Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

Episode Summary   For decades, the American far-right has been screeching constantly that its activists and politicians are being censored by “cancel culture.” It’s nonsense, of course, because almost invariably everyone who supposed canceled ends up with a huge media following and a very profitable victim narrative. But the lies about mass censorship of reactionaries and conservatives aren’t just...

Episode Summary  Donald Trump is now once again the president of the United States, but his victory in 2024 was more than just a victory for himself or the Republican Party, it actually is part of a larger advancement that is happening across many different countries around the globe for right-wing reactionary parties who are sometimes incorrectly referred to as populist. (These parties are not po...

Episode Summary The second term of Donald Trump has officially begun, but despite all the things he’s unveiled in the past several weeks, we don’t know fully what his policies are going to be over the next four years. That is in part because Trump himself is a very erratic figure who says things that are nonsensical, even by his own standards. While there are documents such as Project 2025 which w...

Episode Summary As Donald Trump’s second presidential administration takes shape with a host of controversial and unpopular executive orders and numerous unqualified and bizarre nominees like Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth, it raises the question, is this what his voters asked for? That question is actually a lot more difficult to answer than it may seem, because people voted for Trump for a v...

Episode Summary Following her recent electoral defeat, many people have questioned why Kamala Harris didn't go on to the podcast of Joe Rogan, the standup comedian and sports commentator who has the number-one podcast in the world. For the record, Harris’s former advisers have said that they tried to coordinate a time with Rogan , but they very obviously did not make it a priority. The more intere...

Episode Summary Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump came as a huge surprise to many Democratic Party loyalists, especially since Republicans had a number of serious defeats in elections in 2018 and in 2022, and abortion rights ballot initiatives prevailed in every state where the public had voted on them since the Republican Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade . So what happened? We've talked on...

Episode Summary Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was a triumph of political ecosystems and how much better the right has been in the United States at creating a full-scale ecosystem to funnel people into their party, but it also took place within a larger political environment in which many Americans are unsatisfied with the way things are. For a decades, most Americans hav...

Episode Summary The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson ending a national right to terminate a pregnancy came as an abrupt shock to millions of Americans. But if you had been paying attention beforehand, the verdict was no surprise at all. In fact, the repeal of Roe v. Wade was the culmination of a successful strategy that began in the 1970s to flood the American legal system with activis...

Episode Summary The 2024 presidential election is over, and the results are not what many of us hoped for. Despite engaging in treason against the United States on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump will become president once again. While there are plenty of things that Kamala Harris could have done better, she was up against several larger obstacles, chief among them the price inflation that has troub...

Transcript Election Day is upon us, and as you surely know, the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is looking excruciatingly close. After Harris jumped to a small lead once she became the Democratic standard-bearer, Trump has tightened things up, primarily with the assistance of crazed former Democrat Robert Kennedy Junior. How much support each candidate is receiving is t...

Episode Summary JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is a newcomer on the political scene, and as such, a lot of people don’t know very much about his ideas. That’s concerning because Vance identifies with a reactionary far-right tradition that is explicitly and fundamentally at odds with American democracy. Donald Trump, by contrast, has no core ideology and no core beliefs. His main goal at al...

Episode Summary JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is a newcomer on the political scene, and as such, a lot of people don’t know very much about his ideas. That’s concerning because Vance identifies with a reactionary far-right tradition that is explicitly and fundamentally at odds with American democracy. Donald Trump, by contrast, has no core ideology and no core beliefs. His main goal at al...

Episode Summary As he nears the end of his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump is falling apart in public view. He’s holding far fewer public events than ever before where he constantly goes off on bizarre and irrelevant tangents and conspiracy theories about everything from sharks and hurricanes to Kamala Harris’s headphones . But most people don’t tune into his rallies. Instead, they hear...

Episode Summary “I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump famously boasted in early 2016 as he started racking up victories in the Republican primary election. It was an unintentionally hilarious thing to say, but it pointed to a truth that’s since became undeniable: People with less education are more likely to vote for Republicans. Trump has almost certainly never heard of the 19th century phil...

Episode Summary As everyone probably knows, White Christians with theologically conservative views are the backbone of the Republican Party, and they are Donald Trump's most loyal voters and followers and donors. But far-right Christians were not always the backbone of the Republican Party. They became that way through the work of reactionary Christian media who brainwashed them over decades to be...

Episode Summary JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is a newcomer on the political scene, and as such, a lot of people don’t know very much about his ideas. That’s concerning because Vance identifies with a reactionary far-right tradition that is explicitly and fundamentally at odds with American democracy. Donald Trump, by contrast, has no core ideology and no core beliefs. His main goal at al...

Episode Summary It’s tempting to look back on the technological progress we’ve seen in the past few years and marvel at how much things have changed, and they certainly have. But if you zoom out on the historical scale, it’s very arguable that the trends of today were set in motion by processes and ideas of the late 19th century. Brad DeLong , my guest on today’s episode argues just that in his bo...

Episode Summary After she became the Democratic Party's standard bearer, Kamala Harris didn't make sweeping changes to the campaign infrastructure that she inherited from Joe Biden. But there is one critical difference between the two campaigns, and that is that Harris’s team, and possibly the candidate herself, seems to have realized that the mainstream media is not her ally, and that news organi...

Episode Summary Everywhere you look, the radical Christian right is on the march trying to ban abortion, birth control, pornography, and books that they think are insufficiently pure, or insufficiently deferential to their beliefs. Obviously, trying to force everyone to live according to their religion is a huge motivating factor for far-right Christians. But it isn’t the only reason that they’re...

Episode Summary If Samuel Johnson was right that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, surely trolling is the last refuge of people who cannot win an argument. In the modern political landscape, the far-right movement that dominates Republican politics has increasingly turned to trolling as a strategy to compensate for the intellectual bankruptcy of its core beliefs. Incapable of engaging i...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Episode Summary In public opinion surveys, people who are gay and lesbian tend to overwhelmingly back the Democratic party. According to Gallup, 83 percent of both groups identify or lean toward Democrats. This seems like such an obvious preference given the Republican alternative, but the extremely lopsided support...

Episode Summary Less than five years ago, studying online rumors and misinformation wasn’t a controversial job. It most definitely is now, however, thanks to a powerful group of reactionary politicians and activists who have realized that improving the quality of our political discourse has a negative effect on their electoral chances. We now live in a social media environment in which everything...

Episode Summary By necessity, monitoring and debunking disinformation has become a much bigger part of journalism and academia in recent years, but oftentimes the important work that people are doing on these matters is missing the larger context. It is certainly worth reporting the truth when politicians, businesses, and activists lie about things. But what the public should also know is why this...

Episode Summary It's just over three months before Election Day and President Joe Biden is behind his Republican opponent, Donald Trump, in most public opinion polls. One of the biggest reasons this is happening is that Biden seems to be getting much less than the 85 percent support from Black Americans that Democrats typically do. Just how much less support is difficult to say, however, because m...

Episode Summary The “Sexual Revolution” started more than 60 years ago, but in a lot of ways, having complete control over your own choices when it comes to dating, sex, and family is only just now becoming a reality for many people. That’s particularly true for women since far-right Republicans have continuously rejected the idea that abortion and birth control should be legal. But the radical ri...