suggests that the reason we should vote for Democrats is because it's her turn, or his turn because they're the most qualified candidate. That's the way we should go, going forward. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, exactly. Liberalism has never developed the ability to politically defeat reactionism SHEFFIELD: And but just to go back to Nietzsche for a moment here, because I think his, his thought is really the animating impulse of today's right wing. And that's what is so, has been so challenging for you know, liberalism slash socialism to respond to because, know, the liberal political order was, It was was born by defeating, you know, classical monarchy, essentially, now we have this, you know, completely reborn version of that same attitude, which is much better at articulating its vision and in a way that is appealing to people who have, you know, authoritarian sentiments. you know, and, and psychological research indicates that there's somewhere about at least a minimum of 30 percent of [00:54:00] people who have so called authoritarian personalities. So that's an automatic population base, regardless of what they say or what tactics they may engage in. and so this is, you know, this is an experience that, neither liberalism nor socialism has ever had to defeat and argue against. Reactionism and said they've always had to defeat monarchists. McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely and I think this is something that you can only really grasp if you I spent a lot of time reading and listening to figures on the right and I don't just include you know, the kind of banal populists like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, whoever it happens to be. I mean, actually, like, very serious right wing thinkers like Nietzsche, like Joseph de Maistre like Heidegger, or Carl Schmitt, yeah or in the United States, you know people like Russell Kirk Leo Strauss, you know, a lot of valuable things that we learned there. But, you know, The political right has been aware of this problem for a very long time, right? Because, foundationally liberals and socialists should have an advantage in arguing for a kind of society where the many will rule. Right? Or where the 99 percent will organize the economy in a way that works to their benefit rather than the benefits of plutocracy. And going back to Joseph de Maistre, I would certainly argue, there's been an awareness that one needs to try to find ways to make aristocracy or make inequality or make elitism seem attractive to ordinary people, which includes by popularizing it. And this is a very tricky thing to do since. Aristocracy and elitism and oligarchy shouldn't be popular for most people, because they might think that they're not going to benefit from it. But the savviest minds on the right intellectually and rhetorically, people like Chris Ruffo, have found very skilled ways of doing so, right? Joseph de Maistre is a good example where from the very beginning he says what we can learn from the French revolutionaries is this need to elevate or to inspire the masses. And one of the ways that we can do this is by [00:56:00] pointing out or arguing as he did routinely that it's actually monarchy rather than democracy that most elevates ordinary people. Why? Because de Maistre said well, ordinary people get to participate in the splendor of monarchy and participate in its power in a certain kind of way. And throughout American history, there have been defenders of conservative causes that have been, Very aware of this need as well, just to give a couple of examples, American slaveholders, certainly in the 1850s, became deeply concerned about the potential for working class Americans in the North and the South to see more of themselves in the slaves than in the slaveholders, because why wouldn't you, right? And so what you started to see are people like Townsend, for example say, no, actually look if you're a ordinary working class Southerner, you should support the slave system. Why? Because in the South being part of The white community is basically a title of aristocracy, right? You will always have someone that is below you. If you are a poor white Southerner who will address you as, sir, bow and scrape when you come by and you can treat like crap if you want to. SHEFFIELD: won't compete with you for jobs. McMANUS: Yeah, precisely. Right. And this rhetoric was enormously attractive. And to go back to the kind of Nietzschean point you make Nietzsche is actually quite interesting in that he was actually quite dismissive of these kinds of exercises. When he was talking about Bismarckian conservatives and Germany, he was contemptuous of their efforts to educate the masses saying you should, if you want to educate the masses to be slaves, you shouldn't educate them to be masters. So you should just treat them to be slaves. And you shouldn't give them any kind of major role to play in political enterprises. Nevertheless, his thought has always been. had a kind of allure to many members of the population for fairly obvious reasons. And this is something that I think many on the left don't understand. Many on the left think that everyone is kind of like us, has this instinct to find a more egalitarian society where we treat each other like equals as an attractive ideal to aspire to. But many on the right, certainly [00:58:00] many who read Nietzsche, find much more alluring, and why would they not, this idea that, no, actually, I am a kind of closet aristocrat. I am better than everyone else. I am one of yes, I'm an uber mentor, one of Hayek's recognizable superiors. And there but for the efforts of the feminists, and the democrats, and the liberals, and the socialists, my elite status, SHEFFIELD: me back. McMANUS: Yeah, would be recognized. And even if you don't think you are the ubermensch, you can always imagine that, well, if I put the right kind of people in power I'll be one rung below them. I'll be able to, as de Maistre put it participate in their splendor more directly than those who are at the very bottom. Because, you know, from the perspective of the people at the bottom, I'll be the aristocrat, right? And this vision has always been very compelling for a lot of people who have a resistance to aspiring for a more egalitarian society. And it takes new forms and instantiations every generation. And I think one of the major mistakes of liberals and socialists is assuming that it is ever going to be com defeated completely. Because it's a natural human impulse on the part of a lot of the population to want to say that, you know, there but for SHEFFIELD: Yeah. McMANUS: all the s the SHEFFIELD: personality. Yeah. Exactly, right to say, you know, there but for the nasty feminists and Bernie Sanders and AOC, you know, I would be king in this country or at least I'd be king with respect to everyone else who will be looking up to me, right and we need to understand the appeal of this mindset if we are going to develop a sufficiently Inspiring vision, a liberalism of hope or a liberal socialism of hope that will be able to compete against it. McMANUS: And I don't think it's impossible to do that. I think it's very possible to do that. One of the ways of doing this is precisely by emphasizing hope and that can mean pointing out that liberalism has often been contra what Nietzsche thinks, a very heroic creed, right? It has a lot of bad sides to it but as you see liberals also were the major ideological group that defeated the Ancien Regimes and Monarchies of Europe. And they did so in a time period where that looked quite impossible given the power of these aristocracies. And, you know, they reshaped the [01:00:00] world in many ways for the better. And that is a good thing. World historical achievement as even Karl Marx pointed out routinely for the Communist Manifesto onward He was always a laudatory of the bourgeoisie for being the most revolutionary class in history and creating better kinds of societies than then We'd seen through history and I think that liberalism needs to recover this heroic Revolutionary aspirational and hopeful kind of outlook if it's to succeed in a new century where we're competing once again against those who just don't care insist that human beings aren't equal that we should not treat them as equal and that everyone won't be better off if we discard these commitments to equality, but we will be better off and that is enough. SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, and I think that's a, a great way to end it there. So just give that book title one more time for people who are listening and where they should follow you on social media, et cetera. McMANUS: Sure so my book title is The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. A bit of a mouthful, but it's my own tip of the hat to a figure I like called C. P. McPherson. And if people want, they can get the book on the Rutledge website or if you're bad, you can get it on Amazon. And Give Jeff Bezos a bit of your money. If people want to follow me on social media, there's at Matt Palfroff on Blue Sky and on Twitter. Or you can email me at mattmcmanis300 at gmail. com. SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. And I encourage everybody to check it out. This is not a super long book. So it's you can digest you know, a lot more readily than some 400 pager and it's some important, important, stuff here. Thanks a lot. McMANUS: Yeah, thanks, Matt. Bye. SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion and you can always get more, if you go to theoryofchange. show, you can get the video, audio and transcript of all the episodes. And my thanks to everybody who is a paid subscribing member. This couldn't happen without your support, so I thank you very much for that. And if you're watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post a new episode. And thanks for watching. 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…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Will Texas Ever Turn Blue? Brianna Brown of the Texas Organizing Project Discusses the Power of Black & Latino Coalitions 44:57

13 weeks sitten44:57

44:57

Is it possible to turn Texas Blue? Especially considering the large Latino, and Black voters in the state who share political interests like climate justice, housing justice, and immigration reform. Brianna Brown of the Texas Organizing Project , or TOP , joins Jen Taylor-Skinner , on The Electorette , to discuss how they are using collective organizing to build community, grow political power, and build unstoppable coalitions in Texas. We also discuss how the organization seeks to repair fissures created between Black and Latino communities that were widened during the 2024 election cycle. In this Episode Texas Organizing Project Listen to All Electorette Episodes https://www.electorette.com/podcast Support the Electorette Rate & Review on iTunes : https://apple.co/2GsfQj4 Also, if you enjoy the Electorette , please subscribe and leave a 5-star review on iTunes . And please spread the word by telling your friends, family, and colleagues about The Electorette ! WANT MORE ELECTORETTE? Follow the Electorette on social media. Electorette Facebook Electorette Instagram Electorette Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Trump’s looming attack on higher education 1:12:06

