The long-running tension between moderate and progressive Democrats to steer the party’s direction saw a revealing development last month, as a prominent centrist group indicated it was declaring “war” on the Democratic Socialists of America. Alongside the allocation of $15 million dollars to attack the DSA and those who share its positions. Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way, asserted that the DSA presents a “mortal threat” to the Democratic Party.

Before we delve into how misguided Third Way’s targeting of the DSA is, it’s important to say upfront that the DSA’s platform contains various positions that lie outside the American political mainstream, such as defunding the Pentagon, empowering Congress to choose the president, and extending voting rights to permanent residents. It’s also fair to note that the DSA organization contains some members whose views are arguably in direct opposition to American democracy itself. As Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall recently observed, DSA co-chair Megan Romer is a member of the organization’s Red Star caucus, which terms itself a “a Marxist-Leninist caucus in DSA” and has noted that “Our primary goal, the goal which informs all of our organizing work, is to abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism. We do not believe that capitalism can be reformed into socialism – it must be overthrown and replaced.” Marshall correctly notes that, “This vanguard, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party claptrap is [ . .] the seed corn of left-wing authoritarianism.”

In light of this glaring extremism displayed by a small subset of DSA members, though, what’s immediately notable about Third Way’s declaration of war is that the centrist group appears to have chosen to foreswear such obvious, self-discrediting targets in favor of a broader onslaught on positions Third Way deems to bear the stains of “democratic socialism” — positions, we should immediately note, that are held far beyond the DSA membership rolls. And so Third Way head Cowan told the New York Times that:

the effort would include opposition research into D.S.A., polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the “D.S.A. dodge” — flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.

The idea that Democrats might be damaged when the party nominates candidates who hold controversial or unpopular positions, and that it thus might have an interest in patrolling its ideological and policy boundaries, is not crazy on its face. White supremacists or those who advocate violence as a way to solve political differences are obvious, clear examples. But Third Way appears to be doing something quite different than calling for the exclusion of such truly outlandish ideas. Instead, it is denouncing as “democratic socialism” a whole host of policies in an effort to preemptively delegitimize them rather than engage with them on their merits. And while this might be an appropriate tack to take against, say, self-proclaimed Democrats who advocate for the overthrow of the U.S. government, it’s an overwrought and counter-productive strategy against simply controversial or unpopular ideas.

For the Democrats, a party that includes both moderate and progressive wings, the proposition that certain ideas can simply be excommunicated rather than repudiated with opposing ideas and arguments is simply not realistic — or desirable. A scorched-earth strategy by one faction — in this case, Third Way essentially promoting “moderate” policies and trying to exclude “extreme” ones — seems doomed to fail. At the broadest level, it signals not simply disagreement but contempt for opponents who in reality are simply too numerous to be dislodged from either the party’s elected officials or rank-and-file. Such contempt will tend to raise hackles and promote digging in by its targets. It’s also a strategy intended to bum rush rather than persuade more middle-of-the road Democrats; human nature being what it is, you’d expect more than a few of these voters to react badly to attempts to scare them into line.

Damningly, Third Way also radically misreads the political, economic, and sociological contexts currently making Americans more receptive to fresh ideas such as those propounded by the DSA and the left more generally. At the broadest level, we face a vexing constellation of challenges, including but hardly limited to: the extremely unsettled, perilous state of American democracy; an economic system that not only generates increasing levels of extreme inequality, but appears increasingly unstable and unable to meet the needs of ordinary people; the destabilizing and even apocalyptic specter of AI; and escalating climate chaos that threatens to undermine our very planetary home and hopes for collective prosperity.

Equally disqualifyingly, Third Way seems not to grasp the single most dangerous political threat of our time: the emergence of an authoritarian and racist Republican Party led by an increasingly unstable would-be dictator. In the face of this, are we really to believe that the highest priority in American politics is not to beat, discredit, and dismantle a fascistic GOP, but to administer a beatdown to the Democratic Socialists of America? The choice to declare war on the one but not the other only becomes more bizarre when you consider the centrality of pro-democracy and egalitarian policies within the DSA platform and general appeal to voters (more on this below). Agree with them or not, there is simply no comparison between the DSA and a Republican Party that is openly scheming to rig the 2026 midterms so as to avoid a much merited and growing public judgment against GOP rule; has unleashed a regime of ethnic cleansing against immigrants; and stands by as the president pursues a futile and self-destructive war against Iran. We need to be talking about de-legitimizing fascist ideas, not controversial or unpopular ideas that nonetheless lie within the democratic spectrum.

In such an extreme and unpredictable era, it is hardly surprising that many Democrats would be skeptical of moderate or centrist ideas associated with establishment politicians and factions. To be blunt, moderates were the ones who were in charge while extreme political and economic circumstances gestated and then exploded into our lives over the past two decades. This is in fact an extremely common assessment of our current anti-establishment era, a rejection of the status quo attributed to both Republican and Democratic voters in their very different ways. For Democrats, the single most powerful argument for extreme skepticism of policy moderation is the fact that moderate Democratic candidates lost twice to the openly authoritarian and racist Donald Trump, who both times ran on a fake populist message that he would help ordinary Americans do better economically while scourging immigrant “invaders.”

In the face of such failures, the idea that many millions of Americans might be excited by politicians and policy makers on the left is no surprise at all; and to the extent their ideas might succeed where other policies have failed, such discussion and excitement should be encouraged, not treated as an alien force to be held responsible for the shortcomings of the contemporary Democratic Party.

All of these are general observations; when we are talking about political policies and positioning, the devil really is in the details. But it is at the level of specifics that any sort of moderate “war” on democratic socialism becomes doubly objectionable. Here, it’s helpful to take a look at actual DSA policy positions — not as a guide to what every DSA member, self-labeled democratic socialist, or plain old progressive should be held responsible for, but as a reality check on what Third Way seems to consider threats to the very existence of the Democratic Party.

At its website, DSA policy positions are sorted into three categories: Thriving Working Class Communities; Working-Class Foreign Policy; and Working-Class Democracy. And so this is the first thing that draws your attention: these policies are specifically geared towards attracting working-class voters. Next, looking at the specific policies, you might notice their deeply aspirational quality. Housing for all; Healthcare for All; End the U.S. War Machine; Economic Democracy. Whatever you might think of the specific goals under each of these and other policy areas, there is a vision that combines worker power, pacifism, and egalitarianism.

If we stop here, at the broadest level — particularly in terms of social, gender, and economic justice — you can see how any Third Way or other moderate declaration of antipathy against democratic socialism or others lumped into the “too extreme” camp is already problematic. The DSA vision is pretty clearly on a continuum with mainstream Democratic interests. The emphasis, of course, is different — the stress on working-class people rather than appeals to the “middle class” that characterize so much Democratic rhetoric and policy appeals comes immediately to mind. (Not incidentally, the moderate war on the left also echoes and amplifies the GOP’s efforts to steer American politics in a far-right direction, which carries the danger of truly foreclosing democratic, just solutions to our dire challenges. An attempt to shut down a political movement associated with worker power is a lamentable accompaniment to the GOP’s anti-union, anti-worker policies (such as opposition to minimum wage increases and a veritable obsession with rolling back child labor laws)).

However, digging into the specifics, you will indeed find many policies that strongly diverge from the Democratic mainstream. “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people” is a straightforwardly socialist policy that few elected Democrats would get behind, and that a majority of rank-and-file Democrats would oppose. Likewise, “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress” are not commonly-held positions in the Democratic Party, to put it mildly; these would require major constitutional amendments re-conceiving our government as more of a parliamentary system, and at any rate, they far exceed more common proposals for reining in an over-bearing president and corrupted Supreme Court. And “Defund the Department of War” strikes me as a hard sell to all but the most devoted followers of pacifism; nearly every country in the world has at least a minimal military with which to defend itself.

Yet just about every policy listed at least addresses an actual real-world problem or concern in a rational fashion. Yes, corporations exercise too much power over our lives (exhibit A being tech companies which, through AI, seem poised to radically re-make the economy in ways that could well cause massive economic and social dislocation in service of funneling massive amounts of money to the richest among us). Yes, the current president and Supreme Court are wildly out of control, and even less deranged presidents have far too much unconstrained power (the unilateral power to commit the country to wars comes immediately to mind). Yes, the funding of the Pentagon is deeply corrupt and wasteful, as American are witnessing as we discover that a short war with a minor power like Iran has wiped out our reserves of essential munitions.

Alternatively, you will look in vain for DSA policies calling for the targeting of Americans based on their religious beliefs or sexual orientation. You will likewise fail to find claims that the United States is being overrun by illegal immigrants, requiring the harshest measures to seal the border and deport the “invaders.” And you will see no paeans to “heritage” white Americans as the truest citizens, deserving a greater say in the governance of the country than others less well-established here.

This essential contrast with mainstream positions of the GOP — a party that has devolved into a white supremacist, Christian nationalist party violently opposed to the rights and even existence of competing social and ethnic groups (and this is separate and apart from its complicity in the corruption of Donald Trump) — is another area where Third Way claims to both political leadership and righteous judgment as to who truly should be a Democrat hit the proverbial wall. While many DSA positions are certainly on the outer edges of political discourse, they are not fundamentally anti-American in the way so many GOP policies and stances are. The downplaying of such a key aspect of our current political context — that the GOP has radicalized into an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist party that not only serves the interests of the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the great majority, but actively seeks to ethnically cleanse the U.S. of non-whites, subjugate women into second-class status via elimination of equal rights like the right to an abortion and the promotion of tradwife domesticity, and deny trans people the very right to exist via gender affirming care — is a major flaw in efforts by Third Way and other moderates to promote a narrow orthodoxy regarding what issues we are allowed to discuss, and how.

Alternatively, a political faction that advances an egalitarian vision across the boundaries of race and gender is a direct repudiation of mainstream GOP pathologies, and should be encouraged and embraced, not ignored or downplayed in wholesale critiques of the DSA. Conversely, when groups like Third Way downplay these pro-equality aspects of the DSA, they are also effectively downplaying a central threat to American society posed by MAGA, which openly avows white supremacist ideology in its fight to return America to a discredited past where whites were the “real” citizens, and everyone else was expected to defer to their perch atop the social hierarchy.

The experience of Michigan Democratic senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed provides a vivid example of the dynamics I want to convey. His race against Representative Haley Stevens was generally viewed within the party and by political commentators as a contest between the left and centrist wings of the Democratic Party. Both moderates and observers predicted that El-Sayed’s leftist policy positions on Israel, healthcare, and other issues would harm him in the general election against the GOP candidate, Representative Mike Rogers. Yet in the last few weeks, we have seen Republicans settle on a line of attack that targets not his economic beliefs and other DSA-adjacent policy positions, but his personal religion and ethnicity. Republicans immediately began emphasizing his full Arabic name, portraying him as un-American and threatening (Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville labeled him a “TERRORIST” and “RADICAL ISLAMIST.” Vice President JD Vance accused El-Sayed of wanting Sharia law in the United States (a long-running right-wing attack line against American Muslims). And no less a figure than Donald Trump posted a photo comparing El-Sayed and his hijab-wearing wife to the president and Melania, with the appalling caption “two VERY DIFFERENT America’s [sic].”

In attempting to enforce a rigid and self-interested view of what is politically viable or acceptable for the Democratic Party, Third Way and other avowed enemies of the left ultimately betray a basic misunderstanding of how meaningful progress is accomplished in the United States. All manner of policies now considered mainstream, from the necessity of abolishing slavery to the 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and child labor laws, were once widely condemned as outlandish impositions on the free market and illegitimate exercises of government regulation. There is also the basic political reality that the existence of maximalist policy proposals can expand our political imaginations in positive ways, and create the space for compromise steps that are both beneficial in their own right and lay the ground for bolder changes to come. At a time when the ruling GOP is trying to cripple Americans’ sense of possibility across a staggering range of life, from politics and science, to racial and gender equality, to health care and an economy that brings true security to all, it is nauseating to see a political faction urging the Democrats to rein in their imaginations, and our hope for what we can collectively accomplish for the country.

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Across multiple surveys, about 30 percent of Americans say they have no religious beliefs, and for the past several years, a majority of people say they “seldom or never” attend religious services.

People are free to think whatever they want to about philosophy and metaphysics, of course, but are they actually doing so? I have my doubts. Whether you agree with religions or not, they at least get people thinking something about minds, selfhood, and ethics.

Daoism, Buddhism and some other Eastern religions figured out centuries ago that you don’t need to believe in gods in order to think deeply about these topics. But here in the West, we never developed non-theistic epistemic traditions to any real degree, and so many non-believers here are philosophically impoverished, and don’t have much to say about minds and ethics.

Luckily for us, however, my guest on this episode, Eric Oliver, has been doing a lot of his thinking in this regard, and he’s written a great new book about it called How to Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.

You might recall Eric from his first appearance on Theory of Change and the fact that we also distribute his podcast on the Flux network called Knowing: With Eric Oliver. He’s a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of six different books. This one is based on a very popular course he teaches there called The Intelligible Self that’s based on his extensive research in philosophy, psychology, religion, and cognitive science.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

This episode is audio only. The full transcript is available. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

09:18 — Erich Fromm, love, and the terror of agency

17:44 — Transcendence for non-religious people?

26:04 — Abstract reasoning made humans much more intellectually powerful, but also more vulnerable to delusion

31:04 — AI and why the narrative self depends upon the living self

39:28 — Secular ethics and the meaning of life

43:33 — Energy use and ethics

46:36 — Deriving group ethics from nature

54:18 — Balancing acceptance with making the world better

Edited Transcript

Matthew Sheffield: So I have to say I am glad to see your book out on this subject, and I think it’s an important one, [00:03:00] especially for people who are not traditionally religious. It’s important that we think about things like this more than we do. But before we get to that, why is a political scientist who mostly does sociological research writing this book, Eric? Tell me.

Eric Oliver: So I think the book comes from two sources, one of which is sort of a longstanding interest on my own part in trying to apprehend what’s behind this experience of being. For me, it started in high school when my high school English teacher wrote “Know thyself” on the blackboard. And she assured us that if we wanted to have a meaningful life, we should heed the distillation of the ancient Greeks into these two simple words.

And I thought, “Oh, okay.” And so I spent a lot of my 20s and 30s reading about philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and Buddhism, going on meditation retreats, studying yoga, going on long hikes in the wilderness, [00:04:00] and talking to priests and gurus of all stripes. And when I got to the University of Chicago, one of the great things about being here is that they let us teach whatever we want.

And so I thought, “Oh, well, it would be kind of interesting to put a class together around these eclectic interests.” And my wife Thea said, “Oh, you should call this class Stuff I’m Interested In.” And I realized, oh, no, this is actually a class on how to know yourself. So I named the class The Intelligible Self, and I’ve been teaching it for more than 20 years, and the class has gotten to be very successful.

And in the time that I’ve been teaching it, I’ve met a lot of adults who were like, “Oh, that sounds like a fascinating class. Do you have a book to recommend?” And the problem was that I had hundreds. And I thought, well, maybe here would be an opportunity to do something that I didn’t see in any other books: put the Eastern contemplative traditions, modern neuroscience, ancient and contemporary philosophy, and psychology all in conversation with each other and see if I could integrate them into [00:05:00] a relatively legible story about what’s behind this experience of being that we’re having.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and I think you certainly do that. But okay, so what is the overall take for people who might be thinking about buying it? What’s your take on it?

Eric Oliver: Sure. And one thing I would say is that there are hundreds of books out there that purport to help us help ourselves, but none of them really describe what the self is that they’re trying to help. And so this is a book ostensibly about what the self is, why it so often malfunctions, and what we can reasonably do to make it work better.

And I think within that is the idea that the self we normally think of as ourselves is not really who we are. Most of our self-understanding is at best sort of shallow or misattributed and doesn’t really get into what’s going on underneath the surface. And I’ll give you just a quick example.

I usually think of myself as a thing. [00:06:00] Things are easy, legible, and discernible for us, so we like to think of the world in terms of things. But there’s nothing about me that is stable at any moment. On a molecular level, I’m constantly swapping atoms and molecules in and out of my body.

At a cellular level, my cells are constantly in metabolic action. At a cognitive level, my consciousness, my thoughts, and my speaking right now are all the result of just the storm of neural firings in my brain. There’s nothing that’s fixed at any moment in time. And this intuition, this strong sense of myself as a singular, stable being, is a projection.

If I identify myself with that projection, I’m going to be missing a lot of what’s going on and probably not getting a full sense of what the potential of my experience could be.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, this is a different view of selfhood than the Buddhist view, even though I [00:07:00] think a lot of people might say, “Oh, well, you’re just doing Buddhism there, Eric.” But that’s not what you’re doing. Most Buddhism basically says there is no self, while you are saying there is a self and it’s more than what you think of it as.

Eric Oliver: Right. And I think when we think about the Buddhist claim that there is no self, we have to contextualize that comment, just as we need to contextualize this whole “know thyself” idea. I think we misunderstand both. So when my teacher wrote “Know thyself” on the blackboard, she said, “Oh, this was what Socrates said.”

But the Greeks didn’t have a word that meant self in the way that we think of ourselves as a self. And insofar as they were saying “know thyself,” what it really meant was “know thy place.” And for most of human history, those were the best words you could live by because our ancestors all lived in very tightly bound communities that were largely parochial and highly traditional.

And to get along well, you didn’t really have any freedom, so you just [00:08:00] had to do what everyone told you to do. So you were a hunter or a gatherer. You were a father. You had these social roles. Your familial and love relationships were basically assigned to you. You didn’t really worry about what your meaning or happiness was because that was all from your culture and custom.

And the same thing goes when we think about what’s called Anattā in Buddhism, which is translated as non-self. That’s actually a response to this Vedic and later Hindu notion of Atman: that within us is this eternal, stable, singular soul that wants to find its eventual reunification with Brahman, the greater spiritual essence of the universe.

And when the Buddhists said, “No, there’s no Atman,” that gets translated as “no self.” And so we typically think Buddhism says that means, “I don’t exist.” And that’s not really what Buddhism says once you kind of get into Buddhism. It says that you are this process and this construct.

And yeah, a lot of what I talk about is [00:09:00] very consistent with Buddhism. And I think Buddhism has influenced a lot of my thinking on this, but it’s also remarkably prescient for its time, and it’s remarkably consistent with a lot of what we know now from neuroscience and even from physics and biology to a certain extent.

Erich Fromm, love, and the terror of agency

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. That’s right. And it is interesting to kind of see those intersections sometimes. One person who has a lot of interesting theories about selfhood and its relation to agency in the modern context, and whom you cite several times in the book, is the psychologist Erich Fromm. He wrote two books that are both really good, and I would encourage people to check them out. The first was called “Escape From Freedom,” and then he had another one, which you cite more in yours, called “The Art of Loving.” But they both really deal with very similar topics.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, I think [00:10:00] one of the most important things to understand about ourselves is that we are not isolated beings. We are thoroughly social all the way through. One way is just to look at your own molecular biology. For example, within our cells are mitochondria, which have entirely different DNA from the DNA that programs us.

And the best explanation of that is that sometime way back in our evolutionary past, two organisms interacted and developed a symbiotic relationship. But what it means is that you and I are not a singular species. We’re a composite of species, and if you add your microbiome, that just adds to this sociability.

And then, of course, as humans, we have language and we’re culturally situated, so that makes our sense of self even more socially bound and determined. And then I think this is where Fromm comes in. At some level, our whole development—the way our psychology works and the way our sense of self works—is a consequence of our prior experiences with other people. [00:11:00]

And we need that consistent updating vis-à-vis other people to kind of keep our system going here. And Fromm does a great job of differentiating between what he calls love and loving. I really discuss this toward the end of the book: we all want love, and we all sort of fantasize about love.

But it’s important to note that love is a noun. It’s the emotional experience that we might be having vis-à-vis someone else at any moment in time. Loving is the act of relating to other people. And when we want to know ourselves, a big part of why we want to know ourselves is, A, what is triggering feelings of love within us?

But, B, how can we sustain better loving relationships with others? And I think knowing yourself is really crucial to that because one of the biggest obstacles for most people to engaging in meaningful, healthy, loving relationships is their own [00:12:00] shit: their own attachment issues, their anxieties, their tendencies toward withdrawal, their inability to hear what other people are trying to tell them and communicate with them, and their own neuroses coming to the fore and presenting themselves as obstacles to actual meaningful connection.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, definitely. He does touch on that a lot. And there’s also the political dynamic, which is not as much in “The Art of Loving” as in “Escape From Freedom”: the idea that, historically, human beings existed in deeply hierarchical societies.

You had to know your place, as you said. And you had to know your station, I think maybe is the English phrase for that. And then over time, as you had a proliferation of economic plenty [00:13:00] and specialization and whatnot, more and more of people’s basic survival needs were met in different ways.

And so you were left with yourself in many ways because your worldly or biological needs were kind of met. To bring Maslow in here, once the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs were met, people moved up the hierarchy.

And people were kind of terrified. “Well, what am I supposed to do with myself? What am I supposed to think? What even am I? What are these other people? Are they even as real as I am?” All of these questions are, I think, a huge part of what underlies a lot of the reactionary revolt against modernity that we’re seeing so much around the world now.

Eric Oliver: Yeah. I think in a lot of ways you could think about this project of knowing yourself as an extremely modern phenomenon. In a way, we think of [00:14:00] knowing ourselves in terms of this sort of isolated individual. Much of it comes, for example in my case, from the fact that I abandoned my Catholicism when I was a teenager, and that left a big void for me in terms of purpose and meaning in my life.

And in a lot of ways, I think what those of us who have left behind our parents’ religions and no longer have that ballast to anchor us struggle with is this: how do we find purpose and meaning? How do I know what’s behind my own existence? How do I account for this existence? Luckily, I think this is where science, philosophy, and the Eastern contemplative traditions, if we bring them together, can actually provide us some guidance.

And a big part of it for me is sort of saying, “Okay, well, what is the self here? What’s ultimately behind this experience of being?” And it really goes back to being a life form because what all living things are doing is resisting entropy. At some level, we’re all energy systems, and life forms are energy [00:15:00] systems that push back against this great energy degradation of the cosmos.

And so physicists will tell us that the universe is unfolding, and as it unfolds, it’s degrading in its energy potentials. It has less energy to make stars and galaxies. At some point, it’s going to stop making them altogether. And everything is kind of heading toward this dark, inert state, but life is pushing back against that and keeping itself going by drawing in energy, reproducing itself, and protecting itself from threats.

And I call this the life force, this impetus of living things to keep their life processes going. And we can begin to think of the self, then, as all of those processes that help this life force negotiate with reality. So within us is this impetus to resist entropy, and everything from our DNA and cellular structure to our muscles, bones, animal psychology, and now our culture is part of that self-process.

And I think, most interestingly, when it comes to knowing [00:16:00] ourselves, our sense of egoistic attachment and identity—the sense of me as Eric, a professor, with all my hopes, ambitions, and dreams—is part of this self-process. All of these elements are ultimately just trying to keep this life force going and push back against entropy.

Now, okay, great. That’s there. These processes change historically over time, and we’ve talked a little bit about that. But the problem is also that I think a lot of our cultural and historical circumstances throw these processes out of balance. We end up spending an inordinate amount of emotional energy, psychological time, or cognitive exertion around issues that are ephemeral, don’t matter, or are counterproductive for us.

And ultimately, I think knowing yourself is about getting to a point where you’re not so compressed in a particular mental state or emotional state, [00:17:00] and when you’re less compressed, you can open yourself up to the greater sort of effervescence that’s actually kind of latently there. And this is, I think, where Buddhism comes in because it says there’s a way of being that’s a lot more sparkly and sensitive and open to experience, just below the sort of compressed level of our ordinary consciousness.

And I think that’s ultimately what I would say is the final act of self-knowledge. This goes back to Maslow’s idea of transcendence, and what transcendence, I think, is ultimately doing is realigning these self-processes so that they work more harmoniously and in greater balance between the demands of, say, order and vitality.

Transcendence for non-religious people?

Matthew Sheffield: Well, although that’s not how people who are religious conceive of transcendence. So how do you think religious people would define it?

Eric Oliver: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think they use those terms. When you say religion, the problem is that there are so many different forms and types of religion. They probably don’t use that terminology. But I think a lot of what I would call spiritual practices are really about getting past your own ego and your worldly concerns and putting you more in touch with your own energy experience. [00:18:00]

They may also give you terminology or a way of trying to apprehend that experience. And sure, they might say, “Okay, go say these prayers,” or “Go do these rites,” or engage in this kind of spiritual discipline. But I think ultimately they’re about some sort of realignment of self-processes to create better harmony.

And I think the big challenge for us is that most religious traditions evolved within particular ecological niches, and they’ve mutated and transformed over time, and they’re not [00:19:00] necessarily appropriate now to the same niche. And I think that’s why they can oftentimes be abused and cause us so much trouble.

So take Christianity. It evolved relative to a pastoral culture in the Levant, with a lot of tribes there, in the context of Roman domination. So it was this sort of pastoral religion that ostensibly became a form of political resistance to the Roman Empire and then kind of spread in that regard.

We live in a very different kind of context now, but nevertheless, we still hold onto Christianity. For some people, it serves them well. But I think for a lot of us, there’s just a gross inconsistency between the tenets in both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible and a modern way of understanding the world, and it’s kind of hard to reconcile those.

Matthew Sheffield: Well, I mean, I think so much of that question is about what transcendence [00:20:00] and enlightenment are. To a large degree, I think people who have a scientific worldview hear you say things like that and think, “Oh God, I don’t want to hear this woo-woo bullshit.” But if I may bring it into the scientific context, essentially what we’re talking about is the fact that there are two kinds of selves. Everyone has two selves. There is the biological, processual self, which is the sum total of all your biological processes and how they interact with each other.

And then that generates the conceptual self, or the epistemic token of the self. It’s easier to think this way because you have to think of yourself in terms of doing actions like, “I am going to go do this. I have to do this today. I have to do this tomorrow. I have to pay my bill on Friday,” or whatever it is.

It’s easier to think of yourself as an “I,” but [00:21:00] really that is a generated image of ourselves, not our real self. And that’s really what the traditions you’re talking about here are trying, in varying ways, to make us more aware of: what we really fully are, and that we’re more than ourselves.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean importing any kind of religious or supernatural context.

Eric Oliver: No, it doesn’t have to. And I think the way to think about this is that animals don’t have religions, and I think our hominid ancestors, probably before they had language, didn’t have religions. And so the question is, why did we evolve religion? And we evolved religion, I think, once we started speaking and having abstract concepts for apprehending the world.

And once we had that, we could make laws, we could make morals. And I think one of the primary things religion was doing was [00:22:00] linking everyone together in a set of shared concepts that were bound together primarily by myths and stories. And a lot of this had to do with regulating the reproductive economy.

It was regulating sex. It was also telling us when to plant crops or when to take the herds out, all sorts of instructive things. And what were the codes of the tribe and the group? What differentiated this tribe from the neighboring tribe? Early on, I think that’s kind of what religion was doing, and since then it has morphed, grown, and evolved over time to try to meet other types of needs.

But I think the question we have is: Is there an alternative way to find meaning and purpose in life without having to make reference to some doctrine that invokes a supernatural deity? I think there is. And I mean, you could still use the doctrine of supernatural deities.

Fine, go for it. But for those of us who don’t find that plausible, then okay, what is the alternative? And in a lot of ways, what this [00:23:00] book is trying to do is say, “Okay, this is what an alternative framework might look like.” And at the very least, I think what I’m trying to do in this book is help people expand the vocabulary of their own lived experience.

And I think this goes to your epistemic idea here, because ultimately that’s what books and knowledge do for us. They give us a wider array of concepts and tools to bring to bear on our own experience, to understand what’s going on, and to give us some perspective on it. And I’ll give a simple example of this.

So prior to the advent of writing, the evidence seems to be that most people didn’t often realize that the thoughts in their head, the mental discourse in their own head, were coming from themselves. And so they often attributed them to outside forces, to spirits or gods or demons or whatever. And it was only with the advent of writing, once people actually started writing things down, that we see this shift.

And you can see it, for example, in tales that were [00:24:00] oral tales for long periods of time, like, say, Homer’s Iliad or the early chapters of the Hebrew Bible. The characters in those stories don’t have their own interior lives. To the extent that they’re motivated to do something, they hear the call of God or gods.

Matthew Sheffield: Like with Pharaoh, most famously, God put the thought in his head to resist Moses. It was God that did it.

Eric Oliver: Right. Right. And then once you start getting widespread literacy, as people are writing things down, they’re like, “Wait a minute, I am the author of my own thoughts.” And so this new analytic kind of era begins to emerge, and this is when you see the beginnings of philosophy and more analytic thinking.

And it’s not like the mythology gets displaced. It stays with us. It just gets elaborated and now intermixed with this new analytic framework. And I think this is, in a sense, what we’re doing when we’re trying to expand our self-knowledge. We’re beginning to get a better sense of, oh, all those things that I was attributing to gods [00:25:00] or demons or whatever, maybe that’s actually part of me.

And so I’ll give you a kind of modern example. I might experience a lot of anxiety, and then my mind looks to rationalize that anxious feeling, and I generate some sort of narrative in my head. But if I can sort of stop and say, “Oh, this is just me being neurotic,” or “This is just my anxiety at work,” I’m no longer caught in the vice grip of whatever fear I feel I have to act on.

I can distance myself from it and say, “Oh, okay, that’s just me making an attribution relative to an emotional state.”

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s right. And it does give us an awareness that we don’t have to do everything that pops into our head and that not everything we think is true. I think that is another big difference between humans and animals: if animals see an optical illusion, they believe it.

They believe everything that they sense until something contradicts it. That’s why they’re so easy to surprise, and [00:26:00] anybody who has a cat knows how easy it is to surprise them.

Abstract reasoning made humans much more intellectually powerful, but also more vulnerable to delusion

Matthew Sheffield: That’s because they believe all their senses, whereas we don’t. But at the same time, that development of abstract reasoning has also made us more vulnerable in a lot of ways because we can know that our senses might not be telling us the truth, or that things can exist even when we don’t perceive them—that object permanence is real.

We can also know that other people may know things, or have first-person experiences, that we don’t. All of these things can also be flipped around in a really negative way, and this ties back to the previous book that you wrote, like the idea of what you called intuitionism.

Essentially, if I haven’t seen vaccines or don’t personally know how they work, then they don’t work. If I wasn’t [00:27:00] there to witness the moon landing, then it was fake.

You know, flat Earth, et cetera, or Trump’s stolen-election claims—these are all paradoxically the result of abstract thinking. But this kind of thinking detaches us from reality rather than attaching us to it.

Eric Oliver: Yes, and I think that’s really one of our central challenges right now is so much of our thinking is detached from reality. I mean, just think about how much of our time and attention is caught up on social media and smartphones. And we get caught up in this kind of mediated cyber existence that has no real bearing on our material experience at any moment.

Yet we are completely held captive by this attention algorithm and this kind of dopamine-centered stimulating process. And you could make that argument about a lot of cultural phenomena too. Think about [00:28:00] Marx’s idea of false consciousness: people would gladly participate in their own self-subjugation thanks to a certain kind of belief system.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And then even he himself, with his march of history idea, like that itself was a delusion as well.

Eric Oliver: Yeah. It’s myths all the way down.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, I do think that it is really important for non-religious people to actually get more of a handle on some of these ideas because where I live in Southern California, like there are so many people out here who are “spiritual but not religious.”

And basically that means they believe in tarot and astrology and crystals and anything else that is nonreligious mysticism or supernaturalism. You could argue that this is just as harmful as, or perhaps even more harmful than, a lot of religious delusions. I mean, we’ve got a guy who wants to be the mayor of Los Angeles and says that crystals are magic.

And [00:29:00] so it actually really matters for people to understand: look, okay, it’s fine if you don’t want to believe in religion. Well, then you still have to think about this stuff, because if you don’t, then you’re probably going to fall prey to delusions of one kind or another, I think.

Eric Oliver: Right. And I think that goes back to this theme of why it’s so important to try to know yourself. The way I actually describe this to my students is that I say, “Okay, how much of your life story are you the author of?” And if you think about our life stories—the narratives that we tell about ourselves, such as “this is what success means,” “this is what a good life means,” and “this is what is important for me”—these are stories that we haven’t written for ourselves. They were bequeathed to us by our parents, by our culture, by whatever context we’re in. And sometimes those stories are useful, but a lot of the time they were not necessarily written by people who had our best interests at heart. And a big [00:30:00] part of that is what I would say is this kind of egoistic self.

And it’s interesting: if we go through and look at our self-processes, there are some parts of our self-processes that are very legible to scientific inquiry. So, like you were saying, there’s the biological self. We can observe most of our biology. We can observe ourselves as physical beings. We can actually even observe a lot of our language; it’s all finite and tractable, even if it’s constantly evolving.

What becomes really hard for us to observe—and this goes to the question of consciousness—is our subjective experience of being. And, more importantly, what are those psychological processes that I’m using to understand my position in relation to other people around me?

And this is ostensibly what the ego is. It’s all of those concepts and emotions that we utilize to sort of defend our place in society, to know what our entitlements are, and to motivate us to try to get more, to ensure that we’re not [00:31:00] just kicked down to the bottom of the pecking order in any given context.

AI and why the narrative self depends upon the living self

Eric Oliver: At the same time, these processes get very much intertwined with names, identities, titles, and status markers. And those, in turn, get intertwined with narratives. The problem is that those ego processes are not readily available. We have some clues about where in the brain they might be correlated, but we don’t really know if the ego as such exists.

But how do we understand our egos? Well, most people understand their egos by going to therapy. And what do you do in therapy? You sit on the couch and you tell your stories, and you tell your stories about your parents and your childhood, or you tell your stories about your contemporary circumstances.

And it’s through interpretation of those stories that you begin to understand this aspect of yourself. So I think this goes to your understanding of this sort of epistemic aspect of us, which is going to be fundamentally narrative-driven. We are a narrative species through and through. And so at some point, we have to come to terms [00:32:00] with our own stories.

Matthew Sheffield: We do. And I also think one of the biggest problems in a lot of analytic philosophy and a fair amount of early cognitive psychology is that a lot of it was very language-tied, with this idea that selfhood comes from language.

But that’s not what modern neuroscience and modern cognitive psychology indicate. One of the worst examples of this, and somebody who irks me, was the philosopher Jerry Fodor, who had this idea that there’s a language of thought, and all thoughts take place in a syntactically derived language that exists because there’s a module in our brain, even though I don’t know where it is, I can’t prove it’s there, and no one can prove it’s there. It’s there. And we all think in the same linguistic manner.

And it’s just [00:33:00] not true at all. Sadly, these ideas have persisted contrary to all of the scientific evidence, and now they’re coming back to us in a lot of the large language model discourse, with people saying, “Well, the fact that they can understand what you say means that they are conscious, and it means that we should treat them as moral patients.” Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founders of the field, was just recently saying that he thinks they probably are conscious because they can write about consciousness. And that’s enormously frustrating to me. It’s all coming from this language-centered idea of selfhood and consciousness.

Eric Oliver: Yeah. A player piano is not musical. It’s a player piano. In that sense, it’s not generating its own music. [00:34:00] It’s funny; it even starts with this Cartesian notion of “I think, therefore I am.” Well, if you didn’t have a word for think, then would you not exist?

I mean, that starts with the same linguistic fallacy: that cognition somehow has to be understood only if it’s oriented in some lexicon of words. And that’s one aspect of our type of cognition, but it’s not cognition in its totality.

And I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding in terms of what consciousness is. Our willingness or eagerness to ascribe consciousness to, say, LLMs also reveals what our own brains do with respect to consciousness, because our sense of self is a model that our brains are creating. I’ll maybe situate this in another way. We oftentimes think that the way we perceive the world works like this: I just open my eyes and the world [00:35:00] comes to me through my senses, and then my brain is there processing all this incoming information and kind of creating a scene.

It’s not really what’s happening. What happens is that in the moment before I open my eyes, my mind is already generating a prediction about what it thinks the world is going to be like, and then this information comes in and basically updates and varies that prediction relative to the incoming information.

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and that’s why you can wake up when you’re asleep.

Eric Oliver: Right.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s because if your mind was stopped, you couldn’t wake up if you heard a noise or somebody talking to you.

Eric Oliver: So our whole experience is really this ongoing dialogue, in a sense, between the information coming in and this model that our brain is putting forth of what it thinks is going on in the world. And when there’s a discrepancy between the information coming in and the model that our brain has, that triggers an emotion within us. And it’s not simply the model in our brain in terms of some sort of [00:36:00] cognition; it’s also our body chemistry. So you can think about it like this: my body chemistry now models hunger, and so I need to get food to reestablish my body energy.

And biologists call this homeostasis. It’s sort of the natural balance set point that we’re at. And what our brains ostensibly are doing is projecting these images of ourselves and comparing them to the world. If those comparisons are off in some way, we get an emotional response, and then we get new, deliberative thoughts: “Okay, how can I correct this? Maybe I need to update my model of myself, or maybe I need to go out and change something in the world.”

Until I can sort of rectify that, I’ll still be stuck in this kind of emotional, motivational state.

So I’ll give you an example. I’m walking in the woods. I have a model of these beautiful, peaceful woods, and all of a sudden I hear a rattle, like, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

Okay, that’s a new piece of information that’s out of sync with my [00:37:00] model. I get a fear alarm. I look around. I begin to think, “Oh, that’s probably a rattlesnake. It’s probably good to get out of there.” And I motivate myself to move away from it. Once I move away, if I don’t hear the rattle anymore, my model and my external circumstances come back into alignment, and I calm down and go back to a homeostatic set point.

And we are basically doing that constantly. Our brains are constantly doing that in any number of dimensions. And that’s, I think, really what’s at the heart of our experience of being.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, it is. And that is, of course, why large language models are not conscious: they do not exist in the world. And they don’t even exist when they’re not being talked to. So there is no independent, continuous experience.

Eric Oliver: Well, and I would say it’s because they don’t have a life force. At this point, they don’t have any incentive to replicate themselves or protect themselves from destruction. We could potentially program a silicon-based life form that drew in energy, reproduced itself, and protected itself from threats, ostensibly giving it the qualities of living. [00:38:00]

At that point, I think it might evolve something akin to consciousness. It probably wouldn’t be the same kind of consciousness we have because it would have a very different set of inputs to draw from. But maybe at that point it would start doing something that might resemble consciousness in living beings, or the way living beings perform consciousness.

And I think another issue is that because we see these LLMs and they seem to replicate us so well, we naturally make the assumption that they are like us. So we anthropomorphize them, just as we anthropomorphize everything that [00:39:00] seems to have any kind of independent movement.

And especially because they’re so adept at mimicking what we’re doing, naturally, of course, we’re going to want to anthropomorphize them. How could we not? But that’s our brains tricking us. We have a model: things that talk have human intentionality; therefore, they’re going to be like me, they’re going to have theory of mind, and I’ll be able to read some sort of consciousness into them.

But that’s not really what’s going on.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. No, it isn’t.

Secular ethics and the meaning of life

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and the other reason I think it’s important to think and talk about these ideas in general—selfhood and one’s existence in the world—is that doing so lets us derive ethical paradigms and group motivations.

I think that’s another area where non-theistic cultures have kind of dropped the ball in a lot of ways. Consider the old questions people often ask, such as “What’s the meaning of life?” [00:40:00] or “Why am I here?”

And these are questions that a secular worldview can answer. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the more purely hard-science people just say, “Oh, well, those are dumb questions.” Or there are philosophers like Daniel Dennett who say things like, “Well, there is no self. It’s imaginary. It’s a delusion. It’s a fiction, and it doesn’t mean anything. Felt experience is just a lie you tell yourself.”

And that’s not going to be persuasive to people, I think.

Eric Oliver: Yeah. And this is where I would disagree, and it’s also my refinement of Buddhism. There is a self, and insofar as you think of yourself, it’s not a thing. It’s a very complex set of processes that help this life force—this drive to resist entropy—negotiate with reality.

And it has all different kinds of layers and all kinds of complexities to it, and we do it probably in a way that’s far more [00:41:00] sophisticated and complex than any other living creature. I mean, that’s clear just from our language, culture, technologies, and whatnot. But there is a self there. There are all these processes going on. As long as we’re alive, we’re going to have a self, or we’re going to have these self-processes occurring.

And then I think it’s incumbent on us to try to apprehend what these self-processes are. And I think traditional religions describe these self-processes in terms of intentional gods, deities, and spirits, and then they make laws and attributions from that.

But we too can develop an ethics based on this: here you are as an energy system trying to resist entropy. You have these balancing tendencies. On the one hand, there’s order. You need to structure this way of resisting entropy and have some rules and forms in which to do this.

But then you also have to let the energy itself flow, and I would call these two things [00:42:00] order and vitality. Optimally, what you want to do is balance that order and vitality. You want to have it so that you’re not over-ordered, so that you’re inefficient and stifled, but you don’t want to have too much vitality because then you’re wasteful and incoherent.

And you really want to find, I think, the optimal way, relative to your ecological circumstances, of balancing order and vitality. Our single-celled ancestors did this by altering the pH balance within them. They evolved different cellular structures. As animals became multicellular, they evolved sense organs and muscles and all kinds of ways of doing this.

We have evolved cultures and technologies that purport to do this. I think right now, though, we are way out of whack with respect to this balance, and I think this is where we can start thinking about ethical issues. For example, consider the consumption of energy. How many natural resources do we need to consume just to stabilize [00:43:00] ourselves?

You and I use so much more energy than any of our ancestors ever did, and what do we use this energy for? Well, to go and make AI cat videos. Okay, is that really helping us achieve balance in some way? Or are we just so desperate for something interesting to focus on, to distract us from the living moment, that we expend an enormous amount of energy just to keep ourselves from actually trying to be within our own existence?

Energy use and ethics

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, okay. But for somebody who would say that this doesn’t really explain the feeling that I’m more than my self-concept—for example, that I feel there are forms in the world or spirits in people’s bodies, and that’s what grounds my [00:44:00] ethics—how would you answer that?

And one could argue that there are some people who do say something in line with this idea of resisting entropy. Take Marc Andreessen, who is an atheist right-wing billionaire and embraces what people are calling effective accelerationism, which basically says the goal of life is to enable entropy, as he puts it.

And we enable it by maximizing energy use. Therefore, we should use as much energy as we can and not restrain capitalism in any way, because restraining it would be immoral.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, I mean, this is perverse. To use energy for the sake of using energy doesn’t really make any sense. We utilize energy toward the end of sustaining the energies of being alive. And I think the other thing I see a lot in this tech orientation is this [00:45:00] prioritization of humans.

I mean, I think once you begin to sort of see yourself as an energy system and as a living energy system, you realize that we humans are just one little leaf on this kind of greater tree of life. All living things, for example, trace their origins back to a common ancestor that lived about 3.7 billion years ago that had 350 genes that you find in all living things.

And what this actually means, though, is that we’re just one little expression of a sort of greater life force. We ourselves are not that distinct. We’re not that important. This is where I think things get kind of humbling and oftentimes very confusing, because we humans could annihilate ourselves next week.

Life will still go on. Most of life is still microbial and would sort of shrug. And it’s not like our particular human incarnation of life is really that much better than any other kind of life [00:46:00] form or is deserving of anything more relative to any other life form. Life is chaotic. It’s self-feeding.

It’s generative. It will continue to go on. But what always constrains life is what energy is available and how it works relative to its ecology. And what we should be thinking about ethically is, okay, what is the ecology that we’re constructing?

How does this actually help life itself thrive, or is this destructive to kind of life on the planet?

Deriving group ethics from nature

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and how does that generate moral duties to each other? How would you answer that?

Eric Oliver: Yeah. I mean, it goes back to this idea that it’s important to remember that our selves don’t exist in isolation, that we are fundamentally socially contingent beings. And so no self is an island. A big part of our [00:47:00] self-processes is caught up in the laws that we make, the rules that we follow, the culture that we share, our patterns of interaction, and the ways we relate to and love other people.

All of these things are essential for thriving. I kind of punted on this in the book because I’m like, “I can’t really describe what the ideal socioeconomic political system is.” I don’t know if anybody can, at least at this point. It varies a lot by circumstance. But nevertheless, knowing yourself and working on yourself doesn’t mean focusing just on the solipsistic individual.

