Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield Matthew Sheffield

Audio Chapters
00:00 — "Right privilege" and America's broken politics
08:36 — Is the distinction between overt and covert racism worth anything?
14:32 — How much do run-of-the-mill Republicans know about their party's policies and aims?
21:26 — What the American left has lost since Obama 2008
29:22 — Why it's important to distinguish between conservatism and reactionism
35:46 — Multiple messages are necessary in political communication
Join the Conversation!
Matt
https://twitter.com/mattsheffield
https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield
https://www.threads.net/@realmattsheffield
Kali
https://twitter.com/kalihollowayftw
STJH on Twitter
https://twitter.com/stjh_pod
Theme song
Easy Lover: “The End of Our Deceit”
Lyrics and Vocals by Kali Holloway
Music by Jeremy Wimmer


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe

We're off this week at Doomscroll because Lisa is preparing to film her very first standup special! In the meantime, we thought you'd enjoy listening to Lisa’s first comedy album, “Alive for a While,” which she recorded in London in 2019. It’s not safe for work, just in case you were wondering.
If you're in, near, or visiting Madison, Wisconsin from somewhere else, come out and see Lisa on December 14th at Comedy On State. There will be two shows and tickets are available now.
Audio Chapters
03:30 — Shaman
06:08 — Arrowhead
10:17 — Scheduled cry time
13:16 — Funeral jams
16:12 — Dolls
19:36 — Knife
23:47 — Sensitive men
26:27 — Dick pics
28:58 — PSA
30:28 — Undefeated
32:27 — Friends with benefits
36:05 — Not a fetish
38:27 — I hate racists
41:27 — Made in America
Follow or Die!
Doomscroll
https://www.instagram.com/doomscrollshow/
https://www.youtube.com/@doomscrollshow
https://twitter.com/doomscrollshow
Lisa
https://www.instagram.com/olympianlisacurry
https://twitter.com/lisa_curry
Matt
https://twitter.com/mattsheffield
https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield
https://www.threads.net/@realmattsheffield


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe

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 centuries and more recently by the QAnon cult which has managed to recycle many old conspiracies for the internet age and invented some new ones as well.
There are so many conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds that you could fill a book with them all, and my guest on this episode has done just that.
Mike Rothschild isn’t related to the family that’s been the focus of so many bad ideas, but he does have a lot of experience focusing on conspiracy theories, having previously written a book about QAnon. His most recent book, which we’ll be discussing, is called Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.
The video of this episode is available. The transcript of the audio follows. It is automatically generated and is provided for convenience only.
Membership Benefits
This is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.
Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.
If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.
If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.
About the Show
Theory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.
Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChange
Matthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield
Matthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield
 
Transcript
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Mike. Thanks for being here.
MIKE ROTHSCHILD: Thank you for having me.
SHEFFIELD: Okay, well, so, I have to imagine that you have two reasons why you became interested in this book as a topic. One being your last name, and then the other being that before this, you wrote a book about QAnon, right?
ROTHSCHILD: Yes, so I've been writing about conspiracy theories now for probably about 10 years, and right as soon as I started, the first comments I would get were a Rothschild debunking [00:02:00] conspiracy theories, how stupid do they think we are the matrix must be broken, somebody unplugged the simulation.
As this, stuff started to seep into mainstream culture. I started seeing all of these memes and conspiracy theories and accusations about the Rothschilds, and I knew I wasn't related to them. I've always known that, but. It felt like a really fertile ground to really do some myth busting and really kind of figure out what is this family? Who are they? What have they done? And I think much more importantly, what have they not done?
And a lot of that came out of QAnon. Rothschilds are mentioned a lot in QAnon. They own all the central banks and they control everything and they have these occult human hunting parties and their vast Austrian lodges and things like that.
So it really made sense for me as a next

Audio Chapters
0:00 — Intro
01:09 — Elon Musk sues Media Matters for telling truth about Twitter's monetized hate
11:32 — Republican appeals court judges void part of Voting Rights Act
18:22 — Sean "Diddy" Combs settles Cassie Ventura rape lawsuit
32:45 — Good news: Retailers getting more likely to give employees Thanksgiving off

Join the Conversation!
Matt
https://twitter.com/mattsheffield
https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield
https://www.threads.net/@realmattsheffield
Kali
https://twitter.com/kalihollowayftw
STJH on Twitter
https://twitter.com/stjh_pod
Theme song
Easy Lover: “The End of Our Deceit”
Lyrics and Vocals by Kali Holloway
Music by Jeremy Wimmer


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe

It’s our first-ever Flux podcast crossover as So This Just Happened co-host Kali Holloway joins in the fun!

