How to Tell the Truth (pages 13-25) [script]

[in lieu of a March update - there's not much to report but a lot more writing - here's the next 12 pages of How to Tell the Truth. There is only one section after this which is nearly finished, but there's some research still to do and I didn't want to leave you hanging!]

TELL A STORY

Flags up top: [forthcoming]

“In a recent interview, while I was presenting some scientific discoveries that may point to the existence of God, a camera operator - a young woman whom I’ll call Maria - began to weep visibly. Later she told me the reason for her tears. Like many young people, Maria believed in God when she arrived in college. But while there, she repeatedly encountered professors who insisted that, based on ‘the science,’ God was a myth. No more real than Santa Claus. Maria didn’t feel equipped to challenge her professors. She eventually left college with nagging doubts about her faith and wondering whether life, including her own life, might be nothing more than a cosmic accident.”

• What’s Wrong with Atheism? - Science and God [1,596,681 views]

…

[“some of this I don’t think happened” clip]

You might be reasonably skeptical of that story. I don’t find it very convincing. But, they know their audience, and they’re not trying to convince me.

There are a lot of ways we think about college. College, a hallowed institution where light streams into dusty libraries and generations of knowledge are passed down to the young. College, that first step into adulthood, where you learn to take care of yourself, manage your own time, think about your future, learn what matters most to you. College, the place teenagers go to drink and party and experiment with drugs, sex, and genders. College, the thing that lures country mice to The City where scary things happen to them and they risk their innocence being corrupted by the big bad world.

Prager is tapping into the image of college as a liberal, secular, rigid institution that tests your faith and makes you doubt what you thought you knew. Now, you maybe never thought of college as a godless propaganda mill, but you probably know a version of that story. You maybe even lived a version of that story. College as the place that makes you second guess yourself, that challenges your beliefs, makes you wonder if you’ve made the right choices. Art school never changed my spiritual practice, but I still remember my first bad crit. I wanted to drop out and pick a different career path. (Fortunately for you I stuck it out, and look at me now!)

It’s not a universal experience, but it’s universal enough that Prager can assume most of the audience has this frame, where college is a place of self-doubt, slithering around in their meat brain. Even if they haven’t experienced it, they’ve seen it a hundred times in movies and television. And one of the best ways to get people to think with that frame - the frame that is useful to Prager - instead of one of the others is to put it into practice with a story.

Humans are very responsive to storytelling. The reflex to identify with a protagonist is much stronger than the reflex toward skepticism; it takes work to teach oneself to dismiss another person’s experience (soy face, pink hair, pronouns in bio). (Like, this is why they don’t want us telling kids about queerness. If you tell a child “sometimes boys love boys, and sometimes women have penises,” they’ll just accept it. That’ll be normal to them. The idea that these things are aberrant and people should disbelieve anyone who says otherwise has to be taught.)

Prager doesn’t convince you to use their desired frame, it’s already in your head. They just need to tell a story that uses that frame and most of us will adopt it automatically because it’s the one through which the story makes sense, in the same way that, if “Maria” met a ghost, you would pull up the “horror story” frame. You wouldn’t even think about it; it just happens.

Contrast this with how the Left tells a story:

“If you have a reasonable fear that someone might hurt you, you have just as much right to shoot them in the street as you would if they were coming through the window of your house. And this change was largely due to the advocacy of one woman with a pretty compelling story.”

John, please tell me hers is not the first story you share in this video.

“Marion Hammer says she was walking to her car after a long day at the office, when she was accosted by a car full of men. But she had a surprise for them.”

“I drew the gun up through the headlights of the car and I aimed at the driver. [...] The police chief told me, ‘well, in that situation, if you’d called the police, we’d have arrested you because you were the only one who employed the use of deadly force.’ And that made me angry.”

• Stand Your Ground [5,529,725 views]

Yep! Yeah, in a video about the evils of stand your ground laws we start with the argument in favor of them, why wouldn’t we?

I’m not just gonna sit here repeating myself, but this is a theme.

