10: Don't Talk About Politics w/ Sarah Stein Lubrano

Antifascist Dad Podcast Episode 10 – Don't Talk About Politics (with Sarah Stein Lubrano) Host: Matthew Remski Guest: Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano Audio excerpt: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [00:00:00] Matthew: So there's this co-op bike and bike repair shop in the Annex area of Toronto. It started up in 2006 as a collective of anarchists and bike punks who wanted to make bicycling more accessible to working people. And they used to have a sandwich board out front that made me laugh. It said, “Everyone wants a revolution, but nobody wants to learn how to fix their damn bike.” [00:00:30] Matthew: I'm Matthew Remski. That wasn't exactly an Antifascist Dad joke because it was actually pretty good. I'll return to the groaners next week. Welcome to episode 10, “Don’t Talk About Politics,” with Sarah Stein Lubrano. [00:01:23] Matthew: Housekeeping. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and you can find me on YouTube as AntiFascistDad. I’m also on TikTok under that handle, where I try to post regular mini-essays. The Patreon for this project is AntifascistDadPodcast. The way that works is that today you’ll hear the first half of my interview with Sarah Stein Lubrano, and then you’ll be able to catch the second half on Patreon at AntifascistDadPodcast. It’s already up there and it will be exclusive to Patreon for a few weeks. Also, in the show notes you will see a preorder link for the book that this podcast is based on and supporting. It’s called “Antifascist: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.” The publication date is April 26, 2026. And lastly, I’d love to hear from you if you have an antifascism story to share, especially about relationships, the generations, parenting, whatever you like. I’m on Signal and my username is antifascistdad71. So: antifascistdad71. You look me up on Signal, you leave me a voice message, and it would be great to connect. [00:02:50] Matthew: Okay. In Fascist, Squish, and Antifascist news of the week, I mainly want to focus on the Squish category, and here the honors really have to go to former political journalist Olivia Nuzzi, who released her memoir of being swept away by love and political intrigue. The memoir is called “American Canto,” and it just came out this past week. [00:03:15] Matthew: I’ve been doing some TikTok reviews of the book and how it works, and you can catch those there or on YouTube. But what I want to say briefly here is that the book is basically about Nuzzi’s now-over career in covering male fascist politicians, starting with Donald Trump but ending with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now Trump’s HHS secretary, where he is butchering public health in ways that will push disease and virus management back for decades and cause mass casualty events in the future. Nuzzi was fired from her top-tier position when it was revealed that she and Kennedy had begun an online love affair while she was supposed to be covering his march to the White House. So there’s a prurient sex-scandal thing at the heart of this. But what I think is very useful about the spectacle is that the tawdry stuff really pales in comparison to the general theme it illuminates. And I think this is actually a good conversational pathway with the young person in your life who has become aware of this story. I think the word should be that nobody needs to care what these people are doing together on FaceTime. Now, if Kennedy is lying to his staff and his family and his wife about it, that definitely should be outed. That’s in the public interest. But what’s far more important, for me, is to zoom out and realize that Nuzzi has given us a diary of a love affair between a liberal and an emerging fascist. And the love-affair diary is written by the liberal, who now has regrets and feels a little bit helpless, but thinks they can hold on to their dignity by turning the collapse of society into the landscape of their own hero’s journey. There are entire streams of research that cover exactly how a similar attraction happened between the liberal western media and the emerging fascists of the 1930s. They wind up failing to confront fascism because they don’t have a critical position. They are invested instead in access and proximity to power. When the liberal journalist or content creator encounters the fascist and gets a whiff of their danger, they bite their lip and cross their fingers and hope for some kind of return to normalcy. They pull their punches for fear of losing access. They are fascinated by the fascist’s energy for innovation and creativity. “Wow, look at how the trains are working better now. Wow, look at all of these supplements we have on the market now. Wow, look at this biohacking technology that is low-key replacing our public health systems.” They can detect some problems, but they also believe that the goodness of their own soul can positively influence the fascist. So does that work? No. And I guess my takeaway is actually two antifascism points, so we’re doing two parts of the three-part segment here. First of all, spread the word that fascists make really bad boyfriends. And second, be the kind of journalist, researcher, or content creator who never gets infatuated with power. [00:07:14] Matthew: Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano is my guest today, and in her new book, “Don’t Talk About Politics,” now out with Bloomsbury, she poses a really tough moral challenge and backs it up with empirical data. Her review of the social