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Audio Chapters
00:00 — RFK Junior endorses Trump to help him with his weirdness problem
06:09 — Tulsi Gabbard ends fake liberal front, endorses Trump
08:17 — Trump whining about live mics during upcoming debate with Kamala Harris
13:38 — Harris campaign announces it's raised more than $540 million in donations
14:43 — Republicans are coming up with the most absurd fake scandals against Tim Walz
20:25 — Jack Smith appeals Trump judge's dismissal of documents case against the felon
22:26 — Moms for Liberty raising money for Glenn Beck teen novel
28:58 — Minnesota Republican Royce White says his party should give up trying to get suburban women's votes
30:09 — Lionsgate Films pulls trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" for fake critic quotes
33:07 — Martin Shkreli accused to violating sale agreement for unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album
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This Doomscroll episode is available on video as well as audio, and as per usual, it's not “safe for work.”
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Kamala Harris and Democrats wrap convention while Matt fails to find Mike Lindell in Chicago
06:17 — Right-wing sickos attacked Tim Walz's son for loving his dad
12:27 — Michelle Obama is done with the going high stuff
17:18 — JD Vance can't even order doughnuts like a human being
22:29 — Gretchen Whitmer killed it with her speech
24:22 — DL Hughley talked about falling for misinformation
26:27 — NBA coach Steve Kerr spoke for Democrats also
29:08 — Raphael Warnock showed what sane religion looks like
30:50 — Fox cut off or refused to show many top speakers
35:20 — Josh Shapiro throws Republicans' fake concerns about antisemitism back in their faces
39:26 — George Santos convicted, faces years of prison
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Representative Shontel Brown of Ohio discusses her key legislation, including the U-FIGHT Act: The Uterine Fibroid Intervention and Gynecological Health and Treatment Act, as well as, proposed legislation to minimize the impact of artificial intelligence technologies on all U.S. elections.
From this Episode:
U-FIGHT Act: The Uterine Fibroid Intervention and Gynecological Health and Treatment Act
Securing Elections from AI Deception Act
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Special Coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago: Representative Lauren Underwood joins The Electorette to discuss a new resolution (Resolution 1386) just introduced by Democrats to counter the Republican's Project 2025, and its dark vision for the country. Underwood also discusses the Momnibus Act, Vice President Kamala Harris's support for maternal healthcare, and the palpable energy at this year's DNC held in Chicago. Maternal Health Hotline is 1-833-TLC-MAMA
From this Episode:
Resolution 1386
Full Text Resolution 1386: Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives on Project 2025
Project 2025
Momnibus Act
Maternal Health Hotline is 1-833-TLC-MAMA
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Author, and award-winning political strategist, Atima Omara, joins me to discuss the energy and enthusiasm behind Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz's campaign. We discuss whether this energy will translate to more trust and support for women candidates in the future, particularly Black women, and other women of color who run for office. We also talk about the chemistry between Harris and Walz, Walz's legislative background, and what other men in office can learn from his record.
From this Episode:
Atima Omara's podcast: Embracing Your Voice
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This Doomscroll episode is available on video as well as audio, and as per usual, it is not “safe for work.”
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Project 2025 co-author exposed saying Trump still supports the extreme group
08:47 — Republicans are telling Trump to stick to policy, but that won't work
13:08 — Adding creep JD Vance wasn't enough strange jerks for Trump so he brought back Corey Lewandowski
18:35 — FTC rolls out new policies against fake online reviews
22:19 — Biden and Harris announce success of lower drug price negotiations
25:34 — RFK Jr. asked Kamala Harris for a job
26:28 — Vice presidential debate now set for Oct. 1
30:15 — Kim Kardashian reportedly concerned about Kanye West’s alleged addiction to laugh gas controlling wife’s wardrobe
36:55 — Katy Perry accused of illegally filming music video in Spanish islands nature preserve
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Episode Summary
If Samuel Johnson was right that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, surely trolling is the last refuge of people who cannot win an argument. In the modern political landscape, the far-right movement that dominates Republican politics has increasingly turned to trolling as a strategy to compensate for the intellectual bankruptcy of its core beliefs. Incapable of engaging in genuine debate, Republicans under the tutelage of Donald Trump have become the troll party—using harassment, misinformation, and online provocations to discredit opponents and manipulate public discourse.
Even if Trump had never come along, however, it was almost inevitable that the online trolling culture that began emerging in the early 2000s on websites like 4chan would eventually merge in with the Christian far right, not necessarily because they agree on their worldviews, but because their personal extremism and misogyny overlap perfectly. Online communities such as incels, “groypers,” and other extremist factions within the far-right have embraced trolling as a tool to spread their misogynistic ideologies. These groups, often sidelined in mainstream society, find empowerment in digital spaces where they can attack women and feminists without facing real-world consequences.
Rather than attempting to persuade through reasoned argument, the far-right focuses on destabilizing public discourse, making it harder for truth and reason to prevail. This strategy not only poisons political debate but also reinforces the toxic elements within the far-right itself, as it encourages a cycle of hostility, extremism, and intellectual stagnation.
In this episode, I’m joined by Robyn Pennacchia, a writer at Wonkette.com who has been covering the online misogyny space for more than a decade.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
This episode aired previously on July 22, 2021.
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
10:42 — Turning Point USA versus Nick Fuentes and the "groypers"
20:54 — Debate culture and conservative hypocrisy
23:32 — The evolution of online misogynistic groups after Elliot Rodger
29:19 — "Gamergate" as the crossover moment between trolls and Republicans
34:03 — January 6th and the alt-right's media attention
37:43 — Mainstream journalism still hasn't figured out how to cover right-wing trolls
44:52 — Non-troll Republicans still haven't realized that it's not their party
53:20 — The old-guard Republican oligarchs still draw the line at pro-public economics
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Robyn has been looking at online misogyny for quite some time. And I figured she would be one of the best people I could talk to about all this. She used to write a column for Wonkette that was called “The Week in Garbage Men,” and I love the term on that, because certainly there are a lot of garbage right wing men on the internet, but Robyn, you, had been covering that subject, for a lot longer than your time at one cat. I understand since about, 2012, can you tell, tell us a little bit about. What got you interested in this subject?
ROBYN PENNACCHIA: I'm actually not sure where I first came upon, um, the PUA hate site. It was a long time ago. I think mostly like we, a bunch of feminists at the time, like feminist bloggers had found a lot of these sites, that were just directed. Towards straight up misogyny. And one of them was PUA hate, which is, where all of the incel stuff first started for the most part.
I mean, there were non [00:02:00] misogynistic incels at that point. but this like that whole, aesthetic, I guess, really like just stated and was born at PUA hate. com, which no longer exists and was taken a member of that group, Elliot Roger, went and murdered a bunch of people in 2014.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I mean, and that was, he really kind of inspired a lot of these people afterward, like they refer to him as a St. Elliot, and make memes glorifying him, just as if he was a, A Christian saint or, or whatever, I mean, it's really disturbing and a lot of people, even now I feel like are not aware that this stuff exists. Would you say that?
PENNACCHIA: I mean, it was a huge, huge, huge thing for a while to the point where, like, it's been a storyline on several different television shows, most recently “Evil,” the show where they're like, exorcizing demons and whatnot had a whole incel storyline last season. where not spoiler alert, this guy who is evil and like a demon of some kind. and also the guy from lost, I don't, really understand what his deal is, but he convinced this one guy to go and join an incel group and try and murder a bunch of people, but.
It didn't work out. So
SHEFFIELD: yeah. yeah, well, and, but at the same time though, I think while people may be aware of it, it exists more than before. They, I, there's, I, I found that there's kind of a similar, thought pattern about, the religious right, the Christian right in general, also that people are like, yeah, they're out there, but no, they're just not relevant.[00:04:00]
to anything. No one cares what they do. They're just dumb. Like, everyone knows they're dumb. is that, is that something you, you encounter from people?
PENNACCHIA: To some degree, although I do think that, the amount of people that they've actually murdered, has resulted in people taking them pretty seriously.
SHEFFIELD: As somebody who writes about the Christian far right a lot, when tweets about it, a lot of times I will. Encounter. And this is especially true from like centrist media outlets. They'll be like, ah, no one cares about what these people say. They're irrelevant. and like, they're just a joke and like, why write about them?
Is, have you ever had, has anybody said something like that?
PENNACCHIA: Well, I think everyone collects like very few people. are trying to justify them unless they're, Jordan Peterson, who is a very big fan of justifying them. But they have had an influence, I would say, on the larger, right wing anti feminist bent more so than probably, Any other, group thing other than Christianity.
So they have like a lot of the same anger towards the sexual revolution, a lot of the same anger towards, women being able to do whatever they want. And a lot of the, there's been a lot of, mingling, I would say, even if everyone says, Oh, these guys are losers who cares about them.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
Yeah. Oh no, that's no, you're right. That that's exactly how they fit in. and there's a, there's an interesting, book out there, that I would recommend people if you're interested in, in how sort of a lot of this stuff correlates, it's called the long Southern strategy. and [00:06:00] it's by Angie Maxwell and Todd shields.
they're Professors at the University of Arkansas and, it kind of shows how misogyny is really interconnected with a lot of other things that you wouldn't necessarily think. So, such as racism or such as, Christian supremacy. and what's, if you look at right wing politics over time, cause it started mostly in the 1940s, 1950s, in the United States as a formal conservative movement, quote, unquote, and in the beginning, a lot of the popularity that they had was racially based.
So opposition to segregation, that was how the religious right originally got engaged in politics, because the. Government was closing down the, segregation academies that they had created after Brown versus Board of Education, or it was going to tax them. And that got them interested in supporting Ronald Reagan.
And then after that, kind of the Christian supremacism is very strong, for a lot of, boomer and older people. And then among younger people, let's say young Gen X and younger, Anti feminism seems a very strong, component in what they do. Like, they hate like real, they're obsessed with you guys.
PENNACCHIA: Somewhat. Yeah. Well, I think what they're really upset about is that, feminism generally won, like they're outside of like trad wives and like very specific, genre groups generally speaking, like women work. women, Have no problems speaking their mind. And most of all, women are not just like getting married to the first dude who comes along and.[00:08:00]
staying with him forever because she has no, because she has no other choice, which frankly, you know, considering Betty Broderick and whatnot, you would think would be good for them. But
SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, why don't you explain that reference there?
PENNACCHIA: Betty Broderick was a 1980s who killed her husband. after he left her, but she had put him through college.
She had supported him the whole time. And when he left her, she had nothing and wasn't able to, or, earn a living or really do anything because she had just been a housewife for so long. And, she had never been able to, achieve her dreams. And as a result, when they got divorced, she was screwed.
And this had happened to a lot of other women. But a lot of these men really like this idea of women being trapped in this way because they don't, they're angry about no fault divorce. They're angry about, a lot of these things that It's like permit women to leave. they're mad at things that permit women to, wait a long time before getting married and having kids, anything like that, because they have just, these ideas of how things would be better for them if that were the case.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, and, and so a lot of that kind of intersects with, of course, the Christian rights view of how women should be, that their place is in the home and, and you should obey your husband. And so, and, and what's been kind of interesting though, is that, so you do have this sort of intersection of cultures where people who, are, may not necessarily be religious, but they are anti feminist and they're, or they, [00:10:00] are anti Muslim.
and so you're, you're seeing an influx kind of into Republican politics of non white Christians in recent years. So like for instance, Donald Trump in 2020 improved his, his voting performance among Hispanics, among African Americans, and among white women. compared to 2016 and actually why he lost was that he had, he had, actually lost quite a bit of white men in his vote, because they were like, holy s**t, this dude is crazy.
Like my friends had told me that he was crazy. Maybe they were right. And it was educated white men who basically left. and that's why he ended up losing.
Turning Point USA versus Nick Fuentes and the "groypers"
SHEFFIELD: Um, so, but you know, and, and one of the, we've, we had an incident recently with One of these new conservatives who has come in, her name is, she's a, a porn actress and her name is Brandy Love.
There's a picture of her on the screen there. She's got her Trump shirt, and doing a selfie for everybody. and, She is a, very famous in the industry. I would say, she's kind of like the, the Jason kid of porn, if you will. and, so very well known and she tried to go to the, a convention run by the Turning Point USA.
group, which is, this group that basically functions as a propaganda organization for young people and to try to propagandize them with basically Christian nationalist Republican, talking points and brainwash them. And it's an interesting group because unfortunately for them and people, they don't get a lot of attention from the mass media, but one thing they did become known for was.
They had a guy, they had some college students wear diapers and baby clothes [00:12:00] to protest what they said was childish censorship on the part of liberals, because liberals couldn't handle disagreement and so they were just like babies, according to Turning Point. And so, and of course, needless to say, everybody thought that was absolutely hilarious that they were going to own the libs by dressing in diapers.
