Offline with Jon Favreau - Dramatize the Injustice

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Should protests be about expression or persuasion? What makes for an effective protest? And is it still possible for protests to effect change in a fractured, algorithmic media environment? Jon talks to Dr. Omar Wasow, a professor at UC-Berkeley, about his famous study on the effectiveness of civil rights protests in the 1960s. They discuss why the protests of the early 60s led to more political change than those of the later 60s, why the media environment of that era is much closer to our current environment than we realize, and why Dr. King and John Lewis focused on storytelling and dramatizing the injustice of the moment. But first: Jon discusses the shutdown fight and why we need a big grassroots political movement to wake the rest of this country up.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash offline, free shipping, and 365-day returns, quince.com slash offline. In the 1960s, this was a core strategic insight. How do we put on a protest? We stage a protest, right? They're dramatizing injustice. There's real intention about constructing narratives in the public mind. There has to be a story. There have to be good guys and bad guys.

There have to be a kind of, in some ways, a moral high ground and people want to identify with the characters who are on the moral high ground. I think that's the real problem with the democratic narrative that's being offered, or the kind of more tactical stuff that we're seeing from prominent Democrats is, you know, we were in this kind of epic moment and they're offering very tactical sorts of messaging. And I think it's actually, there's an invitation to be a part of something that is really important right now, which is defending democracy. I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from political scientist Omar Wausso, who talked with me about what movements, particularly the civil rights movement, can teach us about the most effective ways to protest, organize, move public opinion, and bring about real change. And before we get to our conversation, I just want to spend a few minutes on why this has been on my mind. If politics isn't your profession or addiction, there's a decent chance you don't remember or know

or care about all the insanity coming out of this White House. I don't blame you. Even if you try, it's just a lot. You might have a general sense that things aren't great. If you listen to us, you might think that actually things are pretty bad. But when you look away from the screen, your world probably seems pretty calm, at least by comparison. You go to work, you live your life.

For most of us, most days don't feel all that different. And besides, what are we supposed to do? What can we do? It's a great question. There's a top-down theory of politics the change comes from the people with the most power. Politicians, government officials, lobbyists, big donors.

Their words shape public opinion, their issues get talked about. They make decisions that the rest of us live with. Clearly, that theory looks pretty accurate right now. The president has already replaced hundreds of thousands of Americans employed by the federal government with loyalists whose only qualification for the general government. job is a willingness to carry out his orders. Generals, prosecutors, judges, even scientists and

economists. He's using state power to threaten lawyers who've challenged him, journalists who've reported news he doesn't like, comedians who've mocked him, students and teachers and researchers, he just assumes, disagrees with his politics. He's already extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from businesses and institutions that couldn't fight back, or more likely, chose not to. YouTube settled this week. He just bragged he's getting $500 million from Harvard. The president personally ordered over the weekend the prosecution of a former FBI director he doesn't like, even though he had to find a random staffer to sign the indictment because not one of the 300 federal prosecutors who looked at the case believed there was evidence of a crime.

He's also ordered prosecutions or investigations into two of his predecessors, his former national security advisor, a U.S. senator, and countless other officials who've pissed him off. He doesn't care whether or not they've committed crimes. He wants his enemies charged. He wants them to go broke paying legal fees, have their lives turned upside down, hopefully see jail time if he's lucky. And he's not stopping with the enemies he knows. Stephen Miller is the most powerful person in the government and keep saying over and over, that those of us who vote Democrat are part of a domestic extremist organization. The president just signed an executive order written by Miller that directs the joint

terrorism task forces to investigate, quote, potential federal crimes committed by left-leaning organizations and Americans who the government thinks may be promoting violence based on indicators like, and this is real, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, extreme views on race and gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality, whatever that means, that's real. That's our government. We're paying for that. Our own military has been deployed to our cities over the objections of those who live there and the leaders we've elected. The president sent them anyway, and now he's trying to turn them against us. He just ordered every top general in America

back to Washington, so he could tell them at a public event that our country is under invasion from within. An invasion from within that he said is no different from a foreign enemy, but more difficult because we're not wearing uniforms so they can't just take us out. That's what our president thinks of us. Our tax dollars are also funding an army of masked federal agents with a budget the size of most militaries, who have long ago stopped limiting immigration enforcement to dangerous criminals or even people without legal status. This week, they shot a pepperball that burned the face of a local journalist from Chicago, who was sitting peacefully in her car. They broke the ribs of an 80-year-old American citizen who runs a car wash in Los Angeles.

They're on video, slamming a crying mother into the ground who just had her immigrant husband ripped out of her arms in front of her little kids. We're paying for all this. In fact, we're paying even more because the president has unilaterally raised taxes on just about everything we buy with tariffs that are most likely illegal. And now he's refusing to help stop health care premiums

from going up on tens of millions of Americans. But also, $20 billion to Netanyahu for more weapons, $20 billion to bail out Argentina, God knows how much to fund a war in Venezuela, which he seems to have started already with several extrajudicial executions at sea. But what are we supposed to do? What can we do?

Well, there's another theory of politics that says sometimes change comes from the bottom up. But every once in a while, it's possible for David to beat Goliath. Or to put a finer point on it, it's possible for a lot of David's to beat Goliath. This is what movements can do, especially big movements that are organized, sustained.

strategic, and disciplined. Political movements win against even the most repressive regimes when tactics like protests, boycotts, strikes, or sit-ins are covered by journalists and recorded by witnesses in a way that breaks through to the majority of people who don't always pay close attention to the world of politics. Even more important is the story a movement tells and how that story lands with a broader audience.

There should be sympathetic heroes and clear villains. The stake should feel big and urgent. and moral. The goal should inspire, even if they seem out of reach. You'll hear in this episode that the strategy of civil rights leaders like Dr. King and John Lewis was to quote, dramatize injustice, not just with persuasive words, but compelling images. The lunch counters, the Little Rock Nine, the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There are a million reasons this kind of storytelling is more difficult today, and many of them have to do with the way you're watching this video. But it's incumbent on all of us who want to beat back this regime to figure out how to send a signal through the noise.

