Have the Conversation: Neal Rickner
November 21st, 2023
”We are all products of the news sources we consult.”
Just in time for Thanksgiving, Neal Rickner joins us to talk about the American Values Coalition, a growing community of Americans who are empowered to lead with truth, reject extremism and misinformation, and defend democracy. Get some pointers to dialogue across political divides and across the table.
First, have the courage to have the conversation. As much as hiding in the kitchen sounds preferable, we’re going to engage on the issues one relationship at a time. Begin the conversation with a thoughtful question, and then sit back and really listen. Since we rely on the news to understand what’s happening in the world, our news choices frame our reality. In fact, media source is among the top indicators of political choice. Consult multiple news sources and bring more truth to the conversation.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Neal Rickner
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Neal Rickner Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
In recent years, we've all experienced polarization amongst our friends and family, which has led to dead ends, sore feelings and in the worst cases, to broken relationships. And in my mind, a lost opportunity to share ideas about what's happening in the world and sharpen our thinking. We're exhausted. Some of us have even become politically homeless, making us unmoored from democratic norms. And further, we are awash in misinformation and disinformation by the fractured media landscape. It's difficult to discern what's true and even what's relevant. We've had several episodes about having constructive dialogue across divides, and so we're thrilled to have this conversation in time for Thanksgiving.
Our guest is Neal Rickner. He's the chairman of the board of American Values Coalition, a growing community of Americans who are empowered to lead with truth, reject extremism and misinformation, and defend democracy. He's also the managing partner of Elevation Ventures, a climate focused investment firm, and previously had a long career at Google. In addition, he served for 12 years on active duty in the US Marine Corps and completed three tours in Iraq, earning the Bronze Star with Valor Device and 13 Air Medals.
Welcome, Neal. Thank you for joining us.
Neal Rickner: [00:01:50] Oh, thanks so much for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:52] So you are the chairman of the board of the American Values Coalition, whose mission is to lead with truth, to defend democracy. And I know that AVC actually started as a super PAC called We Vote Values. I'd love for you to tell us more about the origin story. What were you experiencing that prompted you to found this super PAC?
Neal Rickner: [00:02:17] Yeah, well, it's very personal, actually. In the Marines, I was serving in Iraq mostly, and seeing firsthand how news was sometimes difficult to interpret, even though I was living the events that were being written about. I'd have conversations with fellow Marines. And, you know, after my time in service, I transitioned out to the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. And while I was at Columbia, I started a veterans organization, and we continued some of the exploration. You know, this was 2009-10 timeframe. Social media was new. But even at that point, I started to see the fracturing of our media and how it was impacting those conversations with my military buddies. I also have family through the middle of the country, mostly in the Midwest, and as that developed, I began to worry a bit more about it. But it wasn't so sort of existential at that time. Relevant to the story is that my faculty advisor at the time was one of your previous guests, Anne Nelson. And then Trump got elected in 2016, and I had reached out to Anne. We had dinner. This was just after the election where the misinformation had become poignant. The challenges had resulted in, in a real turn of events that we didn't see coming. And, you know, one of my tours in Iraq was as a forward air controller; was on the ground with the infantry walking the streets of Ramadi in 2005 and 2006. And as a part of that, I studied insurgencies and I studied dictators and propaganda campaigns. And it was so obvious to me in 2015 and 2016 that what was happening in the Trump campaign was really just a misinformation campaign that had been seen so many times before. It had been used through history. And during that dinner with Anne, we didn't know what we would do, but we knew we had to get involved. And that is sort of where I activated as a citizen, like so many folks did. I'm not a politico. I'm not an advocacy person. I'm not a professional in this space. But I activated to do what I could do. As I mentioned, I've family throughout the middle of the country and military buddies who are from everywhere. I really leveraged that insight, even though I've lived in New York and San Francisco for the better part of the last decade, I sort of see myself as a translator, somebody who can understand and appreciate perspectives from multiple bubbles. Right? There is a media bubble on the left and one on the right. There's several, actually, in both communities. So that was sort of what brought me to the topic. We vote values was generated out of a desire to protect democracy, which is what I was in Iraq to do and what I studied to do and what I was most passionate about.
Neal Rickner: [00:05:08] I saw Trump and Trumpism as a threat to democracy, but more broadly, our fractured media and our media bubbles as a threat to democracy.
