How to Fight Back with Messaging Guru Anat Shenker-Osorio

This is Brett Mycelos from Midas Touch, and welcome to this week's edition of the Midas Meetup series. This is a live interview series we've been doing every Thursday at 1 p.m.
Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific time, live on our Substack.
You could watch this live every single Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m.
Pacific. This is an interview series, and we've been bringing on some of the most brilliant thinkers in the space.
So today we are especially excited to welcome Anat Shankar

Asario to the show. She is a political messaging guru extraordinaire and strategist.
Anat, welcome to the show. Thank you.
I'm thrilled to be part of the Midas cinematic universe, which is what it feels like. You are definitely part of the universe and it's been an honor to know you over many, many years.
And as our description for this Substack Live is adequately or accurately said, you know, you are a messaging expert in these areas. We need that more than ever right now.
You're with a group that you founded called the Research Collaborative, and you go around the country. You speak with people, you talk to focus groups, you're looking at the trends, you're seeing how people are responding to different messaging.
And, you know, it's interesting because we've been reporting a lot now. It seems that as these MAGA Republicans are going to not be doing these town halls, they're canceling these town halls and running away from it, you are starting to see, and we reported on it last night and this morning, Democrats, whether they're taking our advice or they're also just doing it on their, you know, it's not exactly like we're the only people who have said it out there, but they're saying, hey, maybe we should be going into some of these districts, these reddish or purplish districts.
Look, Senator Bernie Sanders is getting a hero's welcome there. And he's listening and talking to the people and asking, what does it mean to live paycheck to paycheck? And people are saying it out loud.
And those ideas are being exchanged. So we see AOC doing that.
And we see a whole tour now, though, of other Democrats now saying, we're going to go into these reddish and purplish areas and we're going to speak to these voters. So the question is, is what should they be speaking about? And just remove the political party aspect of it.
What should people be speaking about to meet the moment? Yeah, thanks for the question and for the introduction. What I would say is that we cannot seem to be or be in defense of the status quo.
We cannot seem to be offering people a vision that is, you know, January 19th, 2025, meaning right before inauguration. People understood before that day, and they certainly understand right now, that the way the world works and the way that things are done, whether that be our electoral system and certainly our financial system, is beyond broken.
And so it begins, if you are in these town hall settings, with demonstrating not just empathy, but I would say showing not telling that you actually know

that there are sides, right? This neoliberal fiction that, quote unquote, a rising tide lifts

all boats, which I think too many Democrats fell prey to and perhaps still are, that was a sellout