psychology of political change shows that talk is cheap, that this whole realm of discourse that so many people, including myself, spend so much time in has little transformative effect on anyone’s political values or commitments if it’s contained and limited by the frameworks of the “marketplace of ideas” or the supposed inherent value of debate. Politics through talking is often just a parallel, also monetized universe that fails to interact with the real world of relationships and shared life experiences. Now, as I say at one point in our conversation: Sarah, you have a really challenging thesis, especially for leftists who view social revolution as being rooted in education. But I also think it’s a real challenge to my other work over at Conspirituality Podcast, where the primary objective has been to debunk medical misinformation and to deconstruct the religious drives behind right-wing extremism. Does this work? Does this change people’s minds? Does this preach to the choir? These are really difficult questions. There’s a point in our conversation in which Lubrano says, “Okay, let’s get really Marxist about this,” and then she goes on to say that the entire premise of fostering critical thinking too often bypasses the fact that political convictions are deeply interwoven with an individual’s identity, agency, and sense of belonging. This can make them impervious to intellectual arguments or evidence alone. She says that the critical-thinking framework often just parrots dominant liberal talking points on the value of debate. It suggests that middle-class, educated intellectual labor is so important, so compelling, and so special in people’s lives that it should really transform anyone it touches. [00:09:29] Matthew: One of the most moving things Lubrano says in our time together is that if you’re not engaged in a cooperative social relationship with a person, you have no purchase with them for discussing your political program. If you’re not already out there helping people build and live in a more just world, why should they listen to you? Now, two things I want to flag before I run this interview, from Lubrano’s parting advice for young people. That’s in part two. It’s now up on Patreon for a few weeks, but then you can catch it here as well when I unlock it. She says that learning how to do good politics is synonymous with learning how to be a good friend. Now, I just want to point out that in my book coming out in April, chapter 8 is called “Friendship (Is Not Easy).” The “is not easy” is in parentheses, and it’s exactly on this point, though without the research angle. I talk about how Aristotle’s old scheme of friendships is as relevant as ever as we search for the friend of virtue, which is at the top of his typology: the person we love because of who they are and because we are committed to what they might become alongside us. In my own parenting life, I’m finding that conversations with kids about the joy and trouble of friendship are some of the richest and most accessible in terms of building the antifascist toolbox. Okay, second point: Lubrano refers in our conversation to the work of Leon Festinger and his colleagues back in the 1950s, for a book called “When Prophecy Fails.” This book was famous for its articulation of the theory of cognitive dissonance. This is a theory that is important in Lubrano’s work on why it’s so difficult for people to change their minds if their beliefs are embedded in social networks that give them support. Now, funny story. Just this past month, a researcher named Thomas Kelly published a review of archival materials showing that Festinger and his colleagues actually fudged a lot of the key points of their study, while they also unethically embedded themselves within the social matrix of the group they were studying. My colleagues and I covered this controversy on Conspirituality Podcast, and I interviewed Thomas Kelly to find out more, so I’ll link to that. But this news broke after I interviewed Lubrano, so I didn’t want that comment sitting there unaddressed. Like any good researcher, Lubrano put out a comment acknowledging the embarrassment for the discipline, but also pointing out that cognitive dissonance theory has been well supported since those initial studies. If this new finding alters the balance of evidence in some way downstream, she’ll take account of that. My guest, Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, has a background in feminist mutual aid and other local organizing, as well as teaching in prisons. Her PhD comes from Oxford and her master’s degree comes from Cambridge. She works through the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. Her first book is “Don’t Talk About Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds,” and it’s now out with Bloomsbury. Here’s our conversation. [00:12:45] Matthew: Hello, Sarah. Welcome to Antifascist Dad. [00:12:47] Sarah: Hello. So nice to be here. Thank you for having me. [00:12:50] Matthew: So here we are on a podcast where usually the idea is to explain things to people in persuasive ways. But in a nutshell, your research says that, for the most part, our ideas about how people’s minds change are mostly wrong. Is that a fair way to begin? And if that’s true, should we end our conversation here and just maybe play a board game? [00:13:15] Sarah: Yeah, I think that’s not a bad summary. The point that I’m making in my book is very specific, actually. It’s not that we don’t learn things from talking about politics. It’s not that people aren’t learning things from your podcast; they probably are all the