Anat Shenker-Osorio - ChangeMakers Chat - Art of Communication

So I think that I'm pretty clear about what I care about. And I'm sure you are too. But there are times when I get into campaign mode, where I find it really hard to explain these things I care about to others, especially to people who aren't like me. Today's Changemaker Chat is with Annette Shanker-Ossorio, and it's all about how we communicate in campaigns. And that is based in the US, and one of the world's most sought-after progressive communication specialists. She helps movements, NGOs, and candidates talk about what they care about. In this Chat Annette shares her remarkable journey, not only as a progressive person, but as a practical linguist. Someone who is familiar with the art of meaning and translation from her family experience, who then built on that knowledge by studying with the world-renowned linguist, George Lackov. She then took what she learned into the world of progressive politics, working with communities to unpack what isn't working and how they develop messages for their campaigns and building new approaches. Here she talks through some of the elements of a good message, as she shares stories of dozens of campaigns that work, many of which are also documented in her amazing podcast, Words to Win by, that's now in its third season. Common listen to a remarkable wordsmith and her generous lessons that can help us all be better communicators. So, let's go. I'm Amanda Tattasol, welcome to Change Maker Chats, conversations with people changing the world. Changemakers also produces episodes that feature stories about social change campaigns. Changemakers 2024 is supported by the Civic Power Fund, and also works with the UCL Policy Lab. They bring together extraordinary ideas and everyday experience to understand how we can change the world. Check them out at ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab and civicpower.org.uk. We have broadcast on eight castes part of the iconic class network, so you can find us there, as well as on all the usual podcast apps. You can find out more about Changemakers on our website, where you can also sign up to our email list. It's ChangemakersPodcast.org. And that welcome to Change Maker Chats. We're so delighted to have you with us. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you. And look, part of what excites me to have you on the show is that you are a true globalist. You might sit in the United States, but you are across stuff in the world. So, please, we're going to look excited that you're going to be sharing your global insights with our audience here today. I want to start by asking you, what we always ask our guests, which is what kind of Changemaker are you? A sleep deprived one. One who is fortunate to live in a state where marijuana is legal. Those are probably not the answers that you mean. Oh, well, whatever it takes, right? Now, honestly, whatever it takes, what kind of Changemaker am I? Joke's aside. I am a Changemaker who, colleague in comms, Holly Minch has this phrase that I love, which is, I help do gooders do better. I see myself as someone who helps equip the folks who speak directly with various audiences, whether that be grassroots leaders, whether that be actual candidates running for office, political parties, big international NGOs that are going to run either a communication campaign or write ads. I try my best to equip them with the knowledge and the actual words and images and ads that will make it more effective for them to tell their stories. So, I guess, you know, the non-sexy term for that is that I'm a middle, middle man, middle person. And communications experts, a communication specialist in that space. That's the story that I tell people. For me, I'm telling my clients, you pay me to tell you that words mean things. So, I spend a lot of time explaining to people that words do, in fact, mean things. And when you use different words, you will convey different things. Yeah. This is like a perfect segue into what I want to explore. It's like how you became that kind of change maker, right? Like, we're to this meaning around words and this connection to social change come alive. Like, and having read a little bit about you and knowing you from your time in Australia, I'd invite you to go all the way back. And I guess give our listeners a sense as to how this idea of translation and meaning and language became such an important part of your practice. Sure. So, I trace by the social justice side of that equation. And then I'll get to the language side as the tool by which, you know, I would try to make change after that to a moment in kindergarten. So, when I was four, I started school a little bit early. My parents had had enough of me by then already, so they had to send me off. And we, this is how old I am, had gotten these notebooks. And my notebook, I very distinctly remember, had a picture of the Muppet show on it. And every kid in the class got a different notebook. And the teacher was called away into the director's office and left us alone. I know it's unimaginable right now. But and said, you know, I will be right back when I'm gone, just like start drawing in the front of your notebook, because like at the beginning of kindergarten. And she's no sooner out the door that, you know, a few of the kids are grabbing one kid's notebook, ripping off the cover, like the kid is crying. He's, you know, sort of like the kid that other kids pick on. And she comes back to this scene of mayhem of the kid crying in the notebook ripped and so on. And she says very upset, I'm giving me back all the notebooks, give me back all the notebooks, give me back all the notebooks, none of you get these notebooks, these new notebooks. And I was very indignant and I said, but not, you know, just some of us were doing something wrong, some of us were just sitting here. And she said, did you help him? And I was like, no, I sat here. And she said, if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem. And she did indeed confiscate all notebooks from the perpetrators and the bystanders. And that moment, I just like really stands out to me. It