{"id":2117,"date":"2026-10-01T14:01:48","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T14:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/?post_type=showcase&#038;p=2117"},"modified":"2026-10-01T16:11:22","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T16:11:22","slug":"season-6-episode-4-transcript","status":"publish","type":"showcase","link":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/showcase\/season-6-episode-4-transcript\/","title":{"rendered":"Season 6, Episode 4: Transcript"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Season 6, Episode 4: Conservatism on College Campuses: A Conversation with Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd and Sophie Wunderlich\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/5qCiOhyedkkBjqRwSJZDdP?utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Joseph W. Ho [narration]: <\/strong>On May 4, 1970 Three-hundred students gathered on the Kent State Campus in Ohio to protest Nixon\u2019s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia. What began as a peaceful demonstration against the draft, the war, and the presence of armed National Guardsmen on campus ended in the deaths of four student protestors. As news of the Kent State Massacre broke, one photograph in particular captivated the anxious attention of the American public. Kent State student John Filo\u2019s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph featured a distraught young student, Mary Ann Vecchio, shrieking with despair over the still form of a murdered student named Jeffrey Miller. This shocking photograph proved to be powerful rhetorical ammunition for the anti-war movement and other linked student movements. In the aftermath of these student movements, photos like Filo\u2019s played an important part in fashioning the continuing image of the American college student. American college students, according to the narrative, were liberal or leftist and supported civil rights, feminism, and opposed the war. But are there really so few conservative college students? In this episode we invited two experts of the American right to discuss the history of conservatism on college campuses. Sophie Wunderlich is a PhD candidate in the University of Michigan Department of History and is currently working on their dissertation, \u201cAmerican Fascism and Its Afterlives: The American Far Right and Paramilitarism in a Global Perspective, 1930-1965.\u201d Joining Sophie is Dr. Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd, a historian of American colleges and universities, and a community scholar affiliate of Indiana University and the Society for US Intellectual History. She is the author of the recent book, <em>Resistance from the Right Conservatives and the Campus Culture Wars in Modern America<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Join us as Sophie and Dr. Lassabe-Shepherd discuss what conservative movements have looked like on college campuses in the past and how the history of conservative activism on college campuses has influenced our present political moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We\u2019ll investigate this history in this episode of <em>Reverb Effect<\/em>, the podcast exploring how past voices resonate in the present moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie Wunderlich: <\/strong>Today, we&#8217;ll try to unpack the longer history of right-wing student movements and how it connects to American politics as a whole. With us today is Dr. Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd. Her book hones in on the early sixties as a critical point in the right&#8217;s crusade against higher education. College campuses in the sixties bring to mind demonstrations from racial justice by groups like Students for Democratic Society or protests against the Vietnam War, but resistance from the right chronicles the formation of conservative student groups like the Young Americans for Freedom and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. These organizations not only criticize their more liberal peers, but with the help of national leaders of the conservative movement leveled broader critiques of the academy as a whole, these students would also go on to positions of prominence in the modern Republican party. The book is a really excellent read, and I highly recommend it. Thank you so much for being here, Lauren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd<\/strong>: Thank you, Sophie. And I love that introduction. This is not a new phenomenon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> Yeah, definitely not. I think I wanted to start out our discussion today with just a little bit of background about you. What brought you to this topic, to this work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren: <\/strong>Oh, gosh. A lot of different factors. So the first one probably is the time period. So I finished my dissertation in 2020, but initially it started as a paper as a doc student. I was taking the history of higher ed course, and we were working through the unit on the 1960s. And I just remember thinking at that point, it was 2015 or 2016, it was sometime around Trump&#8217;s first election. And I remember thinking like, well, where is Donald Trump as a student in the archives? Right? He would&#8217;ve been a