Dramatize the Injustice

Summary

Podcast Summary: Offline with Jon Favreau – "Dramatize the Injustice"

Host: Jon Favreau
Guest: Omar Wasow (Political Scientist, Princeton University)
Date: October 2, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the role of protest and mass mobilization in shaping political change, specifically through the lens of the 1960s civil rights movement and its lessons for modern activism. Jon Favreau and Omar Wasow discuss the tension between expression and persuasion in public movements, how media shapes (and is shaped by) protest actions, the importance of storytelling, and the complexities of mass mobilization in today’s hyper-polarized, algorithm-driven media environment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power of Protest and Movement Strategy

• Dramatizing Injustice: Successful movements create strategic, emotionally resonant narratives with clear heroes and villains, and compelling images that “dramatize injustice.”
  • “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.” (Omar Wasow, 01:20)
• Democratic Narrative Shortcomings: Favreau criticizes the Democratic Party’s tactical messaging as too small and uninspiring in epic times:
  “We were in this kind of epic moment, and they’re offering very tactical sorts of messaging.” (Favreau paraphrasing Wasow, 01:20)

2. Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Political Change

• Elite vs. Grassroots Influence: Wasow reviews prevailing political science arguing that elites dominate political narratives but identifies “punctuated moments” where bottom-up protest breaks through.
  • “Elites just have way more voice...but there are these punctuated moments where we get these bottom up voices getting heard.” (Wasow, 19:56)
  • Protest can temporarily give non-elites a megaphone, especially via media attention.

3. The Expression vs. Persuasion Dilemma in Movements

• Competing Energies: Movements fluctuate between cathartic expression of outrage and disciplined persuasion needed to win over uncommitted bystanders.
  • “Every movement is a contest between expression and persuasion.” (Wasow, 13:30)
• Strategic Targeting: Nonviolent demonstrators in the 60s often intentionally placed themselves at risk of violence to provoke dramatic, sympathy-inducing media images.
  • “The way activists in the 1960s solved that problem was to be the targets of violence. So you got both coverage and sympathy…” (Wasow, 36:09)

4. Research Findings on Protest Efficacy

• Media Coverage: Reliable data links nonviolent protests to more sympathetic media coverage and increased public concern for civil rights. Violent protests (riots) triggered “law and order” backlashes.
  • “Nonviolent protests are kind of liberalizing, the violent protests are producing more Republican votes.” (Wasow, 29:39)
• Natural Experiment: King’s assassination and rain patterns were used to show violent protest caused measurable electoral shifts—costing Democrats five states in 1968.

5. Modern Implications & the Internet-era Challenge

• Media Fragmentation: Unlike the 60s’ “three-channel” news landscape, today’s media are far more fragmented, making it harder for protest images/narratives to achieve unified national impact.
  • “Even in the kind of almost kaleidoscopic media we have now, there can be these moments where something is such a powerful image…that it still sort of stops…the national discourse.” (Wasow, 50:36)
• Social Media’s Double-Edge: While allowing rapid mobilization, digital networks often lack leadership structures for negotiation and policy clarity.
  • “The speed with which a movement can mobilize is also a strength and a weakness.” (Wasow, 58:16)

6. Backlash, Coalition Building, and Storytelling

• 2020 Protests: Majority were peaceful, but media/partisan amplification of isolated violence contributed to backlash, policy debates, and a surge in rightwing “law and order” rhetoric.
• Need for Cohesive Stories: Protests are more effective as part of a compelling moral narrative than as isolated expressions of anger or tactical demands.
  • “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.” (Wasow, 69:18)

7. Participation, Community, and Agency

• Transformative Power: Direct participation in protest confers community, agency, and lasting motivation.
  • “Participating in a protest…transforms you as an individual. You have a sense of agency. You feel connected to the people around you. You don't feel alone.” (Wasow, 69:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Strategy v. Emotion
  “There are these two really powerful energies in any movement: the hunger to express yourself…and another component which is often driven by leaders…strategically, what is effective.” (Wasow, 13:30)
• On Historical Research
  “If you overlay the protest data…it's not just noisy, it's following a structure. There are these big violent protests…These are front page news across the country. They're driving public opinion.” (Wasow, 25:39)
• On Nonviolent Tactics
  “Activists…picked a place like Birmingham because there was…understanding that Bull Connor had a hair trigger for violence…to dramatize injustice.” (Wasow, 34:10)
• On the Limits of Hashtags
  “A slogan works well as a hashtag, but may not translate well to policy.” (Wasow, 58:16)
• Summing Up the Democratic Challenge
  “We were in this kind of epic moment, and they’re offering very tactical sorts of, like, messaging.” (Wasow, 69:18)
• On Offline vs. Online Community
  “Today’s Internet…offers the illusion of connection and…community, and it is a false one often, particularly because of what the algorithms have done and where they've sorted us. In person, organizing…gives you a real sense of community and connection…” (Favreau, 72:02)