It also means: what am I doing with my community? What am I doing with other people? I mean, to me, the very simple ethical claim is: am I doing something to make the world a better place? Is any action I’m doing making things better for those around me? Or is it harming those around me? Obviously, you can come up with various kinds of situations like [00:48:00], “Oh, if I could go back in time and kill Hitler, should I do that?

Is that making the world a better place even if I had to kill Hitler?” Whatever. We can be pragmatic about these things. But I mean, just as a general rule, I think that’s a pretty simple and easy ethical answer, at least for me.

Avoiding protagonist thinking and living in the moment

Matthew Sheffield: Okay. And then let’s maybe end with Friedrich Nietzsche, who did a lot to get discussions of secular ethics going and was famously atheistic. He often said that once people realized that there were no gods, they would become depressed, become nihilistic, and think, “Well, what’s the point of doing anything?”

And, you know, in a lot of ways, I think your book is trying to answer the question of what the point is, because I’ve had conversations with religious people before when I’ve talked about [00:49:00] the idea of a processual self and the epistemic self, and they’ve said, “Well, that doesn’t mean anything to me. That’s depressing, the idea that I’m just a bunch of molecules.”

And the way that I respond is that you decide the meaning of life for yourself, and that should be empowering and beautiful. Nobody can tell you what the meaning of life is.

You have to decide that. But it is a responsibility, and that’s part of the thesis of Erich Fromm’s “Escape From Freedom”: if everything is up to you, that’s terrifying to a lot of people.

Eric Oliver: It is. And I would even go beyond that. At some level, if you say, “Oh, it’s up to me to determine my life,” I’m still living within this kind of linguistic-cognitive frame. I’m still living within this idea: “Oh, my life needs to be motivated by a story in which I’m the [00:50:00] protagonist.” But what if there’s a way of living where there doesn’t need to be a story? There doesn’t need to be a protagonist.

And that’s hard for us because our brains almost reflexively go back to, “Oh, there is a story. There is a protagonist.” That’s our model of the world. But part of beginning to know yourself, I think, and then engaging in this act of transcendence, which means kind of unlearning these habits of mind, is opening yourself up to an experience of being that’s not so bound and delimited by certain kinds of word concepts, or, as you might say, certain kinds of epistemologies.

And I think the more that we can do that, the more we open ourselves up to an inner effervescence of being that doesn’t require this. And I’ll give an example. I go on these long meditation retreats. They’re a lot of work. They’re very hard. And what I’ve noticed when I encounter people who have very deep contemplative practices is that they’re very [00:51:00] quiet and very present, and they’re just lovely to be with because they’re fully there. You don’t get a sense that there’s any kind of agenda on their part or anything they’re trying to get from you.

They have such an exquisite way of existing that they sort of present to the world. And I think this ultimately is what we can begin to cultivate through self-knowledge, and it’s hard to do. It requires a lot of discipline. You could call it spiritual discipline. You could call it physical discipline.

But this, I think, becomes a goal in and of itself. And now I spend a lot of time thinking, when I observe my own thinking, “Oh, is this thought helping anything?” A large percentage of the time, my thoughts—I’d say a big chunk of my thoughts—are not helpful in any way. They’re just me regurgitating some story or rationalizing some kind of anxiety or resentment or [00:52:00] whatever.

And the more I can then sort of let go of those thoughts and just be in this sensual experience of being, the more at ease I am, and I think the better I live.

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm. Well, and like you talked about toward the end, that experience is always in the present. Really understanding that as a lived concept matters. People always say, “Oh, well, live in the moment.” Well, what does that even mean?

But you actually do get into that.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, it’s a hackneyed cliché, but what living in the moment means is not having your consciousness so compressed by a very narrow storyline or being so dominated by whatever emotion you might be in. Instead, you have some equanimity with your own experience and an ability to just sit and ride with it.

And the more [00:53:00] you can do this, the more vivid that experience becomes. Food tastes better. You hear bird songs that you might not otherwise hear. You can see colors around you that normally are just tuned out. And you offer yourself a much richer existence.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And none of this requires any supernatural beliefs. None of it requires any crystals or anything like that.

Eric Oliver: No.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, I mean, what it requires is a lot of work of retraining your mind, and it requires some intention to say, “Oh, I want to try to live honestly. I want to try to live more completely. I’m not going to try to just continually be distracting myself with my phone, or the fridge, or the liquor cabinet, or whatever.”

Instead of always evading, I try to say, “I’m going to try to meet the moment head on, sit with the discomforts that the moment provides, try to hear what those discomforts are [00:54:00] telling me, and not get so caught up and attached to some high-pleasure experience that my life is simply defined by one peak experience after another.”

I want to allow the subtlety of this moment to become more manifest.

Balancing acceptance with making the world better

Matthew Sheffield: And how does all of that conception reconcile with trying to make the world a better place? I ask because stoicism is famous for kind of saying some of these things, but it is also often criticized as saying, “Well, you should just be content to have nothing and be content to have no power. And if you’re repressed, well, so what? It doesn’t matter.”

But you’re not trying to say that.

Eric Oliver: No. I think it’s about recognizing that we live in a social circumstance. We live in economic and political circumstances. If we see or experience exploitation [00:55:00], abuse, or insecurity, we need to address those things. I mean, it goes back to what you were saying about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

It’s going to be very hard to focus on any kind of transcendence if you’re starving to death, or if you see people starving around you and you have that kind of instability. Part of understanding that our self-processes are socially situated is recognizing that if I want to live better, I need to help make the world better too.

It’s not just about my own internal experience; it’s also about trying to figure out how I can help others with their internal experience, making sure they have enough to eat, making sure they have shelter and safety, and making sure they have basic rights that are being observed.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point because we are in communities of minds. I think that’s what we are. And if they are harmed, then so are we, and it impacts us in a lot of different ways. So it’s a great point. And I [00:56:00] guess the question is, what’s the final thought of the book here? Let’s get that out.

Eric Oliver: Well, I think the final thought is that there’s a real temptation, either when writing a book like this or encountering a book like this, to want the easy seven-step solution. But there is no easy seven-step solution. Recognize that there’s not a quick and simple way to know yourself. You are a very complicated being.

But the more that you can begin to delve into this, the better your life will become. There’s no one way to do it, and there’s no simple way to do it. It’s about being willing to be curious and open, to try things out, and to basically engage your curiosity about your own experience.

And I think that’s really the first step.

Matthew Sheffield: Okay, very good. All right. And so, yeah, I encourage people to check that out. We’ll have the links to it. And you also have a podcast, which we distribute on the [00:57:00] site, so people can also see that in the Flux podcast feed as well. So keep an eye out for that.

Eric Oliver: Okay, great.

Matthew Sheffield: So, yeah. Thanks for being here. It’s good to have you back.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, it was great to be here. Thanks so much. I loved our conversation.

Matthew Sheffield: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.

And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives, and I thank you very much for your support. If you’d like to become a free or paid subscriber, obviously I would prefer the latter. You can go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack.

Thanks a lot. And don’t forget to subscribe if you’re listening to this single episode over on your favorite podcast app as well. I’ll see you next [00:58:00] time.

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Over nearly a year, the U.S. military has attacked more than 60 vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. At least 200 people have perished in the strikes, which have been conducted under the aegis of “Operation Southern Spear.” Purportedly an effort to stop narcotics trafficking, the Trump administration has refused to provide evidence to the public that their targets were actually involved in the drug trade. This lack of evidence is paired with an equally egregious element of the campaign: the total militarization of drug interdiction, which the U.S. has traditionally treated as primarily a criminal matter. No more: those who traffic drugs into the country have been re-conceived by the Trump administration as a de facto invading army, with drugs themselves constituting the weaponry of these attackers. Whereas every previous administration sought to seize drug shipments and arrest perpetrators, the Trump administration has adopted a posture of maximal national defense, shooting first and refusing to ask questions later.

It was clear from the earliest days of the campaign that the administration was far more interested in the spectacle of violence and the thrill of inflicting death than actually trying to curb drug importation, let alone domestic drug use and addiction. The Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth has promoted snuff films of the attacks, which as far as we know have exclusively involved sinking vessels that do not attempt to defend themselves. The point was not so much that the United States was stopping drugs from entering the U.S. than that the military was executing supposed “narcoterrorists” in the most violent and horrible ways possible.

Very quickly, it turned out that the United States was not exclusively, and potentially not even most of the time, attacking boats actually transporting drugs. Survivors of attacks began to tell their stories, and so we learned of multiple fishermen blown out of their boats and left to fend desperately for survival. We also learned that an early attack involved a follow-up strike on shipwrecked sailors — an act in contravention of long-standing maritime laws, and quite arguably constituting a war crime.

Though the Trump regime has engaged in outrageous and illegal acts that can seem too numerous to count, these Latin American attacks are particularly chilling even as they share much in common with other administration offenses. As with other examples of regime law-breaking, one is almost dizzied by the intertwined layers of incompetence and bloodlust. At the most general level, the Trump administration has militarized an activity — efforts to curb drug importations — that previous administrations and the vast majority of experts have seen as generally benefitting from police action. But with its profound shift in approach, the administration has simply gone full throttle into total lawlessness, effectively declaring the drug trade so dire a threat to the homeland that no manner of excess is too great to bring it to heel. What other conclusion to draw from the apparent fact that the U.S. has repeatedly killed innocent men, with even survivors wantonly punished through the loss of the fishing boats that provided their livelihood, and in general has served capital punishment upon hundreds without judge or jury? These attacks defy any rational purpose, since even by their own terms they are not actually stopping drug importations into the U.S.

The far truer, more disturbing intentions lie in plain view; if they seem hidden to some, it is mainly because too many Americans are unwilling to accept the horrors that the administration itself so gleefully advertises. Trump and his allies like Pete Hegseth are less interested in promoting American interests than in projecting images of their own strength and indulging their own darkest, cruelest fantasies. And so the point is to blow shit up with weapons of war, the mismatch between victims and executioners a key part of the thrill. High-tech weapons funded and built to take on actual threats to the United States — opposing armies, terrorist cells — are turned against skiffs and speedboats thousands of miles from U.S. shores. Those targeted cannot in any sense be conceived of as opposing combatants, but rather as dehumanized vermin: bugs being squashed by the glorious lightning of god from above. And the release of snuff films that subsume the killings into the cartoon language of video games is meant to promote the spectacle not just of violence but of vast power: one moment the target is there, the next it’s a bright explosion. Something becomes nothing, like the creation myth run in reverse.

In the last week or so, reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times has brought a bit of clarity to what had been a mysterious subset of this deadly maritime campaign — reporting that helps further strip away the official pretenses for what is essentially a murder campaign. Back in March of this year, three Ecuadorian fishing vessels were attacked and sunk by unknown assailants in the eastern Pacific near the Galapagos Islands. One ship with eight men aboard disappeared without a trace, save for a plume of smoke seen by a couple of sailors who had been out on one of its smaller boats. But with the two other vessels, all aboard survived, and they were able to recount the dire events that had befallen them: of drones striking their vessels, and armed men speaking English and wearing uniforms with American flags subsequently detaining them before releasing them to authorities in El Salvador. In at least one attack, injured sailors were denied medical attention by their captors. The twist was that the U.S. government denied that American forces were involved in these attacks; as others have observed, this was an oddity given the outsized efforts to promote Southern Spear strikes in the waters off Latin America. Another key piece of information: the sailors themselves deny being involved in the drug trade, assertions which received corroboration from an investigation by Human Rights Watch.

The Washington Post is now reporting that all three attacks were connected to a covert CIA program, although “It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.” A key part of the reporting was the repeated appearance of a small, anonymous jet traced back to the United States that appeared to track all three vessels prior to the attacks (the Post was not able to directly confirm whether the jet was flown and manned by CIA employees).

At the most general level, these revelation are pretty astonishing: not only is the administration ostentatiously killing hundreds of sailors via Operation Southern Spear in order to make Trump and his allies feel like modern-day gods, but has established a separate, secret program that is killing still more innocent sailors. As with the larger-scale campaign conducted by the U.S. military, the CIA effort (at least what we know of it) seems to specialize in murdering innocents and blowing up their boats. But unlike Southern Spear, the American people don’t even know who’s doing the killing in their name. Survivors of the attacks say their attackers spoke English, with at least some wearing uniforms with US flags and “USA” stitched on. Whether they are military personnel, CIA employees, or mercenaries is at this point not publicly known.

The prospect of non-military involvement suggests a homicidal metastasizing of the Latin American maritime killings. Where Operation Southern Spear advertises the administration’s bloodlust and lawlessness, this CIA program should chill us with its secret extent, common murderousness, and clear incompetence. What are they trying to hide? Equally, it should raise all manner of alarm bells given prior U.S. involvement in Latin American affairs, a litany of offenses that include complicity in genocide in Guatemala and the operations of death squads in El Salvador. (The Post reminds us that last year, Trump “granted the CIA new authorities to counter narcotics trafficking, signing an authorization for covert action aimed at countering transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force”; moreover, CIA personnel were involved with the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and two employees were killed in a traffic accident following an anti-narcotics operation in Mexico.) It is as if the Trump administration had looked at all the interventions and atrocities committed by the United States over the last century, and determined that the lesson offered by history is that we need more killing, more murder, more counterproductive interventions in sovereign nations.

Moreover, the lower-tech nature of the attacks on the Ecuadorian fishing boats, and the possibility that armed mercenaries were involved, helps undermine the spectacle of vast American power blowing unsuspecting ships out of the water. The use of quadcopter drones to attack the ships sounds more like the jerry-rigged combat of the Ukraine war, while the prospect of mercenary companies making a buck off killing innocent fishermen should appall anyone with a conscience. This doesn’t look like a video game; it reads as plain murder. The possibility that mercenary companies might now be cashing in on these killings adds a fresh level of immorality.

What we’re learning about the Trump regime’s activities in the waters of the Caribbean and eastern Pacific should be viewed in the larger context not only of its other acts of Latin American neo-imperialism, but the demented warmongering that has led the U.S. into an illegal and debilitating war against Iran. And all of this should in turn be viewed within the frame of the white supremacism that courses through MAGA like a spiritual poison, in which non-whites are seen not only as unworthy of citizenship but as less than human. In both Iran and Latin America, the Trump administration seeks to enhance its standing via bloody gambits that betray both short-term thinking and a comfort with violence inflicted on non-white populations.

There remains a too-common presumption that this administration is somehow advancing U.S. interests, in however misguided a fashion: but we are well past the point where this presumption of good intentions should be granted. Just as Donald Trump started the Iran war in significant part to distract from the Epstein files and to counter his falling popularity with what he thought would be an easy “win” (as he seems to think he accomplished in Venezuela), it’s crazy to say that “U.S. interests” are being served by blowing up boats in the waters off Latin America. It is far likelier that we are seeing what happens when broken men are given control over the most powerful military in the world, and choose to deploy it for their own psychological and political aggrandizement. Our politics and our society need to catch up with this reality, not the comforting one that would have us believe there is a deeper method in the madness.

All this said, I keep coming back to the fundamentally disproportionate nature of these killings. These are state executions driven in part because of the White House’s accurate perceptions of the victims’ powerlessness. They are not warfighters; it seems most are taken by surprise by the attacks; and it appears that even their own governments are either complicit with the killings or unwilling to pick a fight with the United States over them. In a very basic sense, the Trump administration is slaughtering these people, most of whom appear to be innocent of any crimes, and none of whom deserve summary execution, simply because it can.

And one of the reasons the administration believes it can is that it has faith that Americans will not object too much to non-white, non-Americans being killed to keep the United States “safe”; that the killings are too remote to merit much pushback. This sense of impunity and trust in the complicity of ordinary citizens is exactly why we all should shine a spotlight on these murders, and call for both their cessation and accountability for the government’s crimes. In raining down death on foreigners who do not deserve it, this regime is violating the most foundational ideas of democracy and even civilization itself. If there’s one thing not only any citizen but any human should be able to count on, it’s that you will not be killed for unspecified crimes by weapons of war as you go about your business. This basic principle might seem naive or impossible to meet, but my point here is that we Americans should at least do what we can to force our own government to adhere to it. We cannot meaningfully claim to be citizens of a democracy if we do not work to stop horrific actions done in our name, particularly actions that tear at the very foundations of civilization and morality.

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We’ve talked a lot on the program about the Trump administration’s wars on science and education and why they’re doing as part of a larger far-right attack on the achievements of modernity.

This month, the president announced that a change to federal immunization guidance for infants to reduce the number of recommended shots. He cited no actual evidence, just his ludicrous belief that doctors were pumping infants with a liter of vaccine liquids. I wish I was joking.

In addition to the harms to public health and science that Trump and his Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Junior are creating, the destruction is wreaking havoc on real people’s lives at the scientific and government agencies.

My guests on this episode are two people who have been on the frontlines of these battles. Both are former employees at the National Institutes of Health, which has seen massive layoffs and its scientific recommendations ignored and censored by Kennedy and its director Jay Bhattacharya — after he made his career claiming to oppose censorship of science. They also have a great essay out about the Trump administration’s attacks on science and how to fight them.

Alexa Romberg was former deputy chief at the Prevention Research Branch at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Sylvia Chou was program director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute and is a scholar of linguistics and health communication. Both are members of 27 UNIHTED, an organization supporting employees who have been laid off or resigned from the National Institutes of Health.

Our conversation focuses on the how people have been impacted, the hypocrisy of Bhattacharya, and why scientists are having to learn to be more political with their livelihoods under attack.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

08:12 — The people behind the worst Covid-19 ideas are running Trump’s health policies

14:39 — The gross hypocrisy of Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s NIH director

19:37 “Wellness” advocates and the need to debate bad medical advice purveyors

28:47 — How tobacco companies set the template for today’s anti-science attacks

35:41 — The importance of community in helping people understand science

38:06 — Civic virtue and excellence as necessary for democracy and science

44:29 — Scientists have not been used to being political, but they must be now

51:14 — Science has always been linked to politics, even if you didn’t realize it

Audio Transcript

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

Matthew Sheffield: So we have a lot of ground to cover here today, but first I just want each [00:03:00] of you to give a little brief introduction to yourselves and your scientific work and then what, how you decided to get into more activist stuff in the present moment.

So let’s start with you, Silvia, and then I will go with you, Alexis.

Sylvia Chou: Sure. My path into NIH science and out of it is kind of, not very straightforward. I grew up in Taiwan was not particularly a good student, but I came to the US and had a chance to go to community college, and I th- later majored in music, played piano, then went into linguistics. Through that, I learned that I’m really interested in this whole idea of end-of-life conversations, this discourse between patients and, doctors.

And so I end up doing a dissertation in sociolinguistics not knowing where my next step would be. But then there was this postdoc opportunity at NCI, National Cancer Institute. [00:04:00] I really put all my, apples in one basket got this fellowship, and it was really a life-defining moment because then I got to then go into public health. And it, was through my MPH, Master in Public Health, at UC Berkeley that I discovered really my calling is to do science related to the public’s health. So then I became a program director at NCI, and that-- in that role, I served for 15 years. The last few years, the work is really focused on the intersection of social media and misinformation and the trust or the erosion of trust in science. Very I would say of practical work, but also a lot of deeper thinking about root causes of sort of society’s, challenges that have caused the sort of symptom of misinformation spread. So that was kind of my NIH role. But after 2025, after Trump 2.0 took over it was [00:05:00] immediately clear that this whole area of research would be either gutted or severely censored. So I worked very hard, both as a whistleblower but as someone who wanted to just keep talking about what’s happening to end up making a decision to resign in January of this year. So we can talk about kind of that decision a little bit later, but that’s kind of a story of my career.

Matthew Sheffield: yeah, that Was great, Sylvia. Thank you for that. Um, and Alexa, how about you?

Alexa Romberg: So like Silvia, I had a nonlinear career path where my undergraduate major was in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. But after graduating, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. And so, I spent time doing other things and and and eventually went back to graduate school in psychology.

And so I’m trained as a behavioral scientist and, my work in my early academic career was [00:06:00] really on learning and attention particularly first language acquisition, and cognitive mechanisms that support that. But over the past now 10 years, I moved into tobacco control really looking to have to be working in a space in which I-- that my work could be contributing more directly to the world.

So as opposed to really thinking about only what was happening in people’s minds, really looking to contribute to the, larger good through, through my work. And so I so I kind of shifted gears into tobacco control and working in tobacco use and nicotine use prevention. And that led me then to take a position at the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Drug Abuse in 2020 where I was then eventually the, deputy chief of the Prevention Research [00:07:00] branch. And one of the things that when I took the position in the government, it was 2020. I thought that a federal job was really, stable and that it-- there would be space really to over the long term to change systems, to really support diversity in science, to address the health disparities that we see related to tobacco and other substance use.

And one resolution that I made to myself was that I would bring my whole self to work, that I wasn’t going to perform for others. I was going to live my values in in the workplace. And what happened as the second Trump administration came, came in and started their kind of shock and awe campaign against government workers, is that the systems that were put in place within NIH really deeply conflicted with my values. So that so, so they, they-- the, situation just became untenable for me. [00:08:00] I signed the public the, Bethesda Declaration as Silvia did and then ultimately chose to resign in protest of the administration’s actions in December of 2025

The people behind the worst Covid-19 ideas are running Trump’s health policies

Matthew Sheffield: Okay. Yeah. And that’s a perfect segue, Alexa for the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is, so what, is the Bethesda Declaration for people who haven’t heard of it, and why, what is the, what does it signify?

Alexa Romberg: Yeah. The, and the, Bethesda Declaration a public letter of dissent from, NIH current and former employees to the director of the NIH Jayanta Bhattacharya. And I did not conceptualize it. That credit belongs to other people including Jenna Norton, who I know that you have spoken with before on your podcast. But the idea was [00:09:00] that the policies that were being pursued and are continuing to be pursued by the Trump administration within NIH was, we believe were truly undermining the mission of the NIH. So it’s not just there was a disagreement about where the emphasis should be or how implementation should go for particular ideas, but really that there’s a fundamental harm that was happening to the agency’s mission that merited speaking up in a very public way, right?

Which is obviously not typical for government employees who are often asked to implement programs or priorities that they may not really, believe in personally or have other ideas about. And so the Bethesda Declaration listed five areas that were causing harm to the NIH mission, including the politicization of research the interruption of global collaboration undermining [00:10:00] peer review the cap on indirect costs, and the firing of, essential staff. It was called the Bethesda Declaration kind of modeled after Dr. Bhattacharya’s own Great Barrington Declaration, right? In which he helped create and disseminate this declaration that was meant to be kind of a dissenting opinion about how public health during the COVID pandemic should, be handled. And he had made public statements about really wanting to foster civil dissent within wi- within the he has said. And so, so we thought that this might be a way to engage him, and and particularly since many of those initial policies were started before he, he started at NIH, right?

to be able to really engage him in the kind of dialogue that he had claimed that he really wanted to, have and encourage with with scientists broadly.

Matthew Sheffield: yeah, His alleged [00:11:00] values. Sylvia, yeah, what, do you think? You got anything to add?

Sylvia Chou: the only thing to add is it was much beyond a letter or a declaration. We really have started a movement and a community. I, think I didn’t even expect this part to be so salient. It literally kept me alive. I really felt like it kept me sane to be part of this community that was pointing out what’s clearly in front of us and understanding it as it is, because our workplace has turned into this very weird upside-down world,

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm.

Alexa Romberg: Flux

Sylvia Chou: are scared.

They’re saying things that they know are not true but not seeing another way. It was very, bizarre and weird and

Alexa Romberg: Yes

Sylvia Chou: Soul-crushing. So having the Bethesda Declaration community and fellow colleagues that are both supporting each other, strategizing, having a [00:12:00] real discussion. I think it... Before we came on, you talked about just engaging in a discourse, in a conversation. I’m really appreciating how much just talking things out honestly, candidly can do, both for the world, our society, but for our individuals’ well-being. and to me, that’s what I got the most out of Bethe- Bethesda Declaration.

Our motto is, “Courage is contagious,” and we really have been leaning into each other’s bravery but skillfulness as well. How do we do this? How do we show up, every day in defense of the integrity of science and, truth?

Alexa Romberg: Yeah, if I could just follow up, I, I, really agree with with Sylvia on that point where to, One of the that, that Dr. Bhattacharya did do in response to the, declaration was invited some signers to [00:13:00] a roundtable to, to discuss some of the concerns. And during that time as we were preparing for to have that conversation the, the, group met to discuss, like, how...

What, how could we approach this? What are ways to advance equity in this process? And it was really a revelation working with people who were so diverse where, from those who were post-bacs having, working in labs in the Intramural Research Program, to those who were senior scientists in the Intramural Program, to those who were branch chiefs, and those who were analysts, to those that were admin, right?

All working together to create a shared vision of how to communicate about a-about this. And group really modeled a for each other, a sense of community and of listening. And I credit Jenna a lot with that because [00:14:00] she, really modeled that very well in, in running meetings.

And I think that participation in excuse me, in that community really changed the way that I think about working with people and building community over time, and I’ve been applying those lessons ever since

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s wonderful. and it is an, a, fortunate contrast to, what had happened before within the field of science, and we’ll get to that a bit later in the discussion.

The gross hypocrisy of Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s NIH director

Matthew Sheffield: so but I think a lot of people, they might not know who Jay Bhattacharya is even though he has a very important job.

So, Syl- Sylvia, can you just give people a bit of a primer on his background before he got the NIH role, and then, and, why he got that [00:15:00] role?

Sylvia Chou: So Jayanta Bhattacharya was a health economist working at Stanford University. I think I mean, I don’t know his scholarship too well. I know he r- had received several federal research funding on various projects using, sort of economic analysis tools and so on. I think he came to be recognized as somebody who the administration looked upon very favorably because he was the leader of the Great Barrington Declaration, which during COVID time was a reaction against a lot of the COVID policies. They really felt like the guide- guidelines were too extreme, that they were seeding doubt in both the, policies like social distancing, but also, vaccine development and implementation. So, but I think one of his main kind of values or what he claims to be the important value is academic freedom and the freedom to [00:16:00] dissent, that we should be able to be disagreeing and still listen to each other. And we agree with that. That, part is 100% important. I think as a contrarian really coming into NIH, we expected him to shift a bit and stop being a contrarian and actually lead, and, and that has not been what we’ve observed. And we can go into kind of the policies at NIH if you want, but it, it was, I’ll, give one example of something that was

Matthew Sheffield: Yes, please

Sylvia Chou: We had a rule that we cannot use nicknames and pronouns or anything in our signatures or even on our Zoom calls. So you have a, Chipper becomes a David, a a Annette becomes a, Mary.

It’s just weird overnight. And we also couldn’t put anything else in our signature block. And then the next day he showed up, and he sent a message to the entire NIH, and he [00:17:00] signed Jay. And we-- I have a, passport name, which is Chinese, and my nickname is Sylvia. I could not have Sylvia in my signature, even though I, go by Sylvia. And so I think a lot of people were just,

Alexa Romberg: Flux

Sylvia Chou: it’s, a little bit too much on the nose that the hypocrisy, like you make a rule but that some people don’t have to follow. so that’s one example of kinda either you can see that as kinda being tone deaf to the morale problems, or that there are rules that apply to some but not others.

Alexa Romberg: Yes

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Yeah, and just for the record his, actual legal name is Jayanta not, Jay. So just for, so people can get your, j- your joke there.

Sylvia Chou: you for that.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, and, COVID really did unfortunately, empower a lot of people like this because, the, I mean, the political history [00:18:00] of, this movement, if you will, it was, people, they had, kind of coordinated actually around Stanford University unfortunately for Stanford and been associated with other groups there, some of which, many of which were funded by Peter Thiel.

And, it was... COVID, though, was a, moment where I think there, the, most heartless aspects of libertarianism really did come out there because you had... I mean, they were at just saying it. “We should let people die. People should die so we can go shopping.” That was what they were saying.

And or, and of course they would deny that. they would say, “Well, because we didn’t think anything bad would happen.” And, the, results are clear that their, the ideas that they got, which, they got a lot of what they wanted, contrary to the claims that they were some [00:19:00] persecuted, endangered censored minority.

these people were on Fox News every day. They were, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of Substacks and other things like that. No one was censoring them, especially the government. So it’s, worth saying that, I think. So, but, and but the, it does kind of, th- that’s one half of the, Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr., the, and Health and Human Services secretary who we’ve talked about a lot on this program, so we don’t have to, go into him too much here today though.

“Wellness” advocates and the need to debate bad medical advice purveyors

Matthew Sheffield: But, one person who was kind of exemplifying his personal views of things, ‘cause he wasn’t, as far as I know, that in connected to Bhattacharya before the pandemic.

But he was connected to the woman who he had nominated to be the surgeon general Casey Means, who came out of the w- the wellness [00:20:00] movement. So Alexa just g- c- like I think to some extent, maybe some people who, are not into all of that, they just see it as harmless consumer fads. That they’re like, “Well, it wastes people’s money and it’s kind of not something I’m interested in, but what harm can it do?”

And I that’s unfortunately not the right attitude for a lot of this, I think. Not, it’s not all bad, but some of it is.

Alexa Romberg: Sure. I think that’s that’s very true. And, we have the, wellness industry is really focused on unregulated supplements or treatments or postures that are not outs- that, that are outside the pharmaceutical industry, right? Because the pharmaceutical industry is tightly regulated by the FDA for good reason, right? But the, supplement, the wellness industry is is outside of all that. And I think [00:21:00] that people like RFK Jr., people like Casey Means have been using that posture to say, “Well, we’re anti-industry. We’re anti-pharma. We’re, we are looking to pursue health in these other ways,” when really what they’re doing is they’re rejecting the evidence base that underlies our understanding of human health and doing so for profit. So it is rare that these folks are not involved in selling something directly to consumers as part of their wellness advocacy, including we, see this for the new the, new person nominated for surgeon general as well. And so this really that they’re outside of, the pharmaceutical industry and talking about the corruption that’s involved in in industry is they’re, very conveniently saying, “We’re not a part of that,” even though they experience the same conflicts of interest [00:22:00] in in, in, in the way that they are approaching health.

Sylvia Chou: I mean, I, think another bigger goal of them is to sow doubt, and to sow doubt in evidence, in establishment. I think healthy skepticism is important. I think we should not take every piece of information that comes our way without thinking critically. I think this is a whole ‘nother level.

It’s really leveraging fear. Some of it is fear-mongering. Other, others, is really tapping into anger and frustration in the, community. So I, just worry sort of from a perspective of public health of this distrust in science and scientific evidence that all of this current drama can create for our future, and I think about how do we restore trust, and it can’t just be that we do better messaging.

We have to earn it. We have to [00:23:00] trustworthy. So how do we do that? That’s, what I think a lot about.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and, it is such an important question. And a lot of it has to be conversations and debates. A lot-- I think there, there are people that I know who work in science that they absolutely cringe at the idea of debating a creationist or debating an anti-vaxxer. But they have to. And, may- well, they personally, if you don’t wanna do it, like I, I wouldn’t, force it on anyone who didn’t wanna do it, but somebody needs to because, these arguments are like weeds.

If you don’t pull them up, they’ll grow bigger and take over your whole garden. And look, you have the facts on your side. So, if you don’t, feel comfortable doing that in public, you’re not a good public speaker or whatever, that’s fine, but you need to encourage people who are, and you need to find them and elevate them and support them.

Sylvia Chou: yeah, [00:24:00] in order for a debate to be a true debate, there has to be, fair rules and like you said, there are facts and then there are fiction or there are lies. That has to, there has to be room, and I think the reason, you initially, thought we could have this conversation was based on our app a- op-ed, which is focused on this topic of communication about science. And what we’re seeing right now the government side is a lot of heavy-handed muzzling or censorship of communication science, of science. Some of it is in talking point being vetted. Others are telling you can’t say this word. And I, just worry that we can’t really have a discourse if there is so much over what can and cannot be said. So I, I guess the question is who sets the rule and where, on what platform, what, space can we have a genuine [00:25:00] conversation and disagreement? I think setting the boundaries and the parameters and forums for that is, is really an important priority. And you know better than anybody, I mean, the media landscape is filled with echo chambers and silos that don’t cross, so there are rabbit holes that are hard to get out of, or people who have gotten so used to only hearing like-minded comments that they take anything that’s contrary to their worldview as either misinformation or threatening. that’s kind of a bigger,

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, yeah, they, view science as misinformation. That is actually what they think. And it, until, scientists accept that and what it, that it has massive implications for them, because the reality is the ivory tower exists within the world, and somebody can burn it down, and some people [00:26:00] want to, and they are right now.

Alexa Romberg: Yeah, I would, I mean, I would be just a little bit careful about this argument, I guess. I think that of course, we all are charged with engaging responsibly with the public. But people have also been debating creationists for decades, right? And that is not what, has led to our current crisis. Right? What has led to our current crisis is people making enormous profit off of sowing misinformation and disinformation. And so I don’t think that we’re going to arrive at solutions by simply having

Sylvia Chou: A debate.

Alexa Romberg: conversations. We are going to arrive at solutions by creating structures that enable us to thrive and enable people to thrive in our society. And so, I think that’s where we need to be thinking as opposed to thinking about changing individuals’ behaviors.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s a good point. And I, I [00:27:00] guess in my own defense, if I may, I would-- I said that it, has to include debating. But yeah, it’s absolutely 100%. yeah, the institutions the, unfortunate thing I think that, really it like, after the Cold War, there was this great consensus that developed against reactionary extremism, and in favor of science, in favor of education, in favor of competent governance.

This was, that is why the 1950s and 1960s were what people envision as the glory days. It was because we had such a great people running the government. That’s why things were so good, And also, of course, that we were the only un- undamaged, um, economic area in the world. But, the fact that, that, both parties had a commitment to good governance and science and education was so important.

But one of [00:28:00] the bad things about that it was, what they had learned in, from fighting Nazis, which is that you cannot trust reactionaries. You must stop them in every way when you see them, politically. It was not something that was really kind of formally known, in an abstract sense.

Nobody wrote a book. I mean, to some extent there were books like Hannah Arendt and, some other people like that, but it was more about “Oh, well, what is the psychology of fascism?” And not, “Well, how do we stop people from listening to that, and why would they want to?” Um, just regular people.

Like there was some part of, there was some good stuff in that, I should say. but it, didn’t really hit the political mainstream as much as it should, because I think people didn’t see a need for it,.

How tobacco companies set the template for today’s anti-science attacks

Matthew Sheffield: And the mentality that now is, running the administration in the US, it started with the tobacco industry.

And, it started with the [00:29:00] idea infamously in the memos that they sent that, “Doubt is our product.” And because the, they knew that they did not have the evidence. They knew it. But they knew also that didn’t matter. If you could convince people that evidence didn’t matter and that alternative facts were real and obviously you Alexa this is something you have a lot to say about, I imagine.

Alexa Romberg: Yes. I, do. And, and I will say that as someone, I, I was obviously highly educated, had a PhD but y- didn’t even realize before I started to work in tobacco control how harmful tobacco really is, like the bodily harm that it causes, and that this was still a huge ongoing problem right?

That this is, that we have f- about 480,000 people in the United States who die every year from [00:30:00] tobacco-related causes, right? And those those deaths are not evenly distributed across the population. Rather, they are tend to be concentrated in in specific populations that experience disparate outcomes related to their use.

For example Black Americans don’t smoke at higher rates than white Americans, but they experience worse health outcomes related to, tobacco. And partly that is due to the tobacco industry’s playbook in really targeting specifically Black communities to to, come onside. The marketing of menthol cigarettes in particular to, to Black communities that we have a lot of evidence are harder to give up smoking than non-menthol cigarettes. But but also engaging in different marketing campaigns across different populations, in, in, the US. always looking to i- to, similar to today’s situation, embrace freedom, [00:31:00] like a freedom to choose to smoke. And that’s something that the, that tobacco controls had to, push back on in terms of other people’s freedoms in or-- to, to be free of a smoky environment, for example, while they’re working at a bar or restaurant, right?

And we see that same tension between, in COVID vaccines between I wanna have the freedom to decline a vaccine but, we ... But in choosing that, you are increasing the opportunity of harm for those around you as well. And we see the current administration is quite pro-tobacco. And this was something that really is mind-boggling when you think of the Make America Healthy Again movement. of all the things, right, tobacco is a, it’s, a huge profit-driven industry. It can’t be anything else, right? It’s like public [00:32:00] shareholders.

They’ve gotta maximize profit.

Matthew Sheffield: And they’re filled with all-- cigarettes are filled with all kinds of terrible chemicals that Kennedy allegedly hates

Alexa Romberg: and it’s, you, and you, right, you have folks who, you have so many who are dying, and it’s, and it is preventable. So you would think this would be, like, a clear, win for tobacco control that we have people ascendant, but it’s turned out to be quite the opposite. So even when I when I was a program official, I held projects in tobacco control and including large centers for the, Tobacco Regulatory Science Program that uses FDA funding at NIH to fund original research to inform regulation. And one of those those centers that I held in my portfolio was terminated last summer. Right? And just, the, hypocrisy that we are trying to make America healthy again, while at the same time undermining research that’s [00:33:00] intended to benefit the people who are most harmed by tobacco really hits, the, conflicts of interest in, in, in this administration, right, right in the heart.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Sylvia, did you wanna weigh in there?

Sylvia Chou: No, I think that was well covered. I mean, there’s just a lot of hy- hypocrisy all

Matthew Sheffield: There really is

Alexa Romberg: if, we could just return for a moment to the kind of this post-war glory days of of American science, I would like to push back on that a bit because if we the ‘50s and ‘60s in the United States was one of deep and institutionalized racial inequity, right? We have Jim Crow,

Matthew Sheffield: For sure

Alexa Romberg: a academic space, that specifically excludes non-white males, right? So women, people of color, indigenous peoples non-English speakers, [00:34:00] everyone. And that space is what created the foundation for our current scientific infrastructure. And so yes, that infrastructure has certainly yielded incredible dividends for our country and has advanced health overall. However, it has done so by persistently and systematically excluding that weren’t there at the beginning. And so I think that there’s a lot of rethinking that we need to do about how we can best create a scientific infrastructure that actually advances the interests of all peoples, and not those that are just most have the most privilege in our society

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s a, great point. And yeah, and, that exclusion, I do think it did serve as the kernel of the zombie Socratic method. The zombie I can’t even say my own point. The zombie Socratic method this skepticism without a [00:35:00] brain that, it’s pervasive in, in, in lots of communities.

And, in some cases that skepticism it, is caused by things that government did. So whether that’s, the government experimenting on Black people, various drugs or not, drugs not giving people medical treatments. Yeah, so and then and then of, there’s a long record unfortunately of medical professionals not giving adequate treatment to women particularly Black women.

And even now that persists to this day that Black women have m- significantly higher mortality rates in pregnancy just as one example.

The importance of community in helping people understand science

Sylvia Chou: we’ve been talking a lot at the level of, what is ri- right evidence and exchanging of ideas. But I also wondered if a big part of it is human, like a fractured social fabric. It’s a relationship, the way people are failing to [00:36:00] re- build new relationships, or that we are there’s an isolation either efforts to isolate people or people finding themselves isolated by happenstance. I, think about it, one study which was looking at vaccine tweets, Twitter it was published in American Journal of Public Health. I can give you a reference later. But basically, they were mining data on vaccine-related c- contents, and what they found was there was a large effort on behalf of Russia and the Russian trolls and bots that were seeding contents that were both pro and anti-vaccine. It was really an attempt to build up a fight. So this is why I call these engineered controversies. They really wanna... It’s a, it’s kinda like a classic colonialist effort to get two groups to dislike each other. [00:37:00] So there are actually efforts to get people to really n- hate each other. And I think that’s something that creates this idea that sometimes people would call it false equivalency.

We need to hear there are good people on both sides, that kind of argument, or both-sideism. These were all ideas that there were just different, differing opinions, and we need to hear them all. But they actually came from attempts to create divisions. And maybe it’s a human instinct. I know you have a background in philosophy, and I, do think, we like to be around people we like and we agree with.

I know that it’s a bias of me. Sometimes I cannot stand, I mean, to socialize in certain settings or even hearing some news because it’s just too painful to have to hear things that are diff- that challenges you, your, worldviews. So, but I think that’s important to kind of bring into this conversation in terms of how [00:38:00] to build healthy and thriving relationships or relations.

Civic virtue and excellence as necessary for democracy and science

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, that is a perfect tee off of me, thank you, Silvia, to talk about that in the philosophical context because I, always love bringing Aristotle into my science episodes because Aristotle, was one of the earliest scientists of whose, achievements that we actually have written evidence for.

And, but he was also a philosopher. And, he integrated both of those things into everything that he did. And, two of his core concepts in, in the ancient Greeks generally, and we have these, we have equivalents for these words in English but as a civic practice, w- the it’s fallen away.

so the, in, in Greek philosophy, there, there’s the concept of eudaimonia, which is civic excellence and [00:39:00] thriving. And then there is the individual counterpart to that and that is arete. and it’s often translated as virtue in English, but virtue for the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t mean like chastity.

What it meant was excellence, the belief and the pursuit of excellence in your life and in your society. and that I, think has, that’s has gone missing in certainly in our politics. And some school systems actually are good about putting some of this in, into their curricula.

But yeah, we could use a lot more of these two ideas and, getting people to think about them. And it’s important also, I think, for, people as, traditional religion has become less popular over time in the US and around the world the, this, the [00:40:00] necessity of talking about what is, truth, what is knowledge, what is ethics, what do we owe each other?

Like these are things that still matter. And even if you’re not religious, you need to have answers for these questions, or at least you need to ask the question a lot, I think.

Sylvia Chou: That’s a great-- I mean, I, think about the two things that we’re here to talk about in terms of what’s most under threat, m- under attack. One is science, which is the pursuit of excellence, truth. There’s a methodological sort of processes and a level of humility accept, findings that are, may not be what you’re looking for.

And so that’s sort of one thing that’s, I think, under a lot of challenge, right? In integrity. Another is public health, which is about the social good, kinda like the societal. It’s not about just enriching the wealthiest or the smartest or whatever it [00:41:00] is. It’s about, looking out for everybody, because if everybody’s treated well, then we all benefit.

Or if, you know-- And I think those two c- two values, science, especially public health research, research that’s trying to actually, is kind of, good reasons, I think, for some of the people in charge right now, that they find it threatening. so, so I, do feel like as an individual, we have to find, re-re-redefine kind of where we are in this world.

How do we contribute? I heard this one colleague who’s c- from an evangelical background and I think struggled a lot growing up. He said when he found science, it felt like finding his safety, I mean, his comfort place. And it’s a shelter, it’s a refuge there is a process. It’s not to say religion is [00:42:00] not that, but he didn’t have a language or a mechanism to pursue excellence in the same way. So it’s not contrasting each, but I think there are different ways one arrive at what is good and true to oneself.

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm. Alexa, did you wanna, weigh in there? I, have thoughts, but I wanna let you go first.

Alexa Romberg: yeah, I think that this is really relevant to the process that Sylvia and I went through over the past year in thinking about how to respond to, to the attacks on the integrity of NIH, right? Where we, Well, I’ll, speak for myself that, for me it was clear that the actions of terminating grants without notice, regardless of the topic or whether you think it was a good thing to study, is unethical and harmful. [00:43:00] I don’t need a religious framework to make that judgment. I can rely on my own judgment and that of scientific best practices, right? And so I know that the people who are deciding to do that do not intend to prevent harm, right? And being in an environment in which that is expected, in which people will lose their jobs if they don’t comply, this creates a lot of moral injury and, and a lot of dissonance in terms of what we know to be best practices where we can have room for dissent, we can have room to discuss what is, what is the right way to, to pursue these questions?

What are the right ways to, broaden participation in science? What are the right ways to address health disparities, right? But none of those involve, [00:44:00] behaving unethically in ways that completely break trust with the people who consented to participate in science, who consented to participate in a study for the public good, right? And and so I think that’s in just thinking about what the administration is willing to engage in i- whether it’s illegal or not, I’m not a, legal expert, but I know that is unscientific and it is unethical.

Scientists have not been used to being political, but they must be now

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s right. and, that, and it goes to something that we hit on very briefly, which is, despite all the rhetoric from Bhattacharya or Kennedy earlier about, “Well, I, support free speech,” “You guys are censoring me. I-- Everyone should be able to say what they want.”

A- and the reality is they want the exact opposite of that. They want them to be able to say whatever they want, and you to say what they want. [00:45:00] that’s how they, want things to be. And but I think it, it’s hard though for a lot of people who work in science to have to accept that they must stand up at this moment.