is my own kind of origin story into the world of social justice. And I feel like that understanding that if you're not part of the solution that you are in fact part of the problem, you know, this idea that you cannot be neutral on a moving train that it's been said many times very beautifully by many people. But to stand silent in the face of oppression is decide with the oppressors. And I think that that's what in like four-year-old terms, I mean, not that I understood it that way at that time. But I think that that has really been essential to my formation. And as far as deciding to do it the way that I did it, I've always been deeply, deeply interested in language. My mom speaks seven languages. My dad speaks five. He's the kind of a person who learned Russian because he wanted to read Russian authors in the original language as a big deal in my house. My parents speak Polish to each other. We grew up speaking Hebrew, learned English when we moved to the United States. And so I've just always functioned in a sphere of knowing that an object, a sentence structure, you know, it can take multiple forms and occur in multiple ways. And so when I was at university, I became interested in the formal study of linguistics, got exposed to a specific branch of linguistics that's called cognitive linguistics, which is actually more commonplace outside the United States than in it. But, you know, exists in the US as well. And from there, when I was working as many of us do in kind of standard advocacy and doing comms, you know, writing press releases or writing talking points or coming up with, you know, what would we call this campaign? This was pre-social media because I'm old enough for that. I might like don't worry. What really struck me is that a lot of the decisions that people made around why we would say it this way, but not that way, etc, was really just on the basis of God instinct and that God instinct by definition, if you're a highly politically engaged progressive person, which everyone in these situations was, then why would you think that your default instinct, like what was attractive to you in a message was going to be the same thing that was going to work for a swing voter, you know, somebody who's conflicted on the fence or, and for the US case, you know, we don't have compulsory voting like you all do, a disaffected voter. So people don't realize that in the US, the largest voting block that we have have larger than Democrat, larger than Republican, is voter eligible non-voters. And that the true kind of not ideological, but psychological difference, we tend to think about how left-wing people are really different to right-wing people. There's as much and as meaningful and more consequentially difference between politically engaged, politically unengaged people. And even for you all, where voting is compulsory, in terms of kind of willingness to sort of be in the public square and engage in the work of collective action, people who are unengaged are fundamentally different in terms of what kinds of messages attract them, what kinds of messages retain them, what kinds of things sort of repel them. And so seeing folks sort of come up with ideas and campaigns and messages just on the basis of a hunch, I knew because I had at least been exposed to linguistics that there was a way that was a little bit more sophisticated or at least a little bit more systematic to tell whether or not a certain messaging approach was going to work or not. And so basically from there, I did a stint in a thing called the Peace Corps where I lived in Honduras met a man who is now, I'm happy to say my husband for going on 22 years soon. Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you. It's a huge achievement too. I mean, it does feel like that, especially since we married shortly out of the womb, because of course, you know, I'm still in my 20s. That's how math works. And working in politics and then went to graduate school at the University of California Berkeley, we still live in that area and studied with, you know, some really seminal linguists as I was also studying public policy. And I think most importantly, quantitative methods. It's not sexy, but being able to run a regression, being able to do large scale quantitative research means that when I have hunches or when other people have hunches that it's going to be more effective to say, A, than B, actually testing that out and seeing what the impacts of different language are. So that's sort of my story of how this happened. Is a spectacular story. I want to dig into your academic work, you know, with George Lackoff, right? Like many people who are old like me, remember, don't think of an elephant that around the Iraq war and after the George Bush election, being such an interesting and significant book. Also, a tricky one to apply. And I want to dig into, you know, you've got these intellectual academic skills, the sort of craft of linguistics. But then you've also built quite an empirical practice, working with communities, political parties, candidates, not just in the US, all around the world, talk us through that part of your work. Like how did that become an important part of your practice? Sure. So I think that boiled down to its most essential, essence, social science is a form of pattern recognition and different kinds of social scientists look for patterns and different things. I look for patterns in language usage and what that language usage indicates to us about meaning and the construction of meaning, how kind of people come to make sense of a concept, whether that concept be immigration or that concept be abortion or that concept be, you know, liberalism or neoliberalism, you know, whatever that may be. And in that social science is really good at diagnosis and pretty bad at cure. Because it's one thing to be able to say, well, you know, oh, I've noticed that this kind of phrase and this kind of phrase, the seminal example from Lake Off is around taxation and how we frequently say things like, oh, I need tax relief from, you know, these burdensome taxes and the tax burden on middle class families is too high and we need a tax