student in 1968, so what was he doing in the middle of all of these anti-Vietnam war protests? And so I went looking for him in the archives, and I didn&#8217;t find him, but I did find lots of other names. I was familiar with people like Jeff Sessions, people like Carl Rove, other big players in the GOP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I also found some white supremacists like David Duke, who I was familiar with because I&#8217;ve grown up in Mississippi and Louisiana. your listeners, if they haven&#8217;t heard this before, sometimes you hear that your dissertation is autobiography or even that your research is me search. So a lot of this had to do with my own upbringing on the right. I was raised in South Mississippi in a very deeply Catholic family. My dad spent his professional career working at our local newspapers throughout the, excuse me, throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. It&#8217;s not that old. And his interest in politics really affected me. I got that interest from him. I remember as a child, him sort of explaining elections to me. And so it&#8217;s almost sort of ironically, one of the most conservative things you can do as someone on the right is to study social movements of black people, women and peace activists, and then ask, well, where am I in this story? Where do conservatives fit in this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> I think what&#8217;s so important about this book is it&#8217;s getting away from this idea that young people are inherently liberal somehow.&nbsp;What in the archives did you find that really contradicts that idea?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren: <\/strong>I mean, well, it wasn&#8217;t true for me, but to my dissertation, I had already earned a BA in history, a master&#8217;s in history. I was teaching history. I was adjuncting at a community college. So in some sense, I already was a professor. I was still calling myself a conservative, even though I was becoming much more critical of some of my own inherited impulses. So yeah, I would be the example.one of the arguments that I make in the book is that young people in these student groups often try to represent themselves as more popular than they really were. And so one of the tactics that they would use is to create these sort of proxy organizations so that it seems like, oh, look, we have five conservative groups on campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Look how many conservatives they are. And really it&#8217;s just all of the same membership across all five groups. But I was tricked by that in the archives. I went in looking for conservative student groups, and here I am 50, 60 years later, falling for that thinking, look how many groups there are. But what I argue and also what opinion polls of the time Contemporary Opinion data show is that college students in the 1960s were largely politically sort of apathetic. They didn&#8217;t have strong ideologies to the right or left, or even to the liberal center. Many of them just wanted to go to school, get their degree, meet the person they might marry, have fun and party, and drink alcohol with their friends and just make their way through college. Pretty typical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> Even in the late 1960s as the, we&#8217;re sort of past the Cuban Missile Crisis by nearly a decade. The Cold War is sort of still kind of cold, but Vietnam is building up. So yeah, there&#8217;s anti-communist, also a Christian impulse behind a lot of this. Another group I write about that doesn&#8217;t quite dominate the story the way that YF does, but is Campus Crusade for Christ. I think the commonality that they share is just this suspicion or distrust or distaste for liberalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> You talk a little bit in the book about the relationship of these conservative groups to the kind of more radical or extremist right that&#8217;s going on in this moment in time. So I&#8217;m thinking about groups like the Minutemen, which is a small anti-communist sort of survivalist militia movement, or national groups like the John Birch Society, which is this kind of vehemently anti-communist group that it&#8217;s a little bit more conspiracy theory oriented. They think like Eisenhower and MLK are both communist agents. And so I&#8217;m wondering, among the young people that you look at, what are the kind of limits of their conservatism? Do they willingly interact with this more extremist, right? Where do you see that coming up?