Don’t Hold Your Breath for a “Joe Rogan of the Left”

B&B – 241206

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: Welcome to Block and Build, a podcast from Convergence magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence, Caden Mock. On this show, we’re building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impacts of rising authoritarianism, while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win.

[00:00:25] Before I get started, I want to thank Connor Allen for joining our subscriber program at the Movement [00:00:30] Legacy level. Convergence Magazine is an independent publication that relies on the generosity of our readers and listeners to create the rigorous, thoughtful takes you’ve come to expect from us week in and week out.

[00:00:40] You can join Connor as a subscriber at convergencemag. com. Any amount helps, either as a one time donation or a recurring monthly or annual subscription. This week on the show, we’re exploring the challenges of building a left media ecosystem and maintaining movement narratives within the existing corporate media ecosystem.

[00:00:58] I’m first joined by the co [00:01:00] host of the Citations Needed podcast, Adam Johnson, to help us understand the current state of play in media and public relations and why it’s against us to buy design. Then I talk with Hermelinda Cortés, executive director of Reframe, An organization researching how narrative links traditional and social media to create the social weather conditions for our movements.

[00:01:18] She joins to discuss the work and research they’ve been doing post election to help build more powerful narrative depth and reach on the left. But first, these headlines from the past week.[00:01:30] 

[00:01:32] Earlier this week in South Korea, a declaration of martial law by conservative president Yoon Seok yol spurred immediate protest activation in the streets. This included a call for an indefinite general strike by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. The result was a peaceful reversal of the president’s declaration within six hours.

[00:01:50] Opposition parties in South Korea’s parliament are now pushing for a vote on Yoon’s impeachment. On Wednesday, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in Manhattan. [00:02:00] The shooter is still at large, but left behind bullet casings engraved with words Deny. Depose. Defend. In the wake of the shooting, many on social media were quick to point out that United Healthcare, one of the largest private insurers in the country, has a claim denial rate twice the industry average, while raking in 16.

[00:02:17] 4 billion dollars in profits last year. Look, I’m not trying to say that killing people is right, but one thing that this developing story points up is the contradiction between our readiness to identify interpersonal violence, like a shooting, as [00:02:30] violence, while it’s much harder for us socially to identify structural for example, making basic health care unaffordable for average people as violence.

[00:02:39] We urgently need to solve the crisis created by private health insurance in this country. We all deserve better than the system that we have. Also on Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in U. S. v. Skermeti, the case considering constitutionality of blanket bans on gender affirming care for minors.

[00:02:56] By all accounts, the conservative members of the court appeared [00:03:00] very interested in the reasons to ban such life saving care, including Amy Coney Barrett, who professed ignorance of the long history of legal discrimination against trans people in the U. S. A lot of the lines of argument literally make me feel physically ill to think about, from the Tennessee Solicitor General equating gender affirming care to eugenics, to Samuel Alito calling into question whether or not trans people even qualify as a protected class.

[00:03:23] I hate it here. Following November’s presidential election, some on the movement left may still feel a little dazed and misled by a [00:03:30] media that was so bullish about the quality and momentum of the Harris campaign, and then immediately pointed fingers at those of us doing the work to block Trump after her loss.

[00:03:38] Like they’re weird assertions that wokeness has somehow gone too far. Meanwhile, the failing campaign itself is actually quite conservative, considering the way candidate Harris declined to differentiate herself from Biden, or boasting about endorsements from Liz Cheney and her war criminal father.

[00:03:53] Joining me to discuss the state of political media and how our movements need to understand and relate to that ecosystem is Adam Johnson, [00:04:00] co host of the Citations Needed podcast, who’s also a regular writer for the Real News Network and In These Times. On his podcast, Adam and co host Niamat Neshirazi explore the intersection of media, PR, and power.

[00:04:12] The show has been exposing the corporate, profit driven structure of mainstream news media, political campaigns, and beyond since 2017. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. I spoke with Adam earlier this week. Take a listen.[00:04:30] 

[00:04:30] Adam, thank you so much for joining me today. 

[00:04:32] Adam Johnson: Thanks so much for having me on. 

[00:04:33] Cayden Mak: Definitely. So I don’t necessarily want to spend a ton of time looking backward at the election since we’ve done quite a bit of digesting on the show already, but I am interested just for context setting where what your 10, 000 foot view is of what mainstream media coverage of the election really looked like leading up to election day and then also then what it looked like after.

[00:04:53] I’m curious, especially in the ways that the main, you see the mainstream media kind of [00:05:00] replicating. I guess what I would call like separate worlds, this sort of like world building work that they’ve been doing both before and after and what that transformation was like after election day.

[00:05:09] Adam Johnson: Yeah. At the risk of generalizing I think that the, obviously in July you had the sort of media pressure to drop Biden off the ticket. I think for, pretty partisan reasons which is everybody knew that Biden stood no chance of defeating Trump, which despite what any revisionist will tell you remains the case.

[00:05:26] And then immediately when Harris took over, I think there was obviously a sort of a bit of a [00:05:30] honeymoon period. And then there was a general Look, it’s probably true that the media largely favors Harris over Trump, again this is a generalization, but, but they, and then people will release studies showing this, like the Ben Shapiro is always 90 percent of coverage of Trump is negative.

[00:05:43] And I’m like, 90 percent of the coverage of cancer is negative. There’s an objective feature of Trump that he does and says and promises to do a lot of objectively bad things. Now, of course, Harris does as well, but most of the stuff she says she’s going to do bad, Trump also says so.

[00:05:57] It falls within the, it falls well within the the [00:06:00] confines of bipartisan consensus. And I think that’s I think that’s where you’ve seen the sort of media coverage pivot post election, which I’ve talked about and written about, which is this and we’re actually working on an episode about this, which is this lofty idea that Democrats need to work with Trump on bipartisan bipartisan common ground.

[00:06:16] I love this word, common ground. Now, anytime someone says we need to find common ground with Trump, you can rest assured it’s not going to be to save the whales. Or to work on zoning reform it’s going to be to do probably pretty evil shit. It’s going to be to crush [00:06:30] Gaza protests. It’s going to be to discipline the nonprofit sector who are perceived as being too, quote unquote, woke.

[00:06:35] It’s going to be to throw trans people under the bus. It’s going to be whatever the sort of laundry list of things that Democrats are supposedly supposed to go right on ostensibly for electoral purposes, but really because of the powers that be just like those things namely immigration.

[00:06:48] That they need to reach some grand compromise in the Overton windows gone so far to the right that if, the democratic immigration plan that was released last February that by their own admission was a Republican [00:07:00] immigration plan was released, two, three years prior, it would have been called fascist on the kind of liberal media circles.

