Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

Episode Summary 

It seems forever ago, but it has officially been 10 years since Donald Trump announced that he was running as a Republican presidential candidate in 2015. A lot of terrible things have happened since that time, but if you think in terms of the issues that have propelled Trump politically, his two presidencies have been a “los...

Episode Summary 

Over the years on this program, I’ve often said that the political differences dividing Americans are really just artifacts of much deeper epistemic divides. In the episode before this one, we explored how those differences manifest psychologically—but psychology alone cannot explain why so many people feel so alienated that they willingly support political leaders like Donald Trump whom they acknowledge to be dece...

Episode Summary

Politics in the United States and everywhere else has always been about policy—which party wants to do this, which party wants to do that. But in the 21st century, a new dimension has been added: true and false.

That reality has become a serious problem for left-of-center political parties, because they have traditionally oriented themselves around an affinity for science and reason.

As a result, right-wing parties wit...

Episode Summary

Many people expected that Donald Trump's fate would be decided by women last year. It was, after all, the first presidential race since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court had decided to roll back a national right to abortion.

But Trump upended that possibility by deciding to run a campaign that was focused very heavily on men and trying to attract the votes of men who didn’t commonly participate in voting.

That’s ...

Episode Summary

 Ever since he came back into office, Donald Trump has messed up a lot of things. The judiciary, the budget, federal employees, foreign policy, you name it. But we can’t forget that America’s economic, political, and religious systems were already failing a lot of people long before he ever came on the scene. That’s especially ...

Episode Summary

The Trump Administration's wars on federal employees and research science are getting a lot of headlines, but there's a third war that's being conducted by the radical right that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should, and that is its efforts to control Americans’ bodily autonomy.

Whether it’s trying to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, or trying to place restrictions on birth control, the ...

Episode Summary

Donald Trump's second presidential administration has been remarkably different from his first one, primarily through his acceptance of long-standing reactionary goals to attack government and expertise—particularly federal agencies that produce and teach science such as NASA, the National Institutes for Health, and the Department of Education. What’s curious about this assault on science is that while it aligns per...

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 about manipulating the public into f...