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> Yeah, I love this question. That was a challenge. Of course, this was a dissertation first. So the book itself is meant to be readable. So I don&#8217;t get into the historiography of the definitions of conservatism and who says what and when that changed. But in the dissertation, I had to, and so I sort of lean on Corey Robbins definition, and since then I might say my own idea of conservatism in the US context, it&#8217;s really just focused on hierarchy and power to enforce those hierarchies. So super broad, but this sort of reactionary, and you can use different tools. You can use religion as the tool. You can use patriarchy as a tool. You can use racism as the tool, but as long as there is some sort of inherent inequality ingrained in the social structure, to me that is conservatism. So to the question of what did this look like on campus, that militia group that you talked about, the they&#8217;re present on campus too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Birchers are as well, Revelo Oliver, who&#8217;s sort of just a personal favorite. I&#8217;m continuing to do more research on Oliver for listeners. Oliver was a classics professor at the University of Illinois and a self-described fascist who was teaching and tenured, by the way, well into the 1970s. I think he finally retired in 1977. But yeah, all of those characters are at play for the students on the individual campus or chapter level. It sort of depended on who their sponsors were to set the tone of the group. And of course, I mean, they&#8217;re faculty sponsors, so that would be people like Revelo Oliver, when we can totally talk more about him. But regionally, the group sort of represented the different flavors of conservatism. So yeah, for example, had lots of internal disputes between its libertarian and traditionalist branches. You find a lot of those libertarian chapters in the usual suspected places. So Pennsylvania, Arizona, which was Goldwater country or California, which at the time was governed by Ronald Reagan. A lot of the New York YF chapters were really influenced by Bill Buckley in the south. Students were mentored by segregationists like Strom Thurmond. So you sort of see those varieties play out regionally and on the campus level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> So when you&#8217;re discussing this idea of leadership and mentorship, I want to go to the part of your argument about AstroTurf mobilization, which I think is such a good way of encapsulating this movement that&#8217;s meant to look grassroots and student led, and to an extent has a student constituency. These groups couldn&#8217;t exist without some students being interested in it, but it&#8217;s not as many students as they might purport to have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren: <\/strong>So I say at the end of the book, and I probably should have been clearer throughout, it&#8217;s not that these movements aren&#8217;t organic. It&#8217;s not that these students don&#8217;t have these impulses on their ownAnd so what I show at the beginning of the book is that up till about 19 68, 19 69, all of those organic groups don&#8217;t really go anywhere. There&#8217;s lots of infighting. They&#8217;re poorly organized. They really struggle with getting money. And so by 68, 69, you have these national organizations, young Americans for Freedom, also the college Republicans, also the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ISI. And their leadership really takes the reins and they say, look, we need to nationally be on the same page. And so what they start doing is fundraising at the national level and then helping students start their own chapters, and then also giving them handbooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here&#8217;s how to fundraise yourself. Here&#8217;s exact scripts that you can use. Say these exact words. These are tried and tested. Knock on your local lawyer&#8217;s door and ask him for $100 in 1969. He&#8217;ll be flattered that you&#8217;re asking for such a large amount, and he&#8217;ll be glad to write that check. I mean, into They&#8217;re literally that specific. They have training camps for local groups to really teach them honestly, the tactics of the left. So another big theme of my book is that students in the sixties, their mentors are telling them, pay close attention to what you see students for a Democratic society are doing. Pay really close attention to the black student union and copy them, do exactly what they&#8217;re doing in reverse. And you can see that in their sloganeering. You can see it in the counter protest. You can see it in the way that they cordon off buildings like the right themselves. They don&#8217;t occupy buildings from the inside, but they block &#8217;em off on the outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There&#8217;s big money at the top. There are people who are 30 years and older, very invested in seeing these 18 and 19 year olds organize on campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> And I love that idea that they&#8217;re kind of watching these more successful movements on the left and saying, what can we take from this? And that that is somehow not controversial within these groups. To say that the left is successful is, I think it&#8217;s a hard thing to admit, I would imagine for a conservative and to say, we&#8217;re going to model ourselves after that. But I think this idea that they&#8217;re guarding the building from the outside rather than the inside, is this kind of perfect encapsulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> It&#8217;s almost a way to own the left, as we would say today, to take on their tactics and to take on their slogans and to re-engineer them to the way that benefits the right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> One thing I&#8217;m thinking about too, in relationship to this idea of big money and training coming from the top is I think we see today a lot of picking young activists, or not