On this month’s bonus episode, Jonathan and Sy are talking political education in this new era of traditional and social media bowing to Trump and the MAGA movement. We get into:

- The beliefs about free speech behind the changes at Meta that Mark Zuckerberg recently announced

- How our understanding of healthy discourse differs from those beliefs

- And tips for staying politically educated in this new environment

Credits

- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.

- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.

- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.

- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy.

- Editing by Sy.

- Production by Sy and our incredible subscribers

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Sy Hoekstra: The moderation isn't really a problem, it's sort of the greed behind the companies. Like, the people who have realized, “Oh, I can make a ton of money by making people super angry [laughs]. And I don't care what that does to our public discourse, because it makes me money.” That's the real problem to me. It's not actually the fact that somebody has said, “I will not let people say anti-Semitic things on my platform. “

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Hello, hello, everybody. This is Sy. Jonathan and I are still recording these monthly bonus episodes on Substack live. Thank you if you were able to join us for the live recording this time around. I'm just here to tell you that the recording cut off the very, very beginning of what I said when we started. So if I just dropped you in, it wouldn't make any sense. What I'm gonna do is seamlessly transition us from this to the live recording. Now ready? Here we go. Welcome to this bonus episode of Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. [transition to live recording] I'm Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Welcome again to this bonus episode recorded live on Substack. Thank you to everyone who is joining and watching right now and watching later, and again, thanks for being a subscriber to this podcast. We appreciate you.

Sy Hoekstra: We are going to be talking today, as the headline says, about how to be politically educated, how to keep yourself politically educated in this new era of Trump. And not just Trump, but also both legacy and social media platforms, kind of bowing the knee to him and doing his bidding [laughs]. Political education has always been central to what we talk about at KTF Press, and our reasons for doing it and what we’re trying to accomplish haven't changed, but the way that you go about doing it is actually starting to change in significant ways. So we thought we would take some time to talk about kind of the reasons behind the changes that are happening in the media and how that means we need to be paying attention going forward in order to remain people who are informed and who can be helpful and who can serve the kingdom of God in our politics.

So we're kind of merging the whole show together. Normally, we have our conversation and then we do separately the Which Tab Is Still Open, which is where we have a segment where we talk about diving deeper into one of the things from our newsletter, one of the highlights that one of us brought out from the news in our newsletter. When we were talking about this conversation, I was like, “I wanna talk about the Meta stuff and Mark Zuckerberg and those announcements that he made.” And as we had the conversation, we sort of realized that's actually the whole episode [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, exactly.

Sy Hoekstra: We're doing a whole episode of Which Tab Is Still Open. I will explain those of you who don't know, give a brief summary of what it is that Mark Zuckerberg said exactly last week, and then we will get into the meat of the conversation. And then we'll be talking about how to find trustworthy sources and how to better understand the political and news climate that we are in in this new Trump era. So this is gonna be a really good conversation. I'm sure you’ll all enjoy it. Jonathan, though, before we get started, it's your turn to talk [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Well, if you're listening to this live, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting this work so we can do more of it. If you become a paid subscriber, you'll get access to this video, audio and all of our live and bonus episodes from like [laughs] the last four years. You also get access to archives of everything that we've done, our Zoom calls as well. So please, please, do become a paid subscriber. You'll also get the ability to comment and interact with us more, and you'll be supporting everything that we're doing as we push for just political discipleship and education and leave behind the idols of the American church. Welcome to all y'all who just signed on.

For everybody, if you do like Shake the Dust, definitely go to Apple, Spotify, give a great review. That helps people discover the show and lets us know that y'all appreciate what we're doing, and we are so excited to jump into this conversation today. Go for it, Sy.

Sy Hoekstra: All right, let me get us caught up. And for the people who are live, feel free to comment or question in the chat at any point, and Jonathan will be monitoring that. We will incorporate that into our discussion. And join us live, by the way, if you wanna have that opportunity, if you're listening later. So like I said, what I'm gonna do is explain just the brief bullet points of everything that Mark Zuckerberg said in his reel last week [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And all of the changes that are happening at Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram and Threads.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And then we will get into the conversation about it after I go into that. Like I said, Which Tab Is Still Open right at the top of the show. So here are the announcements that he made, and they're all about content moderation and filtering content and everything on Facebook and Instagram and Threads. So the first thing, he has six announcements. I'll go through them really quickly. One is they are ending their fact checking program [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: They are completely getting rid of all of their mostly third party fact checkers and replacing them with community notes like they have on Twitter, meaning users will be doing the fact checking and trying to post notes to correct disinformation on Facebook, instead of having professional fact checkers doing that. He will be limiting moderation on certain subjects. He specifically mentioned immigration and gender. People who have subsequently reported about the policy changes have said there are also things about race and some other subjects that will not be moderated. And this is like basically saying that censorship on those subjects is out of touch with mainstream discourse now.

All of this he made pretty clear, was revolving around Trump's election. They're gonna be focusing their content filters, like their automatic, not the actual people doing the fact checking or the humans doing the moderation, but the robo content filters [laughs] on illegal content and high severity violations, as he described them. So that's stuff like drugs and terrorism and child exploitation, that sort of thing. And then anything that is not on those subjects, in order for the filters to act in any way, people will have to affirmatively report them. The filters won't act preemptively. They're gonna bring back what they call civic content, which is like their political content.