And so we vote values was a political effort to try to bring more truth to the conversation. And in particular, we reached out to a community where my family has roots. It's the evangelical community, and it was specifically targeted at people who were not in the extremes that were sort of open to messaging in the middle. It was focused on trying to dispel some of the misinformation that was active in the political campaign. That political effort ended with the 2020 campaign, and our donors and supporters just didn't want us to stop the work. And that's what became American Values Coalition. But to just continue this work of breaking down the information bubbles, of combating the misinformation and disinformation, trying to help people who are politically homeless, as you mentioned before, who are struggling to understand where they are in their own bubbles and how that relates to others. And that comes to be really important at times like Thanksgiving, when we all sit around the table and we're sort of forced to confront a different reality than what we usually sit in every day in our own media bubbles. And I'll end this part with this statement: that we are all the product of the news sources we consult.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:38] First of all, I love that you described yourself as an activated citizen and that you decided to get in there and be an active participant in sussing out these different threads, these bubbles, and trying to get us all on the same page in whatever way possible. And I will say, I also am a graduate of SIPA, and I think that what differentiates SIPA people from a lot of other people is that we have a fundamental belief that we can have impact, that we can actually make a difference, that we're not helpless. Right? So there are so many options that you could have taken, so many routes, like you could have run for office, but why did you decide to start with a super PAC to get at truth in the media landscape?
Neal Rickner: [00:07:22] I mean, directly speaking, it was that I saw the threat that Trump and Trumpism poses to our democracy. You know, the underlying and maybe fundamental challenge here is that we have a fractured media ecosystem that's incentivized to magnify extreme stories. That's true for the media itself, but also politicians. But most immediately, I thought the thing I could do, to your point about impact, was to impact the 2020 election. I thought that Trump being back in office was going to embolden him and his supporters to go further in damaging democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:04] Well, you mentioned earlier that you wanted to reach the people who could still change their minds, who still had open minds to different messaging. And so in the We Vote Values ad campaigns that you ran during the 2020 election or running up to the 2020 election, what was your message? Who were you trying to reach and what worked best?
Neal Rickner: [00:08:26] Yeah. We are nontraditional, right? This is not our trade. The folks that I brought to the table were mostly volunteers. We had a couple of professionals that gave us advice. But, you know, we learned we pulled from a bunch of different sources. We learned from Republican voters against Trump, for example. We learned from some of the research that was being done on the left as well. What we decided on was one, people turn off political ads right away. We mostly were successful with video ads that were authentic and individuals speaking into a phone. The grainier the video, the better. Because, you know, if you have this professional, highly polished ad, people know they're being sold something. But what they responded really well to was an individual just like them, who represented a point of view that they understood and could relate to. And it came from the heart, right? They could tell in a second if it was an actor or somebody delivering some message, but they responded really well to folks who spoke from the heart. And our approach was to find people in the middle who looked and spoke like somebody that our audience could relate to, and who could validate what they might have done in 2016. Like, "look, here I am. I look like you, I speak like you. And I voted for Trump in 2016, but here's why I can't do it again." And that meets somebody where they are. Like we do a lot of shaming of like, how could you possibly vote for that guy? I mean, one of the things I, and as a translator I'll interject here, is that very early on, I started trying to help people understand this by saying: my family, my military buddies, they are smart. They are engaged. They are highly moral people. And if you were in their reality, you would make the exact same decision and people will say, "oh no, I would never do that. Like I would never, never vote for Trump." Like, well, look, if you lived in the media reality that they do, Trump is the logical choice. For me, this is personal because these are family members that I love. These are my military buddies I went to war with. I have a tremendous amount of love for these folks. And so that's part of what helped me sort of bridge that divide. And so the ads were to break down barriers, which is to say, don't make it look like a political ad, make it authentic. Like, look, I understand why you voted for Trump in 2016, but here's why it might make sense for you to reconsider that. We didn't tell people what to do. We really
gave them the opportunity to make their own choice because, you know, people don't want to be talked down to and and all of that, too. We were very smart about trying to find people.