And they became national news after that. And, but more recently, though, they have kind of been under attack by this alt right Christian supremacist group, who collectively refer to themselves as Gropers. can you talk a little bit about that group and what they've been trying to do to turn any point, Robyn?
PENNACCHIA: Okay, so they, have mostly coalesced around, this, white nationalist, Nick Fuentes. Like, they are all fans of his, and there's been a lot of drama between Turning Point and the Groypers going back to, probably about 2017, like a few years actually. this one member of Turning Point was photographed hanging out with, Fuentes and a bunch of the other, white nationalists, but in trouble.
Right wing watch, showed. Charlie Kirk, the pictures of them hanging out and he denounced white nationalists and, they, she got severed from the organization and everything. So they've basically been like bickering since then. And they didn't get along too well before then either, but that's been like the main, issue like that started everything.
And ever since then, the gripers have been going and, to various TPUSA events and trying to cause trouble. at this particular event, So Nick Fuentes has been banned for, from the TPUSA convention for years, but several of his followers [00:14:00] went. And one of the ones who went actually saw Brandy Love and started, putting it out on Telegram.
Oh, they won't take Fuentes into the TPUSA, but they'll let this porn star in. And so there was a whole bunch of drama. She gets kicked out by email. She ends up posting about it online and. All of these conservative people are like, no, we don't like porn stars. We don't like what you do. That's actually not okay with us at all.
as it turns out, we are really sex negative, except oddly for Ben Domenic. I think that's how you pronounce his last name, but Meghan McCain's feller. he came out and defense of her saying that the GOP should be a big tent party, but she's also written for the Federalists, so.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and it's important also to note here that, so I'm going to just put on the screen, this is a picture that, that Brandy Love took, When she was, had arrived there at the, at the convention of the turning point, this is a student action summit, as they called it.
So it's geared toward high school and college students. and she obviously was dressed appropriately. And she was an attendee. she's got her regular, she, she paid for a VIP, backstage pass, or like granted access to some rooms, but she wasn't a speaker. She was just literally showing up there to watch these awful people speak.
And like, that was too much for Turning Point because, and, and I, I think, the something that people don't realize about this feud and is that, Fuentes, his a huge part of his mojo is basically taking the Christian Nationalist stuff and turning it up [00:16:00] to not just 11, like 15 and being like, well, look, you say that you're a Christian conservative.
Well, what have you conserved? Look at all these women out here who have jobs. Look at all these Porn stars who are, at our conservative events look at all these things here. And, and, and by the way, the Bible says that there's nothing wrong with racism. so no, and of course he's right.
the Bible says slavery is okay. and that slaves need to obey their masters, as a matter of fact, in that in Romans 13. It literally says it's a sin to, oppose the government leaders. so, but apparently that doesn't apply to Joe Biden.
PENNACCHIA: No, it literally only applies to Republicans. That is the law.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and so, Basically, they have been, going out there to these events and being like, So, you say you're a Christian, well then, how come you support, same sex marriage? Or they'll say that to various people. and, like, they have no answer. Like, how can you reply to that in an authentic way?
Because if you're basing your entire political ideology on I know what is in the Bible. The Bible is true. I have the objective truth on my side because I advocate for Christian fundamentalism. Then if somebody's just more extreme and more fundamentalist, how can you address that? I don't think you can other than censoring them.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah. No, there really isn't, any kind of option there. And so they've basically just kicked him out of all of their events, because the thing is, for the most part, they actually agree with him. I think on most things, generally speaking, the right usually agrees with the far right. They just don't want to look too bad.
like [00:18:00] they don't want to be explicitly white nationalist, which is where he catches them a lot. Like he accuses TPUSA, even Donald Trump Jr. of being, insufficiently pro white, and has no problem saying that. Whereas, the others try and sort of cover it up a little bit.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, and, and then the other thing is that he does play on their, continual they brand themselves as, oh, we're against cancel culture, we're against censorship.
Well, if that's true, you gotta let this dude into your convention then. Because, don't all voices have to be heard in this marketplace of ideas? and like, and they have nothing to say about it. These, these people
PENNACCHIA: Conservatives don't ever get in trouble for hypocrisy. Like, they don't.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well We're against
PENNACCHIA: culture.
Or whatever you want to call it, trying to ban people and various things since the dawn of their entire ethos. And, it's different because, as long as you're not banning people for reasons that they don't like, that's fine. And they don't, in general, they don't get in trouble for any kind of hypocrisy from their people.
SHEFFIELD: Now, yeah, but what about in the mainstream press? I would say that that's even true there, too. Like, When have you seen Republicans asked about, well, like this Brandy love thing. I mean, it was all over Twitter this week in the weekend. but there weren't any stories in the mainstream media about it.
like this is a significant story as it relates to the Republican. Christian nationalists movement, and they didn't even talk about it. I mean, why wouldn't you talk about a story about porn stars and, and, right wing bigots? Like, that's an awesome
PENNACCHIA: story. Like they don't want to embarrass people.
It's like, there's like, Oh, it's like, there's like, [00:20:00] there's only so far you can go to their faces. You can't actually, for some reason, I don't know why I would probably ask, harder questions, but you can't directly say like, so what's the problem with porn stars? Why do you guys hate porn stars?
because they don't really want to answer that question. They don't want to touch it. So, They're not, you're not gonna get an interview with them, I guess, if you ask them
SHEFFIELD: about Yeah, no, I, I, and I think you're, you've hit on that's what it is. Because so much of mainstream journalism is about access.
Mm-Hmm. , they don't do research, anymore, like investigative research. Almost everything that they get is just handed to them by somebody else. and the problem is, of course. If you're depending on people handing you stuff, well, then you kind of can't piss them off and you have to coddle them.
Debate culture and right-wing hypocrisy
SHEFFIELD: I mean, I mean, it's like, look at, all these people like Charlie Kirk, the president of turning point TPUSA, this guy never does debates with anyone.
Ben Shapiro never does debates with progressive pundits. And like, Steven Crowder, who is this right wing YouTuber, he literally got scared. Of debating another, a left wing YouTuber named Sam Cedar. Like he, he literally cut off the stream when, when, he was recently, when he was, somebody else brought him in to debate with him, like he, these people are, are cowards and they have no arguments.
and then at the same time, they're going off and saying that liberals are cowards and have to censor people.
PENNACCHIA: And also at the same time, they've spawned a generation of men who feel very entitled to debate women and other people and are constantly asking for debates. So, oddly enough.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, although, yeah.
I don't think debate
PENNACCHIA: is the best.
SHEFFIELD: Well, although, again, like, they can't even win the [00:22:00] debates where they do have. Yeah, no. And, and like, it's fascinating, like what you were mentioning, like, Ben, the one person who Ben Shapiro has been begging to debate is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
Like, he will not debate, he doesn't want to debate anyone else. oh, I'm sorry, he does like debating. Freshmen college students. Because like that, that is effectively the, the intellectual caliber of their arguments. Like they just don't know what they're talking about. And so, yesterday, for instance, on Twitter, I did a thread looking at how this, this, guy who, who writes at the Federalist and elsewhere, he was trying to say that Republicans are not overrepresented among people who don't want to get vaccinated.
And his polling was like four months out of date. And then I, I told him about it and he never took it down. He never corrected it. Because that's
PENNACCHIA: not the point. Like, that's not what the point is.
SHEFFIELD: What do you, well, what is the point? The
PENNACCHIA: point of putting that out there is to make whatever point he wants to make.
It's not, it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It just matters that he, is making the point he wants to make and can point to something that, seems like. It's relatively true because no one who reads him is going to, go and say, Hey, this isn't true. Well, your solidarity is that pure solidarity if nothing else.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
The evolution of online misogynistic groups after Elliot Rodger
SHEFFIELD: Well, so, in the years that you've been covering the, garbage men on the internet, how, how have things changed for this group? Would you say since you first started paying attention to
PENNACCHIA: Well, I'd say like after Elliot Rodger, There was a huge, huge, huge spike in the amount, in the number of message boards in the, the amount they were like reeling people in, and [00:24:00] not just in cells, but like MIG Tows, men going their own way, red pillars, all of these various groups were, attracting a lot of attention ever since then.
However,
SHEFFIELD: would you mind? Explaining what these groups are because, not everybody is as what is a Ming Tao. Yeah.
PENNACCHIA: Okay. So you've got your incels, your involuntary celibates who are not having sex, but would prefer to be having sex and feel entitled to sex from women. And then you have men going their own way,
SHEFFIELD: but only good looking women.
PENNACCHIA: Oh yeah. Exclusively.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PENNACCHIA: they're extremely harsh about how women look like more so, and they're also extremely harsh about how they look like they're talking about like, Oh, Two inches of bone is on their face is the, or sorry, two millimeters of bone is the difference between Chad, who's the, their ideal Chad and incel, Chad is like the ideal man.
And so you've got,
SHEFFIELD: then
PENNACCHIA: the MIG does are. men going their own way and they're men who have decided they are done with women period like
SHEFFIELD: But they're not going to be gay
PENNACCHIA: They're not going to be gay They have decided that women only want men in order to you know Support them and they want to like marry them take all of their money and then leave so that's a big thing for them and so they You Talk a lot about like how they're, learning to live on their own.
and they make their own meals and they're really sad looking because none of them can cook. And they just basically think that women are evil and they want nothing to do with them.
a lot of the time those guys are [00:26:00] divorced. And they're like, Oh, we know the reality about how women are evil and the red pillars.
are, it's the matrix thing where, the red people, the red pill, people know the truth, the blue pill, people are, content living, live their content, living a lie. And the real truth, the red pillars know are, is that it's actually men who are oppressed rather than women.
SHEFFIELD: And how do they say that?
Who's oppressing them?
PENNACCHIA: So their whole theory is that like, all of these, women say that they're oppressed and everything, but, actually, men, are, I don't, who even knows at this point, but different theories as to why, women get, can do whatever they want.
They look a certain way, but men can't. it's generally kind of shallow crap like that. They're also obsessed with, false rape accusations and other things like that.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, they, they do seem to be. And, no, and then I guess you've maybe got Kind of your fourth group, which is you're you're white nationalists.
Yeah. And I mean, what's the, I think you could argue that a lot of what we see today in our right neo Nazi type politics. It originated from this, and so, but can you tell, tell us about the history of how that worked, and like Gamergate and some
PENNACCHIA: of that? Well, a lot of the main, yeah, a lot of the main people, in the alt right, alt light, Literally came from the manosphere,
SHEFFIELD: what is the man?
Oh,
PENNACCHIA: the various [00:28:00] factions of, anti feminist men,
on the Internet and, men's rights activists and what have you. So, like, Cernovich was an M. R. A.
SHEFFIELD: Men's right. For a
PENNACCHIA: long time, this guy, Roosh, was trying to join, he was like a big pickup artist guy. He was trying to join the alt right, but because he's not a white person, Was roundly rejected.
And also because of the fact that he, pushed the whole pickup artistry, sleep with as many women as possible thing, which they were not into. They were like, no women need to be virginal and pure. And you're, polluting all the women. by having sex with them. well, or raping them because he was a pretty big fan of, explaining to men how to rape women or date rape women.
So in various countries, but so he ended up trying to, be like, Oh, I've converted. I'm, totally anti sex now. I'm going to, marry a nice Christian. I'm a Christian. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: I'm a fundamentalist just like you guys. Yeah. Okay.
PENNACCHIA: Well,
SHEFFIELD: okay. Interesting.
"Gamergate" as the crossover moment between trolls and Republicans
SHEFFIELD: Well, okay. So, so then what, what was gamer?
PENNACCHIA: Oh my gosh. so it's really hard to do that in a concise way. Sorry. There, there was already a lot of tension in the gaming community. Because, men felt that, women were having an outsized influence on a thing that, they liked. They were mad at Anita Sarkeesian for, writing
SHEFFIELD: about Who was who?
PENNACCHIA: Oh, she was just a critic of misogyny and sexism in video games. And so she did all these, [00:30:00] videos, talking about the ways in which. Video games were super sexist and the men were really upset about that and they were also very upset about new games that they felt were influenced by like social justice and feminism rather than just like, blowing people up and killing hookers.
So, I am dying for a glass of water.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, so basically, there was this, and these were people who primarily were not that political, but they became very, enraged at, what they saw was an intrusion of women into a male space, and so they basically decided to team up and expose, Her and expose how it was all just a big lie.
and that, no one wanted to hear what she had to say. and anyway, they, they came up with some stuff and it was honestly not very good, from a reporting standpoint. but you know, then they kept trying to force people to talk about it in the mainstream media. and they actually had some success, but as they were, getting together and engaging in activism, kind of, they kind of collided, not collided, they sort of discovered this, discovered 4chan, and the 4chan neo Nazi board of Paul, P O L, and the people from Paul started getting interested in this too, and they basically made a lot of converts.
and Paul itself had kind of originally started off as more libertarian, Ron, Ron Paul type people. And they got basically, because the thing that a lot of people don't understand about, right wing intellectualism is that it doesn't exist. and so basically because they have [00:32:00] no real ideas, no policies, nothing that they're driving toward accomplishing in terms of serving the public.