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Important Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:09 – Wasow and Favreau set up the need for narrative strategy: “There has to be a story…a moral high ground.”
• 13:30 – Wasow articulates the “contest between expression and persuasion.”
• 19:56 – Elites’ role in shaping the political agenda; bottom-up punctuated moments.
• 22:06–29:39 – Statistical findings: protest effects on headlines, public opinion, and voting.
• 34:10 – Nonviolent protesters’ strategic calculation to provoke, and absorb, state violence for coverage.
• 41:11–44:36 – Discussion of enduring activist tension between expression, persuasion, and human cost.
• 50:36 – Fragmented and algorithmic media's impact on protest efficacy.
• 58:16 – Modern movement organizing challenges: speed, cohesion, and social media's structural limits.
• 69:18 – Storytelling and the centrality of narrative, not just tactics, for mass movements.
• 72:02 & 73:35 – The inherent value of community and connection, both online and offline, in activism.

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Tone and Style

The episode’s tone is urgent, introspective, and analytical, blending historical reflection with contemporary anxiety about American democracy—inviting both strategic thinking and emotional engagement. Favreau and Wasow speak candidly about political science, human motivation, and the demands of activism, often addressing listeners directly and empathetically.

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Summary Takeaways

• Mass movements require more than outrage; they need disciplined, sustained action and compelling moral narratives to break through public apathy and media noise.
• Nonviolent protest, particularly when met with state violence, has historically shifted public opinion and policy by generating powerful, sympathetic media coverage.
• In the internet era, the challenges are fragmented attention spans and a lack of organizing infrastructure, making rapid mobilization both easier and harder to focus effectively.
• Movements must balance the need for broad coalition-building with the clarity of purpose and narrative needed to create lasting change.
• Participating in protest and building real-world communities remain powerful antidotes to the isolating effects of “terminally online” activism.

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Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

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[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau and you just heard from political scientist Omar Wasso, 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, that 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 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 US 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 keeps 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, 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 pepper ball 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. That 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 Davids 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 healthcare 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 then, 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 Kings protests are on October 18, 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 2026 midterms and beyond. Now, to talk more about why that's so important, I'm excited to bring on Omar Waso. Here he is. Omar Waso, welcome to offline.

[Omar Wasow]

Thank you for having me.

[Jon Favreau]

I 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. 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?

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, I mean, I. 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 one what, you know, an injustice that's 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? In is those things can be in real tension.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes. This is basically what I spend most of my days thinking about, is this tension. And 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, and you weren't always a political scientist, right?

[Omar Wasow]

That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, partly just to go back a 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 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, I grew up in New York in a moment when it was, 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 the, at the time, the leading black social network. This is before we even called them social networks. They were online communities back in the day. And that was, you know, so that was I one place where I could kind of try to work out some of this, like how to, how to, you know, what does 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.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Omar Wasow]

In the next county.

[Jon Favreau]

But they don't need to know that. And the best part? You won't have to buy gas at all. The way forward is electric. Explore EVs that fit your life at electricforall.org 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 is the basic argument of sort of the prevailing research that existed when you started exploring sort of the efficacy of protests and movements?

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, that's a really important kind of debate within political science. And you would know this intimately having, you know, worked for one of the most influential elite speakers in the world. Right. That, like the messages that someone like President Obama put out, 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 who 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 it kind of becomes top of mind for people. Right. So there's just lots of evidence from a wide range of scholars that 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 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. Elites, 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 at 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.

[Jon Favreau]

So that's your thesis sort of going in before you start doing the research. And as you're, as you're looking at the civil rights protests of in the 1960s, what did you learn about whether protests move public opinion?

[Omar Wasow]

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, 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 protests 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.

[Jon Favreau]

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, you know, what's the most important issue on your mind, which pollsters still asks 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 is 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.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, that's a great. I mean, I love that plot, too. 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, it's, 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, you know, when Selma happens, it's moving when the March on Washington happens.

[Jon Favreau]

So one of your, your big findings, maybe, maybe the central finding is that how the protests are perceived by the public is a significant factor in what kind of political effect it has. How so?

[Omar Wasow]

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 kind of the counter, like, 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 as a kind of motivating puzzle. And part of what I was trying to understand is 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, Detroit or Newark or la, there are dozens of people killed. There are, in the case of la, 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.

[Jon Favreau]

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.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, so 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.

[Jon Favreau]

The.

[Omar Wasow]

And sorry. And 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. 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.

