The Persuaders

1. The culture of the "write-off" is a democratic Achilles' heel exploited by adversaries

The troll farm wanted Americans to regard each other as immovable, brainwashed, of bad faith, not worth energy, disloyal, repulsive.

Exploiting mutual dismissal. Foreign intelligence services, like Russia's Internet Research Agency, realized that America's growing culture of writing each other off was its greatest vulnerability. Instead of inventing new divisions, trolls simply fertilized the behaviors of mutual dismissal already flourishing on American soil. They used digital clones to amplify disgust rather than mere anger, knowing disgust drives societies apart.

The write-off culture. This culture of dismissal is rooted in the fatalistic assumption that differences of identity are completely unbridgeable. When we assume others are brainwashed or acting in bad faith, we abandon the basic activity of democratic life: the hard work of persuasion. This fatalism manifests across the political spectrum, leading to:

• Viewing political opponents as essentially unalterable enemies
• Prioritizing self-protection over coalition building
• Dismissing the possibility of changing people's minds

The cost of fatalism. When change-makers abandon persuasion, they create an unsustainable gap between their grand ambitions for structural reform and their utter pessimism about individual people. Authoritarian and antidemocratic movements thrive in this environment because they excel at making newcomers feel welcome, while righteous movements often make outsiders feel alienated. Reclaiming democracy requires us to dissent from this great write-off.

2. Effective movements must prioritize "calling in" over punitive "calling out"

For me, calling in is a callout done with love.

Accountability with love. Activist and theorist Loretta Ross champions "calling in" as a vital alternative to the prevailing, punitive callout culture. While calling out publicly shames and isolates individuals for their mistakes, calling in holds people accountable while keeping the door open for growth. It recognizes that human beings are fallible and require a pathway to redemption rather than immediate social banishment.

The limits of shaming. Callout culture often functions as a form of performance that exposes movement vulnerabilities to opponents who weaponize them. When we treat every minor mistake as an unpardonable sin, we shrink our circles instead of expanding them. Ross warns that movements must distinguish between:

• An ally who makes an awkward, uneducated mistake
• A committed fascist actively working to destroy human rights
• A person acting out of unaddressed, triggered past trauma

Creating brave spaces. Rather than promising unrealistic "safe spaces" where no one is ever offended, movements must build "brave spaces" where people can struggle together. This requires a willingness to extend civic grace and perform voluntary emotional labor, provided one is in a healed enough space to offer it. By practicing calling in, we allow people the room to err, learn, and ultimately transform.

3. Building power requires messy "popular fronts" rather than pure "united fronts"

Winning is about more than being right—it is also about how you invite others to be a part of change they may not have even realized they needed.

The coalitional dilemma. Activist Alicia Garza argues that movements cannot function as exclusive cliques if they genuinely want to build and exercise power. To achieve systemic change, organizers must navigate the tension between maintaining ideological purity and building broad, messy coalitions. This requires a strategic shift from seeking perfect alignment to embracing the discomfort of working with imperfect allies.

Popular vs. united fronts. Garza distinguishes between two types of alliances that movements can form:

• United fronts: Long-term alliances based on the highest level of political and ideological alignment.
• Popular fronts: Messy, short-term coalitions that come together across a wide range of beliefs to achieve a specific, immediate goal.
• The danger of purism: Treating every campaign as a united front, which makes political circles smaller and dooms movements to minority status.

Embracing the non-radical. To pass meaningful legislation or win elections, radical organizers must accept that having radical politics cannot be a litmus test for joining a movement. We must be highly selective about who we exclude, focusing our energy on growing our base across differences. True power is built when we invite ordinary people into a shared home, even if they carry problematic ideas we hope to change.

4. Persuaders must meet the "waking among the woke" with accessible on-ramps

The thing about our movement is that we’re too woke, which is why we don’t have mass mobilization in the way that we should.