Which brings me to the government shutdown that began on Wednesday at midnight. Democrats in Congress are, at least for now, refusing to provide the votes necessary to fund Donald Trump's government. Their demand is a reversal of the Republican health care cuts that will cause millions to pay more for their insurance or lose it altogether. It's a worthy policy fight on a popular issue that would make a huge difference in people's lives. But it's also a fight that's too small. Does anyone really believe that we arrived at this point because of health care policy? That's part of the story, sure. But it's not the full story.

Democrats chose to have this fight at this moment because Donald Trump and his government are threatening our most fundamental rights and freedoms as Americans. the freedom to say what we want, to believe what we believe, to walk down the street without fear of being arrested because of who we are, or how we look, to enjoy the same equal protections under the law as every other American and to be treated the same by our leaders, whether we voted for them or not. If it were me, I would refuse to fund a government that's at war with half the country because of our political beliefs. The president won the election, his party controls Congress,

and they are free to pursue the policies they want to pursue. But if they insist on breaking the law and violating the Constitution and weaponizing the government against Americans, they disagree with, Democrats are free to vote against giving Trump the money to do that. And if Trump and Republicans truly want to reopen the government, they are free to change the rules of the Senate, get rid of the filibuster, and pass their bill. But let's have that bigger fight.

because that's the fight that matters most right now. And we can't expect people to understand what's really at stake unless we at least try to make the argument. Instead of treating the shutdown as a negotiation over a policy difference, we should see it as an opportunity to break through the noise with a story about who we're fighting for, who's standing in the way, and why people who are rightly sick of politics need to join this fight.

The midterms are a year from now. the shutdown will probably be a distant memory by them and maybe normal politics and normal campaigning will be enough for Democrats to take back the House who knows maybe even the Senate but a year is a long time and Donald Trump is moving very quickly he's unpopular yes

he's not nearly as strong as he wants us to believe absolutely but that's precisely why as many of us as possible need to be engaged in the work of building a real grassroots political movement that wakes the rest of this country up. The next No King's protests are on October 18th, just a few weeks away. If nothing else, this shutdown could help frame the stakes of the fight to come in a way that gives more Americans something to show up for, to organize around,

and to sustain well into the 26 midterms, and beyond. Now, to talk more about why that's so important, I'm excited to bring on Omar Wausau. here he is. Omar Wausau, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me. I've thought about you and your research quite a bit over the past year, and especially in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination and some of the political violence we've seen in the last several months.

And part of the reason is because I genuinely believe that we are not going to get out of this political crisis without some kind of mass mobilization of Americans. But I don't think there's a lot of agreement on the left about what that mobilization and movement look like, how it's built, what the best strategy is. This is your area of expertise. You have a famous paper on the political effects of the 1960s civil rights protests.

And I noticed you gave a talk about the paper about a year ago, and you started with a line that I love. every movement is a contest between expression and persuasion. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, this is something, I mean, part of where my paper generated a lot of attention was it happened to be published three days after George Floyd was murdered. And it was a moment where people's emotions were running really high, right? And there were debates online about like the, you know, kind of analyzing the paper and other people were like, no, no, no, like we're going to a funeral. Like, we don't need a statistical analysis of like whether

this is going to improve the Democrats' point share, you know, a point or two, right? And sort of in that, in the tumult of the paper coming out and there being controversies around it, I sort of realized that there's like this, there are these two really powerful energies in any movement, which are, one, the hunger to express yourself, the hunger to articulate some kind of outrage or anger or frustration or sadness and sorrow about what, you know, an injustice that just occurred. And then another kind of component, which is often driven by leaders or people like academics, sort of thinking about, well, strategically, like what is effective? And that contest between expression and, you know, efficacy or persuasion, how do we not just

articulate our own feelings, but actually reach the people who aren't at the protest? and persuade them of the morality of our cause is those things can be in real tension. Yes, this is basically what I spend most of my days thinking about is this tension. And, you know, I do want to get into it more a little bit later with you. But what got you interested in answering questions about this particular topic? You weren't always a political scientist, right? That's right. Yeah. So I mean, partly just to go back a little,

little bit before I became a political scientist and even before I was an entrepreneur, my parents were involved in the civil rights movement. My dad was registering voters in 1963 in Mississippi and his work as part of that Freedom Summer was loomed large for me as among the, you know, kind of for people who grew up in the shadow of World War II, the greatest generation was people who fought in World War II. For me, in some ways, the greatest generation were the people who fought in the civil rights movement to dismantle Jim Crow. And so there's just this deep reverence for the work that went into the civil rights movement, partly as a child of the civil rights movement. And that has just kind of echoed in my head my whole life. And at the same time, they grew up in

New York in a moment when it was a, you know, the dominant political question was, how do we have more law and order and tough on crime? And so in my coming of age, there was this disconnect between the kind of victories of the 64 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and then fast-forwarding into the 80s and 90s, this tough-on-crime rhetoric that seemed to have just totally crowded out the successes of the civil rights era. And so I was trying to understand how did we get from civil rights to tough on crime? And that ultimately, so for a little while I was an entrepreneur, helped start a website called Black Planet, which became at the time the leading Black Social network. This is, before we even called them social networks, they were online communities back

at the day. And, and that was, you know, so that was, I thought, one place where I could kind of try to work out some of this, like how to, you know, what is the civil rights movement of a modern era look like? We're going to fight the digital divide. And then at a certain point, just thought, no, I need to go back to school and really study these questions. Offline is brought to by Zbiotics pre-alcohol. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, just don't bounce back the next day like we all used to, you know? It's just, it's...