There are actually four stories in this video. The protagonist of the first one is Marion Hammer - which is a Mickey Spillane-ass name - in which the men harassing her are faceless, anonymous villains. The second story is that of Joe Horn, a Texas man who sees his neighbor’s house being robbed, calls 911, and, despite being told by police 14 times to stay inside, leaves his house saying “I’m going to kill them” and shoots two burglars dead. Thanks to stand your ground laws, he is not arrested, he beats the grand jury trial, and is celebrated by conservative gun lovers. All of this is detailed by John Oliver. The two men he killed had names and faces and families and a story that was cut short by a guy they posed no threat to but John doesn’t share any of that with us.

The protagonist of the third story is Nick Julian IV, a Florida man - you knew there’d be a Florida man - whose neighbor, Carlos Garcia, gets in a drunken argument with him about Nick blasting his music too loud, so Nick Julian IV shoots him to death, but, because Nick has one of these US Concealed Carry Association cards that coaches members on how to evoke stand your ground laws, he repeats the right phrases to the dispatcher and has a lawyer on the phone before the cops even arrived. He beats the charge. Carlos Garcia, the man he killed, at least gets a name, face, and family in this story, and is even foregrounded in the local news coverage John is citing, but John preempts this by reframing what you’re about to hear as a story about Nick Julian IV. [“And at least one of USCCA’s clients apparently took the advice on that card and ran with it.”]

The protagonist of the fourth story is Siwatu-Salama Ra, a Michigan woman whose story is meant to parallel Marion Hammer’s: she draws a gun on a person threatening her and her family with a car. But, because stand your ground laws overwhelmingly benefit white people more than Black people, she is arrested, convicted of a felony, and gives birth in jail. Now: this is the only story where the protagonist is someone fucked over by a stand your ground law. She gets a name and a face, but she’s the only one whose voice we never hear. Her story comes last, it’s the shortest, and, unlike the others, it isn’t dramatized; the whole thing plays out as John listing a series of bullet points to the camera.

This should have been the first story. This is what the video is actually about. This is the frame you want people to use when they look at the other three.

What John is attempting is to look at this conservative idea - stand your ground laws - in isolation. It enters our field of view, we consider its merits, then steadily dismantle it before finally rejecting it. We then bring in this nice, progressive idea - get rid of stand your ground laws - and say, “doesn’t this work better?” And that sounds fine in concept, but it’s not what brains do. John is presupposing a neutral frame, when no such frame exists.

In reality, John and his audience find this argument convincing because they came in with a progressive frame, and, through a progressive frame, a conservative idea is very easy to dismiss. It doesn’t match its surroundings. That people don’t deserve to be shot to death for stealing or that women shouldn’t give birth in shackles don’t need to be argued. They come with the frame. But conservatives have their own frame, where the only way to stop crime is for good guys to have guns and where many women - for instance, women seeking abortions - absolutely should go to jail and be forced to carry their babies to term there. Those are a given in many conservative frames. Stand your ground laws fit in those frames. Even if our arguments did turn them against a specific idea, they’re not going to accept the progressive one we try at the last second to replace it with because we think disproving a conservative idea is the same as proving a progressive one; they’re going to reach for a different conservative idea that fills the same niche.

We find these arguments convincing because we think this is what we’d need to hear if we were conservatives, but we’re not thinking like conservatives when we hear them. And we’re measuring how good an argument it is by how well it convinces people who already agree with it.

John seems to feel that conservatives and progressives alike prefer to engage with difficult topics on neutral ground, without frames. Unfortunately, “no frame” isn’t a thing. Humans contain multitudinous frames, complimentary and contradictory, taught, picked up, or invented, and we can choose to look at things through many frames, we can update our frames to make them more accurate or more ethical, we can pick up new ones and try to use destructive ones less, we can compare and contrast ours with other people’s, but we can’t put them down. Trying to experience the world without a frame is like trying to perceive the world without your senses. Frames are all we have. It’s all frames.

John is indulging in the delusion that one’s own frame is neutral, and, by treating it as neutral, he fails to establish it, leaving conservatives to come in with whatever frame they usually employ for stand your ground laws. Prager doesn’t make this mistake.