of the Democratic vision and of the time under FDR when if you were a working person, if you were working class, you didn't just vote Democratic. Being a Democrat was a core part of your identity.
And we were not lamenting, you know, why don't we have purchase with the working class? FDR spoke quite eloquently, as I'm sure you know, about, you know, I welcome their hatred, speaking of the big bosses at the time. So really, the name of the game is saying, I see you, I hear you, you have more month than check.
That's not right. I see you, I hear you, you are not getting a fair return on your work.
I see you, I hear you, you just want to go to the doctor and not get sick worrying about the bill. Speak in the concrete language of lived experience, not in the language of abstraction like universal single payer health care, which is a policy and an important one.
Don't mistake me. But that kind of language is what I call selling the recipe and not the brownie.
You have to speak in brownie speak, meaning the outcome of the policy and tell folks that, yeah, there are sides. The sides are almost every single one of us who just want to get by, put food on the table and be home in time to eat it.
Ensure our kids have the freedom to learn the truth of our past. Ensure our neighbors can make it home safe at the end of the day.
Ensure that we can live our lives, be with the people we love and express ourselves as we see fit. And then there are these macro Republicans who are bankrolled by billionaires who want to take the wealth our work creates and turn us against each other, hoping that if they can get us to point our finger in the wrong direction, we won't notice while they pick our pockets.
That's pretty much the essence of the message. I hope everybody sees right now why Anad Shanker Osario is in the Midas universe of superheroes right now, because it's where I, she helps for my intellectual foundation and gut checks me on these types of things as well, which ultimately form the foundation for the type of reporting you see here on the Midas Touch Network.
Let's talk about what the Republican messaging is right now and what your reaction to it is. You hear some variation of a MAGA Republican senator or congressperson saying, look, this is a detox period.
We need no pain, no gain. This short-term suffering is needed.
We are a bloated nation. This was a sugar high, and we need to come down from the sugar high.
There's various variations of that, but they all seem to be like suffering is okay for the greater good of what's to come, which seems to be more suffering. But let's just start with the messaging, which is what's your view? Does it surprise you that that's the direction that they're going in? And how do people who do not want to suffer when we hear, okay, fight, what does it mean to counteract that? But let's start with what they're doing and then how to counteract it.
Yeah. So what they're doing, which you summed up beautifully, has to be understood in a broader context.
And that broader context is their 30, 40, arguably longer year war perverting our notion of government, perverting the idea that we can have nice things, that we can collect money together in order to, I don't know, flush our toilets and have the stuff go away, send our kids to school and have them have maybe somewhat of a nice time, be able to get health care, be able to drive on roads and all the rest. The reason why we have come to this place and they are able to, you know, make this sort of you need to suffer now is because that's not the entirety of their argument.
The entirety of their argument is that they are the strong men. You know, this is the authoritarian siren song we know from the world and time over.
And they are coming to wrestle the evil behemoth of government, the bloat, the waste, the fraud, the abuse. That's not my language.
That's theirs. Hopefully that's clear.
And the reason why you need to feel pain right now is because government has grown too large and it has enabled and empowered bad people, right? We know this from the older language of welfare queen. We know this from the language of giving to the undeserving.
So they've already constructed for themselves a platform wherein government is bad because it takes from quote unquote hardworking people who are coded as white and gives it to profligate, undeserving people who are coded as black and immigrant and, you know, not like you, not real Americans or not real Californians or not real Minnesotans or whatever you feel in the state. And so their argument for pain right now, because because of course, as you rightly said, people are feeling pain, is right.
This is a short term thing in order to deal with this kind of giant problem. And it's only because they've set up for themselves this entire foundation of thought, wherein they shame and blame some other.
And that other, you know, has different manifestations at different times. Sometimes it's Black folks, sometimes it's Latinos, sometimes it's trans people, sometimes it's all of the above.
But that's why they can make this argument, and it is compelling not to most people, but to their core base. So they then utilize that core base, the MAGA red hat wearing base, in order to spread that gospel.
The antidote to it is to recognize that it is absolutely essential, of course, to talk about people's pain and to do it not in abstract terms, as I said before, but, you know, you want to be able to go to the supermarket and fill up your basket. Like, What the fuck is this shit? Just to, you know, speak in very, very on the hill approved language.
But it's also important to remember that politics isn't solitaire. And if we are not actively countering the rest of their narrative, then our economic only promises actually don't break through because they're still hearing, yes, but immigrants are going to take my job.
Yes, but, you know, undeserving people are on Medicaid and they should have work requirements and why aren't they working? So what the message requires is both and. It requires saying, hey, look, most of us believe that people who work for a living ought to earn a living and that the money that we put together collectively should fund our futures and care for our needs.
But today, these MAGA Republicans and the broligarchs that they decided could engage in a hostile takeover of our government.

And I want to stop myself and say, always refer to Trump and the ilk as the regime, never refer to them as the government. Our government are the civil servants who actually do things for us, who make sure that this country functions when they are actually allowed to do their jobs.
So that's a distinction, the regime versus the government. Going back to the message, but today these macro-Republicans and their Brolicark enablers want to take your money to line their own pockets while they destroy everything our families need.
They think if they can make us hate each other, turn on each other, that we won't notice that they're the ones inflicting pain upon us. We have to remember that their story, as evil and horrible and completely false as it is, it has heroes, it has villains, it has an origin story.
And so ours needs to as well. You know, one of the things that I see as, which I think is a good sign, but a sign of how desperate the other side's getting, but we have to counteract it, I think.
And I want to get your thought. We're seeing them now say, well, look, what if, you know, yeah, we didn't lower prices on day one.
We didn't do peace in Ukraine in 24 hours, but we're coming up with a plan now. If you make under $150,000, no taxes at all, or we're going to do a Doge rebate, all this money, and it's not a lot of money at all, actually, and it's all bogus, that Doge is getting, you're going to get Doge rebate checks, and we're going to make you rich.