break for people who are struggling. And when you look at that language and you think about words like relief and break and burden, you know, as George laid out, we usually use those words like outside of the tax context to talk about an affliction, a disease, something that is undesirable that you don't want. And for a group of people who want to convince others that taxes are a requirement of living in a functional society, they are desirable. They are, you know, the way that when you flush the toilet, the stuff goes away like I'm pretty, pretty big fan of that. - It's really important. - Yeah, basically. - Yeah. - Sounds cool to me. Can drive, you know, down a road that's not fully holes or better yet, have a bike lane somewhere. So it's one thing to be able to say, oh, I noticed this way of talking actually reinforces a super right wing idea and that happens over and over and over and I can give so many examples. But obviously what the advocate, what the candidate, what the person who's gonna go door knocking or peer-to-peer texting or whatever, their question is like, okay, interesting. What do I say? What do I say? What do I say? And the way that you arrive at what to say, at least in my experience, really can't be done analytically. You can't kind of analyze yourself to a better answer because if there were a better answer in prevailing communication, there would be a better answer and we wouldn't be in this situation. So how are you gonna get to cure? Well, you're gonna get to cure or at least I am and I'm sure other people have other ways by first and foremost doing an analytic step. So we do look at what is the range of ways it's possible to talk about this issue and here I'll give a super concrete example that actually popped up both in the US and in the work that I did in Australia where I was fortunate enough to get to live there for a time in 2015 and specifically look at the language of people seeking asylum. So when I did the analytic work in the United States and I'm looking at, you know, how does advocacy talk about immigrants? How does the opposition talk about it? How are they depicted in popular culture? And the same thing for people seeking asylum within Australia. What was really noticeable in the US case was that there was nothing about moving. There was stuff about harms, there was stuff about horrors, there was stuff about laws, there was stuff about conventions, there was stuff about the border and so on. Even way back then this was 2011 here, 2015 there, but nothing about moving. And instead what we had was this narrative about how the US is a nation of immigrants. And in Australia, there was a similar narrative at least at that time in 2015 where people would say things like, "We're all boat people." We all came from somewhere else. And what happens with nation of immigrants in the US is that that narrative, first of all, is insulting to native people for reasons I trust are obvious. It's insulting to a lot of black people because it implies volition where there was done. People did not make a deliberate choice to move in many cases or to be immigrants. And then it isn't rooted in the lived experience of enough of your audience. So in the US, in an average audience, if you're talking to an adult population, most people were born in the US. We have a huge immigrant population, but it's not anywhere near 50%. And so if instead of talking about nation of immigrants, you actually talk about moving and we say, the same as true today has been throughout history people move to make life better for themselves. It's hard to move. You know, we have a saying that going gets tough, the tough get going, America's supposed to be land of free in the home of the brave. That's a good thing. So let's make it that way. That's a very like US-ified narrative, which we need. What we found in Australia is that when we did a very simple experiment and this brings me to the question of, you know, how you get to cure and then how you check whether that cure is true, I had a hypothesis that any narrative that tried to kind of proceed from the point of departure of Australian identity, that you would say to the listener any form of like, you know, this is the Australian thing to do, or this is how Australians do it, or just kind of that claiming of national identity in order to pivot people to a case for people seeking asylum, that that wasn't going to work, that nationalism was not our friend. And so we set up a simple experiment, which is part of what you have to do if you're trying to figure out is this working or not, where we set up what's called a forced choice. This is where the respondent in a survey gets asked, which of the following statement most closely represent your view and they get two statements. The opposition statement, and I won't remember it for Baytown, but with something like, no one can take care of everyone, we have to take care of our own people first. And then as Australians, we have a duty to those who come escaping danger. And people have to pick. That was what half the sample got. The other half the sample got the identical opposition statement, you know, No one can take care of everyone. You have to look after own people first. But instead of the pro-statement being as Australians, we have a duty. It was as caring people. We have a duty. Yeah. In that condition, it was 20 points more or less, more likely that the person would side with the as caring people as opposed to opposition statement. And when you think about it, it's logical because when you bring top of mind for a person like any person having multiple identities. People can self-identify through their nationhood. They can self-identify through, in my case, being a mom. They can self-identify through their race, through their gender, through their membership in a church, through their hobby. Like, we all carry multiple identities. And so when you say to people, "As Australians, we should do X," by definition, you're asking them to put on their Australian hat. Yeah, priming their brain. Right. You're priming them into a form of nationalism. And even if they're a fairly progressive person, by making