The Opposite of Chaos is Community
A discussion with the screenwriter, filmmaker, and Democratic Party messaging consigliere Billy Ray.
Billy Ray is a screenwriter and director and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. His writing credits include Color of Night, Captain Phillips, Richard Jewell, and The Hunger Games. He wrote and directed Shattered Glass, Breach, The Last Tycoon, and The Comey Rule. Since 2016, he’s been the messaging consigliere for the Democratic Party, helping scores of politicians and candidates with issue framing, speechwriting, debate prep, and rapid response. If you’ve seen Democrats not in disarray, getting the word out like champs, chances are, Billy Ray has his fingerprints all over the job well done.
This is a particularly good time to talk to Ray, because he is both hopeful and realistic. He thinks Biden is a superb president, as I do; he thinks Biden will win re-election, as I do; and he has the polling and the statistics to back up what he says. I always leave a conversation with him feeling better about the state of the country.
Here are three takeaways from our discussion:
The country is not as divided as most of us think.
The MAGA loyalists have been steeped in violent patriotic rhetoric for some time now: Civil War this, Don’t Tread On Me that. Those of us who pay close attention to all of this fear that their views represent what most conservatives think. And that’s simply not true.
“There are a lot of really dangerous lies in our politics,” Ray tells me, “but there’s no bigger lie than the idea that we are a divided country. We’re not, and it’s not close.”
He begins:
And so what we need to understand is it’s not that they disagree with us. They don’t. They don’t disagree with us on abortion. They don’t disagree with us on guns. They don’t disagree with us on protecting Social Security and Medicare. They don’t disagree with us on the environment. They don’t disagree with us on decriminalizing cannabis. They don’t disagree with us on anything. It’s just that they think we’re fucking crazy.
And then explains what he means:
You put a minimum wage on the ballot in Florida, it got 60 percent. You put it on the ballot in Arkansas, it got 62 percent. In Missouri, it got 67. These are states where Democrats routinely get their asses kicked. And yet, this fundamental democratic idea is so wildly popular there. Two-thirds of the country agrees with us on abortion. Two-thirds of the country agrees with us on guns. You know, if you don't say universal background checks, which is a phrase everybody hates, and if you instead say violent history checks, 95 percent of America comes with you. Ninety-five, okay? They agree with us on safe storage. They agree with us on protecting Social Security and Medicare. They agree with us on everything.
The disagreements lie in the wedge issues.
It’s true that we disagree with many of them about Donald Trump. We know him to be a liar, a longtime criminal, a Kremlin stooge, a corrupt executive, a serial sexual predator, a raging narcissist who insults our military and our veterans, Epstein’s wingman, and, oh yeah, a catastrophically awful president who intentionally sabotaged the pandemic response because he thought it would help him at the polls— and an insurrectionist who, when he got his ass handed to him in 2020, tried to overthrow the government on his way out the door. They see some weird combination of Rambo, Jesus, Don Juan, and Don Rickles.
But in terms of actual issues? In the grand scheme of things, the points of contention are minor, as Ray explains:
What do they not agree with us on? Cultural bullshit. They don’t like it when we tell them how to talk. They don’t like cancel culture. They don’t like when we call them deplorable. They don’t like when we tell them they’ve got white privilege. They don’t like when we tell them that we don’t like their pronouns. They don’t like when we say, “No, no, you’ve got to say pregnant person instead of pregnant woman.” They don’t like it. Okay? So how about we stop doing it?
Because it’s got nothing to do with anything. We’re talking about something so much more fundamental than that. We’re talking about saving the greatest democracy that was ever invented by humankind. That's a pretty big deal. So if they want to say pregnant woman instead of pregnant person, okay. Okay. I’m okay with it.
And by the way, if someone who’s trans wants to call themselves a pregnant person, I would die for their right to do so. But I’m not going to tell someone else how to talk. I’m not going to do it. And I’m not going to cancel them if they fail to. Because I need their vote on something bigger, which is democracy. Am I going to lose them to Donald Trump because I’m going to insist on telling them how to talk? That’s asinine. And that’s another way that Democrats need to learn how to communicate.
The most effective way to talk to conservatives about abortion is to press them on how all these new forced-birth laws will work.
To articulate this point, Ray sets up a theoretical debate with debate champion and universal asshole Ted Cruz:
If I were Colin Allred, running for Senate in Texas, against Ted Cruz, and I were on a debate stage with Ted, I would say, “Ted, I need you to take my 90 seconds on this one and explain something to me, because I don’t get it. How is government-mandated pregnancy going to work?”
That’s the phrase you want to use: government-mandated pregnancy. Because that’s what happened to that woman in Texas, right? She was pregnant, couldn’t have the baby—like, wasn’t ready to have the baby. And the State of Texas said, “Fuck you, we’re making you have it.” That’s government-mandated pregnancy.