[00:07:05] And that’s the current state we’re in now where it’s very different than 2017, which we can get into. But 2017, I think, because so much of the anti Trump rhetoric was swooped up in this kind of conspiracy, conspiratorial lawfare around Russiagate and, I, again, I think there was plenty of smoke there with Russiagate.

[00:07:23] I think investigating was perfectly fine, but it became its own. kind of media ecosystem that’s [00:07:30] spiraled into this unwieldy, um, neoconservative laundromat, right? We need to bring back David Frum and Bill Crystal and then Applebaum and we need to sort of, but that’s not here this time.

[00:07:41] There was a ton of money that went into these kind of democracy preservation groups. There was all these claims that Trump was going to be out of office in six months because of, they were going to unravel this massive conspiracy. 

[00:07:51] Cayden Mak: So 

[00:07:51] Adam Johnson: a lot of energy I think went into this total waste of time.

[00:07:55] And absent that kind of neoconservative framework in the New York times reported on this last [00:08:00] week. That big liberal democratic donors are drying up because they don’t have this kind of conservative wedge and to the extent to which the so called, the democratic party, even the so called left needs to orient themselves against Trump.

[00:08:12] It’s mostly going to be back to basics. It’s going to be, and I, and again, you saw a little bit of this with a lot of the critical coverage of project 2025. So it’s not like they’re not, there’s not like media is not capable of doing like substantive, criticisms of the right. But really to the extent to which you can even coalesce around something, it has to be that it has to be.

[00:08:29] Good old [00:08:30] fashioned mid 2000s, late 2000s, let’s work against this written down conspiracy on paper about how they’re going to gut the liberal state, right? And this is something that a lot of people in media don’t really care about because they either agree with some of it. Or it’s just not as sexy because it doesn’t pump money and power into the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the US military.

[00:08:52] And it’s, and this I think is why a lot of the money’s dried up. Because that’s the only place it can really go, which is, and again, you’re not going to [00:09:00] get, Never Trump Republicans to agree to a policy that opposes 99 percent policies they agree with. 

[00:09:06] Cayden Mak: So 

[00:09:06] Adam Johnson: I think that’s the current state of play.

[00:09:07] I know that was a little bit of a broad brush, but I think that the current state of play right now is there’s this instead of, focusing on project 2025 and focusing on the threat to liberal civic society and again, you see this with the nonprofit killer bill that recently passed the house, let’s instead focus on.

[00:09:26] Again, finding out which vulnerable group to throw into the bus that we can work with Trump on. [00:09:30] 

[00:09:31] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And I think that like on some level I like once the election results were finalized, I was like, Oh, I know exactly what comes next because it’s like a predictable playbook. Cause it’s the same thing in 2016.

[00:09:43] Totally. So there’s there’s two different paths that I would love to explore with you. And the first is. is thinking about really for our core base of listeners who are probably nodding and being like, yeah, this is a very frustrating thing that we deal with cycle after cycle, because these are the kinds of folks, our listeners tend to be the kind of [00:10:00] folks who are like on the doors of grassroots organizations, or they might be more senior leadership trying to steer strategy for movement organizations, thinking about like, how do we deal with this media current media ecosystem?

[00:10:12] They’re, thinking about what are the communications kind of experiments that could disrupt or at least run counter to some of this narrativizing and in some ways historicizing this moment in the moment. What do you think organizers need to understand about the mainstream media entities [00:10:30] that shape?

[00:10:31] these kinds of electoral narratives that are like as you say, in a lot of ways, foreclosing on possibilities right now. And, do you think there are opportunities for folks working on social movement strategies to be thinking about making those kinds of interventions? 

[00:10:47] Adam Johnson: Yeah. Look, there’s, I’m speaking with a, in broad terms here.

[00:10:52] So while it’s true that generally big donors, who would fund, normally fund progressive or liberal causes under the first Trump administration [00:11:00] have realized that to some extent they can instrumentalize Trump to go after mutual enemies, whether it be, again, woke or immigration or trans people, whatever it is Gaza protesters.

[00:11:10] I do think that’s a, there are exceptions to that. There’s still, various funding flows within those movements. And, of course, there’s grassroots there’s user supported. union supported, union backed stuff that’s not within that world. And yeah, I think there’s a lot of interventions that can be done.

[00:11:24] And frankly, I think it just needs to orient around some again, many people are already doing this. I’m not telling anyone to do [00:11:30] anything that I’m doing. But the kind of normal partisan I say partisan, that makes it sound small. I would say the normal orientation of opposing the Republican Party.

[00:11:36] Because there was this obsession, I think, in large, a lot of quarters to save the Republican Party from Trump. And I think after eight years of Trump being the Republican Party that fiction no longer is there, it just can’t, again, without the neo-conservative hook of, again, so Bber met with Cohen in, in pro, in, in Prague in 20.

[00:11:54] And it’s okay, now we can focus on things that actually matter, which is, what’s the first thing Trump did in 2017 when he became [00:12:00] president? He did a, he did the largest tax cut in for corporations and rich people in, in, in American history. And so. When Trump gets in office, as shocking and as vulgar and as rapist as many of his picks are, for example, for his cabinet and other appoint appointments that have to be either we either can, need to be sanctioned by Senate or not there’s, this is going to be a pretty routine right wing takeover of the government, and that’s not a, that’s not like a boring thing.

[00:12:26] That’s a very important thing. It’s a very bad thing, right? And you see this with A lot of [00:12:30] people like Freed Zakaria and Wall Street Journal editorial board, all these people are jumping on this so called Doge, government efficiency committee. Which is just a warmed over version of Bull Simpson on steroids, which is like a sort of rich person obsession with getting rid of the liberal state.

[00:12:44] And so you see this sustained attack on the liberal state. And I don’t use liberal state as a pejorative, I often times will use liberal as a pejorative, but in this case I, I very much am not. Which is to say the state that is. Provides work, provides labor protections, provides environmental protections, provides requiring the federal [00:13:00] government to use union labor, whatever the sort of good things the government does.

[00:13:04] Trump very much wants to get rid of all the good things it does and wants to double down on all the evil things it does. And so I think that it’s not sexy. It’s not going to be this kind of, we’re going to get him out of office in six months, this kind of MSNBC brain worm oh, he’s going to be held off in handcuffs, selling people a fantasy, selling people this kind of Millerite ism.

[00:13:21] And I think that is going to be the hard work of saying here’s this, and people have done this around abortion rights, I think, fairly successfully. And again, I do think that the [00:13:30] popularization of Project 2025, when it got so such a, it became such a burden that, Trump had to ostensibly distance himself from it.