that identity salient to them, and then asking them a question about a person whose dominant characteristic is not Australian. Yeah. Obviously, you're going to get a worse answer. And so, sorry to have straight from your original question. Basically, the empiricism is about both. What is the range of ways we could argue this instead? And which of those actually would work? And what do we mean by work? Because oftentimes, what happens in public opinion research and political research that I think is really problematic. And this is what a lot of center-left political parties do. And this is why they end up with shitty milk toast messaging, is that their question, or their dependent variable for those of you who are familiar with research methods, is approval. So, you know, message A, message B, message C, is this convincing? Do you approve? Do you like this message? And when you ask that kind of question, which is not irrelevant, we sometimes ask those kinds of questions, just we ask other questions too, what you're asking people to do is to reason consciously, to have a thinking, not a feeling response, to something that, by definition, has to evoke a feeling response. And so, people could say, so, you know, famously, people say negative ads don't work. You ask people, they're like, I hate negative ads, they don't work, they don't move me. And every bit of research demonstrates that negative ads absolutely do work. Yeah. And so, yeah, you have to figure out, how are you asking questions in order to get out what's actually going on as opposed to, what does the respondent think is going on? Yeah. And what I find really interesting in the approach is that it's like getting digging in with the communities that you're working with. Like, you might have these analytical understandings, but it's not about giving a lecture. It's like getting deep and empirical and on the calls working with the community as a sort of, like, you know, people call it co-design or co-creation or co-production, like, collaborating in the creation of a message, it being a sort of joint exercise. Yeah, almost always, the message that ends up working the best is actually the message that the most impacted community wanted to use all along. And either was told not to use because we have to sound like the reasonable adults in the room and offer some sort of, you know, very rational, reasonable sounding thing with some statistics. And that's what's going to convince people. Or they were told not to use it because, you know, it was too lefty, lefty, left, or too radical, or, you know, that it would sound whatever they were told that it would sound. And just so often, I mean, it's funny the number of times I will give presentations and people are like, "Oh, it just sounds like you're saying try to sound like a person." It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, the asylum project, you know, the status quo message, because one of the things I try to always do in my projects is we test the status quo message. Like, whatever the sector has arrived at is the message that they've dominantly been using. We will test that because if I'm endeavoring to convince people to stop doing what they've been doing all along, I also have to demonstrate that that didn't work, right? And the status quo message at the time was a very human rights. It was like, as signatories to the Refugee Convention, Australia must fairly police, its territorial waters, according to the United, and I was like, "Oh, this shit's terrible." Like, if people cared about human rights, they would care about human rights, and I can assure you that they don't, otherwise, this wouldn't be happening. And why it is you think that this sort of set of facts about Australia's kind of obligation to fairly patrol its territorial waters is going to move any normal human being. I mean, it's, you know, this is what happens when lawyers write messages, no offense to lawyers. Some of my best friends are lawyers. Yeah, they're just not great communicators to the public on these issues. Look at this, it sort of brings me to the bigger question that sits behind the limits in the message of the lawyers and in some ways in your entire career. Like, if you could just briefly explain what other progressive community doing wrong, you know, like if you were to capture it, you made a great career out of it, right? But like, for those who are on the call, I imagine there's a bunch of listeners who are like, "In our curious, unpacking their own messaging, unpacking their own thinking about how they do what they do. How would you, you know, a brushstroke, but like, how would you describe what's going wrong in terms of how progressive left, whatever you want to call them, people are communicating." Yeah, I think that when we focus in on sort of the core missteps among progressive organizers, advocates groups, as opposed to center left parties, which is different. So I'm answering the question as opposed to. Yeah, and then let's dig into what, what, you sort of moderate parties are doing wrong too. Yeah, yeah, to somewhat different problems. So among the actual left, generally speaking, exceptions apply, the error is that the opening salvo of everything we say as boy, have I got a problem for you. So when it's not that, it's this is the Titanic, would you like to buy a ticket? This has been a hallmark of climate messaging for a very long time, as we all know, you know, and that's a critique that's been made for a while. Most normal people. And this is where it's really important to focus back on that distinction that I made earlier between the politically engaged and the politically unengaged, the latter being most humans. Yeah. For a politically unengaged person, boy, have I got a problem for you is not very enticing because they are set for problems. Like, their problem, quote, I got met a little while ago, and they're not excited about your new problem, whether that new problem is poverty or its homelessness or its drug addiction or its domestic violence or its climate or it's, you know, like they're good. Like, they, they shopped for problems. They filled their problems. Yeah, they got