Summary

The news is terrible. Americans are extremely divided along political and religious lines, and far-right radicals have completely taken over one of the country’s major political parties. It’s a lot to handle.

And yet, as bad as things are, it’s important to realize that they are improving. Although it may be hard to perceive right now, beginning with Generation X, every single generation of Americans has become successively more tolerant and more willing to update and expand the social safety net in ways that every other industrialized country has done so.

While Generation Z is by far the most active and progressive group of young people in decades, the older Americans who agree with them are going to have to stay in the fight to protect democracy by expanding it.

How do we do that though? It’s a complex question, a significant part of which is getting people with progressive views to be more open about challenging right wing extremism in their communities, families, and institutions, especially religious institutions.

In today’s episode, I’m pleased to welcome John Pavlovitz, he’s a writer, pastor, and activist who has personally experienced being canceled by intolerant Christians a few years ago. He’s since gone on to write several books and has a new one out that we’ll be discussing called “Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty is Trending.”

The transcript of our March 15, 2024 conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the complete text. The video of this episode is available.

--Matthew Sheffield

Theory of Change is part of the Flux network, please support our work and get more content like this by subscribing.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:04 — The mental health crisis lurking behind MAGA

17:48 — Religious fundamentalists have finally realized they do not have facts on their side

28:57 — The challenge of reconciling progressive values with ancient religious texts

33:59 — How to love MAGA relatives while still protecting yourself

40:34 — Understanding what tolerance actually means

42:38 — Religion should be about the values rather than historical narratives

51:39 — The world has changed less than our awareness of it, and this is frightening for people who never really paid attention

01:00:22 — The need for religious and non-religious progressives to unite around common values

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been verified. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So there are a lot of different themes in your book that are worth exploring and I really do think that, and this, this is a theme in some of your other works—that it's easy to see all these terrible things that are happening and conflict. But it's important also that we see more than just that.

JOHN PAVLOVITZ: Right. For sure. I think that it's really easy in the day to day being in the trenches of life and being really up close to so much that we're struggling with. And the news is bombarding us constantly with all the threats and all the things to be worried about.

And there, many of them are valid, but for me, it's always about helping people and myself right-size the threats and to realize that that is only part of the story and that there is so much beautiful work happening in the small and close of all of our lives. And sometimes it's important to remember that the, the agency that we have individually and collectively, and that's what the book and that's what most of my [00:04:00] work is about.

SHEFFIELD: Well, okay. So when you say “right-size,” what do you mean by that?

PAVLOVITZ: Well, I think many of us get up every day and we hop onto social media and we see something that alarms us or worries us and we want people to be informed. And so we share that. And then they, they share it and they repost it and then they comment to us and we get a notification about that.

Then we see it on our timelines again. And so what social media does and what that influx of media can do is artificially enlarge the bad news. So that by 9 a. m, 10 a. m, we've seen the same stories over and over again. So much that it's sort of saturated us and we can get so deflated that by the morning we want to just stop everything.

And it's important, I think, that we remember there are other, there's other evidence. There's other data that we need to take [00:05:00] in and be reminded of that to balance out all of the existential dread that so many of us are feeling.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, that's true. And well, and then also, I mean, you use the word existential and we're actually going to be doing a couple of episodes on theory of change about that later in the year existentialism proper.

But one of the key tenants of of existentialism is that you are the one that's responsible for how you choose to respond to the situation that you live in. And, and you talk about in the book, a lot of people have this belief that somebody's just going to come in out of nowhere and fix everything and save us from this mess. And it's a nice, it's a nice thought, but it's, it's a fantasy.

PAVLOVITZ: It is the, the, the greatest movements in history have been born out of people who looked around, saw [00:06:00] the evidence in front of them, and And decided that as dire or as disconcerting as it may be, there's something that I can do to affect that.

And those 2 sort of resources we have our agency and proximity. We are always somewhere. We always have. Closeness to a community into a group of people and to need and then we have. something that we can do to affect that. It's the idea that the arc of the moral universe, yeah, it is long and it does bend toward justice, but human beings are the arc benders.

We, we have the ability to affect the times in which we live. We're not passive participants in them. And so, whether that comes from a spiritual place or from your own morality or your own sense of identity, That's what I want people to embrace that there is always something you can do. And as you said what happens is is objective reality, but then we editorialize that in our heads and we can [00:07:00] choose how we respond to everything happening around us.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And what an important part of being able to choose how to respond is. Is sound mental health care for yourself and and that, and that's something that you talk about also that, the, I mean, there is. A mental health crisis, particularly for Trump supporters. And I, it's something that, it's, it's something that really doesn't get addressed in, in most of the mainstream media coverage.

Like they love, sending a reporter on an expedition to a diner in Ohio or a church in Georgia. But they don't actually, really dig beneath the surface other than to simply ask: ‘Well, do you still like him?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Okay.’ And nothing beyond, well, what is it that was there inside of you before Trump?

And it's an important question to note [00:08:00] because a lot of people who are, are especially devoted to Trump. They weren't political at all before because they felt like there was nothing, there was nothing there for them. And for, for whatever reason they felt that way there's just this, this profound crisis that a lot of people are in of conservative and reactionary people are having, especially in the red states. And you talk about it.

PAVLOVITZ: Absolutely. And what I find is that when, when we do have media pieces about a Trump supporter and why they're still, we still have adoration for him, why they still support him, it almost is sort of a sideshow image that the media is creating.

But really beneath that, there's a sadness there for me. There's a, an understanding that a whole group of people in our nation. Lacked a sense of community or a sense of belonging so much so that they found in this person [00:09:00] and in this movement, a place where they somehow, as you said, felt that they belonged, even if that they were embraced conditionally, even if they were being, they are being used by a group of people.

And yet. They don't seem to understand that. And that's the saddest part. And what that movement has done, both politically and and religiously, it's leveraged the worst of people's fears and phobias and prejudices. And so you have a group of people who are not just. embracing a movement, but they are being weaponized to fear other people.

And I think the worst of religion and the worst of politics requires an enemy, an encroaching adversary. And that's the mindset that so many people are in. And it's just when people, no one is at their best when they're terrified, I think.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, true. And, and the other thing about it also is that the, the, the sort of panic [00:10:00] response that they're having, it is it, it, it makes them behave well, and they, they're choosing to behave and that's, let's be clear about this.

Everybody has agency, they're, they're responsible for their own actions as well. But, the, the, their actions that they're engaging in oftentimes are so repellent and so, awful that the natural inclination is to just. Get away from me. I want nothing to do with you. You people need to.

Go away and, and, and, and like, and, and, and it's even cropping up especially I think also in terms of, of romance especially between in the, in the heterosexual sphere where, there is a significant political divide that is emerging between women and men. And you see it on, dating.

So I hear from women all the time. They're, they're like: ‘I keep getting approached by these awful Trump men who don't understand what I think at all. And they don't want to understand me and they don't care.’ [00:11:00]

PAVLOVITZ: And that for me, Matthew is the real story here as someone who has worked in-- I've been in local church ministry for three decades, but now doing this work as what I call a collector of stories. And I hear from people, hundreds of people every week. And what has really surfaced from the pandemic. And then from everything of the tribalism, we've sort of been living with for the past 8 years.

This is really a relational crisis. There's the political side of it. And there's the, theological side of it. And aspect with the church, but this really trickles down into the relationships we have with our families and friends and coworkers and neighbors. And that is where we're going to have to reckon with all of this because it's where it settles into really where the rubber meets the road of our lives.

And so many people are living with a, with an extremely different feeling about their, their tribe of affinity that they [00:12:00] used to have.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and, and a lot of it is. It is, it's the product, it's the product of decay or disinterest by institutions that should have been there for them. And, and and we'll talk about the religion side of it in a second, but you know, like, I think that people who are have a left of center perspective often correctly note that the, the The Republican voters are kind of going against their own interest, to use a phrase that's often used.

But at the same time, they're doing it because they feel that what Republicans are offering them is their interest. In other words, their interest has changed. And so their economic interests may not be benefited, but they have, they have been made to want something different.

And yet at the same time, the anger and angst that they feel is actually the product of the Republican party because they don't actually care about their voters and they don't take care of them in terms of, funding for mental health care or [00:13:00] funding for healthcare period, or, not having job training programs for people who are displaced economically for a variety of reasons, and trying to cut out things like social and emotional learning in schools because, those programs are really, really important right now, especially because a lot of people are not interested in, religious institutions that you have to give them some sort of tools.

To deal with with adversity in their lives, and the right wing is is trying to make people not have those tools.

PAVLOVITZ: That's right. And when you when you inject that fear into a person's emotional systems, and they're going around every day, believing that there are constantly, Adversaries and enemies around them.

And then you have a movement that says, we'll take care of you. It, the details don't really matter. And I think the Republican party has done a great job of creating a mythology that people will simply [00:14:00] embrace. And, and that's, there's, that's a product of things like our critical thinking, breaking down and people's just lack of general knowledge about civics or what's happening in the world.

Or, partisan media, which takes out any bad news or any differing news to the story that they tell themselves. And the end product of all of that is a group of people who will embrace the, the lie that Republicans care for them. And when really there's zero compassion in that movement, and that's what's been Startling to me as a minister for all these years is seeing a cruelty, a movement of cruelty rise up in the evangelical church and in, conservative politics that is simply predatory.

And, and what I'm always trying to let people on the right know is that I'm for them. As well, I'm for their families. I want health care for, for their families as well as my own. I want to clean planet for [00:15:00] them as well as my family. And that's a hard thing in the, in the tribalism to, to hear,

SHEFFIELD: It is. And your point on that is, is really, really important because ultimately, the, the vast amounts of anger and loss and loneliness that, that is really what drives Trumpism it exists because, conservative institutions, they failed in what they were assigned to do. And, and that's a lot of that is on the, is on the, is on the traditionalist church and, and I mean, in terms of that, they haven't learned to evolve with the times.

So, I mean, like in many ways. We're dealing with the, our, our society as a whole is dealing with problems that were controversies that existed in the, in the early 20th century. Like, they, those were problems, that were debated by. Whether it was [00:16:00] Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard, or, these, these early 20th century philosophers, they saw this crisis of meaning much sooner than the rest of the world did, and, and they were writing about it, and, and, and Nietzsche also, I think, people, because of his sister kind of, um, she was basically a Nazi and kind of rebranded him, but you know, like so much of his work was, saying to people, look, what you derive meaning from is over.

And you cannot go back to it. And, I think that, that realization, It took a hundred years for everybody to finally have it. And, or at least in even maybe intellectually, they don't have it, but, but psychically, psychologically, they do have, and that's the moment that we're, that we're having right now.

PAVLOVITZ: It's some days I think for people like myself and possibly for you, many of your, your listeners and, and viewers is that there's a disbelief that [00:17:00] we're, we're Having these conversations and this struggle seems so profound that so many people seem to be pushing back against ideas that we felt like were now fixed parts of our society.

And just even the ideas that someone could marry the person they love, or a woman could have body autonomy voting rights, all of these things that felt like givens and maybe left us feeling a little falsely, that we had made more progress than we had. And, but now there's, there's an awakening, a disbelief that so many people are feeling and trying to decide, how do I find myself in this new environment?

What is my place? Where is my identity? And so it's happening from, both sides of the political aisle per se

.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and and just to go back to the religion side of things I mean, there is, there's, There's a real crisis. I think that like, I mean, when you look at surveys of Americans, a [00:18:00] large percentages of them have always disbelieved in evolution.

Even though it's been a scientifically proven for more than a hundred years and but it's, it's like, it's finally, They finally realized that they lost this because like before, let's say in the 90s, 2000s when the Internet was, first becoming sort of, completely mainstream and pervasive.

They really thought that the facts were on their side. They really did. And, like Ben Stein, for instance, the the right wing actor, he made a movie called Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed. which purported to, was a case against evolution. And I really actually encourage people to watch that movie because it's, it's so illustrative of this mindset and, but he, he put it out there and they all thought it was so great, but everybody else just laughed at it and thought it was absurd and, and stupid.

And like, That sort of thing [00:19:00] happens, has happened in so many people's lives. Like it used to be the case that people could say, well, like evangelical churches, they had tremendous growth in the United States for many decades, and they were always boasting against.

More mainline Protestantism or Catholicism that, Oh, you guys are headed for the grave. No one likes you anymore. You're losing all these members. We're, we're, we're going to win all this. And things have now actually reversed. That liberal Protestantism is now the one that's growing and evangelicalism fundamentalism is just collapsing.

And you said something, you wrote something in the book that I want to talk about in particular on this point. You said that. Honestly, I don't know if organized Christianity on balance is helpful anymore. I do know is that the compassionate heart of Jesus, I find in the stories told about him is helpful and urgently needed.

How is that perspective kind of terrifying to a lot [00:20:00] of Christians? Would you say?

PAVLOVITZ: What you wrote there, it probably is, but I think it's one of those questions that that many people of faith who are left leaning ask themselves all the time, because what progressive spirituality of any kind really is a willingness, as I say, to fight with and for our faith traditions to be ruthlessly critical of them to challenge them and to trust that the answers are going to be, Something that we can live with, but there is a sense of lostness or, or homelessness that comes when you look at the tradition of your past and you discover realities about it.

And then you have to decide, well, who am I now? And for me as a minister, that was where the journey began really asking hard questions about theology toward sexuality and toward racism and toward gender equity. The answer is I didn't like what I was getting because I had built my whole [00:21:00] life on this myth, this evangelical or this mainstream Christian orthodox understanding, at least in America of, of people's color of the marginalized.

And so now I'm in a place where so many others are is trying to decide how much of this faith can I hold onto? And how much of it do I need to discard? And what do I do with what's left? How do I identify?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, and that, and that, that's what's terrifying, I think, and that's what's driving a lot of this traditionalist Christian rage against everybody that, they don't, they don't want to have these thoughts.

These thoughts are, are dangerous. Mentally, they are, and, and what, or at least they seem that way. Like in my case, I was born and raised in a very fundamentalist Mormon family. And, and I had all those beliefs. I I believed that, I had God, God gave me revelations and I wrote [00:22:00] them down.

I was all in for this stuff. I read the Bible and all the other Mormon books in their entirety by the time I was eight and many times subsequently, so like, I really believed it and But at the same time, so I, I, I left that tradition when I was 27, there were still throughout my, my life up until that point there were always these little things that I noticed along the way and, and people would tell me, don't notice those things.

Don't think about those things. You need to put those away. Those don't matter. You'll find out someday in heaven, God will explain it all. And, and, and that worked for me for a while. But then once I, once I realized it's okay for me to not it's okay for me to decide what I believe is correct.

I don't have to do what other people tell me. And like, that's, I think that that moment for, because many people, for [00:23:00] them The value of religion is, is answers. And it doesn't matter if they're good answers. It doesn't matter if they're healthy answers. It doesn't matter if they're kind answers. What matters is that they're there.

PAVLOVITZ: Well, and exactly. And what I usually say is most people want a shorthand religion. They want a group of scriptures that they can kind of pull out when they need to. They can be told. What they're to think and feel about these big issues and that those things can be settled and they can attend a building for an hour on Sunday and then go on with their lives.

And as I said before, that the existential crisis, most people don't have the time to go through something like that. And it's necessary. And I, I, I didn't intend to be a minister. And so I entered into the church, not realizing that this was going to be a position where I was going to find myself.

And yet it made me keep asking those difficult questions. And you're right. Certainty was sacred in so many of the communities that I was a part of. And [00:24:00] doubt or questioning was some sort of character flaw. And it was only when I really. Realize that whoever and whatever God would be would not be intimidated by my questions.

Only people are intimidated by questions that I pushed into those things and began writing and speaking and preaching about them. And that's when the trouble comes because people are threatened not by something you say. Usually they're threatened by simply saying, well, is that possible? Could you be wrong?

The existence of hell be incompatible with the character of a loving God, and could women be actually equal to men and have their gifts be responded to in a spiritual community? And once you begin upsetting that, that turbulence comes and people will run away from it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that's because, I mean, for me, I, I think that, that everybody wants to be seen, but most people don't want to be known.

And the one, and the, oftentimes the, [00:25:00] The most terrifying person to be known by is yourself.

PAVLOVITZ: There are those I think speed and activity in our lives can always mask a lot of things. And so when you see people who are running all the time and their lives are busy and they are busy because there's important things happening, but that can also anesthetize us from those deeper things that we don't want to give time to.

And you talked about the sort of mental health crisis. And I've written about what I call the mental health crisis of MAGA America in that, There there's a whole section of our population who not only rejects science, but rejects the idea of therapy and medication and mental health care. And those things are somehow some, moral failings.

And that's contributed to a large group in our population who simply haven't. They don't know how to process their feelings or talk about [00:26:00] their angst, especially men, as you, alluded to earlier, there's a divide here along gender that men have been done a disservice by their politics and their religion.

And it's now being shown tremendously.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really unfortunate because, it's basically making like right wing people often, try to. They talk about sort of the, the product, which is, a decline in marriage rates or decline in birth rates. And they, and they get very upset about it and they blame, almost anything for it, whether it's, chemicals or gay people or, whatever it is immigrants doesn't matter, but like what they, what they don't want to admit is that, that many men, especially let's say 30 and up, they don't have the tools.

To process the reality in which they live and, and, and, and that, and that they don't understand that [00:27:00] when the feminism has won and women are never going to go back and they don't have to go back and they should never go. And so if you can't accept that, then, you're going to have problems in with reality and you're going to hate everyone and you're going to hate yourself.