[00:13:37] Of course, that was all bullshit, but and to focus on that, to focus on the attacks on the environment, the attacks on again, labor, I think is going to be probably the most profound, especially with Musk in charge of this. He basically spent 150 million to buy himself a quasi government position to settle these ideological scores and seeing who in the media and the mainstream media is either acquiescing to that or jumping on board with [00:14:00] that.

[00:14:00] And that already there’s been a lot of this Doge thing is not so bad because again, it’s carrying out the wishes of third way and the wall, the sort of wall street crowds designs to privatize many aspects Of education of, again, gutting labor. These are bipartisan rich people stuff.

[00:14:16] They’ve been trying to jam down people’s throats for years. Prioritize social security, which they say they won’t touch, but I, yeah, they will. 

[00:14:21] Cayden Mak: I don’t believe anything they say at . 

[00:14:23] Adam Johnson: No. 

[00:14:25] Cayden Mak: And it seems we’ve talked about this before in the show, the sort of the ultimate triumph of [00:14:30] neoliberalism that like, there’s just like this giving over of.

[00:14:36] of territory in that way, to this entity that’s y’know, we, simultaneously like this weird made up meme bullshit, but that as you say is designed to carry out some of the like, deepest and most painful cuts of 

[00:14:51] Adam Johnson: The general Trump strategy is always take a maximalist approach to everything.

[00:14:55] And then the Overton window shifts and then the compromise becomes reasonable. And to some extent it’s [00:15:00] because many Democrats, especially around things like immigration and cutting of the liberal state, they agree with it. It’s, it must, Musk and Trump and these guys, they provide a cover for them to go right.

[00:15:10] They will say it’s always we have to do it because the election, the electorate demands it, right? There’s people outside their, Senate office saying, please, shrink the post office. Like this is some sort of organic demand but really they agree with it. And Trump provides a bad cop that they can negotiate with and say ho hum, I guess we have to support these so called efficiencies.

[00:15:27] Now, of course the, government efficiency. [00:15:30] commission or whatever it is doesn’t makes no mention and it has almost explicitly said department of defense intelligence police these things are all off limits yeah some of the most incredibly 

[00:15:40] Cayden Mak: inefficient entities in the 

[00:15:42] Adam Johnson: right and i’m writing a piece for this which is you saw this with the with the gut with the way the media covered the government shutdowns in 2017 2013, they call it a government shutdown, or, but it’s not a government shutdown, it’s a liberal government shutdown.

[00:15:54] If you look at any of those so called shutdowns, they never affected the Defense Department, they never defected the, the [00:16:00] FBI, the NSA, the CIA. They only affect government programs like WIC and those that help poor people Housing and Urban Development, EPA. So Musk is using a similar playbook, he’s framing this as like a, an attack on government, and that’s how the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have phrased it.

[00:16:15] But it’s not an attack on government, it’s not an attack on inefficiencies, it’s an attack on government that is perceived as racially coded, pro labor or protectionist of, the blind salamander. It’s government that does non evil stuff and, which is again, which we’ll call, [00:16:30] colloquially call the liberal state.

[00:16:31] And so even framing it as some kind of anti government thing is totally misleading, and you already see people adopting that framing. And I think they’re gonna go far with this thing. I think when you see The opinion page of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, not so much yet, but I would imagine that would change fairly soon when they start to normalize and say, actually, there’s some good ideas coming out of this commission, then you’re in trouble because again, the posture is not, which again, I think to some extent it wasn’t 2017, which is, disrupt, [00:17:00] Make sure that Trump can’t get anything through, resist.

[00:17:04] Now it’s I don’t know. Let’s see if he can do normal bad things rather than abnormal or a vulgar bad thing. Yeah. If he’s doing normal bad things, we’ll go along with it. And I think that’s a, that’s dangerous because a lot of the, I think a lot of the wind gets taken out of the sails of and I’m cap lowercase r resistance.

[00:17:22] Cayden Mak: I got It seems like also, there is this, there is another simultaneous [00:17:30] world building project that is happening in specifically right wing ideological media whether that’s independent alternative media, whether that’s, right wing talking heads who have podcasts or on YouTube, and then obviously Fox News and One American News Network, all those the apparatus of the far these, like, how As the left, as social movements what are, what do you think we need to reckon with knowing that there’s this sort of like mainstream institutional media environment, [00:18:00] which is the New York Times, the Washington Post, your cable news networks even to some extent NPR’s National Newsroom, and then this other sort of right wing environment, and that there’s, these two things are like playing a game of telephone with each other, but also neither of them, I think, in the Trump era, are going to be too Thinking about talking about a truly left agenda worldview how do we reckon with that?

[00:18:25] Issue of sort of audience capture that like we are going to be losing [00:18:30] access to potentially sympathetic folks. 

[00:18:33] Adam Johnson: I think there, there’s a lot of incentive for people to find Democrats failures to win elections and refusal to adopt to the, Needs of voters in a sufficient way to beat someone who’s deeply unpopular, by the way, in Trump in terms of, favorables higher than gonorrhea or lower than gonorrhea rather and then turn around and say, Oh, actually, this is just evidence.

[00:18:51] The country’s kind of axiomatically right wing. This is the popular. This is the popular point because then it becomes, it’s like economic headwinds. It becomes this thing outside of their control. [00:19:00] Because that’s, if I lost him, I spent at 1. 8 billion. That’s exactly what I would do to deflect blame.

[00:19:05] I would say, Oh, you know what, the country it’s again, if you ever worked in sales, which I unfortunately had to one summer I’m really bad at it, but you say, Oh, they’re just not buying, you can’t be me. I’m a great sale. They’re just not buying. So there’s an incentive to paint the American electorate as this kind of fixed 

[00:19:19] Cayden Mak: axiomatically, 

[00:19:21] Adam Johnson: Reactionary entity.

[00:19:23] And that’s true for, 20%, right? The guys storming, the guys who spent, 10, 000 to fly to DC to storm the Capitol. These weren’t [00:19:30] like people working double, overtime shifts at church’s chicken. These were guys who own boat dealerships and, Northern, Northern Georgia.

[00:19:36] That’s not what I’m talking about but there’s a high percentage. And again, increasingly. People of color who have joined the Trump coalition, who are very winnable and who aren’t voting for Trump because they’re ontologically evil or they’re Nazis or whatever. And I think that’s the terrain of course that left the left operates in almost by its very nature.