a good list, right? Yeah. And, you know, in between, boy, have I got a problem for you and we're the losing team. We lose a lot. We lost recently, which is another favorite of ours. And there are reasons like their there is a set of calcified ideas around online fundraising, which is really where a lot of this comes from and what gets people to give money and not because for most organizations, the bulk of their communication is the fundraising communication. And so oftentimes, even when I'm working with an organization, they'll be like, you're allowed to touch, you know, the political department, you can talk to the advocacy people, you can talk to the cons people, you cannot touch fundraising. You, like, you will not be talking to fundraising. We know what we're doing. We know how to do it. You know, we measure it. We do A, B testing, like, and I'm like, I hear you. And the bulk of the messages that you send to people come via fundraising. And so we can't actually change the narrative. If you won't let me change the 300 emails that you send to people. What we find is that fear-based messaging, scarcity-based messaging, everything is horrible based messaging. Actually, over time, makes people more right-wing. It increases their neophobia. It makes people non-activist people. It evokes a fight or freeze response. And for most people, it's freeze. Right? For activists, it's fight for most normal folks, it's freeze. And so we are sort of like engaging in self-inflicted wounds because our number one communication problem, if we are like truly the progressive left, is not convincing people that our ideas are right. but rather convincing them that our ideas are possible. That this better world that we want and desire and describe that is more just, that is equitable, that does redress all of the generations of wrongs that we have done to people of color, that does honor our land, that does treat people across genders equally. All this stuff that we've never had, never ever, ever, ever had in no place, if you want people to jump aboard that train, then that is requiring a huge leap of faith, that that could actually be possible and it's worth expending energy and sustaining energy, you know, not for nothing, did Martin Luther King Jr. in the midst of horrifying violence, horrifying discrimination say, get famous for saying I have a dream and obviously he said much more than that, but there has to actually be a dream, there has to be the selling of what I frequently call a beautiful tomorrow. And so I think that's sort of the in its core, the kind of key mistake of progressive groups is that we tend to belabor what is wrong. I just saw a really really funny and interesting experiment was done around the Super Bowl, which just happened here and a sample of 600 people were asked what team they were rooting for before the game and a demographically identical set of people were asked who they were rooting for before the game, but they were asked that question after the game and there was a huge shift toward the the the chance of many chiefs. People want to be on the winning team and they will manufacture back that they were supporting the winning team all along once they figure out that that was the winning team. So we need to stop doing that. Yeah, and and I do love in your work that you talk a lot about the fact that that undecided or uncommitted population of people around politics are not just a massive vague group of people, but actually people who were just undecided on a whole bunch of questions. I love it in some way you've talked about toggling between different different questions. So it's it's not like there's this sort of group of people who don't have thoughts. They have lots of thoughts they're just not they're just not landed for them yet. And they have extraordinarily contradictory thoughts. My colleague, Selinda says you know 50% of Americans don't know what socialism is and 60% of them don't like it and you know people are perfectly comfortable having absolutely contradictory thoughts and very much resent that pointed out to them. So people who are conflicted or who are swing or who are whatever they have lots of thoughts. As you said, it's just that they don't have a consistent and coherent and cemented ideology. And what we find with them is that what is repeated most frequently is what becomes true and common sense. And there's no possible way to explain things like the rapidity of change with respect to an issue like marriage equality except for this phenomenon. You know, how do you go from this thing when I distinctly remember being in university and people coming up to me and being like, oh, we're organizing or do you want to donate to this campaign for what was then called gay marriage? And I remember thinking vividly like totally support you. That's awesome. Never going to happen. Like like that's absurd, right? Like that's that's not a thing that's going to occur in any proximate lifetime. And the speed with which that change and I'm not saying it was fast enough, I'm not saying but like, you know, the prolonged period in which that was utterly inconceivable was okay. But as far as like a shift in social perception in, you know, nowadays and your referendum was much more recent than ours. But like the idea that someone is publicly allowed to sort of say a hateful thing. I'm not saying it doesn't happen of course it does. But it's not socially sanctioned in the way it even was when we were kids. Yeah. In one generation there has been a tremendous change. And it shows the power of not just a powerful message, but also what you're what you talk about when we talk about what's in left parties perhaps are doing wrong is that actually our best allies for creating change are getting our base to talk to other people about it. Like actually we've got thousands of people who could be called in to be ambassadors for change if we could just sent till get them to say something, you know, powerful that they believe in. Yeah. I mean, I think you know sometimes people will dismiss an effort to for example be develop really clear boundaries around language. So the most iconic example is probably