Brené Brown: Hi, everyone. I’m Brené Brown, and this is Unlocking Us.

BB: Welcome back to our conversation with Heather Cox Richardson. This is part two of that conversation. Both of these episodes are part of a series that I’m calling On My Heart and Mind. And man, going into this election season, there’s nothing on my heart and mind more than, you know, saving democracy. And I’ve spent so much time traveling, including, you know, I did this whole like four countries, four events, five days, so many places faced with some of the same struggles and challenges that we’re having. And just a historical understanding of how we got here, and of how narratives are being constructed to channel power to a very few people is it’s just I have never been more excited about a set of podcasts. So I’m glad you’re here. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit about Heather. Dr. Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College. She has written about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West in award-winning books whose subjects stretch from the European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration.

BB: Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian, among many other outlets, and she is the co-host of the Vox podcast Now & Then. One thing I want to tell you is we’re going to jump in and I am going to make a reference to something that Heather explained in the first podcast. And I will tell you this is a true part two or so. If you’re jumping in here, I’d go back and listen to the first one. It’s a really profound setup for this one. But as a reminder, I asked her to kind of explain what’s going on. And she said, let’s take 10 people. Two of them want complete control over people. And their job is to craft narratives and stories and myths that villainize the bottom two people in order to get the votes of the middle six people. And so when you hear me talk about the two, six, two, that’s what we’re referring to. Let’s jump in part two. Whoo. Let’s go. Heather, welcome back. Part two. This was the part you were most excited about. Remember the rapid fire?

Heather Cox Richardson: Oh, yes, that’s right.

BB: Okay. I’m going to hit on a couple of topics. They’re huge. And what I would like and I don’t know if this is going to work or not. This is an experiment. I’m going to talk about a topic, and I’d like for you to help us understand what the narrative or mythology is that’s driving that.

HR: Okay. There’s something I really, really, really hope you hit. So let’s see how we do.

BB: Will you promise that you’ll bring it up if I don’t?

HR: Yeah, but just so you know, I really am not good on opera. And I’m really not good on modern day sports. So if you’re going to go in either of those directions, we’re out of luck.

BB: Oh, no, I’m in your wheelhouse friend. Okay, I just got back from a trip a couple weeks ago, where I did four events in four countries in Europe in five days, Oslo, Helsinki, Amsterdam, and London. Authoritarianism on everyone’s mind. We absolutely see it here. Center to, well, you look at some of the elections happening all over the world, actually. What is the narrative around immigration and how is it used to bolster authoritarianism?

HR: The narrative around immigration constructs an other that you can then use to tell people in your home country that they are being attacked by an other, by some group that is going to come in and ruin what they believe is their centrality. This is not new in American history, but there are a couple of things that really stand out. One is that the methods that people like Donald Trump are using are very, very close to the ones that Viktor Orbán used in Hungary when he managed to undermine their democracy and create an autocracy there, putting himself in power of what used to be a democracy. And he did so by warning people about immigration. Now, in the United States, that same pattern is happening. And that pattern is virtually, you could superimpose it over the kinds of ideas that people like Hannah Arendt, who was a scholar of totalitarianism, or Eric Hoffer, who was a scholar of the rise of authoritarians in the United States in 1951, he wrote a book called True Believer. And the idea is that you can tell a population that there is this dangerous group of people, who they are doesn’t matter, the Nazis used this as well, in order to make them hold together and to protect what they consider a perfect past, you know, the past where they were the ones who were central.

HR: And it’s important to remember that that’s really key to an authoritarian because what it says is that it is possible to make this country perfect. It was perfect in the past. And the reason it’s not perfect now is because of those people. And those people are being protected by the law. And what you really need is a strongman to come in and get rid of those laws, to bulldoze right through those laws, to make America great again. And that is sheer authoritarianism and antithetical to everything democracy stands for, because democracy is never perfect by definition. And that’s a really important piece of this, to recognize that there was no perfect past and that the problem is not them or those people. The problem is those people who are trying to destroy the legal system that protects all of us to ensure democracy.

BB: Okay. So going back to the first podcast, we’re talking about the two that want absolute power over, the six who want to, you know, make sandwiches for school, go to work, live their lives, and then the two on the bottom. So in this situation, the two at the top are telling the six in the middle, everything that you hold dear.

HR: That the two at the bottom are the enemy.