[00:19:52] Otherwise it wouldn’t be doing this for a living or for for activism or what have you. So I, yeah, I think that the right wing has [00:20:00] built up its own faux populism, I think quite successfully. This is what Tucker Carlson has done. You could argue in some ways it began with kind of Lou Dobbs and I guess you could even take it further back with Ross Perot and that kind of but even, again, I was reading an editorial for a show I was working on from 19 or an op ed from 1999 where or rather from February of 2000 where Trump is making critiques of NAFTA that, ended up being largely true which was not usual for a real estate mogul in New York to be doing at the time.

[00:20:25] I think he comes at it from, again, from a white nationalist or nativist perspective. But [00:20:30] I think in many ways he foresaw the outcome of those as something that could be politically exploited. And he, of course, was right. And think that the riot has built up this faux populism, JD Vance did this, right?

[00:20:39] My mom was addicted to opioids, therefore. 

[00:20:43] Cayden Mak: We 

[00:20:43] Adam Johnson: must punish Mexican migrants because they’re bringing upwards, even though they’re not, even though I worked for the American Enterprise Institute, which took money from the Sackler family. But ignore all that, ignore the fact that I worked at, for private equity and investing in venture capital.

[00:20:54] And they’ve built up this faux populism, which of course, again, can only get this much oxygen and environment where [00:21:00] Democrats have abandoned any concept of class politics or class rhetoric. And without over prescribing what the Dems should or should not do because I think that’s the people who ran the election, again, who are mostly comprised of consultants and and lawyers and marketing people with very little ideological or professional or social commitments to movements.

[00:21:19] With some exceptions, but generally that’s true. I don’t think they’re going to really reform. They don’t want to, because why would you, again, you can just blame economic headwinds or some other. Inscrutable force that had nothing to do with [00:21:30] it. But as far as movements go, which again, I know is a broad term.

[00:21:33] I think a lot of the people that I’ve spoken to, and I say, again, I say this to someone who’s a pundit, I’m not doing the actual activism myself, God forbid who is that it’s, again, it’s about building networks. I know that y’all have done that. Others have done that. Other media outlets have done that.

[00:21:46] I think that’s the right move to support each other. Cause again, you’re certainly not going to get it from, And of course the corporate media that is, that does so much damage and launder so much of this right wing that itself is being slowly eaten up as well. . I think I, forgive me, I, I feel like I’ve heard [00:22:00] the stats of the New York Times employees, something like 30% of all full-time journalists.

[00:22:03] The New York Times has proved the only outlet that makes profit. But it’s very likely though a year from now, there will not be an M Mss NPC. 

[00:22:09] Cayden Mak: Sure. 

[00:22:10] Adam Johnson: For me to dump on anymore . And I think some of that is largely because. I think the sort of utility of having that partisan outlet is just not what it used to be.

[00:22:19] But yeah, I think activists against showing up, supporting each other. A lot of people of course are pivoting to user supported content, moving away from traditional media. I know, some, but again, there’s [00:22:30] only so many left or fellow traveler, software engineers, you can harangue 5 a month out of.

[00:22:35] So I, I, to have an operable large scale media, that’s a really hard question. And when I think about a lot, I know I, my partner and I Sarah Lazar and I talk about this a lot. I know that unions obviously are supported with union dues and that’s one way worker controlled media co ops.

[00:22:50] These things are all models people are trying to build. And I think a lot of those are great and sustainable. We have our. which is, again, does not really scale and [00:23:00] has its own problems, but I don’t really know what else to do. So I’m curious what, others think about that.

[00:23:05] But I, I think that again, yeah, a lot of right wing media has organic buy in, but a lot of it is astroturfed. And I think that without coming, without sounding like we’re just making excuses while we’re losing the ideological war, again, Ben Shapiro’s career and the daily wire was propped up by Mercer money for years and it wasn’t profitable.

[00:23:23] Totally. Yeah. A lot of people would kill for that kind of runway. 

[00:23:26] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realize just [00:23:30] how much like of that sort of like billionaire and think tank money goes into propping up a lot of the talking heads. If you’re like, why, one of the folks that I think have been doing A lot of bringing some of this stuff to my attention has been the folks on In Bed with the specifically around gender and sexuality and talking about where these people are what the pipeline is, that there’s such a uh, there’s real dollar signs behind a lot of the, like, jerks on the internet who then become talking heads specifically when you’re talking about the [00:24:00] war against trans people.

[00:24:01] Adam Johnson: Oh, of course. Yeah. We can talk about that, that, that pipeline for days. It’s, there was all kinds of different quote unquote wedge things they used. But I remember when the DOJ indictment came out a few months ago about, Tim Pool and a few of these other guys taking, half a million dollars from some Russian front company.

[00:24:17] And people are like, how could they not know? And I’m like they probably did know, but also I don’t think you quite realize how much of these guys are constantly just cashing half a million dollar checks from mysterious billionaires. True. Totally routine within that ecosystem.

[00:24:27] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:24:27] Adam Johnson: Now, that’s not to say that someone like Joe Rogan, who I [00:24:30] think is I think it’s probably fair to say is right wing media, but he’s a little more eccentric than that. And obviously, a great deal of his following emerged because he likes to, talk about drugs and MMA fighting and talk to, physicists about the creation of the universe and talk to quacks about this and that.

[00:24:45] It, that, that’s different. Cause I think that is more organic, but I do think a lot of General MAGA media is astroturfing. I know, I don’t mean to say that it’s just a catch all excuse. Cause again, I do think one, one runs the risk of saying it’s futile to do anything to try to counter it.

[00:24:57] That’s not what I’m saying, but I do think like [00:25:00] it doesn’t, it also doesn’t do one any good to be too hard on oneself for like how you lose an ideological war. It’s look, the left has always lost an ideological war against the right. That’s almost how it always is. When the other guys have power and money and again, the kind of nihilistic brand of Of Trump type fascism, it doesn’t even require any consistency.

[00:25:17] It doesn’t require any real ideological work. It’s just, it really is just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. And you saw this with his with his coalition. Mutually exclusive coalitions, people who were severely critical of his vaccine policy. His [00:25:30] vaccine policy that he created, right?

[00:25:31] He took credit for it. He still takes credit for it. And we’re going to, Take on, elites, but not this elite. The elite is actually an associate editor at Teen Vogue. It’s not your boss. It’s this kind of, it’s so much easier to destroy than it is to build things up. That’s the, that’s part of the formula.

[00:25:47] Is they just fund, and this, I talked about this on Blue Sky. I, now that I’m referencing, my, myself. I just want to make sure people don’t think I’m self plagiarizing. But I mentioned this because the New York Times had like their fifth article about why is there no left wing Joe Rogan?