13 weeks sitten1:12:06

1:12:06

Episode Summary The second term of Donald Trump has officially begun, but despite all the things he’s unveiled in the past several weeks, we don’t know fully what his policies are going to be over the next four years. That is in part because Trump himself is a very erratic figure who says things that are nonsensical, even by his own standards. While there are documents such as Project 2025 which were created by Trump's ideological allies in the reactionary movement, that document itself is not particularly detailed in a number of ways. But one thing we can be sure is going to happen in the second Trump administration is that he will conduct a full-scale assault on America's colleges and universities. As a candidate, he promised repeatedly to create taxes on private university endowments. And he also talked about removing the funding for universities that don't bow to his various censorship demands, which are already being imposed on federal government agencies such as the National Institute of Health. Unlike a number of other Trumpian boasts and threats, he is very likely to follow through on his promised attacks on higher education because Republicans in a number of states and localities have enacted many of the policies that Trump talked about on the campaign trail. Joining me today to talk about all this is Nils Gilman , a friend of the show who is the chief operating officer at the Berggruen Institute, a think tank in Southern California that publishes Noema Magazine . He is also the former associate chancellor at the University of California-Berkeley, where he saw first-hand just what the [00:02:00] Republican vision for education in the United States is. He’s also the co-author of a new book called Children of a Modest Star , which we discuss at the end of the episode. The video of our December 18, 2024 discussion 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 Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe to stay in touch. Related Content —The forgotten history of how Republican college students invented “canceling” people —Inside the right-wing plan to ‘ seize control of the administrative state ’ —Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA are building a reactionary cult for young people , does anyone on the center-left care? — MAGA media figures previewed Trump’s extreme priorities for his second term —Inspired by Trump, reactionary comedians are the most popular media figures in the Republican party — Jordan Peterson and the far-right’s war on education and sound epistemology Audio Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 03:31 — The Milo Yiannopoulos incident at Berkeley 13:34 — Trump has learned from other authoritarians' playbooks 22:36 — The crisis of legitimacy in higher education 32:24 — The role of sports in universities 34:55 — DeSantis's attack on Florida universities will be Trump's model 39:52 — Historical parallels: Germany in the 1930s and the rise of the American university 43:39 — Despite the right's wholesale assault on education, many academics still don't take it seriously 46:43 — The deadly myth of "non-partisanship" in an era where the far-right is assaulting all knowledge 51:17 — Liberalism's epistemic inability to use power politics 55:24 — 'Children of a Modest Star' and a future-oriented liberalism Audio Transcript The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So before we get too far into the topic of discussion for today, let's just briefly talk about your own personal direct experience with some of these issues and some of the ideas and people that are surely going to be a factor in what Trump is going to do with education. NILS GILMAN: Sure, well the last seven years, I've been working at a. Research center and think tank in Los Angeles called the Berggruen Institute. But my previous job to this was working as the associate chancellor and chief of staff to the chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, where obviously I dealt with a lot of local issues. But I also saw and had conversations with many people across the higher education landscape in the United States. So I have a lot of experience knowing the way in which universities operate as well as some of the ways in which they've been targeted. As you can imagine, Berkeley is kind of a symbolic lightning rod for a lot of opinions that people have about higher education, particularly on the right, has been that way since at least the 1960s. And so I've seen the way in which Berkeley has been targeted, particularly, but I think it's just emblematic of the way in which, you know, the right regards higher education more broadly. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And specifically, like, some of the things that you encountered, can you talk about a couple of, well, The Milo Yiannopoulos incident at Berkeley GILMAN: One of the first real encounters I had with this was actually just 10 days after, maybe 12 days after Trump was inaugurated in 2017 for his first term. At that time the, I think it's fair to say provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos was doing a kind of and the previous stop and he had, he'd been scheduled by the young Republicans at Berkeley to give a talk on February 2nd, 2017, and that had been scheduled before the [00:04:00] election had been scheduled back in September, I think, of 2016, and this proved to be an extremely controversial episode on on numerous different levels. First, there were quite a number of faculty and especially students who. Wanted him to be banned from campus, and I have to say the administration was adamant that he be allowed to speak. Berkeley has a long tradition of free speech and any accredited student group or faculty member is allowed to invite anybody they want to speak on campus. And that's been a, you know, a standing policy on the part of the University of California, Berkeley, since the free speech movement back in 60 years ago in 1964 now. You know, there are some limits on free speech, the so called time, place, and manner restrictions. You can't, you know, bring a bullhorn into class and start yelling at a professor that way. Obviously, that's disruptive. But these are all sort of established. The limits on free speech are well established by Supreme Court jurisprudence, and particularly University of California, because it's a public university is required to have a you know, an open an open posture towards any political opinion that might that might be expressed 1 of the political opinions that got expressed. Of course, it was many people on campus wanted Milo not to be allowed to speak. And we said, no, he will be allowed to speak. And and then what unfolded on the evening of February 2nd, 2017 was really quite quite a striking episode because You know, we tickets have been sold for the main auditorium in the student in the brand new student union. I think there were about 500 people who were planning on attending this thing. Berkeley, as you know, with protocols for this kind of thing, we'd set up a line for people to line up to get into the venue. And there was also a separate space that had been cordoned off for people to protest. You know, we had about, I think, maybe 100 police officers University police officers who were there to make sure that good order would be would be maintained at 1st, you know, up until nightfall. The talk was set to go on. I think it's 30 or something like that. So, you know, it was in it was in [00:06:00] February. It was quite dark. And everything was going fine. You know, there were people lining up to go listen to Milo talk. And then there were people who were in the Kordendorff area that were protesting, and it was all sort of going according to protocol. And then right as it became completely dark, an unexpected, an unprecedented event in the history of Berkeley took place, which was About 150, that's an estimate anarchists from Oakland came and arrived using black block tactics to shut the event down. They came on the campus from, you know, it's an open campus in an urban setting. They just. Float onto campus from the south side of campus and basically started attacking the building in order to disrupt the event. And by the way, there were thousands, literally thousands of people who had gathered around Sproul Plaza, which is the main square at the center of Berkeley to see what was going to happen. And with that many people, there were not enough cops to do crowd control and to make a long story short, the cops decided for the safety of Milo himself. That they had to, they had to pull the plug on the event. Milo was whisked out of the building in an unmarked vehicle, and he drove off immediately to the Fox News studios in San Jose. By the way, you know, a riot broke out that were. Television television helicopters— SHEFFIELD: Wasn't there also dumpster fire ? GILMAN: There was a fire that was set in the middle of campus right next to our brand new student union. I was really worried. I was in Spall Plaza observing this this all unfold. I mean, the scene, Matt, I have to tell you, is the closest approximation I've ever seen to what I imagined hell would be like. You know, there was fire burning. There's helicopter music. People had like plugged in and were Playing death metal. There's a riot breaking out. It was really it was a terrible scene. You know, this made national news. It was a huge embarrassment for the university that we had failed to properly prepare for to be to be fair and unprecedented event. But we, you know, in the event, we were not able to pull that event off. But what happened next, I think, is really characteristic and telling and really gave me a clue right at the very beginning of the [00:08:00] first Trump administration, what things were likely to be like. So Milo you know, this makes him more of a celebrity than he's ever been. He drives off to San Jose, goes immediately on Fox News, talks about all those terrible liberals at Berkeley who won't let him speak, and makes national news. He gets invited onto a bunch of more talk shows the next day. And meanwhile, the riots sort of continued for several hours, and then eventually it died down. And I went home around midnight that night, and about five, four o'clock in the morning, my phone starts buzzing, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. And, you know, I was a little bit sleepy, having barely gotten any sleep. And I look at my phone and my phone is blowing up because Lots of friends are texting me. Hey, have you seen what Trump tweeted? Have you seen what Trump tweeted? And I had not seen it, so I walked on, saw what real Donald Trump had to say, and I'm going to paraphrase. I don't remember the exact phrase, but he said something to the effect of, if Berkeley won't let conservatives speak, we're going to yank Federal funding. And I thought, okay, this is nonsense. I just put it down. I went to work. And at this point, like when I by the time I got to work at about 8 30 in the morning, the PR and crisis communications team was all up in a lather because phone calls were coming in from local media and national media asking things like how much federal funding does Berkeley get? So if he yanks it, I happen to know that the approximate number was something like seven or eight hundred million dollars, if you count all the various contracts and, you know, NIH money and NSF money and, you know, large amount of money goes to Berkeley from various federal sources. But I also knew that there was actually no way that Trump could unilaterally yank funding from us. And so I said, let's just ignore that. And the PR people were like, oh, my God, we have to. You know, we have to, we have to respond to the New York Times. We can't just ignore them. Like, ignore them. It's a silly, it's a silly question. Trump's just bullshitting and trying to jit us up and troll us, and we should just ignore that. Don't feed the troll, even if he's president. Even if it's the New York Times responding to the troll, we don't have to [00:10:00] do that. But the PR people just wouldn't, you know, they start calling around different departments to figure out how much money it is and and I just was like, okay, forget it. If you guys insist on doing this, go ahead. But what unfolded over the next two days was actually really, really interesting because What the media kind of realized is actually, if the federal government wanted to yank funding from Berkeley, they probably couldn't do that. They'd have to yank it from the whole UC system. So then calls started going into all of the other nine campuses at the UC system asking them, how much money do you get from the federal government? And then people realized, well, actually, they probably couldn't target just the UC system. They'd have to target Like all federal