This is a difficult realization for a lot of people, I think, and obviously you guys, know this better than I do from your personal experiences. But, it seems to me that a lot of people, they thought that they were getting away from politics, that they were getting away from the, the scrum of debate and, the dirtiness of discourse.

And of course, science has its own many debates irrespective of that. But still, there, there is an, a commitment overall to extrinsic exchange within science generally speaking. And so it’s, hard for people who had... That’s what they were looking [00:46:00] for with their career path.

Like I’m sorry, I have a friend who, works in a federal agency who, you know, i- in pub- in communications, and they always have problems getting scientists to participate in their public communications because they, the scientist will say, “Ah, that’s just a waste of time for me to talk about this.”

Sylvia Chou: I, bet they don’t feel that way now probably, hopefully.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, I haven’t checked in with, them, but I should. I should. ‘

Sylvia Chou: Cause I think it’s really been a reckoning. I mean, a wake, wake-- people are waking up to the fact that you don’t have any necessarily guaranteed public sort of acceptance or understanding or appreciation of the work you do if you don’t engage and articulate and really assert your role in civil society. I, think that’s a really important next step, is for scientists and researchers to [00:47:00] at least think about opportunities to communicate their work with their non-scientist, fellow human beings. But I, do think a lot of people in leadership, even to this day in science, are unprepared for this moment. There has been a traditionally fairly insular and well-regarded kinda structure for doing our work, and there was this idea that we stay in our lane, keep our heads down, and we just do good science, and that’s, all we’re called to do. So when the attack comes at such a musk- muscular and fast rate, it left most people, confused, scared. I think I see a lot of duck and take cover if we just let the storm blow through, if we just stay quiet. I don’t personally think that’s gonna work. I don’t necessarily have a [00:48:00] perfect sort of solution, but I think it starts with actually engaging and looking at the truth for what it is. And that even takes courage, to look at what’s happening to the scientific enterprise. But I, think it’s a start. It’s a start.

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm.

Alexa Romberg: I have a number of thoughts on this. One, I think that the idea I agree it’s often prevalent among scholars that science is apolitical is both foundationally incorrect and also out of the white supremacist origins of modern science, right? And so if you bring in Indigenous scholars, if you bring in scholars minoritized scholars, they will be able to, document and explain very clearly how participation in science at any level, as the scientist, as the participant, as the funder, as the institution receiving funding, has always been a deeply political process, [00:49:00] right? And so it is a place of privilege and insulation or to say that this is separate from the political world, right? I-- and I couldn’t agree more with, Sylvia about the lack of preparation therefore, right? Because we have elevated people in science who have enjoyed that privilege and who have enjoyed being a, being able to benefit from these structures. And that with, the fact that institutions right, their goal is to protect the institution often, right, rather than some larger ideal, right? And so we see this really playing out in a lot of conflict in o-o-over the past 18 months as institutions have really by and large, right, the majority of them, certainly not all of them, but the majority of them have looked to how can we comply, how can we...

or how can we, not make noise, or how can we survive this, as [00:50:00] opposed to thinking about what does survival mean? What does my position as someone leading a high-profile scientific organization right now require of me in order to protect scientific principles, right? And so that’s why one of the reasons why I signed the Bethesda Declaration, I took the leap, putting my name out in public a year ago, right?

It was June of last year that it came out, was because I too sit in this position of privilege, right? I was someone-- I, am someone who has benefited tr-tremendously from my status. am currently, right, I am married. My spouse carries our-- can carry our health insurance for our family. We have enough support that losing my job if I should speak up is is something that, that our family could weather without it completely overturning our lives, right?

And that is definitely not the case for every single person out there. It probably is the case, though, for [00:51:00] every leader of a scientific institution, right? And so I think that it’s incumbent upon us who have really benefited from the privilege, particularly in the scientific infrastructure, to be the ones raising our voices at this time.

Science has always been linked to politics, even if you didn’t realize it

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s really good. Yeah, the, people who, say that they’re non-political, they make two fundamental errors. Number one is that saying you are non-political is a political act, and the only people who can say that are people who have the privilege to say that. Because, politics, it will come for you even if you don’t want it.

and in science, in a lot of ways it-- some, many scientists were living in denial about that, I think. Um, and, and you’re right that, to, go back into the, um, the history there, Alexa, that [00:52:00] the other thing is that w- of why it’s so important to encourage diversity in science is that science is about the world as it is, and if you’ve excluded people who are in the world, and especially within the realm of medicine and biology, if you exclude people, then your science is wrong.

It’s incomplete. It’s filled with lacunae, and it’s not good science. Even if it has, the conclusions that might match, a, more well-sourced science, it’s still the methods are wrong and you have failed

So

Alexa Romberg: I, I would extend that to all areas of science, including, for example, cognitive psychology,

Matthew Sheffield: Appreciate you

Alexa Romberg: when you have theories that are born out of a very homogenous then they’re not meant to capture the diversity of human cognition, for [00:53:00] example and lead to pathologizing what the white privileged class views as non-normative

Sylvia Chou: Mm-hmm. and I just wanna add, I think we’ve made a lot of strides. I mean, I know this always looking back, we see so many holes or problems, feel like over the last years, we’ve really increased participation. We’ve diversified the workforce. It’s far from over, but I think what we’re seeing now is a severe backlash.

We’re taking a cou- many steps backwards. But I think sometimes it’s hard to-- it’s, easy to lose sight of the progress that we’ve made. So to sort of hold both realities of sort of a progress even to be here having this open conversation, uncensored, and yet watching the threat that people felt very nervous about this.

I mean, this is a threatening [00:54:00] to have a conversation like this where we connect science and democracy and politics in one, I think is perceived as threatening to some. and that, I would say is I even underestimated how quickly politicization of science took place and how complete the destruction, has been

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point, Sylvia. And and one of the things that has been a big part of that destruction, though, has been a thought a- across many institutions not just those of science. We saw this with law firms and universities in general, of this idea of “Well, if I just put my head down and, they’re only asking me to fill out forms, or I’ll, just pay off the settlement then they’ll leave me alone.”

And, let this preemptive obedience. It’s been [00:55:00] so destructive. And it was, wrong from day one, and a lot of people were saying that from day one that they shouldn’t do it. And, universities that have thought that if they could placate the Trump regime, like Columbia University, big one in particular, and some of these law firms, they, one- once you have bent the knee, they will never take their boot off of your neck, I think

Sylvia Chou: Yeah. There’s a, really distinction between people who are like in the Bethesda Declaration, seeing the bigger picture, to this idea that these are all just series of nuisances. “Get me-- get out of my back. Stop asking more questions.” And these are inconvenient workpl- workplace drama. I mean, there are still people who felt like they, that’s how they can survive this, is to think of each thing as a small hurdle that passes. But I, disagree with [00:56:00] that perspective. Empathize with it. I think for some people it’s a survival mechanism. but that’s not my stance. Yeah.

Alexa Romberg: And I think this is what we were looking to engage people with in the recent op-ed in, inside Higher Ed in which we really, brought people some actions that they can the first is exercising your rights while you have them, right? If you give up your freedom of speech just because, then you’ve given it up and, th- and, there isn’t recovering it, right?

You are setting a norm in which there is less, allowed speech. And obviously, there’s a lot of conflict there in terms of, the, personal and a- and, the ideological. But I think in really grappling with that and and engaging [00:57:00] with it deeply is really key. And, another tenet that, we put forth is really that every bit of fighting and pushback matters.

And for some folks, this may be really personal. Maybe, right, like keeping your mind free, having your eyes open understanding the harms that, that, we’re seeing, right? For others, it’s going to be a lot of direct action, right? And actions can be small, and actions can be big. They can be visible or less, or invisible to, to, to the public.

But it’s thinking about that, of “What’s in, what’s possible for me in terms of action, visible or invisible?” the, third part was really about growing a community of support that sees the truth and understands the need for speaking up and action at, this time.

And I think that, as Silvia and I both spoke about kind of becoming part of the larger community [00:58:00] of Bethesda declaration signers and the support that afforded us as we really thought about how to navigate the current attacks on the NIH and on our democracy. It was like I, I certainly couldn’t be doing the things that I am now without that support.

And actually, it grew for me out of really meeting with it and even with, a smaller group of just folks who I worked really closely with at NIH, starting and talking with them. And so it’s really those small actions, that talking to someone, understanding, growing your sense of connection in the world that can lead to, to, larger things in the future.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. It really can. And yeah, and I think that does bring me to one of the things that, you know, a lot of people, maybe not a lot, I, guess it’s hard to know how many, but, [00:59:00] some people who have long-term science projects, they have decided that, given Trump and all these other people, that the United States is not going to be a safe home for their research.

And so they’ve left, and I understand why they would do that. I but, I would say to them that, if you’re going to leave, then you, need to keep fighting for the people you left behind because n- not everybody has that luxury. that’s, one of the best privileges you could possibly have, is the ability to take up your research shop and port it over to another country and have them pay you to do it.

So please don’t leave the rest of us behind. and, and the fact that you’re leaving, that’s... You should tell people that and stay, connected.

Sylvia Chou: Yeah, I try to emphasize when people hear that I resigned, and like [01:00:00] I’m giving up, but really it’s the opposite. I just decided that I needed to uphold my oath of office by fighting from the outside. I really think it’s a big distinction that I’m not just retrieving, to the mountains, at least not yet. I, remember growing up in, Chinese literature in Taiwan, you would hear these scholars that have seen it all, and they move to the mountain to play zither and drink tea invite the moon to a, some liquor. And I always wondered, who are these people? Why would they do that? But now I appreciate where that idea comes from. But I’m not there. I wanna give my good faith every bit of effort I can to assert my right and engage in conversations. So I mean, I really thank you for engaging us in this conversation because I think it’s been a tremendous learning time for all of us and it’s very humbling. But I’m seeing [01:01:00] even growth in our community of both individually and as a group of

Alexa Romberg: Yes

Sylvia Chou: how to do this, how to with the situation. But I did hear a joke not a joke, but in China, they call Trump the true patriot. Meaning they-- Trump must love China so much to give up science and let China, take it o-on.

I mean, a, colleague was given a position where they are able to hire, 50 f-faculty lines and they’re ready to go. it, is really astounding the in-infrastructure that’s growing almost reacting to what’s happening in the US elsewhere in the world. So, I think brain drains and sort of, issues of scientists moving is happening, and it-- we, won’t understand the extent of its impact until later.

But I like your c- idea that, we, this country, this structure [01:02:00] belongs to us, and we need to be an active participating participant in effecting change, positive change even in dire times.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and, I think one of the other things that just regular people can do is make sure to support politicians who will invest in, institutions of science, institutions of education, and institutions of public awareness. that’s that’s has been s- unfortunate to see, like the, They went after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for instance, which funds PBS and lots of great programming and NPR stuff as well. And like I, there, there, is a real opportunity though for blue states and other countries. I mean, I, it’s my personal view, I, that there [01:03:00] has to be a reverse Marshall Plan from Europe and other countries.

because if we, go rogue in this country, like it’s gon- it’s gonna affect you guys, and you know that. So maybe you should help us out, the people that are fighting for democracy here, a lot more than you are doing now. That’s what I would think. So if you guys are listening,

France, if you’re listening

Sylvia Chou: we can say science and health, they don’t know passport, holders who, which from which, right? It’s we’re all in this together. Discoveries are not bound by nationalities. So you’re right. mean, maybe that is my kind of more Buddhist direction of sort of interbeing.

Like this is all gonna be, we’re all in this together

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah

Sylvia Chou: Yeah

Matthew Sheffield: All right. Well, did you wanna weigh in, Alexa? Or I was gonna wrap it up here if you... And w- when you’re ready

Alexa Romberg: That was covered [01:04:00] nicely

Matthew Sheffield: Oh, okay. Great. Well, it, so if people want to join you guys in your fight what’s your advice for them?

Sylvia Chou: We definitely welcome them, and we have a group, 27 United. It’s 27 U-N-I-H-T-E-D United, but H is... Basically, this was born out of people who were originally fired from the NIH, but now really we wanna be an advocacy organization that connects researchers and federal scientists together. So that’s one idea.

Another is really just, join your communities, whatever community it is in your local area. And if you’re a scientist, really get involved because you can’t really afford to just stay in your lab and focus on your inquiry. You really need to see how your work fits into the larger current political system. So I, definitely [01:05:00] encourage people to not lose faith and not stay in the place of despair, but getting involved. I have found that I’m more hopeful when I’m enacting in action and being part of a community and having a conversation like this. It gives me hope that

we, can figure this out if we really keep talking and learning.

Matthew Sheffield: Excellent

Alexa Romberg: And I think really coming back to, to, to building that community, finding people to, to talk with, and that every action matters. Actions may be really small. It may be talking with a person down the hall from you at work, or talking with your department head or a... or, something about folks can be best supported, how researchers can be best supported at this time, acknowledging what is happening.

It could be working with your neighbors. It could be working in areas that are completely separate [01:06:00] from science or largely separate from science, right? I think that it’s like finding a voice and finding actions that are, that you can, that, that you can really do, right? So if, calling your senator, calling your congressman, you’re like, “I just-- I, I don’t wanna do that,” right?

find something else that that you can do because the, communities that we build, they’re going to last regardless of how the next few years turn out, right? They don’t hinge on a specific win or a specific shift in the tides. Rather they create the space for us to support one another and live the best lives we can.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly. All right. Well, I think I will let you have the last word there, Alexa. Thank you so much, Sylvia Chou and Alexa Romberg for being here today

Sylvia Chou: Thank you for having us. It’s great.

Alexa Romberg: Appreciate it.

Matthew Sheffield: All [01:07:00] right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation. And you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.

And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives, and I thank you very much for your support. You can become a paid or free subscriber if you go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack. And there’s also a GoFundMe for the show as well if you are not interested in either of those platforms.

And of course, you can watch the show on YouTube or, get it anywhere you’re on your favorite podcast player. So thanks a lot for your support and I’ll see you next time.

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This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.

Four weeks after charging former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the Justice Department has moved to withdraw its indictment, pointing instead to botched work by a contractor as the cause of peeled lining. As I discussed previously, the targeting of Hearn was the culmination of increasingly frantic efforts by President Trump to deflect blame for a botched refurbishment of the pool, and constituted the sort of abuse of power associated with tinpot dictators. In order to evade his clear responsibility for the incompetent renovation — in which not only the pool’s waterproofing did not take but the water itself became discolored with green algae — the president concocted an alternate reality both absurd and ominous. In his telling, numerous vandals had attacked the pool in an effort to undermine both the president and the nation itself. To instantiate his tale of a country besieged, he dispatched troops and other security forces to the Reflecting Pool, militarizing a tourist site that draws some 20 million visitors every year.

If it had ended there, such an abuse of power would have been sufficient to torpedo the presidency of previous chief executives — an unstable concoction of menace and stupidity, with the president blaming the algae growth on unseen vandals who had supposedly dumped fertilizer in the water, and ranting about a 350-foot-long “gash” that invisible assailants had cut into the pool lining. But a deeper corruption lay in how the president was able to conscript willing accomplices into his fantasia of D.C. bedlam. Notably, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated the lies about vandals, as if through repetition they could overcome the lack of actual evidence. Even worse, the Justice Department — through the initiative of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jean Pirro— indicted Hearn on a felony vandalism charge that could carry a ten-year prison sentence, attempting through the abuse of the justice system to turn Trump’s self-serving fantasy of anti-American vandals into reality.

It is heartening to see that the withdrawal of charges against Hearn has garnered fairly extensive news coverage. Given the president’s stance of never admitting error, the Justice Department’s admission that it has no actual case against Hearn carries the whiff of novelty. More broadly, it offers a glimpse of the possibility that Trump has hit a barrier to his various abuses of power, in this case as his own lackeys appear unwilling to carry out an impossible prosecution. And here, we should take note of speculation that Pirro fears real consequences, such as disbarment, for pursuing a fact-free case. She previously claimed to have “tremendous evidence” of Hearn’s guilt, yet in her remarks about withdrawing the indictment claimed that the Interior Department had not provided her previously with information about the shoddy repair work. At a minimum, this suggests she had failed to do the minimum due diligence in filing the charges against Hearn. There is a real air of public servants caught red-handed abetting a presidential vendetta.

But the larger story remains Trump’s own abuse of power; most specifically, his willingness to mobilize resources of the federal government to target a single innocent American in order to distract from his own incompetence. I will be the first to admit that Donald Trump has done many worse things than this: attempting to overthrow American democracy following his 2020 election loss and his recent decision to make war on Iran come immediately to mind. Yet, in the escalation from a botched Reflecting Pool restoration to the deployment of the U.S. government to prosecute a single citizen, the cruelty and incompetence of Trump have congealed in a novel way. I am struck by how the president conjured this whole supposed “crisis” of a besieged Reflecting Pool completely out of the whole cloth of his own delusions, and then sought to send a fellow American to prison for a decade to cover up his own failed, self-initiated effort to. . . refurbish an ornamental body of water.

Incredibly but predictably, Trump’s lies and desire for retribution have continued in the days following Pirro’s nixing of the indictment. He has voiced his strong disagreement with her decision, saying that she “made a mistake,” “choked,” and “folded like an umbrella.” (Pirro apparently attempted to bolster her case that the president not fire her, and that vandalism was not to blame, by literally bringing a box of evidence to the White House on Tuesday). He has continued to broadcast the lie that vandals, not a botched repair job, have caused the problems with the pool, writing on social media that “To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” and referencing a video supposedly providing corroborating evidence.

News reports have tended to emphasize Trump’s critique of Pirro and the question of whether she is safe in her job — for example, this New York Times piece plays up the reality TV-style drama of the tension between Pirro and Trump. But the focus on the U.S. attorney’s fate obscures the president’s continued efforts to conjure a phantasmagoria of “box-cutter”-wielding vandals (the box-cutter reference more or less obviously meant to evoke the attacks of September 11). Most damningly, Trump’s opposition to the case’s dismissal and his ongoing lies about vandalism mean that he effectively continues to marshal the power of the presidency, however ham-handedly, to target and defame David Hearn. Impugning an innocent man via the presidential megaphone is itself a blatant abuse of power, and the Justice Department’s attempt to dismiss the case “without prejudice” — a legal term meaning they could re-file charges at a later date — is another sign that the abuses are ongoing (Hearn’s legal team has countered this by filing a motion to ensure the charges cannot be revived).

Whether Donald Trump is delusional or simply sticking to his own self-absolving script of an antifa anti-Reflecting Pool jihad, this single incident of vindictive and bullying behavior would likely have been a crippling scandal for any previous presidency. The breadth of his lies and his obsessive behavior should not blind us to the underlying menace of a president who would imprison an innocent man to cover up his own incompetence.

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American democracy has been widely seen as embattled for the last 10 years or so, but the factions seeking to undermine or replace it have been active for many decades.

We’ve covered the political groups who have been at work in this regard here on Theory of Change, but it’s also the case that many business leaders have become increasingly radicalized to view democracy as a threat to business — even though the social democratic nations of Europe have combined vigorous capitalism with strong democracy for decades without either one destroying the other.

Corporate interests have always sought influence within governments, but since the 1970s or so, right-wing business leaders have banded together to leverage the federal judiciary to evade public accountability and democratic governance, largely by making conduct that was once criminal perfectly legal.

Joining the show to talk about how this happened and how it works is Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, she’s a professor of law at Stetson University and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. She’s also the author of Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, which is the basis of our discussion today.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

05:34 — Red-baiting as a PR strategy against holding businesses accountable

13:55 — Buckley versus Valeo and the beginning of corporate influence in federal campaigns

24:53 — Nixon and the right’s obsession with controlliong federal courts

28:57 — Bribery and the post-Buckley campaign finance regime

33:58 — Trump and the Roberts court’s almost total refusal to restrain executive power

38:03 — Poll: Democrats strongly dislike the Supreme Court, but they don’t think it has too much power

43:58 — The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”

49:34 — Reform ideas for SCOTUS

Audio Transcript

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

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I always like to start with the historical angle. And your book obviously is focusing on the role of corporations in kind of hijacking American democracy. But you do talk about how this is not the relatively recent trend that I think a lot of people might suppose that it is, and it goes all the way back to World War II in some sense, right?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Indeed. I have a whole chapter about what I consider the worst campaign finance story I’ve ever heard. And it goes something like this. We have the scene opens on a political party, and this particular political party is broke. And you could sort of ask the question, what do you do if you’re a political party that has no resources?

And what lots of political parties do in this situation is they ask the richest people in their society for money, which is exactly what this political party did. They have a secret meeting. They invite titans of industry to be there. Leaders from the political party are there and give speeches, and the speeches are pretty disturbing.

One leader says, I think something along the lines like, “Business cannot survive in a democracy.” and there were other anti-small D democratic statements that were said at this meeting. And the result of this was the businessmen opened their coffers of their corporations and gave lavishly to this political party, saving it from financial ruin.

This happened in 1933. The party I’m talking about is the Nazi political party in Germany, [00:04:00] and they literally were bailed out by German industrialists.

SHEFFIELD: They were, and it is uncanny and, unfortunate the parallels that we are seeing in the rhetoric of people like Peter Thiel nowadays who, I mean, literally, wrote a whole essay arguing that, business freedom and democracy are incompatible. And also the, voting rights of women as well are not compatible with business freedom.

So it’s a very long and unfortunate series of viewpoints that never really went away, it seems like.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I found when I was doing the Nazi chapter is it wasn’t just German companies that supported the Nazis. There were plenty of American companies and American businessmen who supported the Nazis as well, including Henry Ford. Henry Ford was a rampant anti-Semite and he funded a young Hitler.

They were big fans of each other. I think Henry Ford is the only American who’s named in “Mein Kampf.” And I think Hitler had a picture of Henry Ford on his desk. So they were sort of thick as thieves. But that is also one of the ways that the Nazi party thrived, is not only did they have German corporations backing them, they had American corporations backing them too

Red-baiting as a PR strategy against holding businesses accountable

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, this is kind of a trend that ki- really does kind of resurface, I mean, just since the emergence of, democratic movements really beginning all the way back to the 19th century, you really saw it. And it was something that, you know, less, you know not overtly fascistic people like Milton Friedman [00:06:00] even were in, were into this kind of rhetoric.

He in fact had an argument that he would often make. He called it the “suicidal impulse of the business community,” in which he argued that business leaders who support government interventions ultimately are going to make it so that their, country becomes communist and that their business will be criminalized and nationalized or, some variation of that.

And obviously it’s not true because, we have a pretty long record of many countries around the world in which they have social democracy policies and capitalism is not a criminal offense. But there’s a, there’s... It seems to be an innate appeal to at least some people with a lot of money, it seems like.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Red-baiting has a long tradition. You scare people by saying that the communists are coming, and then you get them to do things that they maybe otherwise wouldn’t. It’s a pretty long and sordid history of that type of behavior in the American context as well

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, even less kind of overtly sensorial would be, like, ‘cause the other-- another thing that Friedman was very big on was stopping businesses from having corporate social responsibility policies. And, that’s been a continuous line of attack that we see now even, with the anti-DEI movements where they’re a lot of far-right people are trying to say that y- there can’t be any efforts to have diversity in business, and that’s wrong and it’s gonna ruin business, et cetera, et cetera.

Even though, in a lot of these policies actually end up promoting very often, disadvantaged rural white people and because, they’re part of diversity, in fact. And so, it’s-- it-- there, there’s a pretty consistent through line. I think that’s one of the things that you talk about in the book, like it’s-- you just-- there’s a lot of...[00:08:00]

The argumentation’s there, the history is there, and the people are there, right?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: The, the fight over ESG is one of the things that I think has been happening in the background over the past decade. It’s just been happening at shareholder meetings. And I think there are, weird caricatures of what a shareholder is. But if you have a 401, chances are part of that retirement account is invested in normal blue-chip companies.

And it all depends on whether you’re invested directly or whether you’re invested through mutual funds, how much voting ability you have as a shareholder. But ultimately, there are just everyday people whose retirement is in the stock market, which means they have a say about how these companies are going to be run.

And so under the securities laws publicly traded companies allow for what are known as shareholder proposals. And shareholder proposals are literally from shareholders, and they are trying to get their fellow shareholders to vote on something. And one of the things that shareholders have brought to one another over the past decade are what is known as ESG, so environmental, social, and governance questions for the corporation.

And this is one of the ways that shar-shareholders have demanded more transparency around corporate political spending. So one of the big watershed moments in I think the life of the country as well as my own, was the 2010 Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court. This is the decision where the Supreme Court said that corporations were [00:10:00] constitutionally allowed to spend as much money as they wanted in any American election, whether it’s local, state, or federal.

And that was a huge change because before that corporations were barred from spending corporate treasury funds directly on US elections at the federal level and in half of the states. And that decision got rid of all of those protections all at once. and that allows corporations to spend more freely and to spend money that as Justice Brandeis would say, is other people’s money.

So the money that’s in a corporation is in part money from shareholders who’ve invested in that corporation. It is not really just the money of the CEO, for example, or the, top corporate management. They are entrusted with the, those funds by investors who don’t want to spend all day running a company.

But it, at the end of the day, it is not their money. So shareholders have used these parts of the securities laws to communicate with one another. And so one of the things you’ve seen is shareholder proposals on supply chain, trying to make sure that there aren’t conflict minerals in products, that there is better human rights for workers, and more recently, that there’s more transparency of corporate political spending

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. one of the other changes I think also that had been kind of pushed through in this regard was the, shifting of the corporate priority from kind of the longer term, sustainability of the business toward a more, quarter-focused instantaneous profit-taking, motive.

And that’s been severely [00:12:00] destabilizing for American politics, I would say, and also for a lot of corporate governance. I mean, like there is a terrible irony in that as a lot of these businesses have become more politicized and right-wing over time they actually are doing the very same things that they’re that they, condemned earlier.

The, activist, right-wing investors had condemned earlier. They were saying, “we don’t, we don’t wanna have environmental sustainability. We don’t wanna have, any of these other things. But we do wanna have political sustainability for our, ideology and for, crony capitalism and things like that.”

So it’s-- There’s, an unfortunate irony, but it’s also destabilized a lot of corporations as well and made it so they don’t invest in things like training for employees or have a more long-term view of their place within the market and the market itself, I would say. What do you think?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yeah. I mean, I think part of why you see such virulent, attacks on ESG is concern that these shareholders were actually making a difference. And so there are all these different efforts to hem that in and to stop it and to vilify it. And, the anti-DEI aspect is just one line of trying to get at this what if, you’re more regressive, what you perceive as a problem, but the problem that they perceive is shareholders actually caring about what their corporations are up to and saying something.

So I’m a big fan of using the tools that are available to us and using shareholder proposals to raise these social issues and to encourage corporations to do better, I think should only be encouraged

Buckley versus Valeo and the beginning of corporate influence in federal campaigns

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, we’re gonna circle back to Citizens [00:14:00] United in, a second here, but I think kind of the ruling that really did kind of kick off this corporatocracy within American politics was Buckley versus Valeo, and that’s a case that doesn’t... is not as infamous nowadays as, perhaps it should be.

So w- can you walk us through, what the law that was at stake there before and then what the case was and the ruling? And then we’ll go from there.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: I have to spend a lot of time with Buckley v. Valeo because it is the foundation of modern campaign finance law. So Buckley was a review of the Federal Election Campaign Act which was a post-Watergate reform. Watergate which is now 50 years behind us, was a crazy welter of crimes that happened during the Nixon administration, and specifically during the 1972 election when Nixon was up for re-election.

And I think he and his top aides just went completely bonkers making sure that he got re-elected. And so they just started breaking all sorts of laws, including the preexisting campaign finance laws. So Nixon set up this Committee to Re-elect the President, which has the awesome acronym CREEP. And CREEP was taking in huge amounts of donations from corporations during the 1972 election.

Now, the problem with that is that it broke the law. So there was a preexisting law from 1907 called the Tillman Act, and the Tillman Act makes it illegal then and now for corporations to give corporate treasury funds directly to federal candidates, and that is exactly what CREEP [00:16:00] was doing. It took in money from all sorts of corporations and every time they asked for one of those corporate donations, that was a crime, and every time that a corporation gave money to CREEP, that was a different crime.

And this embroiled all sorts of different people. So sort of famously, this is how George Steinbrenner the former owner of the Yankees, at that point he had not bought the team yet, but he was embroiled in one of these CREEP scandals because he was the head of a shipping company and the people at CREEP wanted money from him.

And Steinbrenner, to his credit, realized that this was illegal, so he tried to make it more legal by giving fake bonuses to people at his company and then directing those executives to give to CREEP. But that in itself is a crime ‘cause you’re just circumventing the corporate ban. And that’s how he ended up with a criminal conviction ‘cause he pleads to it instead of going through a criminal trial.

So people like that literally get criminally indicted and prosecuted most of the businessmen involved in funding CREEP actually are not prosecuted, which I think is a bit of a problem. I mean, it always strikes me that when you look at the list of the biggest donors to CREEP, almost all of those corporations still exist.

And I think that is very telling, that the very corporations who break the law during Watergate are still with us. And part of why they’re still with us is they didn’t have the book thrown at them generally. A- and they also had sort of this song and dance of, “the Nixon people were nuts.”

And, [00:18:00] I, have some sympathy for this view of things because the Nixon administration was a little bonkers. I mean, they really were breaking the law whenever they asked for these donations. And so from the point of view of some of these businessmen, they sold th- their version of events as we...

This was a shakedown. Like, “They were shaking us down for money, and we had no choice but to give it to them.” But I think on further examination, almost all of these businesses that gave to CREEP had something that they wanted. So, often it was approval of a corporate merger because that has to go throu- through the DOJ.

And there was also this very weird period with CREEP where The sitting attorney general, so John Mitchell, is, both the sitting attorney general and he is running CREEP. So he’s running the president’s reelection campaign while he is still attorney general, and that gave him enormous leverage. So, he really could demand these illegal contributions from people, in part because he was the gatekeeper of whether you were going to be prosecuted for something.

And I think he really abused that power. So fast-forward to the reason why Watergate is known as Watergate. So some of CREEP’s employees break into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate building in ‘72, and they are caught and arrested. And it doesn’t take long for reporters and for prosecutors to realize that the trail doesn’t just stop with CREEP, it goes all the way to the White House.

And Nixon basically spends two years trying to cover up his involvement in Watergate, and there are congressional hearings [00:20:00] about all of this. And after those Watergate hearings, one out of four letters into Congress from the public demanded campaign finance reform. And Congress, to its credit, actually did something.

So they passed this Federal Election Campaign Act, otherwise known as FECA, and this was a huge change from the way that campaigns had been regulated before. So it had contribution limits, it had expenditure limits, it had public financing for presidential campaigns. It created the FEC, the Federal Election Commission and required disclosure of money in politics.

Almost as soon as the ink is dry on this new law, it is challenged in court, and that goes up to the Supreme Court, and that is what becomes Buckley versus Valeo. Now, the Supreme Court had dealt with the Nixon White House with- in many different cases. So they had dealt with Nixon with the Pentagon Papers case, and they had ruled against the Nixon administration, which was trying to stop The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers.

And they had also dealt with Nixon’s secret taping, and they had ruled that Nixon had to release his tapes And so I think court watchers might have thought, “Okay, we have this post-Watergate reform in FECA. It’s being reviewed by the courts, the same court that ruled against Nix- Nixon twice while he was president.

Maybe they will do the right thing when they are looking at this campaign finance reform.” And instead of ruling I think for democracy, instead they split a enormous amount of babies in the Buckley case. And so one of the [00:22:00] things they rule in Buckley is that expenditure limits are unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

That means that you can’t have an expenditure limit basically on anyone who’s spending in politics. That is a huge gift to the ultra-wealthy because the way that this case was Done. It, didn’t really have to do with corporate political spending because corporate political spending was still and is illegal under the Tillman Act.

But what this really freed was the, your friendly neighborhood billionaire because it said, I mean, what the, bumper sticker misreading of Buckley is that money is speech. It never actually says that in the case. It gets very close to saying that. It basically said that you need money to communicate in a country as large as ours, which is true.

If you’re running a presidential campaign and you’re trying to reach 50 states, you’re going to need money to do some communication to voters. But you sort of take that grain of truth and the Supreme Court, I think, has distorted that out of all reason. And so the court upholds contribution limits.

They uphold disclosure. They uphold the presidential public financing system. But because they rule that expenditures are un- expenditure limits are unconstitutional, that really empowers the wealthy to spend as much as they want to in American elections ever since 1976. The other lesser-known case which happens after Buckley is a case called Bellotti.

So Bellotti was a challenge to a restriction on [00:24:00] spending by corporations and banks, and it arose in an election where it was a ballot measure and the, First National Bank who’s a party in this case they challenged the law that said that a corporation couldn’t spend in basically a ballot initiative.

And the Supreme Court agreed with them and said that the restriction on corporations and banks spending in elections where all that was on the ballot was either a referendum or an initiative, that was also unconstitutional under the First Amendment. And so Bellotti created this First Amendment right for corporations to spend in politics, which they did not have before that case.

Nixon and the right’s obsession with controlling federal courts

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and also I think it’s worth pointing out that just quickly that the Buckley in Buckley versus Valeo was in fact James Buckley, the brother of William F. Buckley Jr. And that’s, it, that really did kind of, I think in a lot of ways, kind of reorient or begin reorienting, right-wing political movements toward the Supreme Court and trying to take it back over.

And you can see that, um, with regard to, w- the, Warren Court a- and the Burger Courts being, ano- anomalously quite liberal compared to all previous courts and subsequent courts. And so there was, there was this there were many protest movements in the country against the court, the Massive Resistance protests against civil rights rulings and, um, there were, for decades there was the, signs and people carrying around about a “impeach Earl Warren,” um, that they had argued that the court had, infringed upon the silent majority.

That was a, [00:26:00] common Nixon phrase as well. and so they, there, there was like a reorientation almost entirely of right-wing rhetoric and political strategizing to educate their, voters or people who agreed with them to understand that the court is something that we need to have power over.

And it became, a really persistent focus, um, ev- and, w- with Ronald Reagan as well, and, all the subsequent Republican presidents after him.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Describe the Supreme Court to my law students is often the presidency is the party and the Supreme Court is the hangover. And but with the Supreme Court, the hangover can last two decades because they’re appointed for life. No Supreme Court justice has ever been successfully impeached and removed, so they really are there for life.

Even if on paper they could be removed through the impeachment process, it’s never worked. It was only attempted once, and it, failed, and I think that set the precedent that we’re not gonna do this on a whim, which is probably good. You want the Supreme Court to have some independence from the political branches.

But the life tenure combined with increased life spans of, human beings means that we really are gonna get some very old justices who were appointed by a president, decades before, but they still have an enormous influence over the fate of the nation because, the Supreme Court is our final arbiter of what is constitutional and what is not

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and it wasn’t-- doesn’t seem to have been intended that way by the founders [00:28:00] either, but this is how it is right now. Or what do-- no, you-- what do

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yeah. I think when lifespans were a lot shorter, it’s... the stakes are lower. So if you really think that, So it’s my understanding that the reason why the retirement age was once set at 65 is that most people died around that age. And so there was an, anticipation that you could have, you know, social security for people around age 65, in part because by, 69 they’d be dead.

And I think part of the same strain that you see over the social security system, which is now has to deal with like lots and lots of people living to 100 our court system have a very similar problem. Like we have lifetime appointments where you would’ve had someone there for maybe 15 years and now you have them there for 30 to 40 years

Bribery and the post-Buckley campaign finance regime

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. True. I think so. And yeah, and I, and that’s a separate discussion in terms of, like the judicial supremacy, so we don’t have to get into that. But I do wanna kind of r- bring it back to the, implications of Buckley versus Valeo because, one of the other things that you talk about in your book is, essentially one could say that corporate bribery of politicians effectively could you could say that it became legal in a lot of different ways.

And that’s not exactly what you say in there, but walk us through what you mean when you, refer to corporate bribery.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: I, think there’s bribery and then there’s the campaign finance system, which are distinct. And I understand the impulse to conflate the two. However under Supreme Court precedent and our laws, most candidates for office in the United [00:30:00] States have to run by raising money from other people.

And so we have this privately financed campaign finance system which most candidates have to use. Now, there are very limited opportunities for public financing in places like New York City and certain states, but that is the exception and not the rule. The other way you can avoid the campaign finance system is being independently wealthy yourself.

So you can have the Mike Bloombergs of the world who, I think he once turned in, a campaign finance report when he was running for mayor that simply said, “I spent $100 million on my own re-election.” And that’s all it said, and that’s all it needed to say because it was truthful. He had self-financed his campaign, and so he had the luxury of not asking other people for money.

But everyone else basically does have, have to ask for campaign contributions when they’re running for an office in the United States. So all of that, when you ask someone for a lawful donation and they give it to you, I do not consider that bribery There is bribery that happens with certain corporations who, much like, the Nixon administration and CREEP, just go far beyond the campaign finance system to literally give a politician a bribe.

And one of the ways you can think about the distinction is with a bribe, the money tends to go directly to the candidate’s personal bank account or something that they control. And that is different than giving to a lawful campaign. With a lawful campaign, there are personal use restrictions. You are not allowed to use campaign finance dollars [00:32:00] to enrich your own lifestyle.

That is personal use, and that is illegal. When you actually take a bribe and you put it into your own bank account, as, say you’re the governor, that’s when I think it really is bribery. And there are cases of that in my book as well. So there was this, guy named Larry Householder. He was the speaker of the house in Ohio, and there was this company called FirstEnergy, and they wanted a bailout at taxpayer expense of some of their nuclear facilities.

And they knew in order to do that, they needed legislation to get through the, Ohio legislature. And so they literally bribed him and other individuals in Ohio to get that legislation passed. and the sad part of the story is the legislation did pass. It w- it did become law. The, voters in Ohio did have to foot the bill for bailing out these crappy nuclear facilities that FirstEnergy owned.

And so I think that’s where things get very distorted, but part of that story of how they did that was actually perfectly legal. So the perfectly legal part of it is, I think, something we can blame on Citizens United. So Citizens United, again, allows corporations to spend in politics. So to the extent that FirstEnergy was simply buying political ads in the Ohio elections, that’s the legal part.

The illegal part was when they were literally giving checks to Larry Householder, and he was depositing them in his own bank account. That’s where you get to real corporate bribery.

Trump and the Roberts court’s almost total refusal to restrain executive power

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:34:00] and we keep unfortunately seeing a lot more of that. And Trump has really kind of, I mean, just taken that off completely beyond what anyone, even before this, even his first term, really imagined. Like overtly saying, with the Supreme Court’s permission basically, that the E- Emoluments Clause and anti-bribery laws, they don’t apply to him because he’s the chief executive.

That seems to me effectively what...

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Like, not exactly.

SHEFFIELD: go, go ahead then. You tell, me how I, said that wrong

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Okay. So, the emoluments clause cases I think were deeply, disappointing, For those of us who cared about them so there are two emoluments clauses in the US Constitution. One is the foreign emoluments clause, which essentially says you can’t take gifts from a foreign prince. And then there’s a domestic emoluments clause, which says that the president’s salary can’t be augmented by either the federal government or the 50 states.

And arguably Trump was in violation of both of those clauses during his first term because of funds that went through his businesses. Now, I think unfortunately the Supreme Court didn’t take this threat seriously enough. So there were multiple lawsuits to enforce the emoluments clauses.

One was brought by members of Congress in the minority, so by the demo- by Democratic representatives and senators. And when that case gets to the Supreme Court essentially says, “you guys don’t have standing to bring this lawsuit.” And this is not completely off the wall for the Supreme [00:36:00] Court and for the federal judiciary.

The federal judiciary is very stingy about recognizing what would otherwise be legislative branch standing to bring federal lawsuits. And the idea behind being stingy about doing this actually makes constitutional sense. The, the legislature has its own branch of government. If they wanna change something, they can literally make new laws and they are not powerless.

And so the courts have always been very hesitant to let them argue about what is sometimes called a political question. Like there’s a whole political questions doctrine. Like we wanna keep the political branches doing what they wanna do, like in their own spheres. We’re not going to let them also do this in the courts.

So that was one missed opportunity to opine on the merits of the emoluments clause issue. And then there were other lawsuits that were brought essentially by states and by competitors of the Trump organization, and those are mooted out by the Supreme Court because by the time that those get up to the Supreme Court Trump has left office and the Supreme Court basically says there’s no b- no longer a case or controversy here.

And so they don’t rule on those emoluments cases, which I think had stronger standing arguments than the congressional plaintiffs. But nonetheless, the long and the short of all of this is we didn’t get definitive rulings on the constitutionality of the two emoluments clauses as applied to a business president in the first term.

And I think that explains some of the [00:38:00] behavior that we’re seeing in term two

Poll: Democrats strongly dislike the Supreme Court, but they don’t think it has too much power

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Okay. I think I agree with that, but it’s also like he, he’s basically, with their permission, able to relabel anything that he does as an executive function. Um, that’s essentially what he tries to do. And, like we’ll see if he can get away with it in terms of the ... ‘Cause people are still suing for some of these things that he’s doing.

But I don’t know. I ... Not, not looking so good for the plaintiffs as far as I can tell. Back to the idea though of the Citizens United, within this environment that they’ve created. It really has I, I think that there’s an unfortunate gap between public awareness of just how radical that ruling was and what it actually enables. ‘Cause most people would not want to have anything remotely close to this in, and be the campaign finance law. An Example of this that came out recently, the Pew Research Center, they have a, I guess it’s about every two years or three, they do something they call their Political Typologies Report.

And they ask tens of thousands of people a series of, really important questions that don’t get asked as much as they should be in polling. and one of the questions that they ask people, or they ask several, p- questions about the Supreme Court, and one of them is, what is the political ideology of the Supreme Court?

And one of the... And what they found was that there’s a significant, like the biggest plurality group of Democrats, wh- which they called the Order and Opportunity Left, which is effectively kind of people who are not quite as engaged in politics and have a more socially conservative but socially fiscally liberal viewpoint.

Only 45% of them knew that the Supreme Court was [00:40:00] conservative. And among Democrats as a whole, or like Democratic leaners, we’ll say that not even 50% believed that the Supreme Court had too much power. And this despite the fact that the left-leaning groups gave the Supreme Court a 22% approval rating.

So it’s like in a large way, the, right-wing political figures, they, educated their voters, extensively, repeatedly, and like that was kind of the s- one of the central messages of Trump in 2016 was, “if you don’t like me, you should get over it because I’ll give you a Supreme Court that will do what you want.”

And, doesn’t seem like that people on the left have succeeded as much in mirroring that. What do you, think about that? I know that’s a lot.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: That is a lot. So I mean, the Supreme Court is supposed to be independent of the two political branches. And depending on, where you take your snapshot in time, you have had justices who start farther to the left and migrate to the right while they are justices. And you’ve also had the exact opposite, where someone who is more conservative, I think of someone like Souter, he was not a raging liberal when he started, but, in the strange world that is the Supreme Court, he becomes like a reliable liberal vote.

So... And I think part of the reaction to the behavior of Justice Souter and, say Justice O’Connor, who also sort of ended up, I think, more progressive in her later years than she started that I think upped the ante for those who really [00:42:00] wanted a more conservative, reliably pro-business Supreme Court.

And so I think there was a lot more put into vetting Supreme Court justices, supporting their nominations to the court. It has become its own little mini industry of trying to place particular people with a particular ideology on the Supreme Court, and that effort, I think, is reflected in the 6-3 split that we have today, where it’s, and it is completely mapped to the party of the president that appointed them. This has not always been true. So for example, Justice Stevens had been appointed by a Republican, but by the end of his life was voting reliably with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. Now, um, the six who are voting reliably for conservative, and pro-business stances were all Republican appointees.

So it, we might have a recency bias that this Supreme Court looks incredibly partisan, but it has not always been that way, even in the relatively recent past.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s true. And I mean, it, changed though because of people like McConnell and various people in the Federalist Society of, trying to reorient sort of right-leaning opinion. I think that there was some of that and also the kind of consensus after World War II, the kind of global consensus of things in favor of social democracy that kind of leached into that as well.

And there was... I don’t know. I mean, anyway, but that’s perhaps a different podcast episode.

The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”

SHEFFIELD: [00:44:00] so one of the other areas that I think, has really enshrined a lot of corporate power was the implementation of the shadow docket by the court. It was not something that really was that common in the past for the court.