time. But we do not change our fundamental views on key political issues from listening to them being debated or from being exposed to new ideas. This draws on a whole bunch of social science research and also some psychology research where people have looked at big data pools. For example: people watch a debate; do they change their point of view? The answer is no. Do people report having changed their mind about something based on what they read on the Internet in the last year? Almost never. In fact, we don’t really see large-scale effects even from people being near protests. They’re being exposed to arguments and ideas from even being near a protest, and that doesn’t seem to change people’s minds either. None of these discourse-based activities appears to be fundamental in what people hold true as beliefs. They might become more educated, they might acquire more information, but they won’t change their views. And that’s very important if you want to make change in this world. Because a lot of people’s theory of change, as we say in organizing, is, “Oh, we’ll just keep telling people things and then they’ll change their minds and then we’ll have a different political world.” [00:14:29] Matthew: And that doesn’t work, you say. I think the book basically argues that instead of debating, you do constructive things. You get out of the endless and self-perpetuating theater of political debate, and you build third spaces, or you participate at the library. To me, it reminds me of a parenting strategy or bit of wisdom that I think is probably more prevalent in the neurodiverse parenting world, which is: if emotions are spiraling, it may not be the best idea to confront them head on, to tell the child, “Calm down, you’re being irrational. Let me explain to you how things are going to work and why your present behaviors are not going to lead to good outcomes.” Sometimes the best thing to do is to redirect, to literally say, “Hey, look over here, isn’t this cool?” So I’m wondering if this tracks with your general idea, just to bring it beyond the confines of political discourse for a moment. [00:15:32] Sarah: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think while that’s probably more true for certain kinds of neurodiverse people, I think it’s true for all of us. Very few people like to be told that they should calm down. And also, a lot of grown-ups are neurodiverse. But I think, yes, there is something about experiencing an idea, rather than being told it, that is far more profound. In the book, I don’t just take apart this idea that you can learn through a “marketplace of ideas” and then change your mind as a result of that. I don’t just take apart the idea of debate as a force for good in democracy. I do that, but I also look at two things that do appear to shift people’s political commitments and beliefs over time. One of those is their relationships with other people, especially their friends. And the other one is their own actions and experiences in the world. Basically, the fundamental thing is that we’re not so much distracting people. It’s not, “Oh, let’s make all the fascists go bowling.” That’s just a distraction. The goal is more to take people who might be able to come around to your political project in some way and give them an experience that enables them to have that idea in a different way. So you’re not just telling them, “Actually, not all migrants are terrible sex pests and criminals.” You’re saying, “We’re going to go down to the food bank and deliver some food. Would you come with me? I need some help carrying stuff.” And then they go meet the people they’ve had a completely different set of ideas about. Or you say, “Let’s go and check out what’s happened to the farmland in the last year. Some of it is way more dry than ever before.” That kind of thing. A gateway experience or a new relationship with a new set of people does appear to change people’s political views. As we’ll discuss, it’s a little bit harder to do. It’s a much more profound commitment to change people’s minds in that way than just chatting to them. But it does work. [00:17:16] Matthew: In a way it is more difficult, because there has to be more buy-in to, “Let’s come to the farmland and see how the soil is doing.” That’s a time commitment. It’s a time commitment to go to the food bank. At the same time, there’s something very visceral about moving boxes around and interacting with people because you have to interact with them. So there is something easier about it if you get over the time-commitment part. [00:17:42] Sarah: I think the question is what we mean by “hard,” right? It’s funny. I wrote this book and just sort of nerded out for a while. I read lots of studies, I pieced them together, I made a framework for what I was learning, whatever. And then I started talking to the public and presenting my ideas, and people in the public said two things which I think about every day now. The first thing they said is, “But this sounds hard,” and the second thing, which we’ll get to later, is, “But I hate talking to people.” They’re related, but they’re not the same. And I’ve thought a lot about the question of “hard,” because I realized that most of the time we are sold “easy.” We’re sold: here’s a Tupperware, it’s easier to use; here’s a software, it saves you time. Most of the things we’re being sold are easy. The thing I’m “selling” in my book—since I’m certainly not making very much money from it—is hard. It is hard. It means you have to get out of bed, you have to deal with other people, and other people are nightmares. You have to... it