No thing that they believe

Campaign catchphrases can catch fire or salt the earth for candidates and movements alike. In this election year, understanding what moves people and why is critical. Keeping that in mind, I spoke with Anat Shenker-Osorio, a cognitive linguistics expert whose work on political messaging I find fascinating.

She and I come at the current U.S. (and global) crisis from different vantage points, but end up in a similar place. She helps people who want to change the world champion complex and often fraught issues using clear, effective language.

You might recall that last month in the newsletter, I went through in detail the idea of what a concentration camp is and why it matters that we use that term now. My argument in favor of its use is literal and historical—that people can’t accurately understand events like ICE kidnappings and detention today without understanding the concentration camp process that’s happened in the past and is unfolding today before our eyes.

That’s not to say people couldn’t recognize ICE and Border Patrol actions as cruel and inhuman, or see the US immigrant detention as heinous. But using the historical term and educating others about the past clarifies why we need to stop what’s underway and how much worse the situation is likely to get in the absence of millions of us standing up against it.

But there’s another reason it’s a good idea to use the term—a strategic reason. So today’s post will be entirely devoted to the role of messaging and how political change works. It will be a long one, but there’s so much worth diving into here. (And even at this length, I’ve had to leave three-fourths of our talk on the cutting room floor. Therefore, any confusing bits are entirely my responsibility, victims of my attempt to capture the most important parts. Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

Shenker-Osorio ponders all this for a living and has developed fantastic and effective ways to push back against the hateful propaganda having such powerful effects on the country. So buckle up—and as always with Tuesday posts, if you hang around until the end, you’ll find a list of ways to take action right now.

Race-based narratives

One of the things I wanted to talk with Shenker-Osorio about was her work on developing the “race-class narrative” for use in public campaigns. She was a pioneer of this approach in the U.S. after Trump rose to power a decade ago. Collaborating with legal scholar Ian Haney López and policy expert Heather McGhee, she tried to figure out how to counter far-right narratives that get furthered through racially coded dog whistles.

And by that,” she says, “I mean—if you wanna go old school—things like ‘welfare queen’ or ‘inner-city crime.’ And if you wanna go into more modern, current times, ‘they're not coming in the right way,’ ‘threat to our way of life,’ or if you'll forgive the use of the word—’illegals.’ If you listen to all of those words, what's interesting about them is that at no point do they actually name race.”

But, Shenker-Osorio suggests, everyone understands perfectly well what the people using these words mean. “That’s why it’s a dog whistle,” she says. So she worked with collaborators to develop and test a narrative that could disrupt the effectiveness of the indirect racist rhetoric.

“The race-class narrative,” she explained, “was created and tested to figure out what is it that we need to say that is simultaneously about class. But doesn't try to play into this ‘we just won't talk about Bruno’ strategy that has been a failure the world over—where we just won't talk about race, or we just won't talk about abortion, or we just won't talk about immigration, [or] fill in the blank, in the hopes that somehow we can eke out a win with colorblind populism, not recognizing that the right is gonna keep doing their unrelenting race baiting, xenophobia, and hate-stoking.

“And if we're silent on it, that either just gives them permission to have all the air time. Or if, as many center- left parties do, we actually echo them, we give a light version of their refrain, somehow we’ll capture people back.”

Shenker-Osorio worked on a project in the U.K. to figure out how to frame this for the public over time, adding gender to the model—both in terms of struggles around abortion rights and trans rights. She came up with a way to redirect the public’s attention.

“So what it sounds like is, you basically point your finger at the bad guy, not the brown guy,” she says. “It is a narration of the dog whistle. So in the U.K. case, for example, it's ‘if you wanna know who took your money, it's the people with all the money. That's how you can tell. And if they can convince you that it's anyone else that you need to point your finger at newcomers, or at black folks, or at trans people, then they can keep picking your pocket.’”