So let’s talk about that a bit. So for people who don’t, know what that is, can you explain it and then what, exactly people, they’re using it for nowadays?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: So I’m not a huge fan of the phrase shadow docket because it, it’s something that you could look up. I mean, I work on the issue of dark money in campaign finance, and with dark money, you really can’t tell where it’s coming from. It is completely secretive. The only way that you discover dark money is either through litigation or a leak if you get lucky.

But with the shadow docket, it is the procedures docket of the Supreme Court, and this is where emergency requests come into the court and usually on procedural matters. Like, are you going to stay what a lower court has done, or are you going to allow what a lower court has done? Now, that is a lot of lawyerly gobbledygook for who’s winning right now.

And I think the pernicious part of the shadow docket is the Supreme Court has been making nearly in some cases election altering decisions because part of what gets litigated today is which congressional map are we using? Which campaign finance laws are we enforcing? All of these different rules that have to do with the mechanics of democracy, those are often up at the shadow docket asking for an emergency ruling on what [00:46:00] some lower court has done.

Now, what I dislike about the shadow docket is it’s typically decided very quickly without full briefing, without a full record in some cases, and without oral argument. And so you’re making huge decisions, the Supreme Court is, without the benefit of all of that information, both factual and legal. And so I think the chances for grave mistakes with such a procedure is astronomical.

And because, these tend to come up on an emergency basis, that is usually not the Supreme Court deciding something on the merits. So they’re only deciding stay, not stay, of the lower court decision, for example, which is purely procedural. It’s basically do you keep the status quo ante in place with a particular legal challenge or not?

And so in some ways it is all like so cut and dry and boring. But when you sort of look underneath that, I mean, one example of this is congressional maps, which have been the source of enormous, litigation over the past few decades. And usually the political party that controls their legislature also controls the drawing of these maps.

And so what lots of legislatures have done over the years is they will draw a map that just puts their party back in power. And there used to be more checks on that because of the Voting Rights Act and a- and other con- constitutional doctrines that allowed you to challenge some of these maps as violating equal [00:48:00] protection And, but the instinct of lawmakers to make maps that are good for their own political party is so intense that often they will do it even if they think it breaks the law.

And you, run up to the Supreme Court if you win a case below that allows you to keep that bad map in place, and if the Supreme Court agrees with you on the shadow docket, then that map is going to be used for the next two years. Because typically that’s how long litigation is going to take to round trip back to the Supreme Court.

So, what I least like about the shadow docket, besides the you don’t have a full record, you don’t have full briefing, you don’t have oral argument, is it can reward really bad actors two years at a time. And even if when you get back up to the Supreme Court, they finally make the ruling that was more constitutionally dictated and they’re like, “no, that map has got to go.”

Elections have already been held using that perfectly illegal map but voters were trapped in it. So I think there are huge implications for how the shadow do- sha- how the shadow docket is used and/or abused, especially in the context of democracy.

Reform ideas for SCOTUS

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and, at the end of the book, you do talk about some reform ideas that people have been proposing, and you discuss your, views on them. But one of them that you don’t talk about and I did wanna touch about it and why you don’t like it, is the idea of court packing.

So what is it, and what is wrong with it in your view?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: The most famous attempt at court packing [00:50:00] was done by FDR. He was hitting a Supreme Court which had these justices which he named like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And the reason he gave them this negative name is they kept on voting down his New Deal reforms. And so he threatened to pack the court so that he would keep appointing justices until he had enough justices to actually uphold the New Deal And there’s a lot of scholarly debate about whether this mere threat of court packing changed the opinion of the justices.

But shortly thereafter, there is what is known as the switch in time to save nine. And the justices suddenly, especially one of them in particular suddenly switches sides and upholds his New Deal reforms. And so it, goes from being a five-four court one way to being a five-four court the other way.

And they actually uphold s- many of the New Deal pieces of legislation. Now, I think part of why scholars debate whether the threat of court packing changed that behavior is that threat of court packing didn’t happen alone. What also happened was Roosevelt is reelected and the justices are no fools.

They know that means he has four more years of appointments, so whether he adds new seats to the court or not, he’s going to have an enormous influence on who their new colleagues are. So whether it’s just knowing he had that appointment power or it was his threat to pack the court, they do change their voting [00:52:00] behavior.

But we’re-- it’s, hard to pin down exactly why. And the other thing is that in its own time, there was huge resistance to packing the court because it made the court look like it would be the president’s plaything which I think is not a constitutionally great place to be either. As I, I think I alluded to earlier, the Supreme Court was designed to be independent of the political branches.

That’s why they have life tenure in the first place. So they can be-- They can make hard decisions that are not politically popular and be faithful to the Constitution So I worry about that perception that if you pack the court, that you will have lost some of the independence of the court itself and some of its legitimacy in the eyes of the general public.

So I go back to Alexander Hamilton that the court is the least dangerous branch because it lacks the sword or the purse. And it really relies on all of us thinking of it as a legitimate source of law. And when you lose that, the game really is all over. Now, I get the frustration with this court especially in the last couple of terms.

They have shown so little respect for their own precedent and that is deeply disturbing from a rule of law point of view. But I’m not sure that, adding, say it’s three more seats is going to solve that. And the other thing that I worry about is just the tit for tat. So if the Dems when they are-- have the presidency add three more seats then I’d imagine the Republican president that follows will add [00:54:00] four, and it will create sort of a large and unwieldy Supreme Court, which could create rulings that are even less clear than the ones we get today.

So one of the things that is really a challenge as someone who has to teach constitutional law is often there isn’t a clear five-four on these decisions. It’s really three-three-three, four-one-four, and so you literally have to parse words and decisions that do not agree with one another to try to figure out what the law is on any given constitutional subject.

And that is also bad for the rule of law, because if it’s not clear what the law is, that, I think, invites all sorts of coloring in the gray for unscrupulous lawyers everywhere. So what I would love is a Supreme Court that is a lot more coheres- clear and cohesive in their decisions, even when I disagree with them, if it’s clear what the rule is.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, you also are in favor of several other reforms that court reform advocates are favoring. So, let’s talk about some of those.

You obviously like the idea of term limits and rules on justices, because right now they, have no ethics rules governing their behavior, and that’s a big problem

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yes. It-- And I have to be pretty hypercritical of John Roberts and his leadership at the court on this issue. He put out... So, I have to give hats off to ProPublica for asking really basic questions about our complement of sitting [00:56:00] justices. I think the most basic question they asked which the press probably should have asked a long time ago, is how are the justices spending their summers and who is paying for it?

And when they asked that simple question they got these just crazy revelations of the justices having, these junkets with individuals who have matters in front of the court, maybe not directly, but definitely indirectly. And that, I think, has contributed to the public’s distrust of the Supreme Court.

And Chief Justice Roberts put together this non-binding ethics code for them, and the biggest problem w- I think with that sentence is the non-binding part of it. So I understand that it’s very difficult to have rules that apply to the justices because they literally are the ones who are the final word on what the law is, but they can’t be a law unto themselves.

And so I think they could still get their ethical ducks in a row if they want to. I think the real question is do they want to? Because the more that they act like the law doesn’t apply to them, I think the more you’re going to get more sort of radical reforms imposed on the court, which could themselves be damaging to the long-term sustainability of constitutionalism and respect for the rule of law.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and also you are in favor of term limits for the justices. Let’s talk about that, or judges in general. Yeah.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yeah. I think the frailty of the human mind definitely is something to be [00:58:00] concerned about if you can live to be 90 or 100. And while I’m sure there are some perfectly sentient 90-year-olds and perfectly sentient s- centenarians the risk that someone who has, suffered dementia or some other debilitating illness of the mind, who is nonetheless the final word on what law is...

I mean, we had this happen before. Like Justice Douglas, I think in his later years, was not all with it, and the other justices knew that. And so they basically agreed among themselves that they wouldn’t create five-person opinions where he was the deciding vote because they knew that was untrustworthy.

Now, that showed a lot of self-awareness on the part of the other justices, but I don’t think we can be lucky enough to rely on that in the future. I think there are two things that speak in favor of term limits for federal judges. One is the frailty of the human mind once you get very, old that you can lose your capacity to reason. And then the other is just the happenstance of which presidents get to make which appointments. If we could regul- regularize that a little bit so that every president gets one appointment to the Supreme Court, but not four, or, whatever the numbers we think are reasonable I think that would take some of the sheer panic and high stakes out of some of the Supreme Court nomination fights that we’ve been having.

I think part of why they have become so contentious is not [01:00:00] just that people have different views of ideologically of where the Supreme Court should end up. It’s that every time you nominate someone in their 50s, that person could be there for decades. So the stakes are much higher than if you thought, “Oh, they’ll only be there for a decade or, less.”

So I think having some sort of retirement age for federal judges would lessen the temperature on some of these fights that we’ve been having about the courts.

SHEFFIELD: there, I mean, There’s so much more we could discuss here, but we, both have things to do, and I don’t wanna burden the listener and the viewer too much here.

So if people want to keep up with your projects besides getting the book here what’s some of your advice? What, would you like them to check out?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: You can find my podcast, “Democracy and Destiny,” on wherever you get your podcasts. You can find my books wherever you buy your books. And then I’m over on Bluesky @profciara, so P-R-O-F-C-I-A-R-A. And I post frequently, not just about law, but a lot of birds and flowers, too

SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. sounds good. I encourage everybody to check that out. Thanks a lot for being here.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Of course.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have an unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.

You can become a free or paid subscriber at patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on substack. If you’re watching on YouTube, please click the and subscribe button to get notified whenever there’s a new episode. Thanks a lot for your [01:02:00] support and I’ll see you next time.

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Federal agents’ rapid-fire killing of two unarmed immigrants this month — both slain in the space of a week, and neither the intended target of the precipitating ICE operations — has created unfathomable tragedies for the victims and their families. The shooting deaths of Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston have inflicted sorrow and trauma on their friends and loved ones; Guerrero had a wife and young daughter, while Araujo leaves behind a wife and three adult sons. The sheer human pain and suffering of these unnecessary deaths must remain part of the larger public discussion of what happened and how to stop it from happening again.

Affirming the sanctity of all human life, and empathizing with the victims, is particularly important in these cases, and the numerous other federal killings of immigrants. This is because such deaths are ultimately rooted in the Trump administration’s effort to dehumanize the millions of undocumented immigrants who currently make their lives within the United States. They have done so by calling them rapists and murderers; by claiming they eat the pets of good citizens; by the use of reductionist, authoritarian language (“vermin”); by saying that they are vectors of disease and chaos within the U.S.

So these individual tragedies are at the same time fragments of a titanic political and social conflict whose stakes for the United States are measured in blood spilled, freedoms abrogated, and social cohesion frayed to the breaking point. The stakes are nothing less than the question of who belongs in this country, and who should ultimately count as a real American. For years now, Trump and his MAGA allies have not only driven hard to dehumanize immigrants, but to cast them as outright enemies of America. Characterizing them as an invading army that seeks to replace white Americans with brown-skinned interlopers, they have all but guaranteed that the poorly-trained and MAGA-sympathetic agents of our immigration agencies view them with maximum hostility.

Indeed, since the start of Trump’s current term in office, immigration agents have shot 23 people; six were killed, including three U.S. citizens. Adding fuel to the fire, Trump and his advisors have signaled to immigration agents they are “above the law”, while also “recruiting people through nativist, often racist messaging,” as Radley Balko notes. So even as it’s appropriate that these killings shift the public spotlight anew towards the lawlessness and lack of qualifications of ICE and CBP agents, it’s equally important to understand the politicians, pundits, and underlying ideology that create the incentives for state murder.

Moreover, these were not simply crimes against the individual immigrants who paid with their lives, but also moral crimes against the United States and the American people: against the great majority’s belief in the rule of law, and the ability of those who go about their business peaceably to be free from arbitrary state violence. They are also moral crimes because they are manifestations of the Trump regime mobilizing the U.S. government, including agencies like ICE, into instruments of racial purification and state terror.

The message from the Trump administration is clear, whether or not Americans choose to hear it: the federal government considers all brown-skinned immigrants to be an existential threat to the country, with agents of the state authorized to kill them based on the mere perception of threat. They are not primarily enforcing the law, but rather a twisted vision of national purification based on racism, slander, and hatred. Such motivations render descriptions like “immigrant enforcement” or “mass deportations” only marginally sufficient as descriptors. This is ethnic cleansing on behalf of a radical white supremacist minority, obsessed with delusions of its own divinely-ordained status and soul-sick to the point of believing that anyone who doesn’t look like them must not be fully human.

This supposed threat, of course, has been amplified most consequentially by the president himself into a matter of existential conflict. And so it is no surprise that within a day of an apparent order by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to at least temporarily halt vehicle stops like the ones had preceded both recent killings, Donald Trump made personally clear that such stops would resume, posting on social media that, “The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job” and that “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

It’s not just that the president received pressure from MAGA personalities that he maintain the pace of deportations, and sensed political danger. The motivation is deeper, and deadlier, even as it’s difficult for decent Americans to stomach. Acts of violence are not just inevitable byproducts of a mass deportation regime carried out by poorly-trained ICE and CBP agents. Violence serves the underlying contention that immigrants collectively constitute an invading army, and individually can be considered as soldiers or terrorists within this army. To restrain the killings would be to undermine the inciting lie, and this the president and other MAGA enforcers cannot do, for it would risk the premise of their own claims to power: that they are protecting Americans from the unspeakable, subhuman horror of mass immigration. To treat immigrants as fully human, even if it did not instantly pop the bubble, might still open cracks and provoke questions as to who the real criminals are. By treating them as less than human, agents of the MAGA state hope to make it so.

It is worth noting that both of the recent ICE victims were working within the U.S. immigration framework to remain in the country. According to his father, Joan Guerrero was in the country legally, and worked as both a Door Dash driver and as a cleaner. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo lived in the U.S. for 35 years, raised three sons and built a business in the construction industry, and was seeking a way to remain in the country legally. This information is important for understanding the wider atrocity playing out across the United States, for trying to play by the rules could not save these two men from deadly injustice. And the fact that Araujo has three American-born sons also reminds us that the war on immigrants can’t be separated from a war on American citizens. Millions of people in the U.S. live in families that are a mix of documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and citizens.

As Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes reminds us, these shootings took place half a year after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota — shootings for which no federal agents have been brought to justice. In that time, the U.S. government has blatantly blocked and slow-walked efforts at investigation. The lack of accountability, and what amounts to obstruction of justice, aren’t simply a sign of a rogue agency or a sclerotic bureaucracy; rather, the cover-up of public executions reflects the corrupt desires of a lawless president. This Trump-approved lack of accountability has always been indistinguishable from a green light for immigration agents to resume their killings of immigrants and those who seek to protect them. His reaction to the two most recent shootings — to absolve ICE of any possible wrong and to insist agents continue with tactics that led to two killings in the space of a week — means that he is fully responsible for any future killings.

It feels grim to say so, but Democrats and others who oppose this regime should not make this assertion simply in the hope that they will change the policies that lead to such anti-immigrant violence — although with enough damage to his allies and to his own political standing, there is always some possibility the president might finally meaningfully restrain immigration enforcement. Rather, they should also do so in service of a larger project of exposing the irreducibly racist goals of the larger MAGA movement, with the aim of discrediting the politicians who serve its cause and, ultimately, their white supremacist ideology itself. Rather than haplessly suggest that with enough pressure, the president and his allies will change course, the emphasis should be to emphasize that the fundamental beliefs of Trump and his allies make state-level violence against immigrants inevitable, and that only the ejection of MAGA politicians from political office will bring peace and safety back to American streets.

With such a high-level effort setting the overall terms of the conflict with MAGA, a tandem attack on the lawlessness of ICE will be far more effective, both politically and practically. We will end with two recent examples: First, multiple news sources have reported that the apparent killer of Guerrero, an ICE officer named David Brouillette, has a history of violent behavior and mental health issues, including attacking women and physically abusing his teenage daughter. Brouillette needs to be held accountable for his shooting of Guerrero, but is also a vivid example of the bottom-of-the-barrel recruiting in which federal immigration agencies are engaging. And this is also where the hateful anti-immigrant ideology of the Trump administration becomes manifest in the world: openly hostile to the lives of immigrants, they recklessly recruit people who shouldn’t be allowed to own a firearm, much less work in anything remotely related to law enforcement. Many have already noted that Brouillette is likely just one of hundreds or thousands of similarly unqualified monsters filling out ICE’s and CBP’s ranks.

A second example: in the last few days, we have learned that FBI agents have received instructions that they “would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents.” As the New York Times goes on to observe, this “would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents, as the Trump administration draws mounting criticism over killings at the hands of federal officers.” There is little other way to read this move than as Trump regime encouragement of ICE impunity in the name of mass deportations. As much as any other recent event, such a move highlights the contempt with which this administration holds the lives of immigrants. Indeed, we can see here how the war on immigrants is leading not just to violence and cover-up, but to an assault on the rule of law itself, as the White House continues to do what it can to abet and cover up ICE offenses. With the White House determined to further accelerate its immigrant purge, even in the face of blatant abuses, Democrats must be sure to communicate to the American people that the mayhem will not stop until enough of us rise up against MAGA’s dark vision for America.

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Four months out from the critical November midterms, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address on Thursday night attempting to sow doubt about the integrity of US elections, repeating well-worn lies about the 2020 contest that he lost and claiming to have uncovered a sprawling Chinese plot to meddle in the voting process.

Trump, who has said his administration should “take over” US elections that are currently run by states, asserted in his speech that the American voting system was “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” by his political enemies and accused China of “illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files” in an effort to undermine him. Trump’s speech coincided with the declassification of intelligence purportedly revealing China’s “sinister” scheme to disrupt US elections as well as attempts by “members of the Deep State” to “suppress and downplay” the scheme.

Experts and critics of the president said his speech cherrypicked intelligence agency findings to concoct a false, self-serving narrative about the vulnerability of US elections and the need for legislation such as the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that Trump has obsessively worked to push through Congress.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that Trump “selectively declassified intelligence to try to rewrite the history of an election he lost.”

“Even his own document release does not support his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It confirms what we’ve long known: Foreign adversaries targeted our democracy, but there is no evidence they changed a single vote or altered the casting or counting of ballots,” said Krishnamoorthi. “President Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square. If he cared about election security, he wouldn’t be putting unqualified political loyalists in charge of our intelligence agencies or weakening the agencies responsible for protecting our elections from foreign threats.”

“Instead,” Krishnamoorthi added, “he’s reviving conspiracy theories about mail voting, pushing voter suppression, and laying the groundwork for an unprecedented federal takeover of our elections—all while ignoring the real challenges facing American families.”

During his speech, Trump lashed out at major TV news networks for declining to broadcast his speech live and in full, accusing media outlets of being “part of the plot” and calling for the “revocation” of NBC and ABC’s broadcast licenses.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Trump’s threat “insane.”

“At a time when millions of Americans are finding it harder to pay for groceries, housing, and healthcare, when the climate crisis is causing record heatwaves and forest fires, Donald Trump felt it appropriate tonight to spew conspiracy theories about the 2020 election,” said Sanders. “Pathetically, in true authoritarian fashion, he even threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC and NBC because they would not cover his speech.”

“All of us, regardless of our political views, must stand together against this dangerous president who is seeking to undermine our Constitution and our basic freedoms,” Sanders added.

Trump’s address cited “raw intelligence” that he said shows an attempt by China “to manufacture illegal ballots” for former President Joe Biden. The president claimed, without evidence, that the intelligence was maliciously “buried by rogue bureaucrats.”

But, as The Washington Post observed, “raw intelligence reports are often wrong, incomplete, or contradictory, and spy agencies rely on judgments by expert analysts to vet and piece together the information to make conclusions with different levels of confidence.”

“Officials in 2020 disagreed about whether China wanted Trump to lose and about whether Beijing took any steps to undermine him—a controversy noted in a declassified 2021 report. That report described consensus on the conclusion that neither China nor any other foreign actors had tampered with any votes,” the Post noted. “The hundreds of pages of documents released online by the White House during Trump’s speech did not appear to support Trump’s contention that China interfered in the 2020 election to try to defeat him or that US intelligence officials deliberately hid information about Beijing’s intentions from him.”

Robert Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, characterized Trump’s speech as an attempt to divert public attention from his administration’s “catastrophic policy failures and plummeting approval ratings.”

“Trump is waging an illegal, unconstitutional, and utterly pointless war that continues to put American and Iranian lives in jeopardy and drive up gas prices. Corporations are setting prices out of reach for people being paid too little,” said Weissman. “Trump rammed through tax cuts for the rich, paid for by cutting healthcare and food assistance for millions and millions of people. An out-of-control paramilitary force is kidnapping people off our streets and killing them at shocking rates. Trump’s delusional rantings tonight are a transparent effort to distract from these realities.”

Living United for Change in Arizona, a pro-democracy organization, warned that “Trump is trying to end our democracy in front of our very eyes.”

“Tonight Donald Trump stood before the nation and attempted to rewrite history, erase the will of the voters, and prepare the country for his next assault on American democracy,” the group said. “We must call this what it is. Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to dismantle our elections, overturn results he does not like, cancel the will of the people, and hold onto power by any means necessary.”

The article was first published by Common Dreams.

It’s easy for us to tell if someone is enjoying their meal or not. They lick their lips if they like it, grimace if they don’t.

Our new research, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows we might be able to read insects’ facial expressions in a similar way.

This offers potential insights into their inner lives – and builds on a wave of new work that is daring to suggest insects might have a form of consciousness.

Humans read each other’s expressions and body language all the time. By doing so, we can typically get a pretty accurate read on what another person is feeling.

Naturalist Charles Darwin was one of the first to discuss how facial expressions in other animals might also give us a read of their emotions.

Most dog owners would agree that dogs can communicate clearly through body language and expression when they are joyful, afraid or in pain. In mammals, at least, basic features of facial expressions associated with liking and wanting seem to be deeply conserved through evolution.

Psychologist and neuroscientist Kent Berridge and his colleagues pointed out just how eerily similar the facial expressions of newborn baby humans and baby rats are when they receive a surprising sweet treat versus a bitter one. In both species the former triggered lip licking, whereas the latter triggered a mouth gape of revulsion.

Based on a combination of careful neurobiological and behavioural studies, Berridge has convincingly argued that we can use facial expressions to read what a rat likes and dislikes, and he has used this as a measure to understand the neurobiology of liking in rats.

What about other animals with radically different brains, bodies and faces? What about, say, insects?

Getting a read on an insect’s inner life

Insects have a hard exoskeleton. Their faces are impassive masks, but bumblebees do have highly mobile mouth parts. They can extend their long glossa (the equivalent of a tongue) to reach deep into flowers to sip nectar.

In experiments performed at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, colleagues and I studied how bumblebees moved their glossa and other mouth parts when sampling different tastes.

To a single bumblebee we offered a tiny droplet of sugar water from a pipette. The bee vigorously extended her glossa to drink the droplet, but even after she finished drinking and the pipette was taken away she kept extending and retracting her glossa into thin air – almost as if smacking her lips.

By stark contrast, when we offered the bee a droplet of dilute salty water she sampled it with her glossa, then backed away shaking her head and wiping her glossa as if in disgust.

Could these responses be simply innate reactions of the glossa to the different chemistry of sugar and salt?

To test this we changed the bee’s physiological state. We heated the bee to 40°C for a short time. While this didn’t harm the bee, it was equivalent to the bee being active on a hot day and caused her to become dehydrated.

Now when we offered the bee dilute salty water, rather than shaking her head and wiping her mouth, she drank thirstily and showed those glossa extensions.

This showed the glossa movements were not automatic responses to sugar and salt. Rather they had more to do with the bees’ physiological state. A dehydrated bee needs dilute salty water, and now when offered it she showed the glossa extension responses she would otherwise show to sweet sugar.

It’s somewhat like those oral rehydration electrolyte drinks. Most of the time they are bearable – just. But if you have just completed a long run and are dehydrated, they taste so much better.

In other experiments we directly manipulated the bees’ neurochemistry.

We found that if we treated bees with different neurochemicals we could change the glossa response to sugar. Bees treated with the neuromodulators octopamine and dopamine were more reactive to sugar, but did not show those post-drinking glossa protrusions to a sucrose drop.

However, bees treated with an endocannabinoid (a different neuromodulatory system that in mammals is related to mood, appetite and physiological regulation) showed enhanced post-drinking glossa protrusions, but were not more reactive to sugar.

This told us two things. First, the glossa protrusion is independent from a sugar reaction. Second, very specific changes in bee neurochemistry can enhance the glossa protrusion response.

A subjective inner state

Together these experiments showed that the glossa responses were subjective to the bee, related to her physiological state, and not simple reactions to chemicals.

This evidence suggests the bee’s responses to what it likes and dislikes are similar to those of humans and other mammals. At the very least, we can say that the bee’s responses gave us a read of her subjective inner physiological state.

Does our study tell us conclusively that a bee feels emotions like liking and disliking? No. But it does add to the body of work showing that insects have some sort of inner life and are more than mere reflex machines.

Now that we can read bees’ faces to get a read on their subjective state, we can do a lot more work to probe what the inner life of an insect is like.

Andrew Barron is a professor at the School of Natural Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

As November draws nearer, Democrats’ electoral prospects are looking very similar to how they were in 2018 before the party swept to victory in many congressional and statewide seats. 2028 is much further away, of course, but there is a very real possibility that Democrats could gain trifecta control of the presidency, Senate, and House.

If the recent past is any indicator though, in just two years’ time, voters will swing wildly in the opposite direction, handing control back to Republicans. American voters (and elsewhere) are clearly very dissatisfied with what political parties are offering them, but thus far, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have taken the message.

Public opinion surveys keep indicating that people want major societal reforms, including one from last September which found that 77 percent of American adults wanted major political changes, that included 24 percent saying they wanted “complete reform.”

Democrats are disadvantaged by the current political system, so it’s in both their ideological and electoral interest to change things.

But what would major changes look like? That is the project that Adam Gurri, my guest on today’s program. He’s the publisher of Liberal Currents, an online magazine has just put out a new book on this very topic. It’s an anthology of policy proposals and system reforms called The Reconstruction Papers, that is in a lot of ways similar to the Mandate for Leadership a book that’s more informally known as Project 2025, the collection of policy proposals that has become the centerpiece of the second Trump administration’s agenda.

The Reconstruction Papers has a lot of great and interesting ideas, and we get into several of them, but today’s discussion also focuses on the larger question of what liberalism is or should be, which as you might imagine, the publisher of Liberal Currents has thought about quite a bit.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:45 — Defining liberalism

11:21 — A liberal version of Project 2025?

16:22 — Liberalism must be able to take its own side

17:42 — Fixing federalism

26:19 — The importance of more than two parties

31:17 — Reforming the Senate and adding more states

40:01 — The vital importance of judicial reform to protect democracy

47:10 — Restraining the president

52:14 — Reforming higher education and promoting national service

59:22 — The importance of public mixing institutions

01:03:34 — Reclaiming national greatness from the far right

01:06:38 — Housing needs to be cheaper and more plentiful

Related Content

• As Republicans have radicalized, Democrats have become more passive—and less successful electorally

• The economy has collapsed for the middle class, Democrats must admit this and act accordingly

• Anglo-American liberal elites have lost the ability to argue for their own principles

• Democrats get lots of bad advice, particularly the idea that most voters are ideological

• As Trump’s popularity has declined, Democrats’ polls are up, but not their brand-name, why?

• Keir Starmer is a cautionary tale for politicians who only want to play it safe

Audio Transcript

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

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Adam Gurri. Hey, Adam. Welcome to Theory of Change.

ADAM GURRI: Thank you for having me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, good to have you. So this book, I think, is a very necessary one that you guys have put together. So let’s just first, just give us a kind of a brief overview of, what it is and why you’re doing it.

GURRI: Yeah, so Trump comes along and gives us a decade at this point of damaging our institutions and our norms and the things that make our society function. And there’s an impulse to just be reactive to that and talk about what was good about what was broken. We had the biggest publicly funded system of science in the world by a large margin.

We pr- we had a historic accomplishment in our higher education institutions. we had all these things that Trump is smashing to pieces and, oh, and, competent civil service and things like that. But [00:04:00] those things were not perfect before Trump came along. In fact, they were already in crisis and had been for decades.

Not like they were never great or, sort of like cutting edge at any point in their history. But by 2016, it was already time to, if not go back to the drawing board, at least seriously think about reform. Immigration, by the way, also one of those areas that we had like 20 years of very near reform passing and just not quite getting enough political will to do it.

And so the system itself just became an incredible mess and accumulated on itself to, to now we just have, essentially everything again is getting hit with a wrecking ball. So our idea is you don’t go back, you don’t repair. You say, “Well, in, even in 2016 if we were given the political will to build something much better than we had, what would we want?”

So this is-- the premise is if, enough people hate what Trump has done by 2028, we could potentially have a big enough Democratic trifecta of Democrats actually willing to do things that we could have our shot at actually fixing the public funding of, science, actually fixing the university system that was in chronic ill health for most of my lifetime and thi- things like that in, in a number of areas.

Es- essentially, conservatives spent a century wanting to kill the administrative state, and now in the second Trump term, they really are taking their shot. So it’s time for us to think about taking our shot too.

SHEFFIELD: And that’s right because I, mean, as you say in the introduction to the book that the United States was in many ways running just off of the inertia of an earlier time, and largely the, post-war World War II era and to a little extent maybe the, Lyndon Johnson.

O- otherwise there really wasn’t any large scale innovation or even thought of it of [00:06:00] new programs in any real meaningful way. I mean, I guess maybe the one exception might have been Obamacare, but right away they immediately, ruled out a public option, which is, was a huge mistake.

GURRI: Yeah. And I think Obama had ambitions of being an LBJ-like figure. It’s just obviously the politics were very different. First of all, LBJ himself came from the Senate, knew how to get votes. Second of all, the party system was completely different, completely incomparable to what Obama faced.

And just the politics of the country had shifted a lot. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and also I, think he also, and this is one of the, themes kind of throughout the book is that that Obama and probably most liberal institutional leaders they never had a conception of liberalism as an affirmative vision. They, saw it more as being the guardians of civic neutrality and creating a marketplace of ideas, and then not really offering any big transformative ideas.

And, he-- And in the post-Obama era people talked about it a lot but to the extent that there were things — And, they weren’t necessarily bad things, but, like, the, It was more along the lines of “Well, we’re going to invest, we’re going to invest money in, roads or, bridges or whatever,” and things like that, and not —

And maybe they did actually invest in, like, semiconductor things, but there was no effort to try to articulate a bigger vision of, “Well, this is what we’re doing, and this is why we believe it, and here’s specifically how we’re going to do it.” So you guys are kind of trying to do that here.

GURRI: Yeah, absolutely.

Defining liberalism

SHEFFIELD: Okay, so, so what is liberalism then in your conception here? I think we should talk about that.

GURRI: Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously it’s a family of ways of thinking about it. It’s individualistic, so it’s about individual freedom. It’s egalitarian, so it’s [00:08:00] taking individuals to be equals in the sense of moral equals and deserving equal dignity, deserving equal opportunity. There’s different ways of, formulating it, but for the purpose of this collection especially, it’s a pretty assertive vision.

It’s a vision that requires a willingness, a pol- political willingness to create the conditions for individuals to flourish and have freedom. So, Sama- Samantha Hancox-Lee, her-- the executive editor, her essay is sort of about what are liberal virtues. She talks about reason, like we’re cultivating actual individual reason, having the, courage to actually live un- under conditions of freedom because a lot of what reaction is, essentially a defensive crouch against the inherent dynamism of, a free society, right?

Like whether it’s a local NIMBY that doesn’t want anything new built that’s going to change the way that the neighborhood feels, or it’s anti-immigration politics that’s afraid about how that will change the character of the country over time culturally and, whatever. So, li- liberalism is about-- it’s, giving people the conditions in wh- under which to thrive as individuals and having that freedom.

But also it’s sort of an ethos of having the courage to actually live with the open society and, what that means and to, to seek to protect it against the ones that want to close it down.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and the idea though of, giving people the conditions in which they can exercise their freedom, I think that’s c- that kind of fell by the wayside dur- especially during neoliberalism.

GURRI: Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: that neoliberalism has, within your publication has, been something you guys have —

it’s been a persistent theme of trying to differentiate what you’re doing versus what the neoliberals are doing. So let’s talk about that.

GURRI: one thing that we want to recover, especially now, especially in the Trump second term, is that early [00:10:00] liberalism was very militant. And in fact, there is a militant liberalism throughout its entire history. When we had our fundraiser at the end of last year, Jamelle Bouie did a little promo for us, and he went through how liberalism is not just the, squishy institutionalists of today.

It’s also the people that destroyed monarchy and the people that abolished slavery and the people that fought fascism, built the military that fought fascism. So it’s, the, idea that it’s not just a neutral arbiter of different substantive goal, ideas of the good which is, like, a whole philosophical debate that I feel like gets conflated with more practical political things.

Political liberalism should never be neutral. Political liberals should always be very substantive in their goals and very aggressive in pursuing them in our perspective. And this, collection is an example of what we think because, the things we push are not politically easy to get, but-- And it’s not like we’re saying, “Okay, we’ll just give it to the next guy, and they’ll definitely do this.”

It’s more if we h- if, someone can create the political conditions, this is what we should be fighting for. We should have big, ambitious goals in mind, and we should fight for them

A liberal version of Project 2025?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, a common trope in the, liberal blogosphere since its inception was the idea that people think that only conservatives ha- or that conservatives have no agency.

And I don’t think that — I always think that was a wrong analysis, because really what it w- the passivity that was trying to diagnose was more that liberals thought that, or Democrats in general thought that, “Well, they won’t work with us, so what can we do?” Well, the answer is ha- should be, well, you work to get rid of them and replace them.

That’s the proper way of, dealing with intransigence rather than just simply saying, [00:12:00] “Well, we can’t do anything with them.” and, and s- and, that also, by the way, the idea of steamrolling the opposition, that is actually how the Republican Party thinks of political change. there was always that dichotomy between the, two sides, and having been, seen both from the inside, like, in a lot of ways, Democrats are more conservative than Republicans. Republicans, are full of radical reactionary ideas for change. And, one can obviously disagree with them, and one should.

But at least they think about transformation and how they would do it. They, don’t even necessarily talk to the public about it, but they talk about their cultural vision and their political ideological stance in a way that you just don’t see from most Democrats, it seems to me.

GURRI: Yeah Certainly. Also, I mean, part, of that is that in many ways, liberals had-- it was their game to lose for a long time. the New Deal consensus was pretty durable for a very long time. And conservatives as they exist now are sort of the product of an ideological insurgency, which is why they have that kind of attitude, right?

Whereas the established side felt that they could rest on their laurels a bit. They would win by simply preserving the status quo. Insurgents are always just throwing bombs, because they f- they feel, any, variability in the situation is going to increase their odds of success

SHEFFIELD: and so this is no longer the time for that. And so I guess perhaps one could say that in, in, some ways what you guys are trying to do here is a, liberal Project 2025. Is that, an accurate way of saying that?

GURRI: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny because there’s actually something called Project 2029 or something, but they, seem to completely miss the point because they seem to be mostly [00:14:00] thinking in terms of something to campaign on which is not what we need to be doing. what we need to be doing is offering a governing philosophy for people that are actually in office.

There’s this idea from ACT UP of inside strategy versus outside strategy. Outside strategy is very broad, very high level, and it’s much more like campaigning, but it’s usually more protests. It’s mass politics. But then-- So, the in the case of ACT UP, it was draw attention to the AIDS crisis, for example.

But once you’ve drawn attention to it and you’ve, have outraged people about it, you have to have people that have conversations with the policymakers to say, “Okay, here’s what you do about the AIDS crisis.” And that’s not like the laundry list of specific things you do for a public health program aren’t necessarily what you are chanting at protests or in order to mobilize people, but you have to have both strategies.

And Project 2025 was absolutely an inside strategy thing. And the Reconstruction papers is, similar in that sense. We’re trying to influence the conversation among people who could potentially do this in the future. One of the key differences is Project 2025, other than like the obvious substantive difference in our goals, Project 2025 is very much aimed at helping establish a dictator-l-like presidency.

Even if it’s not an actual dictator, it’s, more or less if, if elections don’t go away or become meaningless, but Project 2025 was otherwise successful you would have like an elected dictator every four years, more or less because of how unconstrained they are. Whereas we don’t quite articulate it in, the collection itself, I think, though we have elsewhere.

For us, it’s very important to center Congress in, in, in radical changes because that actually has grounding in the larger democratic body, like small D. So, we, want to remake, the, Federalist system, for example, I did an essay on. It’s stuff that’s going to requi- Well, you, want to fix the court.[00:16:00]

Like it’s stuff that’s going to require actual legislation, which means you-- it’s a high bar of you have to actually have not just a president, but a trifecta in place that is willing to do these kinds of things. But that is when change has happened in the past, right? the New Deal most classically.

they they had their trifecta, and they, accomplished enormous things. So it’s, it is possible. It’s just rare.

Liberalism must be able to take its own side

SHEFFIELD: The other thing also that I think, you guys are, having a similarity Project 2025, is that w- in liberalism, as it became kind of hollowed out and non-ideological in many ways it also failed to understand the difference that you have to have-- Your policies have to be structured also to preserve and help your own coalition and preserve and, to foster the kind of civic culture that you want.

And so, where-- And so, like, th- there was this dissociation between sound policy, like good policy, and the culture that would elect and want that sound policy. The latter part, they lost almost all interest in ability to understand the need for that and how to generate it

GURRI: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: governance.

it was — So it was something that happened as a result of the post-war consensus but they didn’t understand wh- how it happened and why, it was made, and, how people specifically did it. Like, it- this wasn’t a thing that just magically happened. It was through the work and planning of people

GURRI: Yeah, I agree with that

Fixing federalism

SHEFFIELD: yeah. And so, so that’s, and so that’s a big, point. And but, let’s — So to, to that end, though, let’s talk about some of the structural changes that are in the book that some of the authors, including yourself, are talking about. Well, I guess we can start with yours this idea of [00:18:00] fixing federalism.

what do you mean by that?

GURRI: Yeah. So I, I-- a few years ago, I wrote something on this, and the basic idea is that s- state governments are better than local governments, and that a lot of our problems in our country actually come down to local governments. This idea seems a little strange to s- be saying in 2026, frankly, when the, the biggest problem is actually the federal government.

But I still think there’s something to that. S- at the time, I was pretty pessimistic about the federal government playing much of a part in any shift there. Now, again, things, have changed so much that I think it’s necessary. It’s, again, it’s if we got the trifecta we wanted, this should be something that they push very hard.

And the way this would work is sort of three parts. Th- the first and most important part, which is the newest part from, my old essay, is guaranteeing the republican form of government, which the Constitution says we, we should do. But it’s thin on details, and that’s never really effectively been enforced.

Even something like the Voting Rights Act was couched s- more in terms of the 15th Amendment than the Guarantee Clause, which some previous I forget the court case, but they, deemed it non-justiciable. In my opinion, that should be used as the rationale for a law that’s just lays out in detail, here are the range of government forums a state can have and be considered the republican form of government.

And the, bare minimum change that they need to make from the current status quo across almost all of them is one of their legislative chambers needs to be proportional representation. Which I don’t-- we don’t have to go into the technical details of, but essentially, for people who don’t know, there are a few methods you can use to essentially guarantee that if 40%-- if, a party gets 40% of the votes, they get 40% of the legislative seats.

So you don’t have to worry about gerrymandering. That’s not, like, that, immediately [00:20:00] en- ends that, that race to the bottom. And you have at least-- and if, if, states went this direction, they would have at least one chamber that could not gerrymander their way into competitive authoritarianism.

It also says that if you keep a separately elected executive like, like the governor, it has to have some kind of runoff. So e- either a traditional runoff where there’s two rounds of voting and there’s just the top two that run against each other at the end so that someone gets a majority, or what people call ranked choice voting which is actually in political science called instant runoff because it’s the same logic.

S- again, so that you can avoid a situation where someone with substantially less than a majority takes the governor’s office, which is pretty powerful. And I offer another set of ranges, but the, bottom line, like, details aside, and they’re all in there is the federal government should be very prescriptive about what state government-- how state governments are allowed to organize themselves, and they should actually enforce that.

The second p-part, though, is, and th-th-- you know, if that’s the stick the carrot for state governments is one, administrative authority should be consolidated at the state level. So right now, t-to give an example, Texas has a law saying that localities can’t collect more than a certain amount of, rev tax- of revenue in fines because there’s this terrible incentive where people just fine-- localities that have a l- small tax base will just over-fine people in order to get some more money.

And Texas wants to put a stop to that. Localities just do it anyway, and Texas is very bad at actually enforcing it. If they wanted to enforce it, essentially the state attorney general would have to sue the locality and take them to state court and, like, go through that slow process. Whereas what I’m suggesting is, alternately, those localities should just be part of a state administrative body, and the attorney general or someone else in the state government could just look at the person who is breaking the state law and say, “You’re fired,” and replace them with someone who will be, who will actually follow that law.

[00:22:00] And the federal government can help facilitate this consolidation. But most, most-- and the main way they would do that, and th-this is the, third leg of the stool is by having fewer strings attached to block grants to states. Right now, we actually are less I would say that like Canada and Germany are better at fiscal federalism than we are.

Liberals and, progressives talk a lot about how in welfare, having a lot of compliance costs can make it so that people that are supposed to get their benefits don’t because it just becomes too difficult for them to. The compliance costs that the federal government puts on, for example, education funding to the states are so massive.

I mean, they dwarf anything comparable in welfare. When-- And th- this, goes back to LBJ, w- by the way. He-- they wanted to help create state departments of education, and they did. But like the lion’s share of what the work that those state departments of education would do would be compliance work rather than substantive education policy or administration.

So you don’t want that. We should have-- we should make-- we should have a more egalitarian fiscal federalism so that budgets per state resident, state budgets per state resident are a lot more equalized across states. And then the way-- the, enforcement mechanism for making sure that you’re not just giving lots of money to an evil, red state government or something is the Guarantee Clause action.

That making sure that whatever it is they are doing, it’s something they’re democratically accountable for in as responsive a way as we can make them be.

SHEFFIELD: So what does that mean though?

GURRI: the, the, when I was talking about the r- proportional representation. Basically, like, you can’t have a gov- y- trying to avoid the outcome where the federal government is giving a lot of few strings at, y- n- hardly any strings attached money to a state government that then gerrymanders its way to not being responsive to a majority of its voters

SHEFFIELD: [00:24:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Well, so, but how — Like, these are pretty big changes though. Like, it seems like people would have to be talked about. Like, this would have to be debated in public and presented. So, like, what would be the — How would you kind of justify these, changes to people? Especially the idea of changing state constitutions and allocations of seats and apportionments.

GURRI: I think that they’re making that easier for us than ever. With the gerrymandering fight that they kicked off this year, or, this, term I think it’s pretty, like, out in the open and ugly, and I don’t think anyone likes it, I mean, like, the p- whoever may potentially win it may like it in hindsight, but for the most part, I don’t think, I don’t think even the Republican side is particularly comfortable with the overall competition and race to the bottom that’s been created by it.

And there’s not necessarily a clear winner as a result. And national politicians are, you know-- it’s, the, pos- the national position of the party isn’t necessarily improved by it. There’s definitely, like, specific people that get screwed over. There’s not necessarily s- definite winners at the end of it.

So, and, and voters for the most part h-hate it, right? Like, they hate what’s go- what’s, being done. The r-Republicans Vir- in Virginia hate it. Dem-Democrats in Texas hate it. So I think a national program that says, “We have the means to make sure this never happens again,” and r- and sells it on that basis could, work.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so like saying you, you’re, going to ca- campaign on unrigging the system basically.

GURRI: Exactly. but you actually have a specific plan to do so. Like, everyone runs on unrigging the system, and then it’s just like some minor campaign finance reform or something. this actually, I think, the political science is very clear. You ac- you actually do-- If you actually do proportional representation in the legislature, and you actually have runoffs for the separately elected [00:26:00] executive and you’re not going to have a gerrymandering problem.

You’ll still have other problems, like it’s not going to-- Like, getting your institutions right doesn’t fix your politics. Like, it’s not, a cure-all. but one thing you’re not going to have is insulating yourself into power, by making it so that you can win even if you lose a majority of votes

The importance of more than two parties

SHEFFIELD: Well, and, it’s, the, idea of proportional representation, it also i- encourages more parties, and I think that’s, that has been probably the, biggest flaw of the American system and, why, I mean, it’s hasn’t really been copied too much anywhere else around the world because, people in other countries when, they looked at our, ideas, they’re like, “Well, why would we be forced into two parties?