is hard. But there are different kinds of hard in this world. There’s the hard where you go home at the end of the day and you’re like, “I’m happy with myself as a person.” Whereas there’s a lot of easy where you go home at the end of the day and you’re like, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” I’m really big on the first formulation: we’re going to do the hard thing. There are going to be a lot of difficult bits, and we’re going to feel great. [00:18:58] Matthew: This is a really challenging thesis, especially for Marxists or leftists who view social revolution as being rooted in education. I’m thinking about one of my favorite podcasts, The Dig. At the beginning of every episode, Daniel Denvir says, “This is a political education project, and that’s why we want to have this available to everybody.” There’s something about that that is very compelling to me. It feels like an act of generosity, and it’s rooted in this very old idea that if you tell working people exactly how their bosses exploit them, there will be a change or a shift in consciousness. Is that education itself useful, or are you talking about a threshold that it can pass over, after which it loses efficacy, burns itself out, or doesn’t work? [00:19:50] Sarah: I think this is actually conflating two things. I don’t listen to The Dig that much, so I don’t want to overgeneralize about them particularly. But I’m guessing that The Dig is a podcast that has listeners who are already roughly on board. Maybe they get on and listen and say, “But I’m actually an anarchist and I really think…” Fine. But we’re not talking about some kind of 180-degree persuasion. In that case, sure. The question is: what is political education for? My honest answer, zooming out a little bit, is that I actually have two professional trainings. I’m a political theorist by training, with a fancy PhD, and I’m also a person who is—and I mean this with no judgment toward myself or anyone else—a content creator. I quit academia because there was a massive gender problem in my department, and I went and worked for a place called The School of Life. It teaches basic ideas from psychoanalysis and other weird stuff to people on the Internet, and it has millions of followers on YouTube now. So it’s a popular content-creation world. I also now make videos every day, pretty much, for the algorithm. I’m pretty good at it. I understand how that world works. Honestly, if we were to evaluate the human need in that stuff, and in a lot of podcasting, the human need is that you are giving people tools that will both make the world less scary and overwhelming to them and make them feel smart at parties. And that’s fine, frankly. That’s most of what you are doing. Most of your audience is not going to go and start a revolutionary movement, even the people listening to The Dig. Sorry. They are going to feel smart at parties and feel less overwhelmed. And that’s okay. I often think about Terry Eagleton’s line that it’s beneath the dignity of a rational creature not to understand the conditions of his own oppression. That applies to those of us who already consider ourselves Marxian in some way, too. We don’t really understand what’s going on because it’s overwhelming and there’s so much of it. Marx was wrong about some things; Marx disagreed with himself. Trying to understand the world you’re in is a valuable human activity in itself, in my opinion. Education is interesting and fun. People use their brains. Thank goodness. Every once in a while, someone also listens to your podcast and decides, “I’m actually going to do something differently.” But that’s way more rare. Mostly you’re helping people feel smart at parties and feel less overwhelmed and alienated, and that’s okay. Most podcasts are doing that, including probably this one, and that’s also okay. [00:22:10] Sarah: The question is: what next? What’s your theory of change after that? For me, I often think about this very specifically and say, okay, my book is for people who are leaving liberalism. I actually didn’t write this book for you. No offense. I’m sure you’re great. [00:22:25] Matthew: Right. [00:22:25] Sarah: I wrote this book for people who were not already convinced, necessarily, of a radical political theory, or even familiar with one, but who were becoming disillusioned with the project of liberalism and all of its culture, and who wanted to understand why that isn’t working for them anymore and what they can do, because they’re scared. To be completely honest, I mostly wrote this book for Americans, because Americans, more than other groups of people right now, have this pain point. I think Brazilians are also pretty much there, but a lot of Europeans are still in denial that this is coming for them. People in Britain are also in denial. So I have a very specific theory of change when I write, and I write for a very specific group of people who are not me, and are probably also not listening to Antifascist Dad. But hi, Antifascist Dad people. You should read the book too, yeah. [00:23:09] Matthew: When you say “it is coming for them”—it is coming for the Europeans, and the Americans are at a pain point right now—let’s define that. You’re talking about antifascism? [00:23:18] Sarah: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, look, there are other forms of authoritarianism more broadly. There are other crises that will arise that are linked to fascism but not the same thing. A lot of the tools in this book you can also use to handle climate crises in your neighborhood. You can use them to, at the most basic level, improve