I listened to the episode titled “Is Deep Canvassing the Serum America Needs?” I generally don’t like to listen to these kinds of podcasts, ones where two people just talk for the entire time. With these kinds of podcasts, they’re generally not as thoroughly edited as something like 99% Invisible, which incoporates clips from interviews to help weave a story, rather than just plunking down a conversation between two people with advertisements in between. The only podcast I can listen to like this is Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, only because Conan is one of my favorite comedians of all time.

In terms of story, it’s mostly an interview with George Goehl about deep canvassing, voting in rural America, political strategy to get rural America to vote, and how effective deep canvassing can be. It mostly tells us the importance of deep canvassing, and having a conversation with people in rural, largely white communities. They haven’t experienced as much diversity as someone in a city, so they may just follow what a politician tells them (blame these people for this issue, blame these other people for this other issue, etc). However, through deep canvassing, you can help these people realize that those groups, whether it be the Jewish or immigrants, aren’t causing issues. Illegal immigrants generally aren’t going up to North Dakota to steal petroleum engineering jobs.

The main connection to language and culture I got from it was how a poor understanding of other cultures, and to that extent language, can cause people to blame people of those cultures for issues they may not even be involved with. Rural people only have their own cultures, and probably have never seen other cultures, so they lack understanding of what other cultures may be like. So, immigrants and the like are then seen as “different” or “outsiders,” and somehow since America was fine before their immigration, they are the problem. Deep canvassing can help solve this by explaining the actual causes of issues, which, according tot he episode, had a good rate of converting people to vote for Biden.