[00:25:59] And it’s first [00:26:00] off, there is. Also, I think that kind of codes Joe Rogan wrong. I think that kind of misses his appeal. But thirdly because the Republicans openly court their extremes and the Democratic Party exists almost exclusively to discipline theirs and to channel theirs into a non profit industrial complex where to shut the fuck up and go home in service of capital.

[00:26:17] They have two fundamentally different functions. Which is to say that right wing extremes don’t threaten capital. And indeed they help it, whereas the left does. So naturally if you have two sets of donors if you have the, if you have the right wing and left wing of wall [00:26:30] street going at it represented, he will say for the purposes of this represented in, we’ll say Fox news and the New York times.

[00:26:34] The right is necessarily going to have far less limitations on what it can fund in court and support. Again, you don’t, Donald Trump went on Alex Jones in 2015. That was like almost where he got a lot of his following. And this is after he said, the dead the parents of dead kindergarten children were crisis actors.

[00:26:51] It didn’t matter. It didn’t care. And so the right courts its extremes, I would say that’s I’m not making a normative claim. I think that’s bad, not because they’re extreme, but because they have odious ideas. [00:27:00] Whereas the again, liberals and Democrats they, by definition, discipline ignore, don’t care, or actively hostile to any kind of movement that is perceived as being existentially, um, would existentially undermine those who currently run the party.

[00:27:14] And so that’s necessarily going to inhibit a media ecosystem. Where you’re just not going to have that kind of feedback with electeds. And no, and frankly, nor should you, like we have a rule on our show. We don’t ever allow anyone who’s running for office or in office on our show, because it’s just, we don’t want to get into the business of electioneering.

[00:27:28] I think it’s not really what we [00:27:30] do. But not that we’re big enough anyway, although we have had some someone running for dog catcher in Appleton, Wisconsin ask or whatever, but generally it’s not I’m not saying it’s a huge demand, but I’m saying, whereas that’s just not something one sees with so called left media.

[00:27:41] Because, they may have this bad opinion or this fringe opinion or they may, taint me as too far left or whatever both in terms of clamoring for donors and also just a general careerist vibe. And that’s what happens, again, a party that’s run by and led by people who worked at McKinsey and company or went to went to law school and, or they’re just a bunch of climbers.

[00:27:58] They don’t have any real [00:28:00] ideological commitments. And in many ways. The real ideologues and right wing extremists were given a safe haven in the Trump coalition. And so necessarily that media ecosystem is going to thrive as a result. 

[00:28:11] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. Now that makes a lot of sense to me.

[00:28:14] And I think that the other thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past, oh, couple weeks, especially with regards to the Trump coalition, is how on inauguration day, Trump is coming into office in some ways with state owned media. Like his own state owned media [00:28:30] network in the form of X, that he’s got infrastructure that I think is substantive, I have 

[00:28:35] Adam Johnson: to call it X now, but yeah, 

[00:28:37] Cayden Mak: I know it’s terrible, but it’s substantively different than I think the sort of broadcast channels or whatever, that previous administrations have had access to because it is so close to him.

[00:28:49] And I’m wondering what you’ve been thinking about with regards to the challenges and opportunities online for alternative media these days, knowing that this is going to be part [00:29:00] of and closer to the White House than I think anything we’ve ever really seen before.

[00:29:06] Adam Johnson: Yeah, there’s always, again, there’s been instances of that before, right? For example, in 2009, Twitter shut down. service in Iran at the request of the U. S. State Department. Examples of like social media doing the bidding and Silicon Valley doing the bidding of the U.

[00:29:22] S. military state. So it’s not totally unprecedented, but it, this is more overtly partisan. 

[00:29:26] And will be turned in domestically, [00:29:30] right? What is fascism? It’s colonialism turned inward, right? And so I think these tools that, that they’ve always used for people overseas will increasingly be used.

[00:29:36] Domestically, and I think that Trump, and again, it’s more Trump, people who view themselves as, who view Trump as benefiting their ends around him as well. But, um, we’ll because again, I, Moscow, to some extent, was forced to take, to buy Twitter. Because he made some joke tweet, but I do think once he decided to buy it, he made it very clear he was going to use it as a right wing.

[00:29:57] Propaganda machine. Cause I think he did understand the value of it, which [00:30:00] is it doesn’t have a ton of users, but the people who use it are all like, it’s their gatekeepers, their opinion curators their sort of, they tell everybody else what to care about. So it does matter. And I know that’s self serving to say, since I’m on there 18 hours a day, but, 

[00:30:16] Cayden Mak: and in the era that he bought it, I feel like it’s less true now, but like the era that ran up to him purchasing Twitter, it was like, People would normal mainstream journalists would write stories about what people were tweeting in a much [00:30:30] more, they’re there 

[00:30:30] Adam Johnson: and that’s what they see, right?

[00:30:32] And it’s easier than doing real reporting. Yeah I do think, but I do think it’s influences waning because it has, I think, must got misplayed. It got greedy is making it overtly white. Nationalist making it, there’s only so many memes they can push on your timeline about white hashtag white genocide, where you say, this is enough.

[00:30:48] And they’re obviously shredding support. They’re shredding users for that. It’s just a kind of gross environment to be in again, a lot of transphobia, a lot of like really mean, cruel shit that no matter how many people you block finds its way on your timeline. And [00:31:00] the Wall Street Journal did a pretty, actually a pretty decent expose on this.

[00:31:02] They were like, yeah, no matter what you do, Trump Musk is making sure you see his tweets. Like you, you can block him, but if not, you’ll see the tweets that he retweets and so forth. Yeah, that’s going to be interesting. Especially cause he, he uses it as a machine to incite people like he did in 20, late 2020, early 2021 last year.

[00:31:17] But of course this, he actually won. So he just maybe doesn’t need to do that. But. But yeah, again, incitement against migrants, incitement against trans people, though he personally doesn’t seem to care as much about that, but certainly those who are around him do Musk. [00:31:30] Yeah. I don’t know.

[00:31:30] It’s gonna get ugly. I, so as far as activist spaces go, I think people have to migrate to other platforms or and not because I necessarily think that like the existence of the right on a platform makes it bad. I think it’s really just about whether or not the right is 90% of promoted content in a way that’s.

[00:31:44] That completely reshaped the character of the forum. Um, like it’s, I, there’s just only so much Nazi content that one can ingest just on an aesthetic level before they’re like, I don’t wanna, 

[00:31:55] Cayden Mak: yeah, absolutely. Um, is there as we wrap up here, is there [00:32:00] anything else that has been on your mind about the sort of like state of the media and I 

[00:32:04] Adam Johnson: don’t want to leave anyone in doom and gloom.