your school’s curriculum. [00:23:36] Sarah: But the reason that I quit my perfectly nice job in the tech industry, where I would earn twice as much, and went back to get a PhD in political theory, is because I think that fascism is coming—or is already here, depending on where you are. My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, and I’m very alert to this idea. I don’t think we’re anywhere near far away from it. Equally, you only have to look at what’s happening in Palestine. You could go on and on. There are a lot of incredibly bad things happening right now, and a lot of people who are very poorly equipped to even begin the necessary struggle against them. And all of us are lost. I also don’t know what to do a lot of the time. But we need to begin to think through how change actually works. [00:24:15] Matthew: To speak about that rare listener who will hear something and say, “Oh, I’m going to go out and be active. I’m going to take some action.” I wonder if this particular example might fit into some theory of change here. I’ve heard two registers of leftist argument that I find very moving, and I think they’ve been transformational for me. When I think, “Did somebody change my mind through persuasion or through talking about ideas or through debating?” I think in these cases, yes, maybe that happened. The first was cognitive, because at some point somebody explained to me the theory of surplus labor value, and it happened through the example of making a chair. I got it. And then the second one was psychological. Someone said, “Hey, the boss’s job is to get as much time and labor out of you as possible for the least amount of wages. He’s not your friend.” And that hit. They were saying it to somebody who wasn’t necessarily hostile, but I wasn’t particularly receptive. Those two registers felt different, but they both worked on me in different ways. I’m wondering, however, if they’re still both in this contested realm of trying to change minds directly, which seems to be the mystery you’re picking at. [00:25:40] Sarah: Yeah. I don’t know what your views were before those two insights happened, and they are important insights. But my guess would be that I still wouldn’t view that as a case of hardcore persuasion. I would view that as a case of soft-core persuasion at best. [00:25:52] Matthew: Soft-core in the sense that I was already halfway there. [00:25:55] Sarah: Yeah. To be honest, I think a lot of education is that. And honestly, that’s fine. Most people, if they’re trying to convince people who profoundly disagree with them all the time, are usually wasting their time, because those people are embedded in networks of relationships and actions that are going to keep them roughly where they are unless you change those networks of relationships and actions. When we think about political education in the way you’re describing it, what you’re usually talking about is somebody who doesn’t yet have certain concepts but is already experiencing the phenomenon. The missing piece for them in that case is mostly the concept. They already have a network. They need the words to name their experience, which is great. It’s as if they’ve got a really nice mechanism and then you’re attaching a new extra feature to it, and now they have a feature that helps them understand their world. That’s great. Of course, the book is a joke in a way—not the book, but the title. It’s not that I don’t think people should talk about politics. The question is: is that the mechanism for change, or is the mechanism for change introducing people to a new way of life that profoundly, radically reorients them in the world, and then also giving them new friends? For deep political change, it’s the second one. [00:26:59] Matthew: I want to walk back a little bit, because as you’re describing the pre-existing network that allows for concepts like that to actually land… I grew up in a leftist union-labor household, and I’m really talking about moments in which very specific items of theory became apparent to me and resonated with something in my familial memory. It’s not like I had to take that home and tell my tycoon real-estate dad what I now thought and believed. It was more like, “Oh, that’s how it’s been working.” So is that what you’re talking about with regard to networks? I’m not really describing a conversion experience. [00:27:52] Sarah: Yeah, I don’t think that you were converted. I think that you were enlightened, which is cool, but different. There are people who, when they understand the world differently, everything changes. For that to happen, there has to be another world there to receive them. There has to be a new group of friends who are there for them. There has to be a different social world. There has to be a new set of actions they can take. As it turns out, most of the time we are cognitively aligning our beliefs with our actions. So if we tell somebody, “The boss is oppressing you,” but they have no options for resisting that oppression in any way or discovering a source of self-worth outside of their mode of capitalist oppression, they’re probably going to tell us to fuck off. Because the one thing they feel good about is that they did really well for the boss this week. [00:28:47] Matthew: Or they will feel super depressed. [00:28:49] Sarah: Yeah. But more likely, given the research I’m looking at about cognitive dissonance theory and people’s attachment to their sense of themselves as good people and as having agency, they will actually just glorify their own oppression. This is part of what leftist theorists would