systems, because the money runs through these, you know, things like the NSF grant making process, which is, you know, it's not it's controlled by scientists and so on. So if they want to yank money, they have to make money from all the universities. And all of a sudden, all the universities in the country were being called by local and national media, asking them how much money they get from the federal government. And this took up 2 days of Executive time that was basically completely disrupted the operations of all the universities in the country based on one tweet that Donald Trump types, you know, with his thumbs in 30 seconds over breakfast. The ROI in terms of disruption of what he regards as adversary institutions was just incredible, right? I mean, 30 seconds of tweeting. Two days and lost productivity for the executive for executives at universities across the country. It really gave me a sense of two things. One is what Trump's methods are for kind of trying to throw the you know what he regards as opposition institutions offline and also the inability of those institutions to see what he's doing and realize they're being played for suckers. And that includes both the media institutions who were being his useful idiot and propagating his his trollishness into these universities and the inability of university to say we're just not going to play that game. And I think of that to me has become a microcosm that I personally experienced of the way in which Trump has just outplayed both the mainstream media and many of the institutions in the country over the last, you know, now going on, going on eight years. SHEFFIELD: [00:12:00] Yeah, well, that certainly has been the case and, and it was an episode also that, I mean, it was one of many of. Of that, those early years of his political career that did illustrate not only that the institutions didn't know how to respond to them, but also there were no countervailing institutions or individuals. To really push back adequately and actually explain this is what he's doing you know, and, and that, and he's continued this, you know, this, this litigious or, and trollish threatening approach ever since. And, you know, like, just most recently, he was in the news for launching a lawsuit against the Des Moines register for a poll that was done that showed him losing the state of Iowa. And of course that was not. It was way off by Ann Selzer. But obviously this is not a real lawsuit. It's designed to intimidate and to make things costly for people. And, you know, this is, it's just not for some reason. People who have these institutional positions, they don't want to say that that's what's happening. And they don't and they also don't want to talk about just the gross hypocrisy of this, that if you claim that things are being censored, you know, you're, you're against censorship. You're a free speech absolutist. And that's what they're, you know, what Trump and Elon Musk and all these other people are constantly claiming to be. And yet they're the only ones who are using literal government. Power to try to forcibly control the speech of others and penalize them for GILMAN: yeah. Trump has learned from other authoritarians' playbooks GILMAN: So, I mean, the I think what's interesting about this retribution campaign that Trump and his minions are promising to deliver. I mean, the 1st thing I would say is we don't actually know if they're going to do all of these things that they're threatening to do. And they may just be saying, I mean, you know, in 2016, the campaign slogan was locker up, locker up, locker up with regard to Hillary Clinton. And then, you know, once he actually took office, he didn't pay much attention to Hillary Clinton anymore at all. Right? [00:14:00] He had moved on and it may be that that's going to be the same case here. He's claiming, you know. Various people are claiming he's going to go after people like Liz Cheney or, you know, various people who are involved in trying to prosecute him and in various in various venues and, you know, maybe he's going to go after those people. Maybe he's just going to ignore, but I do think that the the Des Moines register lawsuit is actually a telling about another part of what his strategy Thank you is likely to be if he's serious about the retribution campaign. So, this is actually something that, if you look at other authoritarian illiberal democratic governments, that is very common, actually. I mean, I'm thinking here of people like, you know, Erdogan, or in Turkey, or Orban in Hungary, or Putin in Russia. or Bolsonaro in Brazil. These are all people who get elected in elections, so they're Democrat, they're Democrats in that sense, but they're deeply illiberal. And the strategy they have for dealing with their political adversaries, the political, the political opposition, is actually has two different dimensions to it. So on the one hand, Yes, there are high value targets that they try to go after. So, you know, if I were Liz Cheney, I would be pretty concerned that she might, she's made herself into a lightning rod, and they might specifically want to go after her. You know, in the same way that Putin went after Navalny, for example, as the leader of the opposition in Russia. But then the other part of the strategy And I say it's a strategy because these people are also all learning from each other, right? Like Orban came and gave a series of talks at the Heritage Foundation back in June. Maybe it was May of this year. CPAC organized an event in in Budapest this fall. So they're all mutually learning their strategies and tactics from one another. So this is not just that there's similarities, a vibe or whatever. These are actually like Programmatic elements. And if you look at what's been done in some of these other [00:16:00] countries, yes, they go after high value targets, but they also select kind of at random, lower level, lower profile people to go after. And the at random point is really critical because going after somebody like the Des Moines Register and Am Seltzer, you know, she's just a pollster. Who's been doing this job for a long time. There's literally hundreds of people like her across the country and various guises going after her this way and bringing down, bringing down this kind of heavy handed you know, lawsuit against her puts fear and people at a totally different level, right? When people go after, you know, whenever anybody who's very high profile gets targeted, you know, that's bad, but it doesn't like make other people who aren't high profile scared. It's when they start going after the little guy that makes all the other little guys. Sort of sit up and think twice about what they're doing. So it's actually in some ways from an intimidation perspective. Going after an Anselter is a much more dire thing than going after a Liz Cheney. We don't know that they're going to do these things. You know you've got to imagine that the, You know, the first amendment rights of the Des Moines Register and the press in particular. You know, the Supreme Court has 60 years of jurisprudence on this, but we don't know what this court's going to do in terms of upholding those kinds of rules about, you know, very loose definitions of what defamation against public figures looks like. And, we'll see what the where these lawsuits go. You know, trust in the court system in the United States just hit a low an all time low since polling began on the matter, and it's not totally clear to me that the court system is going to be something that we can rely on going forward. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it seems not. And I mean, just recently there was a judge who got rebuked for publishing an essay criticizing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for lying about his wife flying flags outside of his house that were insurrectionist and linked to Christian supremacism and Christian nationalism he wrote a New York Times op ed about that. And, The judge got reprimanded [00:18:00] for a breach, a supposed breach of ethics, not Samuel Alito, the guy who actually did the gross violation of his supposed judicial impartiality. I mean, it's, you know, that's, it's, and, and, and it's just, just this very common vein. I do, I think that a lot of people. They think that this Trumpian, you know, flavored authoritarianism is going to ignore them, but these cases like against Ann Selzer and other ones, which we will see, and certainly like the lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos for stating a judicially derived fact. About Donald Trump being found liable for rape. You know, he was sued over that and these there. It's exactly what you're saying. It's to it's to make it so that people not only are they not only to confuse the public about what is true, but also to prevent people from saying what is true, whether through force of law or just their own acquiescence. GILMAN: Yeah, I am. I think one distinction that's really useful for thinking about what we might be coming up against is the distinction between the rule of law. Which is a basic foundational principle of liberal governance, and then rule by law. So the distinction that's often made between those two things, rule of law assumes that the process of law the process of adjudication is impartial. You get the same set of facts, people, you'll get the same results regardless of who the person is that's being accused, who the judge is that's doing the adjudication, who the jury is that's evaluating the facts. Rule by law is something different. Rule by law is uses the same sort of mechanisms. There's a court case and so on and so forth, but the results are preordained. And you know, Navalny, for example, to go back to that example, to go back to the Russia example, you know, he was tried in a court of law. They went through a process that looks [00:20:00] like a court case and looks like there's a, you know, fair minded evaluation of the evidence, but it was a foregone conclusion. How that would go the, the, the, the legal the legal process was a kind of theater for making it seem legitimate and seem like an even handed decision. So it's sort of drafting off of the reputation of the law as an even handed force to produce a totally preordained and uneven handed result. And, you know, we may be heading into that kind of a scenario where. The judicial system is simply no longer reliable to provide a fair minded result that is, you know equality before the law, no matter who's coming in front of the judges and juries. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and also especially given their very pronounced ability to and interest in revenue shopping for lawsuits and like that. That one judge in Texas whose name I can't remember off the top of my head you know, his. He's declaring half the laws unconstitutional in the United States because he doesn't like him and they go against his religion, but oops, I can't say that in but he all but, you know, says that in his in his opinions. And so that's, I mean, you know, and, and I think also we can get a flavor of, especially from the academia side. I think that that's. You know, one of the areas where they have shown their hand the most about in terms of what their intent are is because, you know, overwhelmingly there isn't. Any right wing domestic policy on most issues you know, not, notwithstanding project 2025, like the document, if you actually read it, you know, it has all kinds of contradictory proposals and that were in many cases, very immature and just almost childish in terms of their quality of writing. And like the policy ideas, you know, they could all be done, like they'll, they'll spend 30 pages on something. That essentially, if you were to be able to do [00:22:00] it at all legally, it would be done in a week. And so the whole paper is it's pretending to be a policy for an entire administration, but it's actually an outline for one week of work. And so, but, you know, but whereas in the realm of public education, they have actually began to develop more of a you know, a larger policy domestic policy apparatus. And, you know, there's a lot of things and you're in your own observations that you have talked about in terms of what like Rhonda Sanness, for instance, has done and what he would do. That's, we can get some flavor of what might be in store. The crisis of legitimacy in higher education GILMAN: Yeah, I mean, I think that the way to cut into this topic, Matt, might be to start with the fact that I think there's a much broader crisis of legitimacy in. In the Academy, particularly in the elite Academy. Used to be, you know, I'll talk about California because that's where I'm from. I went to Berkeley. I worked at Berkeley. And I noticed the various educational systems here, both the Cal State system and the UC