Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments

"Robinson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Current Affairs , which is a leftist journal. His unique selling proposition among lefty writers, editorialists, and reporters is that he spends an awful lot of time comprehensively consuming right-wing media. He reads all the books, including biographies and memoirs. He watches Fox News. He watches weird documentaries about conspiracies–everything from 9/11 to vaccines . He systematically lays out what the argument is and what its nuances are, and where the cleavage lines are among the right. He breaks these down into about 25 different right-wing beliefs, then he describes the underlying factual matter. There are areas in which the right is not entirely wrong. I was just talking about this with a reporter. When they say that the Davos crowd is sinister and has it in for us, they’re not wrong. I’m speaking as a Davos attendee. I didn’t pay to go; I was a speaker. Then he lays out what you can say back. He creates what you would call in the union movement an organizing conversation about how to address these arguments. What to say to people who are enmeshed in them, but much more importantly, people who have encountered them and are like, “I just heard this thing. It sounds plausible. I don’t know what to make of what you have to say.” Rather than saying, “Oh my God! That’s a racist dog whistle. You’re a bad person for even thinking it,” he gives you the tools to have a systematic conversation that will actually change minds."