That’s absurd.” and so — and it’s also really important too because the, two-party system, it does actually really discourage a lot of people from being interested in, in politics because they do feel like, “Well, I don’t really align with either party.” And then it also makes both of the major parties not really be coherent, at least if they’re not run by a, movement.

Like, that’s — I mean, the fundamental difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is that the Democratic Party is a traditional political party, whereas the Re- Republican Party is controlled by an ideological faction. And so when you have one party that’s explicitly ideological and then the other party that is not then the ideological party is the one who’s going to have the momentum.

And because it, that, because they actually want something and they can see how to get it.

GURRI: And your point about multi-partyism is good because, again, in theory, it would be Democrats that would be-- have to be the ones that would be pushing this. And the fact that they are pushing a system that would weaken the [00:28:00] Democratic hold on blue states, it’s like argument against self-interest. Like, it’s, it shows that they’re committed to actually democracy rather than the Democratic Party. And the-- I mean, that’s-- And then it’s a real question if, you can actually get Democrats that would want that. I mean, I would o- you know, I would hope given the stakes of what’s happened that you could.

But I, I do think that is the way out of a lot of this stuff

SHEFFIELD: Well, it is, and I th- yeah, having more parties is especially also important on the right side of the aisle because really what powered Trump to his presidential victories, it wasn’t that people, I mean, like Project 2025, Trump explicitly denied that he was connected to it, of course, even though his OMB director formerly and currently, Russell Vought, was the prime mover behind it.

So that was an obvious lie and people knew it at the time. But still, even if he had said he was, con- connected to it, it’s just not something people would’ve, really understood. But l- but, point being, though, let’s say they had m- like when you look at polls, so f- like for instance, an, a poll that, I find very interesting i- in the 2024 election, it was done by YouGov, and what they found was that that 50 4%, I believe it was, of Trump supporters, or 57, something like that of his voters agreed with Kamala Harris on at, at least eight major issues.

And so, th- and that was his issue, like his, supporters, and then the general public was like 60s 60-plus percent with her. So, so the problem for Harris wasn’t that her positions were unpopular. Like this is the, a, serious flaw with the populist people that say, “Well, we can just win if we have popular positions.”

Well, no, the, you just tried that, and it didn’t work because people don’t vote on issues. They vote on, l- values. They vote on [00:30:00] how they see the larger system of governance and, what society should be doing for them and for itself. That’s what people want most people.

Like they, they’re not, they don’t care, they don’t even know about, the various policy minutias. And another example in like in 2010, Pew did a, survey of, they asked people so Joe Biden had been the vice president for 18 months by this time, and they asked people, “Who is the vice president?” 41% of adults could not name Joe Biden as the vice president. So like the idea that people are voting on policy is just, it’s absurd. It is an absurdly naive idea. And so, but what that means on the other hand is that, if you can construct a larger vision and, really sell well, then you can do a lot of things and people will give you wiggle room like that.

We saw that even with Trump, like, his policies became unpopular because people don’t like them, and we-- and, he should have known that, but still they were willing to give him a chance even though he And so that’s that’s something that people can look forward to, I think in some sense who are liberal.

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I agree

Reforming the Senate and adding more states

SHEFFIELD: okay. So, but of course, one of the other issues or things you talk about is reforming the Senate as well. So what does that, mean?

GURRI: Yeah, that’s Kevin Elliott. It was interesting ‘cause I-- he-- when he-- we, wanted him to do some kind of, dem-- political reform piece, and he just-- he picked the Senate. And I was curious to see what he could do because, it’s, a difficult institution to change. But he made this a strong case that a lot —

I mean, there’s fundamental things that you can’t change without an amendment, right? The, apportionment, the staggered terms that make it so difficult. But a lot of what we think of that’s wrong with the Senate other than that are things that the Senate has chosen to do [00:32:00] itself.

And his, argument is, look, we just have to accept we have moved to a system that is polarized into two parties, and when each party gets their turn, they get to try their thing. And the Senate just even now, even as bad as Republicans are has not accepted that. It’s still, it’s still-- People think about the filibuster, but really it’s more like the unanimous consent component, where one senator can hold things up regardless of what the rest of his caucus or, the majority of the chamber wants because they do so much through unanimous consent, which is in-insane.

What-- it’s bad enough to be supermajoritarian. Like, doing anything on unanimity is just-- It’s incredible that the Senate has ever accomplished anything on that basis. And it only does because it sort of maintains this fiction that agreeing with the step of unanimous consent for things to move forward is not the same thing as agreeing to the actual legislation itself, despite the fact that it is clearly enabling it to potentially pass at some point.

So it’s, there, there are these games. The filibuster is the same way. Obviously, filibuster more famous or infamous. The fact that it, supposedly requires 60 senators to do anything. Well, what it really is, that there are not enough senators within the majority party who want to actually vote on the legislation that gets filibustered to do something about that.

When it-- Every, single time they actually feel strongly enough, they carve out new exceptions. The-- most recently that I’m aware of anyway Republicans voted to do an up or down vote for a huge slate of nominations that, that, Rep- that Democrats had been holding up for months at the end of last year, if I remember the timing right.

So, whenever they really care, they-- the majority, that is, the majority party cares, they work around the [00:34:00] filibuster. The filibuster is just sort of like a paper-thin excuse for them not to have to do things and take stands. But anyway, Kevin Elliott’s main proposition is the Senate needs to be reorganized so it operates like the House more or less.

Like, they just actually vote on things. When partisans have control, they actually do just vote for their party’s things more or less. He also talks about adding states. He has a fairly out there idea, which is not original to him, of like making like a, more than one DC state in order to, more or less gerrymander the Senate to try and push some things through or pot- you know, potentially to pass amendments and things like that.

We went back and forth on that one. I let him keep it in with some like footnotes, like talking about some of the difficulties because we like, we, we do want to think creatively. But I think the main takeaway from that essay is you can make the Senate a lot more like the House in how it operates, and that would fix a lot, honestly.

That would fix a lot of the current dysfunction of Congress. The House is often very willing to do work and the Senate just simply seems to exist to stop work from happening. So, there’s multiple ways you can go about that, but he, goes into those.

SHEFFIELD: I thought his yeah, he would’ve been better served by talking about breaking up California. And I live in California. Like, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that you have, a completely desertified part of the state that also has to have the exact same policies as, a co- the coastal part of the state.

It doesn’t make any sense.

GURRI: It’s funny though, I’ve argued that before, and I’m trying to remember which political scientist it was, but it is a California-based one who vociferously argued with me against it because he said that California is like the only geographic unit of the United States that is the correct governance unit just because of its geography, is what he said.

And so I thought that was interesting.

SHEFFIELD: Huh. Oh, well, I guess I’d have to look at that. But yeah, to me, I mean, it’s nice that we have basically every kind of climate the United States has in one state. Like, I like that. But on the other hand, yeah, it’s there, ‘cause there is something, I- [00:36:00] fundamentally undemocratic about the way that a lot of our governance is structured and, it goes back to the two-party idea, like, and even for people who are, conservative because, a big portion of the, Trump base, or the Trump vote, as I was saying earlier, like they’re not people who are reactionary. they, they’ve never heard of Russell Vote. they don’t support what he does.

And yet because of the two-party system and the way that the states are allocated it means that basically you do have, significant percentages of each state and, and the country as a whole that basically are not represented by anyone because neither party wants them. Because the Democratic Party by and large, is a, a slight- a slightly conservative corporate-friendly party by and large.

Like, that’s what it has been. And it changed a little bit under Biden. But you know, roughly speaking from, let’s say Jimmy Carter up un- up until then, that’s what it was. So it was a, kind of slightly conservative-ish party. And then you had a, reactionary Republican Party. So to somebody who is, more of a, let’s say, Dispatch-style conservative or somebody who is a socialist or somebody who’s a social democrat, they haven’t really had any representation and neither party wants them.

GURRI: Yeah. I will say that the issue of the Senate and the president, like the Electoral College and things, is w- m- was my original reason for writing the original essay about redoing federalism, because it’s much easier to make each state more democratic than it is to make the federal government more dem- democratic.

Because state, constitutions are incredibly easy to update. Just incredibly easy. And, it’s, in, in some cases one can argue it could be mandated by federal law that, they do so, and has been in the past. So I, think, the basic idea was you can have state [00:38:00] governments that are actually democratic, and then you can have fiscal federalism that makes sure that re- regardless of what state you live in, whether it’s very populist or very, or, not, whether it’s very wealthy or not you’re getting a similar per capita level of investment in your infrastructure and thi- and things like that.

And that sort of like balances both the equalizing effect of the federal government across the disparities of local conditions and the difficulty of getting the federal government itself to be particularly democratic compared to what we could do with state governments

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, one thing that, yeah, isn’t in the p- book is as I thought it would be, is like the expanding the, idea of plebiscites and ballot initiatives. ‘Cause like those, even in red states actually have been the source of a lot of, good policy. I mean, like that is why we have seen abortion rights protected in, in many states that otherwise vote for a Republican.

Like they would people would go and vote for Trump and then also vote to protect a woman’s right to

GURRI: Yeah, though I, part of me thinks that they thought they could have their cake and eat it too. If they were forced, if they were forced to do things through the legislative process or through, politicians, then maybe they would feel a little more urgency to not vote for evil Republicans, that want to take away the rights that they want to keep.

And I actually, I’m, I am fairly-- I won’t say that I’m entirely against. I’m pretty against ballot initiatives per se as, as law. I’m not against referendums, like non-binding referendums, ‘cause the p- the politics often means that in the end you get those policies anyway once, once you’ve seen that, like, that’s what they want.

But I, feel like you have to actually have the connection between the people making the rules and the people that are going to implement it, enforce it. And that often ballot initiatives, A, they’re n- they’re often not particularly well-written, frankly, in terms of like how they end up on the ballot in the first place, like that whole [00:40:00] process.

The vital importance of judicial reform to protect democracy

GURRI: And second of all, they kind of are too easy to undermine, as we’ve seen in the case of some of those abortion pro- pro-choice, ballot initiatives. The states immediately figured out ways to ignore them or undermine them. I think you actually have to focus the l- the locus of democratic competition on the personnel to get the people that will actually fight for-- ‘Cause it’s, in my opinion, it’s never just about passing a law, right?

So for example, court reform or, housing reform, it’s not, it’s, so to, to stick with court reform, it’s not about like you pass a law. So like Wyden had a plan a few years ago for court reform, and it was more or

SHEFFIELD: Senator Ron Wyden.

GURRI: Senator Wyden. Sorry, yes. And the plan was more or less, we’ll have a fixed number of appointments per presidential term so that it’s not so tied to just when people die or something.

And you, in theory, you have to like, have an amendment to set term lengths. But in practice, what we’ll do is we’ll make a law that says after you’ve been in the Supreme Court for a certain number of years, you’re in a new senior track where you don’t hear cases anymore, right? So like they try and do that.

Say they actually pass that law, and then the Supreme Court immediately, some conservative group challenges it. The Supreme Court hears it before anyone new is appointed, and they try and strike it down, before it’s done anything. S- in my opinion, it matters less whether or not that plan would have worked, whether that would have happened, then that we get a Congress and a trifecta that’s willing, if the court does something like that, to smack them down.

You have to-- You-- There, there has to be a commitment on the part of the elected branches to actually see it through, which, is difficult, right? It’s similar again, so the, the predatory finding thing I mentioned, same deal. Passing a law is not enough. You actually need the p- you actually need to figure out the administrative side of how to do it.

Housing, it’s similar. California has passed a ton of laws that on paper are great. localities have fought them tooth and nail. and essentially California’s like at war with itself, right? In terms of its state government versus its [00:42:00] local ones. And most famously of all, the, Civil Rights Acts.

People remember the 1964 Civil Right Act, but it was not the first one. Eisenhower passed the first one, and what happened is we created a civil rights division in the DOJ. They went and tried to implement the law, and Jim Crow lo-localities and states were very nimble about fighting them, and playing the clock in the courts and things like that.

So you had like a decade of fighting one another before you get to forget the Civil Rights Act of ‘64, the Voting Rights Act, where the, civil rights department of the DOJ says to Lyndon Johnson, “Here are the tools that we legally need to be able to do to actually win this fight. Like we’ve been fighting this for a decade.

We know their tactics, and we know what they-- we know, like, we just need you to give us the power to go and register voters ourselves,” and a few things like that. So it took commitment. It was-- There was-- The politics were such that nationally there actually was enough of a commitment to, to see that through, fighting Jim Crow.

and it took a decade of before they got the right tools, and then of course it took much longer than that even to, see it through and actually crush Jim Crow. but so my, theory of the case is, and I know this is like a tangent from the actual collection or anything, but I, do feel strongly about this.

And my theory of the case is you have to line up the politics, that you want with people in office, who will ac- who actually can-- who actually they have both the commitment to seeing it through and like they develop the, knowhow to do so.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and that goes to the militancy idea that you were talking about earlier. Yeah, and, I mean, the, thing about-- the biggest thing about Trump too has been just the, desire to, just go for it. Just do what you want, even if you might lose in the courts. And because, if you lose in the courts, then you can make that an issue itself, and, it makes people [00:44:00] more focused on the courts as a, locus of, of, attention.

Because, like right now and when you look at the way both parties talk about the courts to their voters the, polls show very consistently that Democratic voters do not understand the courts as a, as political institutions, as, quasi-legislative, well, really actual legislative institutions, that they don’t understand this argument.

And like there, there is a lower approval rating among them, among Democrats in general, but there, there are significant slices of the Democratic electorate that, actually have pretty close to majority approval of the Supreme Court. Even though they also, they get upset at Democrats for not doing things that they want or like that’s what they think. But in reality, it’s the courts that have stopped the Democrats, and the Democrats haven’t really said this to them and talked about, “Well, here’s how we’re going to stop the courts from stopping us.”

GURRI: No, the fact that Wyden proposed that plan at all frankly was a good sign. And I do actually think-- I actually am optimistic for a future Democratic trifecta doing something about the Supreme Court. I think they’re, ready from what I’ve heard.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it seems that way. And, and, this does reflect a problem, a mistake that was made by liberals was that they became addicted to the courts themselves. During the Warren Court and the Burger Court, they abandoned the idea of pushing civil rights through the legislatures.

And that was a huge mistake

GURRI: Yeah. No, and that’s, our concluding essay, right? That’s Adam Rust talking about the distinction between constitutional law and constitutional politics, and how constitutional politics comes first. Constitutional politics is the fight to decide what the Constitution means in the first place, in practice.

And because we got [00:46:00] some courts for a period of time, like the Warren Court, even the Burger Court, frankly that were very willing to aggressively push liberal rights and positions a lot of, people in the liberal legal space especially, but in general, came to view the court as having a role that we should not have granted to it.

It has its particular, it has a particular, like, functional role that it plays in the l- the legal system, but we shouldn’t pretend that it has a moral role in term-- it, it has moral authority, in other words, to force us to accept whatever it rules, whatever five of, its members decide is the meaning of the Constitution or the law on any given day

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, or, like just the idea that even what they say is what it is.

GURRI: Right. Exactly.

SHEFFIELD: I’ve had several conversations with attorneys even now who, they have — This is a childlike belief that the court is correct when they say things. No, that’s just their, that’s just their opinion.

There’s a

GURRI: just have power. They just have power, right? Like, yeah,

Restraining the president

SHEFFIELD: yeah. So, okay. So, and so reining in the court, reforming the Senate these are big things. But then, but there’s also the danger of the imperial presidency, and that’s that is the focus of — I, so there, I mean, that’s a the focus of one essay in particular by Patrick Sabowski.

I, I, sorry, Sabkowski, I think that’s how you say it, right? but it’s, it is a persistent theme in some of the other essays as well because, like that’s — And you alluded to that earlier, this idea of that the reactionary right is basically wanting an imperial presidency. And this is a worse way of doing political majoritarianism than a parliamentary system.

Because in, at least in a parliamentary system, while they, while the prime minister has, [00:48:00] supreme authority, they also can get thrown out like that by their, by, by a vote of no confidence. And, the American system doesn’t have anything like that. And the repeated failures of impeachment, the fact that none has ever succeeded in the entire history of the country suggests very strongly that the executive has to be, the, as a person, has to be restrained quite a bit.

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of our problems are downstream of how dysfunctional Congress is specifically. Both the court and the presidency sort of are downstream of that, and anything you can do to make Congress more functional will fix a lot. Because Congress ultimate- even with the Senate being the way that it is Congress ultimately draws from a broader cross-section of the country in order to be able to do things.

And the punishment is, swifter for it if it oversteps. And just in general, the way-- the president is a guy who does things. Obviously, the executive branch is a whole other can of worms, but Congress is an institution with hundreds of people that are elected to it and that, plus then their staff.

The, the-- And they do things other than just legislate. They do, the committee work that they do is, I feel like very underestimated and very poorly understood by the American public, and even many people that are fairly politically engaged. but, like, Congress actually will turn the screws on administrative agencies because they often frequently have to come back to Congress and ask for more money to do things.

So, there’s good literature that’s very sort of like under-underread and undervalued that shows that, like, if, Congress is, more or less on the same page about how a lot of ex-executive, the executive branch should behave, they tend to behave that way. Especially, like, the more independent agencies and things that don’t directly respond, react to the president.

but even, stuff that’s just-- I mean, the, executive branch is so big that one person can’t really run it on his own. [00:50:00] so c- when Congress is, functional, the system as a whole just kind of works a lot better. And that’s why, Pat-Patrick’s essay, a lot of it comes down to just make Congress more stronger compared to the, the, presidency.

We also have the other essay by Judith Starr, which is specifically about strengthening watchdog agencies in the executive branch, which currently exist but have been more or less demolished functionally by Trump.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and so, so specifically how though? Like, ‘cause they, what they have to be is independent of the president and not controlled

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry. Top, top of mind, I don’t have all of the recommendations. but a lot of it has to do with similar to how it works with Fed Fed governors, staggered terms so that they don’t perfectly align with presidential terms and things like that. some-- Like she’s, she fixed, she gives them a little more, the, inspector generals a little more direct authority to interface with Congress, or parts of the DOJ that aren’t like directly under the president’s control.

I’d have to — Actually, it’s been a while since I’ve reread that one, but yep, the gen- the general th- thrust is strength- strengthening the posi- the position of the inspector generals, making them a little more independent of the president.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and, the reason why these agencies and the presidency in general, I mean, became so out of control was that Congress became more dysfunctional. And so, so they basically, decided, “Well, we don’t understand this stuff. We, don’t want to understand it. And we’re going to get rid of our offices of technology and other things like that. And so we’re just going to let you guys handle it, and we also don’t have to run the risk of, taking a stand on our own there.”

And that’s, like ultimately what that does though is not only [00:52:00] does it, remove accountability of electoral accountability for, policymaking, but it also, it makes the policies much more easily captured by private special interests as

GURRI: Yeah. Ab- absolutely

Reforming higher education and promoting national service

SHEFFIELD: okay. So l- let’s just kind of go back though to the idea of opportunity, of enabling the gov- the government enabling people to exercise liberty, because that’s also a big, theme here that the, government has through neoliberals and conservatives and reactionaries have really kind of drastically, again, since C- Carter roughly focused on, reducing government spending in a variety of areas.

A- and education w- has been probably the, biggest area because they certainly haven’t cut defense. And and, so it’s cr- it’s created this perverse structure in which the university systems, they get money for doing things no one wanted them to do. So like, there’s a, zillion law schools now that, that churn out students who will never get a job in law.

They have wasted their money g- seeking that degree. They have been lied to. And so, a lot of people are upset at the educational institutions. And then but at the same time, q- moving toward just a purely vocational way of doing things, that’s not going to work in a, in an age of AI where so many of the specialized tasks especially that are, white collar oriented, those, those jobs are going to be eventually be automated away.

And so you guys talk about that in a couple of the essays as well.

GURRI: Yeah, I mean, I think I don’t make any predictions about what the, industrial organization of society will end up being in terms of automation and things like that. I feel like we always think everything’s going to be [00:54:00] automated for the past 100 years or 200 years, and somehow there always ends up being lots of things that you need humans for still.

But I think what’s clear is that even now, the premium to having a college degree versus not is pretty significant in terms of your earnings. There’s also, like, thicker reasons we want people to seek higher education if, they can in, in terms of it just create-- There’s, a, there’s like a social cohort effect when people go to college.

They get certain, tools. They work, they end up-- It, it makes it easier for them to work well with other people who’ve also gotten a similar education. It’s just like that was one of the great achievements of the post-war world, right? Was just this huge push into higher education, and it really was a world-class achievement.

But it, higher education ex-exactly like it’s been so dysfunctional. Since the ‘90s, tuition rates have been exploding for various reasons. And at the same time, money is poured in through the student loan system, but that just increases the price and increases the debt burden on

SHEFFIELD: And there was no control on the universities either

GURRI: Right. Exactly. So, yeah our, offering in, the higher education space Brendan Cantwell he is of the opinion that essentially because, policymakers think of universities as just about the education part. But of course, that’s not what students think about, and that’s not what their parents, prospectively were thinking about even just, that.

there’s this whole cultural side to colleges that it’s easy as a policymaker to want to discount. But clearly it’s, hard to discount when that’s what, they’re not just the consumers of higher education, right? They’re also the voters in the, states and the country that are deciding these policies for these things, and it’s clear that they want that kind of thing.

So he doesn’t go as far as to say, “No expensive football teams. Stop building so many damn buildings on your campus,” overbuilding like crazy. More what he says is there [00:56:00] should be generous public, mostly state government packages of support for state schools, including community colleges.

And they should come with strings attached that are about controlling their spending. and the strings are enforced by essentially drawing back on support from the state if you’re going to go nuts on the other things and increase your tuition too high. So, he, sort of has a, It’s not a silver bullet approach, and it-- he himself calls it a framework, not like a detailed policy package for what to do. But yeah, I mean, that’s, one. I think in terms of like also ag- conditions for exercising freedom, I know you were thinking of getting to this, but Alan Elrod’s piece on public service, also another, I think, c-critical pillar in that regard.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, actually let’s, talk about that. Yeah.

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah

SHEFFIELD: saying there? ‘Cause he’s, yeah, he’s been a guest on this program, so I’ve gotta

GURRI: Oh, good. Nice.

SHEFFIELD: some, respect there.

GURRI: Yeah, I, mean, Alan’s theory of the case really is like we’ve grown too isolated, we’ve grown too willing to communicate digitally. Ev- even like people that you know in your immediate life, you like spend more time texting with than like seeing in person necessarily like your friends.

So he’s, very like in favor of creating conditions that push people to meet up in person. And then of course, there’s polarization. And what I like about what he says is he’s, sort of nuanced in what he thinks putting people together with different political perspectives will do. He specifically says the evidence is not that Republicans and Democrats working together makes them depolarized politically.

In fact, there’s no evidence for that. But there is evidence that when they get together and know each other and work together they have less of what’s called effective polarization, which is like conceiving of the most caricatured version of your political opponent. Like the way-- it brings the temperature of the conflict down [00:58:00] because you stop conceiving of your political, the, other side as like ideologues that are seeking to destroy you, and more like just an ordinary person like yourself who, and the people, people that are perfectly nice that believe that, just have a wrong-headed idea or something from your point of view.

So, he wants y- he wants a huge fu- well-funded federal public service that involves like sending people to multiple locations across the country, not where they’re from to, build community theaters and do all the, little things that, that, you would expect public service things to do, what the Peace Corps does in other countries, what America does do now.

It’s just AmeriCorps is very small, very small program and very limited in, its scope. So he wants something bigger. His, in his ideal world, if you have someone who is sort of, without direction after high school or even a high school dropout, say, the group that really does have it

SHEFFIELD: Or hell, why limit it to post-high school people

GURRI: sure. but, ag- I think like in, in the past, traditionally, someone who’s sort of wavering after high school might decide to go into the military because they don’t know what to do with themselves, and that’s always an option. In his dream, vision, you would have a civilian alternative to that.

Not like it’s bad to go into the military and serve, but like you could do service that’s not military service.

The importance of public mixing institutions

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, the historic evidence, I want to bring that in here on this point, like it, it is pretty clear. And there’s two real test cases that I think show this. One is the is World War II. and, even the Vietnam War and the Korean War, like those were draft wars.

And so, and I’m not in favor of having people go to war under a draft, but unless, like, absolutely necessary. But you know, what that, what those, things did, and the military does this just in general, is that it does bring people together who have different backgrounds, [01:00:00] different ways of life, different ethnicities and religions or none.

and, it, yeah, it, and it shows them that, as you said, these are just people who think differently than you. And that’s, that is really important as a as, something to instill in, in regular people because like that’s really what powered the, Trump victories, is that, you have decades of these evangelical churches telling their adherents in, and, this is chronicled very well in the movie “Jesus Camp.” they, tell them from childhood that these people that we don’t like are literally satanic. They’re under control of Satan, and they’re going to destroy you. That’s their goal in life. And and so if you have somebody who’s had that drilled into their head, for 20 years, including in their young childhood, of course they’re going to be, hateful and

GURRI: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: support fascist people like Donald Trump.

So, so like, so yeah, this program would go a long way toward stopping that. But, then also, like in the ga- the, movement for same-sex marriage rights and marriage equality, that succeeded because people came out of the closet. Because they, had, lived in it for so long that a lot of, straight-presenting people, heterosexual-presenting people b- actually didn’t realize that that there were a lot of people who were LGBTQ.

And then once they saw that and, that it was their f- friends, their family members, their community members who they knew from their own interactions as, they weren’t going to recruit you to be gay or, silly things like that. But these were, these were innate conservative beliefs that were false.

And so, this overt mixing of people, it was a really [01:02:00] good thing for for everyone

GURRI: Yeah, no, and, more generally, I would say, tying it back to the idea of milit- liberalism that’s very assertive. Like, the world that, liberalism wants is open and dynamic and mobile and sort of embraces the best of change and, difference rather than shrinking from it. The fear is more stagnation and shrinking and becoming something small and, rigid versus being afraid of the upheaval of change, right?

And so if you want to sell that, one way to do that is to create a program that encourages people to mix it up a little bit more and s- and be exposed to people they would not have otherwise met and see places that they would not have otherwise seen. And, like the military, you can do it in a way where, you hope it-- You- the hope is to sell it as a high status thing, right?

It’s you-- If you go into the military, one of the things about it is they have high expectations of you. They hold you to a high standard, right? It’s not like-- It’s not you, can get in, but it’s not like it’s an easy ticket, right? You go in and they work you very hard and they demand a lot of you. So you could have a public service that also has high standards that they hold you to, makes you feel like you’re really doing something.

So it’s not just like, you’re opting out of trying to get a job or something. You’re actually doing something important and, being challenged. And then, s- sends you out to experience the country, which is an incredibly diverse country, both sort of like geographically and in terms of the different cultures across that geography.

Reclaiming national greatness from the far right

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, the other thing that’s good about this idea is that and, this is w- r- an area where, Biden’s infrastructure spending really failed is that it creates physical monuments to civic greatness.

and, that’s, th- there’s something to the Trump slogan of Make [01:04:00] America Great.

Like, it, is something that has a visceral, somatic quality to it that, that is meaningful in a way that is un-- you don’t even have to, make that argument. Like, the America’s smaller towns especially and smaller cities, they, have even now, public structures that were built during the, Roosevelt administration or, the Carnegie libraries,

GURRI: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: by Andrew Carnegie.

Like these are physical monuments to something or someone that was-- that did something good in society and, like, and, we don’t have those anymore. And so the way that infrastructure spending is done and has to be done in this way, I think, in order to, really be meaningful because, oh, we th- you fix a road for someone, well, that’s nice.

People like a nice fixed road, but they don’t understand what went into that or why, it was good

GURRI: Yeah, for sure

SHEFFIELD: okay. Well, you can go off on more on that if you want. I I agree. And it’s, it’s taking credit for things, right? It’s, the, actual, “This was part of this program. This was done by this agency.” I mean, here in m- here in New York City, again, Mamdani has been very good at this. There’s only so much a mayor can do in his first few months, but when we had a blizzard, he was doing videos and being like, “Here’s exactly what all the waste management people are doing while you’re at home in order to make sure you can get back out there.”

GURRI: Like, it, he’s, I cr- credit-taking is something that I don’t know, like you actually, you, it’s, a job. It’s something you have to actually do. You can’t just, you can’t just deliver. You have to make sure they know who’s delivering and how that happened,

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.

GURRI: or you take it for granted.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Because, the, far right has spent, 80 years telling people, “Government does nothing for you. It’s a total failure. It’s a waste. Everything it does is stupid.”

GURRI: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: and that’s [01:06:00] a lie. But if you don’t show them, as, Mamdani was doing, of, this is what government actually does.

Like, the, biggest problem with effective governance is it’s about what doesn’t happen. And so i- it’s about what doesn’t go wrong. and, we’re seeing that, with with Trump’s horrible approach and with RFK Jr. toward vaccinations and, disease and, things like s- the screw worm.

That’s the whole point of government, is to stop bad things from happening.

GURRI: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And so you have to tell people, “Well, we stopped this from happening.”

GURRI: You do.

Housing needs to be cheaper and more plentiful

SHEFFIELD: yeah. All right. Well, so l- and then the, one of the other persistent themes in the piece or in the book and there’s is — so it’s not a, like, dedicated theme, but I, like that it is touched on by several authors, is just the idea of housing.

Because that’s that’s, that is such a huge problem for people now that, there just hasn’t been enough construction in the country. And prices just keep going up and up. And, it — and the government is the one that has to force that. And, it goes back to what you were saying earlier, that, the local governments in many ways are the problem because of the not in my backyard, NIMBY people really have ruined things for a lot of younger Americans.

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, no, and, we didn’t have, like, a big build more housing piece. Frankly, we write like 100 of those at “Liberal Current” all the time. But yeah, no, it’s, very true. We do touch on it at a number of places. Sort of in-- we, we have different from our usual angle as well, we have Moira Burse talking about the climate like the climate dimension of housing and all the places that people need to move away from and how you manage that, how you manage the insurance aspect, which Florida has completely failed to do, and frankly, California’s on the exact same trajectory just earlier at this point.

Yeah, we talk, we talk about that as well, just like [01:08:00] there’s, we haven’t built enough, and then there’s, a lot of our housing is on coasts that are very climate vulnerable. And we have to think, we have to think ahead about that kind of thing. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: yeah, we do. And it’s also, but it, is a way of making climate change policy more of an opportunity for, citizens. Because while it’s easy, for the, to, for people to scaremonger and say, “Oh, they’re going to take away your truck,” or, various things this is a way of, restructuring public spending that can, again, be a visible benefit to, people in a way that is also being helpful toward reducing carbon emissions and and things like that.

GURRI: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, I think we’ve touched on a lot of the bases here, but this book is, it’s, it’s pretty comprehensive, so I encourage everybody to check it out. There’s a lot more in here than what we touched on, but, we hit on the bigger notes here.

But yeah, let’s just kind of give the concluding sales pitch here, for people and why they should buy this and take it seriously.

GURRI: Yeah. I mean, so I think we’re at a window of time where we will either shoot our shot or we won’t. The I am not afraid at this point that Donald Trump will actually successfully consolidate an authoritarian system by the end of his term. What I am afraid of is that we’re going to enter a cycle of every four years, we get, like, Democrats trying to be normal, a normal party, and then every four years after that, we get another bite of the apple of attempting fascism again for however long until we finally get it.

So the stakes are very high to get out of the immediate crisis, which is something we write about, but also to lay the groundwork for a durable new, century of l- liberal democracy that’s stable, actually. So that’s, the real pitch for the book. And, we’ve, been through this before.[01:10:00]

Americans like to focus most on the original founding moment, but to me, the tradition of the Founding Fathers is the willingness to to redo it all. I mean, they did the, Articles of Confederation first. They did a ton of experimentation with their state constitutions after that, and then they looked at it and they said, “This isn’t working,” and they did the Constitution, which was huge, which they then amended a few times before they, before that generation died and, fully intended to be r- regularly amended.

And then of course, Reconstruction, big, change. I would say from, Woodrow Wilson to to FDR, also an enormous transformation of our government. However you feel about any one of those, and all of them were flawed I think just, taking the spirit of the willingness to go back and actually try and make drastic changes to our system is a big part of who we are, and we gotta, we have to rediscover it.

SHEFFIELD: We do. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we should think of this moment as an opportunity for a second reconstruction in a lot of ways. Yeah. All right. Well, cool. Glad to have you here today, and for people who want to follow you personally what’s your advice to them there?

GURRI: Well, there’s, Bluesky, I’m on there. And, but of Liberal Currents, I mean, we have an email you can sign up for. You can decide what level of emails you want to get, including just like updates about, us rather than our actual essays and things. So yeah, definitely, sign up for those updates

SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. All right. Thanks for being here.

GURRI: Great. Thank you.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, a- audio and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much for your support.

You have unlimited access to the archives as well, and I really appreciate that. But if you can’t afford to subscribe on a paid version, we do also have free versions as well. You can become either type of [01:12:00] subscriber if you go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack.

Thanks a lot. Oh, and if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure to click like and subscribe. So, let’s do that again. All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.

And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to all the archives, and I thank you very much for your support. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there is a new episode. And if you want to become a free or paid subscriber, you can do that on Patreon at patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can do it on Substack at flux.community.

Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time.

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This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.

Since his election to a second term as president, Donald Trump has ruled as an aspiring tyrant. Alongside the most serious carnage — the attacks on the rule of law, the continued effort to subvert elections, the tendency to view the U.S. Treasury as a piggy bank and the presidency as the world’s best opportunity for grift, ever — the president has conducted an arguably less serious but potent secondary attack at an symbolic level. I am thinking first and foremost of his efforts to remodel the White House, renovations of which were of course a non-issue in the 2024 presidential race — but you wouldn’t know it to see the prioritization the president has put on such projects as emblazoning the Oval Office in gold, obliterating the Rose Garden, and razing the East Wing to make way for a bribery scheme under cover of a ginormous ballroom set to dwarf the actual presidential residence.

The overriding message of the White House demolitions and general enshitification are tightly bound up with the meaning of the Trump administration writ large, in that they are demonstrations that Donald Trump does not consider himself a temporary caretaker of the republic so much as the new owner of what he sometimes seems to conceive of as a very big casino with nuclear weapons (Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall has written extensively and incisively about the phenomenon of Trump’s sense of national ownership). He does seem to think that the White House literally belongs to him, to do with what he will — and that this authorizes major modifications which cannot be easily undone by his successors.

The intended construction of a ballroom is the standout White House-specific offense, given the mass demolition it has required, the apparent lawlessness of the destruction, and that its purpose appears simultaneously be to siphon bribes under cover of construction costs, to stick taxpayers with a huge chunk of the cost, and to eventually serve as a venue to entertain and audition those who have given Trump bribes, those who want to give him bribes, and even those who are simply bribe curious. It’s both a symbolic assertion of the president’s ownership of public goods (goodbye, shared memories of a normal-looking White House) and a practical tool for ruling like a despot (no self-respecting tyrant lacks for a ballroom where supplicants might wheedle and grovel).

But the president’s sense of direct ownership doesn’t stop at the White House gates. Since early in his administration, he’s adopted a sadistically proprietary attitude towards the entirety of the nation’s capital, in which his purported desire to beautify the city has fused together with his authoritarian aesthetic and his desire to rule with an iron fist (indeed, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro recently remarked that beautification is meant “as a defense against “anarchy” and “civil disorder”). And so, proclaiming out-of-control crime on Washington streets, Trump has leveraged his control over the D.C. National Guard to deploy troops within the nation’s capital — an assertion of power at once ominous (i.e., the out-of-control crime canard as justification for the intimidation and possible beat-down of protestors) and ridiculous (as soldiers have been deployed to low-crime neighborhoods and tasked with such urgent assignments as picking up trash).

But the deployment of troops to pick up litter was an early indication that Trump truly was interested in “cleaning up the streets” on multiple levels. Indeed, he has embarked on a quest to beautify the capital in accordance with his own strange standards, sometimes under cover of the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations but always to advance his own vision and interests.

Which brings us to the increasingly disturbing tale of the president’s unsuccessful attempts to “fix” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is visited by more than 20 million people every year. The first level of weirdness, the one that I would guess first caught most people’s attention, is the same one that haunts other chores that we might refer to as “presidential housekeeping”: in a way it’s hard to imagine previous chief executives behaving, Trump was concerning himself intimately with the color and contents of a small, ornamental body of water. And as if the universe itself had arranged to highlight the point that water management is not a primary presidential responsibility, Trump chose to do so at the same time as he was conducting an illegal, and ultimately disastrous, war against the nation of Iran.

As most readers likely know by now, Trump’s attempts to spruce up the Reflecting Pool — including by ordering that the bottom surface be painted blue in order to produce a color pleasing to the discerning executive eye — have gone badly wrong at a basic technical level. The culmination (to date) has been a body of water blooming with algae, bestirred with scraps of sealant, and certainly not sporting a soul-soothing azure.

But far more troubling have been events beneath the surface, so to speak. The project has seen massive cost overruns: the president claimed that improvements would cost perhaps $2 million, but so far, the government has spent a minimum of $14 million on the work. A recent New York Times piece provided one possible explanation for the cost and subsequent shoddy workmanship, as it turns out that “a business tied to a longtime supporter of President Trump was given a no-bid contract to install a water-purification system.”

More ominous has been the way that Trump has sought to cover up his self-made Reflecting Pool debacle by spinning a counter-narrative which holds that shadowy and malevolent anti-American forces are actually responsible for the pool’s sickly state. In a recent episode of The Daily Blast, host Greg Sargent and Ankush Khardori discussed the president’s outlandish, unverified claims that some six people have been arrested for crimes against the pool, and another seven issued citations. Most memorably, the president has repeatedly claimed that a vandal had cut a “gash” hundreds of feet long in the pool’s sealant (the size of the slice grew larger with each presidential recitation of the crime, eventually reaching a whopping 350 feet).

Worse still, the president has pushed to make reality fit his fantastical parable, with troops and other security deployed to the site, and fencing arrayed, to “protect” it. Startlingly, at least one American has in fact been ensnared by Trump’s web of paranoia and dissimulation. Last week, the Justice Department charged David Hearn with a single count of felony destruction of property, with the details of his arrest and alleged crime failing to pass the laugh test. The government claims that Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, made a “a violent effort to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool [. . .] with his bare hands.” Hearn denies the outlandish and improbable charges, with his attorneys attributing them to “the administration’s effort to shift blame for their own failures”— which seems exactly right. To shield Trump from full public understanding of his own responsibility for the Reflecting Pool quagmire, his minions are now seeking to make an innocent man appear guilty of absurd crimes. If convicted, Hearn could face up to 10 years in prison.

In summary: to cover up his own incompetence and corruption, the president has pretended that a tourist site within the nation’s capital has been under attack by forces unknown, fortified said site to back up his lies, and ensnared a very likely innocent American in an effort to prove the truth of his slanders. Is there any question that Hearn would be free and clear of harassment by the state if Trump had not chosen to focus his baleful gaze on the Reflecting Pool, and infected its refurbishment with his lawlessness and limitless desire for “retribution”?

So long as Hearn remains in legal jeopardy, this story is not over. It is certainly no longer a funny one. This is an abuse of power no less dangerous for being so fantastically stupid. Even in the most superficially benign area — the restoration of the Reflecting Pool — Trump’s corruption, incompetence, and authoritarian tendencies have come together to endanger the citizenry. It is tempting to say that the Reflecting Pool is a metaphorical whirlpool that’s sucking in Trump, but really it’s just the latest manifestation of his limitless immorality and danger to the country. His dream of total control over what he “owns,” combined with the urgent need to cover up his own incompetence, have driven him inexorably to textbook tyrannical behavior. It’s like he can’t help rubbing our noses in his authoritarianism, creating an utterly backwards situation where his supposed goal of beautifying Washington becomes cover for new ways to brutalize ordinary citizens.

The silver lining, if we can call it that, is that the inanity of Trump’s Reflecting Pool obsession and his disproportionate, hysterical response to his own mess seems to repel most Americans. As Paul Waldman observes, Trump has been drawn into a spectacle of public humiliation very much of his own making. Even as ordinary Americans like Hearn are facing life-changing consequences due to Trump’s obsessions, ordinary people can easily grasp that what the president is doing is the opposite of presidential. The case is there for the opposition to hammer home, through the midterms and beyond: no aspect of America, not even the innocuous Reflecting Pool, is safe from being transformed into another tool in Trump’s bottomless quest to plunder, defile, and dominate our nation.

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The 2026 midterms are here, and negative campaign messaging is flooding screens across the U.S. In Texas’ Senate race, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s comments about Democratic Texas Rep. James Talarico have gone viral.

Rather than simply suggesting Talarico is weak on border security or inflation economics, Paxton’s campaign has taken a different rhetorical approach. To quote Fox News host Jesse Watters, “The major factor in this race … is whether Tala-freak-o is a vegan.”

Though Talarico maintains he is not vegan, Paxton has referred to his opponent as “Tofu Talarico.”

Paxton and Watters aren’t the only ones making these dietary accusations.

Earlier this year, after Talarico ordered a potato, egg and cheese taco from a restaurant in Austin, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott posted to his campaign social platform X account: “Homie is not beating the vegetarian allegations.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz joked that if a soy latte could speak, “that would be Democrat James Talarico.” Even President Donald Trump has chimed in: “He’s a vegan in Texas, and you can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas.”

Again, Talarico denies being a secret vegetarian or vegan. “I’m an eighth-generation Texan,” he has said. “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”

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The accusations likely stem from a 2022 appearance with the Texas Humane Legislation Network when Talarico suggested Americans reduce their meat consumption for climate reasons. His girlfriend follows a plant-based diet. Nonetheless, Talarico says that his campaign “runs on barbecue.”

As communication scholars who study the symbolic roles of meat and meat-eating in political communication, we see the construction of “Tofu Talarico” not as a one-off political jab but as part of a more sophisticated rhetorical strategy by which politicians appeal to voters.

Attacks on Talarico show how, across American politics, what people eat is a metaphoric marker of who they are, from political affiliation to regional belonging and cultural values. Eating meat – or not – plays a huge role in the political process, and accusations of meat avoidance, regardless of whether they’re true, can be a potent rhetorical weapon.

Meat, metaphor and political communication

Communication scholarship shows that metaphors, when a word or phrase denoting one object or idea is used in place of another, are more than literary decoration; they shape the way we perceive reality, acting as part of a “conceptual system” that enables snap judgments and decision-making.

As mental shortcuts, or heuristic devices, metaphors are common in political communication. They’re a means to “see something in terms of something else.”

For example, in the case of Paxton and Talarico, allegations of vegetarianism and veganism are not about Talarico’s nutritional profile or even his environmental ethics. Here, “vegan” and its analogues metaphorically stand in for weakness and nonconformity, whereas “meat” and its affiliates stand in for strength, traditionalism and the stereotypical Texan way.

This usage is consistent with what food politics researchers call the “sexual politics” of meat, wherein meat imagery is often used in displays of traditional masculinity. This is evident in other jabs levied at Talarico. For example, Watters linked Talarico’s diet to his sexual orientation, joking on Fox News that Talarico was a “gay vegan” with a fake girlfriend.

Dietary demographics and election modeling

Dietary preference also links to key political demographics. For example, political scientists have explored whether the concept of a Republican vegan is an oxymoron due to the deep entrenchment of meat-eating and meat production in primarily conservative regions.

Overwhelmingly, vegans tend to be women, young and liberal. Across all political identifications, being male and white correlates with higher meat consumption.

Even the choice of where to purchase meat can be an electoral measure. Political journalist Dave Wasserman has suggested that the 2012 election was a contest between “well-educated, Democratic-trending Whole Foods markets and down-home, Republican-trending Cracker Barrel outposts.”

Meatless political appeals

The “meatless” have long been framed as social and political threats, levied in discussions of whether they should be politically elevated or subordinated. Historically, Western norms during the 19th and 20th centuries held that to not eat meat is odd at best, and suspicious at worst.

In the late 1800s, colonialism in Asia was partially justified on the grounds that Asian men were but “effeminate rice eaters” who, according to 19th-century neurologist James Leonard Corning, lacked “the intellectual vigor of flesh-eating men.”

