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 talking to themselves on YouTube or talk radio are too afraid to debate actual progressive pundits, so instead, the reactionary right picks battles with imaginary Democrats. I know this because I used to do it in my former career as a right-wing activist. It’s a dead-simple method: Find an obscure person you can say is “on the left” and then make that person’s little-viewed TikTok video somehow representative of everyone on the center-to-left. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox cable channel pioneered this tactic decades ago with its infamous “War on Christmas” lies. In actuality, celebrating Christmas was popularized by the liberal cultural Christian Charles Dickens. The original right-wing Protestants, the Puritans like Oliver Cromwell, hated Christmas and banned it from being celebrated for its supposed pagan and papist origins. But truth does not matter to reactionary authoritarians. Only power. And we saw that most recently in the recent hoax generated by right-wing media over actress Sydney Sweeney’s decision to do an ad campaign for a jean manufacturer that we won’t name. Most people didn’t care about the Sweeney spot. It was one of thousands of celeb paid endorsements. A handful of people noted that using “jeans” as a play on the word “genes” had unfortunate echoes of eugenics, but mostly it was ignored—until far-right extremists like Libs of TikTok and Charlie Kirk seized on a handful of scattered online comments and inflated them into proof of a massive “woke” meltdown. In reality, the outrage they claimed to be responding to didn’t exist; they had manufactured it, using a well-worn tactic called nutpicking to pretend that Democrats nationwide were outraged by an ad they had never even seen. In this live Theory of Change episode, Noah Berlatsky of Everything Is Horrible joins to talk about the right’s history of lying about the left, the center’s falling for it, and why Donald Trump is desperate to have Americans talk about anything but his failed administration and cover-up for Jeffrey Epstein. The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere. Related Content * The right-wing freakout about sorority dance videos is more disturbing than it looks * How 1970s right-wing college students invented canceling people and many of today’s political consulting tools * Inside the cult of Turning Point USA * It’s not just schools: Reactionaries are targeting public libraries as well * The fact that Ghislaine Maxwell is being considered for a Trump pardon reveals his absolute desperation * Trump’s many broken campaign promises Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 05:33 — Right-wing envy of progressive cultural influence 09:53 — History of manufactured controversies 14:25 — Beauty standards and eugenics 19:01 — Trump's comments on minorities 23:49 — Republicans love canceling people 28:41 — History of Christmas celebrations 32:36 — Trump's failed campaign promises 36:46 — Economic policy failures 40:21 — Right-wing media tactics 44:36 — Online harassment campaigns 48:43 — Trump and Epstein connection 55:55 — The importance of distraction for Trump Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript of the audio. It is provided for convenience purposes only and is not proof-read. MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: [00:00:00] This is Theory of Change. I'm Matthew Sheffield. Thanks for joining me for another episode. And we're doing a live one today with Noah Berlatsky to talk about one of the most absurd and stupid fake controversies cooked up by the right wing in a number of years. And I'm talking of course about Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle and the ad campaign that she did for them, featuring some her wearing a jean jacket and pants, and which it was. Basically kind of a play off of a very kind of infamous Franklin, ad from the, nineties, I guess it was the nineties. Yeah. Featuring Brooke Shields when she was 14 years old and, that was kind of creepy. And they were trying to basically do an edgy, quote unquote, type of ad and, get controversy, but it didn't work initially, and like people weren't really paying attention to it. and, there, there was a little bit of commentary here and there of people talking about beauty standards and euro, euro centra and that sort of thing. But overall, people are just like, oh, Sydney Sweeney did an ad. and a lot of people had never heard of Sydney Sweeney. Like, I think that's the thing that I, when I, have [00:02:00] posted about a, thread about it, a couple of, or yesterday I've gotten so many replies from people saying, who the hell is Sydney Sweeney? Have you have people said that to you, Noah? NOAH BERLATSKY: Not, I mean, I haven't talked about it a ton, but I haven't uhhuh, I mean, I kind of know who she is. I don't know that Oh, you do? Yeah. SHEFFIELD: You're, a, you, are a media and political writer, so Of course, so, BERLATSKY: yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I'm not that surprised 'cause she's, she's a relatively new, her, stardom is relatively new and she, I don't think she's been in any huge kinda blockbuster hits quite yet, so, SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I'm not sure. It's not surprising that people wouldn't know necessarily, I think. but, I guess before we get further into it, so, Noah just give, people a little background of your site and, and how you got into all this, if you would BERLATSKY: please. Sure. I'm a freelance writer. I write about politics and culture. my site is Everything is Horrible, which is a newsletter on Substack. and I've written about Sydnee Sweeney a couple times. most recently I talked about this ad a little bit. and, yeah, I've talked about her movie Immaculate. And, she's kind of been a figure who the right's been interested in for a while. sort of both positive. I mean, they've kind of both praised and attacked her. She's kind of a figure that the right thinks about, so I've talked about that a little. SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, let me, yeah, that's right. and, she's interesting as a figure for the right, because, they, they were trying to make Taylor Swift, their mascot, a few years ago, and I think after that didn't work. Now they're [00:04:00] trying, they've tried to make Sydney Sweeney as sort of their avatar, which is really bizarre because like, that's the, one of the funniest. And the most absurd things about right-wing cultural commentary, is that, or cultural output is that they can't make anything artistic. and so, these people who have these avatars of, Greek sculptures and, Renaissance paintings, et cetera, et cetera, and they're talking about, oh, I'm here to protect the culture from the ravages of the left. Well, guess what? The left runs all of these museums. and they're the ones, you know who, well, BERLATSKY: I think that's right, and I think that there's, I think that the left and Democrats don't really think about that as an advantage or don't necessarily capitalize it on it the way they could. I mean, I was kind of thinking about this with, kind of, people are like, who's the Joe Rogan of the left? Right? Are, because Joe Rogan's kind of has a big audience and people think, oh, well, he's. Got this direct line to a lot of young men, even though his audience is not that young. and I was thinking about that. And the truth is, I mean, there's a lot of cultural product that is made by people on the left, whether you're talking about museums, whether you're talking about like Taylor Swift, who's, a Democrat and who is endorsing Democrats or Beyonce. The right’s envy of progressive cultural influence BERLATSKY: I mean, there's just a lot of culture that comes from sort of the broadly progressive side of the spectrum. and, but you know, there's not a, what there isn't is there's not a lot of effort to people are willing to spend a lot of money to find the [00:06:00] next Joe Rogan, but like less money to do things like fund alternative weeklies, which help cultivate this kind of. Art scene, which is often quite progressive and, is interesting to people who are progressive and gets them interested in culture and in politics. the le I mean, the left doesn't really have an arts policy. I mean, that used to be, there was one of those in the thirties, right? I mean FDR was like, we're gonna fund, well that's, yeah. We kind of don't do that and Then they're like, well, why don't we have Joe Rogan? And it's like, you've got this large infrastructure, which you could do more to fund if you want it. And the right kind of knows that, which is why they're defunding it. Right. the, right is like attacking arts funding. And they're doing that because a lot of the arts are, sort of broadly progressive and they want, don't want people to be able to like, make a living doing that or communicate. SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's true. And and, essentially what they're trying to do is so, so mainstream culture, the reactionary, right. and I think it's important not to call them conservative because, conservatives want to keep things how they are. and Donald Trump is anything but conservative. conservative is somebody like Joe Manchin or Ki or, ki Sinema, that's a conservative. or like George will, or like those are conservatives. Donald Trump is a reactionary and authoritarian, fascist, whatever those words we want to use, I think.