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Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash offline and use the code offline at checkout for 15% off. So much of the prevailing political science research before your paper argues that elites dominate politics. And they're most likely to drive, debate, shape public opinion, enact their agenda. what does the research say about why that is? What does the basic argument of sort of the prevailing research that existed when you started exploring sort of the efficacy of protests and movements? Yeah, that's a really important kind of debate within political science. And you would know this intimately, having worked for one of the most influential elite

speakers in the world, right, that like the messages that someone like President Obama put shape what the media covers, shape what people who are following his speech, think about. There's this great quote from a, I'm forgetting his name now, but a political scientist says, the media don't tell us what to think, they tell us what to think about, right? And so it's not that we're shaping people's values necessarily in any one speech or any one elite act of communication, but they help to kind of raise the salience or priority of something in, you know, it kind of becomes top of mind for people, right? So there's just lots of evidence from a wide range of scholars that, like, the people who have the most access to that big

megaphone of the media are the political elites politicians. In some cases, people who are not necessarily politicians, but who have a big platform now increasingly on things like, you know, podcasts or social media. And so they just have way more voice than the rest of us, and they're shaping the public conversation. And what I found just kind of to pick up where your question kind of left off is that that's true. There's lots of evidence. I don't dispute that. But I think there are these punctuated moments where we get these bottom-up voices getting heard, right? And so I call that one point in the paper leading from below. But the idea is basically that like in particular through protest, but not only protest, people who don't have these big platforms for at least a

brief period of time are able to capture the media's attention and the national consciousness. So that's your thesis sort of going in before you start doing the research. And as you're looking at the civil rights protests in the 1960s, what did you learn about whether protests move public opinion? Yeah. So that's actually a really important question in the present, too, because one of the most common bits of feedback I get is that protests have no effect, right? It's like, why are we even doing this? There's a kind of understandable sort of pessimism or frustration of like, did protests in the first Trump administration matter? And so just to go to the 1960s, there's an active debate in the black community around what kinds of, you know, should we go through the courts? Should we engage in nonviolent civil disobedience? Should we use more militant tactics? And there's a real skepticism about whether protest can be effective. And what I find is, I mean, at the most micro level, I collected 250,000 headlines from newspapers, from eight different newspapers around the country, and looked at if there was a nonviolent protest today, what was the likelihood of there being a front page headline? I just looked at front pages as a very hard test. Would there be a front page headline that mentioned civil rights or voting rights?

And I found that you could predict with a high degree of regularity that protest today predicted this headline about civil rights or voting rights. So the idea is that process of action on the ground is shaping headlines. And then the headlines shape the kind of what people are thinking about is the kind of the core logic of what I observed in the 1960s. And that extends then to public opinion and voting. Yeah, you have this chart that I think you showed in one of your talks that I found fascinating. which is you see you ask voters what's the most important issue on your mind which pollsters still asked today and up through the beginning of the 1960s you get foreign policy is is number one because of the Cold War right not something that we see today and then economy which is what we see

today and then suddenly and civil rights are sort of down at the bottom and then right around 1962, 61, 62, suddenly it passes both the economy and foreign policy for the first time. And so your research finds that that is due to civil rights protests more than sort of elites talking more about civil rights. Yeah, that's a great, I mean, I love that plot too. So I'm glad it speaks to you. And it, yeah, and I think what that, I mean, you captured it really well. but just for the person who's not looking at it, right? There's like, you know, civil rights is sort of, as you noted,

it's kind of at the bottom of the most important problem list and then just spikes massively, right? And one debate is, is it being driven by, you know, John F. Kennedy or is it being driven by protests on the ground? And what I find is that events like the March on Washington are much more predictive of what's happening in that public opinion measure. And to be clear, like when Congress is debating the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act,

we also see little bumps in concern about civil rights. So it's not that elites don't matter, but I don't find, for example, like if you look at the elections in 64 and 68 and 72, civil rights is not moving much around the elections. It's moving

when Selma happens. It's moving when the March on Washington happens. So one of your big findings, maybe the central finding, is that how the protests are perceived by the public, is a significant factor and what kind of political effect it has.

How so? Yeah, so this is... So part of the puzzle for me, as I mentioned, was like, how did we get from civil rights to law and order? And part of what's going on in this period is there is this, like, there are these kind of competing issues where law and order is sort of the counter,

like, a platform, right? So Goldwater runs on law and order in 64 and loses massively. And then Ronald Reagan runs on law and order for governor of California in 1966. And he wins convincingly. And so part of the puzzle was like, how did law and order go from being a losing issue in 64 to a winning issue in 66? And of course, a presidential election and a governor, gubernatorial election are not the same thing. but just, you know, as a kind of motivating puzzle.

And part of what I was trying to understand is, like, what's driving the taste for this tough on crime, this law and order politics? And one of the revelations for me in graduate school when I was studying this was to see that if you look at that most important problem data, it's going up in the summer and down in the winter and up in the summer and down in the winter. And it was sort of at first I thought, well, public opinion data is noisy. It's like, you know, and then as I began to look at it more, It's like, oh, no, no. It's like if you overlay the protest data where we're looking at violent protests and we're looking at the public opinion data, it's not just noisy. It's following a structure.

There are these big violent protests in some cases in an incident like, you know, Detroit or Newark or L.A. There are dozens of people killed. There are, in the case of L.A., thousands of incidents of arson. These are front page news across the country. They're driving public opinion. They reflect, importantly, deep underlying frustration. in the black community about police violence, about injustice, about inequality, but even if we think the motivations are quite sympathetic, the tactic of engaging in violent resistance is producing this very negative coverage, which in turn I find is driving concern about law and order and moving swing voters from the Democratic coalition into the Republican coalition. And when you talk about violent protest, you're talking about violence, you're also talking

about, you mentioned, arson, property damage, basically protest that sort of leads to more disorder. Yeah, so the, I'm building on, to be clear, decades of work, particularly by sociologists, and their definition of a violent protest was there's at least, there's significant property damage, arson, injury, death, and I'm forgetting one. And so those are, the, sorry, it's at least 30 people and not on a, like a college campus. It has to be, like, out in the streets. So significant property damage, arson, injury, or death. And those, that defines what, and to be clear, these are kind of conventionally called riots just to sort of have kind of similar language. I'm talking about nonviolent protest and violent protest. And when those

incidents happen they're they're they're they're really moving um they're you know going back to that same analysis of how the media is covering them we see much more likely when a violent protest happens the headlines the next day are riot and just to sort of zero in on the finding because how do you isolate the protests from like larger social and political forces that could also be driving public opinion so that, you know, you have protests or in the early 60s, it leads to civil rights legislation. There is then a backlash to the civil rights legislation, and that shows up in public opinion. How do you sort of isolate the protests? Yeah. These are, you could, you could, we're ready to give you your PhD so you can, you can ask these hard questions about causal

inference and confounding. I'm impressed at your close reading. So, so yeah, this is like a fundamental problem is that we're not it's not a medical trial where we randomly assign some counties get a violent protest, some counties get a nonviolent protest. So there are a variety of methods I use so the first one is just to as I mentioned a little bit earlier

like I look over 12 years and compare counties to themselves and we sort of have a prediction this county typically you know votes 45% democratic. It had a nonviolent protest. Do we see it shifting from our prediction? Does it become more liberal or more conservative.