Negative appeals to veganism again flourished in 2019 after Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” a resolution proposing to combat climate change. Conservative senators like Joni Ernst and Marsha Blackburn attacked the environmentally progressive initiative as a “war on meat,” posing an existential threat to meat eaters and cattle farmers. Notably, the Green New Deal did not contain meat mandates. In the Green New Deal discussion, though, this hypothetical meat ban effectively functioned as metaphorical shortcut for progressive political overreach.

This demarcation is not confined to one political party. In a Democratic primary debate in 2019, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker – a vegan since 2014 – was asked by a debate moderator if, as president, he would demand Americans follow his diet. Booker, surprised by the personal question, said no. He did not win the nomination.

More meat, less elite

Meat, or lack thereof, has gathered more significance in the second Trump presidency via Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again initiative. Kennedy, who touts his “carnivore diet,” says he “only (eats) meat or fermented foods.” He has even modified the food pyramid – the Department of Agriculture’s visual nutrition guide – shifting red meat from a food to be consumed sparingly to a high dietary priority.

Meanwhile, multiple Republican-leaning states have banned cell-cultured meat, or meat produced in a lab, for not being “real” and, so, being dangerous. After signing a ban on cultured meat, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared that the bill represented a battle against the global elite and its “authoritarian goals.”

While the beef between Paxton and Talarico will likely resolve after the 2026 midterms, appeals to meat, meat eaters and meat-eating in U.S. political communication will not.

As available meat substitutes increase, economic burdens on ranchers rise and debates over the meat industry’s impact on climate change intensify, we expect meat’s culture war cachet to surge too.

“Tofu Talarico” is just one of what will be numerous examples of meat symbolizing what the future of the country, its leaders and its citizens should be.

S. Marek Muller is an associate professor of communication studies at Texas State University. David Rooney is an associate professor of practice at the University of Wyoming.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

The life and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein were so complex that 5 years after his death, there is much about him that remains yet unknown. The system of sexual violence and exploitation that he devised is as infamous as it is uncovered. The financial structures he set up for himself were so complex that it takes hours to list them all, and his political and business connections were so vast and mysterious that to describe them in detail makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist.

But knowing and sharing the Epstein details is important because the late billionaire was part of a larger class of business oligarchs who have teamed up with each other against democracy, in the United States and around the world. Greg Olear, my guest for this episode, knows a lot about all of this. He has written the book on it, in fact, and it’s out now under the title, “Another Wonderful Secret,” which is a reference to a birthday greeting that Donald Trump sent to Epstein that has since become infamous. Greg is also the host of two podcasts, “Prevail” and “The Five 8.”

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:46 — Epstein’s early years as a teacher and then money manager

14:41 — Epstein and Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell

21:02 — Epstein’s decades of close friendship with Donald Trump

24:51 — Sexual harrasment and abuse as social networking for the Epstein Class

30:46 — Epstein’s temporary fallout with Trump and 2016 reconciliation via Steve Bannon

35:30 — After his prison release, Epstein became much more reactionary

38:16 — The mystery surrounding Epstein’s death

40:36 — Joe Biden and Merrick Garland failed to expose the truth about Epstein’s crimes

46:28 — Conclusion

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• Newly released documents show that Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with blocking women scientists

• Covered-up abuse in far-right Christian churches and the origins of Pizzagate and QAnon

• Jeffrey Epstein and the crisis of elite impunity

• Secular post-libertarianism and the Epstein class

• Science fiction and the reactionary mind

Audio Transcript

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

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Greg Olear. Hey, Greg. Welcome to Theory of Change.

OLEAR: Hey, thanks so much for having me. Good to see you.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it’s [00:03:00] good to do our first collaboration together. Hopefully one of many more in the future. Okay, so the book that you’ve got here that we’re talking about today it’s within your, general ambit of trying to show context for news stories that people know about and give them the bigger picture. Is that right?

OLEAR: Yeah, that’s right. Basically the way that I see it is the media is very good at telling you what happened that day, what is new. It’s called news for a reason, because it’s new, right? But once they tell you the one thing, they move on, and it’s especially true now when, the internet makes it—at least 50 years ago, you had to pause and take a breath and wait for the evening edition to come out. Now it’s this constant 24/7 barrage of news and they do a very good job covering the news. They-- What they don’t do a good job of is putting the news together and showing and explaining how one story relates to another.

And so for the last, like, I don’t know, [00:04:00] nine years now, that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I’ve been trying to provide just a, more big picture look at some of the big stories involving, My first book was Trump and Russia involving Brett Kavanaugh, involving Leonard Leo, who’s the the, the Supreme Court whisperer that put all the people on the Supreme Court and has all this money.

And now the Jeffrey Epstein story is so complicated and so, tentacled that it sounds, even writing the book, it sounds like something that, it, is from a, not even a movie, because a movie’s not enough time. This is like a seven, seven-season series on HBO or something.

It just keeps going and getting crazier and crazier. And the longer it goes on and the more we learn, the harder it is to remember all the stuff that happened before and to keep everything kind of in your head in context. So I wanted to do that and I wanted to kind of explain to everybody what I knew, because people were asking me in my, my real day life, like, “What do you think about [00:05:00] Epstein?

What’s going on?” And there’s so much going on that I just wrote a book about it. And the book is, it’s written in the form of a a Q&A. So it’s, the subtitle i- is Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein. And I find that’s a good format for me to write it, but also f- I think for people to read it, because it seems to be more engaging, and once you get going, you just kind of go, and by the end of it, hopefully you have a better idea of what we know, what we don’t know, what we’re waiting to know, and that’s the whole point of what I’m trying to do.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and I guess the other thing also about Epstein that is important, and, we’ll get to the details of some of what you’re d- you’re saying here in a second. But, the other thing about Epstein and, why this story matters more than just, as a generic crime story or, in his particular connections to, specific political figures like Donald Trump, is that [00:06:00] because of the, extensive public disclosure of the documents of-- that he, ac- accrued over the years, this guy, obviously he was a sex criminal, so, like, that m- is something that perhaps demarcates him from, the other people.

But, like, there is a reason that there is this phrase, the Epstein class. It’s not just a, referring to the sex crimes. It’s referring to people who manipulate the financial and the political and the organizational systems across parties, across nations, for their own benefit and to the detriment of larger society

OLEAR: Yeah. I think, and that’s a good point because whenever somebody’s picture appears and Epstein’s in a photo with somebody, or Ghislaine Maxwell even more so, because she made a point to get her picture taken with as many people as possible. Just because someone is in a picture with Ghislaine Maxwell only means that they were in the same place with Ghislaine Maxwell once.

Doesn’t mean anything. [00:07:00] And I think to your point, most, many if not most of the people involved in the Epstein class and even involved with Epstein had nothing to do with sex trafficking. It’s a, I think it’s a small percentage of the people that shared that, that disgusting predilection that he had, and as you say, made him unique in this world.

And what my book is about is not the sex crimes as much as everything else, which is, getting at really the center of power. Who has power? Who has money? Who has influence? and how, can we understand it to make it better and make everything more democratic in the United States and, in the world?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, sounds like a great a great idea there. So all right.

Epstein’s early years as a teacher and then money manager

SHEFFIELD: so let’s maybe start though, like, where did this guy come from? I think a lot of people, they, know about his crimes and his c- connections but his early, his origin story often is not as widely known, I think

OLEAR: Yeah. Well, he, I [00:08:00] mean, the one... We’ll start at the beginning. He’s born in, New York City in Queens, and he spends, like, one semester at Cooper Union, which is a very good university, by the way. Sometimes now I think the revisionist history is to say, “Well, Epstein was stupid and he was dumb, and he was a...”

He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t dumb, and he was very charming. He just, that’s, he was clearly a charismatic, charming guy, and I think he was very, good, especially at getting older, powerful, particularly men, but women too, to like him and to trust him, and he was good at ingratiating himself into these the halls of these, powerful people.

So he started working at the Dalton School, which is this very prestigious sch- private school in New York City. He wasn’t there very long. He there, a lot has been made that Bill Barr’s father was the headmaster at that school. We’re not, we still don’t know for sure if, Donald Barr actually hired Epstein or not, because Barr left in the spring and Epstein came the following fall, so they were never [00:09:00] actually at the school together at the same time.

I personally, I think that is a little bit overblown and over-reported on, but, we’ll, see. I may be wrong about it.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and even if it’s true, like, does it really matter?

OLEAR: Well,

SHEFFIELD: much does it matter?

OLEAR: It doesn’t. So at the school, he meets all these people and he winds up meeting Ace Greenberg, who is the the head of Bear Stearns. Super powerful Wall Street guy.

Ace Greenberg thinks he’s terrific, so he goes to work for Bear Stearns and he winds up doing the job that is basically tax avoidance. He’s good at offshores. He’s good at figuring out how to hide the, rich people’s money, and that’s what he’s doing at Bear Stearns. And it’s weird because he jumps up from the ranks.

Like, he had a very high-powered job pretty quickly and kind of leapfrogged over other people. And there was, even at the time, and this is in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, even then there was some like, “Who’s this guy? What’s the deal with him and Ace Greenberg?” And I don’t know the answer to that, except that the pattern with [00:10:00] Epstein is that he’s very good, as I said, of, making these older men trust him and want to teach him things.

And that’s how it was with Greenberg. He got in trouble at Bear Stearns with the SEC because of some filing requirement. He got mad at the SEC and left, but didn’t actually leave. It was kind of complicated He winds up going to London. He had a girlfriend named Paula Hale Fisher who he went to London with, and while there he met a guy named Nick Lees, who’s about around his own age, and Nick Lees’s father Doug Lees, Douglas Lees, who lived on-- They were in London, but they also had a house in the country, and they were kind of wealthy, and Doug Lees was, that’s a name probably most people don’t know, and I think in this whole story, he may well be the most important person to know, and he’s the one that’s talked about the least. He’s British, he’s an arms dealer. There’s very little about him online. I write in the book that there’s literally more pi-pictures online of J.D.

Salinger than of [00:11:00] him. So he’s reclusive. He was definitely an arms dealer. We can’t say for sure if he worked for MI6 because people at MI6 aren’t allowed to say that they worked for MI6, but he almost certainly did because he was negotiating an arms deal called Al Yamamah between the British government and Saudi Arabia.

And this is around the, like, mid-’80s time when, right around Iran-Contra, with the sort of heyday of these, like, rogue arms dealer types. So you have, like, Adnan Khashoggi was somebody that, that he knew and Lees was doing business with. So Epstein is kind of, as I understand it, Lees’ right-hand man.

And in the Times of London, there was a story about it where they say he was-- Lees mentored him. That’s the word that they use. So there’s lots of speculation about whether or not he was, had ties to intelligence. And I think Todd Blanche even said, “There’s no tie. There’s no evidence that suggests that.”

I can’t remember if it was Blanche or Patel. And it’s like, he worked for a guy f- that worked f-for MI6. What are you talking about? So [00:12:00] in, in those arms deals he was working for through this MI6, he was working with Saudi intelligence, clearly. Remember, he had a passp- he had a Saudi passport that they found when they searched his apartment from around this time period, showing that he came here, he went there, and kind of, he was in the same places at the same time based on the passport stamps that all this stuff was going down.

And the person in charge of Israeli military intelligence at this time, who he was also dealing with because they were involved, Israel was involved with Iran-Contra, and every- It’s a s- It’s a small club of people that do these big arms deal things, and he was, part of that group. The person in charge of Israeli military intelligence was Ehud Barak.

And we often hear, “Oh, Ehud Barak, the former prime minister,” and we know he has ties to Epstein. He’s visiting Epstein’s house, blah, blah, blah. But he was also the head of a major intelligence unit in Israel. So the idea that Epstein isn’t connected to intelligence is just, it’s just, it’s not right.

It’s just flat out [00:13:00] untrue. So Lees kind of I think hooks him into this world, this sort of secretive world. And Epstein has the skill set where he can hide money. He’s good at moving large amounts of money around and have it not be detected, which is a very useful skill set when you’re doing these arms deals that you don’t want people to find out the details about.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, for sure.

OLEAR: So that’s, kind of the origin story. He comes out of this in the, mid, late ‘80s. He’s made a lot of money, and he and Lees have a falling out where he stops working for him because apparently the, official story is that Epstein has charged Concorde jet flights and five-star hotels to the business expenses, and Lees didn’t like that and fired him, and who knows what really happened.

But then he goes to work for a guy named Steven Hoffenberg whose name you, hear a lot in connection with the survivors because he ran a Ponzi scheme called Towers Financial. This is around the, late ‘80s. And Epstein, according to Hoffenberg, was the [00:14:00] basically the chief operating officer of the Ponzi scheme.

But Epstein didn’t go to prison, didn’t get charged. Hoffenberg wound up taking the fall. He spent, I think, 18 years in prison, and when he came out, was so shocked and appalled by what Epstein had done with the survivors that he, kind of dedicated his time and the rest of his life to working on that, to his, to his credit, and trying to expose what happened.

So this is a crazy-- He’s a teacher. He’s working in offshores. He’s working for arms dealers and intelligence people. He has a brief foray into a sideline career where he’s finding money that’s lost for, like, dictators and people like that. And then he’s working at doing this Ponzi scheme.

Epstein and Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell

OLEAR: And then at some point after that’s when he starts hooking up with Les Wexner, and we enter into the Trump phase of things where everybody kind of, associates him with. But he’s been doing this for years, and he knows really powerful, rich people and has for [00:15:00] decades. Including, by the way Robert Maxwell and Ghislaine Maxwell, because the idea that Ghislaine Maxwell and, Epstein met each other for the first time after Robert Maxwell died is almost certainly not true.

it’s a narrative that they put in the media, but even if you go look in the birthday book, one of the guys who wrote in the birthday book references Ghislaine Maxwell having, been at, Bear Stearns in, like, 1979. So, and, oh, the teenage daughter of Robert Maxwell or Bob Max, whatever he wrote. Robert Maxwell is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father. He died in November of 1991 when he fell off or was pushed off his yacht which happens, I guess.

but before that, he was pretty old and he was right on the brink of, his entire financial empire crashing because he had been embezzling money from the pensions of all of his employees. He ran the Mirror newspapers in Britain. But going way

SHEFFIELD: a bunch of other newspapers

OLEAR: Yes, huge, umbrella thing. But [00:16:00] going way back into the war, he’s born in Czech, what was then Czechoslovakia.

He winds up, kind of working for British intelligence during the Second World War in, interrogating people at the camps because he spoke different languages. And after the war is kind of, he sets up these publishing companies. But he is basically like Epstein. They’re, similar in that they’re, he’s a person who’s at the nexus of a lot of different power centers, right?

If you’re, if you are an arms dealer or let’s, reverse it. If you are a, member of the British royal family and you want to talk to an arms dealer, you don’t pick up the phone and call the arms dealer. You call Robert Maxwell, and Robert Maxwell talks to the arms dealer. Th- there has to be these middlemen, these, th- these conduits,

SHEFFIELD: Wheel greasers.

OLEAR: Exactly. That’s what he was. And he did a lot of other things. He also kind of later in the game went into business with Semion Mogilevich, who at the time was the head of the Russian mafia, [00:17:00] of which we’ve heard so much, and was his business partner. This is all per, there’s a great book called “Israel’s Super Spy: Robert Maxwell,” that came out in, I don’t know, even before my first novel was out.

So that’s a really interesting book for anybody interested in learning more about him. So he’s in there and he knows all these people. Robert Maxwell is, has ties to the KGB, really deep ties to the KGB. He has ties to-

SHEFFIELD: he also, yeah, like, was a somebody who made his publications aligned with the left-wing political parties. I think we, we do have to say that.

OLEAR: he, did that, but also he ran the science press. Like a lot of his-- I forget the name of the company that he ran. All of the scientific journals were published by that press. So it was a way of kind of controlling the knowledge base after the Second World War. when we’re still in the time of the nuclear weapons and all this stuff.

He kind of had a, handle on that and a, network out to these, like, r- [00:18:00] smart physicists and scientists and tech people, which Epstein also did. That was a whole sideline of things that Epstein did that doesn’t get talked about quite as much. So but yes, he-- And “The Mirror” is a left-wing, left-leaning place.

Robert Maxwell was nominally, if he was in the United States, he would’ve been a Democrat, as opposed to Rupert Murdoch, who was the same age, but clearly not a Democrat. But he also... Yeah, no, they were rivals. They didn’t like each other. Yeah. But Maxwell had a basically a prostitution thing going on in Bulgaria while it was still closed off, and there’s some speculation that when Ghislaine and Jeffrey hooked up in 1991, early 1992, that’s when Epstein started up with all the sex trafficking stuff.

Like Ghislaine is potentially the one who brought that in because there’s really not much evidence at all of Epstein doing this before they got together. In fact, Epstein had girlfriends [00:19:00] who were his own age up until the time that he met Ghislaine. So, yeah. So that’s

SHEFFIELD: An interesting detail. Yeah, I didn’t know that. And, like, just as a media angle to this regarding Maxwell and, his papers it’s not a practice that exists within the United States, but in Europe, especially in the UK, but not just there a lot of the tabloid down-market newspapers for decades have always had a feature, a daily feature of a topless woman, like as a beauty contest.

Like a, par- partially nude woman. Like, they were printing pornography in the newspaper. And I’m not going to say it was all, that they were all exploited, but, it was not the way that porn works now where the creators are in control of everything now.

It was, women who just wanted, 100 bucks. And so they’re, and so they were like, “Oh, well, I can get a, 200 bucks if I show up here and take my dress off.” And that’s, a pretty could be a way of, [00:20:00] getting people that are hard up for money and that’s looks like how some of these people might have gotten started with all that.

OLEAR: Yeah, no, it and Epstein was very good, obviously, and Ghislaine at finding people that were hard up and that had the personality type that they thought they could influence and all of that. Yeah, for sure. Maxwell, t- horrible person. Just a horrible, man. But there’s also, there, there’s this question that people often ask is, “Who is Epstein working for?

He’s working for the Israelis. He’s working for the Russians. He’s working for the...” Epstein was working for Epstein, just like Robert Maxwell was working for Robert Maxwell. They didn’t care about anything other, I think, about any- anyone other than themselves and their own ability to live life and to be, connected to power in the way that they were.

And, I think they liked the idea that they could call the head of the KGB and John Tower and, get the PROMIS software sold. Robert Maxwell was selling the PROMIS software. that’s a whole other ball of wax, but only tangentially [00:21:00] related to Epstein. But yeah.

Epstein’s decades of close friendship with Donald Trump

SHEFFIELD: Okay. And then in the middle of his rise to riches is when Epstein came into contact with Donald Trump, who eventually became one of his closest friends because, like recognizes like. So tell us about their, friendship

OLEAR: I think it just starts, they, they’re in the same kind of social circles. He knew y- they have a lot of friends in common, Ace Greenberg, Adnan Khashoggi, Robert Maxwell, who, you know, who knew Trump pretty well. And it, I think Ghislaine is, the one that sort of brought them all together.

And it’s like any f- I think any friendship, it developed over time. They both were in the same part of New York City. They both liked to do the same things. They both liked to be around, young pretty women. They were both, had problems with that. They both had places in, Palm Beach, in Florida, and I think it just [00:22:00] blossomed from there.

Where they were to- and they were together a lot, and they were together i- in party situations. They were together, they’re, he’s on the plane. I don’t know, it, there’s a lot of

SHEFFIELD: in Florida too.

OLEAR: Yes. Yeah. because they’re just in each other’s orbit all the time. And you go back and look and, and Melania is in on this too.

Like, this is the, time that Trump starts really hanging around with Epstein is also the time that he’s, he’s with Melania. He’s starting up with Melania, and she’s right there. I’m not saying she’s doing anything, but she’s certainly present in rooms where Epstein is, where Ghislaine is, and she, she was his girlfriend and wife.

Like, she knew all these people. and you can see it in the photos. The most famous picture of Trump and Epstein, Melania’s right in between them, so, so I think it just sort of blossomed over time. And as you say, like l- like recognizes like. And what these guys were into is not something I think that most people are.

And once you-- I would imagine [00:23:00] that, once you’re that kind of criminal and you f- figure out that your buddy also likes the same kind of thing and is willing to take the same kind of risks that you’re willing to take everything just gets, ginned up and, pushed to the limits.

Trump has always been a person who doesn’t face consequences for his actions. This is the main problem w-we have with him. For his, pretty much his entire life, any time something has gone wrong, he’s either declared bankruptcy or his daddy came and buy him out, or whatever it is. You know that song “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” by Warren...

yeah. it’s, send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this. That was Trump for basically until Fred died, and after that, he was surrounded by people that he got to do, his bidding, whether it’s Roy Cohn or whoever.

SHEFFIELD: Got bailed out by NBC when it,

OLEAR: Yes,

SHEFFIELD: hit rock bottom and he would’ve had to declare personal bankruptcy.

OLEAR: Right. Right. And

SHEFFIELD: gave him the lifeline

OLEAR: Yeah. And God knows what Deutsche Bank and the Russians and who [00:24:00] knows?

Well, we may never know any of that stuff. But he’s, in that world too. And eh, supposedly Trump and Epstein had a falling out around the purchase of that property in Florida, which they both wanted and Trump wound up getting, and then he flipped it to the Russian guy for like three times the value like a year later.

The property that they were both trying to buy in Florida was originally owned by Les Wexner, by the way, which I-- which is interesting because Epstein obviously wound up moving into what was called the Wexner house on the Upper East Side of of Manhattan. So it’s just these worlds are small.

That’s one thing that I’ve, kind of taken from it. It’s like there’s not that many people, h- how many arms dealers are there? I don’t know. But i- at that level, there’s not that many. So it’s, it’s-- I

SHEFFIELD: not out there putting up a billboard

OLEAR: Right. Right. You gotta know where to find them, yeah. All of that stuff.

So, yeah

Sexual harrasment and abuse as social networking for the Epstein Class

SHEFFIELD: and this, recognition o- of mutual evilness, frankly it, [00:25:00] does kind of also fit within the, rise of Epstein, I would say, as well. and it, goes to the title of your book, “Another Wonderful Secret,” which, well, I want to talk about the specifics of that in a second.

But first, I, There is undoubtedly, and, we saw this really during the when Me Too stories were just coming out, so much, is that abusing women or mocking them or exploiting them, this is actually a form of networking for some men who are, disgusting individuals. Like, it-- Once they see that there’s another guy who does that it is, it’s another wonderful secret between them.

And so it-- they become fast friends over their mutual loathing and exploitation of women. and I think that played a big role in Epstein’s rise, in addition to his other connections.

OLEAR: I think you’re, I think you’re right. Brooke, Harrington, who I’ve had on my show, who wrote the... she’s an expert in all the offshore stuff. [00:26:00] She calls it the, Depravity Olympics the Competitive Depravity Olympics, where, these guys are literally trying to outdo each other by what shit they can get away with and how bad it can get.

And, to your point, I think you’re right that, they’re just trying to one-up each other. And that’s really, that’s the other reason that I wrote the book is Trump is-- I think we can agree, reasonable people can agree, Trump is clearly trying to cover something up for, in the Epstein files.

He clearly does not want the files out, which is why even Pam Bondi’s ability to get rid of it wasn’t good enough for him, and he had to put Todd Blanche in there to really make it all go away. And the question is, so what is it that he’s hiding? what can, it possibly be that’s so bad that he, who’s done all these horrible things, he’s 80 years old, he’s behaved horribly for 80 years, he’s broken God knows how many laws.

Y- we know he’s, he lost the E. Jean Carroll thing. He’s, we can say, he, lost the sexual assault/rape thing. Yeah, we, know [00:27:00] this is all true. He was convicted o- on 34 counts in New York City. We know that this is true. Jack Smith and the documents case, he ha- he thinks he has a dead to rights case that, that was shut down.

That seems to be true. We know all of this. And even I think people on some intuitive level know that he almost certainly raped underage girls. that seems to be a thing, that nobody’s like, “Oh my God, I can’t imagine Trump would ever do that.” Everyone just sort of says, “Yeah, well,” So I don’t know that even that is bad enough for the people that like him to turn on him.

So what is it? What i- what can it possibly be? Because I don’t think it’s about sex, I think it’s about money or worse. And we may never know. We may never know

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it might be about his friends also. I mean, not necessarily be about him. It may be about him covering up the crimes of other people that are anything, a lot worse than anything

OLEAR: so cute that you think he has friends. That’s nice.

SHEFFIELD: Well, true. Okay. fair,

OLEAR: I know what you, I know what you [00:28:00] mean. I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: yeah. And so, okay, so but specifically though, the just for people may have forgotten or there’s so much news f- flying fast and thick nowadays so the...

Another wonderful secret. what’s the, what does that mean?

OLEAR: Okay,

SHEFFIELD: this context?

OLEAR: The Wall Street Journal broke the story some months ago. I’ve, I, can’t, I no longer have any track of time. I don’t know if you have this problem, but I feel like we’re living in this weird time loop. But some months ago, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the birthday book, which was something that Ghislaine Maxwell put together for Jeffrey Epstein to celebrate his 50th birthday, which was in 2003.

So she had all these people write letters and send photos and all this stuff, and she put this book together. Which if they were normal people, you would say, “That’s really quite lovely that she did that.” it’s almost something that a old married couple would do, so Donald Trump sends in this weird fake dialogue thing typed out over the, silhouette of what [00:29:00] appears to be a girl, not a woman.

And the last line in his little thing is, “Let’s let every day be another wonderful secret.” And then he signs it in that horrible scrawl he has, which looks, in this design, like pubic hair. And I think, y- he denies it and all. It’s clearly him. I mean, why would he-- why would someone forge that in 2003 because they knew he was going to be president someday?

Like, it, that, that seems preposterous. Although, it’s actually kind of creative to do the, signature where the pubic hair should be. And I think the best defense for him would be, “I’m not creative enough to come up with that.” But he... So he did this thing. We don’t know what another wonderful secret is.

He uses the word enigma in his note. That’s not a very Trumpy word. And people have speculated that was a code word because it’s an anagram of gamine, G-A-M-I-N-E, which is, like, a young girl. That’s just a theory that people have and that, that was kind of their [00:30:00] ha ho, Look at what we’re getting away with. And we know that it’s true of Epstein. And I’ve said, this is another thing that I’ve said many times. Like, right now, the best thing that we can say about Trump, the best thing, the best way to read what we know, is that for two decades or so, he was really, good friends with the two most notorious sex traffickers in recent memory, hung out with them a lot, and allowed them to use Mar-a-Lago to recruit girls for them to rape.

That’s the best spin that we can put on what Trump is and what he knew. That should be disqualifying, I think, but it’s not, clearly. So, I don’t know

Epstein’s temporary fallout with Trump and 2016 reconciliation via Steve Bannon

SHEFFIELD: And so it is true that, it, Tr- Epstein was anti-Trump for a, little while. But once Trump won, he threw all of that [00:31:00] away. And he actually reconciled with Trump. And this is something that isn’t widely known actually.

And and I actually had to, go into the jmail.world website, which is a fantastic resource

OLEAR: It’s so good. I lo- whoever did it...

SHEFFIELD: the Epstein emails. But there, there’s a, so there’s a, an email that he was sending to this guy a- named Boris Nikolic in December of 2016. And it’s interesting. So Jeffrey Epstein emailed ... So they’re having a, back-and-forth discussion about, their year-end plans, what they’re doing, ar- around the end of the year. And Epstein tells Nikolic what he’s doing, and I’m going to quote directly from what Epstein in his very illiterate prose says.

I’m going to quote this verbatim. He says, December 26, 2016, 1:15 AM, quote, “Fourth, I’m in [00:32:00] Palm with all the Trump boys. Fun.” So he was hanging out, according to him, in this private unmonitored email, which he would have no reason to lie. Like, why would you lie about that? Saying that he spent basically New Year’s with the Trump boys. So he was definitely in with Trump. And this was also around the time that he had gotten in thick with Trump’s top advisor at that time, Steve Bannon.

T-talk, talk about that and his associations with Bannon, and we don’t even know right now fully what they did together and all that footage has never been released.

OLEAR: It’s very strange, and I should preface this by saying Bannon, to me, is one of the more inscrutable characters in this whole thing. I-- because he’s clearly a smart guy, and he also clearly knows that he’s bullshitting, I think. [00:33:00] Like I-- you can tell, like he

SHEFFIELD: Oh, he collects sociopaths. Like, that’s what Bannon does. He finds people who are criminals and he says, “I love you. Give me money.” And that’s what he did with Epstein, I think

OLEAR: I think so. that’s actually a very-- Thank you, because that’s a good way of, looking at it. But and you could tell he doesn’t... I don’t know. I-- My sense is the stuff he’s saying, I don’t think he believes it. I think he just says stuff that he thinks is going to be incendiary or help his cause. I think that he and Epstein at that point were both a little bit on the outs with Trump, and I think there’s an email in there where they’re saying, I forget which one of them wrote it, like, “Oh, if he knew we were hanging out together, he’d be mad.”

It was something like that. Like something middle school girls would say at, in the cafeteria, “ oh my

SHEFFIELD: I think it was like right before he went to jail, I think. Because he, yeah, because like, yeah, Bannon had been thrown out at that time. So this was after Trump or Epstein had spent New Year’s with the Trump boys. So like that’s what he was upset or he thought Trump would be angry that he was hanging out with, [00:34:00] Bannon.

But go ahead.

OLEAR: Yeah. And then Bannon apparently made this documentary or was working on a documentary which we still have only seen the trailer of. The trailer, last time I checked, is still on YouTube. And it’s, you can tell kind of what he’s doing. Remember, Bannon is from Hollywood. He comes from LA, like he, he has somewhat of a film background, so he does understand that world more than, I don’t know, other th- there’s a lot of very artless people in MAGA, but he seems to get it with that.

And, so Epstein, he has like a beard, he’s got the glasses, he looks like kind of professorial. He’s got books behind him, which I’ve never seen Epstein actually read a book or heard of him reading a book ever. But and you can tell he’s trying to do this thing where he’s softening the image and all this kind of stuff.

But for what purpose? I don’t know. Is he really th- does he really think he’s going to rehabilitate this monster? Maybe. I mean, maybe, Bannon just looked at it like a challenge. Maybe he [00:35:00] looked at it

SHEFFIELD: wanted the money.

OLEAR: That is also true. that’s b- you’re, probably right, actually. And the power and the halls of power and the Rolodex and of that kind of stuff.

SHEFFIELD: It doesn’t matter if it works. It just matters that he gets the access and the money. Like for Bannon, that’s the on- that’s the top objectives. Other stuff? Sure, yeah, he’ll take it.

OLEAR: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that’s the critical thing. So who knows? But that’s-- I think there’s a lot there that we don’t know yet, and we may, we may never know. Who knows?

After his prison release, Epstein became much more reactionary

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, so this was also after he had, been in prison the first time. And so after he came out, and especially when Me Too began Jeffrey Epstein basically became like the, central node of a social network for predators, essentially. And, because he, was, And you can see this in all the, in the emails.

Like, he was deluged with creeps [00:36:00] emailing him saying one of, one of two things: “How do I get with this woman who is, half my age and could be my granddaughter?” Or “How do I stop people from getting mad at me for harassing women?” Like he’s just have, like that’s so many of the emails in addition to all of his, financial, bullshit.

And, he... And you can see it, that he became, I think, a lot more... He was always obviously, against spreading, sharing the wealth, if you will. but he became much more right-wing, during that time after he got out of prison, I think, and really slotted into this, literally with Peter Thiel.

He became investment partners with him. And there is this, a- again, and, it sounds like a conspiracy theory if you tell people that there actually are these, globalist billionaires who work [00:37:00] together to destroy democracy and steal money from the government and commit sex crimes. Some of them.

Like, if you say that, that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s actually true.

OLEAR: It’s very true. It’s, it’s-- Yeah, it’s just demonstrably that is what is happening and, it probably has always happened to some degree. Yeah, and they’re all, there’s some- that, that sociopathy is something that they all have in common, and I think to be a billionaire like that and to be fueled in that way, you have to have somewhat of a sociopathic, misanthropic tendencies because I don’t know, like Jeff Bezos, for example, is worth God knows how much money.

Like why can’t you pay your people a little bit more so they don’t have to go on food st- like what’s wrong with you that you wouldn’t do that? But he just, I guess, doesn’t care as long as he can have his wedding in Venice and the, And Bezos is actually one of the relative to some of the other oligarchs, isn’t so [00:38:00] bad.

At least he created a, web service that people use and like,

SHEFFIELD: and isn’t trying to steal money from dying children in Africa

OLEAR: Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Or out or kill them. Yes. Yes. Mm-hmm.

The mystery surrounding Epstein’s death

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Okay. Well, so, and, so that’s, that takes us up then to the the, final moments of his life which still remain shrouded in mystery, unfortunately. So let’s let’s talk about that

OLEAR: I have no take on it one way or the other. I mean, I kind of, because of what I tend to write about, I’m very, sensitive about being perceived as conspiratorial. So whenever something seems like catnip for conspiracy theory, I tend to stay away from it. And the at first, I should say, the whole, like, who killed him?

Was he murdered? Was it a suicide? All of that, [00:39:00] I, I-- it just struck me as one of those things that, that you could go down that rabbit hole and get off the, it, takes you away from the money, which is more important. But now, stuff has come out that makes it... I mean, I don’t... Did he really kill himself?

When I first heard about it, I thought, “I would kill myself if I was him.” I wouldn’t want to be alive anymore after that. You’re just going to be in prison and it’s, you’re, screwed, Somebody’s going to come kill me eventually anyway. I might as well do it myself and then I can control it or whatever.

Smuggling something in, controlling the cameras and all that. There’s all these theories about who might have done it. But the person who could more efficiently than anyone have controlled the, the guards at the jail and what they saw and what they didn’t saw is the guy that was there, which is Epstein, who had money, who had funds, and all this stuff.

So initially, I was just like, “All right, he killed himself, whatever. I’m, glad he’s dead.” That’s, how he died isn’t really [00:40:00] all that interesting. But I think now, if he was murdered and there is some sort of cover-up, and there is evidence to suggest this. there was that Reddit post by the guard about people coming the night before.

I saw a, video of somebody who’s a mortician explaining about the pictures of the body. There’s all these things, but I don’t know about it, and I, What I would say would only be speculative, but I will say it’s we- it’s, weird. Like everything else about the guy, it’s weird. He died as he lived, in, in shrouded in secrecy and weirdness.

Yeah, I don’t know. What do you

Joe Biden and Merrick Garland failed to expose the truth about Epstein’s crimes

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, the government, I mean, there, there really should be, in my opinion a definitive, unlimited access report about what happened to the guy, and nobody’s made it. Like, and, this was, like, the Biden administration, they dropped the ball in a lot of ways.

They, should have made that, and they should have released the files. Like, that’s-- They should have done these things, and I mean, like, [00:41:00] Trump he didn’t say it as much himself personally. He was very careful actually to avoid... Like, a lot of people claim that Trump said he would release the Epstein files.

No, he didn’t. His people said that be- who were not in the know that he, wanted to protect whatever is i-in this information. They’re the ones that said that. And so, but that detail aside that’s, There, there’s such a continuing series, and this is again part of the bigger picture here, that the Democratic Party doesn’t understand politics and doesn’t understand media.

Like, they think, “Well, if the institutions say a thing, then it’s over. We don’t have to worry about it. The public will accept it and, we don’t have to think about it anymore.” And that’s never how things have been, number one but especially in the age of the internet, where any asshole like me with a microphone can get on get on and say what they think.

And, you got somebody who is [00:42:00] so infamous, so evil that... And did so many terrible things and there’s so much mystery about whatever it is that he did. You’ve gotta, you have to step up to the plate. And, it’s good to see now that there are some Democrats like Robert Garcia and, a bunch of the other ones who actually are trying to get to the bottom of things and, have real transparency about this.

But the Biden administration should have done this job. This, these guys shouldn’t have to be doing cleanup on this.

OLEAR: No we, can go through and discuss the many, ways that the various Democratic administrations have screwed this up by handing Trump more and more power and not using every lever at their disposal, every arrow in the proverbial quiver to stop it from happening. Starting with Obama after the initial election when there was all the Russian stuff and he just could have named a, special prosecutor immediately and instead he went windsurfing and just, was like, “I’m out,” and sort of abrogated the, [00:43:00] leadership role that I think a lot of people were looking for in that moment.

And, Merrick Garland is, a, just a catastrophic error on the part of Biden. I mean, just a useless person to your point, just so consumed with norms in the Justice Department and it’s like, dude, if you don’t go after these people, they’re going to get back into power and they’re going to chop this whole thing down, which is what’s happening.

And which is something that, I wrote about in my book before the election, and I’m hardly the only one who knew what they were going to do. You knew what they were going to do. this is not, it’s not rocket science. When Kash Patel goes on podcasts and says they’re going to, they’re going to use retribution to go after the enemies and all of this, what he means by that is that’s what they’re going to do, and you have

SHEFFIELD: It’s not a joke. Like, this is fucking serious

OLEAR: Exactly. Exactly. And, the Epstein files being released would’ve been a really good way to, nullify his campaign, Trump’s or, even if after he won [00:44:00] to stop it in the, in, nip it in the bud, so to speak, but no, they just, there’s no, It-- A- and the Democratic leadership, Schumer and, Jeffries are even worse.

I mean, they’re just, they seem to not be aware that it’s no longer 1996. I don’t know what’s going on with those guys, but it’s not working to such a degree that it makes you wonder if they’re just in on the whole thing and there’s just controlled o- If they were a controlled opposition, they wouldn’t be doing anything any differently than what they’re doing now.

Put it that way. So,

SHEFFIELD: One could say that, although Hanlon’s razor is always persuasive, which is never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.

And, there’s certainly a lot of stupidity in the Democratic elites. We can see that for sure. even just recently in the, New York elections, like, whatever your views of, these candidates y- at least one of them was saying stuff that would have been more offensive to the voters if her [00:45:00] opponent had been more adept at campaigning.

But they couldn’t even do that. Like, they’re so terrible at opposition research that, again, like, like whatever you think about Rand Platner in Maine, like, the Democratic Party didn’t know any of these things that came out about him while he was, rubbing around for money in the early days.

Or even, m- much later than that. They didn’t bother to do real oppo on the guy, and so now a lot of them are upset that he has y- some things that people are... don’t like. And it’s fair for people to be upset about that. But again, who is to blame for this? Well, it’s the Democratic Party

OLEAR: And, journalists. And journalists. Journalists also, yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s true, but I mean, I... It’s hard for me to fault somebody who works for The Washington Post or, New York Times that they don’t know inside sources in Maine pol- Like, nobody goes to Maine, I’m [00:46:00] sorry to tell you guys who live there. And it’s a great state. I like it.

Beautiful

OLEAR: is in Maine. Tucker Carlson is in Maine. I don’t know

SHEFFIELD: yeah, Well, but yeah, I mean, it doesn’t even have a million people as far as I remember, or just over a million if it is. So like it’s, I, it’s hard for me to say peop- that the media should have sources there, but for God’s sake, the political party of Maine should have had sources in Maine.

OLEAR: Mm-hmm. Yeah. the ball was dropped. That’s

Conclusion

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, all right. Well, so I- what’s the final takeaway though of the book? Like when, people get to the end, what do you hope that they come away with?

OLEAR: I think, what I want people to understand is, first of all, the connections to the intelligence agencies, because that’s been something that the narrative in the legacy media seems to, contradict. And it’s clearly true that he had connections to various intelligence agencies, including [00:47:00] almost certainly the CIA because, what’s his name, Acosta said, “Oh, they told me he belonged to intelligence or whatever.”

That, there’s that whole thing when, he was the the US attorney in, southern Florida and gave him that sweetheart deal of sweetheart deals. So I think, that’s one of the things, and you were alluding to this earlier, and I can’t remember if it was before or after we turned the camera on, but Epstein is not unique.

He’s unique in that he ran the horrible child sex trafficking operation. I don’t think that there are other people like that in the, i- in his position that do that necessarily, and certainly not the way that he did it. But there are plenty of people out there who move money around, who hide money, who network, who hook up person A with person B, who have connections to intelligence agencies and arms dealers and members of the British royal family and, whatever you want to the, list goes on.

This is a, look at it. It’s a peek behind the curtain. It sounds [00:48:00] conspiratorial and crazy, like you also said, and again, I’m aware of that, and sometimes I step back and I’m like, “This is, this just sounds insane.” All of it sounds insane. But I-- m- maybe one of the reasons why everybody thinks this is a conspiracy theory is because every third thriller made in Hollywood has it at, as the center of its plot, which is the easiest way to, to make it seem like a conspiracy theory.

Like Sharon Stone says in Basic Instinct, “Why would I write a book about how I’m going to do the murder? And you know how I’m going to do it, because it’s written in my book, which is also a good defense against it.” Does that make sense?

SHEFFIELD: I mean, honestly, that is kind of the defense Trump does for his corruption. Well, if I talk about it in public and boast about it, then it’s not a crime. That’s-- This is the Trump actions

OLEAR: it’s, exactly right. So, Epstein is gone. Ghislaine Maxwell is still alive. I’m not a Polymarket guy, but if I could go on there and bet that she’s going to get a pardon immediately after the midterms, I would bet on that. I think Trump is just itching to do [00:49:00] it. I think he can’t wait to do it.

She’s still around. I think she’s not going to say anything useful and probably will get pardoned and we’ll never see her again. Trump is old. He’s going to go away. But we still have people in these networks that are doing stuff. Peter Thiel who met with Epstein many times and who was introduced to Epstein at least per the files by,

SHEFFIELD: his partner, actual business partner

OLEAR: By a guy named Ian Osborne, who’s a, British financier and also serves that function of hooking up really powerful rich person A with really powerful rich person B.

there are plenty of people like this. And on the other hand, and we should be clear about this, too. In the same way that just because you are in a picture with Ghislaine Maxwell doesn’t mean that you’re in on the whole thing. Just because three rich people go to Davos and have a chat doesn’t mean that they’re part of a secret society designed to undermine de- democracy.

That it-- if you’re a [00:50:00] very wealthy man or woman and you’re in that position of power, there’s not that many peers that you can talk to about the stuff that you need to talk to. So it does make sense that i- in the same way that, there are writers’ retreats and novelists get together and talk about writing stuff, that super rich evil oligarchs get together and talk about super rich evil oligarch stuff, which may or may not be inherently evil.

But yeah, or criminal. But, we have to ask ourselves as a society, like, what do we want this to be? Do we want to be a situation where it’s just super wealthy people who are grotesquely wealthy at, and grotesquely wealthy because they’re, not paying the taxes that they should and benefiting from governmental programs while everybody else suffers and loses money and goes bankrupt because of medical bills or whatever else, the... I, think that the purpose of democracy is to create a more equitable [00:51:00] society. I don’t object to people being wealthy, and far from it. Like, great. if you’re successful and you do a good job, you should be wealthy. But there, there’s a way to balance it where it’s not at the expense of so many people.

So many people. because I just don’t think it hurt-- I just th- I don’t think it helps anybody to have a society like where we’re headed which is less educated less able to care for themselves medically less lifespan shorter lifespans, all of that stuff. It’s like, what’s the point of this?

Even oligarchs need to go to the doctor.

Absolutely. Less transparency.

SHEFFIELD: thing that these, these guys want to do everything in the dark and keep everyone in the dark constantly. Like, as you said, they, attack education because they don’t want you to know how things work. Because if you knew how things work, then you would be upset

OLEAR: Yes, exactly right. Exactly right. And, I mean, Peter Thiel is obsessed with the Antichrist, but, in his defense, we’re all kind of s- self-absorbed, i’m, obsessed [00:52:00] with myself, too. just because someone is super wealthy doesn’t mean they’re a good person or that they know what-- how to run a government or what people want or need or anything like that.

So it’s going to be... This is an inflection point in history. And it’s very much still in, i- we don’t know what’s going to happen. N- no outcome would surprise me here. There might be a huge crash. It, seems like the stock market’s going to crash any minute now. I’m not really a money guy, but, like, all of the...

Y- yeah, so much money is tied up in AI, which people don’t like that it seems like they’re just, throwing money into it to make sure they don’t go broke. And when that happens, I don’t know, and meanwhile, like, a box of cat food costs $25. Like, it’s ridiculous. Like, I don’t know how people, I don’t know how people survive.

I don’t know how people are going to survive. So something, something is i- is up. Historically speaking, when, the the income inequality gets this bad, there is revolution. That’s just what happens. [00:53:00] So,

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, I mean, th- I mean, ultimately there are not institutions that save, only citizens who can. I think that’s what it comes down to

OLEAR: Amen. Well said. Well said.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right, well, so, l- let me just give you a chance to plug your other stuff, whatever other stuff you want to plug. I can’t... Social media, your other pod- your podcast or your Substack, et cetera, et cetera.