Change around the world

I was anxious to talk with Shenker-Osorio about a number of examples. She described the tactics that activists adopted to win legal abortion in Argentina. Organizers unapologetically advocated for the right to abortion and stood up for the harm to women who were denied this right. She talked about the use of everything from coat hangers to green kerchiefs in the campaign. The kerchiefs became a widely visible symbol of the movement.

“It was a sea of green,” she said. “In the same way—and I hate to use this odious example, but it's relevant—that the red MAGA hat plays for that movement, it created a sense of instant shared identity and something that we call in psychology ‘social proof.’ Social proof is just understanding that humans are social creatures and we do the thing we think people like us do.”

The organizers faced a number of challenges and setbacks, including a legislative defeat in Argentina’s senate in 2018. But abortion rights became law in December 2020.

Bring them here

I found our conversation on campaigns around immigrant detention in Australia to be especially illuminating. Past essays for this newsletter have addressed how the government there managed to successfully promote extreme anti-immigrant ideas during the beginning of the US War on Terror, which stuck around even after leadership changed. Authorities imposed cruel policies to offshore people seeking asylum, detaining them in third countries under monstrous conditions. Shenker-Osorio noted that the tactics were so nasty that Trump found them inspiring and wanted to emulate the Australian model.

“In 2001 is when this evil practice of sending people to offshore detention began,” she said. “It was maintained through sequential, both labor and more right-wing governments. And I led up a giant research project where we looked at what was the status-quo messaging, how had the human-rights sector attempted to prosecute their argument against these really horrific things that their government was doing.

“And what we found out was that the status quo message was trying was more or less something like ‘As signatories to the refugee convention, we must fairly police our territorial waters and ensure that our procedures for asylum…’ It was like ‘human rights’ this, ‘legal‘ that, ‘signatories’—whatever. And the opposition meanwhile had a narrative that was basically like "‘Terrorists! Queue jumpers! Danger!’”

Not surprisingly, the scary message was more effective. In one of the worst numbers Shenker-Osorio had ever seen in surveying, one in four voters was completely sold on the hateful message, worse results than what she was seeing in the U.S. at the same time.

Getting the choir to sing

When she did her testing to divide subjects into three categories—base supporters, persuadable people, and the opposition—the process didn’t involve splitting people by party. She wanted to consider participants in terms of the message her progressive clients wanted to get across and win support for.

“The job of the message,” she says, “is to engage the base in order to convert the conflicted.”

When testing the pre-existing message about Australia being a signatory to refugee conventions and so forth, she found the base agreed with that message. But it still wasn’t an effective message.

“If your words don't spread, they don't work,” says Shenker-Osorio. “The people who agree with your issue agree when you talk about your issue—Congratulations! But what you need the base to do is actually act as a choir. You need the base to not just agree, but to say it, to repeat it, to wear it on a shirt, to go out and protest it, to talk to their neighbors about it.”

How they did it

After identifying the true size of the opposition to their pro-humanity agenda, they found that the opposition’s message was very potent. Their opponents had already reached that ideal tell-your-friends and put-in-on-a-shirt level of virality.

The level of persuadables turned out to be around 55%. In other settings, it’s usually in the universe of 60%, Shenker-Osorio says. But again, by this point, the message of abusing and hating on those seeking asylum had won over a lot of people.

“That's how badly this thing was going when we were doing this testing,” Shenker-Osorio said. “So instead, we created new messaging, which we also tested. What worked much, much better, was a message we called “Unity/Citizens of the world,” which goes, “No matter our differences, most of us believe that all people deserve to live in peace. Our policies for people seeking asylum should respect human dignity and take place in full public view. Doing right, what's right means upholding people's basic rights to safety and fairness. We cannot turn an issue of human rights into political bickering. We all have a stake in making the world a safer place, so we need to fairly examine each person's asylum case in a safe space and quickly integrate the people requiring asylum into our communities. This isn't a matter of right or left, but quite simply a matter of right and wrong.