And without going too much into the details, this method of comparing counties to themselves is considered like a pretty hard test of, is there an effect? Because by comparing a county to itself, you're controlling for a ton of stuff, right? So there I find the nonviolent protests are kind of liberalizing, the violent protests are producing more Republican votes, but that's sort of one test, and it's still correlations. the other test I mentioned was this like looking at kind of over time does a what does the tactic today show up in a different kind of headline tomorrow and that's still a correlation but it's like a it's a very hard test of just looking at front page newspapers for this kind of time series relationship right so and then the third test which is the one that that generated probably the most attention is a kind of natural experiment and what I use there is the horrible tragedy of Martin Luther King Jr. being assassinated in April of 1965 and building on some work by a pair of economists, I use rainfall in that period to approximate random assignment.

So what I mean by that is, so King is assassinated April 4th. I look in the week following his assassination when there are 137 protests that escalate to violence. And what I do is say, well, if there was more rainfall in your county, if there was less likely to be a protest. And if there was less rainfall, there's more likely to be a protest, right? And so if rainfall in April is predicting changes in voting in November, the best, the most obvious explanation, I argue, is that it's through the channel of protest. And I find, in fact, in that one week in April, rainfall is predicting, a shift to the Republican Party. In other words, that Brainfeld predicts the shift.

And it's not true the week before King is assassinated. It's not true in other weeks in April. Just that one week in April predicts changes in voting in November. And so the argument is that's almost like a coin toss at the county, whether it got a violent protest or not. And we can then estimate, you know, an effect where I sort of say, imagine for a moment that King wasn't assassinated. or imagine that the protests had happened but not been violent, right? In that counterfactual world, we can assume that the Democratic Party might have done about two or three percentage points better in a bunch of counties that were near those events,

and that would have resulted in, it turns out, Humphrey picking up five states and winning the 1968 presidential election. And so there are kind of two things going on. one is how do we estimate the causal effect, which is what you just asked, but also sort of thinking about, well, what is the actual implication of that? Yeah. I mean, I think another important point to hit on here is that, and it's easy to miss for a lot of people, is that nonviolent protests, it's not that the nonviolent protesters not only expected

to be met with violence, but that was their strategy. So it's not, this isn't a discussion about nonviolent protesters who just never experienced any violence, shifting opinion one way, and then protests who turned violent, suddenly shifting it the other way. In fact, the violence that was visited upon the nonviolent protesters was part of what shifted public opinion their way. Yeah, so that's a really important point. Again, thank you for being such a close reader of the work. Yeah. So, I mean, the way I think about this, just to kind of go back to the beginning a little, is that activists have, particularly in the 1960s, were operating under conditions of domination, extreme racial hierarchy, but they still had

some agency. They still had some capacity to make decisions about where they protested, when they protested, and we see lots of evidence of them being incredibly strategic. So picking a place like Birmingham because there was an understanding that Bull Connor had a hair trigger for violence and that there would be these potentially spectacles of violence that would not only be of interest to the media because the media likes conflict, likes drama, but also would essentially, in the words of John Lewis and Martin Luther King, dramatize injustice, right? And so the idea was you needed particularly dramatic images in some ways to going back to Mamie Till, who did this with her, but

presenting pictures of her brutalized, essentially lynched son Emmett Till, presenting pictures of him to the world, the idea is you're going to shock the conscience of the nation, right? And so what that meant in practice was picking, again, places like Birmingham and using violence, but making yourself the target of violence. Essentially, strategically using violence to generate sympathetic coverage that was not only now, but international and reshaped the debate over Jim Crow. Have you or anyone else done research into the difference between nonviolent protests that are the targets of violence versus nonviolent protests that don't see any violence and that aren't the targets of violence and the different impacts on public opinion between the two? It's a great question. And there's a little bit of work, but it's something I'm trying to do some experiments with, I mean,

not obviously, like actually subjecting people to violence, but doing what are called like kind of lab experiments. And I think, but big picture, there are a bunch of experiments that find that disruptive tactics, there's just like what a group of scholars, Rob Willer, Matthew Feinberg, and a co-author, find what they call the activist's dilemma. And the challenge is if you...

are a peaceful protest that is more likely to generate sympathy, but it's much less likely to generate media coverage. And if you are highly disruptive, it generates media coverage, but it's much less sympathetic, right? And the way the activists in the 1960s solved that problem was to be the targets of violence, so you got both coverage and sympathy. But it's a challenge.

So, for example, at the No King's protests, the last batch, right, there were, you know, an estimated 4 to 5 million people out, and a lot of newspapers, you know, barely covered it, right? And that speaks, you know, we see echoes of that in the 1960s. There was a major protest in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and one reporter says, no blood, no guts, no story, right? And in defense of the media, like, you know, it's not interesting to cover a plane that lands, right? What's newsworthy is a plane crash. And so the drama and conflict, and the drama and are really a kind of a core part of the logic of media, and that's then a challenge for activists to figure out

how do we thread this needle of trying to, like, again, coming back to your opening question, how do we persuade the public to join our cause and at the same time have events that will generate media that reach that public? This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace provides all the tools you need to promote and get paid for your services in one platform.

