Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Jacobin show. I'm Jen Pan here today with Paul Prescott. Paul, what's new and what do we have going on today?

Well, we have a great show. We have Lesley who pulled on to talk about his great political education program. He runs in unions called Runaway inequality.

Right there. There it is there. He also wrote an amazing book about Tony Mizaki, the legendary labor leader. So we're going to talk about all that with Les.

We also, I want to mention before Les comes on, we have another special guest who I think you all know. Yes, it's Cale Brooks, our producer. He's here for every show, but he will be coming in front of the screen for today's show because he wrote an article recently called From Posting to Politics, which is of course where we got the title for today's episode.

The article is really great. It's in Jacobin, of course. I suggest go check it out if you haven't already. But the kind of overarching theme of today's show is political education, organizing workers and political messaging.

So on that note, I want to start off by talking about political messaging because there was a pretty interesting study that came out recently by two political scientists at Yale.

And what they were doing in this study is they wanted to look at how framing things as racial justice measures affected people's support for race neutral policies.

And before I dive into the study, I just want to say, you know, right off the bat, of course, messaging is a very small component of organizing.

I want to be really clear that there's of course no magic phrase that you can just utter that'll make people vote a certain way or behave a certain way, let alone become socialists, right?

But that said, I do think it's important to think about how we frame what it is that we're trying to argue and what it is that we do.

So when it comes to the racial justice frame, these researchers at Yale noticed that over the last couple of years and over the last year in particular where we've seen a lot of heightened attention to racial inequality and racial disparities.

The researchers noticed that Democrats were increasingly leaning toward framing their policies as racial justice measures.

So you, you know, we have tons of examples of different politicians at the state and federal level saying that x, y, and z policies are reparations, for example, a very classic one is politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Ayanna Presley have talked about student student debt relief being a racial justice issue.

So let's run a clip of Ayanna talking about that.

Let me be clear, the student debt crisis has always been a racial and economic justice issue, but for too long, the narrative has excluded black and Latinx communities and the ways in which this debt has exacerbated deeply entrenched racial and economic inequities in our nation.

These disparities didn't just magically occur. They are the consequences of generations of systemic racism, discrimination, and what I call policy violence that is systemically denied black and Latinx families the opportunity to build wealth, forcing our families to take on greater rates of student debt for the chance at the same degrees are y counterparts.

So this is interesting. Again, I feel like this is kind of a standard way that Democrats talk about a lot of policies these days. So what these Yale researchers set out to do was they surveyed around 5,000 people. I think each of the respondents took an online survey where they were exposed to different forms of messaging and what the researchers wanted to determine is whether people's support for certain certain policies increases when it's framed as this racial justice measure.

So I'm going to get to their findings in a second, but first I want to look at some of the messages that they presented to their respondents. So the first frame they showed to respondents was a neutral frame, and that reads something like this. So this is about increasing the minimum wage.

So this is a very standard kind of minimum wage message. Congress has not increased the federal minimum wage currently set at 725 since 2009.

Some Democrats are proposing a policy that would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025. After 2025, the minimum wage would be adjusted each year to keep pace with growth in the median wage, a measure of wages for typical workers.

So you know, pretty dry, just a standard like this is neutral. This is what a minimum wage increase would do. Then the researchers looked at how people responded to a race frame, which goes like this.

So the people who were exposed to the race frame got kind of the standard messaging, you know, the neutral frame about the minimum wage, but then they also got this.

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