BB: Okay. Let me ask this question. This is going to be so not rapid fire, but I have to ask. Why is it hard to have a deeply human and compassionate immigration policy while also acknowledging that what’s happening right now may not be working and there may not be enough resources in the United States for everyone coming, there may not be enough resources in other countries. Like why can’t there be smart immigration policy that doesn’t dehumanize? I mean, why can’t both things exist?

HR: Well, they can and they have at times in our past. Again we’re coming back to storytelling. If you think about American immigration policy we really start to get our first major anti-immigrant movement in America in the 1830s and the 1840s and it really comes to flower in the 1850s as the Know Nothing movement or the American movement and the idea was to stop immigration. And do you know who stood against that? The freaking Republicans. The Republicans in their first platforms, first party platforms, said “This is a country of immigrants. We want the labor that immigrants bring. We want people to come to this country. We want them to contribute to our economy and then we want to make them Americans because this is how we will create a strong nation.” So we go through these waves and again the trick is that there are times when people want to garner power and they use those others, because of their skin color or their language or their customs, to say that these are the enemies you need to stand against.

HR: In this moment one of the things that I find weird is that any economist will tell you that one of the reasons the United States economy is absolutely booming and it is, it’s the envy of the world right now, although that’s hard to get that message through, is because of immigrants. If you look, there was a recent study by the Wall Street Journal, or an article, that talked about a study in the Wall Street Journal about the counties in the United States that take money from the federal government versus the ones that put money in. And the ones that take money, these are counties not just states, are overwhelmingly they vote Republican and overwhelmingly they’re old. The reason that they end up getting as many federal dollars as they do is through Social Security and Medicare and all the programs that older people use. And the ones that are putting tons of money in are the ones who are quite young. And the reason they’re quite young is because they have immigrants. And so this is a moment when we obviously should have this on the table. And instead we’re going with this, they’re eating the pets story, which is just about as close to the kind of Nazi language or any kind of genocide language that you’ll see around the world as anything we’ve ever heard in America.

BB: It’s like chilling. Okay. Next one.

HR: Yeah, we’ve got to do some good ones.

BB: Yeah, help me understand this one with the two at the top that want power, the six in the middle, and the two at the bottom. And this one is like fricking hard for me because it gives me a lot of fight energy. Reproductive rights. Tell me what the narrative is. What is happening?

HR: Well, I mean, I could go all the way back if you wanted to, but it’s important in this moment to start from the position that what you are seeing now as an anti-abortion movement did not start with Roe versus Wade. Everybody thinks it did. It did not. It actually started in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade. And where we are is this. After World War II, there is a recognition of the importance of public health. That’s when public health really comes onto the radar screen, although it was around before. That’s when really people start worrying about it. And by the 1950s, American doctors, who are overwhelmingly male, are terrified by what they see as a major public health crisis, and that is the fact that they estimate as many as one million American women a year are obtaining illegal abortions and they are dying from them, or they are being profoundly injured by them. And so they start to say, “Listen, we need to get rid of these old anti-abortion laws” that rose in the late 19th century for reasons that I could tell you, but I don’t really have time right now. We need to get rid of those because this is a public health crisis. We’re losing, this is a baby boom, right? We’re losing mothers. We’re losing our patients.

HR: And so you started to see the push in the states for the protection of abortion rights as an answer in public health to this crisis of women dying. And this is across all parties. The Southern Baptists get on board. I mean, this is just, this is perceived to be important for moving the United States into the 21st century and saving lives. Then we get Kent State in May of 1970, which is going to, you’re probably surprised I threw that in there, right? But Kent State…

BB: I am. Tell people what happens.

HR: So at Kent State, Ohio, in May of 1970, four students are killed when they were protesting the Vietnam War and the troops that were there to prevent disruption fired on them, which is a really brief way to talk about a very big event. Think Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, four dead in Ohio, that’s what they’re talking about. Four people die. Very famous photograph as well. But what happens with that is that Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon come out after that and they make a really big mistake of blaming the students for what happened there. Now, there’s a lot going on in that event, but they blame the students. And Nixon’s biggest block of support was middle class Americans, especially middle class men. And when they saw the vice president, especially, but also the president, blaming the students for their own deaths, remember the people who died could have been their children. And Nixon’s support in that key voting block drops. So his advisor, Pat Buchanan, who had been a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, by the way, Pat Buchanan suggests to him that the way he can make up for those missing Republican middle-class men is by reaching out to Democratic Catholics who oppose abortion.