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or domain that's Squarespace.com slash offline. Yeah, the other thing I feel like people miss today, especially younger people who might not have studied Civil Rights Movement, is just the level of strategy and discipline. involved in the early 60s in that movement and I only know it because Barack Obama was an elite moving public opinion but he was also an organizer right and so this was something that he studied a lot as well

so this like your findings made before I even looked at you know the rainfall and all of this like it made intuitive sense to me I also read your paper and read about your work for the first time in the summer of 2020 during the George Floyd protests on Twitter when a mini controversy broke out over Democratic strategist David Shore sharing your findings that ultimately led to him losing his job. This is a terminally online thing for me to remember. And I do feel shame about that, but nonetheless. What was your reaction to the feelings the peace generated among some folks on the left?

Yeah. So it's, I mean, the show is called offline. So I think we're allowed to, like, wrestle with being terminally online. And, and just without being too self-congratulatory, Ezra Klein mentioned the same David Shore firing a week ago. So it, it looms large in the culture of the hyper online. So, you know, I mean, any case. So, and I should note, like, David Shore has landed on his feed and is, yeah. David's okay. Yeah. But to your question, which is like the kind of some ways the beating heart of this, like I think for me, one of the most interesting things about that whole experience was to realize I had spent years training to be a social scientist and to be exceedingly dispassionate to try and like be in some ways really skeptical of appeals to emotion or, and there's a way in which it's almost like you're being trained to be a robot. And in this moment, as I was talking about the findings, I realized at a certain level, like, a man was killed, right? And it's like to just jump into the numbers was something, it was something, I mean,

for me, not David, sure, there was something that was just like, kind of like, it's like there needed to be some acknowledgement, almost like a kind of, I don't know, in any interview at that time, as I started to figure out what this like weird mismatch and social science register is from the kind of the public conversation, I realized I needed to not just drop right into the data, but to talk a little bit about, you know, there's a tragedy here. There's a family that lost a father. And there are a lot of people who feel profoundly unsettled by the video that they watched and that like you kind of have to acknowledge where people are emotionally before dropping into the kind of analytic social science register.

And it's still something I struggle with because, again, I'm trained to live in my head and at the same time where most people live is in some combination of like feeling and thinking. And you almost don't seem human if you can't speak to their heart. Well, and it's also, it's part. part of what activists and organizers struggle with as well, and just, you know, back to the, to the 60s, right? I mean, the idea that you're going to organize and send people to that bridge in Selma or the Little Rock Nine is going to desegregate the school knowing that they, that those

children were going to face, likely face violence. Yeah. But that that was going to be a political strategy that may have helped the larger movement. That is just a tough human thing to wrestle with as because, and the reason you are an activist or an organizer is because you care deeply about issues of justice and equality, and yet you are sort of trying to strategize around it in a way that can feel, I guess, antiseptic and cold to people who aren't involved. I guess that's why your line about persuasion versus expression is really sort of eye-signant. I find it is like a central tension that we're still dealing with.

Yeah, that's right. And I think one other element of the tension is, which you spoke to a moment ago, right, is it takes enormous discipline and often training and preparation to go into a protest, knowing you might be hit with fire hoses or beaten by, you know, state troopers. And most people are just not capable of making them. the target of violence in that way. It takes enormous courage. And the other complication is that for those of us who are watching, it's enraging. And so I think part of why it's so hard to sustain that kind of tactic is that the people who are observing their kinfolk getting

beaten want to mobilize in a more militant way, right? And so it's just, it's like it's an exceedingly hard tactic to sustain both because of the injury in some kind of, cases death that that activists were subject to, but also because it's sort of, it's enraging for people who care about those who are the targets of violence. And so it's just a very fragile, very powerful, but hard to sustain method. The overwhelming majority of protests in the summer of 2020 were peaceful. The few protests that involved property destruction, arson disorder, were, of course, amplified by one of the major political parties, state-friendly media, social media, Biden still wins by a little.

What kind of effect, if any, do you think the protests in the summer of 2020 had on the results or just politically? Yeah, it's, I mean, in some ways, that's like this huge question that I think we're still in the wake of. And so I think there is evidence that protests are, there's work by a colleague of mine, Dan Gillian, where he does great work if he finds where protests, both on the left and the right, mobilize the coalition, right? So people donate more to politicians. They vote, like, there's this whole sort of set of spillovers around the coalition following protests. And so I think it's quite reasonable to, and there's some evidence of this, but I think we're still kind of working it out, that. that where protests happened, it's activating, not just for the people on the ground, but

for neighbors and, you know, again, people seeing it in the media. And so I think that works to Biden's favor and the Democratic coalition's favor. But I also think the kind of backlash we're seeing to everything from DEI and critical race theory and the kind of just sort of eruption, book banning. I mean, there's just a whole range of concerns about what you might think of as kind of like ideological power, where there's a call to think about systemic racism and then a counter-mobilization that is really about crushing any consideration of those ideas. And that I think also should be thought of as part of the kind of cause and effect of that movement. And it's not obvious to me that we could have thread a needle and gotten more concern about systemic racism without the backlash. But I think they're, you know, we're still living in the wake of those, of that, you know, it's not that long ago, right? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, I'm going a little bit, I'm going to go, I, I just a couple weeks ago was a, a, uh, on a panel about a new book called raised to obey by a political scientist name. Agostina Paglayan, and the core idea, she asks a really interesting question, which is like,

why do states over two centuries make these big investments in public education? And what she finds is that it's not because it's democracy or they want, you know, workers who can read or they want to build a national identity. It's a form of social control in response to mass violence. And so when there is mass violence, elites want to essentially try and produce a more more docile, status quo approving citizenry, and they invest in education to produce order. And I think that there's an echo of that research, which to be clear, is, again, over a 200-year period. So it's not about the present.

But the concern about education, the concern about the ideas, the concern about, you know, a rebellious populace is showing up in this counter movement to how do we control universities? How do we control K-12 education? How do we fight things like critical race theory? Right, which we're now seeing on steroids today under the second Trump administration. Yeah, that's right. The monumental changes in how we consume information now versus in the 60s seems really important in figuring out the most politically effective protest and mass mobilization strategies today. And I wonder how you think about a world in which, you know, there's three television stations and everyone in the country

or most people in the country are tuning in just to watch what's happened at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Yeah. And it moves public opinion that way versus what we have today, which is certainly not that. And, of course, it is beyond polarized, in media, and it is now sort of like algorithmically individualized media. And how do you think about how that sort of affects the central thesis or the central findings of your paper?

