Wait… What Does That Even Mean?

What I learned from messing up, listening better, and actually connecting

Yesterday, I was part of a panel at the Field Team 6 summit with Ricardo Gutiérrez from The Comedy Resistance and Ben Meiselas from

MeidasTouch Network

. We were there to talk about something that’s becoming more and more urgent: how to speak to low-information voters. These are folks who aren’t glued to the news cycle, who don’t spend their free time decoding policy briefs, and who might not know what all these acronyms and buzzwords mean.

If you’re reading this, chances are you consume more news than the average person. Maybe you’re the one in your family who stays up to date and shares what’s going on. But here’s the thing. A lot of the ways we talk about politics in activist spaces just don’t land with the people we need to reach the most. Not because they don’t care or aren’t smart, but because we’re not meeting them where they are.

Let me give you an example.

There’s been a lot of content lately calling out this regime’s interest in eugenics. And yes, that’s the correct term. But how many of us stop to explain what eugenics actually means? It’s the discredited and dangerous belief that society can be improved by controlling who gets to reproduce, often in ways that target disabled people, poor people, or entire communities. It’s not new, and it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s something that has been used before to justify awful things like forced sterilizations.

But when we don’t spell that out, we risk people tuning out. When something sounds too complicated or unfamiliar, it’s easy to scroll past or walk away. We lose that person. Not because they’re uninformed, but because we didn’t bring them in.

Same with the word “gulag.” We’ve seen that term used to describe what’s happening to migrants who have been abducted from the U.S. and sent to a detention facility in another country. It’s horrifying. But if you don’t know that gulags were Soviet labor camps where people were imprisoned and exploited, the word itself doesn’t carry the emotional weight it should.

And then there’s “defending democracy.” We say it all the time. But what does that actually mean to someone who’s just trying to afford groceries?

Right before the April 5 protests, I saw this powerful post on Threads. Here’s a little summary:

Checker: "What are you making?"
Shopper: "Signs for the protest tomorrow at the State Capitol."
Checker: "What are you protesting?"
Shopper: "We're defending democracy."
Checker: blank face, quiet voice "I'm not smart enough to know what that means."

But watch what happened when the shopper shifted to concrete terms:

Shopper: "Our new president is not following the laws. He is trying to do things he's not legally allowed to do, like turn off funding for programs like Head Start. Congress, like our senators and representatives, are the ones who decide where the money goes."

Suddenly, the conversation changed. The person bagging groceries chimed in about programs that help pay electric bills. The checker connected it to her rising utility costs and concerns about Social Security wait times.

Checker: What are they doing with all the money they're saving?
Shopper: THEY’RE GIVING TAX CUTS TO BILLIONAIRES. TAX CUTS TO BILLIONAIRES. Not to people like you and me. Billionaires.
Checker: Well, good for you for going! Thank you.

This is what I keep coming back to. We can’t afford to keep talking in slogans without stories or using acronyms without explanation. If our goal is to reach people who aren’t steeped in this every day, we have to be the ones who slow down and explain.

And honestly? I’ve messed this up too. Just recently, someone who follows me sent a kind message asking what “DNC” stood for. And they were right to ask. I’d used that acronym like it was obvious, and I hadn’t stopped to think about who I might be leaving out. That’s on me.

It reminded me of something from a long time ago, when I first started doing this work in 2017. I was reading articles in Spanish about the Russian interference, and I kept coming across words I’d never heard before. I remember feeling so frustrated and feeling stupid and ignorant. I had to look up these words in the dictionary.

That stuck with me. That’s the exact feeling I don’t want anyone to have when they come across our content or try to engage with this moment we’re in. If we’re serious about building a bigger movement, then we can’t make people feel small for not knowing something.

Another thing I’ve learned is that we need to take these conversations offline. I was blown away by how many people showed up for the April 5 protests, but do you remember how shocked I was to learn that many people had no idea they were even happening?

That was a wake-up call. There are still millions of people we won’t reach through posts or videos alone. We need to bring these conversations into everyday life. At the store. In the waiting room. With the person who makes your coffee.

So… here’s what I’ve been thinking.

What if we just start doing this together? Next time you’re chatting with someone, your barista, a neighbor, someone in line at the store, and they mention how prices are up or things just feel harder, try connecting it to something real. Like, “Yeah, a lot of that’s happening because Republicans in Congress are cutting funding for programs people actually use, like help with utility bills or Head Start, and giving that money to billionaires instead.”

That’s it. No jargon. No speech. Just one real person talking to another.

I’m trying to do this more, too. And when I mess it up, I learn from it and try again. We’re not going to get it perfect every time. But we can get better at this, together.

What do you think?