They had been, as a lot of you probably know, sort of hiding it. You had to go into your settings and say that you specifically wanted to see it to get it in your feed. So they're taking away that filter, that'll be back in your feed. And then the [laughs], there's two more. One is the safety and content moderation teams. They are moving to Texas, where they're, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, “where there will be less concerns about their biases.” They are currently in California, so that tells you which biases [laughs] he cares about and which he doesn't. Also, by the way, other reporters have said a lot of their content, there's some of their content moderation teams are already in Texas, but…

Jonathan Walton: It's true.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It’s a hand wave, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Exactly. The rest of them will be moving to Texas.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And then finally, he said he'll be working with Trump and the US government to push back on governments, he specially named Europe, Latin America and China, who want Facebook to be doing more moderation and content filtering, which he always refers to as censorship, to push back against them, combined with the power of the American federal government. Specifically noting that over the last four years, it has been difficult, because the American government was asking for more censorship.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And all of this he justifies under kind of a heading of giving people a voice and allowing people to share their real experiences and free speech. He mentions the constitution and just our culture of free speech and discourse. Those are kind of the, I don't know, bigger ideological points that he gives behind it. I will just note before we start, this is very similar to the moves that Twitter has made and, important for us, this is similar to what Substack has been the whole time. Substack has been a non-moderation, almost entirely unmoderated platform for a very long time. They only moderate material that is either illegal in some way or pornographic. They have pretty much let everything else be, which has caused some controversy.

So we will get into it, Jonathan. As I said, anybody can comment or ask questions as we go. But Jonathan, before we jump into what we think good political education is in the midst of changes, like what's happening at Meta, I wanna talk a little bit about kind of the ideology, the world view behind this, what the politics and economics behind this way of thinking are, because that will inform how we think that you move forward. So tell us what you think about what the world view is, what the ideology is behind these sorts of changes, and how does yours differ from that worldview [laughter]? Because spoilers, it does differ.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I've got a significant amount of disagreement with all of this.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Lots of dissonance that I feel around it. And there's a meme that someone put out really, there's amazing art happening right now around the different things that are happening in culture, particularly around war, injustice, violence, et cetera. So if you're not following amazing artists on Instagram or, we’ll dive into how to use social media a little bit more later, but find some great art, find some great photos, find some things. And I found one that basically showed Trump sitting on a throne with a stream of visibly cartoonish but totally recognizable CEOs dropping million dollar coins at his feet to signify the reality that there are many, many CEOs right now, basically tithing a million dollars paying tribute to our new leader.

And I think that is what we need to hold as the reality, is that all of this is subservient to the reality that these CEOs are trying to make as much money as possible and to protect the empires that they're building, and there is no larger framework of engaging in a social good. The reality is wherever the wind blows that's going to be the most profitable for their company, that is where they're going. And I think this is signified by how Morning Brew Daily, one of the most popular podcasts on the planet, talks about how Elon Musk invested money in the election. That was how they framed it.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: He “invested” $227 million in Trump becoming president. We should not call election manipulation and subversion of democracy an investment. But I think that's exactly how the powers that be see and engage with our current political system downstream of Citizens United in 2010 and all that kind of stuff. So I think we have to remember that we sit on stolen land that’s set up in an exploitative, capitalistic system, and the moves that are being made are to protect the accumulation and the unbridled accumulation of that capital. And I think pretty explicitly now and enshrined into law, like with Citizens United, is this political and economic marrying which has ballooned into just all kinds of campaign finance violations that are no longer violations, and secret organizations and all those kinds of things that I wish were different, but am recognizing, praying and working against so that they actually will be.

Sy Hoekstra: It's interesting to me that you mentioned those things in particular, because as we have said with Donald Trump in so many other arenas, he is not particularly unique in… like everybody always donates to presidents’ inaugurations. Companies have always donated money to senatorial campaigns or to whatever.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: That's not new. The idea that your whole goal of your company is to maximize wealth for your shareholders is not new. It's just as usual with everything else. Trump magnifies things and puts them out in the open, not just him, but the whole culture around him, puts them out in the open in a way that they weren't before. And that's the chief thing that surprises people about him a lot is just how brazen he is.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: But, yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think the things, part of what we're maybe uncovering there is the things that change in how you politically educate yourself are not about radically new ideas that are coming down the pike. They're just about things crystallizing and elevating in a new way, and that's why we have to change. But, yeah, you're right. It's a cohesive thing. It makes sense with how we've had 40 years or so of sort of Republican orthodoxy being the purpose of a corporation is primarily to maximize shareholder value, maximize the value for people who own the company, and then that will in turn, be in the best interest of society, which is sort of an article of faith, that those interests will be aligned, that it is useful for people [laughs] who want to make a lot of money to propagate that faith.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, go ahead.

Jonathan Walton: No, I was gonna say, how about you? What are some of the things standing out for you as we engage?