HR: Nixon has a pretty liberal abortion policy. He has told army bases, the doctors there, to perform abortions on the wives of the soldiers that are there. I mean, he’s got a very modern abortion policy. But in the election of 1972, he says that his opponent, George McGovern, a Democrat from South Dakota, is the candidate of amnesty, acid, and abortion. Amnesty for the Vietnam-era draftees who escaped to Canada, acid for LSD, and abortion. And he begins to talk about abortion rights in Catholic language. Big C Catholic language, the religion, not the concept. And that’s in 1972. 1973, we get the Roe v. Wade decision, which comes under a Republican chief justice, and is written by a Republican, in which they basically use the language that those doctors had used, saying, you know, we’re going to have the constitutional right to abortion in the first trimester, and so on. But that idea that begins in 1972 is never couched as a protection for fetuses. It is couched at stopping those women’s libbers. So Phyllis Schlafly talks about this and says, women’s libbers want to denigrate the traditional roles of women and replace child care with abortion. And that language is going to be key to picking up the traditionalist religious vote.

HR: In the 1970s, as the Southern Baptists become much more conservative, there’s a big split in the Southern Baptist Church in the 1970s. They have this very conservative wing that gets rid of women working in the church hierarchy, for example, if anybody’s aware of that whole right-wing turn of the Southern Baptists. And that branch of the religious right is going to move very firmly into the Reagan coalition. And that piece of the religious movement going into the Reagan coalition is going to become more and more pronounced, both during Reagan’s term after 1986, when he very deliberately institutionalizes them coming in and then under the George W. Bush administration. And abortion turns from being a public health issue and an issue of saving families and women’s lives to becoming, you know, Democrats are murderers. And that literally the guy who’s running for governor in Montana, a Republican named Tim Sheehy, just the other day was saying, “Women keep talking about their health, but it’s really just that they’re murderers.” And I think what we are seeing in this moment is the extreme of that in people like Sheehy and JD Vance, for that matter.

HR: But the recognition now that we lost the constitutional recognition of abortion rights under the Dobbs versus Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision of 2022, that in fact, it really is a public health issue, that this is not a question of anybody wanting to murder anybody, but it’s a question of the fact we now have women who are dying.

BB: Dying.

HR: Because they cannot get health care, especially in places like Texas, where on the day we’re recording this, the Supreme Court has just said that in fact, the Texas ban on emergency rooms having to treat women with abortion care can stand, which is sort of mind-boggling in the 21st century. Not only that we are taking away from more than half of the American people the right to control their bodies, something that we would never permit if it were men, but also that the Supreme Court of the United States has said it is all right to let women die if your religion demands it. And I would love to see somebody articulate why that is any different than the extremist religions around the world who have written women out of the body politic and out of public society. Sorry that wasn’t quick.

BB: No. That’s it. No, but it’s, you know like whatever time you need. It’s so scary here, Heather, because, you know, what they’re trying to do now is really trying to create this vigilante state where neighbors are turning on neighbors, neighbors are reporting people who are leaving the state to get a safe and healthy abortion. What keeps the six who we need so bad to understand and dispel the mythology and understand the source of the narrative, which I think you’re helping us, what keeps the six from thinking, “Shit, that could be my daughter, that could be my wife.” I talk to people and they’re absolutely not okay with it being someone they love, but don’t want to engage in a general like it just seems like they’re not making it as personal as it is.

HR: Well, just to be clear, this whole thing that I just said about the ten and the six and all that, there’s like no science behind that. You asked how I think about it and that’s how I think about it.

BB: Yeah, no, I like it. I think it’s helpful because it fits with what I understand about there are not eight people who are desperately trying to maintain power over marginalized communities. There are two out of the ten and six who, if they don’t get involved, will be complicit in that happening.

HR: It’s exactly right. And by the way, political scientists will tell you that at its highest point, a reactionary right-wing movement will get a maximum of about 32% of the population. That’s the max. Usually it’s in the 20s. And those people are immovable. They’re not going anywhere, but that kind of looks like my two and eight, doesn’t it? And so I would go to the next step and say, “Why do people go along with it? Why can’t they visualize it?” I am a Pollyanna, I guess people would call me. My glass is always half full. And I would say that most people are not paying attention. And not because they’re watching TV and eating popsicles, but because they’re busy getting the kids to school and they don’t like the dirt of politics and they don’t think it involves their lives until it does.