even activists from obscurity and the Republican party, conservative media structures like Fox News propping up individual college students. I&#8217;m thinking in particular of Riley Gaines, the conservative anti-trans activist who, for listeners who don&#8217;t know, she, I believe lost very narrowly, but was already not going to win a swimming competition against a trans athlete. And I think without this kind of larger media apparatus, she would not be a name that anybody knows. And it&#8217;s only because conservatism has these kinds of ways of picking people out of obscurity that we know her. And I&#8217;m wondering if you see anything like that in the past, if you think there&#8217;s some through lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Right&#8217;s major organizations love to sort of pluck, prep and Polish the next generation. So sure. Riley Gaines is a great example. Another one that your listeners will be familiar with, Charlie Kirk, who started Turning Point USA. So is Candace Owens? Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> Kyle Rittenhouse is an excellent example. And to their credit, the right is so good at nurturing it&#8217;s young and identifying them and giving them money and giving them a platform in just giving them connections and making them feel welcome in a way that sometimes other parts of the political spectrum. So there&#8217;s that. It&#8217;s been really successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> So I&#8217;m really interested in the broader 20th century history of conservatism and conservatism against higher ed and on college campuses. So I know your book is pretty tight in its timeline, mostly just the sixties. And so I&#8217;m wondering though, going beyond the scope of the book, where else do you locate the roots of these movements?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> Sure. I mean, this longer history of the right versus higher ed. I mean, you can start in the 17th century. You can start with some of our colonial colleges in the 16 hundreds. I think if you want to talk about the 20th century movement, which is probably going to sound most familiar to your listeners as early as the 1920s and the 19 teens during the first red scare, there&#8217;s this idea that the communism&#8217;s coming from inside the ivory tower. So there&#8217;s that, although that red scare will definitely not be as consequential for higher ed as the second red scare. But I mean, even in the 1920s, you see the creation of evangelical separatist colleges. So Bob Jones University back then, Bob Jones College was founded in 1927 by the son of a Confederate veteran who was upset that, I don&#8217;t know what was his problem at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think that colleges were teaching evolution or they weren&#8217;t Christian enough. So there&#8217;s that. We&#8217;ve got Bob Jones College in the 1930s. There are anti New Deal business leaders who really don&#8217;t like the Roosevelt administration and Roosevelt&#8217;s Keynesian solutions to the Great Depression. So in reaction, they found these academic think tanks. And I say academic, I&#8217;m putting that in scare quotes for your listeners because the whole idea is that these think tanks. The members are faculty fellows, they have PhDs, they produce white papers, they conduct studies, and their whole idea is to create policy, policy suggestions as a way to say, look, actual academics don&#8217;t need to have such a stranglehold over the government because it doesn&#8217;t work out for us capitalists, at least the Keynesian ones aren&#8217;t helpful to us. So there&#8217;s that in the thirties, we talked about the red scare a second ago in the sixties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This all sort of blows up. But I mean, there are other movements in the seventies. Higher ed is much slower than K 12 to integrate, especially in the South Brown Board, doesn&#8217;t really have as much power over colleges and universities as it does in the K 12 specter. So there&#8217;s massive resistance there. I mean, there&#8217;s the culture wars of the eighties and the nineties. I mean, these things, you can almost pick &#8217;em off by decade, although the boundaries aren&#8217;t quite that perfect. But yeah, I mean, the rights for at least a hundred years had big gripes about higher ed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> I think one thing I want to point out with that is that there is this kind of diverging, I want to say strategy, that it&#8217;s either this kind of separatist, we are going to create our own academic institutions that will rival or one day surpass traditional academia. So things like founding Bob Jones University. But I&#8217;m thinking too of 1971. So when Liberty University being founded in 1971, I think that one being kind of in response to a lot of the politics that we were talking about earlier too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> So seventies, I am glad you asked this. So the seventies are an interesting time for the conservative movement. So yes, you do have this ultra capitalist libertarian set up with the think tanks. That&#8217;s really, honestly, most of the think tanks really do follow that libertarian vein from the thirties forward in the seventies when