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, there’s so much, Jonathan. There's too much.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: I have so many things written down [laughter]. So I will pause and allow you to talk as I go through this.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: So I think you're right in what you're talking about is the motivations behind what CEOs are doing, but more broadly, the reason that things like what Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or other people are saying about their social media platforms, there's ideologies that justify those things in the minds of people who aren't making money off of them [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And one of those values or one of those, I don't know, it's a phrase, it's an idea that a lot of people have, is the marketplace of ideas. So this is a big part of our, quote- unquote, First Amendment or free speech culture in America. It's the idea that if you just put all your ideas out there in the world and all the justifications for them, the best ones will win out. Like products. You have a bunch of companies competing selling similar products. People are gonna buy the products that are the best at the best price, and the other ones will not do as well as whoever manages to provide the best product at the best price. It's the same. It is the marketplace of ideas.

You provide the best ideas with the best justifications, you get them out there, they will beat all the other worse ideas, and the good ideas will dominate society. And so I say that that's important because that's kind of the reason that people say so there should be no moderation.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Nobody should be blocking anybody's content, because actually, the way to defeat ideas is by presenting better ideas, not by destroying them or censoring or moderating them. Now I'm not in favor of censorship [laughter]. I'm not in favor of shutting people down in oppressive, authoritarian regimes. I just think the notion that better ideas, if they're put out there, will just automatically be bad ones is absurd [laughter]. And that bad ideas can be propagated through things like money and advertising and political power and whatever. You can do things short of all out censorship and oppression that are bad for our civic discourse [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: That is a thing that I firmly believe. It is not that there's one bad guy of censorship, and as long as we defeat that, then everything will be, all the conditions will be perfect for beautiful, productive public discourse [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And I think part of the problem is that the idea, doesn't really account for either emotions or power dynamics

.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So It kind of stems from a belief, kind of like our beliefs that everybody in the free market just makes perfectly rationally, self interested decisions all the time. It just doesn't account for culture and for emotions [laughs] and decisions that people make that are based on unprocessed or suppressed or repressed emotions, whatever. People are just rational beings that only make good, calculated, computer-like decisions. And so that's just kind of like one fact that it has wrong about the world, but the reality of power dynamics is like, makes what Zuckerberg is doing baffling, if you take them seriously.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Because it's basically the idea is, I'm gonna get out there and be able to say what I want. Because effectively, what he's doing is allowing people to say bigoted things again. That is the primary change he's making to content moderation. He's letting people say transphobic things. He's letting people say discriminatory things about immigrants. He's letting people insult people because of their race again, all those things will not be moderated any longer.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And he says that that is giving people a voice and allowing people to share their experiences. That's one of the weirdest things to me. Like your experience is bigotry [laughter]? “I have to be able to share my experience, which is that I hate this group of people.” It’s wild.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: But it does not take into account the fact that people are going to walk away from the conversation, because this is present. If you just let everybody talk, there's gonna be a bunch of trolls. And if a bunch of those trolls gather in one place, then the people who they're trolling are going to leave that place and you're not gonna have a good discussion anymore. You're gonna have a bunch of trolls. So it’s like… I don't know. I feel like it's something that may be hard to believe when you haven't been on the receiving end of a lot of it, which Zuckerberg has, he faces a lot of anti-Semitism, but he's basically expecting everyone to just be like, their reaction to be, “Oh, Facebook has a bunch of horrifying racist trolls who can say whatever they want,” which on the internet is like truly vile stuff, “And I need to go in there and fight them,” [laughs]!

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: “I'm gonna take my time, my limited time and my limited energy, and I'm gonna go out there and beat them in the marketplace of ideas, and we'll get good information, good ideas out there on Facebook.” Facebook is gonna become like what Twitter has become. It's gonna become overrun by trolls and bots and whatever, and it's gonna be a much less pleasant place to be. It's gonna be a place that people don't want to be. And even when Twitter had a lot more benefit to it than it does now, a lot of people didn't wanna be on there either. People were constantly complaining about [laughs] how miserable it was, how angry and hateful and just like not helpful people were being there.

So anyways, all this part of the problem stems from the idea that there's just a big old marketplace of ideas that we can engage in perfectly rationally without any power dynamics [laughs]. Your thoughts before I move on to my many other thoughts [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Well, no, I mean, I think the reality is we live in a world that exists for… man, how do I say this?

Sy Hoekstra: The benefit of certain people?

Jonathan Walton: I didn't wanna say it so simply, but yes [laughter]. The world that we live in exists for the benefit of some. And again, I mean, I've talked about this many, many times. But if we think about the world that we live in as a large plantation, then things make sense.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: The goal is that a certain group of people gets to decide how things go, and then there's another group of people who gets to implement how those things go so they're not suffering. And then there's the folks that are just experiencing this. And the thing that I think is an exceptional level of hypocrisy, is that if the bottom, quote- unquote, decides to fight, they need to fight in the way that the people at the top have determined that that fight should take place, and so that fight right now is community notes. Whereas like when Elon Musk changed Twitter to X and then literally told ad companies to go F themselves, and with emphasis, that to me looks like someone who has embraced the reality of the power that they've been given and are now going to use it in a way explicitly to name what the person downstream of them cannot change or challenge.

