Indivisibles,

Welcome to the monthly newsletter that Leah and I take turns writing. You got me as your author this time -- sorry about that. Worse, I’m going to take author’s privilege to drift a bit further afield from our normal topic of, “what the hell is Congress doing right now?” and instead share something big we see happening outside D.C. that’s quietly but substantially changing political reality. It’s not all bad though, and at the end of this, you’ll get a brand new pic of Zeke at nearly 18 months old!

As always, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@ezralevin) directly with your own baby pictures or thoughts on democracy. 

And, yes, I watched the new Beatles “Get Back” documentary, which inspired this email subject line. Still, I suffered for this edition of the newsletter -- now it’s your turn.

How the right-wing answers the two most important questions in politics: 

Let’s start with these two all-important questions:

“What is the most important thing happening and who’s to blame?"

If you have the power to answer these two questions, then you have the power to control what the media is talking about, what Congress is talking about, what constituents are talking about, and what voters are talking about. Before a piece of legislation is introduced or a voter is registered or a polling location is opened, you set the terms of debate. 

And that’s what the right-wing propaganda machine is built to do. 

I’ll get to a real-world example in the next section, but let’s go over the three basic components of the right-wing playbook. 

1. Pick a strategic fight locally. The right-wing doesn’t pick fights on deregulating ExxonMobil or cutting taxes for their rich donors -- those are loser issues for them. Instead, they pick fights to distract from their unpopular policy agenda. They pick fights that don’t just resonate emotionally with their right-wing base, but that resonate emotionally with the broader population -- and particularly fights that activate or stoke division along lines of race, gender, or sexuality. The goal is to create conflict that distracts from real issues, supports their wacko worldview, and benefits them politically. Sometimes, there is legitimate reactionary grassroots energy on the issue; sometimes, it’s pure astroturf; often, it’s a mix of both.
2. Amplify those fights with your propaganda machine. Whether it’s a viral rant from Ben Shapiro on Facebook, an opening segment from Tucker Carlson on Fox News, nationally-regurgitated talking points on a Sinclair-owned radio station, or just Russian-funded disinformation, the right-wing has developed a truly impressive (and scary) propaganda machine. Before the New York Times or CNN or your other mainstream news source covers their chosen local conflict, this propaganda machine kicks into gear relentlessly and repetitiously amplifying the strategic fight.
3. Spread the conflict to the mainstream. There are two biases in the establishment media that the right-wing exploits brilliantly: a bias for conflict (“if it bleeds, it leads”) and a bias for treating Republicans and Democrats as two equally-likely purveyors of truth (bothsidesism). The right-wing knows this, and they take advantage of it. Most modern elected Republicans are, to use a technical term, full of shit -- every reasonable person paying attention knows this. But most of the establishment press is intestinally incapable of treating right-wing claims as any more suspect than others. That these right-wing talking heads are talking about some emotional local conflict -- well that makes the issue just about irresistible for mainstream coverage.

And then they’ve answered those two all-important questions: the most important thing happening in the country is this made-up and irrelevant but emotionally charged issue, and it’s those damn elitist, condescending Democratic politicians who are to blame for it.

What this looks like in the real world:

This is not just theory or history -- the right-wing is running this playbook in this very moment to define the political reality we all live in. The dominant version today is the “EdScare” (it’s a take on the McCarthyite “Red Scare”). If you don’t know it by that name, you might know it by: “Critical Race Theory” or “CRT.”

Last year, throngs of angry people started showing up at local school board meetings, concerned that something called “Critical Race Theory” was being taught. And, in their minds, any school material that acknowledged the existence of racism or the history of anti-Black oppression qualified as CRT. Within a matter of months, Critical Race Theory went from a school of legal thought to a central rallying cry of the right -- and an issue in the November elections. Similar panics about gender and sexuality followed.

How does this happen? Let’s run this through the playbook above:

Pick a strategic fight locally. The right-wing picked a strategic fight intended to divide us, and particularly to fuel white peoples’ anxieties about being perceived as racist. Local groups formed with the support of a massive, right-wing, dark-money infrastructure capable of resourcing them and amplifying them (as Media Matters has painstakingly documented here). Their relentless policing and harassment of school boards and teachers helped to produce the content necessary to fan the flames of a panic. All of this added up to a story of parents vs woke bureaucrats -- perfect for packaging as part of the broader national right-wing frame.