Now, I don’t care if Last Week Tonight fails to convince conservatives; as I’ve said, they aren’t the ones watching anyway. My concern is that, by making conservatives the protagonists of the story, Last Week Tonight biases its own audience in the conservatives’ favor. I mean, these guys are the main characters here. This frame of faux-impartiality makes it seem as though this is a debate with two reasonable sides; we are projecting our own reasonableness onto them. John, you’ve done a video about how presenting climate science as a debate when only one side is supported by evidence paints a false equivalence, so why is a debate class rebuttal your default mode of argumentation? I’m not concerned your audience is going to come away thinking stand your ground laws are good; I am concerned that they might come away thinking the conversation about stand your ground laws should keep centering white men and not the people getting arrested and shot.

Every time you tell a story you establish a worldview. Make sure you establish one you believe in.

DON’T PLATFORM THE PEOPLE YOU’RE DEBUNKING

“There was a terrible famine in the Ukraine. Between 5 and 7 million Ukrainians starved to death. The disaster had nothing to do with bad weather and everything to do with the ruthless regime of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Walter Duranty, the Times foreign correspondent in Moscow knew all of this and covered it up. In fact, his reports flatly denied that there was any famine at all. The American media took its lead from the Times star reporter. So did America’s political elite, including newly-elected President Franklin Roosevelt, who personally met with Duranty to discuss ‘the situation’ in the Soviet Union. Duranty had another admirer: Joseph Stalin. The brutal tyrant had nothing but praise for the New York Times man: ‘You have done a good job in your reporting of the USSR… because you try to tell the truth about our country.’”

• Can You Trust the NY Times? [534,031 views]

I didn’t put any flags up top on this one because this is one of the rare instances where PragerU is telling the truth. (God that feels weird on its way out of my mouth.) People say Prager likes to mix in real facts to make the bullshit more believable; in my experience, that overstates how often Prager says something accurate. But this is one of those times.

Mostly.

The facts are a little doctored. To say it “had nothing to do with bad weather” is debatable - some researchers do point to inclement weather as a cause for lower crop yields that the USSR tried to cover up. Historian Mark Tauger points to the USSR’s “massive program of rationing and relief” which would only happen in response to food shortages, saying “New Soviet archival data show that the 1932 harvest was much smaller than has been assumed and call for revision of the genocide interpretation.”

Buuuuut, Dr. David Marples savaged Tauger, pointing out food shortages affected the entire country, but mass starvation only happened in Ukraine. Stalin took what food Ukraine had to feed other Russians as punishment for Ukrainians resisting industrial farming. Marples said, “There is no such thing as a ‘natural’ famine, no matter the size of the harvest. A famine requires some form of state or human input. There is no doubt residents of Russia went hungry in 1932 as they did during most of that decade. But they did not die in millions. Thus, it appears that the ‘massive program of rationing and relief’ was selective.”

Also, claiming Duranty “knew all of this and covered it up” is editorial. How much Duranty was aware of and how much he was just trusting what the Soviet government told him isn’t known… Buuuuuut he definitely knew people were starving to death in Ukraine, and he definitely said “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

(Also Roosevelt met with Duranty mostly to ask about Russia’s gold production. And many journalists did write about the famine, and, while they met with resistance in the West, the articles were published. Also this video is otherwise full of lies, like where they claim the Cuban Revolution would have failed if the Times hadn’t done a profile on Castro, an argument which softly suggests journalists are obligated to not report the news when current events are not ideologically aligned with people like Prager University, but we’re not getting into that!)

Okay, so: you’ll note, throughout Prager’s story, they say things like “the disaster had nothing to do with bad weather,” but they don’t say how they know that or who said otherwise, even though the quotes are there. And, when they say Duranty “denied that there was any famine at all,” they don’t show him saying that, even though the quotes are there. They summarize Duranty’s claims, but never present them to you. He did make them, but you’re supposed to take their word for it.

Even though he’s been dead for 65 years, Prager University does not want to share their platform with Walter Duranty. They are not going to present the counterargument to their own position. The only quote in that segment - in fact, the only quote in the entire video - is from Joseph Stalin, which supports their thesis that Duranty was a stooge for an authoritarian government.