Similar to Trump. Trump said when he was on the debate stage with Hillary Clinton years ago, he said, “I gave you money. Nobody wants to talk about that. I gave you money, I gave you money, I gave you money.” He's saying the quiet part out loud. And so he's using the tools of the game and redefining the game, but the people who don't have power cannot change the rules of the game, and when they play, the rules are changed around them. And so I think that height of hypocrisy that is not invisible is the problem, because we… I mean, the system itself is a problem, but the reality that on the one hand I can say, “Hey friend, I'm a CEO and I run a business, and we are struggling, so we can't give you your bonuses this year. We can't pay you a living wage. We can't do that.”

And then in the next article, on a different podcast, say, “Friends, we've got record profits.” So this is a problem [laughter]. And you can't say, oh, on the one hand, “We are struggling,” and on the other hand, “I just bought a $300 million yacht.” On the one hand, “We can't pay you living wages,” but on the other hand, “We're gonna do historic buybacks for our stocks and give dividends back to…” I think before, it was harder for us to see, but now in the media environment that we have, the hypocrisy is on display, and now you're saying, “Hey, don't look at the trees, even though these are all sequoias. Don't look at them, though.” And that I think is a is a exceptional struggle in the current moment that we're in.

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, do you really think there is a yacht out there that costs $300 million?

Jonathan Walton: I know that there are.

Sy Hoekstra: No, there can't possibly. That's not possible.

Jonathan Walton: No. I think Bezos’ yacht was a half a billion dollars. I'm not joking.

Sy Hoekstra: That's… what [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: So all of this, when I was a real estate agent, the difference between price and cost. And these are ways that people have chosen to hide their money. Like, “I'm gonna have this investment, I'm gonna have this thing,” and yachts are part of that milieu right now [laughter]. So, yeah. Somebody in the chat can Google it and drop in the chat.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I was gonna say I’m gonna look this up later. I’m open to the possibility that you're correct, but I currently don't believe you [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No worries. I remember clicking on those things, but anyway, go for it. We don't have to talk about yachts, it’s kind of…

Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no. This is definitely a rabbit trail. Okay, so another thing for me, it's kind of two things that go together that are behind the Zuckerberg announcement. He mentioned a couple times the Constitution and the First Amendment. A thing that I want to tell people as a former lawyer who has actually worked on some First Amendment cases and stuff like that. The actions of Meta and any private company in the world have nothing to do with the First Amendment whatsoever [laughter]. This is something that everybody needs to learn. It's like a basic civics thing that the First Amendment is about what the government does. It is not about what private not about what private companies do.

Legally speaking, the Constitution does not enter into this at all. Facebook could decide tomorrow that it is going to ban all Democrats and only Republicans will be allowed on its platform, and nobody would have a First Amendment claim against them [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Because it doesn't matter, they're not the government. Of course, they have a massive effect on our discourse, and our political conversation in America, but the First Amendment is not concerned with any effect on our political discourse. It's only concerned with the government. That's one thing. Another thing is like the culture... So the more generous way to think about, maybe he said the Constitution as a slip. People sometimes talk about the First Amendment, and what they're actually talking about is our general culture of free speech, our general civic discussion. And the belief that Zuckerberg seems to have is that his censorship of whatever, people being angry about immigration harms that culture, like hurts the general culture of free speech in America.

And the sort of ironic thing is, one of the things that the First Amendment actually does also protect is a private company's right to discriminate, meaning their right to decide to only publish things of a certain point of view. The way that you get Fox News or the way that you get MSNBC, with their biases, they're only hiring people who have their same biases, is that they are allowed to specifically by First Amendment law [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: They're allowed to make those discriminatory choices as private entities that the government could not make, and that allows people to have news sources that come from their own perspectives. And we've always had those things, and I don't think that's bad. I think it's fine to have, like you have conversations with the people that you agree with, and you have conversations with the people that you don't and you need to balance those things out. The problem is actually things like Facebook's algorithm [laughs] that create echo chambers and create like heightened, there's always been echo chambers, heightened echo chambers, and make us angered and outraged all the time. So it's not actually the… the moderation isn't really a problem. It's sort of the greed behind the companies.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: The people who have realized, “Oh, I can make a ton of money by making people super angry.” [laughs] And I don't care what that does to our public discourse, because it makes me money.” That's the problem.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And I'm not suggesting we nationalize all of our news or whatever. This is just a problem that we have to constantly be pushing against. And obviously, money and business also creates opportunities for there to be great investigatory journalism and stuff that we need and whatever. I apologize for the sirens in my background, I'm in Manhattan. But I'm not saying, stop private companies forever owning whatever. I'm talking about the culture of greed that has sprung up in our economy, and has sprung up specifically in our news that leads people to purchase…Rupert Murdoch has been a big problem [laughs] over the decades. People that are trying to make financial empires off of making as much money as possible from media, from specifically our news media, from the media that affects this culture.