call false consciousness, which I understand is a very unpopular theory for some, but unfortunately for those people it is somewhat borne out by evidence. One of the things I look at in the book is something called system justification theory. [00:29:12] Matthew: Yeah. [00:29:13] Sarah: That looks at population-wide data sets comparing groups that are otherwise similar but where they have one more facet of oppression attached. In some cases they’re looking at, for example, people of a certain income who are Black, who are in the north of the US and in the south. On average, people in the US South who are Black are more fundamentally and structurally oppressed in different ways. Interestingly, when you compare these two otherwise similar groups and try to measure, as much as you can, their levels of oppression, the more oppressed people are more convinced that the system is the way it must be—or even that it’s good, but at least that it’s necessary. This fits with cognitive dissonance theory, which suggests that people experience painful dissonance when they have a contradiction between two or more of their own beliefs or actions. It’s really uncomfortable for us to have a cognitive inconsistency, especially when it affects our sense of ourselves as good, competent people. One of the ways people handle this, especially if they are oppressed, is that they find a rationalization where they’re like, “But it has to be this way.” That relieves the discomfort. Now there’s no contradiction anymore. Yes, it’s bad, but it has to be this way, so whatever. It’s not that my actions day-to-day, which are complicit in my own oppression, are a problem, because there is no other way. We have a lot of evidence that this is part of how people remain in oppressive systems. They rationalize the dissonance away. They may do it more, the more oppressed they are, because if you’re less oppressed, in a way, there’s less to justify. Of course you’re doing it; it’s to your own benefit. [00:30:56] Matthew: There are two intersection points with my own study and personal background, which is in cultic dynamics. In one way, the rationalization of the system is a kind of existential need, because if you cannot figure out how to say, “This leader who’s actually abusing me or exploiting me in some way is guided by God or is doing something for the benefit of the world,” then your entire identity structure will collapse. That need is really forceful. The other thing is that, in terms of exiting a situation like that—a social dynamic like that—it really can’t happen unless you have a landing place. That’s why deprogramming in the 1970s was such an incredible disaster. It usually involved really agitated parents hiring goons to go and kidnap people out of their religious groups, then hold them in hotels and lock them up and tell them why they’re wrong to be involved in the Unification Church. Of course those were disastrous because that is not a welcoming environment or network to reestablish your sense of self. [00:32:16] Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m sure you know this, but we can remind the listeners that cognitive dissonance theory is a theory that came out of studies of cults. The very first study was of an apocalypse cult that believed aliens were coming to get them at Christmas time of 1954. The world did not end in 1954, and so the cult members had to find rationalizations for the dissonance between their actions of being in the cult and the experience of the world not ending. [00:32:44] Matthew: They were really good at it. [00:32:45] Sarah: Oh, they were so good. They were like, “Wow, we did so well at being in this cult that now the end of the world has been canceled by the generous aliens.” Which is honestly an admirable and beautiful rationalization. [00:32:55] Matthew: We’re very creative. [00:32:56] Sarah: Yeah. But you’re right: people cannot leave cults for very much the same reason they cannot change their political beliefs, which is that it is not about giving people good reasons. There are many good reasons to leave a cult all the time. There are many good reasons to change your political beliefs all the time. We don’t do it because the cost to us in terms of our sense of self-worth, our sense of agency, and our human relationships is high. Sometimes, when I’m running movement-organizing workshops with my colleague Max—my very good friend Max—we remind participants that it is no small feat to convince people to change their minds, because we’re going to ruin their lives. In a nice way. If you’ve actually got someone to make a relatively profound shift, this is going to screw up their life. They are going to have to shift their relationships with the people they’re involved with. They’re going to have to maybe lose some friends, maybe lose touch with certain family members. They’re going to have to resent previously positive experiences in their life and see those as harmful. It’s a huge cost to people psychologically, sometimes materially. We are making an enormous ask. One of the main reasons I wrote this book is that I felt that a lot of psychology books about persuasion and liberal political theory books about democracy were almost not taking the problem seriously enough. They were saying, “Oh, well, just use this one hot tip and people will change their minds,” or “Let’s just reframe stuff conceptually.” That’s not taking seriously how deeply embedded people’s political experiences are, even the ones we feel are wrong and oppressive. [00:34:29] Matthew: I would call it the Debunko-sphere, which I think really gained