Lowering barriers to entry. Linda Sarsour warns that progressive movements often erect linguistic and cultural barriers that turn away potential allies. By using highly academic, specialized jargon, activists create an exclusive club that makes ordinary people feel unequipped to participate. To build a mass movement, we must meet people where they are rather than expecting them to be instantly perfect.

The waking among the woke. We must make space for individuals who are newly awakening to social justice issues but still harbor outdated ideas. Shaming a well-intentioned donor or a curious neighbor for using the wrong terminology only drives them away. To foster genuine transformation, movements must offer:

• Clear, accessible language that resonates with everyday experiences
• Patience with those who do not speak the specialized lexicon of activism
• Opportunities for people to ask questions and make mistakes without fear of crucifixion

Transformation through relationships. Real change rarely happens through abstract lecturing; it is catalyzed by personal relationships. Sarsour notes that even her own conservative mother evolved on LGBTQ rights because of her personal relationship with a gay local politician. By building bridges instead of prison-like gates, we allow people the room to grow in the shade of our shared humanity.

5. To change minds, we must navigate the "circles of influence" with strategic empathy

I think that the 90-percenters spend too much time trying to turn people into 100-percenters, which is totally unnecessary.

Mapping alignment. Loretta Ross's "circles of influence" framework provides a strategic guide for how activists should interact with people of varying degrees of agreement. Instead of treating everyone outside our immediate circle as an enemy, we must calibrate our approach based on their level of alignment. This prevents us from wasting energy on internal squabbles and helps us identify opportunities for collaboration.

The five circles of alignment. To navigate coalitions effectively, we must categorize our audience into distinct groups:

• 90-percenters: Close allies with whom we should tolerate minor disagreements rather than demanding absolute conformity.
• 75-percenters: Near allies with whom we can collaborate on shared goals while bracketing major areas of disagreement.
• 50-percenters: People who share our core values but could apply them to the left or the right depending on the circumstances.
• 25-percenters: Opponents who do not share our worldview but still want to see themselves as good people.
• 0-percenters: Uncompromising fascists whom we must focus on overpowering and overwhelming rather than persuading.

Engaging the conflicted. When dealing with 25-percenters, we must take their underlying fears seriously rather than dismissing them out of hand. By appealing to their desire to be seen as good people, we can gently challenge their assumptions and prompt internal reflection. Persuasion is not about pulling people up the mountain by force, but about making them less certain of their existing prejudices.

6. True persuasion requires moving from cold facts to emotional meaning-making

On the left, we think a lot about facts and figures and logic that we hope will change people’s minds.

The limits of logos. For decades, progressive campaigns have relied heavily on presenting logical arguments, policy white papers, and statistical evidence to win over voters. However, cognitive science and political reality show that cold facts rarely change minds on their own. True persuasion requires us to assign emotion to our systems, moving from the realm of pure reason to the realm of shared human feeling.

The power of pathos. Bernie Sanders's 2020 campaign illustrated this shift by introducing intimate, confessional town halls where ordinary citizens shared their struggles. Instead of merely reciting statistics about the rigged economy, Sanders used these personal testimonies to help voters make sense of their pain. This approach helped to:

• De-atomize individual suffering by framing it as a shared, systemic issue
• Remove the self-blame that working-class people often feel for their financial struggles
• Provide a clear, structural explanation for why people are hurting

Providing a political home. People do not make political decisions based on logic alone; they seek a place that feels like home. The political right excels at making people feel like they belong to a grand, shared destiny, while the left often offers only dry policy recipes. To win, we must remember that people will forget what we said, but they will never forget how we made them feel.

7. The "AOC Style" combines bold provocation with the "golden gate of retreat"

I don’t compromise on my values, but I’m willing to compromise in how we get there, how we talk about them, if it doesn’t undermine the ultimate value and the ultimate goal.

The inside-outside game. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pioneered a multimodal style of political persuasion that straddles the inside game of legislative negotiation and the outside game of movement activism. She uses her massive social media presence to bypass traditional gatekeepers and speak directly to the public. This allows her to build an independent power base that she can leverage to shift the boundaries of what is politically possible.

