Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Episode Summary  If you pay any attention at all to American politics, you have heard by now about the death of Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist who was killed at one of his events. No one deserves to die for their political views, of course, but there is no question that Kirk was a complex figure and far from the...

The U.S. federal government shut down on Wednesday morning with both parties unable to come to a budget agreement. It’s the fourth budgetary shutdown of Donald Trump’s presidencies as he and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought are trying to aggregate as much power as possible to rebuild the administrative state in their image as they unilaterally seize funds allocated by Congre...

Episode Summary  Since he became president for the second time, Donald Trump has launched the largest assault on free speech that we’ve seen since Japanese Americans were interned because of their family origins. Among many other things, Trump signed an executive order classifying “antifa” as a terrorist organization, even though there are no actual antifa organizations. The regime has also launch...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Episode Summary  Whether it’s the SwiftBoat Veterans or Moms for Tyranny, right-wing groups are notorious for popping up overnight in American politics, but this past year saw something very unexpected, an organization and collection of people saying they support a politics of “abundance” headed by people who are oft...

Episode Summary  In a generic sense, everyone knows that politics is about power. But when you look at how America’s two major parties use the power that they have, there’s no question whatsoever that Republicans understand power politics while Democrats have a much more passive attitude toward it. This has been true since at least 1964 when a dedicated group of reactionaries took over the Republi...

Episode Summary  I don't get to do a lot of ancient history episodes on this show, but I always love it when I get the chance, and that's because history is a mirror of the present. Not because we judge or even fully understand the people who lived in ancient times, but because they were humans just like we are now. Ancient Egypt has always had a magnetic pull. In ancient times, people were very i...

Episode Summary  For many years, non-Americans have assumed that the right-wing extremism that has powered the political career of Donald Trump was just an American phenomenon. But this is simply untrue. Far-right parties have been elected in nations like Italy, Poland and Hungary, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government is a coalition of openly racist and genocidal parties. And for the first...

Episode Summary  One of the most enduring myths of the Trump years has been that everyone who votes for him does so because they agree with him. Obviously a lot of his supporters do, but polls have consistently shown that Trump is a historically unpopular president with issue positions that most Americans have never supported. And yet, it remains the case that a majority of voters in the last elec...

Episode Summary  Donald Trump in an unfamiliar situation. After years of being able to tell his followers what to think about almost everything, many of the MAGA faithful are upset at his administration for refusing to release the government’s files on the infamous sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. When he was running for office last year, Trump and many of the people who work in the highest levels of...

Episode Summary Right-wing Republicans have lost in the marketplace of ideas. Their policy views that evolution never happened, that tax cuts increase revenues, and that science is a big left-wing conspiracy are laughable. Whenever reactionaries attempt to debate progressives and liberals, as they recently tried against Mehdi Hasan , they fall flat on their faces. The millionaire grifters you see...

On Tuesday, Brad DeLong joined me for a live Theory of Change episode to discuss Donald Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and how it is part of a decades-long war on sound economics and expertise in general waged by reactionary Republicans. We also discussed Brad’s own efforts to get economics as a discipline to understand complexity, an...

Episode Summary  If you’ve watched or listened to this podcast for a while, you probably know by now that Theory of Change is about stories—larger trends that happen and the narratives we tell ourselves about them. We’re finite beings; we exist for a moment within a small slice of spacetime. To understand anything at all about externality, we have to simplify it. But sometimes simplification makes...

Episode Summary  People often say that history repeats itself—so often, in fact, that the phrase has become a cliché. Yet when it comes to technology, that sentiment holds a lot of truth. We don’t just reinvent the tools of our ancestors; we also recycle the same debates, challenges, and controversies that have surrounded earlier innovations, often without realizing it. That is especially true wit...

Episode Summary  Large language models, the computer programs often referred to as artificial intelligence are everywhere these days. There's a lot of hype, a lot of doomerism, and a lot of nay-saying. But despite what all the commentators are saying, the current AI technology is neither a magical god-being nor a tremendous scam. It’s just a really useful technology that is going to be here in the...

Episode Summary  In the aftermath of every presidential election, a flood of analysis pours in during the following weeks. But the real data actually takes a lot longer to come in. And now, several months after the fact—nearly a year actually—all of the most serious validated voter studies have come in, and they have some interesting findings for the losing party. One of the things that has become...

Episode Summary  Politics is a battle over elections and policies, but underneath it’s really a battle over stories, the cultural myths that shape our sense of identity, power, and possibility. And few stories loom larger in the American imagination than the saga of Tupac Shakur, the rapper and actor whose influence continues to resonate across the globe nearly 30 years after his death. It’s easy...

Episode Summary We’ve talked a lot on Theory of Change about the political manifestations of fundamentalist Christian viewpoints in American politics, but the religious origins of these ideas are also important to understand. And right now there is no bigger force within American Christian fundamentalism than Pentecostalism, a movement of unaffiliated churches that together represent the fastest g...

Episode Summary  We live in an uncertain age, one in which wealthy and powerful forces are working tirelessly to overthrow democracy, turn back the clock on human progress and destroy the middle class. The sheer magnitude of the West’s crisis of democracy can be overwhelming, however, and that’s why in this episode, I wanted to take more than a few steps back to explore the Renaissance, a period o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Episode Summary  It seems forever ago, but it has officially been 10 years since Donald Trump announced that he was running as a Republican presidential candidate in 2015. A lot of terrible things have happened since that time, but if you think in terms of the issues that have propelled Trump politically, his two pre...

Episode Summary  Over the years on this program, I’ve often said that the political differences dividing Americans are really just artifacts of much deeper epistemic divides. In the episode before this one , we explored how those differences manifest psychologically—but psychology alone cannot explain why so many people feel so alienated that they willingly support political leaders like Donald Tr...

Episode Summary Politics in the United States and everywhere else has always been about policy—which party wants to do this, which party wants to do that. But in the 21st century, a new dimension has been added: true and false. That reality has become a serious problem for left-of-center political parties, because they have traditionally oriented themselves around an affinity for science and reaso...

Episode Summary Many people expected that Donald Trump's fate would be decided by women last year. It was, after all, the first presidential race since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court had decided to roll back a national right to abortion. But Trump upended that possibility by deciding to run a campaign that was focused very heavily on men and trying to attract the votes of men who didn’t co...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Episode Summary  Ever since he came back into office, Donald Trump has messed up a lot of things. The judiciary, the budget, federal employees, foreign policy, you name it. But we can’t forget that America’s economic, political, and religious systems were already failing a lot of people long before he ever came on th...

Episode Summary The Trump Administration's wars on federal employees and research science are getting a lot of headlines, but there's a third war that's being conducted by the radical right that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should, and that is its efforts to control Americans’ bodily autonomy. Whether it’s trying to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, or trying to place...

Episode Summary Donald Trump's second presidential administration has been remarkably different from his first one, primarily through his acceptance of long-standing reactionary goals to attack government and expertise—particularly federal agencies that produce and teach science such as NASA, the National Institutes for Health, and the Department of Education. What’s curious about this assault on...