Basically, they're just perpetually drifting ever rightward, like that's the only thing they can do because the insane people, they have ideas, they want to make divorce illegal. They want to, like some of them literally call themselves advocates of Christian Sharia, like they call it. and so.
and so basically that's where the alt right came from. And like, that's a story. I feel like Robyn, that a lot of people would you say, do they know that story?
PENNACCHIA: it depends if you're a person who covers this.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. They just say the average political general,
PENNACCHIA: probably not. No. I mean, I probably the average person doesn't even know all the players in the, regular, Game as far as this goes, as far as the whole like alt right goes, if that's what they're even calling themselves anymore.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well,
PENNACCHIA: with new names constantly. So
SHEFFIELD: they do. And the other, the thing that, is like, it's really kind of disturbing in terms of mainstream journalists that they, they dropped the ball on covering the, the, the boomer Christian right. they never told the public who these people were and what they were up to and what they wanted and what they were doing.
and then their children basically, went and launched the alt right, and, all these other splinter movements and whatever they're calling themselves nowadays. and they still don't. talk about it really much at all, other than, like if every once in a while, like in the case of Elliot Rodger, you're like, you'll see some people be like, Oh, holy s**t.
This thing happened here. Let's, let's talk about them for five minutes. and then let's move on to, Oh my [00:34:00] God, did you see what Trump said on Twitter? like, well, I do
January 6th and the alt-right's media attention
PENNACCHIA: think it, Certainly became a thing after January 6th, because so many people with that kind of ideology were the people who were getting arrested after it.
SHEFFIELD: So like
PENNACCHIA: the, there were a lot of proud boys. there was baked Alaska who was like. notorious troll, was one of the people who was there. And so, I think that when that, whenever something big like that happens, there's like, a little bit of interest from the mainstream media, for a little bit, but like, honestly, keeping up with this stuff is like, not the most pleasant of the activities.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And there's also a lot of different characters.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: And you have to keep. Like a soap opera,
PENNACCHIA: and not a very.
SHEFFIELD: Interesting. Yeah, a really shitty.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: and so, but, the and the thing also that I think also is off putting to them is that none of these people is, are elected to elective office.
No. And so, the mainstream press is very, very Congress or president focused, and almost to the exclusion of everything else and anyone else, no matter what they're doing. I mean, like in the case of.
PENNACCHIA: Partially why, four years ago, they missed the beat on Trump. Like they were like, who would even like this guy?
And. That is one thing that I was like, no, there are all these people who are who like him and will absolutely vote for him because he said he was going to grab people by grab them by the pussy. Like that is what they are into. And he's gonna win. And people were like, Oh no, you're crazy.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, but even now I would say that a lot of people don't [00:36:00] understand that, and, and I think this is, pretty common among more centrist Democrats and probably even like some of the more socialist oriented people who basically spend their time attacking Nancy Pelosi, like that's all they do.
and, like for them, they're like, Oh, whatever, Fox news is dumb. Like everybody knows it. and it's like, no, they don't. and and, and to some degree, I actually kind of blame Jon Stewart for that, I would say. because Jon Stewart, like he was correct that these people were stupid and didn't have any ideas.
But he just, made, he made people think of them as a big joke. what do you, what do you think of that thesis Robyn?
PENNACCHIA: I would say that that's true to a degree. I think he did a good job in certain ways, as far as like, even letting people know that some of those people existed, which was, it's very easy to sort of get into your own bubble and like, have no idea that these people even exist or are saying crazy things.
But at the same time, I don't think he ever really took them too seriously and they kind of like, they shouldn't be taken seriously in terms of their ideas being considered as like, reasonable ideas in the marketplace of ideas. But, they should be taken seriously in the way that like they are an actual danger to people like.
I mean,
Mainstream journalism still hasn't figured out how to cover right-wing trolls
SHEFFIELD: yeah, well, and, and, and honestly, like, I think you can see that happening again with the rise of these, junk right wing sites like daily wire and some, all these other ones, like, the mainstream press. [00:38:00] Or outward like Newsmax, OAN, like they just, they think that these media companies don't matter because they're so ridiculous.
And they interview people who don't know what they're talking about. and their stories are, they never do any reporting. They just whine and complain about other people's stuff. and so they think that because they're so obviously ridiculous that they don't matter. But NPR just this week, Oh yeah, the Ben Shapiro thing.
Yeah, it came out with a study that showed that Daily Wire and other things owned by the company that owns them, which is not owned by Ben Shapiro. it's actually owned by these. to Christian nationalists. Like they are absolutely freaky people. they're, they're, referred to as the Wilkes brothers.
And one of them literally is he, well, he retired as the pastor, but he was for the longest time, the pastor of this cult in rural Texas that basically said that, Christians are the real Jews, and we're the children of God and we're going to take over America and impose, well, basically, man made steel type stuff.
Like, that's who, Is funding Ben Shapiro, and like, and then at the same time, Ben Shapiro also has no problem, getting in bed with white nationalists also, like, he's repeatedly talked about how, now he claims he doesn't believe this, but like he wanted to, commit, he wanted to have ethnic cleansing in Israel and get rid of all Palestinians, out of Israel.
And, and he, and then, and a lot of people don't know this about Ben Shapiro, but he even went on a alt right podcast in 2014 and literally talked about secular and atheist Jews and said that they're, they're trying to destroy [00:40:00] America. They have a war on Christianity and a war on white males, and they're so terrible and they don't even believe in, they don't care about being Jews.
So basically, f**k them. you guys can do what you want to, and like the New York Times and all these other publications continue to talk to him as if he's some sort of credible source, but after doing all these things like it's outrageous,
PENNACCHIA: because he's, he's put together. He is in his own way.
Well spoken. And so sometimes when that happens, the blinders go up and they're like, Oh, he's respectable. Therefore, we should treat him as such. I think one of the big problems is that you have a lot of people who really do believe that if you ignore something, it goes away. Like, when you're a kid and you get bullied and they're the teachers who are like, Your problem is that you're not ignoring these people well enough.
and I think that there are a lot of people who believe that, the more attentive these people are only doing this for attention and the more attention you give them, the worst they'll get. However, that is generally not actually the case because usually what ends up happening is that a lot of attention gets put on them and then they end up getting kicked off of whatever platform they were on.
So they have much less influence.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the other thing also is that they don't understand that they actually believe the things that they, they think that it's just about. Trolling, owning the libs, but no, they actually do want to make divorce illegal. They do want to make birth control illegal, not just abortion, birth control.
and like, they, they want these things and like, to pretend You know, and, and like, I, I think, in [00:42:00] 2016, the media obsessions over Richard Spencer, the Alt-right. Racist, activist, I mean, they, it was just a disgrace. I, I remember reading, profile, and this was in Mother Jones, actually a progressive Oh, I remember that.
Yeah. They, they, the lead of the story was not good, Spencer. is eating flecks of tuna with chopsticks. and he's so dapper. And it's like, wow, do you not remember what the media did with David Duke when he came on the scene? It's literally the same act. and they just go for it. and they, and they fall for it.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah. I mean, well, this is the thing studies have shown, over and over and over again, that when someone is nice looking and well put together, People are insanely forgiving of almost any terrible thing they want to do. This is happens with crime. This happens with like, Nazis. If you hear, it's a lot easier to demonize someone if they, seem like a schlub.
then if they look like Richard Spencer and they've got, nice phone structure and, neat little haircut there. there's a desire. And I think a lot of people, especially, The MSNBC kind of people, like those pundits and everything, to just have a very hard time believing that someone who looks a certain way is actually bad.
SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Yeah, and then, and then the Also is that they have a tendency to think that people who aren't are uneducated or poor, that they can't accomplish anything by banding together. and, and, and when you look at what a lot of, I mean, cause a lot of these far right. [00:44:00] Activists, they're unemployable.
no one wants to hire them. So they, they live off of welfare, literally, a lot of them. and of course they never mentioned that, but, and they, so, but, and so they, and a lot of them do kind of, look bedraggled and, and whatever, and there's this tendency, oh, well, they're, they're no threat, they're just a bunch of deliverance wackos, that's all.
And they're
PENNACCHIA: tacky. There's a terror, America has an absolute terror of tackiness. And if you're, classy, if you know which salad fork to use, people are a little bit more forgiving. You look like a schlub, you look, like most of these people do. They're gonna, treat you like that and also think that you have no influence on anyone else because who would ever listen to those people?
Non-troll Republicans still haven't realized that it's not their party
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and at the same time, though, I do think, just going back to the Brandy Love, episode that we just saw, so she's, she's non religious, as she has said, and she said that she was raised as a Republican, and so, for me, as somebody who came out of a non religious background, Republican background, after I left Mormonism, that was non religious and Republican, and, I, I, I, for the longest time, I had this idea that they were a lot more tolerant, or rational, that my, the people that I was with, that, that that's what they, that they were like me, I projected my own image onto them, because, as I supported same sex marriage and, I supported, abortion rights and like, I was okay with those things.
And, and I, I, I had this idea that a lot of people who were on the political right agreed with me. And, and [00:46:00] so when I saw this happen to Brandy love, she basically was reliving what happened to me, in so many ways. so I, I really felt sorry for her. and she still doesn't get it that way.
PENNACCHIA: No, well, because there's a little bit of a battle going on, I think, between like the 4chan Republicans and the usual suspects right now, like there are these people who really thought that. The, the Republican Party is for freedom. They would never legislate morality. And that was one of the things that she retweeted that, someone had said, and they're like, you can't be a Republican if you want to legislate morality, which is literally all Republicans want to do.
They're the only ones legislating morality. They are completely alone in that. they're the ones who want to, ban same sex marriage. They're the ones who want to ban abortion. of course they want to legislate morality. but these people have sort of taken this idea that, oh, the Republican party wants us to have guns.
They want us to be able to be racist without any consequences. And they want,
SHEFFIELD: and they want to get rid of taxes.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah, well, I think a lot of the new ones don't even really care about the taxes thing. I really don't. I think a lot of them, oddly enough, from what I've read, are almost starting to veer to the left economically.
the whole like Anne Rand thing has sort of seen its day. And I've seen people, oddly enough on the Donald, that subreddit that is no longer a subreddit say that they were in favor of a UBI. They have no idea what the Republican Party stands for at all. .
SHEFFIELD: Mm-Hmm. all, yeah. All, all they know is, it's all
PENNACCHIA: they know really is that they want to be able to say racist things on social [00:48:00] media and have no consequences.
And, and be sexist.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and to be sexist. yes. Yeah. And, and, yeah. Well, and, and, and, and it's, it is really illustrative of the intellectual collapse of of, of the American, right. Because like. They, it was constructed as a Christian nationalist movement, like William F.
Buckley, the creator of National Review, his first book was called God and Man at Yale, and the point of that book was to get them to fire professors. Yeah, which they're still trying to do. to fire professors who didn't believe in the resurrection or Jesus's divinity. like that was the point of what they were doing, to stop atheist, godless communism.
that was how they started. and now they've devolved to, well, we just want to be able to be a dickhead on the internet.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah, really, it's like, the cruelty is the point. They just want to be terrible people without anyone being, hey, saying, hey, you're an a*****e. Like that is the main goal for almost everything.
And, they have various ways at which they want to be terrible human beings without any consequences, but that's really the only thing that unites them right now.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and that's, and here's the thing though, when I was, conservative activist and, somebody would, would have said something like that.
I would have been offended at that remark, because I was projecting. My own perspectives onto, onto my co, my, my co, conservatives. and I really had no idea. Huh?
PENNACCHIA: Which is kind of what they're all doing. They're sort of choose your own adventuring it [00:50:00] and then assuming that everyone agrees with them.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, so can you think of any other. examples, recent ones where, these, garbage men on the internet have had some interesting episodes besides this Brandy Love thing.
PENNACCHIA: well, fairly recently, the National Review, I'm sorry, I was looking for, cause I thought you wanted me to send it to you.
SHEFFIELD: you can talk about it, but
PENNACCHIA: basically it was, along with their whole like political discriminate, it was political discrimination as a civil rights struggle. Their whole idea that, Oh, you shouldn't be able to fire people for saying racist s**t on the internet or sexist s**t on the internet.
The main way that they, their, the main weight of their argument was that, Oh, women don't want to sleep with Trump supporters. And that's bad. And they have too much power. And what that now means is that when Trump supporters try and go get jobs, these women who don't want to sleep with them are not going to hire them.
And now it's going to be like their big civil rights struggle. And A lot of the anger from the men's groups is, Oh, women won't sleep with us. That's the big problem. There was also in the Federalist recently an article about how, they should not have subsidized, we should not have subsidized childcare, not because of any kind of, Oh, it's expensive.