And that's terrible.

PAVLOVITZ: Sorry. And then there's an irrational response. So it's not really people don't even know why they're angry, what they're angry about. We were at the airport not long ago and it was like one of the news stories. Some man there just got frustrated by whatever he was frustrated by. And he started screaming and ranting and raving and running around.

And singing amazing grace and all these very bizarre things. And I looked at him and people were of course, laughing and filming him. And all I thought was this, this is a 60 year old man who still doesn't understand how to process his emotions and how terrifying and sad is that? And and, and you're right.

When you look [00:28:00] at the often with conservative politics. And religion, I always say that the attack is an inside job. It's a, it's a lack of being willing to look in the mirror and say, well, what are we contributing to this problem? And for me, Compassion and courage are so huge in the book, because I think that's what we're lacking in so many men who are conservative, they, they, empathy is, A lost art and then the ability to offer a differing opinion.

You know what, when I was steeped in the, in the religious world, in that evangelical world, it was so fiercely protected. I always say organized religion and organized crime are very similar because they're fiercely loving when you're on the inside, but there's such a terror of, of being pushed to the periphery or excluded altogether that people will do anything to stay in there.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they will. And, and [00:29:00] kind of related to that, to some degree, I feel like also with this religion sort of unprocessed, reality that many churches are dealing with is that, there are progressive religious traditions that they, they, they do support women's equality.

They do support, LGBTQ relationships and identities. But they, but they, they are not telling the full story in that they try to say that the Bible supports these things. And the, the Bible says it's okay to be trans or that, it's okay to be gay. And, if those answers are, they're very unsatisfying for a lot of people. I, and I, I think a lot of progressive people, theologians or ministers, pastors, rabbis, I don't think that they understand that, that when, that when people think that you're lying to them and because the reality is, like these traditions, they're not making it up, like right wing authoritarianism has all kinds of [00:30:00] scriptures that they can cite to and all kinds of historical contexts and all kinds of.

Saintly authorities or commentator authorities. They're not making this up that they And, this is not some invention and people, it didn't come out of nowhere. Like, this is real, and to pretend that it's not, it's insulting, I think.

PAVLOVITZ: And I think that's where you see, for me, Matthew, is over the last few decades, as the religious right has so commandeered, theology, spirituality, religion, a whole group of people who are moderate left leaning and have spiritual inclinations of some sort, have simply quieted and yielded the floor to this one stream of theology.

And because it is a messy thing to say, for example, for myself, I started with simply the six or seven verses that were so used the clobber versus to attack people who are LGBTQ. And I dug deep into [00:31:00] those and studied them to find out what the context was and how they were being used. And I came to find out that they were being weaponized completely inappropriately for the conditions in which they existed.

And yet that didn't just mean I was taking those six or seven verses because now I had to ask questions about the words to either side of those verses and to the books they were a part of and to the entire library of the scriptures. And most people As we've been talking about simply don't want to do that on the right or the left.

It's much, it's difficult to say this massive sprawling thing that I have embraced may not be what I thought it was. And what am I going to do about it?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and, and I don't know, it's just like when you, when you're trying to get into, Bible bashing with people who disagree with you.

Like, I mean, the reality is the Bible is such an immense book. and written by, hundreds of [00:32:00] people literally. And, so it, you can pick out any verse to say whatever you want it to say. And so at a certain point you have to understand that, really what these differences are, they are philosophical differences and they're more than they are theological.

And you have to be willing to admit that. And I think a lot of religious people are not there yet, but clearly you have gotten there.

PAVLOVITZ: And for me, whatever the, I call myself a spiritual mutt at this point, I have been at every sort of spot of belief or place of understanding. And what I've come to the realization, and I think many people have, whether they are religious or not, is that your faith, your spiritual beliefs only exist relationally. That's the only way they, they really manifest themselves. And so your theology is really irrelevant to people, especially younger generations who don't aren't steeped in the stories or the [00:33:00] mythology or the orthodoxy. And they're saying, well, what kind of life are you living?

Because they don't really care what you say you believe. And so your, your theology is only valid to the degree that your life is loving. And. So that for me is where the, where the whole thing nets out. What are people experiencing and what you have in the religious right is a group of people saying.

Well, yes, LGBTQ people are telling us we're hurting them, but we're not hurting them. And the women are saying we're being subjugated and we're saying, no, you're not. And it's, so it's a lack of listening to the oppressed or the maligned or the discriminated against. And simply choosing not to hear them in the name of a God of love.

And so that's where it all begins to break down. And it's just frustrating for someone who is not grown up in that environment to even relate to them. So there is just that, that chasm of communication that exists now.

SHEFFIELD: Uh, [00:34:00] yeah. And, and certainly in the, at the interpersonal level as well. And you talk quite a bit about.

That in the book and a bunch of, of chapters and especially on the idea of, how can you, how can you love someone that is toxic? I think that that's, that is a, a, a thing that a lot of people are struggling with now that, they have relatives who, might be virulently anti gay or, or whatever it is.

And yet they still, they still are there and you still do love them. I mean, so let's tell us a little bit about some of that.

PAVLOVITZ: Well, I mean, gosh, hundreds of times a week, people are sharing their stories with me via email or video chats or texts, and they're saying, this is where I am.

I am married to someone who I've been married to for 37 years and suddenly I don't feel like I know them. And so I never want to be [00:35:00] cavalier with people's deepest relationships and say, well, okay, just say goodbye to them and begin to craft a different kind of community. Sometimes that's necessary. But the truth is.

That's what part of the book is, the fighting for America, for the church, for marginalized communities, but it's also fighting for our relationships, and for the people that have been a part of our families and tribes for, since we were born. Those things aren't easy, but To discard and nor should they be.

So it's trying to figure out in each relational exchange, is this still possible to save where, where is the common ground? Or in some cases, do I just simply have to love someone from a distance and realize I can love and respect their humanity, but not want that kind of relational proximity to them. So it's, it's a daily battle to figure out how to wisely yield, Well, I always tell people we're in the tension between our relationships and our convictions all the time.[00:36:00]

And it's how, when do we choose one versus the other is a real challenge.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, not to put you on the spot, but what are a couple of stories that kind of illustrate the approach that you are advocating here?

PAVLOVITZ: Well, I've got a, a good friend. Her name is Susan and I talk about her in, in this book.

And during the 2016 and the fallout of the election, Susan said, I'm disheartened by everything I'm seeing and the tribalism and the animosity, and I want to do something about it. So she decided to have a bunch of women over to her house every week to play bridge and have lunch, but to intentionally talk about the topics of the week that were making the news.

And these were women who were Diametrically opposite her theologically and politically, and that was a case where she invited this turbulence very close and for a long period of time, and it's been very difficult. But what she's been sharing now. Seven years into this is that [00:37:00] there there's true relational intimacy happening vulnerability.

That's allowing people to say, here's, here's the heart of where I am. It's not just some drive by social media exchange. It's something substantive. And I think that's the only way we're going to make any headway is really meeting people's humanity and respecting their story and learning that story. I'm a firm believer that the more we get to know a single human being, the better it is to understand them.

We may not like them after that. We may not agree with their politics or their theology anymore, but we're going to see them as a fully complex human being. And I think we continually have to remember that. And also that there are these universal experiences that we're all having, grief, loneliness, and fear, And whether we're to the right or to the left, those forces are always pushing on us.

So if we can recognize the universal grief and loneliness and fear in the other, [00:38:00] maybe we can meet them in a place where we can, we can reach them and have an understanding.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and one of the other points that you make in this regard though, is that that a lot of times people, you have the expectation that. Love requires physical proximity, and I'm just gonna quote, quote from the book here. You said, you wrote loving another human being doesn't necessitate you placing yourself in harm's way.

It doesn't demand you sustain, sustaining repeated wounds, and it doesn't require you to make peace. With what you cannot abide. The biggest misconception people have about love is that they owe people they care for permanent proximity. They don't. That isn't love's expectation, despite the way we are guilted into believing.

PAVLOVITZ: And, and that idea of love, it's so easily weaponized or the idea of tolerance related to acceptance and love. [00:39:00] I. I hear every day. Well, John, you're from you're a leftist and how you're supposed to be so tolerant. Where's that tolerance when it comes to these things? And it's simply that's a semantic use of words to try and dismiss you.

But for me, it's really about, there are things that I will not tolerate and it's my willingness to dig in and find those hills worth dying on and declare them. I don't want to lose relationships with people I love or people who I've served at my churches. But if that's the cost of my authenticity, and if it creates in me a desire to speak explicitly on these matters and help someone else, then that's, that's worth it for me, because that's the other part of this.

So many decent human beings, I think, are intimidated And they don't want to enter the fray. They don't want to be in that messiness that is required when social change needs to happen. And many people are just [00:40:00] busy or simply too tired. And I respect that. And that idea about love and proximity is important because I think we can all be guilted into believing we have to keep trying when sometimes we're not in that place where we can.

And I, I always want people to respect their, Current condition. There are days when I feel like I can enter that fight or, or try again with a person who I love. And there are days when I can't because it's creating too much toxicity in me and I need to step away. So there's an ebb and flow to this as well.

That's that we need to respond to.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

And it's, and the word tolerance is an interesting one because in the, in the denotation that we're using it here it's actually a metaphor. The, the original meaning of tolerance. refers to metal, how it can bend and yet not break but still be hard. And that's That's really what I think is, is what we should think about [00:41:00] tolerance in this modern age here that, you can be as strong in your convictions as you want to be, and you don't have to break them.

But at the same time, in order to exist in some fashion or another, and that's entirely up to you to be able to bend. I think that's. Something we're thinking about

PAVLOVITZ: And, and deciding how, how much will I, will I tolerate in this context? And how much, when does the moment come where I need to separate myself from this?

Because for me, as a minister, I found that there was a dangerous ambiguity that I. That I engaged in because I knew what I felt, but I knew what my people could tolerate and language. And so I would nudge them to a certain point, but I knew if I nudged them here, it would be too much. And that's one of those places we do that in our relationships.

We say, well, I don't know if I can push back here because if I do, it's going to start this whole chain of events and this [00:42:00] conflict. And it's for me, it's really worth it. The key for all of this to me is to humanize the other person. So I can disagree with someone. I can even decide that I need to cut ties with them, but still see their humanity.

It's the moment that I dismiss them or create in them some stereotype or some caricature that dehumanizes them. That's when I've, I'm in a dangerous place because that is what I see on the right so much. They've been able to discard the humanity of so many different kinds of people, and that makes it easier.

To hold the positions they hold and to yield the theology they do.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so.

And you have a section in the book that you call the church. We really need what what.

PAVLOVITZ: Well, Matthew, this is, these writings come from constantly trying to figure out what, what is the church to us? [00:43:00] And the church for many people of faith, the church with a big C is just the global gathering of people. When I asked that question talked about earlier, is Christianity helpful? It's asking the same thing.

What is, what is the church to people? And there was a story we always told ourselves earlier in our lives that the church did this and did that. And it was the center of the community. And now it's, it's looking and saying, well, what is the, the net result of organized religion? And can we have churches That are known for their empathy, for their generosity, for their diversity, rather than being known as exclusionary predatory environments, which is what they have become to be known by so many people, either because they've experienced them that way, or simply because.

The religious rights prominence has created the false image that that is the only kind of church that exists. So to younger people, to people who have walked away from faith or [00:44:00] never stepped into it, that's made easier by people thinking, well, this is the only kind of Christianity there is. So the questions I'm asking are, as people gather collectively, in a spiritual community, how can they do it in a way that does no harm?

And if we ask those questions, maybe we're going to be better believers in how we practice.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and, and I mean, and specifically, what do you mean by that?

PAVLOVITZ: Well, people will talk about anger, for example, and growing up, I heard about righteous anger, that I, we are Christians, we have righteous anger.

And then I realized, well, everyone who has ever been angry, believes their anger is righteous and their cause is just. And so then. I wanted to replace righteous anger with redemptive anger. So, to say, what is the result of my anger? Does it lead to more people finding acceptance? Does it [00:45:00] yield to civil rights, human rights for more people?

Does it lead to greater compassion? Are more people fed and healed because of The things that I'm driven to do as a part of my faith. And if more people are not helped, I have to seriously ask if this is really worth my time. And the constant question I ask, people of faith is why do you have faith?

Why do you believe it's worth having? And what are the results of your faith that you can point to that it is an asset to humanity? And to be specific. And sometimes they really can't, sometimes it's really the idea of what I always thought the story of religion was, or what I was told faith was it's similar to America.

There, there comes a time when our myths that we grew up with about these things are exposed. And so we have to decide, well, what do I do now? Do I abandon the thing or do I alter the thing so that it is better than it was before or better than [00:46:00] it actually is?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and again, and then it's another sort of terrifying thing to contemplate, because those types of conflict, like they can exist within yourself within your relationship to somebody else, like, let's say, I mean, in the interpersonal level, discovering a something about somebody that you really didn't know about them. And it's so different from what you had expected and, being able to say, well, is this really why am I mad about this?

Yeah. It really is tough. And that's certainly true within a lot of religious traditions, that what is it that you're there for? Are you there for the values? Or are you there for the history book? And a lot of, I think a lot of religious people need to answer that question in, and they don't want to. It's scary.

PAVLOVITZ: Right. When you, when you answer it, honestly, well, that leads to [00:47:00] It often leads to grief. I talk a lot about grief in grieving the old story, and if we really begin to ask critical questions, and we answer them honestly, as you said, we have access to so much more information than we ever had than our parents had, our grandparents had, and so, We can have a mindset that's more expansive, but along with that comes a grieving of the old story, maybe a letting go of the former community that we were a part of.

And so there, there is, it's a frightening thing to say, even if I'm going to hold on to some sort of personal spirituality, where can I do that now? That makes any sense. Where's my sense of place. And so in my travels in person and online, I'm meeting people who are saying, I simply feel like I've lost. A sense of home in my country, in my church, in my family, and that is a huge societal challenge for all of us.

SHEFFIELD: It is, and [00:48:00] something that is interesting and relevant to that point because of the, horrible legacy of racial segregation in the American Christian community. A lot of white Protestants in particular, they have no familiarity with the black Protestant traditions that exist. And they don't understand that, the black Protestant traditions, they've dealt with a lot of these issues, a hundred years ago, 150 years ago of how can you exist in a world that doesn't agree with you? And that doesn't see you and like there, there's so much incredible theology coming out of the the black tradition and I would really urge, a lot of white Protestants in particular, but if you feel this way, black people have had these problems a lot longer than you have. And you should, you should read what they think about that.

PAVLOVITZ: I think what we use, we hear and see and use the word privilege a lot, but [00:49:00] what privilege is in this context is never having to have had this crisis that says, what, what is the world, what is my faith and how does it.

interact with the world and is the system that I'm a part of creating more harm than it's, than it's alleviating. And that is something that for white people of faith is new for many of us to ask these questions historically, because we've never been challenged to ask them. It's always been the assumption that we're on the right side.

And that's the other thing. There is just a terrifying sense of, wow, I'm, The stuff I've built my life on for decades, it's all up for grabs. And some people's response is to press in and some people's response is to avoid and distract and explain it all away and become hardened. And that's what you see the differences.

I think in the right, [00:50:00] the right is responding to all these questions and challenges and saying, it must be something else. It must be immigrants. It must be LGBTQ people. It can't be. White, cisgender, heterosexual Christians who were born in America and raised Republican. And that's, I can understand why you would avoid that if you fit those categories.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It's easy. It's easy to think that way. Yeah. And it's tough to want to recognize that you have advantages. As a person that, have enabled you to avoid thinking certain, that's what it comes down to.

PAVLOVITZ: It does. And we have always had the, the life of least resistance. And so once you have all of these questions and all of this turbulence, you begin to think the world's changing. And it's not that the world is necessarily changing. It's that you're having things revealed to you that were [00:51:00] not revealed to you before.

And that's constantly. Kind of conversations I'm having with even people saying, well, I'm trying to understand sexuality, but it seems like there's so many more people coming out now. Why is that? Well, it's because they're not as terrified in some cases as they used to be, and they're learning. Society is learning how to accept a more diverse understanding of sexuality and gender orientation, all those things.

And so, that's the other part of this. It's helping people see that this is not something new that's suddenly happening. You're just seeing it for the first time and there's going to be some difficulty in even in that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's no, that's a great point that the world, to the extent that it's changing, the things have not changed as much as so much as your perception has expanded is really what it comes down to. And for me, when I left Mormonism, like that, that was really the thing that, that I can relate to that because, I had been, [00:52:00] because for Mormons, you're instructed to never read anything critical of the church . It's worse than marital infidelity in many cases and to read it, to read a, a former Mormon's book or something like that. And it's advantageous to the church or, the local leaders to say things like that. And understanding that people have an incentive to tell you not to read other people like that.

That's the thing that is always interesting to me. I always hear people say, well, you don't want to debate my ideas. You don't want to talk to me. I'm getting canceled for saying things. And they don't understand that. Well, actually people debated your ideas a hundred years ago and you're a side boss. And so we don't need, we don't need to hear your, your, your you don't, we don't need to have your ideas about, the 6, 000 year old earth and the schools.

We don't need to have your ideas about that homosexuality doesn't exist or that trans people are not real. It's just a mental illness. We don't need those things because. Transgender people have been [00:53:00] around, since the beginning of humanity and, and there is ample historical record to indicate that and, but you just don't know about it.

And your ignorance is not an argument is what it comes down to.