the fact that at least in the United States and I trust in Australia as well you don't say the N word you do not say it. It's called the N word. It's not it's not said. Yeah. And on the one hand people may dismiss that as like whatever what does that actually get you like what is achieved by that. And in reality what is achieved by that or what is achieved by not allowing slurs around people with disabilities or people with you know different gender identity or different sexual orientation. What's achieved by that is that it says that this group of people gets to decide how they are referenced and they get to tell you person from the dominant society what you can and cannot say which is in and of itself a meta message about who has power, who merits respect, who has validity and it changes what is socially sanctioned when it becomes unacceptable to speak about people in a given way. Then that automatically says oh that group of people merits respect which should have been known all along it should have been an o-brainer and unfortunately that isn't the case in our societies. And so it's really about creating what we call social proof which is this idea of like this is what is common sense in my culture and this is how people like me think. Yeah. Yeah. And in doing so changing people's behaviour by changing how people talk about each other that being such a huge symbol and representation. So I want to ask I mean you have referenced lots of beautiful stories and lots of elements of the sort of magic and magic for how we should communicate. I wondered if you wanted to if there are any other sort of important features of communication important features of creating a message that you thought were important for for people to understand you know sort of take away elements or lessons that you think that are useful for people to understand. Yeah. So I work under a very clear theory of change. My theory of change is that you engage the base you need your choir to sing from the songbook because if they don't the congregation's not going to hear the joyful noise. I know Australia is a remarkably unreligious place but if I can understand this analogy and I'm Jewish I'm hoping you can understand it. I think so. And it is that choir rather than viewing it as quote preaching to the converted or preaching to the choir that's actually how you get new adherence to the idea. I mean not for nothing does the church grow and grow. You know like they were on to something. There's a reason why they ask their most faithful people for the most money and to do the most things the most of the time right they're asking them every Sunday because they understand that the base is the best messenger of the message and if your words don't spread they don't work. So it needs to first and foremost be compelling to not just the activists notice I don't mean that by the base. I mean the ideologically aligned people who agree with the idea but may not be doing jack shit about it yet. So that's what I mean by the base. Then of course it needs to be persuasive to the middle. You can't just be saying you know anything and everything it needs to be able to pull those conflicted people over into your world view. And then thirdly it needs to actually marginalize your opposition. It needs to demonstrate how that small group of people who cannot shall not will not will never agree with you or outliers and their view is Cuckoo Town. This is something that the opposition does constantly make it seem that the left wing position is some sort of outlandish out there. Wackadoo you know the like completely incomprehensible notion that like all people have rights. How dare we. Yeah outrageous. I know or like the idea that if you have a uterus you should make choices about it like just again mind blowing. Yeah. And I think that as far as examples for me this engage the base persuade the middle marginalize and they actually want to step farther to alienate the opposition was extraordinary. extraordinarily well played in the case of legalizing abortion in Argentina, which was super huge historic victory that happened in a country that is, you know, in a very Catholic continent. Some of you will know that the sitting Pope actually, Argentine, you know, very, very much like not legal there. And when they conducted their campaign, the engaged the base part of the strategy was this green hankerchief. And for those who don't know kind of the story of Argentina, Argentina had a prolonged military dictatorship. And there was a group of women, mothers and grandmothers who would walk around the plasameo in front of the Capitol with white kerchiefs protesting the disappearance of their loved ones and sort of demanding where are my loved ones. And these women were absolutely kind of the pinnacle of standing up to the most sort of rabid machista macho. Like, I mean, what is more that than a dictatorship, a military dictatorship? And so the abortion rights movement, which actually began as an anti-domestic violence initiative and then like all kind of work together, they adopted that kerchief. They decided that they would also use a hankerchief, but they used green instead of white in order to differentiate. And that kerchief, which has a beautiful three sentence phrase on it in Spanish about sex ed and about abortion and about contraception. When you were in Buenos Aires, when you were in the city, like everyone was wearing that thing. You saw it everywhere. It was such a hot item. It was hard to even get one. And so what that was doing is the same thing that the odious red make America great again hat does here. It signals, this is what people here think. This is the dominant idea. And it makes you feel like you're part of a movement. It makes you feel like you're part of an identity. It makes you feel like you're on the winning team. Because look, she's got one. He's got one. They've got one. They've got like, it's just there you go. The conflicted strategy they used in the provinces. So in the rural bits and they're slogan was Salvemos, me les devido us. We will save thousands of lives, which for many people, it was sort of how could you possibly have a