Provocation and teaching. The "AOC style" relies on a two-step communicative method:

• Step 1: Bold provocation. Staking out a maximalist, attention-grabbing position (like the Green New Deal or taxing the rich at 70%) to shock the system and move the Overton window.
• Step 2: Gentle teaching. Meeting skeptics where they are, using accessible analogies and patient explanations to make the radical seem common-sense.
• The golden gate of retreat: Offering opponents a face-saving way to change their minds and join the cause without losing their dignity.

Harnessing the media. Rather than avoiding the corporate media, Ocasio-Cortez hijacks its ratings-driven hunger for drama to force conversations on neglected issues like climate change. She shares her own vulnerability, fears, and daily life to build trust and authenticity with her followers. By refusing to be a single, flat character, she demonstrates that one can be both a fierce, uncompromising activist and a pragmatic, effective legislator.

8. We must animate the passionate base to persuade the conflicted middle

What the middle is capable of believing is what the base is excited to keep chanting.

The fallacy of the middle. Messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio argues that the traditional political strategy of watering down messages to appeal to a moderate "middle" is fundamentally flawed. Moderates are not actually centrist ideologues; they are "Good Point" People who hold conflicting, unresolved views and toggle between progressive and conservative narratives. To win them over, we must make our progressive worldview feel like the dominant common sense.

Turnout is persuasion. We achieve this not by diluting our message, but by so deeply inspiring our passionate base that they enthusiastically repeat our narrative to their friends and neighbors. Repetition creates cognitive ease, making familiar ideas feel safe and believable to the conflicted middle. The key steps to this messaging strategy include:

• Lead with shared values: Start with a universal principle (e.g., "family comes first") to call people into their higher angels.
• Name the villain and their motive: Clearly identify who is obstructing that value and explain why they benefit from doing so.
• Offer a hopeful solution: Paint a vivid picture of the beautiful tomorrow we can build if we join together.

Selling the brownie. Progressives often make the mistake of leading with dry, wonky policy details or terrifying descriptions of problems. Shenker-Osorio advises campaigns to "sell the brownie, not the recipe"—focusing on the joyful, lived outcomes of our policies rather than the legislative process. By framing our fights around contested values like "freedom" and "family," we can reclaim the moral high ground and alienate our opponents.

9. Cognitive inoculation protects minds from the viral spread of disinformation

When we’re exposed to a weakened form of a disease, we build up immunity so that we don’t get infected by the real disease.

The pandemic of lies. As conspiracy theories like QAnon and climate denial sweep through the population, traditional fact-checking has proven to be an inadequate defense. Trying to debunk myths after they have taken root often backfires, reinforcing the lie in the victim's mind. Cognitive scientists like John Cook and deprogrammers like Diane Benscoter argue that we must treat disinformation as a public health crisis and focus on "prebunking" or cognitive inoculation.

How inoculation works. Just as a physical vaccine exposes the body to a weakened strain of a virus to build antibodies, cognitive inoculation exposes the mind to a weakened form of a deceptive argument to build mental resistance. This is achieved by:

• Forewarning: Alerting people that they are about to be targeted by a deceptive message.
• Exposing the technique: Explaining the specific logical fallacy or manipulation tactic (such as "fake experts" or "cherry-picking") being used.
• Refutational pre-emption: Directly refuting the lie before the individual encounters the full-strength version of the disinformation.

Democratizing deprogramming. To protect our democracy, we must move away from shaming those who have been manipulated and instead treat them as victims of a highly sophisticated, viral infection. Cook has gamified this process through tools like the "Cranky Uncle" game, which teaches players to recognize the common techniques of science denial. By teaching critical thinking as a reflexive, fast-thinking skill, we can build a collective "umbrella of protection" that keeps our society resilient against the next wave of lies.