(And I know I just pissed off a bunch of Marxist-Leninists. Look, there’s nothing the USSR did that hasn’t been done hundreds of times in hundreds of capitalist nations. We cannot blame communism for things capitalism does also. Clearly autocracy is more complex than which economic model you’re using. And most leftists will tell you what went wrong with the USSR was selling out their Marxist roots to become everything they overthrew. Orwell wrote a book about this. But Stalin was bad dude!)

Anyway, Prager does this in almost all their videos. People who agree with them are quoted, people who disagree are summarized. In the rare instance they include a quote from the opposition, they trust their audience won’t identify with the speaker because they pick people they know their audience hates, like Stalin. Or AOC. And it’s probably not gonna be a screenshot or an audio clip and definitely not a video; it’s going to be an artist’s recreation stripped of context. They know the persuasive power of hearing a person’s story in their own words, and are incredibly judicious about when and how and to whom that power is given.

I was surprised that that atheism video put a Dawkins quote early on, describing the argument for a godless universe. That goes against the video’s thesis! But it turns out it was a setup for another Dawkins quote at the end, where they try to imply Richard Dawkins’ atheism has softened over the years, which it definitely hasn’t. They faked a redemption arc! A literal come to Jesus moment for the author of The God Delusion!

Prager understands how the internet works, that any time you name a name or drop a quote, you increase that sequence of words’ search engine stickiness. Especially with a platform as large as Prager, anyone they talk about is going to get a bump in traffic. If they quote Walter Duranty, some people are going to google the quote and find his full argument, where, if they just summarize the argument, people can only search “Walter Duranty famine” and dig around for the relevant articles. They can’t even search “Holodomor,” the name of the famine, because the video never uses it! The more steps Prager puts between themselves and a counterargument, the fewer people will make it from one to the other.

The atheism video does this to an absurd degree when they question the idea that the universe “did not have us in mind,” a quote that they attribute to merely “another scientific atheist.” They quote the atheist and don’t name them. I think they’re referring to Neil Broom, but “did not have us in mind” is a very generic phrase, and, if you search it plus the word “atheism,” you mostly find PragerU and other scientific Christians throwing the unattributed quote around. That is grimy, but impressive.

PragerU does not do favors atheists and tankies.

Contrast this with- fuck it, you know where I’m going. There is no Earthly reason 50% of a debunking video should be clips of the opposition.

Now, I actually think it’s a good thing when the Left uses representative quotes. Prager avoids them so thoroughly in order to obfuscate facts and mislead viewers. It is good to cultivate the expectation in your audience that claims be backed by evidence. I am here to stress only that there are knock-on effects of doing so and they need to be accounted for.

Much as we wish for the opposite, human beings are not vibrating bands of pure logic. They are bags of blood and dopamine genetically predisposed to trust one another. The Left, with its disposition towards cooperation rather than hierarchy and competition, is more susceptible than the Right. Any time you share a claim that is dangerous or misleading, no matter how you frame it, you run a risk that some portion of your audience will be influenced by it. This risk increases as you go from summary to depiction and through image, audio, and video. There are times when doing so is necessary, and there are ways of mitigating the risk. But, any time you do it, you need to be asking, “is this necessary?” and “am I mitigating?” If the answer to either is “no,” you need to start over.

When you repeat an idea, even to debunk it, you become part of that idea’s spread. You increase its reach, and the profile of any related names or terms that you say. Part of the business model of groups like Prager is baiting the Left into responding to them just to get their ideas trending.

This means leaving a lie unchallenged and challenging it both do harm, and we are left in the shit position of making educated guesses every time as to which harm is the lesser. It blows.

I suspect compensating for this is why the Left’s most popular mode of critique for the Right has, for years, been mockery. People are less persuasive when they look ridiculous. It interferes with the reflex towards empathy. And, if they get a reputation for being ridiculous, it changes the way their ideas spread. And some folks are very good at making the Right look ridiculous. But most of us overestimate our skills in this arena.

John, you know I love you. And you are a genuinely funny man. But your big dimple, gingham and ties, second-best Zazu, didn’t even get billing on The Love Guru ass isn’t this fucking funny.