That's the real problem to me. It's not actually the fact that somebody has said, “I will not let people say anti-Semitic things on my platform.” You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Obviously, the way I'm putting it makes that seem obvious, makes any other opinions seem silly. But I'm just saying that's a thought process that I think is also behind Meta’s decisions. How about you, Jonathan? Do you have anything else to say on that?

Jonathan Walton: Well, I think I'll get more into that when we talk about how to actually engage in political education. Because the reality is, the amount of money made off of outrage and distraction in entertainment is enormous. And it gets all thrown into the bucket of content, and that is a new thing that I think we need to engage with, as I also confirm that Jeff Bezos’ maiden voyage of his yacht, Koru, that was $500 million set off in April of 2023.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: But, yeah. I agree with you that outrage called engagement is an exceptionally profitable business that did not exist 20 years ago. But it's now in fervent, an enormous fervor in our current reality. So, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I think it existed, but it was a lot harder to do.

Jonathan Walton: That’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: It was harder to make it as focused and effective as it is now without all the data that you get from being on the internet. Just from having a website or a social media company that allows you [laughs] to more precisely target your outrage [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: It's serious. That's the issue there. I'm gonna say, I think there's also some amount, not a ton, or not as much, but there's some amount of blame to the consumers.

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Those of us who opt into it, I don't wanna put all the blame on us, meaning I don't wanna put all the blame on just like the readers of the news or whatever for falling for the click bait or falling for the outrage machine or the echo chambers, because these massive companies that have a ton of money have studied in enormously fine detail how to manipulate your behavior [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Well, it's…

Sy Hoekstra: The thing that you're trying to resist is much bigger than you, but also, there's a culture around how we consume media, and that has also gotten more clickbait-y and angry and all that kind of thing.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I don't know where the line between… I don't know if you can blame oil for going into a funnel.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: I don't know if you can blame the oil, because I do think there's a level of impossibility that exists. And we could apply this to any number of injustices. But if I am an activist in the United States, and I have to buy a phone to communicate, I am participating in an injustice that I want to stop. And that I think is the quote- unquote, the tensions we're always trying to negotiate and quote- unquote consumers, right? That term coming out of post-World War Two, in the Neo Liberalist economics, that now we're all consumers, that I think does two things. One, it frames us as consumers, and literally turns most people, experiences, resources, things around us, into things to be consumed, not stewarded, taken care of, not extended a life of, then you get planned obsolescence and all of those kinds of things.

And so I do think there's a level of accountability for us. I just don't know where us being the folks that are literally trying to eat every day and buy things and communicate, I don't know where that line of complicity versus like, man, it's impossible to be a guy that begins and ends in our just saturated, dominated culture.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, it's hard.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, I think that was a good thought to end that part of the discussion. What do you think, should we move on? Okay.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, let's do it.

Sy Hoekstra: So let's talk about how we actually stay politically educated, which is more than just like informed.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And being informed is part of it, but we're actually talking about how you might kind of form yourself as someone who is trying to be a faithful person engaging in politics, even faithful Christian, faithful citizen, whatever.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Faithful neighbor. And to be a little bit broader than Meta, we're also talking about that in the context of the legacy media companies like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, who are increasingly doing whatever Trump wants. So Jonathan, tips for being well politically educated in this new but also, as we've discussed, connected to the old environment [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I would say there's a few things that I think are consistent, but look different in the context that we're in right now, in our current day. And so I think the first thing is, most of us consume media, and I say consume intentionally. We're not processing it, it's just coming at us. We do it individually. And so the first thing that I would say is please, have conversations with people about what you're watching and reading. Most of us don't recognize that we're in rabbit holes, that we're in echo chambers, that we're in cultural bubbles. We don't usually for the most part, willingly opt in, decide to stay, then amplify and then radicalize. It's not usually a road we're all trying to get on.

And so I think we should have conversations with folks about the content we're engaging with, and then up from there, I think we need to start to identify the content that's coming at us, because it's not all the same.

Sy Hoekstra: Hey, can I say one thing about the community thing before we move on to another thing?

Jonathan Walton: For sure. Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: So the community thing is both to get you out of your echo chamber, and you can have other people, I don't know, fact check you kind of, but it's also that will help you get… not just out of your echo chamber. That will educate you more generally about how people think about things. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Right, right.

Sy Hoekstra: You can read a bunch of things, some people are good at this. You can read a bunch of things from a different perspective of your own, and you can kind of get the general thoughts and patterns behind it. But it's so much easier to do when you're actually interacting with people.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So I just think that it'll round you out, and you will round other people out in a way that's beneficial for everyone.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely.

Sy Hoekstra: But, please continue. Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: No, and we talked about this offline, but me saying, “Hey, Priscilla,” my wife, “This and this, this happened,” and she goes, “Why do you believe that?” Just that little question is helpful for me to be like, “Well, crap. Why do I believe that?”

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: That actually might be a little ridiculous, that I made these 19 connections and now I'm running all around, even if it's just inside my own head, with an idea that could actualize itself into something really unhelpful.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: So up from that, I think we need to slow down and analyze the content that's coming at us, because in your Instagram feed, or in your whatever Meta platform, like I've seen my platform change already with what's on my Instagram feed.