Amplify those fights with your propaganda machine. Let’s just look at Fox News: In all of 2018, 2019, and 2020 there were about 80 mentions of “Critical Race Theory” on Fox News. In a 3.5 month period in 2021, there were more than 1,300 (again, Media Matters is brilliant on this here and here). Right-wing “think tanks” like AEI criticized CRT coverage as too liberal (here), which right-wing news outlets like National Review then amplified (here).

Spread the conflict to the mainstream. By the summer though, it wasn’t just Fox News talking about CRT. You could tune into Terry Gross on NPR (here) or crack open The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, Wall Street Journal -- everybody was talking CRT -- clearly the most important issue of the day, right?

And then just like that, it suddenly stopped. Coverage evaporated after the GOP ran the table in Virginia’s 2021 elections -- “Fox News Coverage of CRT Plummeted.” If you’ll recall, the exact same dynamic played out in 2018 with Trump’s manufactured “migrant caravan” crisis -- coverage “nearly stopped after the US midterms.” Or go back to the midterms before that in 2014, when the GOP manufactured Ebola crisis coverage…and then also dropped the issue almost entirely after the election -- “Ebola Coverage…Plummeted After Midterms.”

That’s how it works. The right-wing never actually thought the real top issue in the country was Ebola, or the migrant caravan, or CRT, or whatever manufactured, strategically emotional conflict they came up with. The point is building right-wing political power by distracting, dividing, and conquering. And it works. As David Smith of the Guardian reported last week, “Republicans’ midterms pitch: never mind the policy, here’s the culture war.” The midterms are back, and the culture wars are back -- amazing how that works.

So what do we do? No retreat, no defense -- only offense.

The diabolical brilliance of this right-wing strategy is the trap it sets. Suddenly, an emotionally charged issue is all over mainstream media. This gives all of us living in reality two options: we can engage in the debate of their issue, or we can try to talk about something else. Both are loser strategies. The right-wing picked the issue for us to lose on -- if we engage directly, we lose. But they also picked this issue to be conflictual, sexy, front-page material. If we try to change the subject (Infrastructure! Recovery! The Biden agenda!), the mainstream media won’t bite. It’s tails -- the right-wing wins, heads -- we lose.

So if you can’t play defense on their turf, and you can’t just ignore it and hope the media covers something else, that leaves one strategy: going on offense.

We see some of this playing out in real-time with great effect. I’ll give three examples:

1. Election win: In New Hampshire (a GOP trifecta state), anti-book banning locals coordinated an aggressive response to the anti-CRT attacks. They didn’t shy away from the issue and they didn’t just play CRT defense. They launched a serious campaign AGAINST right-wing book banning, censorship, and extremism. And they won: How Progressives Won the School Culture War—in New Hampshire.
2. Advocacy win: In Wyoming (another GOP trifecta state), the right-wing-dominated legislature attempted to pass an anti-CRT bill earlier this year. But one brave legislator didn’t stay silent, nor did he go on defense. Rep. Andy Schwartz railed against a bill that he argued would force teachers to teach history “neutral and without judgment.” How can you teach the holocaust in a neutral way? How can you teach forced Indigenous American migration without judgment? He won: Wyoming House Rejects Critical Race Theory Bill.
3. Congressional win: Rep. Raskin, in the pantheon of the top democracy defenders in all of Congress, used his position as a committee chair to directly fight back against the surge in right-wing book banning campaigns. Democrats must hit back hard at GOP book bans. Here’s a start. Legendary civil rights leader Ruby Bridges testified on her own books being banned: “Why are we banning any books at all? Surely we are better than this. We are the United States of America with freedom of speech” (here).

We don’t yet have all the information about how best to fight back against these GOP distractions, but a first step is identifying that they’re happening and preparing for our response. Stay tuned from Indivisible as we consider options going forward.

Some quick feedback:

These are some of my observations, but I want to ask you: reflecting on what you’re seeing, reading, and hearing, in your own community and nationally, does this resonate with you? This is a simple one-click survey, but if you’re willing to provide more thoughts, click through and provide them -- I will read through everything I get. We’re learning together here. So, again, does this analysis above resonate with you?

That’s it for this month’s newsletter. Looking forward to reading your responses and defending this democracy together.

In solidarity and with Abbey Road playing in the background,

Ezra Levin
Indivisible, Co-Founder

Ps: And you made it! Here’s your monthly (and my daily) moment of zen, Zeke at just shy of 18 months old hanging out with Leah on a dinosaur (his newest obsession).