We don't want to pay for that reason, but specifically because they want women to stay home and raise babies. that if you make childcare available, they might not do that and they might not choose to do that.
SHEFFIELD: So, yeah. Well, yeah. No. And, and actually your, that national review piece, yeah, it was, it was interesting because it's yet another example of how, everything they do is in bad faith.
[00:52:00] They're not concerned, for instance, that on dating websites, black women are least likely to get responses from people or, and Asian men are least likely to get responses from people like that. Doesn't concern them at all. And it's only about their own. dominant group. but then, but then specifically that they're trying to privilege their own speech.
everything they do is about that because again, like they don't, they don't want to talk to Randy Love to hear what she has to say. Say they don't want to talk to, they run away from Sam Cedar. Like they won't, debate anyone. and, but they do want their own beliefs to be privileged. it seems like,
PENNACCHIA: and at the same time, they don't want to get rid of at will employment, like, which would actually solve their problem, but they know it's not a real problem.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well,
PENNACCHIA: and but it's firings would absolutely solve the problem that they claim is a big problem where they're going to be just kicked off of their, fired from their jobs for loving Donald Trump too much. there is a solution to that, but they don't actually care about it because it might actually help someone else.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah.
The old-guard Republican oligarchs still draw the line at pro-public economics
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, and, and that's, you were talking about how some of these newer conservatives have beliefs that are, maybe left of center on the economic front. But they're just running into a buzzsaw because the elected Republicans will never do any of that stuff. and like even, even the ones like, like Josh Hawley, who pretends to, have some, Make some overtures toward economic progressives, like it's all fake.
Like he voted for the Trump tax cut. The Trump tax cut literally raises taxes [00:54:00] on the bottom, quintiles of taxpayers, or in the long run, it raises their taxes. It's not a, a tax bill that protects lower income people. it does nothing of the sort and Josh Hawley loved it.
PENNACCHIA: No, he doesn't care.
All they care about is like, do I get to be a shitty person? What do I have to do in order to achieve this goal that I have? Like,
SHEFFIELD: that's
PENNACCHIA: kind of it.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, now, do you think, what can our listeners and your readers, my readers, like, do you think that they should be What can they do to help the mainstream media understand some of this better?
What would you say if people wanted to help with that?
PENNACCHIA: I think just asking people more direct questions would help, honestly, instead of coddling everyone, and acting as if they don't actually have nefarious intentions at all.
SHEFFIELD: I think
PENNACCHIA: assuming that, they're always, I also think that, actually saying what the Republican Party believes in as often as possible would be very helpful.
SHEFFIELD: I mean, some of that is the fault of Democrats too, though. They don't talk about it very much at all. And it's bad.
PENNACCHIA: A lot of Democrats want Republicans to vote for them. So there's like this sort of bind where they can't insult them because they want their votes.
SHEFFIELD: Well, I think also that one of the problems we have in our politics is that after the conservatives took over the Republican Party, a lot of people who were moderate Republicans didn't Just drifted over to the [00:56:00] Democrats.
and so the democratic party has a lot of people in it who actually are Republicans, like that's their, their mindset. And they agree with a lot of this stuff, like on things like that or regulations. and so for them to go off and say. That these ideas are, they would never go off and say these ideas are wrong.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah. Because a lot of,
SHEFFIELD: they agree.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah. And they have money and actually want to hold on to their money. So,
SHEFFIELD: yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and so I would say, something that people can do is, well, one immediate thing is that, both your site, one cat, And, my site Discover Flux or Flux on, internet.
We have a, a Patreon. You can, visit patreon.com/discover Flux to help us get the word out. And Juanette also, you guys are reader supported. I thought that was an interesting development. Was that a, a decision that you guy, that you personally were involved with? you were, you guys had ads for a long time.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah, we didn't have ads for a long time. Then you
SHEFFIELD: got rid of them.
PENNACCHIA: Yeah, that was all Rebecca.
SHEFFIELD: Okay, well, I'll have to talk to her about that because I think that that is, people need to stop giving money to the corporate mainstream media, like they can't, they failed at their jobs. They don't know what they're doing.
don't, don't pay for subscriptions to them, like cancel your cable, your cable TV, because you're, you're subsidizing Fox news, even when you do that, like, even if you never watch Fox news, they take a cut out of your subscriber fee. Every month. well,
PENNACCHIA: unfortunately, they, a lot of the cable company or internet companies, charge you more if you just want to get [00:58:00] internet.
SHEFFIELD: they, they do, they do, but you still do come out ahead though. with not having both servers, they do raise your internet price, but your overall combined price is lower still. but I would, Yeah, include that and the phone. Yeah, and I mean, like, another thing that people should be doing, I think is, there, so cable companies in other countries are not allowed to have bundles.
That's what they call them packages. where you have to, you're forced to buy one, the channels that you. you're paying for channels that you don't want, in other countries, they don't, they don't have that. A lot of other countries that you can just say, okay, I want these five channels and this is what you get.
like that should be how things are in this country, because I think tens of millions of people would not want to pay for Rupert Murdoch's welfare. cause he doesn't need it.
PENNACCHIA: No. I would probably just get the ID channel, but
SHEFFIELD: yeah, all right. Well, so, we're coming to the end here. so I will put up on the screen.
So, Robyn Pinocchio is on Twitter. She's, at Robyn Elise. That's R O B Y N E L Y S. and are you, do you have any other social media profiles that you want to tell people about Robyn? I
PENNACCHIA: mean, I'm on Facebook, but I don't really mess with that. I can do one social media profile at a time.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, you are, one of the many fun writers at wonkette.
com. So I hope people can check that out as well. So thanks for joining me today, Robyn. Thank
PENNACCHIA: you for having me.
SHEFFIELD: I wanted to just remind people that Theory of Change is part of a network that I have launched called Flux, and it's flux. [01:00:00] community is the address, so be sure to check that out. And then of course you can also follow Theory of Change, it's theoryofchange.
show, and And on Twitter at TheoryChange. I'm Matthew Sheffield, and I appreciate everybody joining us today.
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Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, the Executive Director of Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), discusses November ballot measures, particularly initiatives that will expand abortion access in states where abortion has been restricted or banned. We also discuss how ballot measures allow ordinary citizens an avenue to transform their communities.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Trump is spiraling as his fortunes keep falling
03:08 — Jealous Trump concocts AI lie about Kamala Harris's huge crowds
08:21 — Behind in the polls, Trump lies and says he's ahead in the "real" surveys
11:53 — Trump says he's willing to ban abortion pill mifepristone
14:44 — Trump used Jeffrey Epstein's former airplane to travel from campaign rally
16:43 — Elon Musk hosts disastrous Twitter space with Trump
17:22 — Joe Rogan faces MAGA rage for heaping praise on RFK Junior
22:23 — Republicans lied about Tim Walz and menstrual products in schools
24:48 — Freak JD Vance can't think of anything that makes him laugh or smile when asked by reporter
28:29 — Second photo of Vance in drag surfaces online
29:52 — Secret Service apologizes for breaking into Massachusetts salon
32:09 — Tom Cruise closes out Paris Olympics with roof jump stunt
32:58 — Arizona Cardinals unveil gross-looking cotton candy burrito
35:05 — Russian chess player suspended for trying to poison rival
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Episode Summary
In public opinion surveys, people who are gay and lesbian tend to overwhelmingly back the Democratic party. According to Gallup, 83 percent of both groups identify or lean toward Democrats. This seems like such an obvious preference given the Republican alternative, but the extremely lopsided support that Democrats get from gays and lesbians is actually a relatively recent development.
Although the contemporary Republican Party is known as an identity group for straight White Christians, long before Stonewall, more than a few gay politicos thought that shrinking government generally was a way to keep it out of the bedroom as well.
That viewpoint very clearly does not belong in today’s Republican party of Donald Trump and JD Vance with its hateful obsessions over imaginary pedophiles and trans athletes, but it’s still important to learn about the gay Republican experience, not just because it gives us a fuller picture of the past, but also because it may give some guidance as to where the far-right is headed in the future.
I’ll be talking about all of this with my guest in today’s episode, his name is Neil J. Young, and he’s written a very interesting book called Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right, which is now available.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
03:20 — The closet was a bipartisan thing in the beginning
05:51 — Libertarianism and gay Republicans
09:51 — Anti-communism and the closet
14:23 — Marvin Liebman and William Rusher's hopes for limited government
27:10 — Ronald Reagan's more libertarian term as California governor
34:15 — Terry Dolan and the gay DC Republican subculture
The chapters below are for paid subscribers only. Please support the show and get full access!
41:02 — How concerns about a possible “gay gene” motivated some activists against abortion rights
43:38 — Arthur Finkelstein, influential gay Republican activist and fundraiser
46:21 — How mainstream media became the only real place for gay conservatives
52:01 — LGBTQ media's response to the Christian Right takeover of the Republican party
56:26 — The bipartisan spirit of early LGBTQ political organizations
58:54 — Did bipartisanship make same-sex marriage and nondiscrimination laws easier and more secure?
01:04:07 — The precarious position of right-wing drag queens
01:10:54 — Today's gay Republicans are much more extreme than their predecessors
01:15:00 — How hyper-masculine gay reactionaries are reaching out to fundamentalists and incels
01:32:20 — Conclusion and further resources
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So this is a book that I think is long overdue because gay and lesbian people in the Republican party have always been some of the highest and most influential operatives and activists.
And yet most people are not aware of that. Like if you live in DC and you work in politics there, you know that, but most people outside of that very limited world are not aware of any of these stories or any of these people. Or at least the, their personal lives, we'll say they, they might know them from their professional achievement, shall we say?
But your book starts off with the concept of the double life, which would seem inevitable, for somebody working in a reactionary political movement who is not heterosexual.
NEIL J. YOUNG: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the big themes of this book is the ongoing presence of the closet. And I think people who follow the news probably can think of some recent examples of that. I mean, it's a, it's a fairly, I think regular feature of political news in this country that, Republicans get outed as gay where it's Larry Craig or Aaron Schock after the fact, or there's some sort of more recent ones.
But I was impressed to discover how much that was the case, even more so than I expected. And one of the things I realized if the history of the closet was going to be such a huge [00:04:00] part of this story, that it actually made sense to begin in the era of the closet and sort of mid century America.
Where everyone was closeted for the most part, and that being closeted wasn't a condition of one's politics as much as it was just the state of life at the time in the 1950s and 60s. So, I thought this book was going to begin in the late 70s, and that's in fact where my book proposal started, but as I really delved more into the history, And realized again, the importance of the closet as this ongoing aspect.
I want to just start in the air of the closet when one, no matter if you're a Republican or if you're a Democrat your life is really closeted because I think there's just this conception people have that like Republicans. Not gay, anti gay, and therefore anyone who's associated with it had to be closeted, and there's a very different history for the Democratic Party.
And so I wanted to start in a period of time in which that, that difference wasn't the case and what does it mean for Republican men? in the 1950s to have been homosexuals.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and it's true. I mean, in, in essence, in a lot of ways, this was the same starting point for both left wing and right wing gays, basically.
That's right. Exactly.
Libertarianism and gay Republicans
SHEFFIELD: Um, and, and, and in some sense because in, in some sense, because the in the mid 20th century, there was, the development of, of libertarianism as, kind of a, a right wing form of liberalism. And that some of the earliest the earliest libertarians were in fact atheists.
And so in some sense, like there. For some people, they may actually have started, had a little bit easier freedom of movement to be gay, if not, to the public, at least have it be known, within the movement that they operated in. Do you, would you agree with that?
YOUNG: [00:06:00] Yeah, I think a lot of gay men in the fifties and the sixties who are sort of right of center, they found libertarianism particularly.
Useful for sort of, I think, understanding their life and as a sort of model for what they hope the nation would pursue politically, because their sort of sense of, especially at the time, the 1950s, I mean, this is the Cold War era, right? So huge federal, governmental repression and criminalization of gay people.
And of course this was happening in a bipartisan effort. Democrats and Republicans alike were joined in creating, what historians have called the lavender scare this cold war repressive state that sought to, especially in DC and in, in the, in the in the, within the federal government to root out and find homosexuals and to fire them from their jobs and really to ruin their lives.
But that wasn't just the case in D. C. It was the case all across the country. I mean, law enforcement everywhere was targeting homosexuals. And so you have a good number of people who I was really surprised to discover how many there were of gay men who said, okay, the path to freedom here is through Curtailing government power through restricting the powers of the government and that sort of libertarian vision of how the government should operate was one in which they imagined freedom for the, for themselves which is, of course, different than the sort of rights based civil rights connected.