Neal Rickner: [00:11:05] We didn't communicate to everybody. We communicated to people just in the swing states, and we communicated to a sliver of people in the swing states. Trump won in 2016... 77,000 votes in three states, and in... Biden won by 44,000 votes in three states. So we can talk about an electoral landslide. But really, this comes down to a very narrow sliver of people. And our objective in that political campaign was to change about 20,000 votes. We weren't going to do the whole thing. We thought we could do our piece of it. You know, you can never say whether or not you did or didn't change votes. But I feel confident that we did the data analysis to say that we got our message across. And I think it was well received because we took that sort of very measured approach, started with respect and ended with respect, and yet tried to present them with new information. And at the base we were about correcting the record. That means even in the We Vote Values political campaign, it was all about fighting misinformation. You know, they had been told our story, and that story led them to the rational choice that Trump was the right person to vote for. And we were correcting the record, hoping to give them something else to think about. That would be new information, accurate information, truthful information that would then change their rational choice.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:27] Mm hmm. Yeah. It's interesting the way that you ran this ad campaign, like you said, with respect and not talking down to people. And as we have recently heard on the podcast, Americans are not fools. They do make rational choices. I do think that the American electorate is reasonably sophisticated. You know, as long as you're reading accurate news, which, of course is exactly the problem here. But so as you examine the data and you looked at the people, and I know this was a small subset of the American people, as you just mentioned. But as you looked at the data, what do you discover about the American polity? Like, who are we actually?
Neal Rickner: [00:13:06] You know, I'm underqualified to make that assertion, but I will say we're all the product of our news sources. None of us can travel the world every day and see everything all the time. We rely on news to help us understand what's going on in the world, and so our news choices frame that reality. And so for many of us, our just
base reality is different than even our neighbors. Certainly people from different states, that's easier to comprehend. But from a demographic standpoint, age, race, education level, income level, all that. My neighbor and I are basically the same, but we live in very different realities. We live 100ft from each other, and because we consult different media, different news, we live in different realities. Media source is among the top indicators of political choice. Now, the counterargument to that is, well, there's a chicken or the egg there. Are conservative people drawn to conservative bubbles and are liberal people drawn to liberal bubbles. Is there a self-selection that happens there? I'm hopeful that at some point there'll be some academic or otherwise, some research done to answer this question? It is not the only thing that matters, but it is certainly a leading indicator of where we are as a country that we get siloed into narrow media bubbles. This leverages what Ann Nelson wrote about in Shadow Network. Think about it this way: a confluence of events happened in the last 20 or so years. One is that as the internet came online, classified ad revenue went down, and that caused a bunch of local newspapers to shut down. And as local newspapers were shuttering and we've lost, but thousands of local newspapers have shut down. What happened at the same time is that internet news, which was of lower quality, less vetting, began to take over. And along with that, social media began to circulate these digital news stories more rapidly. And so you put those two things together. We -- and I'm not even making a judgment on whether or not Walter Cronkite was the right voice -- but there was a unified voice when... In the Walter Cronkite era. And what we have now is thousands of citizen journalists who don't adhere to high journalistic standards. You have unvetted stories that are circulated at a rapid rate, and algorithms and websites that drive us into bubbles. So if you're conservative, you end up in a conservative bubble or a liberal liberal liberal bubble. What I know is that we are in these silos. And if you want to know something about somebody, like take my neighbor and I as an example again, like our political choices have nothing to do with our income, race, age, education level. Those things are the standards by which most political operatives try to carve up the the population. Right. We hear about the income divisions and education and this and that. I think there's no better way to try to understand people than by understanding where they get their news. And actually, there are ways to identify people. I mean, if you go shopping and buy a pair of Nikes, Nike will follow you around for months trying to sell you more Nikes. Right. So there are ways to help us identify people on the internet. We have a pretty good -- not a foolproof -- but a pretty good understanding of where people get their news just by their digital signature.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:57] We're taking a short break to tell you about a fellow democracy Group podcast that we think you'll enjoy, and we'll be right back with Neal in a moment.
But first, democracy faces a wide range of challenges, from citizen participation in decision making processes and divisive hyper partisan politics, to misinformation, war, and civil unrest. Many people do not trust their democratic institutions and increasingly distrust each other. But our democracy matters, and we need to find space to solve common problems and issues across these divides. The Democracy Matters podcast features conversations with a wide range of scholars, experts, and practitioners dedicated to exploring ways to make our democracy more resilient for the common good. We invite you to join the conversation by subscribing to Democracy Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
And now let's return to my conversation with Neal Rickner.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:03] Well, you know, there are so many things about kind of how we self-identify and how we self find our community. Right? You just mentioned the leading indicator is the news we take in, but also the fact that the media landscape is fractured. There are lower standards. There are algorithms that feed us information that may or may not be true just because of what we follow. So given all of this, what does it mean for us to be talking to each other in a way that is fact based? And, in the words of AVC, to prevent radicalization and restore democratic norms? And also in this context, how do you think about democratic norms?