PAVLOVITZ: That's right. And for years, I think, Especially a white male Christian was used to being able to speak their minds unabated and unchallenged. And, and, and even when you look at the evangelical church, I think we've been closely tied to many organizations that are doing, who are now really instrumental in perpetuating this toxic Christianity, your, your Franklin Graham's, your things like that.

And what are found in those places. Was that they, they simply didn't allow, I speak all over the country. I have for a decade now doing this work. I've been invited by progressive churches, by humanist conferences, by [00:54:00] synagogues and mosques and atheist conventions, but I rarely. Really almost never been invited by a conservative church to come and simply have a discussion about the things we're talking about today, because there is such a control that's being exerted over the people there because they're terrified

SHEFFIELD: of you're terrifying.

Yeah, yeah, terrifying. That's really what it comes down to. And. But they're, and they're so scared of you that they can't even say that also.

Like,

PAVLOVITZ: yeah, that's right.

SHEFFIELD: Is the, like there, there are, are all these people out there that, are making millions and millions of dollars saying, Oh, I was a former progressive. And now, I love Donald Trump, like, Matt Tybee, or, some of these other out there and they never want to have actual debates with anyone. And the same thing is true, in the evangelical world, same thing is true in the, in the Mormon world. None of these people actually want to have a discussion of ideas.

What they want to do is [00:55:00] bully and call it an argument.

PAVLOVITZ: That's right.

They want to have a. Be in front of people and have a monologue that just hits the person over and over again with the talk, with the talking points and the critiques that they've gotten so used to throwing out there in social media world, and they don't really want to have a conversation.

And that's the sad thing for me, being someone who still has a heart for some of the tradition that I come out of. It's realizing that It's actually a better place. I want people to experience that expansive understanding of the world that you, you can ask questions. You can challenge ideas and it's okay.

And it's looking at a group of people who simply have sidestepped that altogether is just really sad to me because it means you really don't believe. What you say, you believe you're actually really worried. I talk a lot about how conservative Christians talk about this God who is [00:56:00] so all knowing and all powerful.

And yet that God seems really neutered because they're so terrified of everything. And if God were as powerful and loving as they say God is, there wouldn't be as much to worry about as they seem to be.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, and let's maybe end on two points here that trying to have that, that dialogue and, and being willing to, somebody who is, um, religious progressive I think a lot of religious progressives, they, and, and people would have told me that, that this was their viewpoint.

PAVLOVITZ: So I'm not just, making it up, but, and I'm interested in, and if you've heard this as well, but, Like a lot of religious progressives seem to think that, well, people will figure it out on their own. They will see that I'm right. And I don't have to advocate against these other people because they're just so obviously wrong.

And, and when people look at my material, they'll see that I'm right. And they don't understand that number [00:57:00] one, the, the followers of these people will never see your material unless you bring it to them. And then number two, why would you want to consign people to these, toxic churches where they are manipulated, where their money is stolen from them, where they are lied to, where their epistemologies are destroyed.

You Why would, do you, did you have any compassion for your fellow Christian? Aren't you concerned about them? Wouldn't you wanna save them? They deserve to be saved, don't they? That's what I would say

it, it's, yeah. Go ahead, Matthew. It's, it's the, it's that, but it's also, there's a point where I might allow someone to remain in their, their ignorance, intellectual ignorance or their.

They're toxic theology, and it's one thing to leave them with it, but I'm also leaving generations of people that they're existing around and damaging and influencing. So there's also that part about it to see for me, I [00:58:00] I've been so grateful for the power of social media because I was simply writing some words and those words were released into the world and those words could find the people they needed to find and challenge them.

And that's what I've, I've discovered is I need to speak specifically, not just to change the mind of the bully, but to stand with the people who are being bullied. So there's a, there's a dual purpose to the work we do in the world in this way.

Yeah. And, and I would say, for, I mean, people can, they're entitled to believe whatever they want.

And, but for, if you are, people need to, who are, our, our political struggles so much are the product of the fact that people do not distinguish between, Authoritarianism and conservatism. And it's the conservatives who, who allow this, their identity to be stolen. They have allowed, authoritarians to pretend to say, oh, I'm a conservative.

They have allowed that to [00:59:00] happen. And, and as a result, they've, they've taken over and they bullied the conservatives to be this little tiny rump. Of nothingness in the Republican party. And, they canceled and destroyed conservative evangelicalism and just stamped it out of existence almost.

And because the conservatives didn't stand up for themselves. So like, that is one thing that I do appreciate that you're doing to say, look, guys. Do you value your ideas? So you need to fight for them. Because no one's going to do it for you. And if you don't, you're going to lose

for sure. Yes. And, and they're, and they're seeing that, I think if the 2016 election goes differently, this.

Conservative religious evangelical right wing Frankenstein monster was on its last legs. And what it had been has been given over the past few years is a power and a voice that it hadn't really had. And I think if we can survive this time and get past this sort of [01:00:00] urgency, younger people, as we've been talking about, they're going They're decided these issues of gender equality and sexuality and race, so they're not going to be bogged down by those things.

And if we could just steward the nation and the world to keep them, having control over their bodies and their votes. Then I think we're going to be in good shape.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I think so. I think so. And let's maybe end with the topic of non religion. So, you're still a believer in God but a lot of people aren't, and, I think a lot of people who are not religious, they have a faith of their own that religion is just going to go away, and everything will be perfect after that happens.

And it is really naive because religion isn't going to go away. You're not going to get rid of it. It's not going to be destroyed on its own or ever. Probably people want to believe in a higher power for whatever reason, it seems evolutionarily we [01:01:00] are wired in some way, so many of us are. And so you have to realize that in the same way that right wing atheists have understood that, they need to make common cause with right wing believers, I think left wing atheists need to understand that as well. So you've, you've mentioned some of your experience on that, but let's maybe talk about

that a bit here.

PAVLOVITZ: I think that's been the most gratifying part about doing the work that I do is. Is creating the writing has become a hub for people who may be religious and non religious, but they're saying, Hey, there's enough here that we agree upon that we can formulate a sense of community. And those are things about, the fragility of humanity and the, the.

The interdependence that we all are a part of. And so those are really, whether you're a theist or not, whether you have spiritual leanings or you don't, we, we can align around things that are redemptive and productive. And so [01:02:00] that's, what's going to have to happen because this is not a, the fight is not religion versus atheism and it's not progressive Christianity versus conservative Christianity.

It's, I think, Empathy versus cruelty. It's, can we see our neighbor as a part of that? We're tethered together or that were enemies that were separate. And that's what you see. That's what we're fighting for is a group of a community that says we actually are better together than we are separately.

And those divisions are never going to be healthy. And so that's the work that I'm trying to do with the, with the book and with the writing and everything I do.

SHEFFIELD: All right. So yeah, it's been a great conversation, John. So for people who want to keep up with you, what are your recommendations for that?

PAVLOVITZ: Well, once you know how to spell my name, which is P A V L O V I T Z, there's not a lot of John Pavlovitz's around.

You can pretty much find me on any platform that you need to. I'm [01:03:00] kind of everywhere and would just look forward to conversations and, and questions and dialogue.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, awesome. All right. Well, thanks for being here today.

PAVLOVITZ: Thank you. Such a great pleasure. Matthew.

SHEFFIELD: Thanks for joining us for this conversation. You can always get more if you go to theoryofchange. show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of the episodes.

And if you're a paid subscribing member, thank you very much. You have unlimited access to the archives. And if you can't afford to subscribe right now, I understand. very much. You can help out the show. Nonetheless, if you go to Apple podcast or Spotify and leave a nice review there, five stars as short as you want just some sort of writing on it.

That is really helpful to get people to get recommended to watch or listen to Theory of Change.

So that will do it for this episode. I hope you'll join me next time. I'm Matthew Sheffield.

This Doomscroll episode is available on video as well as audio.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Trump trashes judge's daughter, gets slapped with gag order in Stormy Daniels case

05:53 — Stock of parent company of "Truth Social" collapses after disclosure it lost $58 million last year

12:41 — GOP congressman says Gaza should be treated "like Nagasaki and Hiroshima"

13:58 — Does the majority of Americans realize that right-wingers declared a "culture war" on us?

18:34 — Far-right Christian attorney John Eastman disbarred in California for trying to overthrow the 2020 election

21:52 — Rudy Giuliani tells bankruptcy judge he needs $3.5 million condo for podcasting space

24:49 — Patricia Richardson denies Tim Allen's claims of a "Home Improvement" reboot

28:51 — Lara Trump releases another godawful country music cover

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Whatever you may happen to think about Joe Biden or Donald Trump, the presidency is not a one-person job. Overwhelmingly, the work inside any White House is done by the advisors. They form policies, promote them to the public, and then make the federal government carry them out.

Ultimately, part of determining who you you want to be president should be examining who is giving them advice. In Joe Biden's case, he has surrounded himself by experienced and well-qualified officials, usually people who have [00:02:00] worked in their fields for many decades and have a lot of experience.

That can have some problems of its own in terms of insularity or perhaps or being too routine in their thinking. But whatever those problems are, they pale in comparison to the dangers of the people who are angling to staff a Donald Trump White House.

As extreme as Trump and his cronies were the first time around — which included sending a violent mob of supporters to the Capitol to attack the vice president and the Congress — a second Trump term promises to be much more radical. That's largely because since he was evicted from the White House, Trump has kept in touch with the same final crew of advisors who accepted and helped his plot to try to steal the 2020 presidential election. They have been radicalizing in tandem for years to fully commit to an authoritarian politics that includes everything from prison camps for immigrants to gulags for political opponents.

In most cases, a president's advisers usually work behind the scenes and the public doesn't get a chance to know much about them. But Donald Trump is different from other politicians in that he takes his advisors from the world of right-wing media, a sector of America's economy that has grown immensely since he came on the political scene.

There are a lot of people who will have Trump's ear should he win a second term, and fortunately, Media Matters for America, a progressive media analysis organization, has compiled a huge dossier of who these people are and what they want to do.

Joining me to discuss this dossier are Matt Gertz, he's a senior fellow at Media Matters who specializes in the connections between right-wing media and the Republican Party. And also Madeline Peltz, she is the deputy director of rapid response at Media Matters, where she focuses on emerging trends in right-wing media.

The transcript of our March 8, 2024 conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the complete text.

The video of this episode will be available on April 1, 2024 at 10:00 am Eastern.

Cover photo: Steve Bannon speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. July 16, 2023. Credit: Gage Skidmore/CC by 2.0

Related Content

* The Christian right was a theological rebellion against modernity before it became a force for Republicans

* How the term “Judeo-Christian” went from a liberal Protestant method of promoting tolerance to a Christian right codeword for oppression

* Dominion’s Fox lawsuit incontrovertibly exposed that Fox isn’t news

* Donald Trump still hasn’t learned the first rule of Republican politics: Right-wing media is only for the rubes

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

04:02 — Right-wing media were always integral to Republican politics, but Donald Trump made them essential parts

08:38 — Web and set-top streaming networks have enabled the launch of multiple Fox News alternatives that are far more extreme

11:15 — Extremist spotlight: Steve Bannon, MAGA's mastermind

18:57 — Project 2025: The Christian right's plan to impose its doctrines with the federal bureaucracy

24:15 — Extremist spotlight: Russ Vought, architect of Christian supremacism

31:17 — Extremist spotlight: Mike Davis, MAGA's authoritarian lawyer

35:44 — Right-wing activists frequently talk about imprisoning political critics while also claiming that Republicans are victimized by “cancel culture”

38:00 — Extremist spotlight: Stephen Miller, speechwriter and gulag designer

42:46 — Why MAGA activists lean into absurdity to describe their radical policies

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been verified. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Let's start with the historical points here, that right-wing media has always been kind of integral to the Republican party, much more so than left-wing media for the Democratic Party. But under Trump, things became much, much tighter than they ever had before.

MATT GERTZ: That's right. And it's the reason for that is because Donald Trump is himself very much a creation of the right-wing media, at least in his more recent incarnation as a Republican party politician. He is someone who in the wake of his repeated claims that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States snagged a weekly guest spot on Fox and Friends, which is the sort of insipid morning show analog on Fox News, and in that role was really able to get a hold of the wants and [00:05:00] desires of the Republican base by participating in that discourse by having an opportunity every week to give his take on the various grievances that were flowing through Fox News at the time.

And so what we saw during Trump was very much a Fox News creation and Fox News super fan acting from the White House. Donald Trump would get up every morning. He would watch Fox and Friends and other Fox shows beginning early in the morning, continuing to late at night.

And what he saw on that network really shaped his views, shaped his communication strategies all aspects of policy coming out of the White House from pardons to policies, to legislation in a real sense Fox News and the right-wing media more broadly we're a partner to the president on a [00:06:00] level that we've really never seen in modern American history.

And so it was really an extension of this trend that we've seen of sort of energy between the right wing politicians and media on steroids, so to speak. And that's continued with even more reactionary figures up to the present day.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And actually the other thing that happened during Trump that really kind of exploded was that there was a profusion of other right-wing media outlets, which were even more radical than Fox news. Can we talk about those a little bit? I want you both to weigh in on that.

Matt, why don't you start first and then Madeline, I want to hear from you.

GERTZ: I think what we have to remember about this is that the right new media is based on a political and business model in which the primary adversary is often the mainstream press. [00:07:00] If you watch or read or consume any sort of right-wing media, one of the first things you'll notice is that the level of media criticism bleeding through is much, much higher than you see in the mainstream press. They are constantly attacking mainstream news outlets and presenting them as illegitimate. And when you do that, you're creating more customers.

So what we've seen over the years is as the right has been able to delegitimize the mainstream press in the eyes of its supporters they've created more and more people who only want to consume right-wing media.

That has obviously created major outlets like Fox News that are fairly well-known throughout the media and political ecosystems, but also a wealth of competitors, smaller TV outlets like Newsmax, like OAN, as well as streaming giants like the Daily Wire, a wealth of [00:08:00] radio shows and a lot of independent and independent individuals as well. People who often were on Fox News like Megan Kelly or Lou Dobbs and lost their jobs there for one reason or another, and now are setting off on their own, this creates a real feeding frenzy that we'll often see in which these are very competitive outlets all trying to get market share from one another and so the fights between them can become quite fierce.

'Over the top' streaming networks have enabled the launch of multiple Fox News alternatives that are far more extreme

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And the other outlets, many of them are taking advantage of what's known in the media industry as over the top cable distribution and using digital platforms like Roku or Apple TV. Madeline, can you talk about some of these other channels in addition to Newsmax?

I think for people who aren't steeped in right-wing media, [00:09:00] there are so many of them out there and if you're just like a regular cable subscriber or you don't look at what's on the Samsung TV or Apple TV news section, you don't even know these things are out there, but they have tons and tons of viewers. And then of course around YouTube and other places as well.

MADELINE PELTZ: MAGA media certainly has coalesced towards over the top streaming. You see it with QAnon platforms having a sizable presence on Roku, and you also see it on platforms like Real America's Voice and Right Side Broadcasting, which each have their own little shtick.

In the case of Real America's Voice, it's Like a Fox News on an acid trip. Essentially you have you have personalities from the very deepest, darkest corners of the right-wing media hosting their own shows, just praising Trump completely, 24 hours a day, [00:10:00] seven days a week.

And this is a platform that the most hardcore MAGA fans are very in tune with and in touch with. Another example is Right Side Broadcasting, which really the bread and butter of RSBN is these live Trump events and live events. In fact, in general, they have a roving correspondent that is speaking to people in the crowds in rallies.

And so if you're a Trump fan and you're tuning into these rallies, which we're seeing increasingly, you're probably watching RSBN. So as the media landscape continues to fracture further and further the same way that major media companies are trying to get a bite over, over the top streaming so too are these fringe MAGA platforms.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they definitely are. And they, in many cases are getting hundreds of thousands of views on their, on their streams and on their videos, and certainly in the aggregate per month, millions of views across all the different platforms they're on. And then of course we have Rumble as well, which is a Peter Thiel-funded alternative to [00:11:00] YouTube, which is running all kinds of openly racist white nationalist content and has no problem with it, except when occasionally they get called out for something extremely egregious that is undeniable.

Extremist spotlight: Steve Bannon, MAGA's mastermind

SHEFFIELD: But in the case though, with some of the channels themselves, Steve Bannon is definitely the star over at Real America's Voice. And we know that he will play a role for a second Trump White House, because he worked in the first one. But he was fired so early on in the Trump White House the first time that I think to some degree, unless you're really into analyzing and reading right-wing media, I think people might've forgotten just what he was up to and how awful he was.

So I'm going to just play one of the clips that he said, this was something that he said in 2020, which got him banned from Twitter and Facebook when he said this.

(Begin video clip)

STEVE BANNON: Second term, second term kicks off with firing Ray, firing Fauci.

Now, I actually want to go a step [00:12:00] further, but I realize the president is a kind hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I'd put the heads on pikes, right? I'd put them at the two corners of the White House. As a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the program or you're gone.

Time to stop playing games. Blow it all out. Put Rick Grinnell today as the interim head of the FBI. That'll, that'll light some, that'll light them up, right?

Unidentified Man: You know what, Steve? Just yesterday, there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia. These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia.

These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.

BANNON: That's how you won the revolution. Nobody wants to talk about it, but the Revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was not, it was a civil war. It was a civil war.