Sy Hoekstra: How so?

Jonathan Walton: Oh, they're trying to make me angry and engage.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: I can see it. And they're either trying to get me angry or entice me. So there's more women in my feed. I don't wanna make comments on the looks of celebrities, but that's what's coming up. So I have to… I've been clicking not interested, not interested [laughs] trying to get out of that. But that was a discernible change. I love MMA and Muay Thai and things like that, and so I think they're trying to pull me somewhere I'm not interested in going. But all that to say…

Sy Hoekstra: You mean they're like, “Oh, this guy likes MMA, so he must also like hot celebrities?”

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, because they are in the same photos, like the fights and they're in the background, stuff like that. So I'm like, “Oh, I don't wanna see that.”

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, makes sense.

Jonathan Walton: But in that same feed I might see the latest update from a fight, or I might see a video about race that's very educational. Then I have an ad from Temu, then I have political commentary, and it's branded all as content. But the reality is, some of that is news, some of that is entertainment, some of that is analysis.

Sy Hoekstra: Some is advertisement.

Jonathan Walton: Some of its advertising. And I think we have to slow down and stop swiping so quickly to understand what is coming at us each day, what we're actually looking at. And so one of the things that I try to do is, even in click not interested, is that to turn my social media feed from a dumpster fire to a garden.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Like, how can I tend this in such a way that it helps me grow up into the person I wanna be, not just the person that they're trying to form me into. And so as we're taking media in, please, please, please stop. Please stop watching short form content. It's conditioning. I'm conditioned, my attention span is shorter, and stuff is hard. It's hard to understand capitalism. It's hard to understand political frameworks.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: These are difficult concepts that can’t be explained in a reel. They just can't. And so I think, for all of the things that we're consuming and taking in, I do think the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart is an amazing tool to go back to just recognize, “Oh, all of the things I'm consuming right now are coming at me are not being processed. So the stuff that I'm consuming, oh, it's actually all opinion. I haven't learned what happened. I've only learned what people think about what happens.” So I've seen fires burning in California, but I actually don't know why the fires are burning. I actually don't know the background of water usage and families meeting with representatives to get water to flow to their pistachio and pomegranate farm. I didn't know that. I didn't know water is being rerouted this way.

And even Frontline just released a documentary on the Maui fires and how that happened. There's like, Inside Climate News just released a report on climate change and trauma. So there's things that we can engage with that are much longer than a swipe up or down that will help us not to become radicalized, because radicalization in any direction is radically unhelpful. Because when we are radicalized we don't listen, we’re unwilling to grow. And then what happens is everything goes through the filter of our own hard thinking, which I think we just need to get out of.

Sy Hoekstra: Wait Jonathan, when you say radicalism or radicalizing, do you mean extremism?

Jonathan Walton: Oh, you know what, I do mean extremism.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I was gonna say, I think Jonathan is actually kind of in favor of certain types of radicalism [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, people would call me radical. I think we should love people no matter what, which is a radical thing. Every single person is made in the image of God and worthy of dignity, value and worth, all of that. That's a radical thought. I do believe that.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: So maybe let's replace that with extremism.

Sy Hoekstra: I have a couple thoughts on this too, if you don’t mind.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, go for it.

Sy Hoekstra: In favor of slowing down and, basically, you're kind of talking about checking your sources a little bit, or checking your facts, or whatever's behind the opinion.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: That's important. And as I've said before, if you take a not very long amount of time [laughter] to go and read some of the actual facts, and ask yourself, what is different between what I'm reading here and what the opinion columnist said or what the person said on social media, you can be very quickly, miles ahead of the average person [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: A lot of people just don't know the facts. You learn a few more things and you are going to be able to help a lot of people out of misinformed takes about things.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And the other thing about slowing down, and here's my plug for the fediverse, for Mastodon [laughs], is that you can dislike things on Instagram while you want, you still have your algorithm. You can make lists on Twitter, Bluesky or whatever, and that'll help, you can only look at the things that you wanna see and not the “for you” tab or whatever. On Mastodon all you ever see is the things that you've affirmatively followed. There's no algorithm, there's no company trying to manipulate you at all [laughs]. It's all nonprofit, it's wonderful. I've been only on Mastodon for a while, like it’s my personal social media, and the past couple weeks I felt very vindicated [laughter] in that decision.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: But go on, before we get to mine, you had a couple more tips here.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, the last thing was, become familiar with the other ways other people are educated.

Sy Hoekstra: Right.

Jonathan Walton: So just ask, “Hey, what are you reading?” in your friend group, in your family. Say, “Hey, who do you follow on Instagram, or Bluesky or Mastodon? Who do you read on LinkedIn? What documentaries are you watching?” I think just moving politics, money, race, class, gender, status, religion, out of this box of untouchable topics into just a normal communal conversation will help us. I was having a conversation a few days ago with someone about a racist incident I had in my neighborhood. And they looked at me and they said, “What? Like that still happens.” And I was like, “Ah, yeah, racism’s still a thing.” Or we had a conversation, and they were like, “Your daughter would experience that?”