Notion of freedom and equality that's developing on the left for gay persons.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And and this, this moment in time, also the, the mid 20th century was kind of when there was the, the bifurcation of liberalism into progressivism and Libertarianism, right? And and it's, it's interesting because I think even today, a lot of people who [00:08:00] identify well, who, who very obviously have right wing libertarian views like Joe Rogan people in his orbit, they actually think that they're, On the left, it's kind of incredible, but, but, but you can see the starting point, like, for instance, in the, the whole in the hippie movement and some of these, kind of, I mean, like the phrase, if it feels good, do it.
That was both that was a ended up being more about. Personal liberation in the views of some people and less about political liberation,
YOUNG: right? Right, right. Yeah. These different sort of notions of freedom that could operate in this period that aren't necessarily tied to one partisan position or another, but like serve as sort of an imaginative, an imaginative theory of the world.
And also as a really I think useful discourse but like tweaked in different directions depending on sort of the larger political commitments.
Anti-communism and the closet
SHEFFIELD: so obviously on the right, while there was this kind of burgeoning libertarian tradition, there was Joe McCarthy, who was really the biggest perpetrator of the lavender scare. And, among other things, he made it very clear that he, not only was he trying to root out. Supposed communist in the government.
He was also going after homosexual men. And so, and then of course he had a gay man on his own staff. Let's maybe talk about Roy Cohn in that context. We'll have, we'll come back to him later. I don't want to talk all the way about it yet. But he's certainly an interesting character and very emblematic to this story.
YOUNG: Yeah. And I don't really write about Conan the book because he's been covered so much. But he's obviously relevant to this history here. And I actually focus on some. Some characters who are less well known to most readers but the, who do have connections to McCarthy some of them directly, some of them just are sort of aligned with him politically.
And it took me a really long time to even figure out what [00:10:00] is this about? Because I think. You have someone like Cone, who's like a complicated psychological figure, right? Like, there's, and, and, a lot of people have sort of wrestled with him and his psychology and what that means for his period of history.
But for some of these other folks who, are not as well known and who I didn't necessarily have access to, their personal papers as much as to really delve into like, what is their inner psychology of this? But I wanted to make sense of like, why would they be aligned with someone like McCarthy?
Why would they, why are they not also libertarians? Like, why do they have what is seen as more of sort of hard edge conservatism in this period? And one of the things that I, I sort of discovered and and that I make an argument of this section of the book is that a lot of these guys. found that sort of fierce anti communism as a way that they actually maintain the closet for themselves.
And so in some ways that seems a little bit contradictory. You would think, why would you want to be aligned or close to a person like this? Because wouldn't you be worried that you would be exposed, right? But I found that a lot of these figures their way of sort of maintaining their position and even their idea of how they might gain power and in Washington, D.
C. was to assist this anti communist fervor, even as it had a sort of anti homosexual focus, at the forefront. as a way that they themselves passed. And I think, does that make them hypocrites? Does that make them sellouts? Like, yes, probably. But I don't think that's necessarily even the most interesting thing that we can understand about these folks.
Although it's certainly relevant, but I think sort of understanding how. In a period of heavy repression and heavy fear that some, a lot of folks actually used this anti communist fervor and sort of the ugly [00:12:00] dimensions of this politics as their own way of building as their way of building their particular closets.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and also I think to some extent. It seems like they also thought that they could steer things in a more, as you were saying earlier that a more limited government direction. So, because like, I mean, originally, for instance, when you look at William F. Buckley's, God and Man.
At Yale book, that book is extremely, right wing Christian, social conservative book including it calling out, people for, if I forget how many people specifically he called out as gay, but there were a couple that he did and said that that was nefarious. But, like, and then he wanted people to be fired for saying Jesus didn't rise from the dead and various things like that.
So, but, but eventually he, he fell in with William Rusher, who is one of the, one of these people that you're talking about as kind of a post McCarthy figure him and along with Marvin Liebman.
Marvin Liebman and William Rusher's hopes for limited government
SHEFFIELD: Um, so, For these, both of these guys are not very widely known now. So why don't you tell us a little, for those, for tell us who they are and what they, what they did.
YOUNG: Yeah, so Marvin Liebman is a huge character of my book. He's a really important figure. He was born in Brooklyn. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, from Eastern Europe, who'd come to the U. S. in the early 20th century. And he grew up in Brooklyn, and in a very sort of immigrant area of Italians and Poles and a large Jewish community.
And he As many people in his community did in this period of time in the 1920s and 30s, he became very active in the Communist Party, USA, first through an organization and his high school, and then ultimately he was very active in the Manhattan chapter of the Communist Party, USA, and he went off to war.
He served in World War Two. He [00:14:00] was outed and discharged because one of his commanding officers read some letters that he was writing to another day soldier. And he came back home and in the 1940s he was involved in fundraising efforts on the left, but he slowly moved to the right. And especially as, and I think a lot of, as, as most people who know this history know, a lot of people broke with the communist party.
USA in the late 1940s because of the stuff they were learning about the atrocities of Stalin and Stalinism that were coming out of the Soviet Union in the time. And so by the late 1940s, he's sort of moved to a right of center position and becomes increasingly anti communist in the 1950s. And through that development of his politics, he becomes connected to William F.
Buckley and Buckley, he meets with Buckley when Buckley has this idea to launch the National Review and Liebman doesn't think that the National Review is going to work because it's You know, he thinks there's not really a conservative movement in the country and this at the time, and like, who would read this magazine but he's, he's committed to helping Buckley, and so he provides a lot of the early fundraising that keeps the National Review afloat in those early years, and, a lot of people have said that if it hadn't been for Liebman's fundraising prowess the National Review would have never made it through those early years. He ultimately helps Buckley and he considers William F. Buckley his best friend. So he's very close to Buckley and his wife. He helps Buckley found the American Conservative Union and the Young Americans for Freedom organizations that are developing in the 1960s that are really foundational institutions for the rise of modern conservatism.
And he's closeted, he's a closeted homosexual this whole time and mostly [00:16:00] living in New York. And so in New York, he's able to have a little bit more personal freedom than a lot of the folks I'm writing about who lived in D. C. and, and had to guard their sort of personal lives a lot more closely but he's a fascinating figure and, and he, he continues through the book and we can talk more about sort of where his life heads in the 1980s, but that's sort of the period we're talking about here with, with his close association with Buckley in the 1950s.
And then William Rusher is, is who Buckley hires to be the publisher of the National Review and did that job for a very long time. Rusher is someone we don't necessarily know. is definitively gay, but someone who other historians have speculated was probably gay. And I did a really close reading of his correspondence.
And especially, I mean, there's thousands and thousands of letters of his at the Library of Congress. And I knew the sort of speculations about him and even the stuff from his own personal biography. He never married. When he eventually retires from his job as the publisher of the National Review, he moves to San Francisco, and he had said that this was a lifelong ambition to move out there.
And I was even, I didn't put this in the book, but I was even able to find in public records that he lived in San Francisco with another man for A very, very long time. And that man was one of only a handful of people that was at his burial when he died. But I do a sort of close reading of his correspondence and again, of his biographical details to, to say that I think there's a, there's a strong reason to believe that he was also a, a closeted gay man.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And, and, and I mean, it was obviously. Something he felt was a need to guard that as a secret, whatever the answer was. I mean, never, he never denied it or said affirmatively in any, in any way.
YOUNG: Yeah. And I think a lot of these guys sort of have this [00:18:00] personal philosophy of like, this is my private business.
And it doesn't really bear upon my public life. And of course, that's a sort of conservative worldview, right? That aligns with a larger conservative politics. But certainly I think was, and that again is a position that a lot of gay men had regardless of their politics for much of the 20th century.
It's just one that had, I think, Had less and less purchase on a lot of gay people's lives as we move into like the 70s and the 80s. But for these right of center conservative folks, I think it aligned with sort of traditional or conservative notions about like public versus private.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah. And.
Yeah. And you don't talk too much about this or maybe at all. I guess you don't, I don't think in the book, but like the part of the, perhaps part of the, the turn against communism or leftism on the part of Liebman and some of these other guys might have been the fact that Joseph Stalin criminalized homosexuality.
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, Conducted a pretty extensive persecution of gays within the Soviet Union as well, including putting them in concentration camps.
YOUNG: Yeah, I mean, that certainly wasn't what they were publicly arguing as a chief reason to oppose communism, right? But I do think it actually, shaped a lot of their thoughts.
And someone like Liebman, who actually was, a member of the Communist Party USA, he says in his memoir that that was sort of his one objection to communism when he was, a full fledged member of the party was its, opposition to homosexuality. And often when he was a teenager and he was coming in to the city and to Manhattan from his Brooklyn home to, Purportedly go to these communist party meetings in midtown Manhattan.
He actually wouldn't go to the meetings. He would instead go to, like, the department store bathrooms at Macy's and other places where he knew, homosexual men met up. And [00:20:00] so, He was sort of already leading this, I think it's just worth remembering that, people were living all sorts of divided lives and it wasn't because they were Republican.
It was because they lived in a time in which homosexuality, no matter what sort of community or what sort of politics you were associated with was, frowned upon or, or worse. And so, so that was definitely the case for Liebman. And I think in the example of some of the other folks they're anti communism.
Part of what they thought was they had to defeat this threat to freedom. And if they did that, then maybe eventually things in the U. S. would be different as well, including around questions of sexuality. Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: yeah. And, and it is interesting, those social conservative views that were prevalent in the Soviet Union during so and so.
Mm hmm. They're kind of, they, they're echoing in the present day now, actually, when you look at some people who call themselves tankies, quote, unquote, that they have in many cases, some of the spillover that happens and, people have this idea of horseshoe theory and whatnot. So whether that's true or not, but it is.
The case that for several of these people who have flip flopped from, identify calling themselves communist or whatever, and then now saying that they're pro Trump and they love fascism. The one thing that a lot of them have in common is that they hate LGBTQ. Um, And this same idea of, degeneracy, quote unquote, it never fully went away on the, on the extreme left, because, everything has to be about economics and the class struggle. And so, talking about sexual liberation or the freedom to live your personal life, that's a distraction. It's wrong.
YOUNG: Right. Yeah, I think especially when sexual, sexuality and sexual identity is tied to notions of personal freedom, the politics of that become pretty complex, or at least that we can see sort of a far right and a far [00:22:00] left having having sort of objections to that, or having a politics that sort of brings them in alignment even if they can't see, even if like they wouldn't see themselves as allies in any way.
I mean, one of the like wonderful challenges of this book was, and I didn't anticipate this when I started it, was there were too many people for me to write about and so, I mean, there's lots of like out gay Republicans and out gay conservatives that I just didn't get to include in this book because you have to, make some decisions there.
And so, that was the case for again, people who are publicly out. And then there were lots of folks who were in the closet, or I assumed were in the closet. And I could only selectively write about some of them. But it was a good problem to have. And certainly when I was starting out for this project and worried about the opposite situation.
I'm not having enough to enough to write about. That, that was definitely not the case.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, there, there is just a lot. And one of the other kind of in these earlier years before the, the rise of the evangelical, right. There, there, I think there was more of a, A freedom of movement.
Paradoxically, even though society as a whole was much more repressive toward homosexuality, the Republican party was not run by, basically confederate Christians. And so, so now it's much more difficult to be a gay Republican nowadays, I think in some ways. And we'll, we can get into that later, but I mean, just keep it to the current The older period.
I'm sorry.
YOUNG: No, but I think again, that's why I wanted to start the book as early as I did in the 1950s because, really a question that I was sort of writing against or this sort of overwhelming assumption that I knew is out there and that I had to tackle is, is this question of like, why would any gay person belong to the Republican party?
And I think, anyone sitting here [00:24:00] today, like, That's an understandable question and understandable assumption given, the last couple of decades of history, but I, and in order to, to really confront that question, again, I wanted to start at a time and place when it didn't make any more sense to be a gay Republican than it made sense to be a gay Democrat, that both parties were inhospitable to the homosexual.
And so that one wasn't, Aligned with either party because of their sexual identity, but in spite of it and to start at that point, so then you can see how history is evolving within both parties, how things are changing and how that sort of decision in that calculation really changes over time.
Ronald Reagan's more libertarian term as California governor
YOUNG: But one of the things that I found really interesting was in writing in the 1970s which is when in the late 1970s is when the first gay Republican organizations Begin these early grassroots groups that ultimately in 1990 coalesce into the national organization known as log cabin Republicans, which is the oldest and largest gay Republican organization in the country.
But that starts from all these grassroots groups that start springing up in California in 1977, 1978, in response to a ballot initiative on in the state that would have made it illegal for any gay person to work in the public school system. And all these gay people and the Republican Party in California start organizing these grassroots groups to fight back against the Briggs Initiative.
That's what the, the, the Bell Initiative was called, Proposition 6, and also to ensure that the Republican Party continue to be the party that they believed in, that they believed was the sort of it's historic commitment to issue to things like freedom, equality, liberty and it was fascinating to look at this organization moment of these groups and the things that they were saying in their meetings where they were basically like, who are these Bible beaters that are trying to come into our political party and take it over?