Yeah, a great question. And again, I think we're still all sort of trying to figure out what the media environment today, how that quite works. But I think a few things where there, I think, are important similarities that are often overlooked. So one is there's a a fragmented media in the 1960s. There's a pro-segregation media in the South. There is a black press that is anti-segregation. And there's a national media, NBC, as you just referenced, that are kind of largely indifferent to the concerns of black citizens. But as the civil rights movement picks up, start to cover the civil rights protests. And it is a great book called the race beat, which talks about the reporters who were on the front lines of covering civil

rights. And that, you know, in a wild way that I didn't fully appreciate until I read that book, TV news. So, like, one of the details that's quite remarkable that is also another echo of the present is in 1950, almost nobody has a television. By 1960, almost everybody has a television. And so there's just this radical change in the media environment in America. And in that early 60s period, people don't know what TV news is. And so, to use a kind of contemporary term, like civil rights becomes the, quote, killer app of TV news. Like, it's the thing that justifies the news. And so TV news sort of grows with the civil rights movement.

But importantly, coming back to your question, like, it's a fragmented world where it's not entirely clear who the allies are in the national media for this cause. And it's not clear. And it's fragmented, right? So that's one important similarity. And then I think one other important similarity is just the power of a certain kind of image, right? So, I mean, coming back to George Floyd, the, you know, part of what makes them that early civil rights era activism so effective is there are these images that just punch through the culture. And the video of George Floyd being killed by, that was shot by Darnella Frazier, 17-year-old who had the presence of mind to sit there with her. cell phone and document that over many minutes, like that also punched through the culture.

And sort of everybody was kind of stopping their tracks for a moment watching it. So I think there are these ways in which even in the kind of almost kaleidoscopic media we have now, there can be these moments where something is such a powerful image or such a powerful video that it still sort of stops, you know, the national discourse kind of begins to focus on that particular incident. So those are some of the similarities. And clearly one important difference is in 1960s, you needed ABC, and now a teenager with a cell phone can document, you know, an important bit of state repression. And I think there's just this, you know, sort of in some ways, that creates lots of opportunities for us to more directly observe

injustice. And at the same time, it also means that there's just this flood of images and flood of networks. And I agree that it's much less likely that we have one conversation as was possible in an earlier period. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day. year, we're saying thank you therapists. BetterHelp therapists have helped over 5 million people worldwide on their mental health journeys. That's millions of stories, millions of journeys, and behind everyone is the therapist who showed up, listened, and helped someone take a step forward. Moments in therapy, like the right question, a safe space to cry or a small win can

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Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash offline. That's BetterH-E-L-P.com slash offline. It also seems like you need an organized grassroots movement to sort of take advantage of the moments when images like that break through. So you think of, you know, LBJ, you know, he makes the big speech after, and says, we shall overcome after Selma and leads to the civil rights, signing the civil rights legislation. And that is a moment that sort of catalyzed that legislation. But it had been, you know, civil rights, king, civil rights organizers had been building

towards that for quite a while. You think about with George Floyd, in the murder of George Floyd, that wasn't necessarily, I mean, there was an election in November, but there wasn't specific, you know, people were not ready for a movement about police violence, at least at the level that you'd have in the civil rights movement. I also think about after January 6th, right? It is the lowest approval that Donald Trump ever has. And there is this moment where, were it not for, you know, Mitch McConnell and some Senate Republicans, he is in. impeached and that's that because you've got all these Republicans. And I do wonder if there's something about these movements that both need to be organized and sustained because with this media information environment, these shifts in public opinion are fleeting. And I'm sure they were always fleeting even in the 60s. So, you know, the chart goes up and down in the winter and the fall in the winter and the summer. But I do wonder if it speaks to the need for sort of this cohesive discipline to organizing that sort of sustains itself and is ready for these moments when

something breaks through to the broader public. Yeah, that's a really important point. I apologize. Forgive me as an academic for name-checking my colleagues, but there's a great book by Zaynep Tufetchi called Twitter and Tiergass, and she tells a story of a protest in, I believe it's Turkey, there's a takeover of, as an Occupy-style protest, and to protect a park that's going to be bulldozed, and the local leaders are finally ready to negotiate. And, you know, the gift of organizing on the Internet is that, like, somebody can post, you know, to social media and, like, a thousand people can converge in an hour or two. And there is this capacity, you know, you've lowered the cost, the coordinating cost of organizing.

But then when the town leadership wants to negotiate with somebody, there is no clear organization to negotiate with. There is no leadership to negotiate with, right? And that's exactly the analogous, I mean, it's a small case, but it's analogous to your story of LBJ and King. Like, what are your demands? If you've got this super splintered kind of movement, it becomes harder for there to be a coherent set of demands, a coherent agenda. And I think that's one real challenge in the present. Another, I think, is there's a real tradeoff between the power of a certain kind of slogan, which works well as a hashtag, but may not translate well to policy, right?

And so we can think about, you know, hashtags work well as a rallying cry, but it's not obvious necessarily, like, what's the, you know, three-point agenda of what needs to get enacted as a result of that. And that also speaks to the algorithmic and, you know, short messaging requirements of, like, what can you distill to something that fits, you know, in the old days of in 140 characters. and that imposes a limitation on the movement to, I think, articulate something more, or any kind of movement, something more nuanced or even like wonky that's like, no, no, these are the specific policy demands. And so I think part of the challenge for any movement in the present is to figure out how to take that momentum and very quickly converted into like a policy win. And that was contested in the 1960s too.

I mean, it wasn't, there was a debate. about whether to focus on voting. There was a debate about whether to focus on, you know, issues like jobs in the economy. So, so, I mean, that's not totally new, but yes, you're exactly right. The speed with which your movement can mobilize is also a, it's a strength and a weakness.