BB: Until it does.

HR: And once it does, some of them react with fear and they say, “I don’t want to get involved because I could be the next one.” But interestingly, in our moment in America, I don’t think that that’s what’s happening. I think people are stepping up and I think they’re stepping up for both that reason I talked about, I think it was in the last podcast, where finally the worm turns, if you will, as Shakespeare would have said, and they say, “You’ve pushed me far enough.” My favorite line from Hamlet, which unfortunately was cut out in the Laurence Olivier version, but when Laertes challenges Hamlet, and Hamlet’s been playing the part of I’m mentally disturbed and so on, and Laertes reaches for his throat and Hamlet says, I prithee take thy fingers from my throat, for though I am not splenitive and rash, yet have I in me something dangerous which let thy wisdom fear.

HR: And it’s always been my favorite line because it’s the person who went along and went along and went along and went along and went along and then said, “Have I in me something dangerous?” Because once you raise that, you’re in real trouble. And I think we are seeing that in this moment in America. And I think we’re seeing it in part because of human nature, but I think we’re also seeing it in a weird way because of Anne Frank. And so many of us were reared on the story of Anne Frank and wanted to believe that we would have protected her in a way that she wasn’t. And because of the coincidence, if you will, or the social movement of a generation of young people now who have been reared on books about young people standing up to authoritarianism. So you have, of course, The Hunger Games, you have Harry Potter, you have Holes, you have this whole basis of literature that young people really grew up on that was young people standing up against authoritarianism when their parents would not.

HR: And I think it’s a really interesting confluence of that literature that was so formative for so many people. And, of course, the Lord of the Rings movies as well, coinciding with the rise of authoritarianism.

BB: I mean, that’s really true. I watched all those films with my kids growing up, and it always struck me that, you know, when I talk to my, well, I have a 25-year-old and a 19-year-old, and we’ll be talking about politics, and they’re like you know, “Well, Mom, late stage capitalism, and we have to make some choices here around the authoritarian regimes.” I was thinking, I didn’t talk like that when I was that age. I mean, I was a union steward, I was involved heavily in labor with Communication Workers of America, but I didn’t have the narrative language that they got from post-apocalyptic film. And my kids can draw a very uncomfortable short line. Okay, let me ask you one more question, then I’m going to end on a positive note.

HR: Yeah, let’s do something happy here.

BB: Yeah, yeah. I think I have more stuff highlighted in your book than I have not highlighted. So that’s, it’s always, okay, tell me what this means. This is you. “Democracies die more often through the ballot.”

HR: “Through the ballot box than with tanks.” I put that there because so many people think that we couldn’t possibly have an authoritarian movement in this country, because in many people’s minds, it is associated with the black and white movies we saw of World War II in which the tanks are coming down the streets.

BB: Yeah, me too.

HR: But an authoritarian movement never takes power with tanks. It always starts by taking power among the people, and it starts by getting voted into office. Remember, Hitler was elected, never with a majority, but people supported him at the ballot box. And especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, people continued to think about the revolutions as tanks, as people coming in and destroying a population with violence. But the reality was that we got, after that collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of the concept coming out of places like Russia, their former Soviet republics, that you could change a society and you could get people to vote away their democracy by creating a false reality, by creating a world that didn’t exist, but you made people believe existed through the stories we told amplified on social media. And we are absolutely, in the United States, a victim of this. We know that about 20 to 30% of what we see on social media coming up to the 2024 election is farmed out by China, Iran, and Russia to the places where we gather our media.

HR: But you also see it with the MAGA Republicans, who I think very visibly are denying reality. They are based in the idea that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, which is demonstrably false. And they are arguing, for example, that the federal response to Hurricane Helene simply didn’t happen. They are saying that the economy is terrible. These things are not true. None of these things are true. They are empirically lies. But if they can get enough people to believe them, they can use the power of their votes to put Donald Trump in power, where, as he says, he has promised to be a dictator, well, for a day, but of course that never ends with a day. They have promised to get rid of the independence of the federal judiciary, to get rid of the independence of the military, to get rid of our independent civil service, and to make all of those branches of government subservient to an authoritarian who has promised to institute Christian nationalism, which will strip women of their rights, which will strip environmental protections, which will strip labor protections, that will, in fact, institute a government that looks very much like Hungary does now or like Vladimir Putin’s Russia does.