[00:32:06] Sorry. Yeah. I think on the heels of Gaza genocide, bipartisan, I think all this stuff, Trump election, a lot of people are feeling down. I’ve been told that my show can be somewhat doom and gloom. I, that is not the goal. My goal is to accurately try to assess the situation and say, Okay. Again, I think people that are building media alliances, people that are building again, social real activist connections, both in real life and on social media, like all that stuff is still ongoing.

[00:32:28] My hope is that when [00:32:30] you do have a more defined kind of traditional Republican Program to gut the liberal state that there is great There will be increased opportunities for coalition building around that because the stakes Will be high and they’ll be immediate and they will involve things like labor protections abortion protections bodily, bodily autonomy in about 16 different way, whatever have you and so I think I’m optimistic that people come around and Build a real resistance around that and hold democrats electable or accountable who do You [00:33:00] Do capitulate or look the other way.

[00:33:01] You saw this with Adam Schiff. Adam Schiff supported the non profit killer. 

[00:33:04] Cayden Mak: The 

[00:33:04] Adam Johnson: newly elected senator in California. And he got a ton of flack and he switched his vote. So it’s Democrats who are falling in line and backing Trump’s, attack on the liberal state, I think, really need to be called out and shamed because beyond that, there’s not really, that’s pretty much the main entry point, I think, for what you can do in these coming months.

[00:33:22] Cayden Mak: Totally. Totally. Adam, where can folks find you if they want to keep up with your work learn more about your [00:33:30] analysis and study of how the media works? 

[00:33:32] Adam Johnson: Oh we have a podcast called Citations Needed and we name it Shirazi and I have a sub stack and I have, I don’t know, I write for The Nation, Real News.

[00:33:40] And that’s it. That’s my deal. 

[00:33:42] Cayden Mak: Great. We’ll stick some links to your podcast and your sub stack in the show notes so people can find you later. Awesome. Thank you so much. 

[00:33:48] Adam Johnson: Thank you. 

[00:33:51] Cayden Mak: I also spoke this week with Hermelinda Cortés, the executive director of Reframe. The work of Reframe builds narrative power to help progressive movements [00:34:00] win.

[00:34:00] Their series, Signals in the Noise, has been sharing insightful data driven coverage of the who, what, why, and how of media narratives that won in this election. You can read it at their website, thisisreframe. org. Hermelinda and I spoke about how movements work to engage communities and build narratives in spite of the disastrous landscape laid out by Adam in our previous segment.

[00:34:21] Take a listen.

[00:34:21] Hermelinda, thank you so much for joining me on Block and Build. 

[00:34:28] Hermelinda Cortés: Thank you for having me, Caden. [00:34:30] 

[00:34:30] Cayden Mak: Yeah, it’s always a pleasure to see you. To start us off, I want to set up some, working definitions. I want to talk a little bit about how Reframe defines narrative and narrative power.

[00:34:41] Because I do think that it’s, it is meaningfully different from the sort of just talking about comms as a way that people do talk talk in public about their work. 

[00:34:54] Hermelinda Cortés: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I think that, we, a lot of us in social movements [00:35:00] have been talking about narrative and narrative change for some time.

[00:35:02] And And over the last decade, two decades, we’ve talked about framing. We’ve talked about strategic communications. We talk about messaging. And more recently, I think that it’s not that narrative is new, but I think that our movements understand it in a new way. We’ve always talked about things worldview.

[00:35:24] And I think that we are seeing in a different way that. [00:35:30] The water that we are swimming in, I call it the narrative conditions. I come out of organizing when we talk about organizing campaigns, we talk about the organizing conditions, we are trying to change things and in order to change things, you have to understand the conditions.

[00:35:44] So I really think about narrative in relationship to the water that we are swimming in that informs and shapes. People’s beliefs, ideas, and behaviors. And I think that there’s not many of us who do this work that can’t see the role that [00:36:00] narrative played in the election, right? Trump didn’t just win on the doors.

[00:36:04] He won on the fanfare of an air war. And, when we think about things like it, didn’t matter that he didn’t have a story. Second, on air national debate. He had 50 million viewers on an episode of Joe Rogan. So when we talk about changing narrative as our movements, if we’re thinking about changing narrative, it’s not just for the sake of it, which is sometimes I think we we start to conflate narrative with story.

[00:36:29] And [00:36:30] story really is. It’s an arc that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it has characters. And narrative is really about the collection of stories that form and shape the larger idea and how people act and think and what they believe. And when we think about narrative change, we have to also Not oversimplify it and also not overcomplicate it, right?

[00:36:53] It isn’t just storytelling. Storytelling is really important But when we focus [00:37:00] on just the tactics of storytelling What we’re missing is the forest from the trees as they say and we’re actually failing to address power itself And we have to think about narrative and narrative power In relationship to other forms of power, right?

[00:37:16] Grassroots power project has taught us this, right? We need the power to be able to set the agenda or to govern. We need the power of the infrastructure of civil society, right? Network leaders and institutions that can set the agenda. And we also need the power to [00:37:30] make meaning and what that means is narrative power is the ability to shape the terrain of ideology worldview and narrative.

[00:37:37] And Our efforts have to include thinking about how to build that power, what is narrative power, how, what is narrative strategy. That includes communications, but it’s not just communications. And how do we think about that in both the short term, the medium term and the long term? 

[00:37:58] Cayden Mak: Yeah I think like the [00:38:00] interesting thing that like the explanation of narrative as like this larger social infrastructure raises for me is that we have to be both simultaneously grappling with broadcast media, whether that’s cable TV, radio news, major newspapers, but we also have to be grappling with the sort of and even other less traditional broadcast media, like podcasts, right?

[00:38:24] We people talking into microphones in their living rooms have become like an incredibly important way for people to understand [00:38:30] themselves in the world. But the other thing that we’re talking about here are the like micro conversations that people are just having with each other on the internet, right?

[00:38:39] That we’re all part of this sort of like narrative, like the sort of tide of narrative in that way, especially with the rise of the network society and social media. How do you all think about that interplay? Between sort of broadcast formats and then one to many formats and then also this like The influence of many to many conversations [00:39:00] that are happening constantly around us 

[00:39:02] Hermelinda Cortés: Yeah, Kate, and I think, as we do a lot of narrative research, and what that involves is a lot of technology where, you know, what people know as big listening, where we’re scoping and scanning billions of data points, and those data points are both kind of traditional news outlets.

[00:39:20] What’s getting published in major databases, whether it’s for the academy or otherwise. It’s looking at social media, everything [00:39:30] from YouTube to Facebook to, and then we’re also we’re working with organizers to do the type of scanning around what are the conversations that are happening inside of what’s at stake.