“The most important thing about this is that after doing the message testing and doing ‘say this, don't say that,’ they conducted four winning campaigns that basically vacated nearly all of the prisoners that had been held in these camps—some of them for fifteen years at that point.” (Though she noted that the dedication to this particular kind of cruelty has not ceased in the years since their victories.)

Each of the campaigns developed deeply humanizing tactics. They showed baby pictures, organized health care workers, and got protestors to blockade entrances. They started with babies, then moved on to parents. They put up “BRING THEM HERE” signs in front of tourist attractions. They got corporate partners, and they managed to shift public opinion.

The futility of moderation

I asked Shenker-Osorio to put this approach into the context of U.S. attitudes on immigration, and to address the pressure by pundits and the establishment itself to get Democrats to adopt hyper-moderate positions to appeal to independents or 2024 Trump voters.

“The idea that the way that you beat your opposition is by becoming them,” she says, “is ludicrous. It does not work morally, and it also does not work electorally. That has been proven time and time again.”

She compares a message to a baton that has to be passed from person to person to person. If it gets dropped, if no one hears it, then it’s not working. No one is ever going to hear a pile of hyper-moderate messages, because they’re boring. if your own base won’t want to repeat it, there’s no way the media will buy into it or cover it in useful ways.

There is no thing they already believe

The second reason hyper-moderation isn’t going to work, Shekner-Osorio explains, is because the public has been fed a false story about what these supposed middle-of-the-road voters want.

About those who support Trump, she says, “Trump is their Jesus. He could murder their own daughter, and they would still vote for him… I'm telling you definitionally, these are the unmovable.”

“There is also a set of people who are unmovable on the left. The rest of the people, if they are up for grabs, what the research show is that they don't have a fixed position.

“Here's the secret,” she adds later. “There's no thing that they already believe. This is what's wild about them. They are capable of believing multiple contradictory things.”

She found that even within the same survey, when asked two questions with opposing ideas—about say, immigration—an enormous percentage of participants would agree with both of them. A majority of people in a given survey might support mass deportation while even more in the exact same survey would support a pathway to citizenship.

“So it is the job of a winning campaign to use their base as their choir to create social proof, to make what we believe be a matter of ‘common sense’ and ‘what everyone thinks’ and ‘what everyone believes’ in order to move those conflicted people toward us.”

Currently, of course, Trump, Miller, and their ICE lackeys are already getting the message out themselves for the left. Their rank cruelty and brutality are shifting public opinion away from them and toward abolishing ICE, on the scale of a staggering twenty-point swing since Trump’s return.

“It's not the job of a good message to say what's popular,” Shenker-Osario says. “It's the job of a good message to make popular what we need said, because we have an agenda we need to enact, and because that's how we win.”

Don’t avoid the fight

For those politicians afraid of alienating somebody for using charged terms of making a direct case, Shenker-Osorio didn’t mince words:

“‘How has that been working for you?’ is the first thing I'd say. ‘What's your theory of change on that?’ I mean, the number of times in a day that I have to ask campaigns and candidates, ‘That's very interesting. What's your theory of change? How are you going to actually enact your agenda by never speaking about your agenda? Tell me more about that.’

“So to me, the purpose of politics—and I include electoral politics in this—is not to get elected for the sake of doing so, but rather in order to enact an agenda. And what has happened is that over the last, at least twenty years, arguably even forty years, we have been subjected to the reactionary centrist advice that we should just not make the argument.

“‘Just don't make the argument on abortion. Abortion's too divisive. Just leave it alone.’ ‘Just don't make the argument on race. Race is too divisive. Just don't do it.’ ‘Don't make the argument on immigrants.’ ‘Don't make the argument on trans people.’ And on and on, and on, and on and on. And in not making the argument, in not wanting to touch a nerve, not wanting to be offensive what has happened, as you and I both know, is that basically we are losing on all of those fronts.

