Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

Introduction The Republican party is completely and utterly dominated by a small faction of political and religious extremists with policies that are incredibly unpopular, such as privatizing social security or criminalizing birth control. And yet, in spite of this fact, Republicans are still able to win many elections, even outside of their stronghold of the old confederacy. Sometimes, as in the...

The best ideas are timeless: Treat others how you want to be treated. Help people less fortunate than yourself. Unfortunately, many of the worst ideas are also timeless as well. And antisemitism is certainly one such idea. While many different people have been targeted by antisemitic conspiracy theories, the Rothschild family of Germany has a particular favorite among the world’s lunatics for cent...

Mormonism occupies an important place in the conservative religious realm and its adherents exercise significant voting power in the Republican political coalition in states like Utah, Arizona, Idaho, and even California. In today’s political media environment, Mormons are influential both as content producers like Glenn Beck and as content consumers, where they share many similar tastes with Whit...

We’re living in a time between times, a moment of dramatic technological change when the future is up for grabs. With the right kinds of policies, humanity is on the cusp of ending or significantly diminishing perpetual challenges of our species like hunger, climate disruption, and poverty. But if we make the wrong decisions, we will be handing over our future to people whose first priority is the...

Episode Summary In previous episodes of our “Why I Left series,” we've heard the stories of people who have departed from various right wing political and religious traditions listening to the stories of individuals who have escaped these radical belief systems is important, but in this episode of the series, I want to put the pieces back together and look at the stories in the aggregate to see if...

Summary It's election season again, which means that public opinion surveys are constantly in the news. Trying to figure out what likely voters want is on the minds of everyone who works in politics or journalism. But what about the unlikely voters? What do they want? At first glance, it may seem a bit absurd to ask about the political views of people who aren't registered to vote, or who are regi...

Episode Summary William Faulkner’s line that “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” is certainly true in regards to today’s Republican Party, which, quite literally, is an outgrowth of a conspiracy revolution that began in the 1940s and fifties, and never really stopped. A key figure in the through-line of American reaction is Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, a conspiracy g...

Episode Summary While it’s easy to believe that Donald Trump unleashed the radical forces that threaten American democracy today, the truth is that they have been present within our system for more than 50 years. And in many cases, some of the same people like Roger Stone or Karl Rove who were active on the student right in the 1960s and 1970s are still active today. Although the mid-20th century...

Summary Donald Trump has been the dominant figure in Republican politics for nearly 8 years now, and yet if you read the opinion columns in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Atlantic, the disgraced ex-president is on the verge of being shoved out of the Republican Party. None of this is true, however. Despite constant hype from anti-Trump supporters of Ron DeSantis, the Florida Gover...

Episode Summary As American conservatism is rotting out from the inside, it is slowly being replaced by both reactionism and fascism. It is a horrifying story to see, but there are also a lot of interesting things to notice as conservatism is decaying. One of those things that fascism is just as much an aesthetic as it is an ideology. While it's become much more radical and obsessed with imaginary...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theoryofchange.flux.community We live in a world of unprecedented convenience. Many of us can do our jobs entirely remotely. We use our smartphones to do a million different things. Electric cars are commonplace. And you can pretty much get anything delivered in a matter of days, if not hours. There's no doubt that when it comes to comm...

Sex workers, people who earn a living as escorts or adult entertainers, are some of the most visible people in media nowadays. According to the web traffic stats company SimilarWeb, three of the top 15 websites in the world are pornographic video services. And yet, despite how popular porn has become, a lot of us don't know much about the people who work in the industry. That's unfortunate, becaus...

Episode Summary For thousands of years, humans have been buying and selling sex. The ancient Sumerians in 2400 BCE included female and male prostitutes on a list of known professions , so the term “oldest profession” is actually more than just a cliché. Despite the fact that sex economies have existed for far longer than most civilizations, many people seem uncomfortable with discussing the import...

Episode Summary This episode is the first in an occasional Theory of Change series of in-depth discussions about the politics of different states and how, unfortunately, right-wing extremism is becoming more common in many areas. The first state we're going to be discussing is Idaho. It’s one of America's most beautiful states with amazing mountains and lakes, lush forests, and gorgeous fields and...

Ever since the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the Republican party has been in a radicalization loop in which successive generations of leaders overthrew their predecessors by claiming they were not reactionary enough. But since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Republican radicalization has increased at a level never before seen. And there’s a reason for this. Olde...

Episode Summary After two years of a global pandemic, most people have no interest whatsoever in COVID-19. And that's completely understandable, given all the hardships and inconveniences that everyone faced as a result of the pandemic. Almost everyone is ready to move on from covid, but there is one subset of people who are obsessed with still talking about it. And that is the same paranoid activ...

Episode Summary This episode of Theory of Change is the second in our "Why I Left" series featuring Lance Aksamit . He is an associate editor at Flux , and the author of a new autobiography about life in the missionizing evangelical sub-culture called Youth Group: Coming of Age in the Church of Christian Nationalism . Beyond telling his story of being born and raised in a homeschooling evangelical...

Episode Summary This episode is the first of a new ongoing series called “Why I Left,” which is going to be based on conversations with people who left political or religious movements. And the first are going to be free to everyone, but going forward, most of this series is going to be an extra benefit for paid subscribers. We're going to start the Why I Left series with a conversation with my go...

Episode Summary The cable news industry is in crisis. It is part of a larger crisis known as cord cutting, which is a phenomenon of people realizing that they really don't need to pay for 500 channels when they only watch 3 or 4. Across the country, millions of people have decided they don't want to pay for cable or satellite TV. That has made a crisis in the cable news industry as well, where CNN...

Episode Summary History, as the old saying goes, repeats itself. There are many reasons why, but one of them is that philosophy is actually far more important than many people may realize. We live during a time in which search engines and AI have made it so that anyone has access to information on any field of human knowledge. But having knowledge available to you does not mean you understand it....

Episode Summary Across America, and across the world, radical movements of far-right Christians are trying desperately to seize the levers of political power to force their religious opinions onto everyone else. And in many cases, particularly the 2016 election of Donald Trump, they have succeeded. Seeing the rise of reactionary Christianity has made some non-religious people recoil in horror to t...

EPISODE SUMMARY The middle part of the twentieth century wasn’t that long ago and yet in some ways, it seems like it was an eternity ago. That’s particularly true in regards to the public branding of American Christianity, which nowadays is often associated with right-wing evangelicalism, including among Christians who disagree. In the Mid-20th century, however, American Christian public discourse...

EPISODE SUMMARY The internet is so commonplace that we rarely step back and think about how completely different today’s information climate is than even 30 years ago. News travels in seconds and oftentimes percolates even beforehand in the millions of tiny online communities that live on their own websites or within larger social media platforms like Facebook. Even elementary school children know...

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a new kind of left-wing pundit, one whose audience consists almost entirely of right-wingers. And there is a good reason for that. Almost every one of these people do nothing but criticize Democrats, despite calling themselves progressives or liberal. There's a long history of this on the political left, and this phenomenon exists in other countries as wel...

(This episode first premiered August 28, 2021.) A lot of people know about the “Southern Strategy,” the multi-year plan of 20th century Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon to get white voters in the South to stop voting for Democrats. But what isn’t widely known is that the GOP itself was changed by the electoral coalition that it attracted. While lingering support for racial segreg...