And so I've been calling it a Ponzi scheme regime because this is the next part of the Ponzi, which is, OK, we tricked you now.

Now we got to we're going to hustle you again with the next one until it busts like the Ponzi schemes of the Madoffs and blows up and becomes a thing. What does that signal? And how do you just stop that and say, okay, y'all, don't you see this, what they're doing? They're doing it again and again and again.
And how do people keep falling for it? That's my first question. Then I got one that everybody's asking, which is what can regular people do? But let's start with the first one.
Yeah. So what I would say is that if you're going to operate within their frame and respond to the proposition, the complete bullshit proposition they're putting forward, as you rightly identified, I think that's a very clever way to do it.
I think that's the wrong choice. I think living inside of their frame is a mistake because then you are ultimately in a you said, they said kind of thing where they say this is the greatest thing since, you know, free eggs.
And you say, no, it's a Ponzi scheme. It's a little bit like having the endless debate that we've seen in many states, New York in particular, crime is up, crime is down, crime is up, crime is not up, crime is up, crime is not up.
How many times can I talk about crime? Did you notice how much I talked about crime? Did I make you think about crime? And so if you're saying this is a Ponzi scheme, unless you're very, very methodical and elegant about it, you're still sort of raising to the fore their proposal, if I can even call it a proposal. Instead, what you do is you exit the frame altogether and you say, this is the MAGA murder budget.
This is a budget that is hell-bent on destroying the lives and controlling the futures of every single person that doesn't live, look, love, pray or think like them. This is the MAGA murder budget.
It's what they've put forward. It's what they believe in.
They will take our money in order to destroy our lives. You don't even credit like you don't go into this is actually why you don't need to, you know, this is actually why their thing isn't true because then you're playing their game.
Does that make sense? And not only does it make sense, that's what we live by. It's why I don't ever even debate or step into the frame of the MAGA podcast people and, you know, why I will say on the Midas Touch Network, we're going to stand up for marginalized communities.
I believe that, you know, you know, being a bully is the weakest thing you can be. That doesn't make you alpha or masculine.
But when they try to bait me to get into all of those debates also about, you know, a transgender athlete in San Jose State. To me, that's their frame to try to take you away from all of the things that they're doing.
And I go, first off, I'm never going to do anything to bully people. I'm going to stand up for people and I'm never going to punch down to marginalized communities.
But why is that what you're thinking about? You are gutting Medicaid, Social Security. You're taking away people's rights.
You're you're destroying people's pensions. And this is what you want to even talk.
So I don't even go there with them because you have, to your point, exiting their frame. And too long, I think both corporate media and Democrats have been living in an entirely bogus, bullshit, bizarro framework, you know, you know, dystopian 1984 is fantasy world that looks like Elon Musk's X or Twitter and not speaking to Americans about the actual issues.
bring them back, exit frame, reframe to where people really are.

So what you're saying makes a ton of sense.

What should people do about it?

This is the comment that you're seeing a lot.

People go, what do regular people do about it?

What we do as a media network, when we show, I think,

the Bernie Sanders rallies and use our platform now to do things and show things that never existed on corporate media before with more viewers. That's that's what we can do with our platform.
But regular people say, what can we do? Well, I say you're a part of the Midas Mighty. You built this network.
So we're in this with you. But people want to know what can they do today? What can they do tomorrow? So what do you tell all the people who are commenting like that?

Yeah. So it's critical to remember that social proof, which is the psychological phenomenon,

I sometimes call it the middle school theory of messaging, is the most persuasive tool in our

belt. And social proof just references the fact that people do the thing they think people like

them do. So to make this visceral to all of us, I think we can all, well, some of us are old enough to remember a time where it was socially acceptable, at least in many circles, to believe that, you know, two men shouldn't marry or two women shouldn't marry.
And it was, you know, anathema and it was bad. And it's Adam and Eve,

not Adam and Steve. And that was a sort of majority view.
Obviously, we had an extraordinary movement toward marriage equality that eventually became, hey, look, folks, we're getting married. Either get on the bus and accept this, or you're going to be having to explain to your grandchildren why you had such a freaking hard time, right?

