This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Ulta and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

That was fascinating and a little bit scary to be honest because I spent a long time reading their chats,

about thousands and thousands of their messages from this closed chat room that a bunch of different

groups, white supremacist groups had leading up to the Charlottesville protest in 2017.

It was people who really were trying to figure out how to recruit more white Americans to

their point of view and they were thinking in a gradual way about things like optics.

What should we be wearing? What should we be saying? What word should we not be using? Should we

have tattoos? What kind of flags? What are flags look like? All of that was kind of fascinating

because it was really a space that they had to strategize and to figure out who they were.

I had very many moments where I thought I would love for progressive groups to have a similar

sort of space, or it's a funny thing to say, but I really felt that it could be very useful

to a different sort of group that had a more sort of pro-social agenda than these guys did.

That's Goal Beckerman. His description of how the white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville

was organized is a chilling example of how a social movement can gain traction by using a period

of incubation out of the public spotlight. In his new book The Quiet Before, positive examples

range from letter writers in 17th century France trying to figure out the size of the Mediterranean

to women today using a closed WhatsApp group to seek a bigger role in the world of baseball.

This is going to be really interesting for me because our show is about communicating and

connecting and your new book is about communicating and connecting in a big way.

It is. How social big social change takes place.

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