Audio Chapters
00:20 — Utah Sen. Mike Lee refuses to retract ludicrous conspiracy theory about vaping pen
08:13 — Right-wing CPAC conference losing board members after sex assault claims
13:53 — Georgia HS football coach fired after baptizing players at practice
18:45 — How the "Church of Satan" is hilariously pushing back on Christian supremacism
25:11 — NAFO, an unofficial trolling group, is going after Trump's Truth Social
29:29 — Taylor Swift tops poll of most admired major US figures
31:56 — Scammers now using AI-generated images to steal money on dating websites
The video of this episode is available on YouTube.

Follow or Die!
Doomscroll
https://www.instagram.com/doomscrollshow/
https://www.youtube.com/@doomscrollshow
https://twitter.com/doomscrollshow
Matt
https://twitter.com/mattsheffield
https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield
https://www.threads.net/@realmattsheffield
Lisa
https://www.instagram.com/olympianlisacurry
https://twitter.com/lisa_curry
Kali Holloway
https://twitter.com/kalihollowayftw
Doomscroll is a podcast from the Flux media network. Visit https://flux.community/ for more smart podcasts and articles about politics, culture, and media


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe

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 White Evangelical Protestants.
But the comparative closeness the two fundamentalist traditions have today is a departure from the past. While Mormonism and Evangelical Protestantism were born in roughly the same time period of the mid-19th century, they almost immediately grew apart for political reasons, eventually leading to the largest Mormon sect, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), moving to Utah, which was part of Mexico at the time.
The shared dynamic began changing for the two faiths during the mid-20th century as Evangelicalism adopted many of Mormonism’s “end times” concerns and LDS Mormons became increasingly absorbed into right-wing political media.
One person who saw this happening in real time is Pat Bagley, a veteran editorial cartoonist who has worked at the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper for more than 40 years. Once a devout illustrator of Mormon media, he now follows his own set of rules with regard to both religion and politics. Along the way, he’s become a fixture in Utah and LDS culture, whether they like it or not.
This episode was previously released July 29, 2021. The video of the conversation is available. An automated transcript of the audio follows.
Transcript
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Please join me in welcoming Pat Bagley.
PAT BAGLEY: Hi Matthew.
SHEFFIELD: So Pat, why don't we get started with you telling us a bit about how you got interested in cartooning.?
BAGLEY: So I was attending BYU [Brigham Young University] and it was in this class that was personal finance and it was, just boring. It, was as do dirt. And I used to kind of scribble in my class notes and, do [00:01:00] caricatures and things like that.
And so all of a sudden I had this idea about a talk that was current at BYU at the time. The Department of Justice was going to sue BYU because of its housing policy. And so all of a sudden I did this cartoon in the middle of my class notes, and I thought, that's not bad. So I took it to the Daily Universe, the BYU newspaper, and I thought that they were going to have their cartoonists take my idea and, draw it.
But I showed it to the publisher, Nelson Wadsworth, and he said, do a finished copy and bring it back. So I did a finished copy of that cartoon, and I brought it back, and it ran next day in the Daily Universe. And when you see your stuff in print, it's pretty heady stuff, and I was kind of addicted after that.
But a few weeks later, this is even better. A few weeks later, I was going to work at, I was working at a little graphics shop at BYU and I walk in and the secretary [00:02:00] says, congratulations on getting published in time magazine that what, and she described the cartoon. And as soon as I was off work, I went down and grabbed time magazine.
Sure enough. The very first cartoon I ever did made it into Time Magazine, and since then it's been kind of downhill. But it's been pretty, pretty heady stuff.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, okay, and so, and that was what, the 1960s roughly was that?
BAGLEY: So I've been doing this for 42 years, so 79?
SHEFFIELD: 79. Okay. Oh, interesting. Okay. So I guess that was around the time when the church was, embroiled, the LDS Mormon church was embroiled in controversy, I guess they had just come out of it though, with regard to their treatment of people of African descent.
BAGLEY: Blacks and the priesthood.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
BAGLEY: I was working at the Daily Universe. They actually hired me after I did that [00:03:00] cartoon, and I was working at the Daily Universe when they came out with their announcement. So, 79-80.
I was born in Utah. And