There are a lot of ways you could tell a story about European immigration. John is coming at it from three directions: he’s trying to cover the individual’s experience with Noujain’s story, the larger population’s experience with his list of laws and restrictions that vary from country to country, and the anti-immigrant European’s perspective with their various justifications for those laws. And, truthfully, none of those stories require much in the way of quotes and video clips. Noujain’s story doesn’t really need any at all, the macro-immigration angle might benefit from a sentence or two to illustrate the indignities immigrants face (though it’d probably be better served by quotes from immigrants about how those indignities are experienced), and the anti-immigrant perspective really only needs to be explained as an ideology; it requires as many quotes as demonstrates you didn’t make shit up, and no more. You can probably just summarize and then list your sources. This video could be made with maybe 3-4% being actual quotes and clips from the opposition, and nothing of value would be lost. It would, in fact, be tighter and clearer.

There are a few likely reasons John gives his opponents so much airtime. First is, you know… snark is the brand, for him, Jon, Samantha, Trevor… And there’s nothing funny about the refugee crisis, so we gotta trot out some conservatives to make fun of.

Second is, the entire research process of Last Week Tonight is watching a ton of news (especially Fox News), seeing how they fuck stories up, and then trying to correct it. “Conservative says something wrong” is often how they come to a story in the first place. It’s inherently reactive. And I find this very frustrating! Any time there’s a war in the Middle East, there are going to be refugees making their way to Europe, and we know how conservatives are going to feel about that. We don’t have to wait for them to be racist to say something about it! I think this is a symptom of assuming one’s own frame is neutral and that people on the Right think basically the same way we do? It “feels wrong” not to give them the benefit of the doubt? You can never get ahead of the story if every time they disagree with you it’s a surprise.

Third, it’s just a journalistic default. Talking about immigration in and of itself is considered bad form; you want to tie it to some kind of breaking news. Conservatives say something inflammatory, and that gets a lot of eyeballs; you make that your news peg, and some of those eyeballs point at you. This is why, when lefty YouTubers want to talk about toxic masculinity, they talk about Jordan Peterson; when they want to talk about anti-science vaccine hesitancy, they talk about Joe Rogan; when they want to talk about internalized transphobia, they talk about Blair White. Attaching the subject to a famous person will get more views than talking about it in isolation. The byproduct here is that, by doing so, we introduce their arguments to our audience and make them more famous in the process.

What is rhetorically sound isn’t always what The Algorithm wants.

This is the conundrum. The best way to tell the truth is to just tell the truth. You don’t have to point the camera at a liar or repeat their lies, you can just tell the truth. But that’s not the best way to get the truth in front of people who’ve been misled. But if making affordances to The Algorithm gets them to see it, while weakening its persuasive power and increasing the reach of the people who misled them, is that a net gain? The difficult answer is: maybe. Maybe not. (Maybe fuck yahself.)

The guiding question needs be: what is the smallest amount I can share my platform with the Right while staying honest?

And if any part of you is still thinking that filling your argument with conservative talking points is being fair and balanced and letting the audience make up their own mind… sweetie, no. That’s what conservatives say to guilt you into putting their shit on your platform, something most of them wouldn’t do for you. You don’t help people think for themselves by showing them conservative propaganda.

[SIDEBAR FORTHCOMING: there's an experiment I want to do with metadata hijacking, the results of which I will report in this part of the script when it's done, but getting a draft of the script done is the priority right now.]

ADVOCATE FOR SOMETHING

Flags up top: [forthcoming]

“Progressive and liberal democrats may mean well. They certainly talk a lot about how much they care about the poor, minorities, and the working class. Yet, somehow, it’s always the poor, minorities, and the working class who pay for their bad policies. That’s why those who can move, move. Those who can’t get stuck with the short end of the stick. Red state America is prospering. Blue state America is in meltdown. So, where do you want to live?”