message that includes life when the opposition has a whole ways that right? It feels like what are you thinking? And what they were thinking and what they had arrived at through tons of research was there is absolutely no way in which we can let the opposition claim this mantle of life. How dare they? Honestly, how dare they? And so we're going to say that we're the ones saving lives. And they did a campaign where they had medical providers, physicians, physician assistants, nurses, tape brief, um, make videos about times that they had treated patients who had come in having tried to self-inflict abortion or having an ectopic pregnancy or, you know, having been the victim of some kind of rape or people who were trying to get pregnant and had previously had some sort of complication or whatever and couldn't just their experiences as medical providers where they wanted to save people's lives and they were prohibited by law from doing so. And then the final thing is that they went all the way there, which was that in the first round of voting, they won in the lower chamber and they lost in the upper chamber of the Senate. And so they made these neon green hangars and they would go out at night and protest and they hung the names of every senator that voted against them in the first round and they called them Senador Birchup, Birchup is the word they use in Argentine for hangar and they would get in their faces and be like, you, you are Senator hangar. And that is like not just alienate but like piss off the opposition. And then in the next round they won in the upper chamber as well and, you know, that was the end of the story. Wow. I mean, there's a lot in that story. I mean, sometimes people get scared about polarization. I guess what you're talking about is there's a place for it once you've built your base and that has created an effective movement then there is a place for polarization. I get this a lot, you know, we don't want to piss anybody off. We don't want to piss anybody off. I have many things to say to that. The first is that if you want to touch a nerve, you're going to have to touch a nerve. Like you are not going to break a signal through the noise by saying puppies are cute. It's true. Puppies are cute. Puppies don't happen to need a PR campaign because they're cute. So you don't actually need that message. If you're going to advance a political cause, let alone something like abortion in a deeply Catholic country that, you know, where it had always been illegal, how are you going to do that unless you amass enough supporters to create a sea change among the conflicted? And by doing that, by definition, you're going to piss people off. There's no way that you can do that and not piss people off. You know, the same is true with the asylum, the same is true with radically changing anything about power. It's a power contest ultimately. And those with power take things going to be a reaction to that. Absolutely. And you know, I was just joking with someone earlier today that within the US, not internationally, every campaign that I've worked on, like for a candidate or for a party has been sued. And I consider that to be like the top line on my CV because if you're not in my case, actively pissing off Republicans, like what are you doing? Like, are you even running a campaign? It's like a form of recognition. I mean, it's like the jujitsu as well when they start attacking you, then you know that you've been recognized, you know, and you're missing about laughing at you and then fighting. You know, like this is a theme in social change, you know, discussion. And the other piece of it, which you just sort of hit upon, is when people say to me, you know, I don't want to call out a villain. I can't call out a villain. Like, we can't do that. You know, we have government funding. In our case, we are a five, one, see three, we're a public charity, whatever. And I understand that there are restrictions. And that makes sense to me. And I try to help people figure that out. If you don't name a villain, you're the villain. Yeah. Because the opposition doesn't give a shit. And they have been in the business of saying, it's because of the people seeking asylum. It's because of the immigrants. It's because of the black folks. It's because of the Roma in, you know, or bonds case in Europe. It's because of gender ideology in Bolsonaro's case in Brazil and also Duterte in the Philippines. The right wing narrative is made out of scapegoating. It is made out of fear mongering. It is made out of hate peddling. And so because they are always naming a villain, whether that be an impacted community or left wing activists, right, who are like in our case, Antifa, socialist, you know, rabble, rouser, whatever, when you let that go uncontested, because your response to that in the US case is democracy is eroding. Rights are under threat. You know, norms are violated when you exist in these kind of passive constructions. And they're saying immigrants are taking your jobs. You know, inner city crime is like epic proportions. People are coming in. They're ruining our way of life. They're destroying America. Then you're not contesting that storyline for the conflicted people who are like, well, I guess this is why my life feels not okay. Or this is why I feel like my community is not okay. Yeah. People are using that information to start to make opinions and move from being undecided and conflicted to being more certain because of the clarity of someone else's communication and the confusion of yours. So and that is so I could sit here and talk to you for hours. But I'm going to just ask you, I'm going to just ask you one more ridiculous question, right? So you're the do-gooder who makes do-gooders better, right? We are not in a world where do-gooding is having a good shot at a moment, right? You were every one of them. I'm at the moment. It's not so hot. Like I can look everywhere. I look to the Middle East. I look to Gaza. I look to the US and you're upcoming election. I just look at inequality. I look at race. I look at climate, right? It's so not hot right now, although it's probably here and it's right