system quite well. But I think what I'm about to say is probably pretty true of most places in the country. It used to be and when I say used to be, I mean, as recently as the 1990s, maybe even the 2000s, that support for the University of California and California state system was a pretty bipartisan affair. You know, if anything, Republicans were probably a little bit more inclined to fund the UC system as they saw some of the. You know, the value that was provided by having a well trained workforce that the state was training for, you know, without requiring that the companies train them, they saw the IP that was coming out of these organizations. And so they were, you know, they were in favor of they were in favor of higher education. There's been a kind of a triple critique. I think of higher education that has emerged over the last 10, 15 years, 15 years, really on the one hand. We'll get to the right wing critique [00:24:00] last, but there's two other critiques that I think are important because it shows the vulnerability that universities are in. So one critique is what I would call kind of left wing critique, which is that people say from this perspective, that the elite universities in particular are basically engines of elite reproduction, neoliberal reproduction. So, you know, they're very expensive. They favor people who have privileged positions. They reentrench privilege. You know, you go to, you know, high percentage of the people who go to the Ivy League have parents who went to the Ivy League. And so the privileges of those people just gets replicated generation in generation out. So, rather than being an engine of social mobility, it's become an engine of. Class reproduction and and privileged reproduction. So that's kind of a left wing critique of the academy. There's also a libertarian critique of the academy, which most prominently is probably been promoted by people like Peter Thiel says that, you know, it's just a waste of money. It's a waste of time and money. Forget it. Don't go to the university. I mean, he went to Stanford, but like he sponsors people. I know some people who have actually been through these programs to say, listen, don't go. If you get into the Ivy League, it's I mean, he's kind of admitting that the Ivy League maybe is actually admitting high, you know, highly talented people. If you get into the Ivy League, don't go to the Ivy League. Instead, I'll pay you all this money to come live in a group house in San Francisco and just start a business. You don't need to do anything. You can just cut out, cut out that whole phase of life and just don't waste the money. Don't waste the time. Just go get right into it and get into business. So there's kind of a critique that it's just a waste of time and money, libertarian critique, if you will. And then there's the right wing critique, which is that, you know, universities are basically sites of woke indoctrination, right? Not always entirely clear. We'll get into some of what they mean by that in a second. But the thing I would just say about those 3 critiques is each 1 of them is Probably pretty unfair as a overall critique of universities, even specific universities. But they all also have an element of truth to them. It is true [00:26:00] that, you know, elite universities tend to bring a lot of kids who are already from elite families into them. And so, and insofar as they're gatekeepers to You know, high quality jobs and other kinds of opportunities in society. That's pretty unfair. And that's not the only thing they do, but that is one thing that definitely is in effect. And there is no doubt that within the panoply of institutions in this country, the right wing is not wrong that. Universities are more to the left more on the liberal side than churches or the military or corporations or what have you. Right? So that's true, too. And, you know, it is incredibly expensive to go to 1 of these private universities. So, you know, the, you know, and the opportunity cost of spending 4 years of your life and. You know, if you go to an Ivy League university, I think the sticker price right now is something like 350, 000 for a four year education. So, you know, that's a lot of money and a lot of time to spend on something and you better be sure you're getting value out of that. Now, it's also important to note that, like, these three critiques sort of can't all be true at the same time. They have dimensions of truth to them, but they're not mutually. I mean, if, in fact, it's an engine of neoliberal reproduction for elites, then how can it really not be adding value for those elites, right? You know, and then for the people who aren't necessarily elite who get into those institutions, doesn't that give them a leg up to get onto the, you know, the ladder to the upper class, right? So there's ways in which, you know, maybe they're hearing a lot of woke stuff, but then they're going and joining investment banks, right? So, like, how much are they actually being indoctrinated if they're going and, like, then Joining up at corporations and so on. And the reason why these things are not complete truths about any of them, but also have partial truths about them is, of course, universities. Are highly diverse, highly complicated places with very different things going on with different segments of the student population, different parts of the university. What goes on in the business school is very different from what goes on in the ethnic studies department and so on and so forth. So these are these are highly You know, back in the 1960s, the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, said that universities really ought to be thought [00:28:00] of as not as universities, not as a singular thing, but as multiversities, right? And that multipli that multiplicity of what universities are has, you know, used to be a strength for them because they could appeal to lots of constituencies, but now it's turned into a weakness as the, there's, there's something for everybody to find critical about universities. And so the right has found a pretty juicy target. Okay. In universities, because there's always it's really easy to not pick at universities. There's a lot of people saying a lot of crazy things at universities, people with tenure, you know, 18 year olds who don't have a lot of sense of what you know how the world actually works, who will be happy to go on camera or to publish in, you know, to tweet something in moderate. And then, you know, they can say, Oh, my God, look at these students at this university. Look how crazy they are. You can pick like 3 tweets and all of a sudden you have a trend story. On OAN, right? So, like, the, the, the way in which the media can represent what's going on at these universities by picking the most extreme and most ridiculous elements of what's going on there is, is a really easy thing for them to do. SHEFFIELD: I actually think it's very possible that all of those critiques are true. You know, and that I mean, that, you know, there, there's so much of the way that federal funding is done for universities has been on the inputs and rather than on cost control and, and the, the cost to students. And, you know, if, if, if things were, if costs were lowered rather than buildings were built, That would be a much better way for the federal monies to be spent because, you know, the the monies, the tuition costs just keep going up and, you know, and, and that's, I think is probably the, the Achilles heel for higher education in the United States is that it just keeps getting more expensive, you know, whereas, and if you can, I mean, that was one of the policies of Kamala Harris that she didn't talk about very much, but, you know, free community college. That would have been a great thing and then a lot of, a lot of good for a lot of people. But she almost never talked [00:30:00] about it, unfortunately. GILMAN: Well, I'll tell a story that's not very well known. It's another Berkeley story that might be of interest to people. So back when the so called master plan for California higher education was put together in the mid 1950s by Clark Kerr, who I mentioned earlier originally, you know, there'd been Berkeley, you know, the University of California used to be just one campus. It was Berkeley. And then that was set up in 1869. And then the so called Southern campus, which was a branch campus that would eventually grow into UCLA was set up in 1910. And then eventually, you know, a bunch of additional campuses were built. There was also the the state colleges, which became the California state system that was basically serving local communities, and then there was the community colleges and originally what in order to control costs the idea was that when they made the master plan, the UCs were going to be designed To train technical elites at the undergraduate level, graduate students and most importantly, produce original research. And the faculty would be chosen based on their research credentials. And then, you know, for mass education for people who need to be county, you know, county lawyers and accountants and dentists and so on, they would, you know, go to the Cal State systems and for people who just wanted basic introductory courses, they could take the community college system. Now, the thing that was originally proposed was that. The uc system would only be for people in their last two years taking upper division classes that all people would be expected to go to community college to take their gen ed classes for their freshman and sophomore years. And then, you know, if they did well in those, they could then transfer, they could finish their AA and go into the workforce, or if they wanted to, if they were showed. Academic promise they can then transfer to one of the UCs to finish off their last two years taking upper division courses. The idea was that the senior research faculty didn't make much sense for them to teach introductory courses. It's kind of a waste of their time and talent made more sense for them to teach specialized courses in the upper division and the graduates course. [00:32:00] So that was the original idea. And the reason why that was defeated. hilariously, is that school boosters of the football programs at UCLA and Berkeley did not want that to happen because if they didn't have freshmen and sophomores, they would not be able to field effective football teams. And so the football program basically kiboshed the system that would have massively cost controlled the entire UC system down to this present day. The role of sports in universities GILMAN: Um, so there's, there's many irrationalities, right? To the way in which universities, the fact that universities have. You know, there's a half a million people who participate in N. C. A. A. sports. This is totally, the United States is a total outlier. In no other country in the world is mass sports a major part of university education. Yeah, there's maybe some rowing teams and people can do intramural squash if you go to Oxford or Cambridge. But the idea that like, there's a mass entertainment industry of college students participating in sport is just a totally weird American thing. And it ends up deforming lots of aspects of Of higher education. I mean, I think the biggest single surprise for me when I started working in the upper administration, Berkeley was what a huge percentage of the time for the senior administration was taken up by managing the sports programs. I mean, I would say something like 20 percent of the senior leadership's time went to sports and it's because it's the alumni. It's the donors, the potential for corruption. It's the underperforming, underperforming students. There's a ton of things that are associated with sports. That are just deforming of universities, and that's a microcosm for so many other things that go on at universities that are not very rational and that don't lead to a, you know, effective cost management of universities. SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. College sports. And that's in addition to the exploitation of deck of the athletes for decades. But hopefully is coming to an end. We'll see. But I guess that's another, that's another show for another day. But yeah, I mean, but, you know, so there are, as, as, as you said, you know, plenty of critiques that are valid that people can make and it's an easy target these you know, you know universities and colleges. [00:34:00] But of course for the reactionary right. Ultimately, that's not their, their main motivation. Their main motivation is that you know, for the people who, who run Donald Trump, so the people who set the agenda in the Republican party you know, William F. Buckley, I mean, his career started with an attack on Yale and it's saying that Yale was full of