Another dynamic we saw in 2020, and we saw this recently in L.A. is that you have a few rioters, agitators will follow around a peaceful protest and then start breaking, burning shit. Those videos go everywhere. And then some people who are supportive of the protests make a point of condemning the violence and the property damage. And then other people who are also supportive of the protests say, why are you so focused on calling out property damage when, you know, the people we're protesting are so much more dangerous. Yeah. In terms of how people shape their opinions based on what they see and hear about protests, what matters

here in terms of like sort of policing within your movement, lack of a better word. Yeah, no, it's a really, it's a good question. And I should also say there's work by scholars that finds mobilizing effects of violence. So in the LA case, another colleague, Ryan Enos and co-authors have a paper on the LA riots where they find there's a liberalizing effect. People are voting for school, more funding for schools and registering to vote for the Democratic Party at higher rates. So I think there can be a mobilizing effect of a high-profile protest. They're looking at 92. And it would not surprise me if someone were able to find that the Waymo's on fire elevates this issue in the national consciousness

and then the No King's protest that happened shortly thereafter has more turnout as a result, right? So it's not just that violence is always going to work against your cause, but I think from a persuasion perspective, we have a lot of evidence that the people who are not aligned with the movement who are kind of watching could be sympathetic but could also pull back when protests are very disruptive or violent, that larger coalition starts to shrink. So that's one thing that happens.

Another important thing that I think, you know, I wrote an opinion piece after the L.A. protests and I've been thinking about what I could have done a little bit better in that opinion piece, and some of the evidence that's come out since that protest was that the police seem to have been firing quite indiscriminately on protesters. So the most famous video of that was an Australian reporter who was just like talking on camera and was like literally you could see the police officer kind of pick her off.

It was a reporter for The New York Post who had a big welt in his head who was taking a photograph from a, I think a freeway or something. And, you know, again, was like you can see the officer shooting at him. And so I think there's a degree to which, both in my work and in those incidents, we need to think about the role of the police as instigators and how that is sort of, I think it was the, I'm forgetting, but the committee for reporters, I'm forgetting the exact name of it, but they had documented something like 37 incidents of attacks on

protesters, on reporters. So all to say, coming back to your question, question, these are like these really complicated events. There are individuals who are going rogue and, you know, lighting Waymo's on fire, breaking glass and like making the larger movement look more disorderly. There are also police going rogue and shooting at protesters. And into that sort of emerges some public narrative about what happened. And what I find in the 1960s, and I think continues to the present, is that if both police and protesters, are engaging in violence. What you see in the headlines is it's just described as a clash, and it's basically like the state is generally understood to be like, you know, they're allowed

to use force. And if protesters are doing it, they're breaking that kind of First Amendment commitment of like you have a right to peaceably assemble. Right. So in some ways, the tie goes to the state and the protest movement tends not to get sympathetic coverage. That's interesting. I mean, to go back to talk about today and to go back to the activist dilemma, which is a dilemma I feel quite familiar with. And, you know, there's this debate after Trump wins and at the second time. And it's, okay, we can't talk about, or if we talk about the threats to democracy, to our rights, to our freedoms, that that is too, it's vague and amorphous and it does not land with what is the top concern for people, which is cost of living economy.

And then the Trump administration starts, and particularly around immigration, which is his strongest issue, one of his strongest issues going into the second term, everyone, you know, don't talk about immigration. Let's focus on the economy. And then ICE starts doing what it's doing. And you start seeing these videos all over social media. And I think importantly, local news. Like, a lot of this is coming from local news stations, which obviously a lot of sort of

traditional older voters are still watching, and you're seeing the state sort of commit violence against not just undocumented immigrants, but people with legal status, American citizens, journalists, and, you know, we're sitting here today, and Trump is underwater on immigration and his best issue. Yeah. Democrats are still, you know, as we have these no kings protests or the Senate, the Democrats, today in Congress, focusing on health care, focusing on issues that have a broader appeal in the electorate to people who aren't closely paying attention, but are not necessarily dramatic

in terms of the images and the stories they're telling. And the most dramatic images and stories are coming from what ICE is doing, what the guard is doing, or just the presence of the guard in these states. And I wonder how you think about sort of the strategizing around those two issues today in the second Trump term? Yeah, that's well articulated, and I agree it's a very difficult issue. I mean, from the perspective of the No Kings folks, they're trying to hold together a really broad coalition, right? There is an anti-Trump coalition, and so their incentives quite reasonably are what is an issue that everybody who has very different concerns from immigration to tariffs to, you know, the economy, to

authoritarianism, like what's the unifying idea, right? And the great thing about No Kings as a unifying umbrella or kind of an overarching umbrella is that everybody can kind of commit to that. But exactly as you just articulated, it's also somewhat vague in that it doesn't really speak to the kind of moral power of seeing images of ice officers throwing people on the ground or engaging in unjust use of force. And that's the, you know, it's a real tension for a broad movement that it can't quite focus on one issue because it's trying to hold together this broad coalition. And at the same time, I agree those images are doing a lot of work. And there's real power in the kind of bearing witness that people do both initially documenting those

incidents and then later as they propagate out on social media and local news. So I don't have an answer to that, but it's a fundamental challenge. Well, it also speaks to something else you've said, which is that, you know, protests and sort of mass mobilization as a form of storytelling. Yeah. Which I, it's funny because when people think of storytelling, they think of speeches and messages from politicians, but it does seem like if you are organizing a mass movement, to the extent that you can organize one, that figuring out the story that you want to

tell and a story involves heroes, villains, obstacles, goals is pretty important in, especially in a media environment, this fractured and diffuse. Yeah, that's right. So, I mean, in the 1960s, this was a core strategic insight, right? We don't, you don't just, like, how do we put on a protest? We stage a protest, right? Yeah. What was the line from MLK and John Lewis?