it's a bit too hot right now. What is your thought? You've got all this knowledge, these reflections. You've got people on this podcast who are keen to have a cleaner, a clearer sense of how to do better. What have insights or reflection, a piece of advice, a thought you have for them? Yeah. I mean, there's a reason why I discipline myself to make a podcast in which every episode is about a campaign we want somewhere in the world. That is both just like a personal practice to try to find some kind of way to keep going at it, but it's also just to show, not tell, that progressive ideas are popular and they win. So I'm going to push back at the stage. Thank you. I'm going to push back at the setup. And I'm going to say that it is actually because of the advances that we have had in terms of radically expanding people's understanding of gender, of sexuality, of rights, of justice, never completely-- we haven't done the job by any stretch of the imagination-- that we are seeing this horrifying backlash. There is, as my friend and non says, there is a revolt against the future, and the future is going to win. Here in the United States, we have a group of revanches judges sitting on our Supreme Court who think that the 20th century was decided incorrectly. Like, they're very, very angry that it was decided that women get to decide over our bodies. It was incorrect that schools should be integrated. It was incorrect that government has the power to regulate things like toxins in our air. And go on and on and on and on and on. All the things that they think they are here to undo. And that's a testament to the power and the changes that have been made by movements around the world. And a predator is always at its most dangerous when it's in the last throws of death. That is when it just starts lashing out the most. And I think that that doesn't mean that everything's rosy. It's definitely not. But to take a concrete non-pine the sky thing, I think most people don't know that in October of last year, there was an extraordinarily beautiful and very hard fought campaign in Ecuador. It was called Sial Yesunni. Yesunni is the name of the indigenous group and also the region within the Amazon that is Ecuador. And there was a public vote. It's the first time there has ever been a public referendum on climate change in order to create a moratorium on fossil fuels with where the Amazon sits in Ecuador. And they won. They won by over 60% in the face of Chevron and BP. And all the money you could ever imagine happening in the universe, being thrown against this campaign that was really fought by these indigenous campaigners who have endured at this point a generation, not just of fighting, but of literal assassinations. So hired hitmen sent to murder them. I mean, you want to talk about the most horrifying conditions you could possibly imagine for campaigning. And when I get to meet folks like that and advise them, and then I see the stuff that we get agitated about in the US or in Australia, I'm like, you know, I'm going to have a hard time listening to you tell me that we can't have a positive message because things are so shit. Or we can't do this because it's so hard. I'm like, you know, you're going to have a hard time selling me on that story because these, like this is what's going on for other people. You know, look at the victory that the extraordinary young women brought in Poland. Look at the ousting of Bolsonaro. Look at the places where we are making, you know, look at the fact that here in the United States, we were able to deal a critical blow to fascism, not with tanks, not with guns, but at the ballot box. That's the first time that's ever been done. Fascism usually doesn't go down without military weapons. And is it over? Nope. It's not. And we're back at it again this year. But between 2016 and 2024 now, 2023, when you count all of the elections that we have had with the special elections, I think, if I'm not mistaken, and if I don't have these numbers exactly right, I get to be forgiven because I'm giving this preamble. There's been 27 different elections, and we've won either 22 or 23 of them. So I know it looks bleak. I would rather win elections than polls. We are on the right side of history. It's just that the long arc of history with all due respect to MLK does not bend itself. It's our job to bend it. Yeah. And we shouldn't. We can't discount the strengths that we already have going into the fights that we've got going on that actually we have done. We and our generations, our people before us, have already done such a tremendous thing to get us to this place. I also think it's extraordinarily important to remember that the actual sort of end goal of authoritarianism is to erode the people's will to resist. And I know that I'm speaking in terms that perhaps for an Australian public, feel outlandish. Remember where I am, remember what's going on here. But if you think that's not in the works, think again, because that's the project. The project is to erode our will to resist. Every scholar of authoritarianism that I've ever spoken to has said, the win is despondency. The win is when people feel they're both the same. There's nothing we can do. It's all too big. It's never going to be unfucked up. This is how it is. Because as long as we're still fighting, that's very costly for them. That's exhausting for them. They have to counter us. When we decide, like, I guess this is it, that's when they've truly won. And so despondency isn't just not an option. It's a capitulation. And holding our strengths even in a tough time is the way we move forward and combat despondency and challenge authoritarianism. I hear you. Yes. So, and this has been a joy. Everyone will go and listen to Words to Win Byne, which is in season three and spectacular. Almost every single anecdote that you've spoken about today is a whole episode on that joyous podcast. So we encourage you all to go from this one, pop on over there, search that one up, and be filled with more joy. It's been a delight. Thank you so much for coming on Changemakers. Thank you for having me. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]