godless. Communists who said the Bible wasn't true and we have to stop them. And that has been the agenda for, you know, the, the ruling part of the Republican party. You know, I mean, you know, for, for a long time, there was kind of this mix of, you know, more traditional conservative types along with the reactionaries and but now, you know, the conservatives have basically all been expelled along with Liz Cheney and people like her and Adam Kinzinger. And so now the reactionaries are finally getting to do what they want fully. DeSantis' attack on Florida universities will be Trump's model SHEFFIELD: And you know, and, and with Florida as you, you had did a, went, did a very viral Twitter thread about some of the policies that, because I, I think a lot of academics. You know, they have tenure and whatnot. And so they think that they're safe from all this stuff. But the reality is that they're not. And you talked about that in your thread. GILMAN: Yeah, so let's talk about the Florida situation in some detail, because I think it's, it's it's emblematic where things might be about to go. So, you know, Ron DeSantis obviously was. trying to get the Republican nomination for president this year failed in that effort, got steamrolled by Trump. But as part of trying to burnish his right wing credentials, um, his reactionary credentials, if you will, one of the things he did was decide to take on what he characterized as some of the woke Universities in in Florida and specifically the new college in Florida, which is the kind of public, but it's a fairly small liberal arts college in Florida. And basically what he did was he, replaced the I don't know if they're called the board of [00:36:00] directors or what have you. But, you know, he decried them as essentially a kind of a propaganda mill instead of a college and has systematically sought to push out faculty members who are preaching what he regards as leftist, Marxist, woke, you know ideas. And the idea of academic freedom which, you know, first emerged Actually, in response to another attack on universities that took place during World War One, there were people who were peaceniks criticized Woodrow Wilson's decision to bring the United States into World War One and Woodrow Wilson, you know, went after Columbia University. Again, it was Columbia that was a lightning rod for this. And one of the most prominent academics there France Boas in the anthropology department who, you know, In some ways could be seen as the, you know godfather of a lot of what we might what the right would today described as as woke activity in the sense that he believed in cultural relativism. He believed that, you know, all human societies had their own dignity that needs to be understood on their own terms. And this idea of a kind of You know a relativism that did not place Western and Christian ideas at the top of the hierarchy of human knowledge and morality was central to his philosophy and his approach to anthropology and he led the charge to demand that the university protect faculty members. From the attempt to censor them by the federal government on that is what resulted in what we now call academic freedom. And there's a lot of details to that story. You get into if you want, but this was really a signal moment that took place over a century ago now. And since then, there's really been a standard that academic freedom that, you know, professors have academic freedom. And the reason why they're granted tenure is the idea is that if they're if they're if you can fire them. Then they don't really have academic freedom, because if they propose an idea that's considered heretical in any way, you know, their enemies in one way or another could yank their contracts from them. So the idea that [00:38:00] you the liberal, small L liberal idea that you need to have free inquiry in a free society is false. Grounded in the notion of academic freedom in the academy that provides professors with the ability to ask any question that they can answer it with any, you know, any in any way that they see fit, and they need to be able to be protected from being fired if they say things that are considered, yeah, at odds with received wisdom in one way or another. And those received wisdoms could be scientific or technical, but they could also be political or methodological or what have you. But the notion of academic freedom and tenure have been conjoined, have been joined at the hip really for the last century. This is exactly what DeSantis decided at the behest of Chris Rufo to take on right. And so Chris Rufo, I think, is really the person who's kind of the intellectual mover and shaker behind this movement to try to really take a hammer and tongs to universities. So, you know, practically the way they did this was to go in and take control over the board of directors at the new college. And to start, you know, defunding them and demanding that certain kinds of courses not be taught. And and it really has resulted in a wholesale evisceration of what was once one of the best public liberal arts colleges in the country. You know, people, professors have fled, enrollments are way down. It's mostly, you know, mostly most, it's mostly student athletes now. And and it's really, you know, Destroyed what was a really good university. In terms of the tweet thread where I talked about this, I think the reason why it went viral is that I made another point, which is that building a great institution of higher learning and research is a very complicated and arduous process that takes. Decades to do. And but destroying it is really quick. And once you destroy it, it's really hard to put it back together again. Historical parallels: Germany in the 1930s and the rise of the American university GILMAN: And the example I gave of this was looking back to what happened in Germany in the 1930s. So if you go to [00:40:00] You look at the survey, the world of academic research, scholarly research in the 1st 3rd of the 20th century. There's just simply no doubt the German University, German research universities are by far the best in the world. And you can see this. If you go and look at who wins all the Nobel prizes you know, Germany has an enormous lead over every other country. SHEFFIELD: And I'm sorry, and it doesn't even matter what the fields were and whether it was even science or arts or whatever, whatever science, GILMAN: arts, you know, literature you know, obviously all the Nobel fields, but also many of the leading economists were were German really in every field in every intellectual field, Germany was really, really the powerhouse country. The U. S. Was basically a provincial backwater. Of of of of of Europe. They're, you know, Cambridge and Oxford were very good. You know, there are some good universities in Italy, you know, when Hitler came in. And by the way, many of the faculty members at these German universities were Jews. And so when Hitler came in in 1933, one of the first things he did was get all the Jews fired. And, you know, many of them left and some of them, the physicists, especially ended up in the United States and Became the backbone of the Manhattan Project which is part of what helped the United States win World War Two. The United States ended up being a huge beneficiary of this exodus from German universities and the power the, the way in which the United States became the number one academic powerhouse in the world in the post war era was very much predicated on, well, there were You know, several different factors. One factor was the exodus of European intellectuals to American universities that provided a supercharging of intellectual capital into American universities. Another one was massive funding of universities by the federal government, which allowed for the massive expansion of the university system. And the people who went into those university systems were Students under the GI Bill, which is one of the, I think, most underrated pieces of social legislation this country's ever had. Everybody who came out of World War 2 and these programs continue to this day. One of the major reasons why people have an incentive or want to join the [00:42:00] military is you will get your university education funded by the military. And so this continues to be a major way in which universities you know, get funded is through that kind of that kind of a program. So those things built up the United States into the academic superpower that it has been for the last 75 years. And German universities have never recovered. I mean, this is the key point. Once they were destroyed, you know, Hitler lost 12, lost the war 12 years later, the Nazis were totally repudiated from a political perspective. But German universities and German research you know, there's many good people in Germany now, but Germany is nowhere close to where it was. It's, you know, again, I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but if you look at the number of Germans, people at German universities who win Nobel prizes now compared to the number of people at American universities who win Nobel prizes, I don't know what the ratio is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 20 to 1, and it's got to be at least 10 to 1 and you know, the numbers would have been almost the reverse prior to. Prior to Hitler's destruction of the German university system. So, you know, I, I made that point last summer and, you know, Chris Ruffo himself screenshot retweeted me and said, you bet this is exactly what we're planning on doing. So you know, I got an affirmation, you know, the things I'm saying on this podcast to you, Matt, are, are not things that. Is some deranged, you know, Rants of some liberal these are like what they say explicitly and then when I say what I think they're planning on doing They say you're right. We're planning on doing that so that is the intention of of the Of the radical right in terms of what it wants to do to eviscerate what they regard as these, you know, engines of will conduct indoctrination. Despite the right's wholesale assault on education, many academics still don't take it seriously SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, and it's incredibly disturbing. And, you know, what's but perhaps what is equally disturbing, I think, is that even now, after the Florida example I think a lot of a lot of academics still are not aware of what they're up against and still. Don't want to defend, [00:44:00] you know, the university, like there's, you know, there's just in the same way that you see in the the mainstream media, you know, does not really defend itself. It just kind of says, well, oh, look, this is happening. It's, it's not good. Well, well, yeah, I think GILMAN: I think that's right. And, you know, look, the there's the basic assumption that's pervasive in the academy and sometimes people will question it, but it's still the baseline assumption that people have that the funding system that has been around. More or less in this form for the last, you know, 7 or 8 decades is not going to change in any radical way. Maybe the money will go up and down a little bit, you know, but like, the basic, the idea that, like, everybody who's ambitious wants to send their kids to an elite university, all the ambitious kids want to do that, that they're all going to get good jobs at the end of that, that all that whole structure. No longer really is something that a lot of people outside the academy buy into, but it's still the overwhelmingly dominant ideological belief of the academy about itself, and that complacency is part of why I think that very few certainly rank and file members of the faculty have any idea what's about to hit them, much less have a plan for what to do when it hits them. I don't think people are are ready for this at all. You know, I'll make another point, which is a little bit political, and I want to pick up something you said right at the opening of this conversation, Max. I think it's a really important point is that in general, you know. Whether it's newspapers or or, or the Democratic Party or universities, they're not organized to be in opposition. You know, if you look at a parliamentary system like they have in Britain, for example, right? There is an opposition party. The, whatever the second largest party in parliament is, is the official opposition. And every, every member of the cabinet has a shadow member of the cabinet in the opposition party that is immediately shadowing them so that if the government falls and the other party [00:46:00] comes in, they're able to walk in overnight, right? So when Keir Starmer won the election on July 4th this year, like literally the next day, everybody comes in and all those cabinet positions were filled by members of the cabinet. Labor shadow cabinet that had been actually shadowing