Neal Rickner: [00:18:49] So AVC is a 501c3. It's Americanvalues.org. Nonpolitical. So we're not advocating for policy. We're also not active in any political campaigns. What we're trying to do is help, in particular, conservative Americans communicate better with each other, acknowledging that parts of the conservative movement has become more and more extreme. We've always had this sort of 10% extreme on both sides, and there's still a 10% extreme on the left. There's always been a very close to equal extremes on both sides. What's happened with the media polarization is that the extremes on the right are no longer 10%. They're creeping up into the 20, 25, 30%. And, you know, extremes have degrees. Not everybody is a QAnon believer and adherent. But the basic point is that the extremes on the right have sort of crept in to bigger
numbers. And at AVC, what we talk about is, it's a few things. One, we've produced some content that we hope is helpful. One is the Truth Advocates Handbook. You can go to the website American values.org and download it. The other is we've created a series of courses called Mending Divisions Academy, MendingDivisionAcademy.com. And those are two resources that lay out, one, like in the Truth Advocate's Handbook, we talk about limiting your news intake. You don't be consumed by your news intake, consulting multiple sources, being skeptical of things that just confirm your bias, and recognizing that if you're liberal and you read a conservative news story, you're not going to just become a conservative And and vice versa. If you're a conservative, you should go consult some other sources. You're not going to just get morphed into the other side just because you read something from the other side, recognize the motivations of the author, recognize the motivations of the extreme headlines, and really try to suss out reliable sources and figure out for yourself who your reliable sources are, but then strive to get outside of your normal sources. Recognize that even if you have some sources you consider reliable, all sources are biased, right? These are things that we we sort of try to work through in the handbook. And then the other part of the handbook, in addition to just being media-savvy and recognizing bias, recognizing that you have a bubble. This is actually on my personal journey. I'll say this. I sort of acknowledged that I had a bubble but didn't really see the bounds of it, didn't really see it with clarity until I started this work. My bubble has been challenged and come into more clarity. I mean, I learn pretty regularly even my assumptions are wrong and I'm blind to them. In any case, in addition to the media savviness we try to lay out, and I think this is right to your point about Thanksgiving.
Neal Rickner: [00:21:52] There's a part of the Truth Advocates Handbook that talks about how to have tough conversations, and we use the acronym Calm, CALM, which is community, ask, listen, and magnify. So community is it's sort of like the ads we talked about. It's, start with your shared identity. Start with the community that you're a part of. Start with sort of validating that. We have a lot in common here. There's a reason we're at Thanksgiving dinner together. And then the A is ask. Ask is ask thoughtful questions and validate views. So if somebody is saying something and they say one thing you disagree with and one thing you agree with. Highlight the thing you agree with them on. Build some trust in that conversation and don't immediately go to the thing you disagree with them on. The L in calm is listen. And this is where we all struggle, myself included. This is not just a exercise and like ask a question and then drift off and sort of listen, no,
no, no, really listen. And to my previous point about my own bubbles and becoming aware of the limitations of my own perception and my own bubble. I think if you really give this a chance, if you ask a thoughtful question and you really listen, believe it or not, you're likely to learn something even with your Trumpy uncle or whoever who's really extreme, or you know that they're going to spout a conspiracy theory back to you. If you really listen, you're going to pick up a nugget, you're going to pick up something that challenges an assumption. There's truth in some of what they say. And what this is meant to do is if you don't actually listen, you'll never actually get to that common ground. You'll never actually get to that that nugget. And then finally is magnify. And that is magnify the positive, magnify the connection, go back and magnify your relationship after you've gone through and ask some questions and really listen. Go back to yes, but we're at this Thanksgiving dinner table for a reason. You're my uncle. I will always love you as my uncle. We may disagree on some things, but here are the things we agree on and I'll finish with this. This is not one conversation. This calm approach will be a building block for you to have future conversations based on trust. Right now we start in at each other from word one and we end the conversation before it ever starts. This approach is to find some common ground, acknowledge that common ground, reaffirm our relationships, and then come back another day when there's more trust. Then once there's that trust and you can have a reasonable conversation, then maybe you dig a little deeper. But it's not two conversations either. It's like ten conversations. And part of the approach here is we're going to find our way through these issues one relationship at a time, and it's going to take a lot of hard work. It's going to take an effort to go through the calm approach, to then come back for a second and third and fifth and 10th conversation.