(End video clip)

SHEFFIELD: So, yeah. And that is somebody who, would [00:13:00] like to be Donald Trump's chief of staff once again. And Matt, when you watch that clip, a lot, some of these MAGA media figures, far-right figures, they like to say: 'Well, I was just exaggerating for dramatic effect. And I'm not actually trying to do that.' How serious can we take those claims? What's your take on when they say we shouldn't take that seriously?

GERTZ: I think you should assume that they will go as far as they are allowed to go, as far as they are able to go. And the last several years have been an exercise in removing any guardrails that might exist on what they might be able to do if they were given power.

I mean, as you mentioned, Steve Bannon was someone who was fired fairly early on from the Trump administration someone who had been an early supporter of Donald Trump someone who chaired his campaign in its final stages in [00:14:00] 2016. But there were at the time some numbers of Republicans, even within the White House, who thought that someone like Steve Bannon was going too far.

What we've seen both throughout Trump's administration and certainly in the years since the 2020 election and January 6th is a steady move to purge critics of Donald Trump, purge people who might stand up against anything he might do from positions of power within the Republican party.

It is very much Trump's party now. It is effectively a cult, and because of that, if people like Bannon are put in positions of power, they will have a much more ability to carry out whatever they want to do than they had during Trump's previous administration.

SHEFFIELD: [00:15:00] Yeah, that's right. And to your point, one of the things that he did say explicitly is that, denying the reality that Donald Trump lost in 2020 should be a core platform of the Republican party and, and a prerequisite for working in a second Trump White House. So we'll roll the tape.

(Begin video clip)

STEVE BANNON: If you don't believe that Trump won in 2020 was stolen, you shouldn't be a senior party of you shouldn't be a senior member of the RNC, you just shouldn't. It's not a loyalty test It's a logic test because the whole thing flows from that and we wouldn't have spent 350 million dollars Remember in economics, you have two types of costs the types of costs that cost you money and resources You look at that. Hey, here's what's going to cost me, but the other is opportunity cost.

What could I've done with this? These resources if I'd done taken another course of action. What does that course of action looks like?

(End video clip)

SHEFFIELD: So, yeah, I mean, he's basically, [00:16:00] and he's gotten his, his way on that. I mean, he, he made that remark just last month as we were recording this, I said that in February.

And I think he was describing a reality that already existed, pretty much right, Madeline?

PELTZ: Absolutely. And it's an, it's a reality that he created through his show War Room. The comment that about the RNC is one tiny data point in the overall picture of the Republican party and the right-wing media at the moment, which is that this is the attitude that the myth, the lie that the election was stolen in 2020 lives on and not only that, but is a central point that they are driving home to their base as in an attempt to motivate them to vote. And that's the core of their strategy at this point, all these months out, and we'll see how it trends over time.

But we arrived here today by years of driving this point [00:17:00] home again and again, since before any ballots were cast in the 2020 election, to the chaotic post election period to leading up to January 6th, every single day since. They've been driving home this idea that the election was stolen and that Trump's return in 2024 is a act of vengeance and revenge.

And you've seen that on the campaign trail in some of the comments that Trump has been making. It's a central refrain that the advisors closest to him are trying to distance themselves from to very little success.

GERTZ: Just to add to that, table stakes right now to become someone in a position of authority in a future Trump administration is acknowledging and, as Bannon says, believing that the 2020 election was stolen.

Table stakes for becoming Trump's VP pick. Is acknowledging or [00:18:00] saying out loud in public that if you had been in Mike Pence's position you would have done whatever Trump wanted to ensure that he could remain in power, throw out electoral votes, whatever anyone who gets in that position is going to do so because they were willing to come forward and say that.

And Steve Bannon is the person who's ensuring that that's the case.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's that's an incredibly dangerous loyalty test that he's having. He's claiming it's not. But of course, that's what it is. And, either you're going to be somebody who's so insanely delusional that you actually believe that, the nonsense, or you're so sociopathic that you will say it anyway and not believe it.

And, neither one of those scenarios is somebody who I think most people would want to be in a significant position of power in the United States.

Project 2025: The Christian right's plan to impose its doctrines with the federal bureaucracy

SHEFFIELD: And of course, Steve Bannon [00:19:00] is just one of the cogs in this machine and the report that you guys compiled talks about many other people.

And one of the core things that they're doing and and they're using this kind of plausible deniability strategy of farming out a lot of the planning to third-party groups, so that they can say, well, we didn't really have anything to do with this. That's unofficial. These are other people that aren't working with the campaign, but if the campaign themselves isn't doing anything and isn't releasing any plans, then, isn't that, that's certainly fair to go off, I think. Can you Madeline, tell us about this whole Project 2025 thing?

PELTZ: Sure. Project 2025 is a initiative led by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. It is based off of a 900 or page policy book that covers every possible plank of a potential hypothetical [00:20:00] Trump, second Trump administration's agenda from governance and staffing policy to a review of every single department at the federal level, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, education policy, and certainly climate denial is factors very heavily. And the initiative is backed by a coalition of over 100 conservative allied organizations. So it's not just the Heritage Foundation. It's the entire conservative movement that has built out the most robust infrastructure behind a potential transition to a second Trump administration.

And that's what the 2025 refers to. At the forefront of this effort is, the first thing they really put forward is it is an attempt to purge the civil service to replace career bureaucrats, experienced diplomats, lawyers et cetera, with Trump loyalists. And they've [00:21:00] repeatedly emphasized that loyalty is prioritized over competency.

That's a very, very important thing. At the very forefront of, of the message of Project 2025 and they've implemented a system of loyalty tests that that are meant to vet applicants into their system to potentially staff a second Trump administration and really dismantle any safeguards that Any safeguards within the federal bureaucracy and consolidate control under what is called the unitary executive theory.

But and a lot of their policy plans are centered around the idea of Christian nationalism that America is 1st and foremost, a Christian nation and that, Biblical principles are at the forefront of any governing agenda for the next Republican administration.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That's right. And, and we'll talk about that more specifically in one of the other people that we talk about next here, but Kevin Roberts, [00:22:00] who is the president of the Heritage Foundation, he also has explicitly said that they have even more radical plans but they're not sharing them with

(Begin video clip)

KEVIN ROBERTS: The basis of the plan is public. You can see that at project 2025. org. There are parts of the plan that we will not share with the left, the executive orders, the rules and regulations, just like a good football team.

We wouldn't want to tip off our playbook to the left.

(End video clip)

SHEFFIELD: So, Matt do you think that the national news media in the reporting side, are they taking this stuff seriously, do you think so?

GERTZ: It's always hard to say. I mean, when you come down to it, if you are interested in information about project 2025, you can find it in accounts from the New York Times and other major outlets.

Are they flooding the zone with constant coverage about every aspect of how extreme these policies are? No, they [00:23:00] are not. When you look at the polling, you see that the American public has really been able to forget about a lot of the worst aspects of the Trump administration and as a result are not, I think, properly prepared for how bad things could be if he returns to that position.

I mean, part of, part of this, and I think. The reason why Schedule F is such an important part of this discussion is while Trump was able to accomplish a lot of terrible things, he was at times stymied by the federal bureaucracy by Republicans and Democrats who would block his various actions.

And people like Kevin Roberts and the Project 2025 plan and Steve Bannon are all really designed to make sure that doesn't happen again. Loyalty to Trump is the first principle [00:24:00] of anyone who goes into a future Trump administration, and that they will do whatever he says without considerations of whether or not it's a good idea or legal or ethical or anything else.

Extremist spotlight: Russ Vought, architect of Christian supremacism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And as you said, Madeline, that a core component of this is Christian supremacism or Christian nationalism, as people sometimes call it. And this is a bedrock principle for the American reactionary movement. They've always had this desire. But the Republicans who came before Trump, the politicians, they were not really interested in doing that. Because in many cases, they were not, like Ronald Reagan was not religious really at all. And George H. W. Bush, what we seem to be kind of just like a, generic kind of a Anglican, I believe he was when when he was alive and.

But Trump, he doesn't really, he's not religious himself either, of course, but he knows that these [00:25:00] people are his most rabid supporters and will work tirelessly to give him power, and that's enough for him.

There's a guy named Russ Vought who is he is kind of the leader behind all of this, the Christian nationalist stuff. And let's talk about him in a bit here, but let's play something from him first.

(Begin video clip)

STEVE BANNON: Are you, you're, I guess your idea is to create kind of, uh, Handmaid's Tale and uh, and, and Cromwell's uh, you know, Cromwell's Puritan movement. All in the united states at the same time that punch list she went to went through is pretty uh, It is it's pretty interesting. Is is there any reality? To uh their overreaction and meltdown on all this sir

RUSS VOUGHT: No, they're just trying to scare Christians across the country from being engaged in the political process. And this is actually part of a 100 year strategy, and it's to level accusations on any particular regime priority, whether that's uh, [00:26:00] uh, you know, having a, a, a rule of law that considers all of us on the basis of being made in the image of God.

They call us bigots for believing that. They call us racist for believing that. And now in this area, they want us if you're a Christian, they want to call you a Christian nationalist. And all we're saying, all I'm saying is that we were meant to be a Christian nation. We should be a Christian nation. We should provide religious liberty for everyone in this country to practice their faith.

But that the Constitution, the system doesn't work. Western civilization does not work without the underpinnings of a Judeo-Christian worldview. That is the bedrock for all of our laws. So it is not unnatural for Christians to be a part of the, the political sphere, the public square, and to say, this is what I believe.

This is the bedrock for which I believe it. And to have it reflected in our laws, in just policies, in healthy—

(End video clip)

SHEFFIELD: [00:27:00] Yeah, so it's I mean, that's and once again, just to go back, Matt, to what we were talking about earlier, like, this, of course, is a conversation that occurs on Steve Bannon's show, because he is the hub for all this stuff. But he once again is doing this 'You shouldn't take it seriously when we say extreme things.'

This is a very, very common rhetorical trope for these guys. And it's a way to kind of shield their extremism to make people not take it seriously, even their own supporters seems like. Or I don't know, what's going on here?

GERTZ: I mean, I think a big part of it is, is interfactional in nature. I mean, obviously the Christian nationalists are a increasingly powerful part of the Republican party, but they're not the only part of the Republican party. And so, keeping at least a little bit quiet on exactly what that movement is trying to accomplish is in its [00:28:00] interests right now.

I mean, you could, you could sort of hear it when he kind of throws in the, the Judeo-Christian worldview in the end there, you, the Jews can have a cookie. It's fine. Yes, it's a Christian nation and everyone else here is just our guests, but don't worry, it'll, it'll, it'll all work out.

They, they are trying, and, and you see that every time this idea of Christian nationalist makes its way into a, a mass audience. The, the instant recoil from the people who establish its principles is to say, Oh, no, no, this is just an attack on Christians. It's fairly dishonest, but that that's basically par for the course.

SHEFFIELD: It is and for people who are interested we actually have on Theory of Change done a couple of episodes on the history of the term, Judeo-Christian. It was completely made up. And doesn't really have any sort of meaningful context in the, in the American legal system, because the American legal system is mostly based [00:29:00] on Roman law and English law. And those, of course, really have nothing to do with the Bible, needless to say.

So, we'll have links in the show notes for anybody who wants to check those out. Did you want to weigh in on that clip at all, Madeline, or we can move on?

PELTZ: Yeah, I think Christian nationalism is just the latest nomenclature on the right for the longstanding Christian white supremacist agenda that has gripped the Republican party. And the fruits that you're seeing bear today really started being organized in the 90s, in a lot of ways with the Moral Majority, the election of George W. Bush and the first mobilization of evangelicals as a major voting block.

And as the Republican party has further radicalized, moved towards explicit white supremacist ideology, the religious fundamentalism has fused with Trumpism to create [00:30:00] what they're calling Christian nationalism.

And it's really just repackaging of longstanding trends on the right. Trump isn't exactly a churchy guy. He isn't someone who. Is you see going to mass every day, but they have somehow turned him into this Jesus-like figure. And so so there is a fusion between the brash sort of playboy billionaire style and the religious fundamentalism that has undergirded the right for decades.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, to circle back on the Judeo-Christian term, like it's as, as you were saying, Matt, it is kind of a fig leaf to try to pretend to be religiously pluralist. But it's notable that, they don't mention, well, what about Hindus? What about Muslims? What about atheists? All of those non-Christians and non Jews do not have religious freedom. [00:31:00]

And if you look, if you delve deeper within the right wing theological systems, they do explicitly state that, that only Christians deserve full religious freedom, and Jews can have some, and everybody else, they're lucky if they live here at all.

Extremist spotlight: Mike Davis, MAGA's authoritarian lawyer

SHEFFIELD: And, one of the other figures who is very pivotal to this MAGA media universe and political sort of kitchen cabinet for Donald Trump is this guy named Mike Davis. I don't have a good clip for him because most of his stuff is Twitter posting. His most radical stuff is on Twitter. He did say, for instance. How about gas chamber for members of Congress lying to and he has talked about putting various people that he doesn't like in a gulag multiple times and it's, it's extremely concerning, right Madeline?

PELTZ: Yeah, Mike Davis spends [00:32:00] a good portion of his day unloading his unfiltered stream of consciousness onto the internet. A lot of that ends up being racist, targeted attacks against prominent Black women in American politics. As you said, he has many fantasies of extrajudicial murder in response to crime problems in American cities.

He is a advocate for undermining the rule of law, especially at the executive level. And he is the founder of this think tank, legal think tank called Article Three Project that really sprung onto the scene in the right-wing media with the nomination of Kentonji Brown Jackson. And he was pretty instrumental in pushing this smear that she was somehow a defender of heinous crimes against children. That was really something that Mike Davis drew drove.

And so, I think it's telling that so much of his profile has been established by [00:33:00] these heinous attacks on black women.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's important to note that. Mike Davis is not just some, random guy s**t posting on Twitter. He is somebody who was a clerk for Brett Kavanaugh when he was in lower a lower level judge.

And he, Steve Bannon often touts him as somebody he would like to see be the attorney general. And if not that have some, some non confirmed White House position within the Trump administration. And that seems extremely likely that he would have such a a high status position.

So I mean, this guy, I think out of all the people that we are talking about here today is, to me, the most deranged and sociopathic individual, I would say.

GERTZ: I will say that Mike Davis is the only person on this list who has called for me personally to be arrested and jailed. So there, there is that yeah, he just, he spends a [00:34:00] lot of his time going on different podcasts and going on social media and explaining that he has lists of people that he has developed, who would be arrested, charged, imprisoned, deported.

If you were to have a high ranking position in the Justice Department, it's never clear how much of that is a shtick or how much of it is serious. Again my general tendency is to assume that these people will go as far as they are able to go and that shtick can very easily become reality under those circumstances.

So, yes, I mean, the fact that he is someone who can be mentioned by Donald Trump's son by Steve Bannon as a possible attorney general pick is concerning. After all, the entire The view that Donald Trump has of the Justice Department is an organization that is supposed to exist to defend him and his allies and punish his [00:35:00] enemies. He got very, very angry during his term in the White House when the Justice Department did not behave that way and I think one of his top priorities, if he returns to that office, will be to make sure that the Justice Department does not exist as an organization separate from his personal whims, and someone like Mike Davis would certainly be willing to be the hammer that Trump is looking for.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And he would certainly know what layer, what buttons to push, and who to fire and, and what policies to put in because he knows it from the inside as a clerk for a high level federal judge.

Right-wing activists frequently talk about imprisoning political criticis while also claiming that Republicans are victimized by "cancel culture"

SHEFFIELD: To your point about these lists of people that he claims he wants to imprison or do whatever to, as we played earlier, wants to fire people who don't agree with him about 2020.

The mainstream media is very, very [00:36:00] terrible at promoting right-wing narratives about cancel culture. That they allow far right activists to claim that they're not allowed to discuss anything in public, that no one with a conservative opinion is allowed to participate in public life. And yet, you have people who would potentially be Cabinet-level officials in a Trump administration talking about imprisoning people for political disagreements.

I mean, we should never hear another word about cancel culture in the political system when they're talking like this. I mean, what do you think?

GERTZ: Yeah, I mean, the top priority of Donald Trump, if he is elected president, he has said, is retribution. He wants to punish people he dislikes and he wants as many levers of power to do so as possible.

He was kind of inept during his first term in office because he doesn't have a lot of interest in public [00:37:00] policy because he does not have a lot of know how of how the system works. But what Project 2025 is supposed to do is ensure that there is a real plan to carry out Trump's mission of retribution against the left, against the parts of the country that didn't support him, and it's really a pretty scary situation.

SHEFFIELD: It is. And we saw a preview of that with the Trump administration's COVID policy, that when the pandemic first broke out, the Trump White House explicitly said, well, we don't have to do very much because it's in a Democrat area. Which is, where the, the initial deaths were primarily in San Francisco and New York City.

And so, they've shown that they are capable of doing this and, and Project 2025 is, is the road map of how they'll do it on a much, much greater [00:38:00] scale.

Extremist spotlight: Stephen Miller, speechwriter and gulag designer

SHEFFIELD: And to that point, though we have another figure that is worth talking about here. People have, he's definitely more well known than Mike Davis. It's Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's longtime speechwriter and anti immigrant activist.

(Begin video clip)

MIKE DAVIS: And with this non controversial topic, immigration we have president Biden importing 10 million people into this country. These, a lot of these people are. Unvetted. They don't share our values. They don't want to assimilate many of them.

And so I'm going to start this with Stephen Miller, who's been the tip of the spear on immigration. What should we be doing in a Trump 47 administration to fix this disaster, this invasion of our southern border?

STEPHEN MILLER: Well, as I say sometimes, the immigration issue is extremely simple. The policies involved in fixing it are very complicated.