all of these dockets all along. There's nothing like that in our system. We don't you know, who's the leader of the opposition now? You couldn't say I mean, is it hakeem jeffries? Not really. Is it nancy pelosi? Not her. Is it gavin newsom? It's not her Right? You know, so there's there is no organized opposition party. You know, so that that makes it a lot easier for whoever is in power to just kind of do things automatically and not really find a systematic pushback against anything in particular that they're doing. The deadly myth of "non-partisanship" in an era where the far-right is assaulting all knowledge GILMAN: This is compounded by the fact that, particularly in the case of the Academy and the mainstream media, they see themselves, their self conception is that they are non partisan, right? That they aren't taking sides. They're merely objective and calling balls and strikes. That's also really different from other countries, right? In other countries, almost all the newspapers are very explicit about their party affiliations. They're often like Literally arms of the party of a party in question, right? They don't think of themselves as, you know, engaged in objective reporting. They see themselves as presenting the point of view of majority party or the opposition party as the case may be right. So therefore, they're very clear about what their function and their role is within the political ecosystem. That's nothing like that here. The New York Times does not think of itself, the right thinks of it as being, you know, the media arm of the Democratic Party, and it's true, probably, that, I don't know, 90 percent of the people who work in the New York Times news desk are Democrats, but their self conception is not that they're doing the Democrats bidding, right? That's why they do things like publish the, you know You know, publish the story about Hillary Clinton's emails you know, a week before the election in 2016, right? And, you know, publish things like articles that say Trump can win on character. That was a famous op [00:48:00] ed that the New York Times put out back in this fall, right? I mean, like, you know, they just don't have a coherent perspective on what What they are you know, you know, I mean, I've said this, this is veering away from the Academy, but I've said this about the New York Times for years, the, you know, and this is true of other parts of the media to like the like, like CNN or Huffington Post or places like that, you know, they can't decide and Whether they are the gray lady, the newspaper of record telling the truth, you know, that's the way it is Walter Cronkite style or are they woke clickbait right for their, you know, liberal audiences and they don't think they don't realize they think that those things are basically identical and they don't understand that that those things are not identical. Those are different functions altogether. Right? And so the result is that they're kind of incoherent when they're faced with it. You know, an organized party and government that Is implacably hostile to them and is well organized and understands that it has a clear political agenda at every at every moment. And that objectivity is not what they're trying to do ever. SHEFFIELD: No, absolutely. And the best illustration of your point, I think, is to for anyone who doesn't understand it from the right or from either side is, you know, look at how if you look at how the New York Times conducts its analysis. Editorial page and columnists and whatnot, and then compare it with the Washington Times. The Washington Times has zero liberal columnists on its staff. It has zero people who prefer Democrats over Republicans. Whereas, you know, the New York Times has. Quite a few. They've got Bret Stephens. They've got Ross Douthat, they've got, you know, and, and, and over the years have had a number of people starting with William Sapphire back in the 1970s. And so that's because, as you said, they don't view themselves as an organ for the Democratic Party, but weirdly enough, I think there's this also the reverse concept is that [00:50:00] Democrats, the Democratic elite. Also believe that the New York Times is on their side and is rooting for them. And so that's why they're constantly complaining about the Times, you know, making these various policies or articles or headlines. And they're saying, look, this is not fair. You can't do this. You're supposed to be on our side. And the answer is they were never on your side. And if you don't like that about them and you wish that they were different, then you need to start your own thing. We're like, where's Where's the left wing Washington times you know, or, or New York times or whatever, like they don't think in those terms in part because liberalism, you know, so complete secular liberalism, so completely, you know, destroyed in the marketplace of ideas. You know, Christian fundamentalism, which was really in the United States, the only you know, opposition that there really was they so destroyed it that liberalism in the U S in particular, but not just here, but other countries. Lost all ability to advocate for itself and lost all interest in even trying to because they, you know, they're like, well, look, this is what the studies say. So this is obviously everyone's going to believe that. It's right there, guys. Here's the policies. We have good policies. We should win Liberalism's epistemic inability to use power politics GILMAN: Totally. I mean, but it actually goes to a deeper point about the pathology of liberalism under the current circumstance, which is that The idea of politics as a whole for liberals is predicated on the notion that it should be inclusive and that the best answers come out of compromises between different factions within society, right? So, like, you know, one of the things that Democrats have been doing, I don't know how long this has been going on for, but certainly since Clinton, the idea is that every time there's a Democrat who gets elected to the White House, They need to appoint at least one Republican to the cabinet, right? The idea that a Republican would appoint, a Republican president would appoint any [00:52:00] Democrat to any position, you know, dog capture, postal service, whatever, right? No way. It's only going to be Republicans, right? That's because the Democrats think that politics is about compromise. The Republicans, and this comes out of their base's view of, you know, absolutist ideas of morality, they believe in total victory, right? They believe that they should win completely. You can't compromise with Satan, SHEFFIELD: yeah. GILMAN: You can't compromise with Satan, right? Like, that's ridiculous. We need to win completely. So it's two totally different models of how politics is supposed to work. And one of the problems I think that liberals have in this country now is that when you're dealing with an opposition of that sort, Right? Or now, now the dominant, now the in power party, you have, you can't continue to, you know, bring a butter knife to the gunfight, right? That's just not going to work. You have to fight on their terms or they will kill you. And the problem is that fighting on their terms is at odds with the conception of politics that liberals want to have, which is reasoned discourse. Matt's got a perspective, Nils has perspective. The correct answer is somewhere between Matt and Nils, and we're going to hash it out with reasoned discourse. That model of politics is just at odds with a party like what the Republicans have now become under Trump. They've been going that way for a long time, I would argue since Newt Gingrich, but like, you know, over the last eight years, it's become completely that way, and so if you continue to sort of say, well, You know, they have a point, right? I mean, you can look at the postmortems that are happening after the election. A lot of people, a lot of liberals saying, well, you know, Donald Trump kind of had a point about this. We kind of had a point about that or, you know, whatever. And like kind of conceding and they're doing the liberal game of saying, hey, We're now going to play nice and like, maybe we can do some bipartisan stuff, right? And, and then, you know, of course, if they don't do that, then they get accused of being hypocrites by the Republicans, who themselves have no intention of behaving that way. But they say, you guys all claim that it's all about compromise, all about bipartisanship, and then you ram through things. So as [00:54:00] soon as the Democrats start acting like the Republicans, the Republicans start accusing the Democrats of betraying their own principles. And they're right, because those were the principles and have been the principles of liberalism. So you can't fight illiberalism. With liberal tools. And by the way, this is an idea, this, this conundrum is one that goes back to the very earliest days of political liberalism, Voltaire, you know, the French, you know, great philosopher of democratic liberalism from the middle of the 18th century. It's famously said that the one thing that you can't tolerate is intolerance, right, as a liberal society. You cannot tolerate intolerance. You have to draw the line there. You should be inclusive, you should be, you should be tolerant, but not of the people who want to destroy the system as a whole. You cannot have that attitude towards them. And somehow that Voltairean idea, which is a quarter millennium old, has simply not gotten into the noggins of people on the liberal side of the aisle. SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, it hasn't. And you know, and there you have I've constructed this really small ball politics that is just incredibly unambitious, you know, and it just walked completely away from the grander visions of FDR or LBJ or Truman, you know, who, who not, not just said big things, but actually did big things, both foreign and domestic and you know, and that, Is something also that you and your co-author talk about. 'Children of a Modest Star' and a future-oriented liberalism SHEFFIELD: Uh, I we're gonna slide this in here at the very end. I wanna make sure we do that in a book that you guys published recently called children of a Modest Star. So talk about it in, I mean, it's a little bit of a, I don't think it's entirely. Inappropriate to put into this context here. I think. What do you think? GILMAN: Well, so yeah, so I just I just published along with my co author, Jonathan Blake, who's also a colleague of mine here at the Institute, a book called Children of Modest Star, which is really trying to think about, planetary what we call planetary challenges, challenges that don't can't be solved by nation states. [00:56:00] They are, you know, a planetary in scope and that the governance systems we have, whether they are national governance systems or the global governance architecture that's made up of member state institutions that answer to those national states simply are not fit. To deal with and you know, one of the critiques we've gotten of this book. So our book is we're not calling for world government We're calling for kind of new administrative agencies to deal with things like pandemic risk or climate change you know specifically carbon carbon emissions abatement and stuff like that. It's a series of narrowly tailored Administrative units that can deal with things like, you know, also things like space junk or oceanic plastics These are all things that You know, humans are not trading, so it's not part of the world trade system, per se, but and therefore it's not governed by the WTO or whatever but that we don't have adequate systems for dealing with right now. The, you know, the critique we've gotten a lot, and it's only gotten louder since Donald Trump won re election, you know, 6 weeks ago is that, you know, you guys are really at odds with the times, right? I mean, it seems like. Neonationalism than nation first politics is is kind of the current wave of the 2020s and people are there's a lot of backlash happening against against any systems of you know, that are perceived to be quote unquote globalist. I don't think of myself as being a globalist, particularly because I think that that is predicated on a kind of economic integration, which is not, I think, the most important thing for us to be dealing with at a planetary scale. I think a lot of economies can be better done at a more local scale. I think that some of the things that the Biden administration. Try to get off the ground during its during its time in office around you know, investment in various kinds of infrastructure projects is the kind of thing that should be done at a national scale. So I think those things were good. I believe a lot of those things will actually continue under the Trump administration, partly