we see, well, you mentioned Liberty University, which is not technically a think tank, but Heritage Foundation is probably a better example. Those are meant to be more fusion. And so for listeners, fusion is the idea. Frank Meyer is sort of the big thinker behind it, but there&#8217;s lots of other people in the national review circuit that are coming up with these ideas. But Fusion says we cannot let libertarianism or classical liberalism just do what at once, because taken to an extreme, it&#8217;ll end in anarchy. We can&#8217;t let the capitalists run a monk or we&#8217;ll get hedonists like Ayn Rand. So we need conservative ideas to be founded or rooted in Traditionalism. And by that, I&#8217;m going to use air quotes again. Judeo-Christian morals, really, they mean Christian morals. I mean, they like the Old Testament, but they&#8217;re actually deeply antisemitic, many of them. So that&#8217;s the whole idea, is that there should be some fusion between capitalism and Christianity. And so the Heritage Foundation is a good example of one of those fusion think tanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> So we&#8217;ve sort of looked backwards, but what about sort of looking forward, how do you think since the sixties, the landscape for conservative student organizing has changed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> It&#8217;s hard for me to find examples of veterans of YF who did not go on to either work in politics, work in a think tank, work in the media, become lawyers, judges, activists in some other way. They were busy bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, they have these long careers. Some of them are literally still in Congress today. Jeff Sessions was an attorney general. We&#8217;ve got, Sam Alito was a member of YF. There&#8217;s two or three Supreme Court justices who have been members of YF or ISI or College Republicans. They&#8217;ve truly had successful careers. So the generations that come through in the seventies and eighties do a lot on campus, but they don&#8217;t always quite make a name for themselves in the same way. So by the 1990s, YF doesn&#8217;t dissolve, but it&#8217;s pretty inactive.But part of the reason they become so disengaged is that core generation of members from the sixties go on to do bigger things. And they also are working in, I&#8217;m going to say adult groups. So instead of YF, now they&#8217;re members of the National Conservatism Conference instead of ISI, they&#8217;re now members of the Philadelphia Society instead of college Republicans. They&#8217;re Republicans, they&#8217;re members of the GOP. And so college was helpful for identifying each other, making these initial connections, and then going out into the larger world and becoming full-time lifelong activists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> I think when I read your book, and really this is true so much now of reading any kind of history of conservatism of the right, it&#8217;s hard not to make connections to our current political moment. And I&#8217;m wondering how you have felt both writing and maybe now in retrospect, and really as you&#8217;ve had to talk about your book during the second Trump administration, I guess historians, we get accused of presentism a lot, this concern about making current connections to get your thoughts on this idea of presentism and this idea of present day connection and how you approach it in your work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> I don&#8217;t like the presentism debate. I just don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s a debate. I mean, our curiosities are always conditioned by the historical moment in which we live. It&#8217;s a conceit to think that we don&#8217;t refract what we know through our personal biases, and most importantly through the biases of our time. I mean, we are presentist, right? Every historian who&#8217;s worked in times before us has been presentist, or despite all the controls or constraints we might try to place around our own thinking, we won&#8217;t escape it. And so I think the most honest thing that we can do is just acknowledge the dominant ways of knowing in our own time, and then just keep working. Future generations will tell us how we are wrong, and if we&#8217;re lucky, we&#8217;ll get to live to see the criticism of our work by those who come after us. So I think the presentism debate is a way to shut down connections to the present, to our current moment. I think it&#8217;s extremely elitist. It&#8217;s very haughty. It&#8217;s very, very snobbish. Or maybe that&#8217;s just my impression of the people who like to throw around accusations of presentism. But yeah, I mean, we are creatures of the moment no matter how we try to escape those bounds. It&#8217;s just true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie: <\/strong>No, and it feels like such a rehashing of this whole objectivity paradigm. There&#8217;s no way, I think we know as a field that we&#8217;re not objective, but I think that Presentism is kind of a re-articulation of that. And yeah, I think especially my also being a scholar of the W, right? There&#8217;s no way that I can shut off my brain to what&#8217;s going on right now and do my work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> Well, and