The simple part is, seal the border, deport all the illegals. [00:39:00] Now, that's the, that's the short answer, right? It's very, you get in, you have two policy objectives that you proceed with utter determination on. Seal the border, no illegals in, everyone here goes out. That's very straightforward. In terms of the policy sets to accomplish this, as President Trump showed in his first term, It's, it's a, it's a series of interlocking domestic and foreign policies to accomplish this goal.

In no particular order, just to rattle off a few fast, you have your safe third agreements, you have remain in Mexico, finish the wall, you have robust prosecutions of illegal aliens, you do interior repatriation flights to Mexico and not back to the north of Mexico, it's very important, you re implement Title 42, you have several muscular 212Fs, that's the travel ban authority, We did a few of those in the Trump administration.

You would bring those back and add new ones on top of that. You would establish large scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you grab illegal immigrants and then [00:40:00] you move them to the staging grounds. And that's what the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home.

You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement. And then you also deploy the military to the southern border, not just with a mission to observe, but with an impedance and denial mission. In other words, you reassert the fundamental constitutional principle that you don't have a right to enter into our sovereign territory, to even request the asylum claim.

The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border and to say no one can cross here at all.

(End video clip)

SHEFFIELD: So, yeah, that's actually some incredibly radical policy that he just described there. Matt, you want to kind of summarize what, like, if people aren't familiar with some of the terminology that he used there, what exactly did he mean?

GERTZ: What he means [00:41:00] is that they're going to deputize the National Guard from red states and nationalize it in blue states. They're going to then basically go door to door through US cities rounding up anyone who looks like they might be An immigrant, which means, brown people, effectively. And then they're gonna try to put them in camps and deport them somehow.

This is a horrifying plan. It is one that is against our fundamental values. It is one that would cause horrific damage to families across the country. It is also a, a very poorly thought out plan. And because of that will almost would almost certainly be a total s**t show disaster. We're talking about millions and millions of people, some of whom who have been here for decades trying to round them up and put them on planes is going to cost a substantial fraction of the U. S. Budget for many years. This is very complicated as well [00:42:00] as sort of, villainous in its very nature but it's something that people like Stephen Miller are saying that they want to do and something that Trump supports and throws as much weight of his weight behind as possible.

And so, again, we need to take seriously that these sorts of horrific policies, which are very obviously in violation of human rights. U. S. law treaty obligations and basic humanity could actually come to pass.

SHEFFIELD: They could. Yeah. And I mean, these are prison camps like that. He's talking about large prison camps with millions of tens of millions of people potentially being constructed in the United States.

Why MAGA authoritarians lean into absurdity to describe their extreme policies

SHEFFIELD: And Trump, as you said, has in fact, endorsed this idea. But to the extent that you hear coverage of Donald Trump's more negative aspects, it's more, he said this thing he, he, he made this [00:43:00] post on his website and it's not so much about the policy.

And I don't know if there's been any polling on this that I can think of off the top of my head, but on abortion, for instance, multiple pollsters have asked the public, who do you think is responsible for Roe versus Wade ending?

The majority of people say, do not say Donald Trump was responsible for it. And I think a similar thing, if you ask the average American, do you know that Donald Trump wants to build prison camps for millions of people in the United States, and do you support that? It's almost unbelievable in some sense, right, Madeline?

And that's goes back to the idea of the absurdity, that they intermingle the authoritarian and the absurd simultaneously, such that it won't be taken seriously, is what I would say. What's your thought?

PELTZ: Yeah, and I think that's why you see the Biden administration or the Biden campaign really zooming in on people, Project 2025 [00:44:00] as a heuristic for these extreme policies, I think.

In that CPAC panel, I was in the room when that panel was happening, and just the extreme arrogance and hubris of these people that this, the idea that these policies are widely popular, I think, is a miscalculation on their part.

In this past week, Miller, Bannon and others have made clear that the results from Super Tuesday and the general election candidacy, presumptively of Donald Trump, will be a referendum on mass deportations.

And that's the bet that they're making. And I think that it's, It's critical for the mainstream media to make that front and center, that the top priority of a second Trump administration is not kitchen table issues like health care or taxes. It's punishing brown people [00:45:00] and making sweeping assumptions about who should and shouldn't be here.

And then ripping the fathers and mothers and children out of their long held neighborhoods and sending them back to a country that many people don't know as their home. And so this is the choice that's in front of us right now.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And in many cases because they have also talked about getting rid of the idea of birthright citizenship, they're talking about sending people to a country they have never even been to.

And dumping them off there. And it's just, yeah, like this, this is the kind of stuff that the mainstream media should be talking about that instead of, particular scuttlebutt about, what attorneys of Trump are mad at each other. Or, these, these things he, nasty thing he said about a judge or whatever.

Like, obviously those things deserve some amount of coverage, but the things that [00:46:00] people should know are the, are the, is the actual agenda and it's. It needs a lot more coverage on it, what's your take on that?

GERTZ: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, Donald Trump is someone who says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country and that his political enemies are vermin.

That is a level of rhetoric that is so wildly oppressive. inappropriate, so, out of step with America's historic values, that it really should be front page news every time he says something like that, but it's not. I think in many cases we've seen the mainstream press become kind of inured to the his most extreme language and has really in by doing that allowed the American public to kind of fall asleep on some of these horrific statements and plans.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, I think that is the, the last of [00:47:00] our clips here that we've got for the episode. Is there anything that either one of you wanted to add or feel like we didn't touch on that? We should

PELTZ: Just the Media Matters is sharpening our focus on the MAGA media and we're going to continue to ramp up coverage over the next year less than a year to the election.

And this is something that we're really closely paying attention to. And we hope that our audience is too.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. And I should also mention that people should also check out the full guide because the people that we discussed here on this conversation, this, this was only a subset of the individuals who are covered.

And then there is a whole array of other people who may not have an official role in the Donald Trump White House, but they certainly speak for the people who would work in there. And sometimes they're used to kind of test a idea or concept with complete plausible [00:48:00] deniability because they can say, well, I don't have any position with (Trump.) And I say that because this happened with regard to abortion and no exceptions for any kind of abortion and very early, bans on the procedure, like in vitro fertilization, and now they're ramping it up against birth control.

Like that's. This, that's another critical area where I think that the average, non political person especially if you are somebody who can, have children, that this is something that will directly impact you and they want to take it away.

All right, well, Madeline, so for people who want to keep up with you on social media where should people go for that?

PELTZ: I'm on all of the platforms. My handle is PeltzMadeline, I'm on X, but also on Threads and Bluesky, so you can check me out there. But most importantly, just follow my work on the Media Matters website.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. And how about you?

GERTZ: And I'm @MattGertz, [00:49:00] not @MattGaetz, at all of the major platforms as well.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, great. Well, I encourage everybody to follow you on those places and thanks for being here.

PELTZ: Thanks so much.

GERTZ: Thank you.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation. 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 if you are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much. You are making this possible, and I really, really do appreciate it. And I understand if you can't afford to subscribe right now but you can help out the show if you just leave a short little review on Apple Podcasts, tell people that you think it's great, that actually is really helpful. It helps Apple or Spotify or any of the other ones that you might be listening to recommend it to the other people who are on the site. So if you can do that, I really do appreciate 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 [00:50:00] episode. That is helpful.

So that's it for this one. I will see you next time.

This is a bonus episode for paid Flux subscribers. Please sign up on Patreon or Substack to get full access. Thanks for supporting independent progressive comedy!

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Dr. Venice Haynes, the Senior Director of Research and Community Engagement at United States of Care, an organization focused on building a better health care system by expanding access to quality, affordable healthcare, discusses their recent report which shows positive outcomes, particularly for Black women, when state-level Community Based Organizations (CBOs) are invested in maternal health.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Trump has to pay $175 million appeal fee which his lawyer thinks is a real victory, huh?

06:33 — Truth Social's stock is Trump's latest scam, experts say it's drastically overvalued

15:33 — George Santos leaves Republican party because he says it's too dishonest for him

20:43 — NBC News faces massive employee complaints for hiring insurrection supporting Ronna McDaniel

26:49 — Self-described pastor hired hitmen to kill guy dating his daughter

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Jewish fascism. It's a term that seems cruelly oxymoronic, a mockery of the memories of millions of people who were slaughtered by Adolf Hitler. And yet, Jewish fascism is real thing, an incredibly strange and hateful movement that's growing in both Israel and the United States.

But what does Jewish fascism look like, and why is it a thing? In this episode, I’m joined by Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive organization that studies right wing extremism. Our discussion is centered around his recent article for Religion Dispatches entitled “Meet the ‘Bronze Age Zionists,’ far-right Jews embracing fascism in the wake of October 7.”

The video of our March 6, 2024 conversation is available. The full transcript of the episode is available to Flux subscribers on Substack or Patreon.

Cover photo: A meme illustration circulated among far-right Jewish online activists showing an extremely muscular Jewish man being admired by a group of women in what appears to be ancient Rome.

Theory of Change is part of the Flux Media network, please support our work and get more content like this by subscribing.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

09:07 — Why some far-right Jews see themselves as similar to neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates

11:48 — Partial reconciliation between some white nationalists and Jewish fascists

17:54 — Why many political uses of the term “Judeo-Christian” represent fake pluralism

21:50 — “Bronze Age Pervert” and Jewish fascists’ struggles against antisemitic white nationalists

28:53 — Ben Shapiro’s antisemitism and the insidious concept of “bad Jews”

37:12 — Antisemitism is integral to right-wing politics, no matter what pro-Trump advocates may claim

43:48 — Building solidarity: The only effective way to combat antisemitism

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Ben.

BEN LORBER: Thanks, Matthew. It's good to be here.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I did want to mention to the audience that you have recently written an article over at Religion Dispatches about the phenomenon of Jewish [00:02:00] fascism. So if anybody wants to dig in even further than what we're going to do in this episode, I definitely recommend people check that out.

I guess this is a very strange topic to a lot of people, as I said in the introduction. So let's maybe first get started on who are these people and what are they doing?

LORBER: Yeah. Well, I think when you have a term like Jewish fascism, could be talking about a, wide range of phenomena, as I'm sure we all know, No there is a really horrific, war, an assault being committed by the far right Israeli government on Gaza right now.

And that's certainly, one locus of it, right? The, extreme right in Israel, largely though, not exc exclusively a religious Zionist, movement has been growing for decades and has been allying itself. With, all kinds of, European ethno nationalist leaders.

And then you also [00:03:00] have minority of the American Jewish community and the, the, global diaspora Jewish community. That's also outlying itself with the far right, around issues, ranging from immigration to black lives matter to, to support for, Israel, to To, the separation of church and state, right?

The, the global Jewish far right, really is very, similar to other far right movements.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And and in regards specifically to the idea of the fascists that we're talking about here, a lot of them are directly connected to the Israeli far right. And they are, doing a lot of memes and things like that in reference to, killing Palestinians and that sort of thing. And it's one of the things that you talked about in the article is that, these Jewish fascists are trying to make connections to other. Right wing extremist group.

So including [00:04:00] people who are explicitly antisemitic, including people who are jihadists or Christian supremacists.

LORBER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, online, something that myself and other researchers have seen since October 7th that I wrote about in my Religion Dispatches article is really a growth in these alt rights meme accounts that are Jewish.

They're run by Jews. Obviously it's possible that, they're anonymous, so they could be lying that they're Jewish, but it's pretty clear that they have a deep familiarity in Jewish religious iconography, in Israeli history, and Jewish identity.

Like much of the global far right, they're championing themes of, hyper masculinity. They're championing, vitriolic, racism both toward Palestinians and toward, like, Arabs and Muslims more broadly.Like much h of the far right, they're virulently opposed to the ceasefire demonstrations that have been very present across the U S and [00:05:00] many Western countries have in recent months.

They see these ceasefire demonstrations, through racist terms, right? They see predominantly Arab and Muslim and Palestinian led demonstrations as a sign of what they called the Great Replacement, right? What they view as like the dangerous, brown hordes who they see as threatening the stability of white Western Christian civilization, or as they'll call it, Judeo Christian civilization, and they're, and so there are these meme accounts who are championing this, but this is also the kind of of rhetoric that you hear from Israeli far right leaders and that we've been hearing for a long time, right? Folks like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett or Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli far-right leaders, they always depict Israel as the kind of frontline defender of Judeo-Christian civilization or the West against the Islamic East. And that kind of clash of civilizations.

And you hear this from [00:06:00] former president Trump. You also hear this in many forms from political leaders across the aisle in the U.S.

So we're really at at a dangerous moment where the Israeli right is really a core part of the global ethnonationalist far right, in some ways, leading the way.

And this is a very dangerous moment for progressive Jews like myself who really have a very different vision of Jewish identity and Jewish safety and all those things.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah that's right. And as you noted, there is a broad cross section of many of these individuals seem to be people with extreme fundamentalist opinions. And they are correct to be able to cite, specific verses in specific books of the Bible to support their ideas, but we do have to make clear that the Jewish tradition and Judaism itself has many conflicting pieces in the Bible has, I mean, has, we don't even know how many [00:07:00] authors the Bible has technically.

But nonetheless, it is the case that many more traditionalist Jewish theologians, are, they're into this idea of authoritarianism. They're into the idea that truth comes from God and they control what God says.

That's a very convenient narrative. And, it's one that. It runs consistently in a lot of religions as well. And it's one of the threads that you do see quite a bit in these individuals that you're talking to.

LORBER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that's, very much in common with either the Christian nationalist far right, the Jewish nationalist far right, also the Muslim nationalist far right, as they claim, and, not to mention like Hindu nationalists in India, right, really all religious ethnonationalism, they claim to hearken it back to some kind of primordial in truth that they find in their religious scriptures, right?

They claim that they're the inheritors of an [00:08:00] unbroken tradition stretching back into the very foundations of their religion. But I think that's really misleading, right? These are very modern, movements, right? They were built, the Christian right in the U. S. was built, by ideologues in the seventies and the eighties.

The Jewish nationalists, right? In Israel, I'd really strengthened and got kicked off, post 1967, post the Six Day War. We see similar things with the global Muslim far right. These are obviously all very complicated phenomena, but you know, they're modern phenomena and these people don't have a monopoly on what religious texts mean.

They don't have a monopoly on religious truth. I mean, are inspiring. Yeah, in movements within Judaism and Christianity and Islam that's all very different conclusions from our text. And I think it's always a danger that that nationalists and fundamentalists will, cherry pick in various religious traditions to kind of, bolster their political goals.

And it's really [00:09:00] important to remember that there's a great diversity of religious opinions and traditions out there.

Jewish fascists seeking common cause with neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates

SHEFFIELD: So we've got on the screen your Religion Dispatches article. And so, for people who are listening, you've got some of the memes that are, that they are using. And one of them is a meme of a muscular looking Jewish man who looks like a bodybuilder in front of some women who seem to be admiring him quite a bit and they are apparently Romans based on the architecture behind them.

And, it's, this idea of trying to integrate within the other nationalism said that we're talking about, as you were saying, and one of them as people can, let me just scroll down a little bit further here that you know, one of the, the means here I'll describe the first one, and then you can describe the second one.

So we've got a Confederate soldier depicted on the left side in front of a, confederate battle flag. And then we have a somebody who appears to be some sort of Israeli [00:10:00] soldier with a Israel flag in the background behind him. Now, what's, the image below that? The meme that we're, that's depicted there?

LORBER: Yeah. the image below is in many ways, even, more shocking. It shows. A Jewish man with, and you can't really, see it so well with the way that it's cut off, but he has like a, a Nazi yellow star on him, really in an embrace with a white power activist and he has a pin on his chest that says white pride worldwide.

And so the, the, idea was, is it really counter-intuitive, right? Because white nationalists are deeply antisemitic. They have antisemitic conspiracy theories at the core of their ideology, right? Their, central belief is that a Jewish cabal has taken control of immigration, of government, of media in order to wage war against white people.

So, but in the eyes of the Jewish far right, [00:11:00] this is an alliance they would like to see. They'd like to position the Jewish community within the broader far right, they see common enemies, right. They see, look, the state of Israel is under attack in their view, from brown people, essentially. And white people in the U. S. are under attack in their view from brown people. So let's get together and let's build a new traditionalist nationalist kind of vanguard alliance to save the West.

And that is a really a mockery of thousands of years of Jewish history, where it very much has been a European Christian civilization that oppressed Jews for thousands of years.

So to see it reversed now in this kind of, very, visible way is quite disturbing.

Partial reconciliation between some white nationalists and far-right Jews

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And, it should be noted that, that these outreach efforts while they are rejected by many traditional white nationalist Christian supremacist types, some of them have been reciprocating [00:12:00] and one of them in particular is a guy named Jared Taylor who has been running a magazine and website for many decades called American Renaissance.

And he is very friendly explicitly to to Jews who want to come in and be a member of his organization. And he's had many Jewish people speak at his conferences over the years. And then it's also the case that Richard Spencer, the infamous white nationalist activist had also said for a number of years.

And, he's perhaps changed his public stated views recently, but for the longest time, he said that Israel was a model for what he was trying to do. States. So, I mean, how's, how serious do you think the white nationalist community, if you will, is responding to these overtures by Jewish far right?

LORBER: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different factors at play. When we say the white nationalist in a community, that might mean very many [00:13:00] different things, right? There are neo-Nazis on the Internet who never want to ally with any Jewish people. They see Jews as the prime enemy.