because a lot of the money from those systems were going into something like 90 percent of the money from. The inflation reduction act, which was actually an industrial policy act. 90 percent of that money is going into red district. So I'm not sure a lot of those people are going to want to yank the money that's going into their own district. So I [00:58:00] think some of those things will bear fruit over time. So those things that, you know, economic issues are properly dealt with at a national scale, but these planetary issues are not ones that can be dealt with at a national scale. You know, even if we reduced our carbon emissions to zero overnight, it wouldn't solve the problem. Okay. Climate change problem, the United States is going to face because there's all these other emitters. We have to have some kind of an agency that's going to enforce emissions limits across all the different, you know, actually existing and potential emitters in the world. Likewise, you know, we clearly saw during 2020 that you can't control pandemic 1 country at a time. Even if you shut your borders, the viruses don't care about that. They move across the borders anyway. So you really can't unless you're like a tiny island and you can really Step things out, you know, it's almost impossible to deal with this, you know, one country at a time. So the argument that we make in the book is that we need new kinds of governance systems that can adequately deal with that. And we propose basically two ideas, one of which I mentioned earlier, which are these narrowly tailored agencies that can deal with these planetary challenges, but also, and I think this is something that I don't think is necessarily at odds with some of the nation first politics we're seeing, although some people might look askance at some of it, is What we call network translocalism. And let me explain to you what I mean by that. You know, if you listen again, give a climate change example. You know, I'm not sure it makes sense for Washington, D. C. the federal government to be setting climate change adaptation policies for the whole country, because the kinds of challenges that say, Miami is facing, which are, you know, hurricanes and flooding and you know, wind and things like that sea level rise. It's totally different from the kinds of challenges that, say, Los Angeles is facing, which is drought and heat waves and fires and so on. Right. So these are both climate change adaptation problems, but they're totally different. On the other hand, the challenges that Los Angeles is facing. Is very similar to the challenges that other cities in the southwest corners of continents with Mediterranean climates places like Lisbon or Cape Town [01:00:00] or Perth, Australia. These are very similar kinds of climates to California, and therefore they're being changed in very similar ways to the way Southern California's climate is being changed. So it makes a lot of sense for you. Those 4 cities, for example, to share expertise, share resources and share technologies for adapting to the climate change challenges. Likewise, for Miami, it makes more sense for them to be collaborating with other places in kind of hurricane alleys that are low lying. So those could be places like, you know, islands in the Pacific Ocean. Maybe Shanghai and China, right? Those, you know, the adaptation strategies that they're going to have to adopt the kinds of expertise is that they're going to have to develop the kinds of technologies. They're going to have to develop the kinds of resources. They're going to need to mobilize or are quite similar the way they're going to need to educate their populations about how to prepare to deal with these climate changing worlds. So those are kind of the 2 big policy things that we propose. And by the way, on the 2nd point. Okay. The network translocalism. A lot of this stuff is already happening. Actually, there's a lot of and a lot of times this is happening, not just at a government to government level, like, you know, not just the city of. Los Angeles collaborating with the city of Cape Town. It's also about, you know private sector organizations, third sector organizations that are doing this kind of collaboration, you know, people, companies that are developing technologies. They understand this perfectly. Well, if you develop a technology that can help Angelenos, you know. Have their, you know, their gardens adapt to a drier, hotter climate. You can also sell that technology in other places that are facing similar changes. And so they're, they're, they're, they're doing that propagation that's happening through the market. And it's also happening through you know, NGOs that are propelling best practices across these spaces. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and and also, I mean, just, you know, to the criticism point, you know, just because the circumstance. May not be as auspicious for an idea. It doesn't mean that it's not true. Just because people don't want to believe something doesn't mean that it's not true or false or whatever. Yeah, I mean, I GILMAN: just what I've said about that is [01:02:00] that you know, in some ways the election of Trump may actually accelerate the arrival of the world that I'm proposing we need to get to. Because I think it's going to, you know, the deconstruction of the. Administrative state and that's not exactly what we've been talking about here and this podcast, but that larger goal is going to really reveal that the federal government is not going to be capable of doing the things that need to be done to deal with any of the challenges that we're talking about here. And so it may actually accelerate that process and reveal the necessity of a totally different kind of structure. I'll just maybe close out with one thought about that. You know, we were talking about the durability of educational institutions, and once you break them, it's hard to put them back together again. But in general, institutional change, which is something that I've studied as a historian in many different contexts for, for most of my career at this point, major institutional change is rare. You know, institutions of governance, but any institutions you know, churches universities, governments even corporations, they're usually set up at a particular moment in time to deal with a crisis of that moment, right? And they're designed to deal with the way that crisis was perceived at that moment. And if they're successful, they then often become enduring institutions that go on and then the circumstances of the world in which they were originally set up to deal with inevitably changed over time. Now, sometimes they can adapt to those changes, but a lot of times they can't. And what they often can't do is effectively address. The new and emerging category of challenges. And then you get to a point where there's a crisis of the institutional order, right? And that's the moment when there's a possibility for institutional massive, you know, radical institutional reform. So I'll give an example. The first idea for a parliament of nations was proposed in 1795 by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. All right. It took 150 years. So 1945. [01:04:00] Before we got to the United Nations, got to the League of Nations about 25 years before that. But, you know, over a century, at least, before we got to a Parliament of Nations and what it took for nations to be willing to give up even the fig leaf of some of their sovereignty, you know, to these, this transnational organization, supranational organization was a massive crisis to enormous world wars, right? So, you know, The crisis of the old order and the inability to maintain peace is what eventually led to the establishment of the Security Council under the auspices of the United Nations. The Security Council was the big change from the League of Nations to the United Nations, and the Security Council, for all of its flaws, has been part of the reason why there has not been a direct war between great powers since 1945. There's a lot of reasons for that, but the Security Council is one reason. The five big powers in the world were given You know, you know, primary power over the ability to do interventions and other parts of the world. And, you know, they were also able to veto it so that they couldn't personally be implicated. They couldn't nationally be implicated by the power of the Security Council. And that structure that structure made sense in 1945 doesn't make that much sense anymore because the challenges we face. First of all, there's other nations that have risen up that are really powerful. You know, does it make sense that it's England and Yeah. France that have the permanent seats on the Security Council and not Germany, not India, not Japan. That doesn't really seem to make sense anymore. But also the challenge was that they were set up to deal with. Which is basically preventing wars between preventing war in general, but especially wars between great powers, cataclysmic wars. That's still a challenge we have to face, right? So I don't think they should go away. I think it's still a useful function, but it's not set up to deal with something like climate change, and it's not set up to deal with something like a pandemic not set up to deal with something like space junk or oceanic plastics. And so it's incapable of doing so. And so it's probably going to take some kind of a crisis. Crisis. Crisis. Or threat, real, [01:06:00] credible, immediate threat of a crisis, of a very large scale before we're gonna be able to get to real institutional change of the sort that Jonathan and I are proposing in our book. But why? So you know, you might ask, well, you know, how soon is that crisis gonna come about? We don't know. But the key last point, why write this book now? I think the reason is. One of the things we know is that when a crisis erupts, the people who have a blueprint about what they want to do have a huge advantage in terms of institutional reform over everybody who's just bewildered by it. So actually beginning to have some blueprints and start conversations about what things can look like so that the crisis, when it comes, doesn't go to waste is, I think, a really valuable exercise. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. And although it would seem nefarious in the views of some people. But they're already probably not fans of yours otherwise. So, you GILMAN: know, in general Matt, you know, you're a writer too there's no reason to write anything that everybody's going to agree with. That's not a useful intervention. SHEFFIELD: No, it isn't. And certainly not how anything interesting gets done. So all right, well so why don't you give your social media handles a plug here so people can keep up with you and also the Institute website and all that. GILMAN: So I am, I'm weaning myself off of Twitter, but not quite fully there. That's @ nils_gilman . I'm now. Gearing myself up on blue skies. So I'm @nils-gilman there. That's probably the best ways to see me. If you want to see me bloviating in the way I just have for the last hour, if you want to see that on a daily basis, those are the places to go. SHEFFIELD: Okay. And then you should give a plug for the magazine too. GILMAN: Oh yeah. In addition to being the senior vice president here at the Berggruen Institute, another hat that I wear is as deputy editor of the magazine that we published a magazine, Noema, which is mid-length form magazine of ideas. We publish on a whole bunch of different topics ranging from technology to environmental issues to governance issues. And we're about to have our fifth [01:08:00] anniversary this coming year which we're pretty excited about. We've gained a pretty big readership over the last five years and we published a ton of great people. And if any of your listeners want to pitch us ideas you can you can, you can write to me directly or or pitch us at our online handle, which is, I think ideas at noemamag.com . All right. SHEFFIELD: Sounds good. All right. Thanks for coming back. GILMAN: Thanks, Matt. Yeah. SHEFFIELD: all right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion. And you can always get more. If you go to theory of change. show with the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you like what we're doing, you can also go to flux. community and get more podcasts and articles about politics, religion, culture, and society and how they all intersect and affect each other. And my thanks to everybody who is supporting us over on Substack or Patreon, I really appreciate that. Thank you very much for your support. And if you're watching on YouTube, make sure to click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post new episodes. Thanks a lot and 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…