“What that means is that their framing and their ideas go uncontested... So what I would say in terms of those fears is, ‘What are you trying to have happen in the world? What are you trying to actually get done? You're not gonna be able to persuade people toward the kind of world that you wanna live in without talking about that world.’ And in fact, telling people to bite their tongue is what serves authoritarianism.”

Moving conflicted people

Looking at what moves conflicted people, she found it’s often watching what other people are doing. Shifting the cultural conversation shifts what people think is normal, what is the dominant attitude, and what is acceptable. As an example, Shenker-Osorio noted how quickly and deeply public opinion changed on same-sex marriage:

“We have to make those same shifts by making the argument in a values-based way. Not in a, “You’re a racist, you’re an asshole, you’re a bigot’ way. That's not gonna convert the conflicted. But making a values-based argument that says, for example, ‘The same is true today has been throughout history. People move to make life better for themselves. It is hard to move to pack up everything and go to a new place. That takes incredible courage. Immigrant Americans move here for the promise of freedom and opportunity in this country. But today, this MAGA regime of the bullies for the billionaires wants to turn us against newcomers because they hope that if we point our finger in the wrong direction, we won't notice when they're stealing the healthcare that all of us need, in order to hand billions more to their backers. But we know better.”

Those who want to change minds can begin by making what is called the “Big We” out of a core value, then call out the real villains for what they're doing and ascribe motivation to it. Or in our case, she points out that the only minority destroying America is billionaires.

“You actually have to have a plan to improve the material conditions of people's lives, period, exclamation point, underscore,” she says. “You have to be for a thing that is going to improve the conditions of people's lives, which means taking on the billionaire class, which is the reason why we presently do not have nice things. If you view politics through the lens of not just getting people elected, but the lens of enacting an agenda, then you need to figure out how to do that, and you need to present that agenda in the most compelling, repeatable terms.”

Framing the moment

I asked Shenker-Osorio about phrasing she’s studied that she might recommend to those now organizing or even talking to their neighbors, hoping to establish values of human decency or to show the actual villains here and now in 2026. She suggested going to the ASO Communications site, because the organization’s research is open-source. There are messaging guides on almost everything you could think to ask about.

Along with mentioning that treasure trove, she touched on a few specific terms. Describing team Trump, she recommends using the word regime, not “government” or “administration.”

“‘Administration’ and ‘government’ are too normalizing,” she says, “and make it seem like it's kind of okay, maybe [they’re] doing things we don't love but still acting in some sort of democratic fashion. We also need to reserve the word government. The word government is important.

“We need to be able to talk about the government that we want. We need to talk about the scientists who are finding cures for the future, the school teachers who are taking care of our kids. The people who are paving our roads—there still is government. What this is, is a regime of the bullies for the billionaires that has taken over our government. So all of that is very intentional.”

And the term “regime” is just the start in Shenker-Osorio’s playbook.

“I also call them the ‘MAGA murder regime.’ This has generated no end of people tsk-tsking me every day. The body count rises, and they prove me more right. So it is a MAGA murder regime.

“You're not going to persuade anybody toward what you need them to do by pulling punches. You need to be explicit and direct on immigration in particular. Besides concentration camps, immigration is a word that has a meaning. The word immigration means the movement of people into a country for the purposes of residency. When we say about what is going on or was going on and still is to some extent in the Twin Cities that ‘the immigration enforcement has gone too far’—immigration enforcement, is this immigration enforcement?

“Immigration policy is how many people get visas in a year, how long does it take to get a green card? And reasonable societies can disagree about immigration policies. Concentration camps, abductions, assaults, murders—none of those things are immigration policy. There is no immigration policy in any of those things. Think how we would feel if people referred to the World War II ghettos as ‘religion policy’ or the concentration camps there as ‘religion policy.’

