About David Morse
David Morse is a multicultural marketing strategist, author of four books, and the founder of a market research firm specializing in multicultural consumer intelligence. With a master’s in international marketing and a second master’s in history, David has spent his career helping major American companies understand consumers across race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. His most recent book, Polycultural Intelligence: Eight Rules for Connecting with Generation Alpha, was published in early 2026. A former brand manager for Gillette in Mexico City, David now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he raises two daughters and continues to write and speak publicly on the obligations of brands and citizens in a period of democratic erosion.
Show Summary
Justin and Virginia sit down with David Morse, multicultural marketing strategist and author, for a conversation that, on the surface, is about branding but is so much bigger. David argues that consumer power is the most underutilized weapon in the current political moment — and that the brands that helped build multicultural and LGBTQ+ consumer trust over the past decade are now going silent at precisely the moment their voices are needed.
The conversation moves through history quickly. David draws direct lines between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the current targeting of immigrant communities, calling it what it is: nativism with a familiar face. He connects his own identity — Jewish, gay, a child of Holocaust survivors’ stories — to a moral obligation he describes as impossible to outsource.
Virginia pushes the conversation toward systems. As a complexity scientist, she asks a harder question than “what should brands do”: what would actually change the patterns of interaction that sustain the current crisis? She introduces the knowledge-attitude-practice gap and argues that awareness campaigns alone produce attitude change, not behavioral change. The gap between the two is where fascism lives.
Justin and Virginia close with The Second Show and riff on communication strategy, shareholder activism, and what a “love is love” equivalent looks like for the anti-authoritarian moment. The conversation ends with an argument that the suburban middle class is the real audience, guilt is the mechanism, and complexity science is the missing framework in American political organizing.
5 Key Takeaways
Consumer power is the most dormant force in American politics right now. Brands that built their identities on DEI, Pride, and multicultural inclusion are now retreating — and the argument David makes is that consumers hold the lever that can make silence cost more than speaking up.
The current nativist moment has historical precedent, and the precedent is ugly. David traces the targeting of Latino and immigrant communities directly to the logic of the Immigration Act of 1924, when Southern Italians and Eastern European Jews were excluded because they were not considered white. The pattern is not new. The tolerance for it is.
Awareness alone produces attitude change, not behavioral change. Virginia’s framework from complexity science and communication for social change identifies the gap between knowing something is wrong and actually doing something about it. Mass communication campaigns that stop at awareness are incomplete by design.
The most effective social change campaigns ask for one specific, low-barrier action. Virginia’s example from South Africa — women banging pots and pans outside the homes of domestic abusers — worked because it was something anybody could do, it carried social consequence, and it required no formal organizing infrastructure. The broccoli principle: small actions at scale produce large system-level shifts.
White suburban apathy is the fuel fascism runs on. Justin argues — drawing on Virginia’s systems framing — that the missing communication strategy for this moment is the equivalent of “love is love”: something that makes the stakes personal for the people who have historically outsourced their political representation to a party and assumed that would be enough.