[Jon Favreau]

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 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. Like, how, how do you sort of isolate the protests?

[Omar Wasow]

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 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, look over 12 years and compare counties to themselves, and we sort of have a prediction. This county typically 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 the tactic today show up in a different kind of headline tomorrow? And that's still a correlation, but 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 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 there's. So King is assassinated April 4. 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, 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 rainfall predicts the shift. And it's not true the week before King is assassinated. It's not true in other weeks in April that 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 counter 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 2 or 3 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. 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 thinking about, well, what is the actual implication of that?

[Jon Favreau]

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 turn violent suddenly shifting it the other way. In fact, the, the violence that was visited upon the nonviolent protesters was part of what shifted public opinion their way.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah. So that, that's a really important point. I again, thank you for being such a close reader of the work. Yeah, so. 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, 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 national, but international, and reshaped the debate over Jim Crow.

[Jon Favreau]

Have you or anyone else done research into the difference between nonviolent protests, where 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. The different impacts on public opinion between the two?

[Omar Wasow]

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 experiments with 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 activists dilemma and the challenges. 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 Kings 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. And in defense of the media, like, you know, it's. It's. It's not interesting to cover a plane that lands, right? What's newsworthy is a plane crash. And so the drama and conflict 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?

[Jon Favreau]

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[Omar Wasow]

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[Jon Favreau]

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[Omar Wasow]

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[Jon Favreau]

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, so. And I do feel shame about that. But nonetheless, what was your reaction to the feelings the piece generated among some folks on the left?

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, so it's, it's. I mean, the show is called offline, so I think we're allowed to, like, wrestle with being terminally online and just without being too self congratulatory. Ezra Klein mentioned the same David Shore firing a week ago. So 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 feet and is. Yeah, David's.

[Jon Favreau]

Okay.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah. But to your question, which is like the kind of, in 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, you know, the findings, I realized at a certain level, like, a man was killed, right. And like, 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 acknowledgment, 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 in the social science register is from the kind of the public conversation I realized I need to do, not just drop right into the data, but to talk a little bit about, you know, this is. There's a tragedy here. There's a family that lost a father, and, and there are a lot of people who feel profoundly unsettled by the, the video that they watched. And, and, 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 feeling and thinking. And you almost don't seem human if you can't speak to their heart.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, and it's also, it's part of what activists and organizers struggle with as well. And just 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, or, or the Little Rock Nine is going to desegregate the school knowing that they, that those children were going to face, likely face violence.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

But that. That was going to be a political strategy that may have helped the larger movement like 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. It is very. I guess that's why your line about persuasion versus expression is really sort of. I find it as like a central tension that we're still dealing with.

[Omar Wasow]

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 state troopers. And most people are just not capable of making themselves 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 cases death that activists were subject to, but also because 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.

[Jon Favreau]

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?

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, it's, 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, to. And there's some evidence of this, but I think we're still kind of working it out that where protests happened, it's activating not just for the people on the ground, but for neighbors. And 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 concerned about systemic racism without the backlash, but I think we're still living in the wake of that. It's not that long ago, right? It's five years ago. And so, and I'm going a little bit, I'm going to go, I just a couple weeks ago was on a panel about a new book called Raised to Obey by a political scientist named Agostina Paglian. 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 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 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, you know, 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 a rebellious populace is showing up in this counter movement to how do we control universities, how do we control K12 education, how do we fight things like critical race.

[Jon Favreau]

Theory, right, which we're now seeing on steroids today under the second Trump administration.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jon Favreau]

The, 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.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And it moves public opinion that way versus what we have today, which is certainly not that. And of course, it is beyond polarized partisan 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?

[Omar Wasow]

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 were there, I think are important similarities that are often overlooked. So one is there's 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, abc, 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 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 excellent 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 kind of grows with the civil rights movement. But importantly, coming back to your question, 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. 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, 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 stopped in their tracks for a moment watching it. Right. And 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. But, and clearly one important difference is in the 1960s, you needed ABC. And now a teenager with a cell phone can document 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, 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.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Omar Wasow]

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[Jon Favreau]

It's all in one.

[Omar Wasow]

Hey, what does all in one mean?

[Jon Favreau]

The Caddy, the wand, the preloaded pad.