I'm like, “Yeah.” He's like, “You believe your daughter will experience racism?” I'm like, “I do, and she does.” But we don't talk regularly, and maybe his friend group doesn't have these conversations or engage in this way. So just having normal conversations where we're bringing up all those topics in a curious way, not a judgmental, not a corrective, but saying like, “Hey, what do you watch? What are you reading?” With a posture of curiosity to connect with someone, not an explicit posture to just correct them so that they're looking at the same things you are. We actually, I think, just have to talk with people about what they're engaging with, what they're reading, and how they're living their lives, and whether it is genuine.

Sy Hoekstra: And for a whole lot more detail on that particular tip, you can go to our last podcast episode [laughter]. witch was more or less all about that.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. How do you talk to people?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly. How do you have difficult conversations across differences on important subjects?

Jonathan Walton: You have more tips, Sy? Go for it.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I do. I do have more. Here's my first one. My first one has to do with the thing that I hear all the time, which is people saying, “I cannot believe how somebody thinks X. I cannot believe how somebody does whatever.” And a lot of times people are saying that they mean something genuine. They're just shocked, or they're just surprised, or whatever. There are reasonable ways to say that. A lot of times, though, when people say that, what they mean is, “I am stunned at what a bad person this is. And I'm also kind of talking about how I'm better than them,” [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I’m guilty as charged.

Sy Hoekstra: Well, I think all of us are probably guilty of that to a certain degree.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: But here's the thing that I want people to cultivate. Which is when you have the thought, “I cannot understand how somebody believes that,” go understand it [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Go find out. Which is, obviously it's related to what Jonathan just said, but what I mean is, assume that the person who is saying those things, in order to be able to understand how other people are being educated, you have to assume that they're a human.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: You have to assume that they have reasons, good or bad, that are similar in, maybe not in content, but they are similar in kind to the reasons that you have for believing the stuff that you do.

Jonathan Walton: Right. Exactly.

Sy Hoekstra: And if you were in their position, you would probably believe similar things to them. And so that is just a big part of it is. I'm always amazed at how many arguments get dismissed, and then the dismissal itself, an implication of the dismissal is that the other person is basically not human. Is basically just not somebody who has any sort of valid belief, just constantly. And not just on social media, everywhere in our political discourse, in a way that makes me honestly pretty sad, even if I do actually think the thing that the other person was saying is objectively ridiculous [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So another thing that we talk about all the time is listening to marginalized people. But there's a thing that I wanna add on to that. So the thing that we usually say is, we wanna listen to, the thing that I have said a lot on the show is we wanna listen to marginalized people because they actually understand the systems that marginalize them better than the people who the systems are built for.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan was talking about the systems that we have. They're built for somebody. Part of that, part of making a system for someone is finding ways to hide the fact that the system is being made for that person.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: It's unbelievable to us now, or to a lot of people now, but the system of slavery had a whole bunch of reasons behind it that White people actually believed and thought it was a it was good, it was a good thing. And the good thing that they had all those reasons that function to keep them from ever thinking about the horrors. So I think you have to listen to marginalized people, but you actually, the thing that I wanna add on is you have to understand who those marginalized people are [laughs], which is a factual question. Meaning a lot of opinion polls have told us that more than half of White Republicans believe that, or it's Republicans period, believe that White people are the most oppressed racial group in America.

So if you believe that, then who are you going to listen to about issues of race? White people. And what are your going to be concerns? Your concerns are that White people are unfairly accused of racism and that White people are not being pushed out by these unfair affirmative action DEI, whatever, “Most things threaten me, and I'm the vulnerable one, and therefore I need to fight back against that.”

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So you need to be clear about who's... And I just gave an example that to us and our listeners is like a very clear and straightforward one. But there are gonna be, I don't know. There are times where that's harder, and you need to understand that your difference, the difference between you and someone who's against affirmative action, is probably a question of fact, not a question of ideology.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: You probably both believe that racism is bad [laughs], you just completely disagree on who's the victim of racism.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And that's a thing like, that thing that I just said about, “I can't understand how people think this,” or whatever, it is sometimes, or the thing that somebody said to you about, “Do you really believe your daughter's gonna face racism?” Like that person who I think you, I don't know if you said it or not, but I'm assuming is White.

Jonathan Walton: No. This is a person of color.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, fascinating.

Jonathan Walton: That's a wrench there, but go ahead [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: There's a wrench, but it actually doesn't matter.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I know.

Sy Hoekstra: I was just making an assumption that was wrong.

Jonathan Walton: No worries.

Sy Hoekstra: Those beliefs, when you encounter them, it is genuinely hard to believe that they are true, and again, part of assuming that someone is a human might be saying, “Okay, what are the facts that this person has wrong?” [laughs] and not assuming, “Okay, why is this person so ridiculous and absurd? Let me make myself better than them.” Just saying, “What's wrong here?” And how they're being educated is part of that question, too. All these things tie together.