HR: And it is imperative that people understand that this is not rooted in reality, that the world that is being sold to them by the MAGA Republican movement is deliberately disinformation to get them to vote away their democracy. Because even as even Trump says, once you have voted in 2024 for him, you will not need to vote again. I mean, he’s made that very clear. Now, there are elections that are being held in Hungary and there are elections that are being held in Russia, but everybody knows how they’re going to come out.

BB: Yeah, right.

HR: And so everybody says it couldn’t happen in America. And I, first of all, the world can change on a dime for the better or for the worse. But it did happen in America. You know, if you look at the American South from about 1874 to about 1965, it was a one party state.

HR: There were elections, but we all knew who was going to win them. It was going to be the Democratic Party that was going to win them. And that meant not only that Black and Brown Americans had no protections from rape or assault or even murder and certainly no protections for their wages. It also meant that poor whites didn’t have any protection either, that you were at the mercy of whomever was in charge of your state government. And that was, you know, an elite in the state. It also meant that capital fled the state. So the South was extraordinarily backward economically until the federal government came in under FDR in the 1930s. So the idea that we are not really at risk of authoritarianism is simply wrong. And it’s so important that people understand this, that your vote is your voice and it must be based in reality.

HR: And that if somebody is asking you to respond with hatred or anger and to respond quickly and to blame somebody else, you need to look more deeply into it because it is almost certainly a psychological operation designed to get you to give up your rights.

BB: So powerful, Heather, and so accurate. And unfortunately, Texas can be a very difficult, I mean, it’s my home. It’s been my home for generations. But it can be such a warning, I think, to other parts in the country that things cannot happen here. I mean, the gerrymandering, the pulling of voting machines, I mean, it’s just almost like we’ve lost control in a weird way. And so, yeah, I would love to know your thoughts.

HR: Well, I would just, I agree with you. Texas is a great example, so is Florida. But I would just like to point out to your listeners, the MAGA Republicans would not be acting in these ways if they thought they had the majority.

BB: That’s right.

HR: The fact that they are stripping the right to vote, that they are gerrymandering, that they’re taking away drop boxes for voting, that says they don’t believe they have the majority. The fact that the Democrats are like “Please, please, please, let as many people vote as possible,” shows that they know that what they want to do is very popular. And that’s a really important thing to remember as people are feeling more and more against the wall, that the reason they’re feeling against the wall in places like Texas is because the radicals recognize that they cannot win in a free and fair election. So rather than feeling like it’s only you against everybody in your state, there’s actually a majority of you who think like you do. And I got to say…

BB: I love that.

HR: Yeah. But, you know, think about Massachusetts. Massachusetts consistently puts Democrats in charge of our legislature, consistently. And then elects a Republican governor, not always, but often. Nobody’s trying to take away anybody’s votes in Massachusetts because they know that people like what they’re doing. And that seems to me to be such a dramatic difference from a place like Texas. Florida’s done the same thing. Florida started voter ID laws in 1998. They threw about 100,000 people off the rolls in 1998. Remember what happened two years later? The presidential election of 2000 came down to about 527 votes, not 1,000, 527 votes. We know the hanging chads made all the difference in that particular district. But think about those 100,000 largely Democrats who didn’t get to vote in that election. That’s how you win elections if you know you don’t have the people behind you.

BB: I am a half-glass-full person, too. What are you hopeful about as we finish this one? I believe, I mean, I know it’s crazy, but I believe people are inherently good and inherently care about each other and their families. And I do believe people have a deep sense of justice. I think a narrative that breeds fear is a hard thing to combat as an individual, but easier as a collective. What are you hopeful about?

HR: I think narratives of fear are easiest to push when the economy is bad. If you look at reform in the United States, it always happens when people feel they can feed their families, which is something that President Joe Biden really doubled down on. And I think the reason that Trump keeps saying, “No there isn’t, the economy is not good, these numbers are fake,” is because if people are feeling like things are good for their families, and by good I mean they can eat and they have jobs and they have a roof over their heads and so on, they are much likely to embrace the narrative of fear. But what gives me hope is like you, I believe that people are basically good, and I also believe that they do care about justice and fairness. But I would actually add to that, that one of the reasons that we’re in the crisis that we’re in, in the United States at least, is because times are changing. The demographics are changing, the economy is changing.