They're dramatizing injustice, right? Right. And so across what's happening in the 1960s, there's real intention about constructing narratives in the public mind. And I think to your earlier point, some of these images coming out of these, you know, ICE raids where we're seeing videos of, you know, a graduate student being, you know, whisked off of the street and screaming, you know, like these are sorts of images we think of as coming from authoritarian countries. and it's happening here. And so I think those images do a lot of work and they're,

but yes, you're exactly right. Like, it's not enough to just have these individual incidents. There has to be a story. There have to be good guys and bad guys. There have to be a kind of, in some ways, a moral high ground and people want to identify with the characters who are on the moral high ground. And I don't, I think that's the real problem

with the democratic narrative that's being offered, or the kind of more tactical stuff that we're seeing from prominent Democrats is it's like there's not there there's you know we were in this kind of epic moment and they're offering very tactical sorts of like messaging and and I think it's actually there's an invitation to be a part of something that is really important right now which is defending democracy and and and and and I would say like I mean you know I a lot of something I've been thinking about just in the last couple of weeks a lot is that even though my work focuses a lot on how does a protest shape public opinion and shape voting and

grow a coalition, I think among the most important things that I have heard from people who are activists is that participating in a protest, a march, a boycott, a strike, it transforms you as an individual. You have a sense of agency. You feel connected to the people around you. You don't feel alone. There's something transformative about being a part of a movement and knowing that while you alone may not have a lot of power, together, there's a kind of collective power that's really important. And so I think that is also, I think, an important thing for, even though I don't have specific research to point to in mind,

it's just like when I talk to people, that really comes through. And I think it's important we not be so focused on what's the right story that we don't also speak to, again, people's hearts and how they are transformed by the act of participation. and feeling like they have the capacity to make change. In a way, by the way, that can surprise you, has surprised me, even as someone who talks about this all the time and encourages people to go to protest all the time.

And then I will go because I'm like, I want to set a good example on go. But after I go and, you know, take my family and friends and we all leave and be like, oh, that feels, it feels really good. And I do think it speaks to a lot of what we talk about on this show, which is today's internet and social media platforms sort of they offer the illusion of connection and the illusion of community and it is a false one often

particularly because of what the algorithms have done and where they've sorted us and in-person organizing and participation more so than just doing it online gives you a real sense of community and connection which I imagine, you know, you know better than most since you started one of the very first social media platforms, Black Planet, you mentioned earlier back in, I think it was 1999, is that? Yeah, yeah. Before Facebook, before MySpace, before Twitter, before Tinder, right, for all that.

And I was wondering just as sort of a final question, how you reflect on, I know when you started Black Planet, it was about community and a place to find people. and social media today does not seem like that. I was just wondering if you have a reflection on how everything has changed over those couple decades. Yeah, at the heart of when we launched Black Planet, the heart of it was really about we were going to connect you to a world, right? Like our slogan was, the world is yours, and we wanted this to be a place where you could find a job or make friends or, you know, people were dating. I mean, it was, but it was like it was very much about real world. opportunity that came from participating in an online community. And so it was like, it was never thought of as like these two separate worlds. And partly in the black community, there's just always

been, you know, a grapevine, a kind of a sense of a really tightly connected network. And so moving that online and then offline felt quite organic. But, and so in the present, I mean, even the language for me is always kind of striking from online community to social network. Like social network is the language of, you know, it's kind of mathematical. People will talk about the social graph and stuff, but it's like, you know, it's like people network in business. They don't, that's not really, you don't network with family. You don't, you know, I don't think of my family is my social network, right? And so it just, something was lost. And we're seeing in places there's still kind of these,

to make it more practical, like on Reddit, you go and participate in a community of interest or in the last, you know, five or six years, Facebook has done more to build communities of interest online, although Facebook itself is not so much of a destination anymore. And so we do see some return to, like, people connecting over common interests. And that, I think, is for me, what the heart of the early Internet was and was quite powerful. But the sort of post-Twitter world of we're all just kind of shouting across the freeway is something, you know, I mean, like you, I am kind of addicted to that short, you know, micro-blogging kind of experience,

but it's not one where you feel connected to a community of interest necessarily, and it's not one where you're doing stuff offline together. And so I think there was definitely a loss in that transition from the early days of online community to the later days of social networking. And I hope that people are able to change these technologies, and introduce new ways so that we kind of return to that community of interest

that was the beating heart of the internet in the early days. Yeah, and not just for ourselves, but for sustaining a healthy democracy or any democracy at all at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Omar Waso, thank you so much for joining. I could talk to you for hours

and really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor. I admire your work. Thank you. You too. All right, before we go, some quick housekeeping. Hey, offline listeners. We talk a lot on the show about trying to understand our fellow Americans, even in this shit show of an information environment. It's hard. It's only getting harder. That's why the work that we do here at Crooked feels more important than ever. We try to give you guys good information and hopefully some smart insights to make sense of the chaos. And we can't do it alone. We need your support. If you believe in independent media that holds power accountable, consider becoming a paid subscriber to Crooked Media. Your subscription helps keep this work going. And in return,

You'll get all the shows you love ad-free plus exclusive subscriber-only content and a vibrant Discord community where you can connect with like-minded folks all over the country. Subscribe and learn more at cricket.com slash friends. Also, Vote Save America is running a first-of-its-kind pilot program to recruit candidates from Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas for races that shape our communities and build the bench for long-term Democratic power. Even if you're not from those states, they'll connect you with partners at the National Democratic Training Committee and run for something to get ready to run anywhere.

Thousands have already signed up. Vote Save America is hosting a live call on Tuesday, October 7th at 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern to welcome new people to the program. Tommy's going to be there, along with Vote Save America's partners, and they'll break down what it takes to run and how we're going to support you every step of the way. So sign up for the call. Learn more at Votesaveamerica.com slash run. Paid for it by Vote Save America. Learn more at Votesaveamerica.com. This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, Email us at offline at crooked.com, and if you're as opinionated as we are, please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform.

For ad-free episodes of offline and Podsave America, exclusive content and more, go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. If you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with John Favreau YouTube channel. Don't forget to follow Cricket Media on Instagram, TikTok, and the other ones for original content, community events, and more. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilich-Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics.

Jerich Centeno is our sound editor and engineer. Audio support from Kyle Segglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva and our digital team who film and show share our episodes as videos every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.