It's just wildly inaccurate. So we need to call things as they are. These are assaults, they're abductions, they're concentration camps, and we need to call this regime a regime. And then we need to have an affirmative demand, and that affirmative demand is to free America, free America from this regime. Free America from wages we can't live on and houses we can't afford. Free America from the billionaires who are destroying our lives. Free America from these murderers who are—from Epstein to ICE to Iran—hell-bent on destroying anyone and anything that does not obey their demands.

“I mean, that's what's going on. If we can't name the thing for what we can see with our own eyes in front of ourselves, then how are we gonna convince anybody?”

Don’t let them get you

I asked Shenker-Osorio what she would say to people who want to believe in these huge shifts that could change society, but who are, in reality, feeling really overwhelmed in the moment.

“Rebecca Solnit has a new book out, so I wanna give credit where due. In it, she talks about how she went back and looked at all of the news media accounts about 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and this sort of like giant sea change around former Soviet countries. And in the time leading up to that massive change, no one—I mean, the very smart people were hindsight 2020 and saying, ‘Of course we knew, we could have predicted’— but in reality, they predicted nothing.

“So the point of this story is that nobody actually knows what is going to happen next. They don't, and if they pretend to, they're lying. The future is made of the decisions that we take together. I literally co-founded an organization called ‘We Make the Future.’ We named it ‘We Make the Future’ because one of the most important things that we have to do in order to be able to fight authoritarianism is understand that their ultimate aim is to erode our will to resist.

“If you start buying into the idea that there's nothing that you can do, they beat you. They got you. And so at the very least out of a sense of like, ‘don't let them get you,’ you can't be thinking that. So what is it that you can do? Well, first of all, you can be speaking in honest, robust terms that, yes, invite people into this bigger ‘We,’ but are honest about what we are confronting and what it is we need to do.”

Talking about the role of elections, we discussed how they can be so important, yet insufficient to guarantee democracy. Securing democracy is going to require more of us.

“We also have to recognize that we're not gonna vote our way to democracy, Shenker-Osario says. “If we were gonna vote our way to democracy, we would've in 2020. The fact is that it did not stave off the rise of fascism. And so we have to recognize that we have an economic problem masquerading as a political problem. We have a problem of the concentration of really rapacious wealth in very few hands, and that has extraordinarily detrimental consequences on society at every level.”

Anat had so many great ideas to share, I’ve only touched on them in this post. I may do a whole second episode with the rest of our talk later. I encourage you to check out the resources on her website and to listen to her podcast, “Words To Win By.”

Guest action list

At the end of each Tuesday post is where I share action items you can consider if you’re looking for something to do. And this week, Shenker-Osorio framed a nice set of them in our conversation. Here are a few that she mentioned:

“You can participate in nonviolent direct action. That means things like No Kings, of course—there's another one coming up March 28th. But it also means go to States at the Core.

“You can figure out how to sign up to be trained in nitty-gritty, nonviolent direct resistance where you live, to create your own rapid response network and mutual aid network. Boycott—figure out which corporations are funding this thing and refuse to give them your money.

“Figure out what creative things you can do… Where the hell are people in rented boats in front of the Statue of Liberty saying, ‘Close the camps’?

“Go to Dilley [Concentration Camp]. My understanding it’s 45 minutes or an hour away from San Antonio. If you live there, go rent caravans, and stand outside singing songs of peace and love. Go raise money to bring supplies to the children in there. They wrote those beautiful, beautiful letters that were so touching. Write letters back and go try to deliver them, not because you'll be able to, but because that's a piece of content. The number one thing that we need to be doing is continuing to shove in the public's face exactly what's going on.”

We spoke about the importance of having something for people to move toward and the role of joy, whether it’s frog costumes, music, or humor. She says her number one precept is “If you want people to come to your party, throw a better party.”

I’ll end on that note, so you can start your party planning. And again, don’t forget to look for a No Kings event near you on this Saturday, March 28.

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