And many of the neo-Nazis or other white supremacist groups like the America First Corporate Movement, they're actually very, anti anti Israel anti Zionist, but not out of any progressive politics or any real sympathy with Palestinians. It's really like a feature of their antisemitism.

But for others, right, like you mentioned, like Jared Taylor and the MAGA movement more broadly, if you want to consider the, MAGA movement kind of part of white nationalism, they're very welcoming to Jews, right? I mean, the MAGA movement has always tried to recruit different minorities into its coalition, right?

At its core, the base is white, evangelicals, and it very much You know, trades on white grievance and on Christian nationalism, but they've also been very adept at outreach, to African American [00:14:00] communities or to Latinx communities or to Jewish communities. And of course, many Jews in America are also white, but there are also, many Jews of color.

And Jews who are part of these other groups as well. But the global far right is, has always, had multiracial components and, multi-religious components. So I think it's important, to see these overtures, between Jewish nationalists and other, varieties of nationalists as part of this, kind of, diverse global nationalist coalition that that has room for Hindu nationalists.

It has, room for some conservative Muslims. It has room for folks like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, right? It's a diverse, movement. And I think more attention has to be paid to the subtle and clever ways that, the MAGA movement tries to make room for for religious and racial minorities.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, it is very important. But it's also worth noting that the way that they make this room, it is for people who know their [00:15:00] place that, you know, so for, so Israel is the place where Jews need to be, and India is the place where Hindus need to be, but within those confines of those states, they should have untrammeled power and have not have to have any regard for human rights or, minority rights of any kind. And and then of course you see that with as well with, far right, black politicians and activists like Candace Owens or many of these up and coming podcasters out there as well that are, black far right individuals. And of course, it's worth noting that that Enrique Tarrio, the former head of the Proud Boys is a Black Hispanic man. He uses that as a way to sort of shield his organization from accusations of racism.

LORBER: Yeah, no, that's definitely true. And there's another movement that's worth mentioning here that The National Conservatives, National Conservative [00:16:00] Movement.

They hold conferences every year. Yeah, National Conservatism, they're, primarily based in the U. S., but they've also held conferences all across the West. And, they, are hard-line Christian nationalists, right? They think the U. S. should become a Christian, nation with a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity, right?

Encoded in our laws and our policies and the identity of this country. But ironically enough national conservatism was started by an Israeli Jewish philosopher named, Yoram Hazony. And there are many there are many traditionalist, Jews in that coalition. And I've talked to some of them, like I went to the national conservatism conference in 2022 in Florida.

And I talked to many right wing Jews at that conference who said openly, we want to live in a Christian nation. We don't see it as a threat to us. If the dominant character of the United States is no longer, pluralistic [00:17:00] and there's no longer a separation of church and state. But if if fundamentalist Christianity is enshrined as the law and the culture of the land.

And some even said to me, I'd rather my kids be educated in a Christian private school than in a secular public school, because at least in the Christian private school, they won't be exposed, to liberalism or to transgender rights or to racial justice movements. So, and that was really shocking to me as someone, I mean, Christians have been trying to convert Jews and, trying to convert everyone else for a really long time.

So it's would you really want your. own child to go to a Christian private school for eight hours every day. And these, people were like, yes, because, to them, the greater enemy is the left. I thought that was a really disturbing, but fascinating look into their view.

Why many political uses of the term "Judeo-Christian" represent fake pluralism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And one person who I think who really kind of. popularized that opinion among American Jews is [00:18:00] Dennis Prager, who is a radio host with a Christian supremacist company named Salem Media. And his interpretations of, Judaism are I mean, he actually has said explicitly that, The role of Judaism now in the 21st century is to convert people to Christianity because we have to preserve the Abrahamic values on DSO.

Since Judaism is not evangelical, well, then, I guess. Making people be Christians and helping Christians sign people up. That's what Jews should do. And like, like, and I, think to some degree, people who are, let's say more devoutly and more traditionally Jewish, they might have a general affinity for somebody like Dennis Prager, but not understand what he's actually trying to do to Judaism, which is destroy it.

LORBER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating because people talk a [00:19:00] lot on the right about a Judeo Christian West, right. As if there's this unbroken continuity. In the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, together really formed, the bedrock of whatever, like, we're calling Western civilization.

And that's, kind of an unbroken, 2000 year old, tradition, but really, like I was saying before the whole idea of a Judeo Christian West is. There's also a very recent, very modern invention. It was initially formed right after World War II, after the Holocaust, as a way to kind of make atonement for what, Europe as a whole, and Germany in particular, had just done to the Jews.

And to say, Hey, now the main enemy is communism, right? So we are the Judeo Christian West, and our enemy is communism in the East. And then once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the enemy became Islamic fundamentalism, [00:20:00] right? So "Judeo-Christian" has always really functioned more to signify who we aren't rather than who we are.

And yeah, I mean, I think it's very disturbing especially given that Christian nationalists, ultimately even though, Orthodox and right wing Jews are, in their coalition. The laws they want to make the laws of the land are disastrous for religious Jews as well. Religious Jewish law is not so anti abortion as, Christian nationalism is, right?

Dr. Krystale E. Littlejohn, professor and author of the book "Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics," discusses her latest book, "Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade," a collection of 52 essays she edited alongside historian, and author Dr. Rickie Solinger. This incredible collection features essays from some of the most formidable thinkers, leaders, and activists of our time, each exploring critical and overlooked aspects of our ongoing fight for reproductive justice. The book presents a much-needed conversation in our post-Roe landscape, and provides a roadmap for how to move forward with a more inclusive, and intersectional lens.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Peter Navarro becomes first-ever Trumper to go to jail for his crimes

04:04 — Trump forced to admit he can't pay $464 million to appeal fraud judgment

09:07 — Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen will testify against Trump in hush money case after he loses bid to force them out

10:53 — Alina Habba, Trump’s airhead attorney, gets thrown under the bus in harassment suit against Mar-a-Lago

13:53 — House Republicans reach tentative deal to stop yet another shutdown threat by their own party members

20:22 — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem posts two infomercials on Twitter for some reason

25:09 — Florida man treated for having tapeworm larvae in his brain

28:42 — Ohio Republican senate candidate claims he did not make gay profile on sex website

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It’s all but official that the 2024 presidential election is going to be Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. And so because of that, we’re going to move to more of a general election focus on Theory of Change.

At this point in many of the surveys, Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them being that the Democratic party is operating under a politics of yesteryear against a Republican party that has not existed in many decades.

Besides being much more dominated by openly anti-democratic extremists, the American right has become incredibly professionalized with a gigantic infrastructure for networking, career advancement, legislation composition, and also propaganda.

Democrats, by contrast, have almost no institutions that are as explicitly ideological and which work to advocate for center-left ideas to the public. As much as Democrats often talk about how democracy is at risk in this country, and indeed it is, they have not functionally changed their behavior from an institutional standpoint.

And we will talk about that today with the guest in today’s episode with Rachel Bitecofer. She is a political strategist and the co-author of a new book called Hit ’Em Where It Hurts, and also the creator of a newsletter called The Cycle.

The video of this episode is available. The conversation was recorded February 9, 2024. The transcript of the audio follows. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.

Cover photo: Lara Trump, recently appointed as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, speaks onstage at a lavish conference thrown by Turning Point USA. June 19, 2023. Photo: Gage Skidmore/CC-by-2.0

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46:25 — The “both parties are wrong” critique of politics is completely disproven by actual data

54:16 — Why humor and mockery are so important in political communications

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Rachel.

RACHEL BITECOFER: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here today.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. so let’s I guess start off the discussion with what’s the elevator pitch behind your book here?

BITECOFER: Yeah, just contextually, I think it’s important for people to understand in this audience, probably in particular. This book is the product of a mission to, to bring the rest of the world up to what political science knows [00:03:00] about.

Voting behavior, the mass electorate voter psychology, political polarization, because the reason that I’m even sitting here today is a forecast using my academic work. I was a PhD. I was a professor at a university in 2018. That forecasted a really strong Democratic performance in the 2018 midterms.

And the reason I even put it out was I was frustrated watching and reading things like 538 and the Cook political report and others that didn’t seem to incorporate modern or recent political science literature, especially the literature on political polarization, because you guys hear the word all the time.

We’re polarized, it’s polarizing, whatever, but what people don’t know is that actually that has created a really distinct mass electorate that never existed. I mean, maybe back in the civil war, we don’t have polling. It’s never existed before, and it has conditioned behavior [00:04:00] in a different way than we’re used to.

What was happening in the nineties or when Ronald Reagan won and won almost every state on the map. Right? Those are things that can’t happen now because we have a different electorate. So motivating the book was to get a, the left predominantly to understand the reality of the American electorate, the role that partisanship party identification plays in vote choice.

And then the very, very rough clay that is the American voter, It’s not like the people who are watching us now, they are tuned out. They are mostly not interested in politics. And if you think about something that you’re not interested in, like say, I mean, NASCAR, I don’t know anything about NASCAR.

I couldn’t tell you one NASCAR driver, but if I was into NASCAR, I wouldn’t know a lot about it. I would be able to tell you a whole bunch, right? So, people don’t have an interest in politics. That’s the reason why half of the eligible electorate, basically it’s 60 40 percent in [00:05:00] 2020 don’t even bother to vote in the most consequential of our elections.

The presidential election people in America are very tuned out and that has gotten much worse in the modern media environment, which allows people to completely isolate themselves from political news and current events in and really just go all in on entertainment. Right. So,

SHEFFIELD: Oh, ’cause there’s, yeah, there’s just so much of it.

Oh, so much for to watch.

BITECOFER: It’s so much, right? Like, I can’t, sometimes I go into Netflix and I’m like, okay, what should I watch? Okay. Too much. I just, I quit . Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: I mean, hell, like, if you wanted to, you could literally. Only watch real housewives shows you literally do that for a year.

BITECOFER: Our system is built and based on a flawed foundation. So this book is 1st, getting you to understand. How that’s that assumption that the electorate is engaged and informed and the, they, the public knows all this stuff that’s happening with [00:06:00] Donald Trump, it’s a flawed assumption.

Okay. And if you accept that the electorate knows almost nothing about what’s happening in contemporary politics, strategically you shift, right? And it becomes, Oh, then we need a messaging strategy. That informs the electorate that they’re facing an existential threat to their health, wealth, safety, and freedom.

So getting that second part of the book is about getting people to learn how the Republican system operates, how they’ve developed and, institutionalized infrastructure to pull off. They’re, really, they have really strong electoral performance relative to the amount of people that they’re, Are in the Republican party and and they’ve used it to dominate.

Right. And so the book is about getting people to understand Republicans don’t campaign the same way their election messaging isn’t, Hey, I have candidate Tim, Tom, Tim Ryan, and he’s a bipartisan, moderate. Who’s going to get things done. He was up. [00:07:00] Good ideas. An extremist in JD Vance and JD Vance won that election.

Now there is a lean to the right on in Ohio, but at the end of the day, the voters that voted for JD Vance on that partisan label preference, the R on the, ballot next to him. Many of them, they had no idea they were voting for a fascist, a guy who’s actually espoused in the public record, very fascist views, especially about women.

Okay, they never heard that he would vote to ban abortion nationally. They never heard any of this because we are, our campaigns do not define our opponent. And so that’s what this book is about, getting everybody out of the old strategy. Understanding how modern elections work and how polarization has, really elevated the effect of partisan label.

And at the end of the day, if partisanship is going to predict the vote choice for 90 percent of voters, and it does, even those independent leaners, then you have to be designing a campaign that sells the entire brand. And that’s what the Republicans have been very [00:08:00] good at. Their brand good, our brand bad, right?

And so it comes, it’s a whole new approach to electioneering on the left.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, when it’s, when you’re talking about, defining the opposition the, Republicans figured out a long time ago and probably I’d say Paul Weyrich, the, right wing Christian strategist, he was the first one that really figured this out where he said that, people, it’s easier to motivate them against something than for something.

And that’s, and essentially like. And that’s right.

Television advertising doesn’t work, but Democrats keep wasting money on it

SHEFFIELD: There is so much political science that has, has, really just floated around within the academic community. And I mean, that was my major in college and I remember reading all these papers and then I would look at the way that the, Two parties behaved and I was on the right at this point in time. And I was like, wow, the Democrats, even though they all have these liberal professors don’t [00:09:00] pay attention to them at all. And what they say, and like one of the, key insides of political science is that advertising doesn’t work.

Especially at the higher, like the higher you go in politics, the less it works in terms of persuasion, because people already know who Donald Trump is. They already know who Joe Biden is. They already know who Barack Obama is or whoever, Hillary Clinton, they are, and they have their opinion.

It’s the same way that if I showed you, if you like, Pepsi and I show you a thousand ads for Coke, it’s not going to make you go buy a Coke. Yes. and it’s because of the, it’s not going to make you like

BITECOFER: it, especially. And really it’s not about the person. So it’s not Biden. I mean, Trump’s different.

Okay. But whatever. It’s not. Bush and Kerry or whatever. It’s the in American political science when the field of mine, mine is behavioral, right? When that field emerged, it was because we had finally invented surveys on telephone surveys. And people were like, people [00:10:00] like me, nerds, political scientists were like, Hey, now we can, find out things about the American electorate.

And so what they endeavored to do Was go find out about the electorate. It’s a seminal work in my discipline called the American voter. And what it found folks was this Americans don’t know jack s**t about politics. They can tell you the president is maybe the vice president. Beyond that, most Americans don’t have much context to work with when it comes to interpreting political phenomenon, but.

The political scientist who wrote this book argue, don’t worry about it because they have this handy cognitive shortcut that they can use to make informed political decisions that don’t require them to have all this information. What is that shortcut? It’s the party label. Okay. And partisan elections, no matter how much you bleach out the party part in the campaigning, which is bad for us, right?

At the end of the day, the voter is getting into the ballot booth. And if [00:11:00] I know nothing, I mean, say you were sitting there right now, Matthew, but you were a black dot. I didn’t know if you were a man or a woman, if you were rich or poor. Old, young, suburbanite, rural, nothing. But I knew that you were an independent who said, I lean to the Republican party or a Republican, vice versa on the other side, I would be able to predict your vote choice a year away from an election, a year away, as I have done in two cycles, right?

I’ll be able to predict your vote choice nine out of 10 times. I’ll be right. Nine out of 10 times, because that you’re not buying a candidate, you’re buying a party. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And and to some degree we’re, kind of seeing that people not understanding that with, when you look at the, a lot of the discussion about public opinion polls and Joe Biden and Donald Trump, that, like, I, I think the.

The number one thing that happened in the Republican presidential primaries this year is that it wasn’t a [00:12:00] real primary. And that essentially because all the candidates were too afraid to attack Trump, basically it was a coronation of. You should vote for Trump because Joe Biden is the devil incarnate Republicans.

And you need to understand that. And that was the, message out of every single debate, Joe Biden is evil. That was it. It was never, well, Donald Trump is kind of dumb or he’s kind of corrupt or is extreme, even though some of, except for Chris Christie, he was the only one that was actually willing to criticize Trump.

And it was like the same, they, made the exact same mistake. The non Trump candidates that, that they made in 2016, they were too afraid to criticize this guy. And if you don’t criticize the number one person, well, you’re not going to win.

BITECOFER: Why would I pick a Trump alternative? If I can have Trump, right?

I mean, like they’re not going

SHEFFIELD: to tell me why Trump was bad. Exactly.

BITECOFER: Right. and as you point out, Christie did it. Now, if they had [00:13:00] all done it, I am convinced they could have put this guy down. Okay. But it would have taken all of them. Right. And they, just, they are so they’re like, it’s like, I don’t know.

They’re so Vic they’ve turned themselves into such hapless lumps of play. They can’t even figure out how to get out of a wet paper sack anymore.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and I think the reason for that is that, the Republican party is not actually conservative. it’s reactionary. It is not a conservative party.

And in many ways, the Democratic Party actually is a conservative party in America. It’s sad to say,

BITECOFER: if you don’t classical conservatism, which you and I both, I think, understand pretty well. Yes, I mean, honestly, the Democratic Party is trying to preserve our institutions and, that’s a classic neoclassic liberalism, right?

Like, it’s crazy. Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: and certainly not trying to socialize anything. Yeah. And, and like, and, something that was, and, [00:14:00] of course, like somebody who’s right wing, hearing us say that might say, Oh, that’s just a bunch of communists talking nonsense. I don’t have to believe that.

But something that is an objective fact to this point is that, when that American political consultants who are Democrats will go and work for the British Conservative Party because they see it as not that different from the Democratic Party.

BITECOFER: Right. It’s amazing. Right. Because. When I do a, I did a survey once to test this and I, because I had a wonderful five year run where I had my own survey research center.

It was fantastic. And so when things came into my mind, I could test it. When I tested, I said, I tested like brand, like awareness, like what is, what do you, what comes to mind when you think of each of the parties brands? Right. And guess what? I mean, you won’t be surprised at all. When I tell you what the most common word was that people Popped out in terms of hearing, what do you think of the Democrats?

Right? And it was [00:15:00] socialism. So let’s think about how Republicans do their swing messaging. Okay. It’s about branding us as socialist and more lately child pedophile.

And what it is like, okay, so a Democrat’s like, well, you can’t call people a fascist. They don’t know what it is. Well, nobody knows what the socialist is either. All right. It’s not that voters know that we’re socialist because there’s a bunch of policy points that prove it out. They just keep hearing the association, the word association and the way that we run like Tim Ryan.