[00:39:40] groups. What are people hearing inside of their churches? What are people hearing when they’re knocking on the doors or when they’re, reading their phone scripts and trying to convince someone of something? And I think that one of the things that’s really interesting for me as someone who’s been doing this work for a long time is we used to talk about online And offline [00:40:00] or in real life and, otherwise.

[00:40:02] And I don’t think that’s the world that we live in. It’s not to say that there aren’t, internet deserts, and places where that’s not happening, but technology has transformed so rapidly that it is changing our relationships to each other. It is changing how we understand. And. Our inner psyches it is changing our behavior, right?

[00:40:26] And so we can’t just talk about it as online and [00:40:30] offline The reality is it’s much more braided together And that the world that we’re living in is even if there are people who are not engaging In online context, they are certainly still influenced by them, right? And there’s still a role to play in certain communities of small regional newspapers where I live in rural Virginia, right?

[00:40:50] The role of FM radio is still really important, but when people are hearing what’s on FM radio, that broadcaster on the FM radio channel [00:41:00] is listening to Joe Rogan, right? There is this like kind of looping, we can talk about parasocial relationships that when we do our research, we’re looking at not just what people are saying.

[00:41:15] But we are looking at how is it being transmitted? How is it moving? How fast does it move? Is it moving quickly? Is it we’ve talked about network theory a lot, right? Are there a hundred small networks and it’s reverberating in those [00:41:30] hundred small networks and those hundred small networks are not actually the mainstream.

[00:41:34] Does it increase there and then jump? To the mainstream, which is often what happens. And that’s often when we talk about it, we actually think about what Trump said, a thing, somebody broadcasted the thing, and then everybody else picked it up. But what we know from our research is that’s not actually always how information and stories move.

[00:41:55] So we really need to think. Think about that when we’re thinking about narrative change and tackling narrative [00:42:00] change. It’s not that broadcast doesn’t matter anymore, but the megaphones that we have are not the same. They don’t function in the same way that they did five years ago, 10 years ago, 50 years ago.

[00:42:12] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I think that like the thing that I hear you saying is actually also a very like deep psychological insight about human beings, right? That’s not just about our media system, but it’s about like how we as. Social animals form a sense of our shared reality that we are more likely [00:42:30] to make sense of our shared reality with one another and in conversation with one another, and that like In some ways, what listening to these kinds of like emergent conversations online and offline allows you to do is see how people are, like, forming their identities and understanding themselves in relation to one another before it becomes Oh, this person who’s a household name said X, Y, or Z thing.

[00:42:57] And that also feels, it’s, it feels simultaneously like an [00:43:00] opportunity to be like, ask some real questions about like, how has the media historically served us or not served us as movements and an opportunity to think about what are the kinds of like conversation spaces and sense making that we can do even if we are not like, even if I don’t have 31 million subscribers, like what are the kinds of conversations I need to be having with the like network of trust that can slingshot ideas out [00:43:30] from within my more limited and specific network.

[00:43:34] And I’m curious to know about, some of the guess some of those more psychological insights. I feel like this question about belonging has become so live for our movements. And there’s this sort of hypothesis that the far right has been much more successful at mobilizing feelings of belonging and therefore pulling people towards them.

[00:43:53] Are there things that you’ve learned from your narrative research that illuminate that or show ways in which like [00:44:00] progressive social movements are doing that work well? 

[00:44:02] Hermelinda Cortés: Yeah, so I think what kind of immediately comes to mind is, uh, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And really thinking about belonging also in relationship to safety.

[00:44:13] So I’m not saying that belonging is not important, but one of the things I think we’ve seen in our research is that there is this piece around identity formation that like there are generations of people now who they are forming their identities primarily [00:44:30] online. 

[00:44:30] And their identity isn’t necessarily gender, race, economic status.

[00:44:36] It might be, I’m a Christian mom who lives in the Midwest, and that’s my identity, regardless of race, class, or gender. That means X, Y, and Z values. And that means X, Y, and Z behaviors. So one of the things I think that we are seeing in the way that networks form online is that Some of it is about identity formation, which is inherently related to belonging.[00:45:00] 

[00:45:00] But for me, one of the things that I really think about, and when we start to tease apart the conversations and it’s different network by network and identity by identity, it’s not just about belonging. It is also about. Safety and mitigation of fear, right? It is about the ability to, there is a component of belonging of, do I feel safe here?

[00:45:21] Do I feel safe in the world? And I think one of the things that our opposition. Has done is to not just [00:45:30] create a sense of belonging But to manufacture fear in which they are the safe haven for people to feel safe Yeah, right and I think that what they are offering is an outlet to feel safe And that’s not just about belonging, right?

[00:45:47] So I have a lot of curiosity about what that means for our movement. I think that for the last 10 years, at least, I think that we have struggled with knowing what to [00:46:00] do around identity and identity being seen sometimes as the primary way in which we are communicating. To people and I wonder where that has served us and where it has not because I what I think about things like by conceptualism.

[00:46:17] This is the other thing that is frequently emerges in our research is really understanding that people are often holding complex and competing ideas. All at the same time and [00:46:30] the easiest way that I know to explain this to people is like i’m someone who has been in movement for a while. I am also a parent I have liberatory values and there are a lot of moments in my parenting journey Where i’m holding my liberatory values and i’m like you’re grounded You know, what is the punitive?

[00:46:48] Action that I can take right and so i’m like that’s happening for me someone well versed in this stuff What is happening You know, when you knock on the doors, right? I did some work [00:47:00] with some organizations in Florida in 2020. And I was working with a statewide coalition and there was a Latino constituency table that was there.

[00:47:10] And it was primarily folks who were working with Latina women in Florida. Which is, diverse by nationality, diverse by ethnicity, diverse by race, diverse by class and education level. But they were primarily trying to do turnout, for progressive candidates in the state. [00:47:30] And one of the things that was really interesting was that most of the people that they talked to identified as Progressive of some variety even if that wasn’t the word they identified as having progressive values But where they stood on abortion as very conservative Led them to primarily vote for conservative candidates And what the table was trying to figure out is all of these people want to vote progressive on all of these other issues [00:48:00] But they’re feeling so pulled By their identity in relationship to their position on abortion that they couldn’t figure out how to make those two things meet and I think for me.

[00:48:12] Organizations and coalitions that are engaging that question of how do we support people in understanding competing ideas and choosing the side of liberation. That is our job. And that is the work that we really need to engage, especially over this next window of [00:48:30] time. And I think it’s one of the things that emerged over and over again in the analysis around this last election cycle around the economy.