• Where do you Want to Live: Red State or Blue State? [9,532,932 views]

“They are women in bikinis, so he looks. Where there is basic domestic harmony and mutual physical attraction, more than anything, your husband wants you. When he looks, he isn’t comparing, he isn’t getting dissatisfied, and he won’t have a clue later as to who he saw. So, when you’re back in your hotel room, but on your own bikini, and tell him you want him.”

• He Wants You [5,970,676 views]

“According to the famous political scholar Hannah Arendt, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. The state literally defines and controls reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. These rulers might say something like men can have babies, or skin color is more important than character, or the American Revolution was fought not for freedom but to protect the colonists’ slave interests, or those who resists a vaccine mandate are enemies of the people, and insist that you not only believe it, but affirm it.”

• Totalitarianism: Can it Happen in America? [579,150 views]

Let’s talk a bit about calls to action.

Prager is very comfortable telling their audience what to do. It may be something very tangible and sweeping - like upping sticks and moving to a red state - or something more interpersonal - like shutting up and fucking your husband once in a while, Susan. Other times the directive exists by way of implication: you define vaccine mandates as a form of “soft totalitarianism” and end the video with a plea to refuse totalitarianism in all its forms, soft or hard; they aren’t telling you not to get the vaccine (because that would probably get them demonetized) but you can connect the dots.

Now, a lot of Prager videos don’t have this. They may have something they want you to believe, or a progressive idea they want you to reject, but not necessarily a task to perform. A course of action may be implied by context - that bit about the American Revolution was clearly alluding to Critical Race Theory in the midst of a wave of parents calling their school boards about it, so, you do the math - but, once the news cycle moves on, these videos remain as pure messaging. Nothing more concrete than “shifting the conversation.” But when there’s an opportunity to make an ask (that doesn’t get them in too much trouble), they usually take it.

The call to action that Last Week Tonight excels at, and that has the most impact, is when they leverage the size of their audience to get hashtags about pyramid schemes trending or run commenting campaigns about Net Neutrality on the FCC website. Tiny asks that become powerful through sheer volume; a kind of mobilized slacktivism. This can be very effective, but, of the way they end videos, this is the least common.

Most of the time, they’re reactive: here is something conservatives say; don’t believe them. Here is a law conservatives have passed; it should be repealed. Not so often “call your representative and ask them to repeal the law,” just, you know, “make a note of it.” They settle way more often for “shifting the conversation.” Despite being vocally opposed to the previous Administration, they didn’t even really tell people to vote for Biden. Granted, “vote for Biden” isn’t a very fun thing to say! It’s not a rallying cry, it’s a sigh of resignation.

The third type of call to action is “pray John Oliver does something about it,” like when he buys up a lot of student loan debt or incorporates a megachurch and donates all the proceeds to Doctors Without Borders. This is a case of people with money and influence using that power responsibly. Which is what you should do with power! But it’s not someplace the audience can follow suit because they do not have those resources. Similar to the commenting campaigns, it’s a thing that happens when someone with a lot of privilege puts that privilege to good use. And I can’t fault someone for doing very good things - John, please buy my student loan debt - but it can cultivate a Great Man View of History, where things get better only when the handful of people with power and influence deign to make them so, and we plebs are only influential to the extent that we appeal to these - let’s be honest - mostly white men to care about the issues that affect us. As opposed to, I dunno, democracy.

I can imagine Last Week Tonight explaining how all those stats about red states being better to live in are bunk - which they mostly are - but I can’t imagine them going so far as to tell people to move to blue states. They’ll tell you which laws should be repealed but not as often which laws we should write. You come away with the sense the Left knows what it’s against, but not what it wants.

Conservatism is a very back-facing ideology: it is founded on a yearning for an idealized past. It’s corrective; things used to be good, and then they went wrong. We’ve just got to put them back the way they were. The thing about “bringing it back to how it used to be” is it’s written down. Hell, we lived through some of it. People have a clear vision of how it used to be, even if no two people have the same vision. So you can say something incredibly vague, like “Make America Great Again,” and they don’t have to agree on what made America great. Each of them thinks you’re talking about how they remember it.