prominence from 2020 on in relation to not only the pandemic but also the rise of QAnon. I think the general idea was, “Hey, we really just have to get people to be critical thinkers.” [00:34:48] Sarah: Yeah. I hate this term because I think it means precisely nothing to most of the people who are using it. They neither appreciate how deeply embedded cognition is in the human experience, nor do they have, say, a tradition of critical theory where you can say, “Ah, yes, the reason it’s difficult to critique the world you live in is because there are structures of power.” You kind of need both of those angles to make the word “critical” mean something other than “I did a big think by myself,” and people doing a big think by themselves are rarely having a new insight, frankly. I could almost make a bingo card of terms that mean mostly nothing the more you stare at them, unless you have a quite elaborated theory of psychology that extends beyond the phrase. [00:35:36] Matthew: Sometimes I think it’s a little bit more with a phrase like “critical thinking.” There’s something smug about invoking this process that everybody should really have access to. The implication is that if you take time you won’t be such a dupe, and really, you might have learned this stuff in high school but I guess you’re behind the ball now and you’d better catch up. There’s something condescending about it, of course. And I think that condescension allows the person who’s advocating for critical thinking to say, “Well, it’s actually simple, isn’t it?” [00:36:25] Sarah: Yes. And the other thing about it is that it is, in fact—and now we’re going to become true Marxists for a bit—it requires a kind of labor that is primarily the labor of the upper middle class in their university structure. It’s saying, “You should think as though you were writing an essay for term three of year four of your university degree,” as though that were the best way to acquire political insights about the world. Which is honestly, and I mean this lovingly, a bit deranged, because the way we acquire insights about our political world is in large part by actually being part of it and by talking to other people who have had different experiences than we have. Very smart people have had very stupid ideas precisely because they spent a lot of time critical-thinking on their own, rather than meeting other people who saw the issue differently and having new life experiences. All of these things are necessarily part of political thinking. If you think about, for example, the feminist movement—it’s a good starting point before we get into something mushier—women couldn’t just magically critical-think themselves into imagining a world where they weren’t, for example, sharing their last name with their husband. They had to go out into the world and say, “Oh, actually, I can drive this car myself. I can manage this budget. I do love my kids, but I can also imagine being fulfilled doing other things.” Obviously, this is a certain white suburban kind of feminism I’m discussing, but it’s part of the picture. [00:37:52] Matthew: It’s part of the story. [00:37:53] Sarah: We do not acquire political consciousness on our own. We acquire political consciousness by doing, and by doing with other people. That does not usually involve any of the things that happen in your essay in your fourth year of university, unless you have a really cool university teacher—but that’s quite unusual. [00:38:35] Matthew: Part two is up on Patreon now. If you can support this project, please do. Or you can wait and pick up the rest of my conversation with Lubrano right here; in a few weeks it’ll show up in your feed. Oh, and please subscribe and leave a review and all that if you can. It really helps. So that’s it for this episode, except for… [00:39:01] Matthew: Fascist Dad of the Week. [00:39:03] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (audio excerpt): Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re two years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. [00:39:44] Matthew: There are a lot of quotes from RFK Jr. I could have pulled while rewarding him Fascist Dad of the Week, but this one will do because it shows exactly the kind of ableist othering and eugenicist misinformation that the body politics of fascism demands. It’s framed as empathy, but what it’s really doing is paving the way to further dehumanization of neurodivergent people, turning them into vegetables or just the victims of evil doctors. Over on Conspirituality Podcast, we’ve probably done twenty episodes on this guy, so I don’t need to say much more here about him other than this one thing. Fascism needs heroes for liberals to fall in love with, and that’s what we see with Olivia Nuzzi’s book. They have to present themselves as strong, noble, virile, aggrieved, protective of women, and pious. For a recent cover story in The Atlantic, the magazine put Kennedy on the cover gazing longingly upward into the lens, a rosary draped over his hands. Nobody would buy Trump or Pete Hegseth or Kristi Noem or Bolsonaro or Pierre Poilievre in a pose like that. But if someone can pull it off, they will be given power because they will be able to make the fascist program attractive to a broader demographic. [00:41:08] Matthew: Next week, I’ll be talking with political theorist Richard Gilman-Opalsky on his incredible book “The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value.” In that conversation, we’ll continue pulling on that thread of what good friendship is and what it means. [00:41:29] Matthew: Until then, take care of each other.