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

1
Can We Stop the Gun Violence Crisis Even With a Legislative Gridlock? 58:27

14 weeks sitten58:27

58:27

The gun violence crisis in America has shown little signs of slowing, and even though most Americans are desperate to stop the violence, congressional gridlock prevents us from making progress. Guns Down America —an organization focused on building a future with fewer guns, weakening the gun industry, and building political and cultural support for policies that will keep us safe from gun violence—has a plan to circumvent that gridlock. Morgan Avrigean of Guns Down America discusses the organization's strategy, and how they've achieved victory's despite decades of inertia. In this Episode Business Must Act: Are your favorite businesses keeping you safe from gun violence? The Deadliest Places to Grocery Shop in America Business Gun Safety Scorecard Listen to All Electorette Episodes https://www.electorette.com/podcast Support the Electorette Rate & Review on iTunes : https://apple.co/2GsfQj4 Also, if you enjoy the Electorette , please subscribe and leave a 5-star review on iTunes . And please spread the word by telling your friends, family, and colleagues about The Electorette ! WANT MORE ELECTORETTE? Follow the Electorette on social media. Electorette Facebook Electorette Instagram Electorette Twitter Resources A video from writer, and content creator, Franchesca Ramsey on grief was mentioned in the intro of the episode. The video can be found here . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Bounty Quick Size Paper Towels, White, 8 Family Rolls = 20 Regular Rolls (Packaging May Vary)

Amazon Basics Multipurpose Copy Printer Paper, 8.5 x 11 inches, 20 lb, 1 Ream, 500 Sheets, 92 Bright, White

Peacock TV

Kuuntelemisen arvoisia podcasteja

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change) explicit

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change) explicit

Kuuntelemisen arvoisia podcasteja

Tervetuloa Player FM:n!

TurboTax Deluxe 2024 Tax Software, Federal & State Tax Return [PC/MAC Download]

Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds, Active Noise Cancellation, Hearing Aid Feature, Bluetooth Headphones, Transparency, Personalized Spatial Audio, High-Fidelity Sound, H2 Chip, USB-C Charging

Gems (Amazon Exclusive)

Ernie Ball Regular Slinky Nickel Wound Electric Guitar Strings, 10-46 Gauge (P02221)

Pikakäyttöopas