HR: We’ve got the crisis of global climate change, of global warming and climate change. We’ve got migration. We’ve got the pandemics coming at us. We’ve got all this stuff going on. And those times are always times of fear, but they are also times of extraordinary creativity. So if you look around you and just see the fear, you are missing all the new music and all the new voices and all the new languages and all the new ways to think about literature and to think about politics and to think about how we interact with each other and to think about clothing and to think about art. And when I look around me and listen to an old radio station and have it play all kinds of new music that I hadn’t ever heard before. Or when I go to the supermarket in the middle of Maine and somebody is speaking Spanish, I think, “You know, we can do anything if we can tap into this creativity and these new ideas and these new ways of looking at the world.” And we have done it before.

HR: So that when we think, for example, of the 1890s, which were so crippled by strikes and by disease and by struggles over immigration and by violence and so on, you can certainly look at it only that way because that’s very much a part of the story. But it was also the period of new music. We get ragtime and we get jazz and we get country music and we get all kinds of new art by 1913. We’ve got the Armory Show that brings modernism to America. We’ve got brand new literature. We’ve got, you know, U.S. Grant sort of sparking, with his memoirs, the idea of realism in literature, which gives us eventually is going to give us Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway. And we’ve got new ways to think about politics. We get the rise of the idea that the American government should protect individuals by holding back the big corporations that are destroying people’s lives. And we get new kinds of clothing and we get new ways to think about gender and we get all these new things that create the progressive era in America and change the United States and change world history.

HR: And so when I think about this moment and certainly the fear is there and the danger is there. And, it keeps me up. I also think about this extraordinary moment of creativity and what it could accomplish if only we embrace it.

BB: This has been just a highlight for me of my career, to be honest with you.

HR: It’s fun. We had a great time.

BB: We had a really good time. And I just deeply appreciate you and your work.

HR: Back at you. You know, I think we’re… we’re sort of on two sides of the same issues.

BB: I think so. And… and yeah, I’m going to be a historian the next time around or a singer songwriter or maybe… maybe a singer songwriter historian.

HR: Well, I tell you, there’s plenty of room for more of us. But now that you say that, I’m going to follow up with you on something.

BB: Oh, my God, I can’t wait. I mean, I can’t wait. So Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, her daily letters are just amazing. Her book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, we’ll link to everywhere you can find her, follow her, dig into her work, invite her to walk alongside you as you try to figure out where we are, where we’re going, by understanding where we’ve been, which I think is absolutely essential. Thank you for spending this time with us for both the podcasts. Really appreciate it, Heather.

HR: Thank you for having me. It’s been a real joy.

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BB: You know, first of all, thanks for being here. Thanks for being a part of the conversation. Thanks for listening. One of my favorite parts, I think Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, Dr. Sarah Lewis, two of the historians I’ve talked to on the podcast, the one thing they have in common that I think is really important for me personally, is rather than looking at history as a sequence of failures, it’s more of a walk through history where we’ve made mistakes and bad choices and where there’s a ton of possibility and hope when we are our best selves and our worst selves. And for me, the possibilities, the potential and the hopefulness is just an incredible part of the work she does. And I would say the same thing’s true about Dr. Sarah Lewis. You can learn more about this episode with Heather along with all the show notes on brenebrown.com. We’ll link to Heather’s book, Democracy Awakening, and her newsletter, Letters from an American, which wow, this is something to subscribe to. If you just want to make yourself smarter, a deeper, richer thinker about what’s going on in the world, it’s incredible.

BB: You learn a little bit about the lobsterman that she is married to, some really great pictures that he takes, and just a ton about history. She kind of goes all over the place based on what’s in the news, and it’s made me a better person and definitely a better citizen. We’ll have transcripts for you within three to five days of the episode going live, and you can sign up for our newsletter on the same episode page. Stay awkward, brave, and kind, and register to vote. Please register to vote. Authoritarianism does not happen because tanks roll in and take over. It happens because of indifference at the ballot box. So please show up and vote. Take care.

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BB: Unlocking Us is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group. The music is by Carrie Rodriguez and Gina Chavez. Get new episodes as soon as they’re published by following Unlocking Us on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

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