So when you actually wear your beliefs, you speak your beliefs, you show your beliefs, again, I'm sorry to use the example, but the odious red MAGA hat is a perfect example of social proof. Most people are not in the mighty Midas, as many, I know many, many, many hundreds of thousands of people are, but that's, you know, there's, there's a few people left over who haven't woken up.
And so they're grappling right now when we can see it in focus groups, focus groups are an extended meditation on people wondering if they're being gaslit or not. They are saying over and again, am I nuts? This seems like a really big deal.
Is it a big deal? I can't really tell. Is this just sort of what happens when there's a new administration, or is this some kind of break? And the reason that they're grappling is because it's sort of the first mover problem where everyone's like, well, I feel like I'm kind of freaking out, but it seems like kind of no one's freaking out.
So I don't know. Am I overreacting?

So the first thing you can do is actually, you know, you own a barn.

You live in a rural bit.

Paint the side of it saying fabulously fighting fascism or say freedom over fascism or say I'm in the know.

K-N-O-W, but also N-O.

Free America. That is an extraordinarily effective free America from wages we can't live on.
Free America from health care that we can't afford. Free America from Elon Musk, who thinks he can purchase himself a country for very little money down.
Free America from the hate, the division, and the fear they are peddling. So first and foremost, and maybe it seems tiny, but you actually need to show not tell that this is the majority position.
The majority of us do not agree with this. We are not into this.
We will not go along. That can be a symbol.
I happen to be wearing right now a little Lady Liberty pin. It can be a hat.
It can be a shirt. It can be all of the above.
It can be signs. So that's the first thing.
The second thing is to go local. I know that everything feels massive and overwhelming.
It does to me. I'm sure it does to the two of you.
But in order to actually implement this autocratic fascistic agenda, they have to do it at the local level. So where you live, here's a promise I can make to you.
You get you and three, four, five of your friends to go to the city council meeting or to go to the school board. Do you know how many people go to a school board meeting? Four of you go.
You're the majority. They're either going to implement this stuff at the local level or we're going to stop them.
So go local. And then my third piece of advice is recognize that we all need to rest.
We all need to recuperate. We all need to sort of be okay to keep going.
This is not a sprint, unfortunately, as we all know. And so figure out the issue area that is going to sustain you, the thing that you're going to be willing to keep marching and keep going to.
And when you do that, remember that their core aim and purpose is to steal our joy, is to steal our togetherness, is to steal our sense that actually we're the ones we've been waiting for. And so be more fabulous.
If you want people to come to your party, throw a better party. These protests should have music.
They should have dancing. They should have food trucks.
We should be showing, not telling, which I keep saying, that actually this is the better way to live. One of the groups I've been talking with now, the band Dropkick Murphys, and they've done an incredible job as they are traveling around the country, making, they've been making music for decades for the working class, and we're going to be highlighting a lot more of their music, obviously, going back to Boston, everybody knows the song.
Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And so, especially as we get close to St.
Paddy's Day, I'm looking forward to covering their shows and doing some exciting things, because I'm with you. Movements need music.
And I think that's, we've been working with them behind the scenes. I'm excited to to roll that out, the musical composition to it all.

So finally, as we wrap this up, you reference these focus groups.

If you can kind of summarize the findings that you have right now, the amalgamation of your focus groups as we're kind of here, you know, mid-March? Where are people? What are you seeing at a high level? Yeah, so these are focus groups I should specify with what I would call disaffected voter-eligible people. So oftentimes they're the Biden 2020 surge who didn't vote in 2024.
And hopefully it's obvious to viewers, listeners, why we're focused in on these people, because 19 million of them fall into this category and are, in fact, the large part of why we lost in 2024. And the first thing I want to say is that there is sort of a prevailing wisdom in progressive land and in democratic circles that non-voter equals non-activist.
And that is simply not true. The ladder of engagement model where the bottom rung is, if you don't vote, you're really not going to do other things.
False. There are two different ladders of engagement and direct action being out in the world, actually in opposition to this, and specifically in opposition to what undergirds this regime, which is, of course, our extraordinarily unequal economic system, to put it in the politest possible terms.
So it's astounding the degree to which these folks really, really, really get it and believe that Trump is merely a symptom. He is not sort of like the grand apotheosis of all of this.
He is, of course, you know, repugnant and horrible and all the other adjectives you want to put in there. But they understand that there is something fundamentally broken here.
And what's interesting is that in all of the punditry and speculation and kind of this endless conversation, which is completely exhausting around, you know, should Democrats be more centrist or more woke?