Sophie, you&#8217;re probably familiar with the fascism debate on the right after Trump&#8217;s first. Well, it actually went before Trump, but especially since Trump&#8217;s first election, there&#8217;s this debate about is the US having its own fascist moment? And there&#8217;s a camp of scholars who say, no, fascism was a specific thing in a specific place, in a specific historical context, right? Fascism is an Italian 1920s and thirties phenomenon. This is Donald Trump is his own thing. So I mean, I am all about getting into the nitty gritty. Those debates are done in good faith. Those are honest. And I think, although I guess some people will say they&#8217;re not because one criticism of the people who say we are living in a fascist moment is that they&#8217;re just being careerists or opportunists are trying to sell lots of books. But again, I think those are definitely conversations worth having.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another important thing, as a K 12 teacher, I would teach my students about presentism to let my 12 year olds to let my seventh graders know, okay, when we&#8217;re trying to think about what life was like in the Middle Ages, knowing had a cell phone, knowing had electricity, those sorts of helpful tools when you&#8217;re trying to expose young people to thinking about the past for the first time, great, we can use that. But the debates that, at least the ones that I have seen mostly in online spaces, but sometimes at conferences, they just get really bitter. And my suspicion is that a lot of times people who don&#8217;t like presentism are the people who feel like they see themselves as, if this were true, if we were to apply the lessons of the past to my behaviors today, I&#8217;d be the bad guy. And those are the people who don&#8217;t want to hear about continuities up to the present moment. Yeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie: <\/strong>I think that&#8217;s exactly right. And I think mean really, it is this kind of important pedagogical tool that we have to, it is a really important part of the historical method to say, what would it have been like back then? Put yourself empathetically into that moment. But I think as professional historians at this point, you would hope that we are able to do that in our area of study. And so I think that it is, it&#8217;s a little bit of a crutch for people who are uncomfortable with making these present connections. I&#8217;m also kind of wondering, I think there&#8217;s been a lot of talk in the field, and I think particularly among scholars of the right around burnout and the way that right now we&#8217;re in a really pretty tumultuous political moment. How has that affected your work? How do you take care of yourself throughout that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> I unfortunately have a really high tolerance for a lot of this stuff. I can read white supremacist literature probably for longer than your average person. I mean, it does affect me at some point. There are moments when I&#8217;m, so I can read the headlines and just be like, okay, okay, okay, okay. I&#8217;m living through this. But sometimes when I, maybe it&#8217;s just visual for me, when I see an image like that, I&#8217;m like, oh my God, I truly am. We are truly living in a historical moment, and it&#8217;s really scary. It harkens back to really scary moments of the past. I guess when I started this research, I wasn&#8217;t quite so afraid of what the rights capabilities were and IFT of my own, and probably one that many of us shared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I think in terms of self-care, I really like what I&#8217;m seeing organizers saying, quit worrying. Quit worrying about your own self-care. That the self-care is to organize, is to do things with other people. With a group, you&#8217;ll feel less powerless. You&#8217;ll feel more motivated and inspired and empowered to change this if you organize. So I mean, being involved with things I voted yesterday, although voting of course is the bare minimum of what we should all be doing, but I don&#8217;t think anyone should be silent. I think we should all be writing, we should be talking to our friends and family. If you like me, have friends and family who are all on the right. You&#8217;ve got perhaps some extra work to do. But, and also, I&#8217;m not so naive to believe that my family can be convinced of anything. Sometimes our conversations just don&#8217;t go anywhere, and I&#8217;m not interested in reaching across the aisle to hear what they have to say. I already know what they have to say. So I don&#8217;t know. This is probably not a helpful answer at all. I guess, let me just scratch all of that and say the best thing that we could all be doing right now is organizing and speaking out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sophie:<\/strong> I totally agree with you. I mean, as someone who works on fascism, the kind of reading and tolerance I have built up for reading, just the most vehemently racist, just really pretty insane stuff. It&#8217;s quite high. And it doesn&#8217;t really, I don&#8217;t know that it seeps so much into my emotional life, but I think that at the same time, there is a kind of cumulative feeling of exhaustion at that, that I think at a