Neal Rickner: [00:24:56] And that leads me to Mending Division Academy, which is the other part of what we have produced, is a series of courses primarily focused on Christians and how Christians interact in the church environment. The courses are polarization and the perception gap, misinformation and conspiracy, journalism in the media, political idolatry, social media, etcetera. And these courses are like, we want to have big impact. We know a digital campaign is not likely to be actually impactful. One on one relationships are the way to do it, but they don't scale very well. So our Mending Division Academy is sort of an approach to say, well, look, these are recorded by experts, they're available. We actually sell them for a nominal fee. And we we hope that churches and church leadership will pay. I mean, it's like $30. It's not a lot, but it's sort of
meant to generate commitment. And also we're a tiny little nonprofit and there's some opportunity to scale the impact of our work because these are recorded and the ideas that we will train moderators and we have trained moderators to go out and do the small group led discussion. So you get the benefit of the experts on video, and then you have a moderator who leads a discussion. And our hope is that churches and community leaders will lead small group discussions with the coursework that we've created.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:23] Right, right. It's great for you to explain what Calm is. That's obviously something to have as a lifelong habit, to be in community and in conversation this way. And of course, we couldn't agree with you more on communicating in this way. It's very hard to do as you pointed out, and it's exciting that you have a module that you sell to churches. And I know that you also work with pastors. How did the American Values Coalition decide that working with churches, working with pastors would be a fruitful avenue?
Neal Rickner: [00:26:56] It goes back to sort of We Vote Values and the population that we were focused on. What we tried to do was impact a population of evangelical Christians. The big headline stat is that Trump got 80% of white evangelical Christians in 2016, and there's a bunch of messiness in that stat. In 2020, it was slightly less. But it starts with where is there a population of folks that we can relate to, identify with, and speak to as insiders? This is an unfortunate reality, but it is the reality that if somebody from outside our bubble starts telling us something, whatever it is, we're unlikely to listen. You know, AVC is conservatives speaking to other conservatives, Christians speaking to other Christians. And look, pastors are a huge part of that community. And in a really important part of that community, we've done pastor workshops in, like Amarillo, Texas, for example. The pastors that come to our workshops are really just trying to get back to preaching the gospel. They are being sucked into political conversations like the ones we were talking about, the Thanksgiving dinner conversations. But they don't want to be talking about that stuff. They want to be talking about Jesus and the gospel, and instead they're being pulled into mediating tough conversations, and they're watching their congregations being ripped apart. And so AVC is is an opportunity to bring pastors together for community. We just had a pastor retreat last month where we had dozens of pastors come together, really just to try to problem solve together. One of the most impactful stories I can tell you is that there was a pastor who had attended some of our AVC, either a webinar or one of the online events we do.
And at some point they had a vote in his congregation about whether to reject political violence, which like just pause for a second if you know what Christianity is and and what Christianity's ideals are. Like violence is nowhere to be tolerated. This was a Christian church voting on whether or not they should reject political violence.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:16] So this is in the aftermath of January 6th, I assume. Neal Rickner: [00:29:20] Yeah,
Mila Atmos: [00:29:20] Yeah. Okay.
Neal Rickner: [00:29:21] And believe it or not, that congregation did not pass that resolution, did not support the idea that they would reject political violence. And this pastor's response to us was, look, I was really close to quitting before that. The only reason I didn't quit is because of AVC, because I have a community of people that I can go to and ask questions of and struggle with this. And I would just posit that that's the pastor we need in that congregation. If he quits, who's there to be the voice that says, wait a minute. No, no, no, that's not what Jesus wanted. That's not what we should be doing. We should reject political violence. We have two pastor workshops coming up shortly, ones in Phoenix in January, ones in Orlando in February. You know, they're relatively modest. I mean, we'll get 100 or so pastors at each one are really happy to have some really great speakers. David French was at the last one. He's a columnist. He's at The Bulwark and The Dispatch. And then we have Russell Moore coming to the next two. And Russell Moore is a well known figure in the evangelical community. This is an opportunity for pastors to meet other pastors, for them to go through some of the material that AVC has produced, learn from experts, and carry those learnings back to their congregations. And again, just for the the idea that they can better navigate the extremism, misinformation, etcetera. I'll give you one quick example, is one meaningful interaction. At one of the previous conferences, we had a speaker, Elizabeth Newman. She was in the Trump campaign. She was Department of Homeland Security. She's now an ABC news contributor. She's an expert on border security, on national security. And she just explained in very simple terms what a propaganda campaign is, why a propaganda campaign might be launched against a certain population, and what the means and ends would be. You know, as a military veteran, I sort of assumed that most people understood some of that, but it was really meaningful to me to see the response
to that content. You know, I wouldn't say minds were blown, but it was like, "oh, wow, now this makes sense. I'm being targeted. Oh, I get it." That's the kind of experience that we want pastors to have. So our hope is that we're going to help them understand it so that they can navigate out of it.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:49] Yeah, this is very powerful. First of all, these stories are fantastic that there was a pastor who almost quit over a vote that should have been a slam dunk to reject political violence and wasn't. And explaining the propaganda bit, I think also is illuminating because, like you said, I think it's difficult to understand that this is happening. So since you mentioned your military service and we talked about, of course, that the news was covered while you were on the ground in Iraq, how has your service informed your activated citizenship and your civic engagement?