And as someone who wrote my first book about the [00:26:00] rise of the religious, right. It's, I think it's often hard to imagine and to remember a Republican party that isn't controlled by white evangelicals, even as a historian who spent a lot of time, writing a book project to show that that wasn't an inevitable development.
So to, to be in the 1970s and to see these guys saying like, This is our political party. This is our, we are the best embodiment of conservatism and republicanism, right? Who better than us who wants the government out of our life in every form, out of our wallet, out of our bedroom. We are the true embodiment of a libertarian, freedom oriented entrepreneurial spirit like Republican Republican politics and these Bible beaters who want to moralize and to bring their, their ideas about morality into the public square.
They aren't conservatives. They aren't Republicans. And I love seeing that at work, in their minds and in their organizational strategy, strategies in the late seventies and also knowing. What else, what, what more is going to happen and how history is going to shift so much in the coming years.
It was sort of fascinating just to, to observe and to think about the Republican party through the vantage point of these gay Republicans.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's, and that struggle is one that really did continue from that moment, in, into the present and I mean, and it, but it, and it's something that distinction you're making there, it is one that I think a lot of people don't get that these Bible thumping evangelicals who came in and took over the party, they weren't conservative.
In fact, they were. Reactionaries, like reactionaries, conservative is somebody who wants to, keep things the same basically. And a reactionary wants to roll them back and to some halcyon day of your whatever that might happen to be [00:28:00] is different. But yeah,
YOUNG: and also to use the federal government for expansive purposes.
I mean, this is one of the arguments gay Republicans make. In the late seventies about the Briggs initiative. And this is how they actually bring Ronald Reagan over to stating his opposition to the Briggs initiative. In 1978, Reagan obviously was the former governor of California. Everyone knows he's about to run for president in 1980.
This huge figure, both in California and in national politics and gay Republicans make this argument and they're sort of public campaigning against the Briggs initiative and also. They make it this argument to Reagan and Reagan echo, voices this in an editorial that's huge, has a huge impact on on the Briggs initiative being defeated at the ballot box that year, but their argument is if something like this is created, if the Briggs initiative passes, This will create an enormous federal bureaucracy whose job will be to surveil its citizens to determine whether or not they are homosexual and to, root them out of their jobs.
And that's a huge expansion of government power. That's an abuse of and a bureaucratic use of government. And also it's going to. Take people out of their professions and we shouldn't be, we shouldn't be harming people's professional careers as Republicans. And so there were all sorts of ways they made these conservative arguments against the social conservative model of how.
The religious right wanted government to be used that again, had a lot of effectiveness in these early years. Ultimately they, they don't win because they don't have the numbers. I mean, religious conservatives take over the party because there's, there's more of them. But it was interesting and fascinating to watch the gay Republicans making these conservative arguments against the religious right types who they saw as reactionary and as not conservative in terms of how they anticipated and plan to use government power.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, [00:30:00] yeah, no, exactly. And I mean, and this is unfortunately one of many stories, though, in which the more moderate Republicans became overwhelmed by the reaction. I mean, that, that is the story of the Republican party beginning in the mid 20th century that happens every few years, uh, into all of them.
And. But, but they, they never seem to learn, they don't know their own history and so that the more moderate ones never band together or, try to create some sort of alternative media. I mean, like that's, that is the thing is that in the Republican party, all of the media is on the far right.
There isn't, any sort of gravitational center pole. And so these conversations just are never had anymore. Like they were in the, in that 20th century or let's say let's say maybe 1970s up until the nineties. Like, everything kind of ended maybe at least in terms of the philosophical debates.
Yeah. And then, think other things were details. All right. Well, so yeah, and you mentioned Reagan.
Terry Dolan and the gay DC Republican subculture
SHEFFIELD: So, I mean, yeah, Reagan is interesting, I think, because as a governor, he. And not just on, on that issue, but also on abortion there were some, he, he did start off as more libertarian oriented compared to where he ended up obviously flip flopped on abortion as well once he became the president yeah, and so, but, he also did know, he, he, his rise was also related or somebody who was, who was Involved very heavily in that from also fundraising standpoint was Terry Dolan.
Yeah, let's talk about him if we can.
YOUNG: Yeah. So Terry Dolan was enormously important figure especially on the far right, and grassroots organizing and a closeted homosexual also his brother, Tony Dolan worked in Reagan's White House as a speech writer, but in the 1970s Terry Dolan helped found one of the most important organizations of the conservative movement [00:32:00] NCPAC the National Conservative Political Action Conference and in partnership with Jesse Helms and other figures on the far right.
And this was really about, in the 1970s, sort of bringing together a national network of grassroots conservatives. And Really mostly on social issues. Things like anti busing pro school prayer anti abortion was really taking shape in the 1970s as a sort of, as a, as a politics. And certainly something that was organizing grassroots conservatives across the country.
And Dolan Along with other, conservative figures in this period, really masterminded direct mail as a way of mobilizing millions and millions of Americans into conservative activism and into supporting the Republican party. And ultimately also in supporting Reagan's rise to the nomination in 1980, Dolan as a closeted homosexual, didn't want his organization to, you really do much about, I mean, he really tried to keep the organization away from, from talking too much about homosexuality.
But it was, it was in the, the sort of group of issues that was important to this organization and important to mobilizing social conservatives in this period. And So he, he's, he's a huge figure and the rise of a far right conservatism in the seventies and the 1980s.
And he contracts HIV, AIDS and, and dies I believe in 1990, so somewhere around the late eighties or 1990. And some of his friends out him once he's and the Washington Post does as well. There's reports about him being having been a homosexual when he does die and that he dies of HIV A's and his family gets especially his brother, Tony Dolan has a lot to say about that because they say, well, They never really officially recognized that that's what he died of, and they even go on to say that he may have been homosexual, but he had renounced that on his deathbed.
But anyway, he's [00:34:00] a he's a really fascinating figure. One that I think gives us another example of a closeted person who's hugely influential on the right. And who unlike a lot of the other people who I'm writing about who are trying to sort of push the Republican Party in a more moderate direction, he very much is about pulling the Republican Party in a much more far right direction through this period.
SHEFFIELD: Hmm. Yeah. And I mean, and what's your take on whether, how he, Reconcile that with his homosexuality.
YOUNG: Well, he was an interesting figure because he was someone who would spend all day in his office sending out these, direct mailers about, the, the threat of abortion on the nation and then go to a gay bar that night.
And and it was sort of known within Washington gay circles that. He was gay. And again, I think in the 70s and even into the 80s, a lot of people were living these sorts of lives where what they did during the day didn't necessarily connect to or, didn't have caused them the question of what they were doing at night or vice versa.
I'm not sure exactly how he reconciled it other than I think he lived a really bifurcated life and his and that was true and sort of how he conducted his life. And I think it might have been true and how he sort of thought about it in his mind. Like I said, he didn't want the organization to focus on.
Anti gay efforts. And there had only been like one mailer that his organization sent out that was ever, about the homosexual threat to the nation. And I, he said that he didn't even realize that that mailer had been developed. I don't think there's any way. That as the head of this organization, and it was a pretty small organization at the time in terms of its office, that he would have been unaware.
But I interpreted that more as sort of an obligatory nod he gave to the anti or excuse me, the anti gay politics of the era to sort of like cover [00:36:00] his bases and probably also to, ward off suspicion about who he was. But he certainly didn't want the organization or, or the conservative movement to to focus on anti gay politics.
And I think it's one of those really interesting things in this period where you have a lot of gay Republicans who are really involved in, or at least supportive of the anti abortion politics that are taking shape in this period, and also sort of privately saying to themselves, Well, the government or the, the conservative movement shouldn't be developing an anti gay politics because really we should have bodily autonomy and personal freedom and the way that they could, say that about abortion or, or, or have that view and not have it.
Change their thoughts about, the abortion issue, even as they thought about what it meant for their own lives. I think it speaks to the way a lot of these guys compartmentalize both themselves and their politics throughout this period.
How concerns about a possible "gay gene" motivated some activists against abortion rights
SHEFFIELD: I'm glad you mentioned the abortion question for a lot of these gay Republicans, especially in this time period. And, even now I hear it sometimes in the things that they say, like with the.
One of their favorite arguments to make is that if there is a gay gene and abortion is legal, then gay people will be aborted. That is an argument that I have heard a lot from them, and so that's why they agree. For some of them, that is why they think abortions should be illegal.
YOUNG: And actually, that was really prominent in the 1990s.
I don't write about this in the book because this is another thing that I just didn't have the room to include. And maybe I'll do a standalone piece about it at some point because it was a fascinating history to uncover. In the 1990s, there was all this sort of speculation that science was about to reveal the gay gene.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Tim Walz has expanded the enthusiasm for Kamala Harris's ticket
10:02 — Kamala Harris's big crowds are making Trump jealous and petty
15:58 — Almost all the national polls have Harris slightly ahead of Trump
19:55 — JD Vance is stalking Kamala Harris, tried to approach Air Force Two
25:28 — Elon Musk lawsuit intimidates advertiser group to shut down anti-hate program
30:17 — RFK Junior makes campaign ad featuring bugs crawling all over him
35:39 — Taylor Swift cancels concerts after terrorist bomb scare
38:31 — Steve Martin turns down "SNL" offer to play Tim Walz
42:01 — Scientists hail discovery of "hobbit" sized ancient humans
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Leader Fentrice Driskell of the Florida House of Representatives discusses Florida's extreme abortion law, which earlier this year banned abortion at 6 weeks — before most women know they're pregnant. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, as there is an initiative on the Florida ballot this November, which, if passed, could significantly expand access in the state. Leader Driskell also discusses the importance of Vice President Kamala Harris's leadership on reproductive rights.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Jenna Ellis, ex-Trump attorney will cooperate with Arizona fake electors case
01:57 — Trump cowers from ABC debate with Harris, wants Fox safe space
06:55 — Trump whines that celebrities are helping Harris get bigger crowds
10:31 — Report: Former AG Bill Barr killed investigation into alleged $10 million bribe to Trump
13:00 — JD Vance’s wife defends his “cat lady” obsessions
16:01 — RFK Jr. says he abandoned bear cub carcass after wanting to skin and eat it
22:29 — Elon Musk PAC under investigate for voter registration website
25:51 — Google found guilty of being an illegal monopoly by federal judge
28:40 — French Olympian fails at pole vault because of his package
30:12 — Paraguay fires Olympian for doing too much sightseeing
32:54 — Vince Vaughn says movie industry too scared to try new comedy stories and concepts
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This Doomscroll episode is available on video as well as audio, and as per usual, it is not “safe for work.”
You can follow our guest Amanda Marcotte at Salon and on Twitter
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Kamala Harris has moved ahead of Donald Trump in polls
03:26 — Trump says Kamala Harris "became black"
10:16 — Rachel Scott of ABC shocked Trump by not coddling him
13:28 — Trump and JD Vance still can't respond effectively to "weird" attacks
18:25 — Fox's Jesse Watters can't understand why men would support Harris
21:31 — Demons are behind accusations that Trumpers are weird, MAGA podcaster says
26:14 — Right warned that Kamala is only just getting started with celebrity endorsements
29:12 — Intrigue surrounds Democrats' veepstakes
36:23 — North Texas adoption attorney charged with trying to sell prisoners' babies
40:36 — "Tradwife" Hannah "Ballerina Farm" Nielman lashes out after devastating profile
49:30 — Zoos grappling with visitors letting gorillas look at their phones
51:35 — Simone Biles kicked butt at the Olympics and mocked Trump afterwards
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Episode Summary
Less than five years ago, studying online rumors and misinformation wasn’t a controversial job. It most definitely is now, however, thanks to a powerful group of reactionary politicians and activists who have realized that improving the quality of our political discourse has a negative effect on their electoral chances. We now live in a social media environment in which everything from harmless speculation to flagrant lying isn’t just permissible, it’s encouraged—especially on X, the badly disfigured website formerly known as Twitter.
My guest in today’s episode, Renee DiResta, saw all of this happen in real time, not just to the public discourse, but to herself as well after she became the target of a coordinated smear campaign against the work that she and her colleagues at the Stanford Internet Observatory were doing to study and counteract internet falsehoods. That was simply intolerable for Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican congressman who argues that organizations seeking to improve information quality are really a “censorship industrial complex.”
Under significant congressional and legal duress, SIO was largely dissolved in June, a significant victory for online propagandists. Beyond their success at effectively censoring a private organization they despised, Jordan and his allies have also intimidated other universities and government agencies that might dare to document and expose online falsehoods.