[00:48:38] Were we able to Convince people of not just the analytical truth. Of where the economy is But can we identify? And say and resonate with people what they are experiencing on a day to day basis And that there is an alternative to what was provided to them right by the trump [00:49:00] campaign Can we tell people you will be able to buy milk next week?

[00:49:03] You will not have to worry about rent. The world will be a better place and not just in a lofty way Because it’s not that I think most people want You A better world for their children, right? Regardless of what other values that they have. But can we convince them or show them, right? That what they’re holding in their head around what they think is happening, the economy and their inability to buy milk, we have to be able to [00:49:30] speak to that.

[00:49:30] And I think that is the work ahead that it’s going to be really important for our 

[00:49:34] Cayden Mak: movements. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s very, that’s really interesting. And I think that it does hit on something that I think in the sort of like aftermath of the election, a lot of people have been prognosticating about, but not necessarily like, thinking about it in this like deeply like interpersonal and psychological way that is like gets, I think, gets to the heart of, I think, a challenge when we are looking [00:50:00] only at the stories our movements tell from a right?

[00:50:04] Because we are right. We have good ideas. But it’s not enough to be right. Oh, I think that’s one of the things that I’ve really learned from y’all’s work is that being right is, doesn’t win you any battles, actually. 

[00:50:17] Hermelinda Cortés: I’m like, I like the truth as much as the next person, but I think we really have to think about, and I don’t know that we do enough study of global movements.

[00:50:26] I don’t know that we are doing enough study. study of [00:50:30] actually narrative in relationship to fascist regime regimes over the last five to ten years around the world and really understanding what’s been happening. I was so interested in what was happening in Korea and the martial law and martial law getting declared and getting pulled down six hours later, right?

[00:50:50] I was like, I want to look at that. I want to study it. I want to understand what was happening narratively. And I think it’s something [00:51:00] that even going back and thinking about, messaging and narrative from the Reagan era is going to be incredibly important for us to continue to do at this time.

[00:51:10] And it’s not that we haven’t done any of that at all, right? There’s a ton of analysis. know that the opposition wedges identity. We know that’s what they do. We know that they use trans people. We know that they use gender, right? We know that they are leveraging race in particular ways. This is [00:51:30] tried and true.

[00:51:30] It’s been a tried and true part of their strategy. all along. And we have to continue studying that. But I also think the other thing that we need to do, I think speaking of this, like getting it right is that we have to be willing, I think, to take more experiments. And I understand why we don’t.

[00:51:48] And one of the things I think that’s really challenging when it comes to narrative and messaging for our movements is that most of our organizations are positioned to talk to our bases. We are positioned to [00:52:00] talk well to our bases, and we are not always positioned for all kinds of different reasons, capacity, size, dollars, technology, to talk to people who are, that we need to persuade.

[00:52:15] And I think that we’re not always understanding some of the science of persuasion to be quite frank. And I think we need to understand. more and I know that, one of the things that I talk about with folks, it’s it feels [00:52:30] icky. It feels icky to be like, to study how toothbrushes are sold.

[00:52:34] It feels icky to say, why am I buying this brand of toothpaste versus this one? It looks shiny and looks like this, and this is what they sold me. But I think that there is something there that we need to understand around what motivates people, whether it’s belonging, whether it’s safety. And I think in this coming period of time, especially as we think about overwhelming [00:53:00] climate disasters, we are going to be in a period where Safety and people’s direct and immediate safety and I’ve been really thinking about this last round of flooding 

[00:53:12] Cayden Mak: Yeah in 

[00:53:13] Hermelinda Cortés: western, north carolina where so many of us were mobilizing bottled water mobilizing clothes, public infrastructure was totally down in western, north carolina and What we need infrastructure wise in terms of movement is [00:53:30] that we need that rapid response support we need The types of infrastructure to make sure that people’s physical needs are taken care of that people are housed that people are clothed Right that people are fed and There is a way that in those crisis moments, the way that we talk about the Overton window, those moments where ideas can rapidly change.

[00:53:50] We also need a set of movement infrastructure that can respond to narrative and set narrative in those moments. And our organizations are positioned [00:54:00] To send the water or organizations are not positioned to talk to the media nationally, talk to the media locally, push out megaphones on social media in those moments of crisis, and we need to think about what it takes to build that networked infrastructure so that the organizations on the ground in that moment, they’re not responsible.

[00:54:21] For setting and moving the narrative. We are consulting them. We are engaging them. We are working with them in a strategic way, but we have to think about, [00:54:30] I think, a different way to organize ourselves around narrative as our movement, so that we can not just be responsive, but to proactively think. Think about we know these disasters are going to happen.

[00:54:42] We know these crises are going to happen. How can we best position ourselves to take advantage of being able to put new ideas into the world for people to contend with identity, belonging, safety et cetera. 

[00:54:56] Cayden Mak: Yeah, that’s really interesting stuff. And I think that like [00:55:00] in this coming period. Doing some real thinking and experimenting around this stuff is going to be incredibly important.

[00:55:07] To that end, I imagine a lot of our listeners are going to want to get plugged in, keep up with y’all having heard all this. Where can people learn more about your work and keep up with the important research and experimentation you all are doing in the coming years? 

[00:55:21] Hermelinda Cortés: Absolutely. So as always, you can go to our website.

[00:55:24] This is reframe. org sign up for our email list for sure. And then we are on all the socials. [00:55:30] We’re not messing around with X that much these days. But you can stay tuned with us on Facebook all the other places. And I think we’re going to be experimenting with some other things over this coming period of time.

[00:55:41] So folks can stay plugged in that way. 

[00:55:42] Cayden Mak: Awesome. Thank you so much for making the time, Hermelinda. It’s always great to talk to you. Excellent. 

[00:55:47] Hermelinda Cortés: Thank you, Caden, for having me.

[00:55:51] Cayden Mak: My thanks again to Adam Johnson and Hermelinda Cortés for joining me this week. You can subscribe to Citations Needed wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more [00:56:00] about Reframe’s work as well as read their newsletter series, Signals in the Noise, at thisisreframe. org. This show is produced by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights.

[00:56:09] I’m Caden Mock, and our producer is Josh Elstro. If you have something to say, please drop me a line. You can send me an email that we’ll consider running on an upcoming Mailbag episode at mailbag at convergencemag. com. And if you would like to support the work that we do at Convergence, bringing our movements together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment, you can become a member [00:56:30] at convergencemag.

[00:56:31] com slash donate. Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure our independent small team can continue to build a map for our movements. I hope this helps.