[Omar Wasow]

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[Jon Favreau]

It also seems like you, 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 and the, in the murder of George Floyd, that wasn't necessary. 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, 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 impeached. And that's that because you got all these Republicans. And I, I do wonder if there's something about these, 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 you saw, you know, the chart goes up and down in the winter and the fall, in the winter and the summer. But, but I do wonder if it, it speaks to the need for sort of this, this, this cohesive, disciplined organizing that sort of sustains itself and is ready for these moments when something breaks through to the broader public.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, that's a really important point. And I apologize, forgive me as an academic for name checking my colleagues, but there's a great book by Zeynep Tufetchi called Twitter and Tear Gas. And she tells a story of a protest in, I believe it's Turkey. There's a takeover of, there's an Occupy style protest to protect a park that's going to be bulldozed. And the local leaders are finally ready to negotiate. And the gift of organizing on the Internet is that somebody can post to social media and 1,000 people can converge in an hour or two. And there is this capacity, you've lowered the cost, the coordinating cost of organizing. But then when town leadership wants to negotiate with somebody, there is no clear organization to negotiate with. There is no leadership to negotiate with. And that's exactly the analogous. I mean, it's a small case, but it's analogous to your story of LBJ and King. 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 trade off 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 could 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 in 140 characters? And it just, that imposes a limitation on the movement to I think articulate something more or any kind of movement, something more nuanced or even 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 convert it into a policy win. And that was contested in the 1960s too. I mean, there was a debate about whether to focus on voting. There was a debate about whether to focus on issues like jobs and the economy. So, I mean, that's not totally new, but yes, you're exactly right. The speed with which a movement can mobilize is also a strength and a weakness.

[Jon Favreau]

Another dynamic we saw in 2020, and we saw this recently in LA, 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 up property damage when you know the people we're protesting are so much more dangerous? Yeah, in, in terms of how people shape their opinions based on what they see and hear about protests. What, what matters here in terms of like sort of policing within your, within your movement, for lack of a better word.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, no, it's, it's a really, it's a good question. And, 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 Waymos on Fire elevates this issue in the national consciousness. And then the no Kings 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, and I wrote an opinion piece after the LA 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 a Australian reporter who was, you Know, just like, talking on camera. And it 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, 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 what 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, these are, like, these really complicated events. There are individuals who are going rogue and, you know, lighting waymos 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.

[Jon Favreau]

That's interesting. I mean, to go back to talk about today and to go back to the activist dilemma.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Which is a dilemma I feel quite familiar with. And, you know, there's this. So there's this debate after Trump wins and 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.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

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. 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.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Democrats are still, you know, as we have these no Kings protests or the Senate, the Democrats that's 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.

[Omar Wasow]

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 the economy to authoritarianism, what's the unifying idea? 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, it's a fundamental challenge.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it also speaks to something else you said, which is that, you know, protests and, and, and sort of mass mobilization is a form of storytelling.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

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. Is pretty important in. Especially in a media environment this fractured and diffuse.

[Omar Wasow]

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. What was the line from MLK and John Lewis? They're dramatizing injustice. 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. Those images do a lot of work. And they're. But. 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, you know, we were in this kind of epic moment, and they're offering very tactical sorts of, like, 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. And I would say, like, a lot of this is 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.

[Jon Favreau]

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 protests all the time. And then I will go because I'm like, I want to set a good example and go. But after I go and 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. The very first social media platforms, Black Planet, you mentioned earlier, back in, I think was 1999. Is that.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Before Facebook, before MySpace, before Twitter, before Tinder. Right. Before 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. It was about community and a place to find people. And social media today does not seem like that. I was just sort of wondering if you have a reflection on how everything has changed over those couple decades.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah. At the heart of when we launched Black Planet, the heart of it was really about we were gonna 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 there 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. 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. I don't think of my family as 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 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 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 can return to that community of interest that was the beating heart of the Internet in the early days.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. And not just for ourselves, but for sustaining a healthy democracy, or any democracy at all at this point.

[Omar Wasow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Omar Waso, thank you so much for joining. This was. I could talk to you for hours and really appreciate it.

[Omar Wasow]

Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor. I admire your work.

[Jon Favreau]

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 [e-mail] 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. Boat Save America's hosting a live call on Tuesday, October 7th at 5pm Pacific 8pm 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 [e-mail] Run paid for by votesave america. Learn more@votesave america.com this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. As always, if you have comments, questions or guest ideas, email [e-mail] 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 Pod Save America, exclusive content and more, go to crooked.com friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. If you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel. Don't forget to follow Crooked 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, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilic. Frank Austin Fisher is our Senior Producer. Adrian Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Jarek Centeno is our Sound Editor and Engineer. Audio support from Kyle Sex, Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel Take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. At EisnerAmper we are creative problem solvers that take a 360 degree approach focusing on you. We're an award winning firm with decades of experience providing accounting and advisory services. Eisner Emperor let's get you ready. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The Titanium Apple Card is no different. It's laser etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything.

[Omar Wasow]

You buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple. Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone.

[Jon Favreau]

In minutes, subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard. Com.