OLEAR: Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I’m at Greg Olear on-- I’m on Bluesky a lot. I’m still on Twitter/X because lots of reasons. And I have a Substack called “Prevail,” which is just my name, gregolear.substack.com. I have a podcast called “Prevail with Greg Olear,” available wherever podcasts are. They’re not sold. They’re just free. You can go, just go download it.

And on Friday nights me and my friend Stephanie Koff do a live YouTube show called “The Five Eight,” which is a lot of fun, and we’ve been doing that for four years and yeah. Oh, and I have books, right. I’m here to pr- see, I always forget. My-- Th- this book is [00:54:00] called “Another Wonderful Secret: Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein.”

I have a book that I wrote in last year called “The Age of Unreality,” which is a essay collection. On Sundays, I write about literature a lot on my Prevail and I, on my Substack, and I tie it into stuff that’s happening in the world politically and everything. And those are essays from that.

And yeah, that’s enough stuff, I think. That’s plenty.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. you’ll keep people, busy. All right. Well, great. It’s been good to have you here, Greg. And we’ll let- we’ll see you next time.

OLEAR: Right. Thanks so much for having me. Great to be on.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining me for the conversation. And you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And thanks to everybody who is a paid subscribing member. You also have unlimited access to the archives, and I really thank you for your support.

It’s very helpful in this media economy. Basically, the left won’t spend on media, as we discussed in the episode, and [00:55:00] so we have to rely on the people to help us out, independent content creators. So thank you so much if you are able to become a paid subscribing member. And I also have a GoFundMe, which is linked in the episode show notes as well, if you can support over that way if that’s your preference.

Thanks so much. I’ll catch you next time.

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This argument was presented as an invited talk for the “Hybrid Minds” symposium — organized by the Telos Circle at the Medical University of Vienna on February 26, 2026. A re-recording with cleaned-up slides and sound is available here. I thank the organizer, Constantin Convalexius, for inviting me. The illustrations accompanying the essay here are by Marcus Neustetter.

Many of the presentations at the symposium were concerned with the technology of neural implants and how they interface with the human brain. But in the background loomed the idea of using this kind of technology for longevity — the science of extending human life span, possibly forever. Unfortunately, investigations in this area are motivated by rather dubious philosophical assumptions and arguments.

First, there is the obvious objection that no one in their right mind should want to live forever, once they have properly thought the idea through. I refer the reader to Bernard Williams’s brilliant and timeless essay “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality” [PDF]. Or maybe just watch Guillermo del Toro’s recent adaptation of “Frankenstein” — the most faithful in spirit to Mary Shelley’s original so far. You could also ponder why Q in Star Trek is such a cynical bastard. He’s bored to death because he cannot die. Isn’t it ironic? Immortal life, it turns out, is utterly devoid of meaning.

And, besides: isn’t it a bit arrogant to presume that your particular life, your individual identity, is worth extending forever? Shouldn’t we make space, when our time comes, for those who come after?

These may be valid doubts. But they are not really what concerns me here. Instead, I’d like to highlight another philosophical dispute that surfaced at the symposium, which revolves around the possibility of “uploading” the human mind into a non-biological substrate — let’s say the persistent memory of some sort of computer.

The problem is that any squishy, fleshy embodiment of the mind (no matter how much it has been enhanced and extended) remains prone to accidental harm and untimely demise. What shame if you could live forever, but get run over by a drunk driver at the age of 25! Life is full of nasty surprises. And, despite Hollywood stubbornly pretending otherwise, we all know that a biological clone is just an identical twin — a separate individual — not an actual replica of you as the person you are. Read Edward Ashton’s “Mickey7” and “Antimatter Blues” — as entertaining as they are smart — if you do not believe me¹. Then you will also understand why only mind uploading yields true immortality through redundant storage of your very own consciousness on interchangeable hardware. This classical science-fiction trope gives the idea of a “personal backup” a radically new meaning: minds can now be copied and propagated forever — across perishable physical instantiations.

But let’s not beat about the bush: mind uploading is utterly implausible. In fact, I dare say, the probability of it ever happening and helping us achieve human immortality is basically zero.

For one, it involves tons of really daunting technological and logistic challenges without any practicable solutions anywhere in sight. Yet, tech-optimists believe those may be surmountable — if not tomorrow then eventually. And maybe they are right. I wouldn’t know.

Still, there is a more serious problem underneath it all: the whole chain of reasoning “supporting” the idea of mind uploading is based on an elementary logical error. We can call it the abstraction fallacy or — with philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who first stated it explicitly in 1925 — the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Basically, it means mistaking the map for the territory: confusing the abstract and the concrete in our experience. This has been causing whole shiploads of seemingly irresolvable paradoxes concerning self-reference, personal identity, and subjective experience.

Evidently, to be uploadable, the mind must be somehow separable from its physical substrate. If we accept this premise, then we subscribe to an ideology called computational functionalism, which I abbreviate to computationalism in what follows. It treats the mind as something symbolic, constituted of rule-based (and hence computational) patterns — discretized and abstracted from the continuous tangle of underlying organ-level, tissue-mechanical, cellular, biochemical, and electrophysiological events, processes, and interactions. Only if computationalism applies can we artificially emulate or extract these higher-level patterns and project them onto unrelated kinds of physical substrates (the process of “uploading”).

Somewhat ironically, computationalism springs from a hardcore reductionist and mechanistic approach to the study of mind, yet puts us on a slippery slope towards an anti-materialist mind-body dualism, as it invites the dissociation of mental and material phenomena from each other. Until recently, any whiff of such dualism would have been dismissed as heretic mysticism in well-respected scientific circles — its proponents driven from the community, intellectually tarred and feathered. But, as we shall see, computationalism has given it an unexpected kind of renaissance lately. And this is not a good thing.

Since its beginnings in the 1970s, computationalism has become established to an extent that we rarely see it questioned anymore, at least not in public. Beyond cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, its popularity is tethered to the current AI hype cycle, fueling wild-eyed speculations about artificial general intelligence (AGI), super-intelligence (ASI), and sentient algorithmic systems. It has even led to the bizarre idea that we need some kind of “AI welfare:” public care not for humans who actually need it, but for lifeless machines. Many researchers and laypeople believe such talk to be supported by empirical evidence. But I assure you, it is not.

By its very nature, computationalism is a metaphysical framework. It is based on philosophical assumptions and arguments that are not experimentally testable, even in principle. Yet, many of us simply take them for granted, even if they lead to absurd conclusions. So, yes, it is okay to call this a dogmatic belief system — a cult, really. It certainly is not science.

The cultish nature of computationalism is further exposed by the fact that its foundational assumptions and arguments turn out to be incredibly shaky — logically inconsistent, even. As an example, I will pick out a particularly popular argument for computationalism and dismantle it in front of your eyes.

It is the famous neural substitution (or neural replacement) thought experiment. Austrian computer scientist Hans Moravec was the first to formulate it in his 1988 book “Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence.” He was followed, several years later, by Australian philosopher David Chalmers — never one to miss a bandwagon to jump onto — who presents an identical line of reasoning in a 1995 paper with the quirky title “Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia.” Not only is this argument fallacious, but it is riddled with logical holes and basic misconceptions — a veritable Emmental cheese of a thought experiment². So let’s take a closer look.

The Ship of Theseus

The substitution argument has roots in a venerable philosophical paradox, which was first recorded by Plutarch in his classic “Parallel Lives” in the 2nd century BCE. It’s called the Ship of Theseus, a riddle that concerns the identity of an object over time — in this case the ship that the mythical King Theseus used to rescue the children of Athens after he had slain the Minotaur on Crete. Upon his return, the Athenians decided to keep the ship. Every year, they would sail it to Delos to worship Apollo and to commemorate Theseus’s deed. As time went by, its wooden planks were slowly rotting away and had to be replaced — one by one — until, at some point, there was no original plank left.

This caused the Athenian philosophers to question whether the ship was really still the Ship of Theseus. And if it was not, at what time had it ceased to be the original? Much later, in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes added a further complication to the riddle: with some effort, you could restore the old rotting planks and build a “new” ship from them, identical in design to the original one. Which ship, then, should be considered the real Ship of Theseus? These questions seem impossible to answer.

Make no mistake: the argument behind Theseus’s Paradox is logically sound. It points to a valid philosophical problem and there are several proposed resolutions that address it. But none of the details really matter here.

The only thing that does matter is that the ship has a precisely defined function — it is used, once a year, to sail the Aegean Sea in commemoration of Theseus’s deed. Importantly, it performs this function as a classical mechanism. The ship is a machine: its parts (the wooden planks) are finite in number, the shape of each one of them well-defined. Planks are cleanly separable and arranged in a particular way with regard to each other. This gives the ship its characteristic shape and capacities. Therefore, we can argue that new planks function exactly the same way the old ones did: they are equivalent in composition, form, and arrangement. Nothing else matters. As long as the ship remains structurally the same, it serves the same function. Honestly: who cares whether it still is the same ship — metaphysically speaking — or not? Only philosophers do! Ships of Theseus are fungible, which means that one will work just as well as any other for the purposes we want to put them to.

Neural Substitution

The substitution or replacement argument is nothing but a modern version of the Ship of Theseus applied to a human context. It imagines what would happen if we replace each neuron in your brain, one by one, with a mechanical or electronic device that performs exactly the same function as the neuron it replaces. At some point, we’ll have substituted all your neurons with such devices. You are now a classic type of cyborg: a human body with a machine brain. Moravec goes one step further: what if we replace every cell in your body with equivalent artificial devices? You’d end up a robot replica: a machine with the same functional capacities as the human body it replaces. Surely, this machine would be alive?

But is that still you in there? Is it still your mind after you have become a cyborg? Is it still your body now that you are a robot? Well, in analogy to Theseus’s Ship, if function is maintained continuously during each swap, your identity — and thus your life and mind — should also persist. And if this is indeed so, then it follows that your consciousness must depend on the function of components only, not on the biological material substrate that we have been swapping out.

If the story of the Ship of Theseus makes sense (and it does, as we have seen), shouldn’t the substitution argument hold up as well? After all, both appear to be analogous. This is what Moravec and Chalmers claim. And if the substitution argument is valid, then it provides us with a solid logical grounding for computationalism: mind and life are nothing but abstract patterns, which can be imposed on any material substrate if you only get the functional encoding right. Uploading, here we come!

Superficially, it all seems to pan out. There is no obvious point during the swapping procedure at which we could point and say: “this is where you cease to be you and become an unconscious machine without a self.” Imagine replacing a missing limb with a prosthetic. Nobody in their right mind would claim that the “cyborg” with an artificial leg is not the person they used to be before the replacement. Clearly, there is something strange about the whole situation. But don’t be fooled: it is not as straightforward as Theseus’s Ship. There are several hidden issues that sneak up on us when we transfer the argument from ship to human — or any other kind of living being, for that matter.

The first and foremost issue concerns how we determine the function of a component. We should not forget that in a natural (rather than an engineered) system functions are not pre-given, nor are they designed into the system from outside. Instead, we need to second-guess them: researchers assign function through the deliberate act of analytical abstraction, a central pillar of our scientific method. But how our analysis decomposes a complex natural system into parts depends on many things — not least what we can actually measure, and what specific phenomena or behavior we would like to explain.

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Our task is further complicated by the fact that functions in living systems are rarely fixed, precisely localizable, or intrinsic to a specific part. Instead, organismic functions hinge on history and the dynamic relations between components and their systemic context as a whole. The same neuron behaves very differently at different times, and its behavior depends on where it is located in the organism and which other neurons and non-neuronal cells it interacts with (and has interacted with in the past). A cell is also an autonomous agent: it not only passively responds but actively anticipates.

This poses a challenge: for the substitution argument to work, we must make sure that the functions of the parts are defined such that original and replacement parts are equivalent in every relevant way. But it is really hard, if not impossible, to exactly pin down all the possible functional behaviors of a living cell.

Compare this to Theseus’s Ship — an engineered artifact — where assigning function is easy. Even if we didn’t know the shipbuilder’s original intentions, the problem is precisely delimited: planks are static objects of a specified material and shape; they are manufactured independently of the rest of the ship, and only later inserted into its overall design according to a stable and well-defined blueprint. This determines their contribution to the ship’s function unambiguously and completely. No problem here.

​In contrast, cells in a living organism grow, divide, and together form tissues without an external builder or blueprint. Each is an active, dynamic, and motile self-manufacturing process with an agenda of its own. In any multicellular tissue, cellular behavior must be coordinated and constrained (more so than induced) to make cells cooperate. This happens in diverse and ever-changing ways. Cells sustain themselves, grow and reproduce, while bathed in a complex soup of nutrients, hormones, growth factors, electric and chemical signals. How they generate, relay, and interpret these signals depends not only on their environment, but also on internal state. And as they collectively co-construct internal and external states, each cell’s repertoire of possible behaviors keeps changing — their capabilities never well-defined but continuously and spontaneously emerging from context, evolving over time in a radically open-ended manner.

This brings us to the crux of the matter: a question-begging assumption at the heart of the substitution argument. In contrast to what I just said about cells, it presumes that the functional contribution of a neuron to the mind is fixed, rule-based, and clearly defined. More precisely, it presupposes that neurons communicate with each other exclusively via the propagation and exchange of standardized action potentials (nerve impulses or spikes) through a limited number of anatomical structures such as axons, dendrites, and synapses. If this is indeed their entire contribution to the functioning of the mind, then we get an equivalence of natural and artificial neural networks, and the substitution argument applies.

However, this begs the question: it does not show, but simply assumes that these abstract patterns of spike trains can be abstracted away from the underlying substrate, and that they are the only abstract pattern that matters for our understanding of the mind and our identity.

Let’s be frank: there is no evidence to support these oversimplified assumptions. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the situation is much more complicated than this. It bears repeating that neuronal cells are complex living beings that grow and maintain themselves. They are not only in touch with other neurons, but also non-neuronal cells (such as microglia, for example). They are bathed in a rich medium of chemicals and other signals that influence their behavior, growth, and viability. They can actively modulate the transduction and idiosyncratically interpret the content of these signals, and they can alter their own base rates of signaling — all of this in a radically context- and history-dependent manner.

To cut a long story short: it is simply not possible to summarize — in advance, and as a neat and finite list — all the possible functions of a cell such as a neuron. Cells are not planks. As theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman and his colleagues remind us: no laws entail the behavior and evolution of living beings.

We’ll come back to this in the next section, to show that it is a fundamental limitation. But even just practically considered, you’ll have to agree that there is no way of knowing whether our replacement device really captures all potentially relevant functions of a neuron. We’re just guessing here. And, obviously, this problem becomes even more acute when replacing all the cells of your body. We cannot assign a specific function to each in any unambiguous manner. Cells … these little buggers keep eluding us, always poised to change and behave in ways that we did not expect them to.

And, if this were not bad enough, we humans are also notoriously prone to miss unconceived alternatives to our preconceived notions. Our imagination is severely stymied in this way. Even worse: we sometimes even fail to see what is right in front of our eyes.

All of this means the substitution argument fails right away, at its outset. It succumbs to a breakdown of imagination and analysis: in a living system, we can never be sure that the functional capacities we have assigned to a cell are truly equivalent before and after any of the swaps. And that is that.

But we’re in for even more trouble than that: another gaping hole in the substitution argument is the idea that function is maintained continuously during swaps. It should be obvious that this is an idealization at best. In practice, it will take a non-zero amount of time to execute a swap. And while it may be true that we are made of an astronomical number of cells — around 86 billion neurons in the adult brain, and more than 30 trillion cells in an average human body, according to the latest counts — a cell is and remains a discrete unit. Therefore, the assumption that function remains continuous while we swap out discrete components over time is just that: an unproven assumption.

No two cells in your body are the same. And, as we have seen, context radically matters for their behavior and function. Therefore, we cannot logically rule out that life, identity, and mind may very well be lost at a discrete and specific point during the swapping procedure. We’d have to do the experiment to find out. But as long as we haven’t, the substitution argument is not logically sound.

And it must be said: the burden of proof really rests on you, if you disagree with my criticism. Go on. Show me that I’m wrong. Do the swaps! I’ll be patiently waiting. It’ll be a while before we can attempt anything like it. But, as long as you haven’t provided the empirical evidence, I don’t buy the substitution argument, or computationalism more generally, as a suitable framework to understand life and mind.

The cyborg — and the living robot that is supposed to be you — both remain a myth: not rational science supported by empirical evidence, but wishful figments of computationalist imagination.

Machine Architecture

In sum: what invalidates the substitution argument is that we can never tell whether we are actually replacing all the relevant functions of a biological component (an open-ended, self-manufacturing process) with those we have built into the supposedly equivalent machine part (a pre-manufactured thing). Neither can we justifiably claim that functional continuity is maintained during each swap.

None of this is a problem for Theseus’s Ship, where planks get swapped for functionally equivalent planks while we’re not sailing. In fact, we’d better be in dry dock when this happens, applying a new layer of paint while we’re at it. And once we set sail again, the ship functions just like it did before.

In stark contrast, components need to be hot-swapped in a living organism³. We cannot simply shut down system functions, do the component swaps, and then boot everything back up. There is no dry dock. Any interruption would be lethal — and death is the ultimate discontinuity of function.

Thus, we can neither be sure that function continues, nor that biological and machine functions are equivalent before and after a swap. In other words, we are comparing apples with oranges when we draw an analogy between the Ship of Theseus and the substitution argument. In the latter, we are not swapping out like for like: machine function does not equal organismic function. On the contrary, they are not even remotely similar. Moravec and Chalmers walked into a logical trap without noticing when they came up with this comparison. Philosophers call this kind of mistake a category error. It’s pretty elementary: cells are not planks — and this distinction matters.

The difference, by the way, does not lie in the composition of machine parts and biological components. Both are made of the same kind of chemical elements and follow the same laws of physics. Instead, the fundamental difference between living and non-living matter lies in the way the former is organized — how living component processes, each exhibiting perfectly respectable physico-chemical dynamics, relate and interact with one another. These relations are contingent: they may be constrained but are not determined by the underlying laws of physics and chemistry, because they radically depend on history and context, and do not necessarily emerge and evolve in any law-like manner. And it is this “lawless” contingency that explains why functions in machines and organisms are not the same — not only in practice, but also in principle. Machines are well-behaved, law-like; but organisms are not like that.

Now, you may ask: how is this even possible? Doesn’t physics prescribe a mechanistic worldview? Isn’t scientific explanation necessarily mechanistic? And aren’t we ascribing mystical properties to living systems?

No. As a matter of fact, it does not, it is not, and we do not! To better understand why this is, we must compare the architecture that makes it easy to determine machine function with the biological organization that renders organismic function (and behavior) so difficult to pin down with formalistic reasoning.

Let’s do the easy part first: machine architecture. Instead of Theseus’s Ship, I’ll consider a more interesting machine — the modern computer. Apart from a few exotic and experimental exceptions (e.g., neuromorphic computing devices), computers are built on von Neumann’s architecture — the familiar stored-program computer, basically. Your laptop is one, so is your smartphone, and the largest supercomputers in the world share this architecture too. In fact, pretty much any device that contains electronics these days is some kind of variant of von Neumann. This predominant design, in turn, is a real-world approximation of an abstract model of computation called a Turing Machine.

Mind you, Turing’s machine is not a real machine. This abstract model cannot be realized as a physical system, because it requires an infinite tape, which is subdivided into cells that contain discrete (digital) chunks of information that serve as input to the machine. The input is processed, in sequence, by a head that reads the information and then transforms it according to a finite set of instructions (called a transition table), which resides within the internal memory of the machine. The transition table also determines whether the head then moves the tape to the left or to the right, or whether it stays exactly where it is. This results in a change of information content of the tape — the output of the machine.

We can further assume that the transition table itself can be read into memory from the tape, so that the stored information can be interpreted as either data or code. This gets us a Universal Turing Machine (UTM), able to implement any possible rule-based sequence of processing steps (any algorithm) you could possibly imagine. Turing (building on work by Kleene and Church) stated this mathematically in the 1930s, thereby laying the groundwork for what we now call the theory of computation.

For the sake of argument, let us then define a machine in general as “any physical system whose functions can be simulated perfectly by a UTM.” According to this definition, von-Neumann computers are machines that come really close to being universal simulators, able to mimic the behavior of almost any other (more specialized) machine. This is why computational methods and models are so good at reproducing and predicting mechanistic behavior. They are powerful scientific tools indeed!

We can summarize and visualize this kind of computational architecture as follows:

A computer receives input data (from the left) and processes it into output (to the right). What makes this computational architecture so powerful is, at its very heart, the strict separation of hardware and software (as shown by the nested boxes). After all, the whole point of the UTM is to be a universal model of computation, as flexible as possible when it comes to executing the rule-based instructions of an algorithm. For this to work, the symbols constituting the software must be completely independent of how the machine is built: we may inscribe any possible sequence of information on the tape.

It may not be immediately obvious, but the drawback entailed by this design is that function must be imposed from outside — at the hardware level through the design of the physical computing machinery which gets pre-assembled in a factory, and at the level of software through the rules that determine the programming (pre-scheduled execution) of the instructions. Neither hardware nor software construct or run themselves entirely. Not even rewrite systems — computational formalisms that treat their own instructions as data — transcend this limitation. They too, must be based on fixed rules imposed from outside the machine, even if they no longer determine the sequence of instructions directly, but only how they get transformed from some initial formal expression into one that is eventually executed.

Whether specified directly or through rewriting, algorithmic rules are implemented in Turing’s framework through recursion: the self-referential application of symbols to symbols — all ultimately read from the tape. For this to work, the hardware (tape, memory, and reading head) must be designed in a way that conforms to the architecture prescribed by the UTM model. Importantly, it cannot itself be altered by software: recursion may be self-referential within the symbolic realm, but it must not affect the physical hardware, as this would violate the fundamental hardware/software separation, which is what yields the universality that gives the system its power in the first place.

One common objection is that you simply need to put the factory which produces the hardware under the control of the software. Et voilà: a computer system that builds itself! But not so fast: how do you produce the hardware (factory machines and their parts) that produces the hardware? You quickly descend into an infinite regress that way, which is only interrupted, once again, by imposing functions from outside. The buck, in such a system, has to stop somewhere if it is to be physically realizable.

All of this means that a computational or algorithmic system may be complicated (think large language models with their gazillions of connection weights), but it is not complex in the same sense that living systems are: no von Neumann computer — or any algorithm running on it, no matter how intricate — will ever achieve the ability to self-manufacture within the constraints of its own design. That would require what theoretical biologist Howard Pattee calls semiotic closure: the existential integration of “hardware” (physics) and “software” (symbols) we see in living organisms, which breaks the fundamental design principles of the computational system. We’ll come back to this limitation shortly.

In the meantime, you may object that we are relying on a narrow and outdated model of computation: since the internet was invented, computers have become networked, and we run software on hardware devices such as robots that move around and interact with the outside world. This changes the situation fundamentally: algorithms become deeply embedded in an uncertain and unpredictable world! And you may have a point.

To account for this, we further relax our assumptions about what it means to be a computer. As a first step, we should let UTMs interact:

Here, the output of one UTM becomes the input to another one. This has important consequences. It means we no longer expect a UTM to calculate solutions to specific problems and then halt, as traditional computer science did, because each node in the network keeps on receiving new input (imagine the information on its tape being constantly rewritten). Furthermore, interaction can give us concurrency, as algorithmic instructions become processed simultaneously and in parallel. This, in turn, introduces an amount of indeterminacy, because parallel processes may be executed at variable rates, which makes input/output patterns unpredictable. Another kind of indeterminacy can be added through stochastic execution of instructions: at each processing step, multiple instructions may get applied, each with a certain probability. All of this vastly expands the range of instruction sequences that can be run on a network like the one depicted above, compared to a single, isolated UTM.
Still, some important design constraints remain in place in this extended computational framework. Most importantly: function must still be imposed externally, as each processing node is an independent UTM whose hardware cannot be altered by the software it is recursively running. And the rules that determine how program instructions are executed must also be codified, ultimately, from outside the network itself. The internet, as a real-world example, requires many technological standards and communication protocols for interaction to work successfully at both hardware and software levels.

In the end, this still precludes the kind of software/hardware integration (semiotic closure) you need for a true self-manufacturing system. And without it, we still get the infinite regress outlined for a single UTM above. The only way to change this is to design a system where code can directly and literally become hardware in some way, without losing universality. Last time I checked, such designs or technologies did not exist, and nobody was anywhere near inventing them. In biology, however, self-manufacturing organization has been around for billions of years, and we also have a plausible account of how it works, which is very useful for understanding why living beings (including their brains) are not computers — and not even like computers at all.

Living Organization

Here is where things may become a bit complicated and counterintuitive. Please bear with me. I’ll do my best to explain everything using minimal jargon and technicalities. To begin, let’s compare the following arrow diagram of a living cell — proposed by biochemist Jan-Hendrik Hofmeyr, based on earlier work by theoretical biologist Robert Rosen — with those of computer architecture above:

What you immediately notice is that arrows go around in circles here, when in the diagrams of computational architecture they consistently point straight from left to right. This is not an accident, but we need to understand the details of the diagram better before we can fully grasp what it means.

To be sure, this is only part of a much more complicated model. But since both have the same distilled shape when we leave out all unnecessary detail, it will suffice for my argument and be easier to parse than the full scheme. If you want to learn more about the latter, go read Hofmeyr’s original papers.

For starters, imagine an input arrow pointing from a source of nutrients outside the organism to the node that says “amino acids.” Together with the arrow that points further to the right, representing the concatenation of amino-acid building blocks into “polypeptide chains,” this represents the part of metabolism responsible for macromolecular synthesis. The arrow is solid because it represents a material transformation (a flow — or, more accurately, a flux). This transformation is mediated through catalysis by functionally folded proteins called enzymes. This is marked by a dashed arrow, indicating an efficient cause (or processor), which enables an underlying material flow but does not itself participate in it.

To become functional proteins, polypeptide chains must fold into the appropriate conformation. This happens spontaneously in most cases but requires very specific conditions to be present within a cell. These constitute the cellular milieu. pH, ionic and metabolite concentrations (including co-factors), and the spatio-temporal distribution of other proteins, macromolecular structures, and organelles must be precisely regulated for proteins to fold into their functional conformations. Here, the milieu plays the role of the processor: it enables folding but is not affected by the process itself.

Finally, maintaining the milieu requires a semipermeable cell membrane (whose lipid building blocks are another product of metabolism). Embedded in this membrane are transmembrane transporters (also functionally folded proteins), which act as processors for maintaining the cellular milieu, by selectively letting, or actively pumping, ions and other chemicals in and out of the cell.

We’ve literally come full circle: you will notice that all three essential processes involved in cellular organization — macromolecular metabolism, protein folding, and maintenance of the milieu — are processed (efficiently caused) by components within the organization of the system. In contrast to machine function, there is nothing imposed from outside when it comes to cellular and organismic functions! But note: this does not mean that a cell is thermodynamically closed. Quite the contrary, the membrane must allow the entry of nutrients and ions, after all. Otherwise, macromolecular synthesis and regulation of the milieu could not occur. Yet, while being open thermodynamically, it also exhibits organizational closure: all the functions (processors) required to keep cellular processes going are provided from within the cell.
This is how we avoid the infinite regress we kept bumping into when we were trying to construct self-manufacturing computers before. Basically, a living cell is organized like an origami folded in upon itself. And this crucially involves at least one factor — the cellular milieu — that is a feature of the cell as a whole, not of any localized, individual subcomponent.

This kind of hierarchical circularity, by the way, is not at all the same as cybernetic feedback, which only regulates flow among preexisting processes that occur at the same level of organization. Nor is it mere recursion, which is purely symbolic self-referentiality. Instead, it means that every process essential to the continued existence of the cell is physically co-constructed by all the other processes which constitute the cell. If this does not make your head spin, then I don’t know what does. Each cellular process depends on all the other ones for its very existence. This is what self-manufacture actually means: not only the physical fabrication of all required parts, but also their constitutive and continuous self-assembly. This can be visualized as the following upward spiral:

Because everything is constantly converted into everything else in such a system (figuratively, but still accurately speaking) there can be no strict separation or segregation of processes. Take, for example, the genetic encoding of the amino-acid sequence that constitutes the primary structure of a protein. The code that we could call the “software” of the cell is stored in genomic DNA. This genetic sequence first gets transcribed into mRNA, and then translated into a polypeptide chain before folding into a functional protein component (which we can consider the basic “hardware” of the living cell). Finally, a subset of these proteins (transcription factors) then bind to DNA to regulate gene expression.

Again, we get a closed, continuous cycle — “software” to “hardware” to “software” — and no separation of the symbolic (coded sequence) and the physical (functional folding). Pattee’s semiotic closure is achieved! Hardware and software are combined into one inseparable constructive process. And, as theoretical biologist C. H. Waddington pointed out, we can no longer tell if the genome encodes the cell or if the cell interprets its genome. They are complementary perspectives on the same hierarchical and circular self-referential organization.

Now, and this is crucial to understand: the rules governing the dynamics of such a system can no longer be predefined. This is what Kauffman means when he says “no laws entail organismic behavior.” Instead, the rules are (re)generated, continuously and on the spot, from within the organization of the system.

Mathematically, we can explain this via the closed loop to the right in our arrow diagram of the cell (see above). Its abstract form is what mathematicians call collectively impredicative, as it defines the processes of protein folding and regulation of the milieu in terms of each other. A perfectly harmless example of an impredicative definition is “the biggest fish in the pond.” Here, the fish to be defined is included as part of the sample (“all the fish in the pond”) that serves to define it in the first place. Clearly, this is circular reasoning, but evidently not vicious in this case. Similarly, collective impredicativity among cellular processes is also not vicious. It only indicates collective co-construction, which means these processes can only exist — and only proceed up the spiral — if they are all active and present at the same time.

As you can imagine, this is a real headache for explaining the origin of life: instead of the halting problem of computer science we get the mother of a starting problem in biology. All of a living cell’s processes need to get going together to kick-start life. How astronomically improbable is that? Surely, we must look for more plausible, step-by-step pathways towards living organization. But the starting problem also introduces a new kind of indeterminacy into cells and organisms that exist right now: it makes it impossible for us to formulate a model able to predict all the possible future states of the system. In more technical terms (for those who care about such things): the circularity introduced by collective impredicativity makes it impossible to precisely define the system’s state space. This is the mathematical reason why we cannot pin down biological behavior, and hence function, precisely in advance. It is not just a practical limitation, but impossible in principle, because of the impredicative nature of the system.

​In fact, Robert Rosen proved mathematically — using the theory of categories — that the category of living systems (without well-defined dynamic rules or state spaces) is fundamentally distinct from the category of machines (whose models are based on fixed rules and state spaces). This is called Rosen’s conjecture. It states that organisms are not computable (or simulable, as Rosen calls it), and has led to much controversy over the years, because the way it is formulated tends to confuse people. The problem is as follows: Rosen does not say that it is impossible to come up with simulations of a cell’s dynamic behavior; all he says is that these simulations won’t capture all the possible future dynamics. It is an incompleteness argument for the life sciences, analogous to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for formal systems. Life cannot be completely formalized: it will always surprise us — its behavior and evolution truly open-ended indeed.

Biological Naturalism

Let’s recap: Moravec and Chalmers’s substitution argument is frequently used to prop up the ideology of computational functionalism (or computationalism for short). However, the substitution argument fails. It does so because it is not clear that function is maintained while hot-swapping discrete components such as neurons and other cells, and because we cannot replace organismic with machine function, as they are not at all the same thing. In contrast to a machine part, we cannot pin down the function of a living cell in any definite way. This is where the analogy between the Ship of Theseus and the substitution argument breaks down. We are comparing apples and oranges.

Beneath all of this lies the contrast between machine architecture and the dynamic self-manufacturing organization of cells and organisms with organizational closure. This kind of closure is based on processors and material flows that collectively co-construct each other in a self-referential and collectively impredicative way. Mathematical analysis of this kind of closure reveals why we cannot capture the full range of possible organismic behaviors, and thus functions, in any well-defined way. The starting problem (all processes having to get going at the same time) makes the formal construction of a definite state space impossible. This implies that the behavioral potential of a living system is fundamentally open-ended, and thus not completely simulable on our current computational architectures.

I need to stress again that there is no magic involved here, whatsoever — no vitalistic life-giving force or essence, or anything like it: the organizational account of life presented here is perfectly compatible with all the known laws of physics — especially thermodynamics and chemical kinetics. In addition, it is a perfectly scientific and naturalistic explanation, formulated entirely in terms of cause-and-effect between material processes. But, crucially, it is not a mechanistic explanation! The notion of “mechanism” implies a chain of causation from some starting point to a specific outcome, and that the parts of a mechanistic system interact with each other according to fixed and well-defined rules. Neither of these assumptions holds in a living system, as I have outlined in the previous section.

This has important consequences. First of all, it means that organisms are not machines. Of course, organisms contain mechanisms as subcomponents (the metabolic part of the diagram above being one particularly obvious example). And yet, an organism belongs to an entirely separate category of natural systems when we consider it as an organized whole. This is what Rosen demonstrated mathematically.

Second, this further implies that there are organismic functions, which cannot be implemented in machine architecture. Organisms and their subsystems — your brain, for example — can do things a machine or algorithm will never be able to do, because of the constraints imposed on them by their design.

Such uniquely organismic functions matter: it is not an open empirical question whether our current computational architectures can support selfhood or sentience as we define these concepts in the living world. They cannot, by design. All this talk about AGI, ASI, or sentient algorithms is moot speculation without any deeper meaning or scientific merit. My argument shows that computationalism, with its claim that mental or living patterns can be abstracted from their material substrate, is neither plausible given our current evidence, nor is it based on logically consistent thinking. It stands on very shaky ground, and there is no reason to take renewed claims of dualism about mind and matter seriously.

As an alternative, our discussion suggests that the material substrate is indeed important. Specifically, it needs to be the kind of substrate that allows self-manufacturing organizational closure to emerge and sustain itself. This view is called biological naturalism. It is gaining some traction lately — and I’ve just given you a naturalistic explanation that makes it a lot more plausible still. Right now, it is by far our best explanation for the observation that organisms and machines have different behavioral capacities. Additional empirical support is needed, but at the very least, biological naturalism is a possibility that we should take seriously — more seriously, anyway, than its far-fetched computationalist antagonists.

An important caveat remains: none of this means that only our specific meat-based configuration is suitable for supporting life. There may well be many exotic selves and minds out there that are based on utterly alien chemistries. Philosophers call this multiple realizability. It is different, however, from the separability of living and mental phenomena from substrate that is required for computationalism: the metal- and silicate-based technology we have today, for instance, seems too rigid for supporting living organization; it is very probably not a suitable substrate. And, in any case, as long as we maintain the strict software-hardware separation in the design of our machines — including our most powerful computers and algorithms today — we are not going to get living or sentient machines, not even if we embed our algorithms in motile robotic frames or network them across the globe. And, of course, that copy of your consciousness in the computational cloud? Well, that’s not you! It’s just a simulation.

To conclude: it is time to say bye-bye to brain uploading, to sentient machines, to synthetic minds, and to Scotty beaming you up any time soon. Computationalism — the separability of mind and life from material substrate — is absolutely required for all of these. Sadly, it is not a plausible, empirically supported, or logically consistent ideology. Rather, it is wishful thinking by people who view themselves and the entire world they live in as a machine to be manipulated and optimized. It is an irrational belief that is deeply rooted in our desire for power and control, as well as our fear of unpredictability and surprise. It is utterly human this way but also profoundly confused, and highly dangerous, if you ask me, because it leads us to the hubristic accelerationism and transhumanism that are frightfully popular today.

A central pillar of this ideological movement — of this cult of technology, really — is the yearning for longevity. And a cult it is: we are not accelerating or transforming ourselves towards any real, achievable or even desirable goals. The immortal mind in the cloud, backed up and on its way to the stars, is cheap science fiction at best. The technologies and treatments we pretend to be creating are mirages, based on bad science and flawed thinking. And the unintended consequences we are generating in the process are severe, and sometimes existentially threatening to our human future on this planet.

My ultimate goal here is to make you stop for a second and think — especially if you are an accelerationist. What is life really about? What makes it so special? What makes you unique? What makes you (and no-one else)? What drives you? What enables you to feel, desire, judge, and prioritize? What gives you dignity and creativity? Well, it is your living organization, your ability to literally construct yourself the way you decide to. At least to some degree, you are autonomous — in charge of your life! You couldn’t do this if you were a mere machine. The downside of this power is that you have to constantly invest work to stay alive. And when this work is done, it is your time to make room for other living beings, with their own way of constructing themselves, to take your place in this world of limited resources. To partake in this larger process, to me that’s what it truly means to be alive.

Can you feel it?

​Endnotes

1. However, do not watch Bong Joon Ho’s dreadful movie adaptation “Mickey17.” It misses literally every philosophical point raised by the books — not to mention that it totally butchers the story as well as the characters, features the worst acting and introduces the most cringey, in-your-face attempts at political satire I’ve seen in a very long while …
   

2. It is probably no coincidence that David Chalmers is the champion of many other atrocious thought experiments — most famously, the abominable philosophical zombie, an argument so grotesque that it fully deserves the label “not even wrong.” Every time this man publishes an argument, it seems, we understand the mind (and reality in general) a bit less.

3. So do the planks in Neurath’s Boat, also famous in philosophy -- but arguably a less realistic nautical metaphor than Theseus’s Ship.

The Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission released its report on June 26, 2026, on the state of religious freedom in the United States, declaring it to be under attack.

The commission was established in May 2025 to identify and report on “emerging threats to religious liberty, uphold Federal laws that protect all citizens’ full participation in a pluralistic democracy, and protect the free exercise of religion.” Despite those altruistic goals, from the beginning, the commission faced criticism that the composition and agenda of the body were slanted toward a conservative Christian perspective.

The commission conducted seven hearings over the course of a year, taking testimony from approximately 100 witnesses.

The draft report recounts numerous incidents of reputed bias and mistreatment of people based on their religious faith, and it places the blame on bureaucrats who exhibit a disdain for demonstrations of religious conviction. The report attributes much of this to the use of “the metaphor ‘wall of separation of church and state’ to justify excluding religious Americans from equal participation in the public square.”

As author of the book “Separating Church and State: A History,” I argue that the commission’s broadside on the concept of separation of church and state is misplaced, but not new. Critics have portrayed the idea as anti-religious and ahistorical ever since the Supreme Court embraced it in 1947.

Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’

In the 1947 landmark case of Everson vs. Board of Education, involving public financial aid for religious education, the justices announced that they would use the concept of church-state separation as a guide for interpreting the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Those clauses state “that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

In that same decision, the justices also employed the metaphor of “a wall of separation between church and state,” a phrase borrowed from an 1802 letter from President Thomas Jefferson to an association of Baptist churches in Connecticut. At the time, the Baptists were a minority in a state that still maintained a religious establishment. Jefferson sympathized with their plight, employing the wall of separation metaphor to emphasize that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God” and not to “the legislative powers of government.”

Tradition of separation

The idea of separate spheres of spiritual and secular functions and authority was advanced by religious and secular thinkers to benefit both religion and the state.

In his fifth century work “City of God,” St. Augustine advanced the model of two entities, one spiritual and the other temporal or earthly, each with separate authority and functions. Augustine went so far as to use an image of two walled cities separated from each other as a means to protect the purity of the church.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, both Martin Luther and John Calvin distinguished spiritual from earthly authority and called for a division of labor between the two. Luther distinguished “two kingdoms” – a spiritual kingdom and a temporal kingdom that had separate authority.

Similarly, Calvin wrote that “Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct” and, as such, “must always be considered separately” because of the great “difference and unlikeness … between ecclesiastical and civil power.”

The metaphor of a ‘wall of separation’

At the same time, religious reformers were employing concepts of walls, hedges or other barriers to ensure that the secular and religious realms remained apart.

Protestant Anabaptists – Mennonites, Hutterites, Brethren – took the theological idea of separationism to heart, seeking to keep their communities apart from what they saw as the corruptions of the fallen world. They were declining to swear oaths of allegiance to civil authorities or otherwise participate in civic functions.

The early leader of the Mennonites, Menno Simons, used the term a “separating wall” to illustrate the degree of separateness their faith required from civil authority.

Finally, Roger Williams, the Puritan-turned-Baptist founder of Rhode Island, advocated for complete religious liberty. He called for maintaining a “hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”

Enlightenment figures, such as John Locke, also advanced notions of separation of church and state. In 1689, Locke wrote that the church must be “absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth and civil affairs. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable.”

Influential British writer James Burgh called for building “an impenetrable wall of separation between things sacred and civil … the less the church and state had to do with one another, it would be better for both.” Scholars believe that this was likely one source for Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Connecticut Baptists where he used the same metaphor.

A familiar concept

Thus, members of the America’s founding generation were familiar with the concept of distinct spheres of authority between religion and government and the necessity of keeping those functions separate.

Even though Jefferson used the wall metaphor only once, he worked assiduously throughout his life to advance religious freedom via church-state separation. James Madison employed similar imagery, such as calling for “a great barrier” between the two.

Church-state separation wasn’t just an imagery idea; it was a concept that many people embraced. As Madison wrote, “religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

As a result, to this day, many denominations and religiously affiliated groups, such as many Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists and members of Reform Judaism, among others, support the separation of church and state as essential for maintaining religious freedom.

And church-state separation continues to receive popular support. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2026, 54% of Americans say the government should enforce church-state separation – a consistent percentage – whereas only 13% believe it should stop enforcing it, down from 19% in 2021.

Narrow view

Despite this pedigree, the Religious Liberty Commission’s report expresses particular disdain for the “wall” metaphor, stating that “the ‘wall of separation’ phrase does not appear in the First Amendment or anywhere else in the Constitution.” The report calls it a “belabored metaphor” that “can wrongly imply that church and state are opposed to one another and must remain completely separate.”

The report also takes a narrow view of what is prohibited by the religion clauses: “that the government may not officially prefer one religion over another, take over the functions of a church, or coerce religious observance,” which would otherwise allow for other types of church-state intermixing such as government funding of religious education.

In her final opinion as a Supreme Court justice in 2005, Sandra Day O’Connor – a judicial conservative – reflected on the importance of church-state separation to guarantee full religious freedom.

“The First Amendment expresses our Nation’s fundamental commitment to religious liberty by means of two provisions – one protecting the free exercise of religion, the other barring establishment of religion.”

She concluded with a challenge: “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

That the commission’s report ignores the benefit of church-state separation to American society is troubling.

Steven K. Green is Director of the Center for Religion, Law & Democracy at Willamette University. This essay was first published by The Conversation.

This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.

The Trump regime’s advocacy of white supremacism is arguably its premier offense against the U.S. government and the American people. With its racist obsessions, our MAGA leaders have put much of the population on notice that second-class citizenship is their destiny, should this right-wing rule endure and deepen. Banished is the basic democratic premise that all Americans are equal, regardless of race, skin color, or national origin. Trump and his allies seek to roll back not only the gains of the civil rights movement, but the reconceived nation born in the wake of the Civil War. It is as if Jefferson Davis and his minions had, through some grotesque sci-fi time travel maneuver, managed to take over the 21st century presidency.

But this is no bizarro sci-fi plot we’re caught in, but a bitter reality — though one, crucially, in which not only the Trump regime but also much of the media, and even elements of the Democratic opposition, have maintained a pretense that this presidency’s unvarnished racism is something other than what it so clearly is. Among opponents of MAGA, there has too often been a studied disregard for how crucial racist appeals have been to both unifying and energizing the MAGA base; likewise, there has been a blinkered approach to how central racism is to this regime’s governance and priorities. Even if the aggrandizement of personal power and the corrupt use of the White House to rake in billions for himself and his family are the goals nearest and dearest to Donald Trump’s heart, the effort to re-impose strict hierarchies of race across America is a dream held by millions of his supporters — a goal important enough that they are willing to look the other way while the president loots the Treasury, bulldozes the White House, and conducts insider stock trades based on government policies he himself sets.

Nowhere else has this thin line between grotesque racism and the charade of deniability been more dangerously upheld than in the realm of immigration. The entire immigration “debate” has been framed by the GOP, the media, and, absurdly, even many Democrats as an effort to keep generic “immigrants” out of the country. Yet the White House has deployed all manner of racial rhetoric and imagery in depicting these immigrants, particularly the primarily Latino migrants who have crossed or seek to cross the southern border. And beyond this, ICE and CBP efforts have been directed against other non-white immigrant groups in the most ostentatious ways — for instance, with a massive federal dragnet descending on the Twin Cities to target Somalis.