Did in Ohio. I mean, we, did kind of a bifurcated strategic map in 22 where Michigan and Arizona ran against the Republican party and defined it as an extremist movement. And then the old strategy ran with people like Tim Ryan. What Tim Ryan’s apologetic democratic approach is this, the Republican opponent saying, don’t vote for Tim Ryan because he’s a Democrat and all Democrats are socialist.

Okay. And Tim Ryan’s messages. Yeah, but I’m not one of those Democrats. [00:16:00] And what you hear if you’re a swing voter is, boy, there’s something really wrong with the brand Democrat. And if you’re walking into a ballot booth where the most important thing on the ballot is going to be the D and the R and brand association and basically top of mind awareness of impression, then that it’s very dangerous and bad to be telling swing voters.

Yes. There’s something wrong with that brand. You have to elevate your own party brand because at the end of the day, It’s the perception of the Democratic brand on the ballot is going to predict your performance in a swing race and especially against an opposition that’s willing to make. I mean, think about it.

We’re living in a country folks. We’re living in a country. The only advanced democracy. That doesn’t even have paid maternity leave. Okay, everywhere else, I’ve paid 6 weeks or whatever of maternity, maybe 6 months in some cases. [00:17:00] Here, I was back to work 5 days after a C section. Okay, no paid maternity leave.

So we’re not anywhere close to a communist regime. We can’t even see communists from our backyard in this country. And yet a not insignificant part of the population, I would argue, probably about 50 million Americans think that we’re socialist.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, it is, I mean, and a lot of that is media effects.

And and as a discipline in political science, it has, there’s a massive, archive of studies that show that, It, media affects people’s opinions and yet when you look at the way that Democrats think about, Democratic leaders think about media, they seem to have the idea, and this is to the antiquated belief systems that you’ve been talking about, is that they seem to have this idea that, well, somebody can hear, 24 7 On six [00:18:00] different right wing cable channels and countless YouTube channels that Democrats are socialist pedophiles who are going to, let China take over America.

Yeah. They can hear that every single day of their lives. But then if we have, a hundred million dollars of ads on shows that they don’t watch for politics, that will counteract it. And it’s like, No, guys, that’s not how it works. But yeah, and, but this it’s so pervasive, this idea that.

Advertising is a panacea. Where, what can, let’s talk about why do you think that is?

BITECOFER: I mean, I, think there’s a real naivety about how media operates and how the Republican party operates in relationship to the media, I mean, Democrats don’t, it’s been, it was like me for five, six years now teaching people, actually public opinion flows From the top down, right?

The reason people are going to start noticing the economy is doing better. [00:19:00] Finally, is because the media is finally giving them headlines about how good the economy is. you can’t, you can, have things that are external, like, Gaza support from the Palestine people, but most of the time.

Media effects are shaping public perception, right? And even once you recognize that, then you have real logistic hurdles to implementing something like they have where they, as you pointed out all day long, if I’m a conservative, I’m going to consume different various. Conservative media, but it’s all going to be the same message over and repetition is what you need to make it sink in.

Whereas like us, we’re going to talk about 400 different things. There’s no repetition. 1 show is focused on this. 1 show is focused on that. And we can’t, we’re not going to, we’re not going to be able to compete with that. But what we can do. Because media follows campaigns is if we shape a narrow, if we’re shaping our message to create a narrative, then, and if we run [00:20:00] it from all levels, state, legislative house, Senate, gov president, it makes, I can make a cacophony effect.

Like the Republican party just did in 2021 was CRT. CRT is something even I, and I know almost everything had never heard of in, early 2021 and yet they took something I had never heard of and made it a household name, a national name. And made an entire election cycle revolve around it. How did they do that strategy and centralization?

We can’t stumble our way into better communication. We have to strategically design that system and intentionally centralize things. So that’s a lot of the work that I’m working on

SHEFFIELD: now. Yeah, no, it’s true.

Republicans invest in political networking and career building, Democrats do notz

SHEFFIELD: And of course the way that they’re able to do that is that they have and I can say this, as somebody who was on the political right, that the right wing spends probably in a [00:21:00] given year, at least 500 million on networking like networking organizations, internal networking.

And so they’ve got these groups like the council for national policy Americans for tax reform, CPAC, and Charlie Kirk’s many, organizations, which just alone, he controls like a hundred million dollars. That’s exactly

BITECOFER: right. You’re the only person I’ve ever met that knows that other than me.

SHEFFIELD: Well, that’s unfortunate.

BITECOFER: I mean, like, I lay out in the book, I’m like, look, this is what they do. Like we need, we don’t, we should stop telling rich people. We don’t want their money. We need. Billionaires and they have to start spending billions on building this infrastructure, Alec

SHEFFIELD: infrastructure of democracy.

BITECOFER: Yes. Infrastructure for democracy. And if we, and we have 500 grassroot groups for youth voting, all elbow grease. Okay. And spit, and there’s almost no one’s paid to run or to work in any of these [00:22:00] things. And they have turning point, they have a hundred million dollar For office buildings of 4 floors each because I went and debated Charlie Kurtz so I can see the infrastructure of turning point 1 of those buildings.

I didn’t access. Is outside labeled the turning point logistic center. So, 4 floors devoted to logistics guys. And like, we’re just getting like, we cannot band aid our way through this. We have to have an infrastructure that’s heavily invested in. We have to start right now because we’re already 15, 20, 30 years behind in that.

Depending on what institution you’re talking about. And at the end of the day, we, I mean, we, for years have been saying, Oh, they have all this stuff and why don’t we have any stuff? Well, okay. Then f*****g build it. It’s time to build it, dude. How many years are going to go by when you were like, Oh, we wish we had an Alec.

Like, we have to find these donors and have conversations about how to better spend their investment money in elections. Because as you just [00:23:00] pointed out, a hundred million dollars in all, in September, Isn’t going to offset 10 months of narrative setting by right wing media. Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: no, it’s true. And, and, I think, and this is something that I’ve talked about a lot on, on, on my show is that I, think that the reason why you don’t see this stuff taken seriously is that when they look at a, like, a Democratic, a large donor or a party leader or high level consultant, when they look at Ben Shapiro or they look at Charlie Kirk, they see a buffoon who says, constantly says stupid stuff. And you know what, they are that, but they also are heard by tens of millions of people every single week when they say these things. And so you can laugh at what they have to say-- and it is absurd and like I have a comedy news podcast, so we do laugh at it.

It’s worth laughing at it But the [00:24:00] problem is that things that are like fascism is both absurd and dangerous Yes and if you only think that it’s absurd then you’re going to lose to it

BITECOFER: Yes, exactly. I mean, I’m doing a project. That’s called Project 1933. It’s tied into my work, trying to get people to read the Heritage Foundation’s Manual for Leadership, which is reissued since 1980.

Every, time there could be a new incoming Republican administration. I thought, could these people have possibly put a thousand pages of a fascist autocracy takeover plan into the Heritage Manual? And I ordered it and guess what? Because they know we’re so in it. They can write their s**t in public and it describes how they’re going to use schedule of how they’re going to take over the civil service, how they’re going to ignore the court rulings.

it’s a pathway to fascism or transition to fast fascism. And I’m trying to get people to see what happened in Germany in 1933. [00:25:00] Hitler’s sworn in on Jan 30th. And it’s basically like the Trump’s swearing, right? Like, Oh, this guy’s going to be a hot mess. He’s going to, this government will last three weeks, but you know, the conservatives are going to reign them in this and that, and I’m not kidding by the summer, DACA was built and it’s filled full of the Nazi party’s political enemies, guys, three months to take long. So I’m like documenting it in real time. Like it’s a live tweet. Tomorrow, in fact, is the next segment of that where I’m trying to show people just how quick it is because all you need is a willingness to ignore the law to suspend the law to say the law is suspended and you are not going to ever sell me that this Republican Party.

Given Elise Stefanik was just on CNN talking about how she would have overturned the government, okay, overthrown the government for Donald Trump on January 6th. We have to believe them. They are quite serious. They are going to establish a fascist autocracy and we [00:26:00] have to panic now because if we wait until they’re actually doing it, like in Hitler’s Germany, it will be too late.

SHEFFIELD: No, exactly right. And, and I think on the Hitler point, one of the other things about him is that. People looking at him today, almost 100 years from when he first came along, they tend to think of him as just, this purely evil and, charismatic figure who was sort of, had an almost godlike competence of, dictatorship.

But that’s actually not how things were like. It is before he became, the absolute ruler, he wasn’t people thought of him as an idiot as a stupid moron who was constantly putting his foot in his mouth. And guess who that reminds you of. Yes.

BITECOFER: I keep trying to tell people, listen. Don’t compare [00:27:00] Hitler to like, or Trump to Hitler from 1944.

Okay? Like after he is murdered 6 million Jews in the gas chambers. What you should be looking at is the comparisons from 19 32, 19 33 Hitler, and if you do that. You’ll see the way the Nazis did their stuff was a victimization narrative. It was grievance politics, and it was an us versus them propaganda psych ops that they utilized a new mass communication tool to execute.

That was the radio. Never before could you beam a voice into a head. Of an American in their living room prior to that, and it was really instrumental in what the Nazis ended up doing. We’re in a very same situation because the invention of the Internet has completely and fundamentally changed how people are getting information and we learn that.

Because we know now that there’s a segment of the Democrats base, right? That has been radicalized over Gaza, probably [00:28:00] by social media content through TikTok and other things that were financed by Iran. Okay? We’ve never had a capability for foreign governments to put content into American brains directly.

It’s a new form of thing. And, Vladimir Putin used it to first elect Trump, help get Trump elected. And now it’s, being turned against us both domestically and internationally. So it, we’re really in a moment. Yes, there are differences. The United States is a stabilized, institutionalized democracy that’s been in operation for almost 250 years.

The Weimar Republic in Germany was never stable. Okay, so that is true folks. But at the end of the day, when you look at the mechanics of what happened, if the ruler is willing to say, there is a crisis of the border, the borders being invaded, I am suspending the constitution. That’s it. It’s game over.

Now you might say, well, won’t we all react? maybe, [00:29:00] but it’s really easy to say that you will when you’re not the one with the AR 15 pointed at your family, right? So maybe we’ll react, but if they’ve declared martial law and they’re shooting protesters in the streets, it’s not going to be sufficient.

The time to stop it is before it happens.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And we know for a fact that when Trump was trying to illegally cling to power in 2021, he was receiving advice from people. You need to suspend the constitution. You need to seize the voting machines. You need to declare a martial law because there is an insurrection.

And they were the ones talking about insurrection.

BITECOFER: Yeah. And we know this too, that was a white house meeting late at night after the, chief of staff had left because Cassidy Hutchinson told us. Right. And it came within seconds folks. And then actually it happened. Trump said, you know what I want to appoint, I can do whatever I want.

Right. I can appoint Sidney Powell. As a special prosecutor and literacy, [00:30:00] right? And, they’re like, yeah, you can do that, but we’re not going to do it. We’re not, no, one’s going to execute this for you. No, one’s gonna like, he tried to appoint her, but the rest of the room was like, no, we’re not going to do it.

Like they literally ignored a presidential order. People have no idea of any of that. Like my friends that vote regularly even, so they’re already better than most people. They don’t, know anything about what happened. They know there was an insurrection thing at the Capitol. They don’t realize it was part of an intricate, multi level, multi pronged, party wide conspiracy that came this close to ending democracy.

And that’s why they devised Project 2025. They’re actually taking applications from young conservatives who they’re going to ideologically scream. They’re going to have this whole data bank of pre scaring to people who were like you, right? You. That are committed to loyalty to not to the constitution, not to anything else, but to Donald Trump personally.

And I mean, that’s just where we’re at. [00:31:00]

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And the, and so all those people that refuse Trump. In 2021, if he wins, they will, no one like that will be allowed in,

BITECOFER: Donald Trump’s going to like pick a vice president that helps him do something like, he picked Pence because he wanted to get, make sure the evangelical vote, the most important constituency in the Republican party was squarely behind him.

And he’s, a hot mess personally. And we thought maybe they would care because they’re supposed to like be religious, but apparently not like that. He’s not doing that this time. Trump has one criteria for Veep, will this person do what I want them to do when I seize power? And that’s it. Okay. And that’s why Elise Stefanik was auditioning on CNN the other day.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, exactly. And of course, they also do this at the, sort of thing at, the local and state levels as well. And, you mentioned a group that I think a lot of people might not have heard of [00:32:00] called Alec. What is Alec for people who don’t know what that is. Yeah. In the Republican.

What do

BITECOFER: they do? Yeah. Yeah. Within the Republican massive infrastructure, which is, as he pointed out, at least 500 million a year, but probably significantly more if we could, actually look

SHEFFIELD: at the media, it’s over, billions.

BITECOFER: Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. Well, one of the things that they did when they were developing a plan called red map, which is what they use to gerrymander, they, they had good timing, they had Michael Steele strategy.

Fire Pelosi, nationalized politics, a referendum on Obama and Obamacare seized in 2010, and they ended up having this great electoral performance right at the right moment, because that was a redistricting year. And they use that power to redistrict themselves a ton of state legislative seats at the same time, what they were doing was building something called the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Alec L A L E C. And what that does [00:33:00] is it, streamlines legislation for the state level. So when you look at Florida, right, we all know they have a thing called the stand your ground law, because we all know Trayvon Martin was brutally murdered for no reason because of the stand your ground law. What people don’t realize is stand your ground is a law that’s in multiple States.

And it came out of this think tank called Alec, which writes what we call model legislation. So they basically take a law, they, write it up. It’s, and it’s always crazy s**t, like trans bans or stand your ground or busting the unions or whatever it is, right to work that all comes from Alec. And then they introduce it all across all the state legislatures that they control in the same legislative cycle.

And that’s how you can get somewhere where like. Ron DeSantis starts ranting about trans people, and within six months, every state legislature that’s controlled by Republicans have passed brutal anti trans legislation. It’s because it’s all centralized, it’s all coming out of ALEC, and we have [00:34:00] absolutely nothing like that.

SHEFFIELD: And I think, it’s really that network is so important because it allows them to move with extreme quickness in to impose their agenda on states and local and locality so like, and you, saw that, for instance, certainly with various, anti CRT laws, various, book censorship laws, teacher censorship laws, and, they just rolled these out before anybody in the local communities had any idea what the hell was going on. And like, and, they rolled the local media as well, because, they would give these signs, to their protesters and they’d show up somewhere and at a school board and say, I’m concerned about this or that.

And these were in many cases, professional. Right wing activists, not parents at the school, no connection at all to the area. And the local media had no idea that this was happening and who was doing this. And they didn’t ask anybody. [00:35:00] And so, they would just report it as here’s some concerned parents who were talking about schools and, and, they, fooled a lot of people and, it’s only now that.

They have, caused so much censorship and so many and suppress so much free speech that people are now realizing, oh, I actually have to pay attention to my school board election. So lunatics who want to, impose Christo fascism, don’t take over my school board.

BITECOFER: I mean, I don’t know if you saw this, but yeah, just yesterday, a Utah, one of these moms for Liberty school board nuts, right?

It was a man, but whatever, that’s the group that’s promoting Christofascism on our school boards. He accused a Utah student, a minor child of being transgender. She is not. And now she’s in police custody because so many people came after her that this poor, innocent, random kid. I mean, what, is that?

Right? Imagine if that was your kid, [00:36:00] like, what, how angry would you be that some dude on a school board set radical extremist to the point where you have to put your kid into protective custody? Right. Like we, yeah, we have to make sure that we’re communicating to people the stakes, because although we are disorganized, disinterested and not motivated are, and there are few in number, but they are all of those things.

How right-wing activists use mainstream media to push their message through manipulation

BITECOFER: And they also are very strategic. I lay it on the book, how they made CRT a household name using not only right wing media ecosystem, which is 1 part, but by getting our mainstream system to validate. The crazy stuff that they want to talk about. Okay. And, we see that last night too, with the, dirt her report for Joe Biden there, they’ve been pounding this narrative, trying to paint him as senile.

And now they’ve got this great report that they can point to. It’s none of it is an accident guys. Like it’s all intentional. And I was reading a book from another ex conservative [00:37:00] activist. I was talking about, Hey, I, everything that I was indoctrinated with, I thought like the left had.

All this stuff that was like, similar to the stuff on the right, all the strategic infrastructure with long term plans and goals that were, rolling out step by step radical plans. And then she gets out of the conservative movement into the, other side and realizes, okay, no, actually there’s no liberal conspiracy there because there’s no, nobody’s doing

SHEFFIELD: it.

Yeah. And there isn’t even a liberal media. No. Like, Right.

BITECOFER: There’s just a media that has been like, since the sixties, we, changed the model from, for media in America so that it had to turn a profit. It used to be that the networks we keep it when we’re talking about a very different environment.

So it was CBS, NBC, ABC, basically at the beginning, those networks in order to use the public airwaves had to air Public affairs programming as a public service, the news, things like that, even though those [00:38:00] things were not very profitable or didn’t turn a profit. It was kind of, the cost of doing business to access the American mind for entertainment and make money.

Okay, after we move away from that model. Suddenly the newsroom is faced with a problem. The corporate owner of the media station is saying, Hey, we need you to be profitable. We’re not going to operate you at a loss. And once that happens, they have to meet what people want psychologically. And people don’t want hard news, dense stuff, serious conversation.

We’re conditioned, we’re human beings and we’re conditioned for certain things. And at the end of the day. If you are operating a new station with a mandate to maintain a profit margin, you’re going to give people what they want, not what they need. So we stopped eating our civic vegetables a very long time ago.