The last thing I wanna say, buck the norm in America of being anti-elite and anti-education [laughter]. Don't swing the other way on that pendulum, and don't be an elitist or someone who looks down on people who are uneducated, but you need to basically just don't have the bias.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Elites and people who are well educated are again humans [laughter]. Like we're all just humans, and they've had different experiences than you've had. They've been educated in something that you haven't, or they've been educated in a lot of things that you haven't. There's lots of people who have tons of expertise that I do not have, and my job is to figure out… There might be some bad ideas floating around in their field, there might be some bad perspectives that they represent, but there's also a whole lot of things they know that I don't. And you need to figure out ways to sort the bad from the good. We just need to treat people like nuanced human beings [laughter] instead of being anti-elitist and anti-…

Here's one thing that I have noticed, Jonathan, and you can correct me or add nuance or whatever. I grew up with a lot of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism being… honestly, just being White in America, but also being White evangelical in particular. That was just the culture around me. That wasn't my parents or my immediate family, but that was the culture around me.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Since getting to know Black Christians [laughs] or just Black people in general, I have found a remarkable lack of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism, and much more of an attitude of like, “Oh, someone from our community went and got an education. Great, what can we learn from them?”

Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: And there's just much less, I don't know, there's so much less of that, “What, you think you're better than me?” [laughter] that I grew up with, and so much more of an assumption that, “Oh, good. You got some information, you got some education, you learned about stuff.” And then an assumption that you're gonna come back and use that to help the community.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And that is just a big… I don't think I've ever said that out loud before, and I appreciate that you're [laughter] just listening to me just talk about your culture.

Jonathan Walton: No, I think that… I mean, there are streams of Black folks that don't do that.

Sy Hoekstra: For sure… because everybody is a human [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It's true. But I will say that the fewer resources that you have or are available to you, the more reliant on the community you are by necessity.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so this idea that… and you actually said this in, I think two podcasts ago, the idea that at some point you are supposed to be able to just take care of yourself, independent of every single person around you, is unbelievable in a lot of ways. And so Randy Woodley, first episode of our last season, talked about if we look at a culture of a people like that, and you can analyze it by the folk tales that they tell. And he said, Native Americans and First Nations indigenous people would never write a story about how someone left their whole family and then succeeded and created a life for themselves.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: They wouldn't do that. It's not their dream to do that. And so the reality is, for me, it's like, and I think this is most prevalent in immigrant communities. It's like, “You are going to college for all of us. You are going to get this job for all of us.” And that is the antithesis of what we were all talking about with Meta’s, with capitulation. It's like, they're like, “I made a business for me and for mine, I did not make one for everybody.” And then you laid out like, the law exists for this thing to work this way, not for everybody to have X, Y and Z. Like one of the, I feel like a stream throughout this conversation has been, are we going to exist for the benefit of the community, or are we going to exist for the benefit of a few people, or an individual?

And helpful to go back to Tim Keller if we wanna talk about trying not to be anti-elite, and trying not to be anti-education, one of the things that I appreciated about Tim Keller, which is why he was vilified by people on the right in conservative Christianity, is because he was unwilling to dehumanize people who made lots of money, and lived in New York City in that way. And when he wrote Generous Justice, like he said, when you go back to the Hebrew Scriptures, the definition of injustice is disadvantaging the community for the advantage of an individual. And the definition of justice is disadvantaging yourself for the advantage of the community. And he said, if you look back and forth, wickedness and justice stand on those two poles.

And so everything that you're saying, I think, is about how to… the last points you're making is, can we refuse to dehumanize people and refuse to participate in wickedness so that we might humanize people and humanize ourselves to be able to participate in an ecosystem and not a plantation?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so I hope that we're able to do that in a little bit in this...

Sy Hoekstra: Absolutely, that's part of why what we said is community is a big part of this. Community is inherently anti-authoritarian.

Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs]. It sounds so simple, but it’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Who knew that loving your neighbor as yourself might be an important commandment [laughter]? Who could have predicted such a thing? I think that's a great note to end on, Jonathan. Look at how well our outline matched our time that we had on Substack live [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: That's awesome.

Sy Hoekstra: We did it.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: We’ve gotten good at podcasting [laughter]. Alright, listen, there's two ways you can follow up with this conversation, is our last bonus episode, and then also the episode from earlier in this season with Matt Lumpkin which had a lot to do with getting…

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Matt Lumpkin’s great.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, it had a lot to do with getting curious and empathizing with people who believe wildly… It was specifically about people with who believe in conspiracy theories, and how people get in and out of them, Christians in particular.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: So that's a very helpful exercise in a lot of the stuff that we're talking about today.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and if you wanna check out our Anthology, like his essay is in there, along with a guy named Bart Tocci. It's just great essays to engage more deeply in long form reading, friends, not just videos.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Absolutely. Alright, so I think that's it then. I'll wrap us up. Reminder, if you're watching us here, please become a paid subscriber and get access to our bonus episodes, our monthly Zoom calls, commenting on our posts and more. Everybody give us a rate and review on Apple Podcasts. Give us a rating on Spotify.

Jonathan Walton: Thanks so much.

Sy Hoekstra: Anywhere else you can do a rating, we'd really appreciate it. Our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Joyce Ambale has done the transcripts, and our paid subscribers are the producers of this show. Thank you all so much for watching and for listening, and we will see you next month.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com