In the last episode of my podcast B*tch, Listen, I mused about a problem I can’t stop thinking about: Online progressives have built the most informed progressive public in U.S. history and it has not translated into any form of power or institutional change. Not even close.

Anyone can explain anything to anyone now. That’s new. Twenty years ago if you wanted to understand how the Federalist Society was reshaping the federal judiciary in alignment with a Christofascist agenda, you needed a law degree or to browse a very specific corner of the internet. 

But now we are a nation of content creators with tiny microphones who are explaining everything and anything under the sun. When it comes to trying to make heads or tails of what the Supreme Court is doing, you don’t need a law degree. You just need a phone and 15 minutes. 

The information is everywhere. The podcasts, the newsletters, the Instagram carousels breaking down Supreme Court decisions in eight slides—everywhere.

And we are still losing. Badly. Across the board. Because all the education in the world isn’t a replacement for actual power.

(Listen: We Did the Reading. Fascism Came Anyway)

I’ve been doing this work for 12 years. I have explained abortion jurisprudence in every format that exists. I have been on panels and podcasts and Twitter.

Roe fell anyway. And voting rights have been slowly dismantled, with the Supreme Court set to stick the last knife in the belly of the Voting Rights Act later this term in Louisiana v. Callais. The Court that is supposed to interpret the Constitution is openly pursuing a political agenda, and a significant portion of the country either doesn’t know or can’t figure out what to do about it.

I don’t think the problem is that progressives aren’t learning. I think they are learning more than they ever have. I think the problem is that we have confused the classroom for the whole project. We built an incredible apparatus for producing informed people and called it a movement. Somewhere along the way awareness became a substitute for power instead of a precursor to it.

The right hasn’t made that mistake. The Federalist Society doesn’t just educate lawyers—it has built a pipeline that turned legal education into judicial appointments into a Supreme Court supermajority. 

It has treated the classroom as the beginning of something, not the end. The beginning was indoctrination in the classroom. The end was a seat on a federal court........

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