This episode picks up right where the last one left off. If you haven't listened to that one yet, jump into this one if you choose or go back to that one first. This is a long episode, and we cover several of the more popular topics in reactionary discourse, as you'll see. Grab some snacks and strap in...

The way I see it, there are no unimportant ideas in philosophy, but among the most important concepts to understand for anyone interested in ethics or politics is epistemology. Fortunately for me, Sam Hoadley-Brill, a PhD student in philosophy is interested in all three of these things--and he's using them to take on some of the most prominent culture warriors. In the first part of our two part conversation, we foreground some of the ways we might think about epistemology to help us understand how to figure out what other people are arguing from their various positions within the Culture War. Now, when I say "culture war," you have to understand that I'm talking about right-wing reactionaries, not the people advocating for justice whom the reactionaries frequently target. The hope is, that by understanding something about how any of us can "know" anything, we might learn something about the ways propagandists convince others to follow them. Sam is just one of the individuals I've met who is trying to provide a counterweight to these reactionary opinions, and in the process he's hoping that he might be able to change the minds of some of the people who subscribe to these charlatans so that we can all get on with building a better world than the one we live in currently. As a society, I often can't see a way out of our current problems, but the hope is that if we can all learn some tools to help us do politics better we might be able to see some progress at last. 

Back on 7 January of this year, I met with Notre Dame professor Ashley Bohrer to discuss her book, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality Under Contemporary Capitalism. Given this was the day after the white-supremacist attack on the Capitol, I had a hard time focusing strictly on her book and ended up asking her how her ideas can still be useful in a world that's so completely polarized. At the time, this seemed like a good idea, but as I was editing the conversation for this episode I began to worry that I hadn't done enough to get the ideas from her book into the conversation. As it turns out, I learned more from this conversation than I'd originally suspected, and I hope you all will find it as helpful as I did. You won't learn a ton about her book or about Marxism or intersectionality in particular, but you'll learn a great deal about how an activist navigates what are often tricky political waters, something I hope you'll fine equally as valuable.