Neal Rickner: [00:32:28] Hmmm. I joined the military to be part of the national defense. What is clear to me now is that the defense of democracy was central to my military service. It remained central to my activated citizenship. I mean, I learned, like all of us, I think in history books like democracy is fragile, and you got to fight for it. I mean, those felt like catchphrases, but they are very real now. Ukraine, to me, is the clearest example of what it means to stand up against tyranny and dictatorship and support democracies. But it was much muddier in Iraq, right? I mean, there was misinformation in that campaign as well. You know, what I was referring to earlier about? I was in Ramadi and there were stories being written about the battle in Ramadi while I was there. And what I remember thinking was, wow. So I just lived this event, and I just read this New York Times article and it is factually accurate. They got all the facts right, but it completely misrepresents what's actually happening here. It's just, it didn't convey the reality that was happening on the ground. So in a way, I was one of those early people. This was 2005-6. I was one of the early people that was like, wow, I really don't know if I can trust the media. And now I've gotten way deeper into it. But that was one of those early experiences where I wasn't sure I could trust the media. I'm not sure I got... To your question.
Speaker3: [00:33:49] It's all good. It's all good. I think you you did connect the dots between the media landscape that you experienced when you were on the ground in a war, and reading it and thinking, this is not really what happened, even though the facts
are accurate. So what are two things that each one of us can bring to the Thanksgiving table conversation, or to any table at any time?
Neal Rickner: [00:34:16] Yeah, I mean, I think one is a healthy dose of humility, acknowledging that no matter how conspiratorial the other side feels. They are your family, your neighbors, or whomever, and they're at the table for a reason. And given that if you focus on the common ground, ask meaningful questions and really listen, I think you'll uncover much more in common than you expect. And most importantly, you'll uncover a perspective that might surprise you. But step one is have the courage to have the conversation. It's hard, I get it. It's probably easier to hide in the corner or go hang out in the kitchen. But step one is if we're going to help this country move forward, engage. Don't go hide in the kitchen too is don't start the conversation with let me tell you something. Start the conversation with a thoughtful question, and then sit back and really listen and really absorb. And if you are willing to take that approach, if you are willing to really absorb and take a look at your own house, the walls are start to come down.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:27] This is good advice. Very good advice. I definitely think if we have an open mind, there are things that we can learn from each other all the time. So as we are rounding out our conversation today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Neal Rickner: [00:35:44] It's a great question. I am most encouraged by the folks that have gotten behind AVC and the energy and the enthusiasm. Some people have contributed dollars. Some people have contributed time. Countless volunteers have built our websites and organized our workshops, have spent ten times the amount of effort and time on Mending Division Academy videos. If democracy is worth fighting for, and we each have to find our way to contribute to that, I'm really encouraged and hopeful based on the passion and the energy that volunteers and funders and experts and non- experts have put into AVC. It makes me really hopeful. You know, like, like a lot of nonprofits, we're resource constrained, but we have lots and lots of energy and enthusiasm, and that's what keeps us going. And that that enthusiasm, energy keeps me going.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:47] Hear, hear. Well, thank you, Neal, for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show, and congratulations on all the work that AVC is doing.
Neal Rickner: [00:36:56] I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:59] Neal Rickner is the chairman of the board of American Values Coalition, a growing community of Americans who are empowered to lead with truth, reject extremism and misinformation, and defend democracy.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Christopher Paul Harris. He's assistant professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care.
Christopher Paul Harris: [00:37:33] To my mind, abolition is a unifying theory of everything that causes harm and is the answer to those harms. And it's going to take a collective recognition that even though we might be impacted by this system differently, we're still impacted. And that a different way of living, a different way of relating, a different way of aspiring is possible. And that is what to me is the signal call of abolition.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:05] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:38:40] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.