But the Left is at least trying to face forward, to imagine a new future. And that future has not been written down. You give them something vague, like “Change You Can Believe in,” and you can rally a lot of short-term support, but, when the rubber hits the road, you’ve got to sell people an actual vision for the future, because they did not come in with one. Most of the Left does not have a plan beyond the next election, and, those who do, do not assume everyone else shares it. It’s why we spend so much time arguing over what that future should be. It’s not gonna happen the way we want it if we don’t shout down the people who want it different. The Left is a big, grumpy family dinner where commies yell at anarchists, demsocs at socdems, and Marxists-Leninists at everyone. But, believe it or not, that’s kinda what direct democracy looks like.

There are a hundred ways forward and only one way back.

This makes it very hard for anyone on the Left to advocate for anything and expect a wide audience to go along with it, whereas there is consensus that we should oppose conservative policies. So it’s easier to make a video deconstructing a conservative position and end with, simply, “not that.” This is actually how the NRA stymies gun control despite it being very popular.

“But the real power of the NRA are in its members, who are highly motivated and can be mobilized quickly. Just look at the website of the NRA’s political action committee: you will find alerts for practically every piece of legislation around the country. And not just ‘write your congressman’ alerts, alerts like ‘the following bills are scheduled to be heard on June 14th at 9am in room 126 of the State Capitol,’ because they know their members often show up.

[...]

“‘I would point out they only have to say “no.” So they’re not for anything, they’re against something. A single issue, one word, “no.”’

“Exactly! It’s a lot easier to drum up support when you’re just flatly against something.”

• NRA

(This video ends with John saying you should call your representatives, but does not end with John setting up a website comparable to the NRA’s that keeps people on top of gun issues, even though he has the resources to do that and his audience has proven good at mobilizing in exactly this manner.)

The default liberal mode is believing that things are, incrementally but steadily, getting better, so long as we don’t let them turn for the worse. All we need to do is prevent the bad things. Discussion of the future remains vague because what liberals are selling is a continuation of the present. Most of the things that would actually address the problems we face are a ways outside the Overton Window. And liberals treat the Overton Window as a natural, impenetrable structure that moves only by the gradual shifting of tectonic forces, where conservatives see it as a thing whose borders can be wherever you put them. The liberal says, "Police abolition is too extreme, so is defunding, and we're not quite ready for reform, but, for now, we are willing to keep discussing the issue and shifting the conversation. So be patient, keep letting police kill your friends, family, and neighbors, vote blue no matter who, and, when the conversation shifts enough, we will do something, someday. Which is more than you'll get out of Republicans."

Republicans just say “Muslim registry,” and they keep on saying it until it’s normal.

This is obviously a failing strategy for the Left. You can’t fight motivated political action with “raising awareness.” I can’t tell you how demoralizing I find it when a deep dive into a serious issue humanity faces ends with “spread the word.” Like we’re gonna solve climate change by manifesting! And, not to be a broken record, but if you spend a long time describing the conservative plan for the future and little to no time explaining your own, people are going to remember theirs better than yours.

But, of course, it’s not just that we’re appealing to the masses or being weak-willed; a lot of times, we don’t say what to do because we don’t know what to do. A catch-22 of not a lot of public strategizing is the people who want to do it don’t have a lot to build on. We’re all starting from scratch! Reading theory from 80 years ago and trying to apply it to the modern day! It took me six years of doing The Alt-Right Playbook before I felt confident in giving you advice. (Though, in my defense: John, I don’t have HBO money or a team of researchers, and I still got there faster than you.)

So it’s all well and good for me to say “advocate for something,” but that takes time. I’ve made the mistake of advocating for something without doing enough homework, and this series is, in part, walking back bad advice. But advocating for something should at least be a goal. When discussing an issue, it’s good to look into who’s been working on that issue and see if they’ve had results. It’s worth seeing who else is talking about it and whether there’s something you could build on. I don’t think you should call people to action before you know which actions are helpful; neither do I think that you have to wait til you have something actionable before saying anything. What I am saying is: if it takes time, the sooner you start, the better.

Whenever you do the research, you save the next person some effort. And, maybe, eventually, we can imagine a future worth building towards.

And, at times when you aren’t sure what should be done, at least tell people what you believe. That’s where it starts.