That's not the axis along which folks actually judge Democrats.

It's do you fight? Do you not fight?

And what they want to see, I guess not shockingly is fight they want to see that you will stand up with me for me alongside me and that is what tells them both oh you've got my back and therefore I'll have yours but it also is what signals to them this is not normal. This is not mere sort of team blue being against the policies of team red, but rather a fundamental break with what has been.
And that is sort of what would induce them to become that famed 3.5%, which you may have heard scholars of authoritarianism use as sort of a benchmark, because in all of the examples that we have from other places, when 3.5% of a population is engaged in visible resistance, there's no autocrat who has withstood that. Well, I think everybody sees right now why, i said before and not shanker osario is in the midas mighty uh uh in the team that are our our what would you call it but our marvel our marvel superheroes or whatever um we're so it is mega minus mighty cinematic universe the midas side of cinematic universe.
I love it. There's about four and a half thousand people here watching.
If everybody were to subscribe right now to the sub stacks above would be fantastic. Everybody make sure you hit subscribe.
Let's end on hopefully an optimistic note, uh, reasons, reasons for hope right now. And, and March, do you see, do you see positive right now? Believe it or not.
Yeah. And here's why we have operated many of us in a fiction for a very long time that we could vote our way to democracy.
We tried it in 2018. We tried it in 2020.
We tried it in 2022. And in those cases, 18 and 20 in particular, but 22 as well, in terms of sort of beating back the expected red wave, as we all recall, it didn't work.
Because you can't actually vote your way to democracy. The only way to actually get there is to recognize the full extent of the problem.
And so my source of hope, I didn't forget the question, is that we're in a moment of fundamental rupture. And in moments of fundamental rupture, those are also what we call persuasion windows.
What we find is that when people are engaged in reevaluating what is going on, what is true, what is false, what is the source of the problem, what are the potential solutions, we can actually make much bigger swings. And part of that is that we are actually having a conversation now, not as much as we need to, about the role of government.
Because we are in a best of times, worst of times, illustration and articulation of the absolute evil ravages of government as embodied in this horrific regime, which I summarize as of the bullies for the billionaires. This is a regime of the bullies for the billionaires.
And real government, the people who work at the EPA, the people who work at the Department of Ed, the people who work on our roads, on our weather, on, you know, all of the things, the long, long, long list of things. And we have an opportunity, and I am using the word opportunity, to actually shift this calcified evil story that government is bad because you don't know what you got till it's gone.
And loss aversion is an extraordinarily powerful force. So let's not squander this opportunity.

I want to thank you, Anad Shankar Asario, for joining us. I want to thank all the Midas Mighty for joining us here as well.
Make sure you subscribe to the sub stacks above it. All you have to do is click it.
It's a simple click, and then boom, you're subscribed. We should do this more or not.
We'd love to have you back on. and we should figure out a way

just to open up this forum to you as well, that when you do a focus group, if you have some new research, you can bring it right away, you know, to this massive audience here, because we go live here, then we post it to the sub stack, which has, you know, a distribution now of close to a million people. And so a lot of people in the United States and across the world are getting it.
And I think it's helpful to get your research and your just your data in front of people so they know how to react. I think this conversation was certainly what's great about this is that this is for everybody watching this.
This is the kind of conversation that Anat and I would before Substack, we'd have with each other and then say, all right, I'll see you later. Have a great day.
And then go on with our day. And then it would inform the videos.
So I'm learning with all of you the same way I would have if it was a private phone call. But now we can open this up and have everybody basically be on a giant conference video call and see it in action.
And we should be doing this more and more. So everyone, please subscribe to the sub stacks and not we'll have you back on.
We appreciate you. Thank you.

And I appreciate you and all you're doing.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

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