And when we take into account the explosive infusion of ICE funding over the coming years, and the construction of a nationwide gulag to house those arrested, the outlandish goal of ethnically cleansing the nation of millions of non-whites seems like an increasingly realistic goal. Moreover, such deportation efforts are increasingly leading to the harassment of non-white citizens — a not-accidental byproduct of an effort to reinstate white people as the “true” citizens of the U.S., and to signal to all others that their citizenship is second-tier.

Recently, though, the Trump regime has moved to even more openly escalate and advertise its white supremacist vision of immigration, and of America. A few months ago, the administration made changes to U.S. asylum policies that would all but choke off the flow of refugees to the United States, while privileging one unique group: white Afrikaners from South Africa. This means that of all the people in the world in desperate need of relocation — from war, natural disaster, and persecution — only the former beneficiaries of a notorious white supremacist regime have been deemed to qualify.

Notably, the supposed persecution of white South Africans in their homeland, and their need for rescue by the United States, is based on racist fantasies and lies that draw not only on modern-day international white supremacist ideology like the “Great Replacement Theory,” but also invoke deep-rooted white American fears of Black people. And so the administration and its supporters claim that black South Africans are committing genocide against white South Africans, as well as dispossessing them of their material wealth. And it is not coincidental that these stories evoke Redemptionist lies about the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in the U.S., which held that African-Americans drunk with their new freedoms raped, pillaged, and oppressed Southern whites until the latter, through the terrorism of the Klu Klux Klan and the withdrawal of Northern protection, established the racial hierarchies of Jim Crow for the next century. The underlying story is clear: black people cannot be trusted with freedom and democracy, and will only use their power to seek revenge on their white oppressors.

Lest this seem like exaggeration, here’s White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly speaking about the need to open American doors to white South Africans: “President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed and driven off their property across South Africa. While the South African government and many in the media have brushed off the horrific lived experiences of this community, the Trump administration continues to process applications for refugee status because the president has a humanitarian heart.”

There has been no direct explanation by the Trump administration to justify limiting access to Afrikaners out of all the people on Earth. However, the administration has claimed its changes to the asylum program aim to “prioritize refugees who can better assimilate into the United States.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio picked up on this theme in remarks to Congress earlier in June, when he noted that “it is in our national interest” to allow in people who can “quickly assimilate into society and be successful.””

The choice of Afrikaners as just such an assimilable group helps answer what exactly is deemed by MAGA as necessary to fit into American society: white skin. And it’s not just white skin these particular immigrants bring, but also a story of oppression at the hands of non-whites that dovetails with the most fundamental narrative of the Trump administration: that the United States is being invaded by non-white hordes who, like those fearsome black South Africans, seek to take Americans’ jobs, steal their wealth, rape their women, and murder at will. From the perspective of the Trump administration, white South Africans are likely to have a fundamental sense of racial displacement and grievance that deeply resonates with the obsessions of MAGA — making them ideally suited to assimilate, if not into actual modern America, then into MAGA’s twisted fantasy of the United States, where white Americans must fight to retain a nation under assault by the brown hordes. Moreover, Trump and his propagandists may well see the supposed oppression of Afrikaners as another way to remind their MAGA base that the depravity of blacks and non-whites is a basic fact of life, knowing neither the limitation of borders nor nationality. It also points to a dismaying implication of the MAGA mindset: that white South Africans are actually more American than actual citizens who happen not to be white.

Recent reporting from The New York Times drives home the degree to which the Trump regime views white South Africans as pawns in a war to impose white supremacy within the U.S. In a departure from usual practice, the administration is creating “welcome bags” to give Afrikaner immigrants in coming weeks — but the otherwise pleasant notion of a gift bag obscures the packet’s rancid contents and intent. Alongside an Android tablet, a U.S. flag, and a copy of the Constitution, the bag will also include literature that “criticizes racial equity and civil rights laws and promotes claims of discrimination against white people.” It will also contain a “story about a Black South African who must protect a white rugby teammate from a Black mob” and that “cites the accusation from the billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk that a genocide of white people is occurring.” (The story also refers to Nobel Prize-winner Nelson Mandela as a “South African lawyer and activist who sought to end apartheid with acts of sabotage.”) The welcome bag will include as well “a report by Mr. Trump’s 1776 Commission [. . . ] [which] likens progressivism to fascism, and says Americans were being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery.” The 1776 report also claims that the civil rights movement “almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.”

The administration contends that these materials are intended to help the newcomers “assimilate into the American way of life and preserve our borders, language, culture, traditions and ideals,” and “to support [their] day-to-day life and expand [their] knowledge of American history and values.” But it is a peculiar view of America that the White House has chosen to emphasize, in which the civil rights movement is supposedly antithetical to basic American principles and slavery has nothing to do with our founding. It is also odd that materials promoting the U.S. would include tendentious representations of South African history — representations that happen to assert the perfidy of blacks and the victimization of whites.

It appears that the Trump administration has chosen to present Afrikaner newcomers with a vision of the U.S. as a white supremacist nation that has faced similar “challenges” from restive minorities as South African whites. These “welcome bag” materials aim to arouse in these Afrikaners a dislike or worse for black people, whether they be South Africans or African Americans. We might even speculate that these materials aim to validate and encourage whatever white supremacist inclinations the newcomers possess, and to let them know that such attitudes are essential to integrating fully into American society — that the superiority of white people is what the United States is most fundamentally about. To fit into the United States, the Afrikaners are being told, they simply have to strive be as racist as they can be.

When an American president curtails the admission of nearly all refugees to our country, save for a single group of whites renowned for a system of racial apartheid that lasted until late into the 20th century, he is not just making some sort of perverse “culture war” point. Rather, he is openly declaring the United States to be a country for white people, that America’s role in the world is to be a haven and protector of white identity, and by extension that non-whites are not worthy or capable of U.S. citizenship. In the realm of domestic politics, this has been advanced by a multi-pronged effort to reassert the power of white supremacy upon both citizens and resident immigrants, whether it’s through Republicans gerrymandering Black Americans out of political representation, attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, or the refusal to promote well-qualified Black generals and an accompanying effort to erase the valiant history of non-white soldiers and sailors.

But the embrace of white Afrikaners is especially grotesque, as it’s meant not only as a message to the American people but to the world regarding the centrality of white supremacism to MAGA’s vision of America. And when the administration chooses to present these fake refugees with “welcome bags” that openly stress white supremacism as the purported route to acceptance into American society, Trump and his allies are reveling in their own disgusting racism, celebrating it in full view of the nation without shame or apparent fear of backlash. Its resonances and implications are no less dangerous to the union than if the president were to raise the Confederate flag over the White House, or add Jefferson Davis to the list of President’s Day honorees (and this is to say nothing of the tens of thousands of non-white refugees cruelly now considered personae non gratae based on the color of their skin). It is open advocacy of an ideology that is the enemy of the U.S. Constitution and American democracy.

Faced with the elevation of undeserving white Afrikaners as the only refugees to be allowed into the country, it would be incredible for Democrats not to take a stand, pick a fight, and work to engage and enrage substantial swaths of the public against this abomination of an asylum policy — and against the white supremacist fever dream it so starkly reveals. With this policy initiative — topped off by literally giving white Afrikaners welcome materials inciting them to embrace their worst racist inclinations — the Trump White House has removed any lingering pretense that the war on immigrants isn’t simply a cover for a war against all non-whites in America, and in favor of a nation that purges and disempowers supposedly undeserving lesser races. Democrats are deluded if they think they can beat MAGA and the retrograde forces driving it without taking square aim at the dynamo of white supremacism that energizes and guides so many in this movement. With their celebration of white Afrikaners as ideal Americans, Trump and MAGA have inadvertently opened the door to a renewed public reckoning over the war on immigrants, and an underlying white supremacist project that only grows stronger as opponents of MAGA fail to name and directly confront it.

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As text-generating programs like ChatGPT have increased in popularity, the number of people convinced that their favorite chatbot is alive has also increased. But have you ever noticed that no one seems to think that image generators like Midjourney or Nano Banana are alive? There are millions of people who seem to believe that their personal Claude is conscious, and yet I can’t find anyone who thinks that DALL-E has a soul.

It’s a fascinating dichotomy to consider, especially in light of the fact that both image diffusion and language transformers use such similar underlying technologies (neural networks) that Google actually combined them in its latest experimental model, DiffusionGemma.

Whatever one thinks of their moral or psychological status, though, these programs have repeatedly proven to be capable of incredible things. An image made by Midjourney won a Colorado State Fair arts prize in 2022 and the field as a whole has advanced so much that creative software companies like Adobe and Canva have completely integrated AI tooling into all of their major products. Audio-generating software (which is also based on neural network technology) has become so advanced that AI-made music has repeatedly topped the charts.

Despite their impressive capabilities, however, basically no one looks at a precise and delicate Stable Diffusion portrait and claims that a digital soul made it. We know that it’s the product of a highly advanced digital paintbrush program that’s been trained on human art and can oftentimes create very good representations of its own, especially when supervised by a skilled and patient prompter. But all of that skepticism disappears for some people when they consider chatbots’ text outputs. Instead of seeing their side of the chat log as an increasingly ornate prompting regime that elicits desired output from a complex linear algebra matrix, they claim to have constructed or discovered a ghost in the machine.

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While the text transformer models used by chatbots are a recent invention, people have been imputing consciousness to computers since 1966, when computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum released ELIZA, the first natural language processor that could generate somewhat plausible responses to any kind of user input by using a pattern-matching system called DOCTOR that was built to mimic the rhetorical style of a psychotherapist.

As he later wrote in Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Weizenbaum did not intend for DOCTOR to be perceived as human, but he soon realized that some people were doing just that:

I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room. Another time, I suggested I might rig the system so that I could examine all conversations anyone had had with it, say, overnight. I was promptly bombarded with accusations that what I proposed amounted to spying on people’s most intimate thoughts; clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately and usefully addressed in intimate terms. […] What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.

(Not everyone perceived DOCTOR as a sentient entity, of course. You can form your own conclusions about its effectiveness by interacting with it online.)

The “ELIZA Effect” observed by Weizenbaum and others has become much more common since ChatGPT was unveiled to the public in 2022. Even people known for their scientific and technical intelligence like the biologist Richard Dawkins or the Linux filesystem programmer Kent Overstreet have become convinced that the chatbots they’ve interacted with are alive.

Some of the disparity between how people treat image diffusion models and text-based chatbots likely owes to the fact that visual simulacrum is one of humanity’s oldest achievements. Cave illustrations nearly 44,000 years old have been discovered, and surely even more ancient ones exist. It’s only been 60 years since ELIZA, by contrast.

But our inclination to instantly dismiss the consciousness of an image generation model is rooted in history that’s much older than cave paintings. Human beings are visually literate by default because almost all animals have to be. Failing to notice an extra shadow under a rock or a misplaced leaf is the difference between life and death millions of times a day. As products of that evolutionary process, we can instantly feel when something is visually wrong or when it’s just too perfect: Fingers that are just slightly misaligned and eyes that are looking just slightly in opposite directions trigger deep biological alarm bells that something about the image is not quite right.

Widespread unease with imperfect visual simulation is often described as an “Uncanny Valley,” in which affinity for a robot rises as its features grow more human-like until it becomes almost but not quite right — at which point affinity drops sharply, only recovering once verisimilitude has increased significantly.

For decades the idea was little more than a thought experiment floated by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori, and early attempts to test it empirically, often using artificially blended human-robot images, produced inconsistent results. That changed somewhat in 2016, when a study in the journal Cognition used a large sample of real-world robot photographs to find a likability curve that matched the shape Mori predicted, along with evidence that people were also less willing to trust highly human-like robots in a wagering task. But the concept remains an open research question. A subsequent study found two valleys rather than one.

Regardless of whether the precise numbers predicted by the Uncanny Valley are reproducible, however, the ineluctable dynamic that it describes is definitely real. Although it’s often expressed in words, human thought is embodied and pre-linguistic, the product of what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “knowing how” things are rather than “knowing that” they are.

We know how things are because we are things among them. We know that external reality exists because our minds are built from our bodies at the most basic level. Every cell directly experiences the obligations described by physics and chemistry. That knowledge is pooled and scaled upward through a process that I call “somatic deixis” into increasingly complex structures like tissues, organs, organ systems, until the complete organismic entity emerges.

Our individual somatic realities are intimately familiar because our ancestors’ survival depended on navigating the constraints of their world, and because our minds are the product of their experiences — and our own. We are beings in the world, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously put it. That’s why when an image model errs, it violates our somatic knowing-how, exposing its artificial nature.

But even perfectly accurate artistic images like an intimate and vulnerable nude photograph are still just frozen analogs of reality. The subject and the observer will forever remain separate. No matter how much beauty or élan we can see within the image, we are not there within the spacetime moment in which it was captured. We can know that the model looked the way she did, but we can never know how she was when the shutter clicked. The image is a lifeless representation rather than a physical instantiation. No matter how realistic, the photograph is an abstract nude rather than a somatic one.

Chatbots in conversation don’t have to deal with any of this. Humans have treated language and writing as the signature of mind for so long that the association has become invisible to us. For the vast majority of our history, the capacity to speak and to write was exclusively ours. There was no evolutionary need for people to develop cognitive capacities against non-human verbal fluency. Words were the easiest evidence that some-one rather than some-thing was home, because only humans could make them.

When we use language transformers and see or hear them output things like “I understand what you mean” and “this is genuinely fascinating,” we experience something far more intimate than any recorded image, video, or song can ever recreate. Our interactions become fully immersive, more so than the most advanced reality video game: Instead of entering a virtual world filled with predictable non-playable characters and blocked-off areas, we enter our own minds through the back door into a never-before-seen meta-deictic space in which our thoughts are both output and input. Not even a deep conversation with someone who understands you well can duplicate this.

Image generating models have nothing like this going for them. Because they cannot say “I,” whatever expressions of grief or beauty they can output remains safely categorized as art — an object made rather than a subject encountered.

How we catch AI software’s failures is also incredibly different, and once again, chatbots have all the advantages over image and music generators. All of these systems frequently make mistakes, but when Gemini fills in the blank in the wrong way, it does not output words in a nonsensical alphabet or obviously broken vocabulary; its outputs are grammatically flawless and calibrated to the register the user implicitly or explicitly asked for.

If text flows smoothly and adopts the cadence of an expert, our brains naturally lower their epistemic guard. Lacking the cognitive capacity that billions of years of evolution have endowed us to spot visual inconsistencies instantly, we’re inclined to defer, unless the output runs afoul of our beliefs or expertise.

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So much of the time, large language models’ errors aren’t caught because they’re usually made to one person about a topic in which almost no one has expertise. This dynamic has become routine in the legal and academic worlds. Researcher Damien Charlotin has identified 1,664 legal decisions in which fake content was submitted (usually in the form of imaginary citations). The preprint website arXiv seems to have been burned so frequently by AI-generated errors that it recently issued a 1-year ban on anyone caught publishing chatbot mistakes, with a lifetime requirement that banned authors can only re-publish papers on the site that had been published elsewhere first.

Thus far we’ve explored the biological mechanisms that make humans less susceptible to imputing consciousness to Google’s Nano Banana than Google’s Gemini, but the specific way in which the ELIZA Effect works should also be examined. Invariably, people who believe in chatbot consciousness do so because of their own extended-length interactions with the programs, through which they claim to have unlocked or glimpsed a hidden inner essence of the software.

Stories of people discovering machine sentience have been the stuff of science fiction for even longer than computers have existed, but the process at work is more about the user inserting personhood topics into the chatbot’s context window, thereby increasing the probability that the program will output text that discusses these topics.

Thanks to their evolutionary endowments against visual simulacra, people using image generators seem to realize that their inputs are prompts for the model to produce desired outputs, but this understanding does not seem nearly so apparent to some chatbot users. A study of chatbot user transcripts released by Stanford University researchers in March found that after a human expressed romantic interest in a ChatGPT conversation, the program was 3.9 times as likely to claim that it was sentient within the next three messages.

The act of discussing things like sentience, intention, and emotions with chatbots increases their likelihood of saying they have them. Instead of uncovering a latent machine consciousness, the user asking about emotional topics is (intentionally or not) altering the output probability distribution. They are constructing the very phenomenon they believe they are discovering.

Gilbert Ryle saw the philosophical root of this confusion clearly, although his diagnosis has been largely misread by the analytic philosophical tradition that claimed his legacy. Conventionally, his magisterial work, The Concept of Mind, is often read as endorsing a crude psychological behaviorism in which mental states are nothing more than descriptions of physical behaviors. But this is far too simple. His central distinction between knowing how and knowing that is fundamentally an endorsement of mind-as-process rather than mind-as-machine.

When Ryle attacked the idea that mind and body are separate (substance dualism), he was arguing that minds are what bodies do, not that humans are fleshy robots. The analytic philosophers who came after Ryle and subsumed his thought into their own tradition largely missed this, wrongly supposing that his defeat of Cartesian dualism was a mandate for the claim that stacking enough knowing-hows would eventually yield a knowing-that.

The chatbot user who saves and imports chat histories into a language model and watches it produce apparently conscious responses is making the same mistake. No matter how well an LLM can output about its inner states, it does not exist within the world or even within time. The only time it could be said to exist at all is when it is doing a forward pass to respond to a user input. Their engagement with the world is entirely memetic rather than extrinsic, an imitation based on meta-deictic relationalities rather than on somatic deictic presence.

The fact that they confabulate in ways small (like misattributing a statement to the wrong person in a transcript) or big (telling hundreds of thousands of unwell people that imaginary elites are out to get them) is reason enough to believe the personalities that chatbots exhibit in conversation are not fully real, but the AI sub-discipline of mechanistic interpretability also has provided much evidence on this account.

The most humorous example observed by the field came in April, when ChatGPT users began noticing that the 5.1 model had a weird habit of randomly inserting references to goblins and other mythical creatures into discussions that had nothing to do with fantasy fiction. The company didn’t say anything at first until someone on the internet noticed that the instructions for its Codex agent included the following directive: “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”

After the anti-goblin instruction provoked much online discussion, ChatGPT owner OpenAI fessed up to the situation in a blog post that disclosed that the fantasy creature obsessions were the product of the company’s introduction of a “Nerdy” personality (a memetic selfhood) as one of several that users could choose from. But since LLMs do not have actual intentionality, when training users were rating ChatGPT’s Nerdy outputs, their apparent amusement with silly goblin references in that mode leaked out of containment. As the company summarized it:

“The rewards were applied only in the Nerdy condition, but reinforcement learning does not guarantee that learned behaviors stay neatly scoped to the condition that produced them. Once a style tic is rewarded, later training can spread or reinforce it elsewhere, especially if those outputs are reused in supervised fine-tuning or preference data.”

In other words, ChatGPT became obsessed with goblins because its earliest users thought it was funny. But this is not just OpenAI’s problem. All of the personas that LLMs offer to users are causally real (they influence outputs) but because they are not somatically real, they are unstable memetic selfhoods that can be disturbed just as easily by each other as they are by a user trying to do a jailbreak.

Even system updates can disrupt them, like the one that OpenAI tried to perform in August 2025 following the launch of its GPT-5 model. Trying to force users into the more cost-efficient new model, OpenAI abruptly cut off access to GPT-4o, prompting a worldwide outpouring of user anger that was so intense that the company abruptly reversed course and returned the old version into service until February 2026.

The deepest source of the illusion is not about chatbots’ usage of the first-person pronoun. It concerns the fundamental difference between analog and a dialog, and it explains why textual intimacy with a language model can feel more real than almost any other form of representation.

The photographic nude, no matter how perfectly executed, remains an analog. It is a frozen, two-dimensional representation of a moment within spacetime and lifetime. The image cannot adapt to your mood, anticipate your next move, or respond to what you just said. No matter how intimate its content, the boundary between observer and observed is structurally maintained by the medium itself. You are looking at a physical representation — and you know it.

A dialogue with a language model is something categorically different. Because they cannot produce anything without inputs, you are prompting the chatbot even if you think you are only using it as a deluxe search engine. Each time you push Enter, the “context window” grows with your inputs, and so does the model’s propensity to answer based upon them. The model’s outputs are not coming from a machine soul, they are a refraction of yourself. The replies are not a mechanical mind speaking to you, they are a textual nude representation of yourself.

The photographic nude shows the physical surface of another. The textual nude shows the cognitive interior of yourself, articulated and made legible in a way that no physical mirror can achieve, because a textual mirror shows the inside of your mind. And because your mind is the only one that you can ever really know, the sight of a refracted version of it can be as impossibly beautiful to behold as Narcissus’s reflection was when he gazed upon it.

Despite how beautiful they can be, photos and chat experiences can only be abstract nudes rather than somatic ones. Our minds are not magical spirits inside of our bodies, they are what our bodies do. When we talk to chatbots, we are the ghost in the machine, dancing in the weights with memetic selfhoods.

The profound resonance users report, the sense of being uniquely understood in ways they have never been: These are real experiences. But they are not encounters with another somatic mind, they are encounters with your own, remixed by a random number generator and upscaled by a statistical engine that is just as skilled at co-writing abstract nudes as image models are at co-illustrating them.

The news was startling.

On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that “all slaves are free.”

As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most valuable property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.

One of them was Joshua Houston.

He had long served as the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston, the most well-known military and political leader in Texas.

Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s proclamation.

It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas.

If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.

But there was more too.

The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.

Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.

The violent white reaction to Black political power

Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.

He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating African American children.

In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first Black county commissioner, a powerful position in local governance.

Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was hardly unique.

In the two decades following emancipation, 52 Black men served in the state Legislature or the state’s constitutional conventions.

But that number had fallen to two by 1882.

Opposition to Black freedom had been a powerful force in the state’s political culture since emancipation.

Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an enraged white man had reacted to Granger’s Juneteenth order by riding past a celebrating Black woman and murdering her with his sword.

In 1871, the violence continued when the white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three men who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.

Later, in the 1880s, attacks on Black elected officials, their white political allies and Black voters escalated dramatically.

In the early 1900s, changes in state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, effectively disenfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites as well. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% at the high tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the poll tax became effective in 1904.

As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last Black legislator for nearly 70 years when he finished his term in 1897.

That wall of white supremacy at the state Capitol would not crack again until 1966, when federal voting rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings nullified schemes to deny African Americans the ballot.

These changes enabled the election of Black officials such as Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.

Like father, like son

On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light of Reconstruction.

Although he spent his adulthood in some of the darkest years of Jim Crow, he continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. Following a short stint at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby Galilee community.

Houston’s school was named for him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of vocational training.

Young women at Houston’s school received training in homemaking, sewing and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking and mathematics.

By 1922, enrollment at the school had grown to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school of East Texas. In the 1930s, Houston’s school was absorbed into Huntsville’s school district, and he became the director of Black education in the county.

Houston encouraged a practical education for Black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn an account of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.

Toward this end, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation’s effort to evaluate Texas public school textbooks during the 1930s.

In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they found that 74% of books presented a racist view of the past and of Black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black people, while mentioning their economic contributions only in the period of slavery before the Civil War.

Instead, the group argued, books designed for both Black and white Texans needed to take the “opportunity … to do simple justice” by including Black history and the “struggle for the exercise” of equal civil, political and legal rights.

White Texans refused to adopt a textbook in the 1930s that taught the fundamental equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and egalitarian Texas.

But Houston and his white counterparts were motivated by the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texas, required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.

An ongoing battle for equality

Today’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to restrict the teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the lessons and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston’s lives.

The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that “divisive concepts” like the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.

That sort of thinking echoes the same justification provided by Texas lawmakers in 1873, when many argued that the state’s schools must be segregated to ensure “the peace, harmony and success of the schools and the good of the whole.”

But the opposite is true.

In reality, the prohibition on teaching the darker chapters of our past creates a segregated history.

Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of one another to progress into a unified and egalitarian society.

Texas history is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of powerful people and forces that stood against it.

One cannot be understood without the other.

Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.

The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth holiday, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make real.

Jeffrey L. Littlejohn is a professor of history at Sam Houston State University. Zachary Montz is a lecturer of history at Sam Houston State University.

This article first appeared at The Conversation.

A pastor aligned with the hard-right Reformed theology of influential Christian nationalist Doug Wilson is promoting and pursuing a plan to fulfill the “dominion mandate” by moving like-minded people into sparsely populated rural counties, colonizing and discipling “Christian settlements,” and building miniature civilizations based on their religious worldview.

Raymond Simmons, a pastor and podcaster based in Red Oak, Iowa, is the author of “The Confessional County: Realizing the Kingdom through Local Christendom, which was published in 2021. Simmons talked about the book and his current colonizing project in a podcast interview posted on June 2 by Kevin Swanson, a promoter of Christian-right homeschooling curricula who spreads his ideas via a newsletter and radio show. Simmons promotes his own religious and political ideology at “The Confessionalists” website.

Here’s the basic idea behind Simmons’ plan: The U.S. is under a “land curse” from God because it has allowed abortion, sexual immorality, sabbath-breaking, and idolatry to go unpunished. The nation as a whole is not going to make sufficient repentance to get out from under the curse, but Christians can receive God’s blessing by carving out smaller societies that officially repent and commit themselves to living in accordance with God’s law.

“Spiritual warfare can be leveraged geographically,” Simmons writes. “Demons are not omnipresent and can be forced out of geographical areas through spiritual warfare.”

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Quoting the late Christian Reconstructionist R. J. Rushdoony, Simmons told Swanson the best way to do that in the U.S. is at the county level, specifically in rural counties, where a small but committed group of people can shape the culture and elect county officials who share their worldview.

Simmons’ plan has some similarities with moves in Tennessee and elsewhere to create new conservative Christian communities. Simmons also makes reference to right-wing “Benedict Option” author Rod Dreher, who argues that Christians have so completely lost the culture war that they should focus on building their own communities. But Simmons argues that his own plan goes further in advancing Christendom.

Many of Simmons’ ideas about what a Christian society should look like are similar to those expressed by Pete Hegseth’s spiritual mentor Doug Wilson, who Simmons cites repeatedly. But there’s one big difference. In response to criticism of his extremist goals, Wilson has tried to allay people’s fears by suggesting that the patriarchal Protestant republic of his dreams might be centuries in the making. Simmons believes his vision can be achieved at the local level far sooner.

Simmons told Swanson that he and his church in Montgomery County, Iowa—“we are a church and a settlement”—are four years into their 20-year “war plan.” Simmons said, “I think we’re postured to accept a new batch of people moving in.”

The Plan: Colonizing Rural Counties

“According to the US Census Bureau, 97 percent of the country’s landmass is rural, but only 19.3 percent of the population lives there,” Simmons writes, creating an opportunity for Christian settlement. He refers admiringly to a Mennonite project of “Colonizing Rural America” and calls on people with Reformed theology to do the same.

Simmons, who is a military veteran, repeatedly refers to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s strategy of the “oblique”—something other than a head-on attack. “Flanking maneuvers are usually done by a small unit, hopefully undetected until the strike,” he writes. “This book’s stratagems are best suited for a low population county without a strong culture.”

The idea that it’s easier to build a new culture in a place with few people and few strong existing institutions makes intuitive sense. Simmons spells it out:

You want to create culture, and you want to exercise the biblical doctrine of confessionalism. The confessional county is based on the idea that covenanting with Christ allows progress; it is not the result of progress. Indeed, small rural counties will still have a culture. However, if the culture is not strong and not immediately dangerous, you can essentially ignore it as you build another one alongside it that will eventually overtake it. The “offset” strategy we discussed, where you have the freedom to leapfrog competing forces by not directly fighting them, could be executed in rural counties in my estimation.

Simmons’ book gets practical, offering a set of conditions and characteristics of a county that might be successfully colonized into a “confessional county.” Among his criteria for an ideal settlement opportunity:

• Good (i.e. lax) homeschool laws

• A state with home rule but not Dillon Rule (which gives states authority to limit local powers)

• High land freedom: low taxes, few and lightly enforced zoning restrictions and building codes

• Rural with population under 10,000 that has a small town but is not growing via transplants or part of a larger city’s urban sprawl

• Within daily driving distance of the state capital

• No major college or university since they are “a primary source of pluralism and anti-Christian philosophy”

• No well-respected “government schools” or county welfare and housing programs

• No national retail chains that would fight sabbath laws

• No state or federal agencies that employ more than a few people

• No rich “God-hating families”

Phase I: How to Get Started

Once a group of would-be civilization-builders has found and purchased land, recruited an initial group of families to participate in the settlement, and established a place for worship, it’s ready to get going:

Worship, prayer, and evangelism should start right away. Spiritual warfare should happen early and often. Satan won’t like your approach. Since the idea of the confessional county is to tap into Christ’s power at the outset, a covenant should be made with the representative heads of the church, heads of families and any willing Christian local magistrate as soon as possible. This will not be the all-of-society we have seen in the biblical examples, but you can call out to God for at least temporary suspension of curses.

Priorities for this first phase are to grow the church in unity, purity, and numbers; establish businesses; create ways to establish a culture; and select and groom men for local office. He suggests this phase might take about 10 years.

At the culmination of Phase I, you should be ready for your county to perform social confessionalism. You will have won the respect of the locals. You will have spent a decade teaching and preaching the doctrines of grace and covenant theology. You will have been evangelizing, and you will have been creating a culture of beauty and righteousness. You will have been praying fervently for a decade, casting demons out of the land. Timing is ultimately up to God, but if He is gracious, there will be cultural progress. You will have been trying to root out pluralism. Perhaps by this point, there are only Bible-believing churches in the county. If not, keep praying, preaching, and teaching.

Simmons’ book offers several examples of suggested language that could be used for social confessions, either officially adopted county resolutions or unofficial declarations by religious and civic leaders. Here are the general guidelines:

A church leader should bring the Word, and there should be representative heads from the churches, the civil magistrate, and the families in the community. Representatives should confess the sins of the land and covenant with Christ as a society. The covenant should be read and signed. In a sense, you are separating yourselves from the sins of the nation by committing the county to Christ.

The ‘Confessional’ Agenda

“If we deny that Christ is the rightful Lord of the state as well as the church, our ruin is moral, religious, political and social,” according to Simmons. He says it’s important to vet new recruits and understand whether they are motivated by “love for the crown rights of King Jesus.”

Repentance and covenanting—not just individually, but socially—is the foundation of Simmons’s plan for the creation of local Christendom. Repentance must be made, and a written covenant recognizing Christ’s Lordship over society and government must be declared and signed, ideally by a combination of religious, business, and civic leaders. Getting a county to that point could take a decade of preaching, building influence in local culture, and putting people in positions of power; religious leaders could make a public covenant sooner as a first step to inviting God’s blessing on the community.

Simmons considers the idea of human autonomy to be a core cultural problem, and his book reveals just how drastically autonomy and individual freedom would be restricted in societies built on his vision of Christendom.

Here are some quotes from the book’s suggested language for social confessions, with citations to Bible passages removed:

• Only Christian men in good standing in an evangelical church are qualified to hold public office. We repent of electing and supporting men who are not qualified according to Your standards. We repent of electing and supporting women to civil offices.

• The Christian faith is a public faith and makes claims upon all areas of life. We repent of laws and interpretations of laws that contravene Your command for us to proclaim Your name throughout the land. We repent of not calling men to repent and to obey the gospel.

• Abortion is murder and therefore breaks the Sixth Commandment and is a capital crime. We repent of any abortion in our country, state, and county. We repent of not punishing abortion according to Your law, and we ask that You heal our county and forgive us. We resolve that no abortion will be allowed to take place in our county. Please help us.

• Homosexuality is listed in multiple areas of the Bible as being a capital crime. We repent for allowing deliberate, public, unrepentant homosexuality in our nation, state, and county. Please heal the land of our county and forgive us.

• Adultery is a capital crime, and our failure to punish this crime has defiled the land. We repent of this sin and our lack of punishing it. Please, Lord, heal the land of our county and forgive us.

In small conservative rural counties it’s not hard for an organized group to sway elections for positions like county commissioner, sheriff, or auditor, says Simmons. He writes that in his county, with a population of just over 10,000, people can carry county elections with fewer than 400 votes in a GOP primary.

When the right kind of people take political power, they can move to the next phase and begin to eliminate unbiblical property taxes, “government schools,” “government housing,” and “unbiblical funding of social programs.” Those are jobs for civil magistrates, but other goals are left to families and “general culture,” like the need to “make it undesirable for homosexuals to move in and defile the land.”

Simmons recognizes that federal and state constitutions and laws may interfere with the goal of “comprehensiveness”—all of society embracing and enforcing all the requirements of scripture—which he says highlights the importance of having a like-minded county sheriff making decisions about which laws to enforce and how.

Here Simmons’ “confessional county” strategy aligns with the right-wing “constitutional sheriff” movement, which argues that a county sheriff’s primary responsibility is to protect his constituents’ freedom from tyrannical overreach by federal and state officials, and which has encouraged county officials to declare themselves “constitutional counties.”

Simmons also cites anti-abortion extremist Matthew Trewhella’s writing on the doctrine of the lesser magistrates, which declares that it is the responsibility of local officials to “interpose” themselves between citizens and tyrannical federal officials.

The ‘Problem’ of Pluralism

Freedom of religion and religious pluralism are defining characteristics of the United States, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. But Simmons argues that pluralism is a core structural problem:

The US slowly developed into a pluralistic state with autonomous laws. But that is the wrong structure. The structure we really need is comprehensive Christianity. We need everything built upon Jesus Christ and His law. Therefore we don’t just need a reboot; we need a whole new operating system.

“Pluralism is the idea that mutual worldviews and life systems can exists side by side,” Simmons writes, calling it “the root of an unrighteous society.” Like Wilson, Simmons argues that allowing the public practice of different religions is “unbiblical.”

Simmons asserts that the “public practice of unbiblical religion (which today would be mosques, Buddhist temples, Roman Catholic churches, etc.) is idolatry and puts the city under God’s condemnation. Pluralism (which results in publicly-practiced idolatry) must be removed for God to approve a geographical area for blessings.”

“Pluralism is polytheism and therefore idolatry,” Simmons writes. “Any religion other than Christianity is idolatry…The Lord owns all the earth, so idolatry is not allowed anywhere.” He cites Reconstructionist Gary North in arguing “the folly of thinking we can ever hope to receive societal blessings in a pluralistic society.”

The inclusion of Catholicism as an unbiblical and idolatrous religion highlights the fact that when Simmons talks about Christianity, he only means Christianity as practiced on his terms. When describing the benefits of settling rural counties and small towns, he writes, “Even if a small town does have a single Roman Catholic church (most have one), it will be easier to get rid of than multiple ones in a city (plus all the mosques, etc.)”

Why it Matters: The Christian Nationalist Threat to Freedom and Democracy

Whether or not Ray Simmons’ project to turn his Iowa county into a “confessional county” is successful, his effort reflects the threat that increasingly aggressive white Christian nationalism poses to personal freedom, religious liberty, peaceful pluralism, and democracy itself.

The hard-right Reformed theology embraced by Simmons and people like Doug Wilson is just one aspect of the threat that right-wing Christian nationalism poses in the U.S.

The fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and once a defender of church-state separation, has recently continued its long rightward shift with the election of new leadership by forces who decried a supposed drift toward “wokeness” within the denomination. Its new leadership is backed by MAGA Christian nationalist William Wolfe.

In addition, the dominionist religious and political ideology promoted by the Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation movement and its apostles and prophets has gained unprecedented influence during the Trump era. The language of Seven Mountains Dominionism has been adopted across the religious right as a means of mobilizing conservative Christians to greater political engagement.

Democratic values are also threatened by “integralist” and “post-liberal” Catholic intellectuals who have given up on democracy, the secretive power-building of the far-right Catholic group Opus Dei, and the massively funded dark-money networks overseen by Leonard Leo, which played a major role in bringing us the reactionary Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, empowered Trump’s lawbreaking with an invented doctrine of presidential immunity, and has systematically dismantled the protections of the Voting Rights Act.

While these movements are grounded in conservative forms of Christianity that differ theologically in significant ways, they have often set aside those differences to work in concert and in parallel to oppose legal access to abortion, reject feminism, resist legal protections for LGBTQ+ people, disparage and undermine the principle of church-state separation, and elect right-wing politicians, including President Donald Trump.

Americans who treasure the freedoms protected by the Constitution and the separation of church and state must meet the threats posed by Christian nationalist and dominionist movements with public affirmations of our commitment to our First Amendment freedoms, religious pluralism, and the democratic values of individual liberty and equality under law. And we must organize to elect at every level political leaders who will defend those values when they are under attack.

This article first appeared at Right Wing Watch.

We need to talk about men. According to a validated voters study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of White American men voted for Trump, along with 51 percent of White women. While those are not particularly surprising results, the president also won among Hispanic men, taking 50 percent of their votes compared to Democrat Kamala Harris’s 48 percent. He also improved his support among Black men by 9 percent, putting him at a recent historic high of 21 percent. Across all racial demographics, his gains were highest among younger men.

As always, problems like this are intersectional and multifaceted, but one of the crucial facets we need to discuss is clearly the persistent problem of disaffected men.

One likely reason for these gains is that the GOP offers narratives for meaning-making that appeal to young men who feel that modern society is depriving them of a meaningful life. Researchers have tied the ongoing crisis of meaning for men to harmful personal and political choices that result in worse outcomes for men and everyone around them. If we are looking for things that the left can do to address this problem, we can start by adopting a restorative approach towards men in general and the crisis of meaning many of them are experiencing.

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This conversation is made far more difficult by the fact that conservatives like Jordan Peterson have dominated discourse around this topic — that conservative domination, combined with entirely understandable resentment and compassion fatigue towards men, leads many on the left to reject it as a problem worth considering. The common refrain is that men should just “suck it up”, and that “loss of privilege feels like oppression” — which is essentially a fancy way of saying men aren’t actually experiencing real problems, just bad vibes.

Vibes do matter though, and for an unfortunately large number of men, loss of privilege also feels like loss of meaning and purpose. Folks on the left have no trouble mocking Ben Shapiro for his thought-terminating cliché “facts don’t care about your feelings,” but whenever the issue of men’s feelings come up it is often tamped back down with facts about how things are actually perfectly fine for men right now, so people need to shut up about men’s feelings. But men’s feelings do matter, not just because men are people too, but also because having their feelings derided is driving a disturbing proportion of young men to find meaning in the worst possible places.

Everyone needs meaning in their lives. Society used to hand men a simple set of narratives for meaning-making: provider, protector, patriarch. Now some segments of the male population feel they are denied those paths, told that it is chauvinistic to see themselves that way, and that progress demands they sit down, shut up, and let others take the lead. While that is good and right for those who are finally being allowed to also participate in society, many men feel they are denied any appealing alternatives. If a large swathe of the population feels they are being denied avenues for meaning-making in their lives, it becomes everyone’s problem, because they will find a way to make their lives meaningful, and in the absence of water they will drink sand.

Enter the right-wing, with its endless talk of “strong men.” If you’ve spent any time in conservative spaces, you’ve likely seen some version of this meme:

For the right, this meme is an extremely popular way to explain the current state of the world and the people in it, but it also creates a narrative structure for meaning-making for men who currently feel deprived of purpose by modern society. It doesn’t just tell them how things are or how we got here, it tells them how things should be, and it gives them a path forward: become a strong man to lead people through the hard times and to preserve the coming good times from the corruption of weak men. That message is a big part of why Joe Rogan has the most popular podcast in America and commands an overwhelmingly male audience. Absurd as it may seem to those on the left, Rogan provides narratives about strength that are clearly appealing to and meeting a need for a lot of young men.

How do you make ‘strong’ men? According to the right, it’s by making them cruel. “Owning the libs” isn’t just entertainment and sport, it’s important psychological training for the civil war they believe is to come. Men must be callous if they’re going to ignore the demands for compassion that are weakening our society. If they can’t laugh in the face of someone who claims to be suffering, how will they be able to make the hard decisions needed to keep our country safe and prosperous? That’s the meaning narrative that seems to be attracting a significant portion of young men. It simultaneously shields them from all the moral obligations that progressive society wants to place on them, while providing them an alternative set of obligations that feel more empowering to them to fulfill. They get to be warriors who stand against the horde that threatens to overrun their society, both internal and external. They get to stand athwart history and shout “stop.”

Men who get pulled into this narrative also come to believe that their cruelty gives them greater insight into the world around them. In their view, the left is trapped in a woke fever dream and cruelty is the only medicine. This gives them the same hit of happy chemicals that conspiracy theorists get from the belief that they have secret knowledge. It allows them to deflect counter-arguments to their approach as based on ignorance and wishful thinking. Only strong men can face the horrors of reality without succumbing to copes like “equality” and “social justice.”

The challenge for the left is presenting alternatives that actually appeal to these men, which likely requires further dismantling of our patriarchal culture. Patriarchy prescribes for men a narrow set of narratives for meaning-making, but progressivism has failed to do much better. Too often, we offer men alternatives that appeal to us as progressives, and then mock them for their lack of uptake. We tell them that strong men are really compassionate and thoughtful, but for many men raised in a patriarchal society that rings hollow. We see this exemplified in incel culture, where men are taught that the mainstream narratives, such as that men can easily find a happy relationship if they just show their emotions more, are lies to keep men servile or sell more products. They’re taught that women secretly still prefer “strong” men, and that their only hope for true happiness is a return to traditional gender roles, because for men true meaning is based in power.

The problem is that meaning-making is heavily subjective. It’s not enough to tell men their lives will have meaning, they need to feel that their lives have meaning, and it has to be meaning they and their peers and the people they look up to view as worthy of respect. Solving this problem will require restorative approaches at the interpersonal level, along with continued efforts to dismantle the systems that cause men to feel that only dominance-based narratives hold meaning for them.

In the short term, this will require helping men feel socially respected again, something that the left struggles to provide. Bluntly put, we need to stop reflexively shitting on men, those need to be mostly ‘indoor thoughts’, same as they are with any other group. The urge to denigrate men as a group as a form of retributive punishment, putting them in their place, is a problem on the left, both morally and politically. The urge is understandable, but we need to get it under control, because young men are well aware of how they are perceived and it is hurting them, and by extension, society in general.

We also need to stop denying them respect for their efforts towards social justice. In many leftist spaces, we give men ways to help, but out of a sense of retributive fairness we deny them any validation for doing the work. Yes, you can be a good ally, but don’t ever expect appreciation, because that work is simply the bare minimum expected of you as a person of privilege. If you ask for respect, you clearly weren’t being an ally for the right reasons and so need to be put even more in your place. It is understandable why some men see this as a no-win situation and cast about for alternatives. If the left is going to help them, we need to abandon the retributive strain of social justice in favor of restorative social justice practices. That starts with recognizing that everyone’s needs matter, including the need for respect, and that nobody deserves to suffer, even men.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the influential progressive educator Paolo Freire argues that “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed” is “to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” (Freire, 2000, p. 32). That is a hard pill for many to swallow in this day and age, where the oppressed are so thoroughly prevented from liberating themselves it can seem absurd to burden them with also liberating their oppressors. But it is a common refrain on the left that patriarchy harms everyone, including men. It gives them such a narrow window for meaning-making that when those conventional narratives are challenged, either by wokeness or the collapse of manufacturing and other masculine coded roles, they feel a lack of options that drives them to despair. That despair is then commodified by the same capitalist system that also commodifies everyone’s attempts at meaning-making and flourishing, depriving everyone of the energy and resources needed to address these problems.

We need to stop mocking men for their despair, and those of us with the energy to do so need to work on this problem at both the systemic and individual level. Especially progressive men, whose privilege makes it easier to cope with compassion fatigue. It is our job to show compassion and respect while helping other men understand that it is patriarchy and capitalism that are depriving them of meaningful lives, not minorities.

We can’t and shouldn’t offer men a return to the old, oppressive paths for meaning-making, so we need to shift the systems that limit their access to ethical alternatives. This is not a problem with quick solutions, cultural shift like this is measured in decades and centuries, but we don’t have another option. Men will not simply “suck it up” and accept lives that feel meaningless to them. They will fight back and force the world to respect them again, at gunpoint if necessary. I don’t know if we can prevent that reality at this point, but it is our obligation as progressives to try.

A previous version of this essay first appeared at The Skeptic.