Even if Jordan and his allies had not succeeded against SIO, however, it’s critical to understand that misinformation wouldn’t exist if people did not want to believe it, and that politicized falsehoods were common long before the internet became popular. Understanding the history of propaganda and why it’s effective is the focus of DiResta’s new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, and it’s the focus of our discussion in this episode.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
Related Content
* Why misinformation works and what to do about it
* Renee DiResta’s previous appearance on Theory of Change
* How and why Republican elites are re-creating the 1980s “Satanic Panic”
* Big Tobacco pioneered the tactics used by social media misinformation creators
* Right-wingers depend on disinformation and deception because their beliefs cannot win otherwise
* Why people with authoritarian political views think differently from others
* How a Christian political blogger inadvertently documented his own radicalization
* The economics of disinformation make it profitable and powerful
Audio Chapters
0:00 — Introduction
03:58 — How small groups of dedicated extremists leverage social media algorithms
09:43 — “If you make it trend, you make it true”
13:32 — False or misleading information can no longer be quarantined
21:31 — Why social influencer culture has merged so well with right-wing media culture
26:50 — America never had a '“shared reality” that we can return to
30:05 — Reactionaries have figured out that information quality standards are harmful to their factual claims
32:22 — Republicans have decided to completely boycott all information quality discussions
40:04 — Douglas Mackey and what trolls do
43:30 — How Elon Musk and Jim Jordan smeared anti-disinformation researchers
51:10 — Conspiracy theories don't have to make sense because the goal is to create doubt
53:40 — The desperate need for a “pro-reality” coalition of philanthropists and activists
58:30 — Proctor and Gamble, one of the earliest victims of disinformation
01:01:00 — The covid lab leak hypothesis and how content moderation can be excessive
01:13:07 — JD Vance couch joke illustrates real differences between left and right political ecosystems
01:19:26 — Why transparency is essential to information quality
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
Matthew Sheffield: So, your book and your career has upset a lot of people, I think that’s fair to say. And I guess maybe more your career more recently. So, for people who aren’t familiar with your story, why don’t you maybe just give a little overview?
Renee DiResta: So yeah, I guess I’m trying to think of where to start. I spent the last five years until June of this year at the Stanford Internet Observatory. I was the technical research manager there. So [00:03:00] I studied what we call adversarial abuse online. So understanding the abuse of online information ecosystems different types of actors, different types of tactics and strategies, sometimes related to trust and safety, sometimes related to disinformation or influence operations, sometimes related to generative AI or new and emerging technologies.
And We treated the internet as a holistic ecosystem. And so, our argument was that as new technologies and new actors and new entrants kind of came into the space you’d see kind of cascading effects across the whole of social media. A lot of the work that I did focused on propaganda and influence and influencers as a sort of linchpin in this particular media environment.
And so I recently wrote a book about that.
Matthew Sheffield: And you’ve got into all this based on your involvement in being in favor of vaccines.
Renee DiResta: Yeah, yeah. I know I got into it by like fighting on the internet, I [00:04:00] guess, back in 2014 no, I was I had my first kid in 2013, my son and I was living in San Francisco.
I’d moved out there about two years prior. And you have to do this thing in San Francisco where you put your kid on all these like preschool waiting lists. And not even like fancy preschool, just like any preschool, you’ve got to be on a waiting list. And so I was filling out these forms and I started trying to Google to figure out where the vaccine rates were because at the time there was a whooping cough outbreak in California.
And there were all of these articles about how, at the Google daycare vaccination rates were lower than South Sudan’s verbatim. This was one of the headlines. And I thought, I, I don’t want to send my kid to school in that environment. And I want to send him to a place where I’m not risking him catching easily preventable diseases.
This is not a crazy preference to have it turns out, but it was on the internet. And so I got really interested in, in that dynamic and how I felt like. My desire to keep my kid safe from preventable diseases [00:05:00] had been a accepted part of the social contract for decades. And all of a sudden I have a baby and I’m on Facebook and Facebook is constantly pushing me anti vaccine content and anti vaccine groups with hundreds of thousands of people in them.
So I started joining some of the groups because I was very curious, like what happens in these groups? Why are people so, so compelled to be there. And it was very interesting because it was It was like, it was like a calling, right? They, they weren’t in there because they had some questions about vaccines.
They were in there because they were absolutely convinced that vaccines caused autism, caused SIDS, caused allergies, and all of these other, lies, candidly, right? Things that we know not to be true, but they were really evangelists for this. And there was no, Counter evangelism, right? There were parents like me who quietly got our kids vaccinated, nothing happened, and we went on about our days.
And then there were people who thought they had a bad experience or who had, distrust in the government, distrust in science. And they were out there constantly putting out content about [00:06:00] how evil vaccines were. And I just felt like there was a real asymmetry there. Fast forward, maybe. A couple months after I started looking at those daycare rates and lists and preschool and there was a measles outbreak at Disneyland.
And I thought, Oh my God, measles is back, and measles is back in California in in, in 20, 2014. So that was where I started feeling like, okay we could take legislative steps to improve school vaccination rates and I wanted to be involved. And I met some other very dedicated, mostly women who did as well.
And we started this organization called Vaccinate California. And it was really. The mission was this vaccine kind of advocacy, but the learnings were much more broadly applicable, right? It was, how do you grow an audience? How do you add target? How do you take a couple thousand dollars from like friends and family and, Put that to the best possible use to grow a following for your page.
How do you get people to want to share your content? What [00:07:00] content is the kind of content you should produce? Like what is influential? What is appealing? And so it was this, kind of building the plane while you’re flying it sort of experience. I was like, Hey, everybody on Twitter is using bots.
This is crazy. Do we need bots? All right, I guess we need bots, and and just having this experience and um, 2015 or so is when all this was going down. And we did get this law passed this, this kind of pro vaccine campaign to improve school vaccination rates. It did pass, but I was more struck again by what was possible.
And by a feeling of I guess, alarm at some of the things that were possible, right. That you could add target incredibly granularly with absolutely no disclosure of who you were or where your money was coming from that you could run automated accounts to. Just to harass people, right? To kind of constantly barrage or post about them that none of this was in any way certainly wasn’t illegal, but it wasn’t even really like immoral.
It was [00:08:00] just. A thing you did on the internet and there were other things around that time, right? Gamergate happened around the same time. Isis grew big on social media around the same time. And so, I just felt like, okay, here’s the future. Every, every campaign going forward is going to be just like this.
And I remember talking about it. With people at the CDC, right? They asked us to come down and present at this conference, made a whole deck about what we had done. And, this pro vaccine mom group and was really struck by how like unimpressed they were by the whole thing, not. That we felt like we should be getting like kudos for what we had done, but that they didn’t see it as a battleground, that they didn’t see it as a source of influence, as a source of where public opinion was shaped, that they didn’t see groups with hundreds of thousands of people in them as a source of alarm.
And the phrase that they said that I referenced in the book a bunch of times is these are just some people online, right? So there’s a complete. [00:09:00] Lack of foresight of what was about to happen because of his belief that institutional authority was enough to carry the day. And my sense that it was not
Matthew Sheffield: well, and also that they did not understand that.
A, I mean, I think we, we have to say that at the outset that while you were encountering all this content, anti vaccine content, that that’s not what the majority opinion was. The majority opinion was pro vaccine and and, and, and so, yeah, with these bots and all these other different tactics of, agreeing to share.
Mutual links and whatnot. They’re able to make themselves seem much more numerous than they really are.
Renee DiResta: Yep.
“If you make it trend, you make it true”
Matthew Sheffield: And, and then eventually then the algorithm kicks in and then that promotes the stuff also. And, and you have a phrase which you have used in the book and used over the years, which I like, which is that if you, if you make it trend, you make it true.
So what does that mean? [00:10:00] What does that mean?
Renee DiResta: So I, it was almost a um, you know, you essentially create reality, right? This is the thing that we’re all talking about. This is the thing that everybody believes. Majority illusion is what you’re referencing there, right? You make yourself look a lot bigger than you are.
And algorithms come into play that help you do that. And in a way, it becomes it becomes something of a self fulfilling prophecy. So the, there’s a certain amount of activity and energy there. The thing gets, the content, whatever it is, gets engagement, the hashtag trends. There is so much effort that was being put in in the 2014 to 2016 or so timeframe into getting things trending because it was an incredible source of like attention capture.
You were putting an idea out there into the world, and if you got it done with just enough people, It would be pushed out to still more people. The algorithm would kind of give you that lift and then other people would click in and would pay attention. And so there was a real um, means [00:11:00] of galvanizing people by calling attention to your cause and making them feel kind of compelled to join in.
So one of the things that we saw, I’m trying to remember if I even referenced this part in the book, was the the ways in which you could like connect different factions on the internet. I have a graph of this that I show in a lot of talks where what you see is like the very long established anti vaccine communities in 2015, the people who’d been on their, their screaming about vaccines causing autism for years.
They didn’t get a lot of pickup with that narrative. There were still enough people who were like, no, I don’t know. Like the researchers over here, this is what it says. And you see them pivot the frame of the argument after they lose a couple of couple of votes in the California Senate, I think it was.
And you see them move from talking about the sort of health impacts, the sort of the things that we call misinformation, right? Things that are demonstrably false. You see them pivot instead to a frame about rights, about health, freedom, medical freedom. [00:12:00] And you see them they call it, Marrying the hashtags is the language that they use when they’re telling people on their side to do this, which is to tweet the hashtag for the bill, some of the vaccine hashtags, and then they say, tag in, you might remember this one TCO T top conservatives on Twitter or a hashtag to a, which is the second amendment people, for a long time before the first amendment became the be all end all on Twitter, it was actually the second amendment.
That was the thing that, that you would see kind of conservative factions fighting over the days of the tea party. And so you saw the anti vaccine activists, again, these people who have this deeply held belief in the health lies, instead pivoting the conversation to focus instead on, okay, it doesn’t matter what the vaccines do, you shouldn’t have to take them.
And that becomes the thing that actually enables them to really kind of grow this big tent. And you see the movement begin to expand as they start making this appeal to more sort of a, libertarian or tea party politics. That was that was [00:13:00] quite prominent on, on Twitter at the time. So essentially that is how they managed to grow the So the make a trend, make a true thing was just if you could get enough people paying attention to your hashtag, your rumor, your content, nobody’s going to see the counter movement, the counter fact check, the thing that’s going to come out after the trend is over.
It’s the trend that’s going to capture attention, stick in people’s mind and become the thing that they that they think about as a, reality when they’re referencing the conversation later.
False or misleading information can no longer be quarantined
Matthew Sheffield: Well, and the reason for that is this other idea of which you talk about, which is that media is additive.
That when people think that, well, I, I can somehow stop bad views from being propagated on the internet. Like, that’s the idea. That’s not true. And, and it, and it never, and it never was. And like you, I mean, you can definitely lessen the impact because I mean, I think it is the case for instance, that Tucker Carlson, [00:14:00] once he was taken off Fox news, his influence has declined quite a bit.
And Milo Yiannopoulos, another example now, now he’s reduced to saying that he’s he’s an ex gay Catholic activist. That’s, I saw that go by.
Renee DiResta: Yeah, no, I definitely saw that one go by. There’s one thing that happens though, where Twitter, Steps in at some point also, because they realize that a lot of the efforts to make things trend are being driven by bots and things like this, right?
By, by automated accounts. And so they come up with, at this point, rubrics for what they consider to be a low quality account is the term. And that has been, reframed now and the political, the sort of political polarized arguments about social media, but the low quality account Vision, that, that went into it was this idea that they wanted trends to be reflective of real people and real people’s opinions.
And so you do see them trying to come in and filter out the the accounts that appear to be there, like [00:15:00] to spam or to participate in spamming trends and things like this. And so Twitter tries to correct for this for a while in the 2017 to 2019 timeframe, it’s unclear. What has happened since?
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and, and, and I mean, and this, the idea of, how to adjust algorithms, I mean, that is kind of one of the perpetual problems of, of all social media is, and no, I feel like that the people who own these platforms and run them, they don’t want to admit that.
Any choice, any, in, in algorithm, whether it’s, reverse chronological per, accounts mutuals interest or whatever, whatever their metric is. It is a choice and it is a choice to boost things. And it seems like a lot of people in tech, they don’t, they don’t want to think that they’re doing a choice.
Renee DiResta: I [00:16:00] think now,
Matthew Sheffield: now,
Renee DiResta: now if you talk to people who work on social media platforms, I don’t think that that’s a controversial thing to say anymore. I think in 20 again, 2016, 2017 timeframe. There was this idea that there was such a thing as a neutral, right? That, that there was a Magical algorithmic, pure state of affairs.
And and this led to some really interesting challenges for them because they ultimately were creating an environment where whoever was the best at. Intuiting what the algorithm wanted and creating content for it could essentially level up their views. So one of the things that happened was Facebook launches this feature called the watch tab. They do it to compete with YouTube and they don’t have the content creator base of YouTube.
So there is a bunch of new content creators who begin to try, who [00:17:00] realize that Facebook is aggressively promoting the watch tab. So they’ve created an incentive and then the watch tab is going to surface certain types of content. So you see these accounts trying to figure out what the watch tab wants to recommend, what it’s, what it’s geared to recommend.