So I would say, “Ted, tell me how this is going to work as policy. You’ve got the Supreme Court, you’ve got the Texas Supreme Court, you’ve got the governor. Okay? So, choice is outlawed. Let’s take my 20-year-old unmarried niece. She’s pregnant. It’s too late to have a conversation with her about abstinence. Okay, how is government-mandated pregnancy going to work? Are we now going to have a new layer of police bureaucracy to follow girls and women like that around the state of Texas to make sure they don’t seek healthcare?
“Okay, that’s the plan. How are we paying for it? How many bridges are we not going to build? How many schools are we not going to build? Which is ironic because those kids are going to need schools.
“Okay, so we’re not going to hire a new layer of police bureaucracy? Okay, great. So we’re going to take Texas state troopers and city cops off of their regular beats to follow my 20-year-old niece around. Okay, how many robberies aren’t they going to prevent? How many rapes aren’t they going to investigate?
“And by the way, Ted, did you know that 60 percent of the women who seek abortions in America already have a kid? They’re not baby-murdering monsters, they’re mothers who want to do their jobs better. So take me through it. How does it work?”
And then Cruz would say, Right to life and sanctity of this. And you say, “Wait a minute, Ted—I didn’t ask you to defend it. I asked you to explain it.
“You know, you’ve been in Congress. I mean, you don’t actually write legislation. That’s not your thing. You don’t actually pass bills. That’s not what you do. But you have signed bills and you know that they have to state how it’s going to be paid for and how it’s going to be implemented. So take me through it. How does government mandated pregnancy work?”
That’s how I would talk to him about choice. Because if you’re a conservative, you go, “That doesn't sound crazy at all. That sounds like a reasonable questioning of this policy.”
The bottom line, Ray says, is that Republicans fear chaos.
“Conservatives like safety,” he tells me. “They like borders around things. They like borders around countries. They like borders around gender. They like borders around sexuality. They tend to live around people who live and think and look like them. They don’t tend to like a lot of accents or a lot of colors or a lot of flavors. They want something safe. And they’ve been taught by Fox News and by the Republican Party that we are the antithesis of safety, that we bring chaos.”
Democrats need to present themselves as the opposite of chaos—which, as he points out, is not order but community. That’s how we win.
“If you give a conservative the choice between authoritarianism and what they perceive to be chaos, they’ll pick authoritarianism every time,” he says. “They’re doing it right in front of us.”
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S7 E17: The Opposite of Chaos is Community (with Billy Ray)
In this discussion, Billy Ray discusses his political “origin story” and his tips on Democratic Party messaging, reveals the secret to communicating with conservatives, and lauds the achievements of President Biden. They talk about reproductive rights, the Supreme Court, the 2024, how the Dems should frame trump’s criminality, and more. Plus: the Sam Alito blues.
Follow Billy:
https://x.com/BillyRay5229
The Clarence Thomas article for The New Republic I cite in my intro:
https://newrepublic.com/post/182635/clarence-thomas-son-mark-martin-jail-relationship
Thanks to Stephen Koff for the brilliant harmonica track.
Thanks AURA. Go to AURA.com/PROTECTION for a 14 day trial plus a check of your data to see if your personal information has been leaked online, all for FREE.
PROGRAMMING NOTES
This is the last podcast episode for June. New episodes resume in three weeks, on Friday, July 5.
There is no Five 8 tonight or next Friday.
This is because LB and I are Allison Gill’s guests at her live-on-stage shows in NYC (Saturday, June 15) and Boston (Sunday, June 16). There are, I believe, still a few tickets left for the New York show.
Happy Father’s Day!
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore. Stage at the final Republican Party debate, hosted by Fox News, before the 2016 Iowa caucuses at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Iowa.
When I opened my email and saw the headline, I was confused, because last night I did a little inventory check of what I have written on my substack so far this year and it is just pretty much the same theme: community, community, community. I hadn't realized it, but it is apparently thematic.
As for containing chaos, I disagree slightly, but only because after my all the writing and researching I did over the years with my project docu-mental, I came to see that the chaos is generated by them. They aren't afraid of it, they create and weaponize it. And then it's not about boundaries, it's about separating us from one another so they can divide and conquer.
Mitch McConnell's behavior is and always has been one thing: fascist. And as I have commented in here more than once, all fascism is when you boil it down is systematic and lethal snobbery: We're better than all the rest of you shits.
Since leaving DC and now living in rural Kentucky, yes. No one talks about pronouns, because no one gives a shit. People are neighborly because that is how people are. All this other nonsense is made up. I am starting to wonder about the numbers and ratings for talk radio. Are they even real? No one seems to listen to it here. If they do, they don't mention it. I never hear it coming from anyone's pickup truck, either.
Thank you for the positivity 🙏🏼