And now we’re, really harvesting the ice. We’re harvesting now was planted back then in the 80s and 90s.

Right wing messaging can impact people who aren’t even conservative

SHEFFIELD: [00:39:00] Yeah. No, it’s true. And we’re seeing this on so many ways when it comes to different issues, like, and I think most principally currently with the economy that, you have, it’s just amazing to me how ignorant economists are about media studies.

They know literally nothing about it. And they don’t understand that, when you going, like ever since right wing media became enormous in roughly like 2012 or so Republicans, when you ask them, if the economy, how is it going with the economy? They say it sucks. It’s horrible.

It’s a depression. If a Democrat is the president and that’s irrespective of how it’s going, you could have, 10 percent GDP growth and, 1 percent unemployment. And they would say it was depression. Yes. And in fact, they did do that. We know for a fact that they, when, the after Obama was reelected, the economy was going great.

It’s been fantastic. And, but Republicans [00:40:00] said it was horrible, the worst ever. And and we’re seeing that over again now with Joe Biden. And it. And that constant, and this is just purely a repetition of the message. So they all believe it. And then that sort of is a. Infectious belief to people who don’t know anything.

Like if you’re a political person, their right wing neighbor tells them, Oh, we’re in a depression right now. We’re in a recession right now. What do they know to say otherwise? And who, who have they heard to tell them that’s not true? So they believe it. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why we are where we are with the economy, but you know, like your average economist, they’re like, Oh gosh, that just must be inflation.

That’s all it is. And it’s like, you guys haven’t looked at any. Actual polling other than the usual ones you look at and

BITECOFER: just to reiterate how powerful the effect that you’re describing is. [00:41:00] And I do this every transition, like, every time the party switches in the White House, because the Gallup data goes back forever.

So you can do it for a long time. It’s much stronger of an effect in the polarized era, but it’s always been there. You have a let’s say outgoing Republican Trump, right. In December, November of the election year, you have an incoming Joe Biden. When you look at that four months of Gallup data, almost immediately upon the inaugural, you will see the Republicans that thought the economy was wonderful under Trump suddenly dropped down to 10 percent and it inverts completely, right, because Democrats are less tribal, so they’ll be more honest.

There’s still a partisan thing to it. And so, Trump is in office. The economy is awful. Trump’s out of office, even though we’re in a pandemic, Democrats are much more likely to say the economy was good even before it actually became good again. Right. So it, partisan, when I talk about partisanship and my frustration and my motivation to even become this person that I am [00:42:00] today, it’s, because it is so powerful.

And yet we ignore it in almost all of our analysis. We don’t understand. Like I did a survey once at the Watson center, my polling firm, I wanted to see like, okay, can I, since people don’t know anything, they, know maybe the Republicans and Democrats, the position on guns on abortion, but beyond that, not really.

Right. So I ran some policy questions by voters in an experimental survey design where I would rotate. The party proposing the policy to show people when you get, look at how Republicans act for a policy proposal. They’re told it’s a Republican that wants to do it massive support, but at the same policy description is assigned to a Democrat.

Collapse, I mean, and not just little changes, 5, 10, I’m talking 40 point movement on that. Okay. And so it really is completely [00:43:00] underestimated and understood how much partisanship matters. And in a modern public mass opinion. What we’re seeing in a lot of survey data now that we, this didn’t used to be so much of an issue is, basically a measure of latent partisanship.

So you have the partisans and then you have the lingerers that are basically closet partisans. And really, if you wanna know how the public

SHEFFIELD: is, , partisans in denial

BITECOFER: is what, right? And so if you really wanna know, like, not necessarily how the public is feeling, but how. Like the top level, top of mind awareness narrative in the independent bucket is, you have to suss out those leaners from your independence and sample enough that you can look at pure independence only.

And that’s where you can see things like how successful Republicans have been defining Biden as senile and having dementia when we all know that Donald Trump has much worse mental acumen problems.

How political branding influences people who consider themselves "independent"

SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. One of the other things that I think a lot of people who do [00:44:00] left-leaning politics is that they, don’t understand that the political.

Viewpoints of people that they were more of an X, Y graph rather than a left to right graph. And, once you have that realization, I think that, you, you understand, like when you look at and on the screen, we’ve got a graph for those who are listening, you want to check the show notes to see the graph.

But basically like libertarianism can be perceived as both left and right. It, because most people, they don’t really have. A sound conception of, well, the government should spend more on this five things and not on these and less on these five things. People don’t think in those terms.

They think in terms of, who do I, what do I prioritize society or the individual, or do I prioritize reason or tradition? And so, and I, and it’s relevant to this discussion because I think there are a lot of people out there who are, they have a libertarian standpoint. And we’re seeing, we’ve seen during the Trump years that a lot of libertarians have come [00:45:00] home to the right wing. Whereas before they, they have maybe a more secular outlook. They’re not religious fundamentalists. So they saw the Republican party as disgusting full of, theocrats. But then under, like with the rise of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren AOC, the Democratic Party is kind of relearning its former economic populism that it had for a long, for a long time.

And these Republicans who, or these libertarians, they’re, disgusted at that because in their viewpoint, everything should be about the individual. And so in their case, if they’re, if the, party that’s saying less regulations and less lower taxes, then they’re going to go for that.

And that’s why I mean, I think the news media is, Filled with people like this the mainstream media that you know, they thought the rich Christian right was gross But now they’re saying oh their Democratic Party has become [00:46:00] too extreme. They’re just out of control. What’s wrong with them? Communist woke stirs

BITECOFER: Well, keep in mind.

I mean we’re talking about A branding operation of now steady for 14 years, 2010 on that have been defining making sure to elevate the squad. Right? I mean, so let me, let’s look at this thing. Right?

The "both parties" critique of politics is completely disproven by actual data

BITECOFER: I study stuff in quantitative form and we have great measurements of polarization and we can see which party has an extremism problem.

The Democrat, every party is going to have a base of ideologues that are nuts. Okay, but the question is about proportion how much proportional control and how much power do they have? Yeah to those bases have and so when you look at the Democrats, right? They’ve got the squad and the whatever the Hamas 11 you But it’s a lot of people dude 11 11 And they don’t have any committee chairmanships and they don’t control anything.

And they certainly aren’t running [00:47:00] the RNC, the DNC, and they don’t have a president in the White House. I mean, they’re basically neutered and the Democratic Party remains pretty much where it’s been the last 2, 20 years, which is predominantly dominated by moderates. Okay. It’s a 70 percent moderate party, a 30 percent ideological liberal party and on the other side.

Okay. 10 years ago, this was the truth for the Republican party, 70 percent establishment Republican, 30 percent Tea Party base, right? When that began in 2010 and what has been so remarkable as a political scientist is to see that invert. Okay. And it’s happening only on that one side right now where it’s actually the base, that’s the majority population.

The 75 percent of the Republican party that’s pro Trump, pro MAGA, pro christofascism, whatever it is, been, it dwarfs [00:48:00] the Mitch McConnell part of the party now. And, that’s the big difference, but the image. It’s very easy to make, to paint. I mean, that’s why I’m, it’s frustrating. Right. I haven’t had to write a whole book.

Like how can Democrats let themselves be defined by 10 people that have no power where the Republican party has all these extremists in charge and we’re not even telling people we’re not defining them around these crazy people. And these crazy people are actually running the ship.

Right.

SHEFFIELD: So we, yeah, Mike Johnson, Donald Trump.

BITECOFER: Yeah. That’s exactly right. And I, it is just a mathematical fact. Polarization is asymmetrical. Democrats are less polarized either, both in the mass public and in, voter, member of Congress behavior. And, at the end of the day, we’re now up against a real Radicalized party in the Republican party.

These are people that are living in a world in which some, truths are self [00:49:00] evident. Number one, Joe Biden stole the election and is illegitimate. Number two, the COVID vaccine is more deadly than COVID. Number three, Donald Trump is an innocent man. Who’s never done anything wrong, right? Those things sound loony.

Okay, but that’s the that is the truth that many millions of Americans are living in day to day. And that’s why we’re under this existential threat level in 2024.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and but what’s. Terrible is that the, the vast majority of Americans don’t have those opinions. Almost all of that majority doesn’t understand that Republicans believe those things.

That’s right. And because if they did, they would be. Exactly.

BITECOFER: And we know it because we did that. We told people in two states in 2022 in Arizona and in Michigan, we told people what, what was happening with the modern [00:50:00] Republican party and made them see. And they rejected them. I mean, bye. September, it was clear that Michigan was uncompetitive for Republicans and that gubernatorial race.

So it, it’s clear to me, like once people find out about, but right now what they, most people who are going to go cast an R ballot in 2024, all they know about Republicans, honest to God, it’s low taxes. They have impressions. Low taxes, good for the economy, good on national defense. We both know that’s not the case for the last 20 years.

And yet those images, those issue ownership effects are still very profound in data. They’re going to remain so until we rebrand the Republican party and define it as a extremist cult.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Now, and I’m glad you mentioned the idea of issue ownership. Ownership, because that is something that you do talk quite a bit about in the book and it fits into the larger point that, for most people, [00:51:00] they, you know, they, don’t have a coherent idea about what the parties think about things.

And even under the, huge propaganda operation of Republicans telling them lies about what Democrats think, they still, all the people who are kind of, who are, will vote for Republicans, all they know is that the Democrats are extreme on that issue. They don’t actually know what, even an exaggerated version of what they, of what Democrats think.

They don’t know it. All they know is Democrats are extreme on education. Democrats are extreme on X. And that’s all they know. And like, and it is, when you, and I think anybody who has a MAGA relative or a Republican in denial relative or friend, like that’s all they really know to say to you about anything that Democrats are, Godless, communist, transgender, black people, radicals, or black [00:52:00] radicals.

That’s all Democrats are. And, if you don’t, and again, because like, because Democratic leaders, they know that’s an absurdly stupid idea, and it’s lies. It is, outright lies. They think, and you talk about this, that, This idea. Democrats are obsessed with the idea. Well, the American people will figure that out, right?

But will they figure that out?

BITECOFER: Right? That’s the whole like, if you had to sum up what the book is about. That’s what it’s about. Right? No, they will not figure it out. American people are plenty smart, like all civilized Western democracies living through the greatest period of human development ever. Okay.

There’s no human that has ever walked the earth that is more fortunate than you living in the 21st century. We can grow new livers out of pig kidneys and right? Like humanity is Peak [00:53:00] freedom, peak individual liberty, like libertarian friends. I have to tell you the entire right era of individual rights is a liberal concept.

It comes from the liberals, not from the Republicans. And yet no one knows that, right? No one understands that we’re living through this incredible time period of Massive calories, massive, people used to starve to death dude in the West, like all the time, millions and it’s so different now.

And we, we don’t do a good job of telling that story and making sure that people understand. how benefited they are from to be alive right now and be living in America, but that it’s all very, new, very. Very new. I’m the first generation as a woman born in 1977, that was born with the actual legal equality.

Okay. Because prior to that, women couldn’t maybe get a credit card. They couldn’t do bank loans. They couldn’t get birth control in the 60s. You couldn’t even get it as a married couple until the [00:54:00] Griswold decision said that actually it’s a privacy matter and people should be able to make their own decisions.

So if you’re big into individual rights and liberty, Okay. I’m telling you, you’re looking at the wrong party if you’re thinking about voting for Republicans.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, definitely true.

Why humor and mockery are so important in political communications

And one of the other things as a co host of a comedy news panel show, I certainly agree with you. You talk about the idea, the importance of mockery as a political strategy.

SHEFFIELD: So what do you, why do you think that is so important?

BITECOFER: Yeah, so, I was greatly concerned. Headed into this new Congress, because I knew that they were going to weaponize the government and use the committee process to try to politically damage Biden and other Democrats and I, the media has always assisted them every time, like, no collusion memo.

Or Benghazi and butter emails or whatever, right? The media will treat things that are delegitimate as legitimate, and once you do so, [00:55:00] you have legitimized it. CRT is a case in point of that. The Democrats kept explaining how it’s this and that, and it’s illegal theory and not about, it’s not even in the schools.

Now you’ve legitimated the stupid rando thing that Chris Ruffo basically steals from some freaks PowerPoint, right? Like you so mocking. Is about preventing the legitimization of the false premise of their b******t investigation. And it’s so critical to our survival because when we, meet they’re crazy with a factual rebuttal.

All we have done is legitimated the crazy. And so mocking the crazy is a way of making people see it. Number one, but number two, it’s about making people feel like, I don’t want to be with stupid, right? So if we’re making fun of them and making, highlighting how ridiculously stupid they are, it’s much more likely that people are going to be like, oh, That’s [00:56:00] crazy.

They’re crazy people. And instead of trying to define why it’s wrong.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the reason for that is that you can’t, fact check your way out of delusions. Like, and if, you disagree with that goes, try to have an argument with the schizophrenic about their hallucinations, whether it’s exactly

BITECOFER: exactly right.

And so, when you look at like the lead, like the Democrats on the house oversight committee have been just tremendous at this, right? Every committee hearing that they’ve had, they have strategically mocked. Yeah. The Republicans and prevented them from painting a false narrative about what is a delusion.

It is a delusion to argue that Joe Biden was selling porn interference with Hunter Biden. Okay. And the way to deal with that is to make sure people see it as ridiculous. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And. When you do that, like, it irritates the hell out of them. Yes, it does. And you certainly see that in those hearings. [00:57:00] They are constantly losing their minds when they’re fact checked like that.

Well, they’re so used to like Both

BITECOFER: mocked and fact checked. Yeah, they’re so used to us swinging on their pitch, right? So, like, it surprised them. That they couldn’t get the media to legitimate these Hunter Biden allegations. Okay. It’s the pride them that Democrats didn’t come in and like, grow the witnesses and dah, And accept the premise, the false premise that instead they use their state. They use their committee hearing time as a stage. Right. And they made their strategic mocking. The point of the coverage, and it was so it’s been very helpful, though. We’ve got lots of room to improve. There are signs of improvement, both on the electioneering and my work and others on team reform, pushing these reforms, because I’m certainly not alone and in the terms of media.

Being at least a little bit more wary of, carrying the Republican water when they serve [00:58:00] them up something. But, we’ll see how this her memo continues to be covered. It was last night was a real backslide, in my opinion, the media jumped right on it and treated it as a legitimate conclusion and not a political document designed to get them to say that Joe Biden’s senile.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, exactly. And and, I think one of the other things that, that the right wing is very good at is pushing and, you do talk about this also, that pushing a simple message. So like Republicans don’t run on their agenda. They don’t actually tell you what they want to do, except for maybe on immigration, that’s right at this point.

That’s all they, will tell you about what they will do on every other issue. They don’t ever talk about it. They don’t talk about what they want to do with taxes. They don’t talk about what they want to do on regulation. they don’t talk about spending. They don’t talk about anything else except for immigration.

And so it makes it easy if for people who are really into that issue to be really [00:59:00] motivated to support them, but it also makes it so that the voters that they don’t have to debate their positions because nobody even knows about them because and so they have no. So, like, there’s, this idea in in warfare of the idea of an attack surface that when you that you want to have as small of a from an aerial bombardment, you want to have as small of a surface possible.

And that’s basically the, core strategy of Republican politics is to minimize all attack surfaces of their own, and then maximize the attack surfaces of Democrats. And they’re remarkably successful

BITECOFER: at it. Yeah. And we have to be too. So like, like to me. Nothing frustrates me more than, well, we’re Democrats.

We just can’t do that. No b******t. We can, we must, and we will. And if we don’t, if we don’t, we’re all, we’re going to be looking at some serious hurt for especially Brown people in this country. The Republican party has been very clear. [01:00:00] That they’re coming for communities of color day 1, they’re talking about route mass deportations and roundups and folks.

There’s no way you do that without really trampling on the rights of Latino Americans, many US citizens and people who have legal. Entry are going to be terrorized if we do this, if we let this happen. So it’s now or never when, Republicans go low, we got to hit them where it hurts.

SHEFFIELD: All right.

Well, there you go. You wrap that up very nicely there, Rachel. I thought you’d appreciate it.

All right. Well, so we’ve been talking today with Rachel, bit of cough. Ah, dang it. coffer. I’m going to, I have to do that again. So God, I always, it’s because you only have one F in there. It just makes

BITECOFER: me famous so I can never get rid of it. That sucks.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. I have to do that again here. So, so we’ve been talking today with Rachel bit of coffer [01:01:00] and she’s the author of the book, hit them where it hurts.

And you can get that everywhere now on the internet wherever you want to including bad places like Amazon, but other places.

BITECOFER: Where if you really like my capital, you can listen to the audible. I recorded

SHEFFIELD: it myself. Okay. There you go. And then you are also on various social platforms at Rachel Bitterkofer.

That is with one F for those who are listening. And so you can I encourage everybody to check you out over there. And then you also have a podcast and subset called the cycle, so people can check that out as well. So, all right. Thanks for being here today.

BITECOFER: It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matthew.

SHEFFIELD: So that is the program for today.

I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation. And of course you can always get more. If you go to theoryofchange.show, you can get the full episode archive with the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if [01:02:00] you are a paid subscribing member. You get complete unlimited access and you can sign up on either Substack or on Patreon.

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And how they all intersect and get our help, get this let’s do that again. And you can go to flux.community to get more podcasts and articles about politics, religion, media, and society and how they all intersect. And we need to band together people who are opposing fascism in this country. And I appreciate everybody who is supporting the show.

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