certain point, as much tolerance as you&#8217;ve built up to see parallels today, it becomes harder. And I think that my work feels harder than it did five years ago. I&#8217;ll give the example that I actually, I&#8217;m editing pieces of my dissertation right now, and I had written one of my chapters about a year ago, and when I had written it, I had decided to cut a section on efforts against the fluoridation of water in a number of states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And that a lot of the fascists I work on, they were very concerned about water fluoridation, thought it was this kind of Jewish world conspiracy United Nations plot to medicate Americans and turn them communist is, I guess the version of this argument is obviously crazy. And I had been like, this is not exactly what I need in here. I need space for other things. And I went back and I was like, no, this needs to be in here. This is kind of back on the table, although definitely re-articulated. And I think this whole, the communism specter is not quite articulated the same way anymore, but it&#8217;s just amazing to kind of be approaching my work with what feels like fresh eyes like every three weeks, which is really interesting. But yeah, I mean, I think I&#8217;m finding right now to be very motivating for my work that it&#8217;s this kind of, to see what you said, we know now what the rate is capable of. And I think that I feel then even more motivated to see what were the precursors in the 20th century to what we have now. How did we get here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Lauren:<\/strong> Yeah, I mean, the past is not predictive, but it is very instructive in that way. And it&#8217;s helpful to see, well, where can we intervene? What happened in the past and what were good forks in the road and what were bad forks in the road? And can we identify them in our own times?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Joseph [narration]: <\/strong>Thank you for listening to our final episode of season 6. Thank you to Dr. Lauren Lasaabe-Shepherd for speaking with us. I want to extend a special thank you to Sophie Wunderlich for their research and editorial guidance on this episode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Our production team is Talitha Pam, Markus Merin, and Sophie Wunderlich. Joseph Ho is our executive producer. Please join us next year for Season 7. This is <em>Reverb Effect<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joseph W. Ho [narration]: On May 4, 1970 Three-hundred students gathered on the Kent State Campus in Ohio to protest Nixon\u2019s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia. What began as a peaceful demonstration against the draft, the war, and the presence of armed National Guardsmen on campus ended in the deaths of four student&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/showcase\/season-6-episode-4-transcript\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Season 6, Episode 4: Transcript<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","format":[],"categories":[84],"tags":[],"contributor":[510,530,440],"authors":[263],"department_or_unit":[5],"funding_sources":[],"project_date":[527],"support_partners":[],"class_list":["post-2117","showcase","type-showcase","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reverb-effect-transcripts","contributor-joseph-w-ho","contributor-lauren-lassabe-shepherd","contributor-sophie-wunderlich","authors-sophie-wunderlich","department_or_unit-history","project_date-527","entry"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"post-thumbnail":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"jwho","author_link":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/author\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Joseph W. Ho [narration]: On May 4, 1970 Three-hundred students gathered on the Kent State Campus in Ohio to protest Nixon\u2019s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia. What began as a peaceful demonstration against the draft, the war, and the presence of armed National Guardsmen on campus ended in the deaths of four student&hellip;&hellip;","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/showcase\/2117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/showcase"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/showcase"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/showcase\/2117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2127,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/showcase\/2117\/revisions\/2127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"department_or_unit","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department_or_unit?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/format?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"funding_sources","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/funding_sources?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"project_date","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_date?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"support_partners","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalscholarship.umich.edu\/lsa-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/support_partners?post=2117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}