And they evolve over time to creating these kinds of content where the headline, like the sort of video title is what she saw when she opened the door, right. Or you’ll never believe what he thought in that moment, these sorts of like clickbait clickbait titles. But it works and the watch tab is pushing these videos out.
They’re all about like 13 to 15 minutes long, right? So these videos really require a lot of investment and the audience is sitting there like waiting for this payoff, is like, what happens when she opens the door? I don’t know. She hasn’t opened the door yet. And you just sit there and you wait and you wait and you watch and you watch.
And so it’s, the algorithm thinks this is fantastic, right? It’s racking up watch minutes. People are staying on the platform. The creators are earning tons of [00:18:00] money there. This is being pushed out to literally millions of people, even if the pages only have about 10, 000 followers. And so you watch this entire ecosystem grow and it’s entirely like content produced solely to capture attention entirely to earn.
The revenue share that, that the platform has just made possible. So it’s like the algorithm creates an incentive structure and then the content is created to fill it. And the influencers that are best at creating the content can profit from it and maximize both their attention, right? The attention, the clout that they’re going to get from new followers and also financially to profit from it.
So unfortunately the the idea that there’s like some neutral. It’s just not exactly right. Even if you have reverse chronological, what you’re incentivizing is for people to post a whole lot. So they’re always at the top of the feed. So it’s just this idea that you’re always going to have actors responding to those incentives and this is just what we get on social media.
It’s not a. It’s not a political thing at all. It’s just, it’s just creators [00:19:00] meeting the, the, the rules of the game. Right.
Matthew Sheffield: The algorithms of who was boosted or what was not boosted like people eventually started.
imbuing all kinds of decision, human decisions into algorithms also. Like, I see that all the time. People, they’re like, I’m, I’m shadow band or I’m this or that. And it’s like, and then you look at their. Posts and they’re just kind of boring, they’re just some links. And especially Twitter now, like they will penalize you if you’re not somebody that is regarded as a news source or something like that, whatever the term is they use, like you’re going to get penalized if you post a link in the post.
And, but a lot of people, they don’t know how the algorithms work. And, and so like, they think that they’re being deliberately individually suppressed. And that’s just not true.
Renee DiResta: It’s, it’s weirdly. Were they narcissistic in a way I would see I would occasionally, so some of it is genuine lack of understanding.
I remember in 2018, [00:20:00] having conversations with people as the sort of shadow banning theories were emerging and asking folks, like, why do you think your shadow band? These were these accounts that had maybe a couple hundred followers, not very much engagement. They were not. Big, political power players or s**t posters or anything, just kind of ordinary people.
And they would say like, well, my friends don’t see all of my posts. And that’s when you realize that there’s like a disconnect. They do not understand that algorithmic curation is the order of the day. And that whatever it is that you’re creating is competing with a whole lot of other, what other people are creating.
And, something somewhere is stack ranking all of this and deciding what to show your friends. And so they interpret it as somehow being sort of a, a personal ding on them. And the part that I always found sort of striking was when you had the influencers who know better, right. Who do understand how this works.
And the, the, they would use it as a as a monetization strategy as, as an audience [00:21:00] capture, sorry, not audience capture, but as a audience attention grab where they would say like, I, I am so suppressed. I am so suppressed. We, I only have 900, 000 followers. I remember after Elon took over Twitter, I thought, okay, maybe this is going to go away now, but it didn’t.
Then it turned into, Elon, there’s still ghosts in the machine. There’s still legacy suppression that’s happening. You need to get to the bottom of it. And so it was completely inconceivable to them that like some of their content just wasn’t that great or some of their content just wasn’t, where the algorithmic tweaks had gone.
Why social influencer culture has merged so well with right-wing media culture
Renee DiResta: So there’s an interesting dynamic that happens on social media, which is that people see influencers as being distinct from media, right? They’re they present as just them. They’re not attached to a branded outlet.
Maybe they have a sub stack or something like that, but but they’re, they’re not seen as being part of a major media institution or brand. And so they’re seen as being more trustworthy, right? They’re just like me. They’re a person who is like me, who is out there sees the world the way I see it and what they have to say [00:22:00] resonates with me.
So it’s a different model. And one of the things that the influencer has to do is they’re, they’re constantly working to grow that relationship with their fandom. And what you start to see happen on social media is that this idea that they are somehow being suppressed, that their truths are somehow being prevented from reaching people.
It’s both a sort of an appeal for, for support, right? For support and validation from the audience. But it’s also, it also positions them as being somehow very, very important, right? So, I am so suppressed because I am so important. I am over the target. I am telling you what they don’t want you to know.
So that, that presentation kind of makes them seem more interesting. It increases their mystique. It increases their their clout, particularly among audiences who don’t trust media, don’t trust institutions, don’t trust big tech. So it becomes in a sense it’s almost a, a marketing [00:23:00] ploy for influencers to say, you should follow me because I am so suppressed.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and, and it’s critical to note that this is also fitting into a much larger and longer lasting pattern that is existed on the political right. Since the
Renee DiResta: idea that The mainstream media is biased against you and your truths. And so, here’s this here’s this alternative series of outlets.
And I think, the influencer is just one step in that, in that same chain, but what’s always interesting to me about it is the the presentation of themselves as distinct from media, even though they have the. reach of media. They are presenting themselves as an authoritative source of either information or commentary.
And so it’s, in the realm of the political influencer, especially it’s like media, but without the without the, the, the media brand, everything else is very much the same.
Matthew Sheffield: It is. Yeah. And I mean, in a lot of ways, the talk radio is, is the model here that this is just. [00:24:00] A slightly different version of it.
And, and that’s why I do think that, like when you look at the biggest podcast or biggest, YouTube channels and whatnot, like they are almost overwhelmingly right wing because that’s the audience has been sort of, that’s what they expect. They’re used to sitting there and listening to somebody talk to them for three hours.
Where, whereas, on, on the left or center left, the things have to be a lot shorter. And they have to be conversations instead of monologues that are three hours long. But I mean, of course, but the other issue though, is that, I mean, there is an epistemic problem as well on the right wing in America.
I mean, it is the case that, I mean, William F. Buckley Jr. His first book, God, a man at Yale was about. How these professors were mean because they didn’t believe in the resurrection. They were mean because they taught evolution and they didn’t take seriously the idea [00:25:00] that maybe the earth was recreated in 6, 000 years.
Maybe that was why, why, why can’t we teach the controversy? We need to teach the controversy. Like to me, that’s kind of the original alternative fact is evolution. Is not true. Um, That was the whole
Renee DiResta: thing. Do you remember that was I remember it would have been gosh, sometime in the 2014, 2015 timeframe, there was this paper that made the rounds where Google was trying to figure out how to assess questions of factuality.
Right. And I’m trying to remember what they called it. It had a name. It wasn’t like, Truth rank or something, maybe it was something maybe it was that actually but the media coverage of it, particularly on the right made exactly this point. Well, how old are they going to say the earth is, and that was like the big gotcha.
Um, And you weren’t
Matthew Sheffield: there, Renee. So how do you,
Renee DiResta: how do you, how do you even know scientists, fossils, who even knows, right. But the it was an interesting, It is sort of first [00:26:00] glimpse into at the time people were saying like, Hey, as more and more information is, sort of proliferating on the internet, how do you return good information?
And there was that Google knowledge, you started to see search results that returned, not just the list of results, but that had the answer kind of up there in the the, the sort of knowledge pain. And if you searched for age of the earth, it would give you the actual age of the earth.
And that became a source of some controversy. So one of the first kind of harbingers of what was going to happen as a social media platforms or search results for that matter, search engines tried to try to curate accurate information as there was a realization that perhaps surfacing accurate information was a worthwhile endeavor.
And now it sounds. Controversial to say that whereas 10 years ago it was seen as a, the normal evolution and helping, helping computers help you.
Matthew Sheffield: ,
America never had a “shared reality” that we can return to
Matthew Sheffield: I think it’s unfortunate that there is a lot of discourse about, we, we don’t have a shared reality anymore.
You don’t have, the [00:27:00] unfortunate problem is. We never had it. It’s just, it’s, it’s just like, for in astronomy, you can, a lot of times you can’t see planets because they don’t generate light or we can’t see neutron stars because they don’t generate light. Or very little. In essence.
These, these alternative realities, they were always there. People who work in academia or work in journalism or work in knowledge fields, didn’t know that they were there. I mean, it is the case that when you look at Gallup polling data, that 40 percent of American adults say that God created humans in their present form and that they did not evolve.
And only 33 percent say that humans evolved with God guiding the process. And then the smallest percentage, 22 percent says that humans evolved and God was not involved in that [00:28:00] process. There’s all kinds of things about that. You could illustrate that.
I mean, these opinions have always been out there, anti reality was always there. It’s just. Now it affects the rest of us is the problem.
Renee DiResta: That’s it. That’s an interesting point. I think the I remember reading the evolution creation debates on the internet because they were, that was like the original source of, debating and fighting, and you could find that stuff on the internet and there were the the flat earthers, but that always seemed like a joke until all of a sudden one day it didn’t.
And yeah, the chemtrails the chemtrails groups. One thing I was struck by was when I joined some of those anti vaccine groups, the chemtrail stuff came next, the flat earth stuff, the 9 11 truth stuff. It was just this this entire yeah, conspiracy correlation matrix basically, that was just like, Oh, you like this.
You might also like this and this and this and this and this. And so is this a interesting glimpse into how these The sort of Venn diagrams and those different belief [00:29:00] structures. But one thing I think that was distinct is that it was the ones that in that required a deep distrust in government to really continue.
So I think that that was also different. I don’t think, you would see the evolution debate come up in the context of what should we put in the textbooks, right? This teach the controversy thing that you referenced. But it, it didn’t. It seems like that existed in a time when trust in government was still higher.
Now you have, I think a lot more conspiracy theories that are really where the belief seems more plausible because people so deeply distrust government. And so that, that cycle has been happening. And when you speak about the impact it has, it does then interfere with governance and things like that in a distinctly different way.
Then it maybe seemed like it did, two decades ago.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And at the same time, I mean, Margaret Thatcher had her famous saying what she said twice in the interview that there’s no such [00:30:00] thing as society. It’s we’re, we’re just a bunch of individuals. That’s all that we are.
Reactionaries have figured out that information quality standards are harmful to their factual claims
Matthew Sheffield: And yeah, I mean, like, but you’re right. I think that it obviously has come. Has gotten more pronounced and this skepticism has become more of a problem. And, but it’s become a problem also in the, in the social media space, because. Trying to do anything to dial back falsehoods even flagrant ones, dangerous ones that are, will cause people to die.
That’s controversial now. And it, and it wasn’t. And, and you yourself, We’re have experienced that, haven’t you?
Renee DiResta: Well, I mean, it, it was a very effective, I think, kind of grievance campaign. I remember the, Donald Trump was It was in office and there was this, do you remember that form?
They put up like a web form. Have you been censored on social media? Let us know. Yeah. And and then they, I think they got a, that was the
Matthew Sheffield: fundraising boy. They got a [00:31:00] bunch of
Renee DiResta: dick pics. Yeah, exactly. dick pics and an email list. But the, because it wanted like screenshots of evidence, which I thought was almost like.
Sweet in how it did not understand what was, I wasn’t gonna come.
Matthew Sheffield: The post is deleted. You’re not gonna see it.
Renee DiResta: But that, that kind of belief that really began to take hold that there was this partisan politically motivated effort to suppress conservatives, despite the abundance of research, to the contrary, and lack of evidence.
It was almost like the lack of evidence was the evidence at some point, so much. Bye bye. Well, you can’t prove they’re not doing it. Well, here’s what we see. No, no, no, no. That, that research is biased. The wokes did it. Twitter did it. The old regime at Twitter did it. There was no universe in which that catechism was going to be untrue.
Right. And so it simply took hold and then they just looked for evidence to support it. And then all of a sudden they looked for evidence to run vast congressional [00:32:00] investigations into it. And it, it has always been a, smoke and mirrors, no, they’re there, but that doesn’t matter at this point because you have political operatives who are willing to, Support with their base by prosecuting this grievance that their base sincerely believes in because they’ve heard for Yeah,
Republicans have decided to completely boycott all information quality discussions
Matthew Sheffield: well, and, and the thing that, and I can say this, having been a, a former conservative activist, that one of the things that made me leave that world was because I did, I was kind of, I mean, I worked in the, in the liberal media bias world saying that all the media is out to get Republicans.
And so, I, I started getting into this idea on social media. Well, are, are they biased against conservatives? And eventually I had the revolutionary and apparently subversive idea that, well, what if Republicans are just more wrong? What if our ideas are not as good?
Like, if we believe things that [00:33:00] aren’t true, then maybe they shouldn’t be promoted. And I’ll tell you when I started saying that to people, they They told me to stop talking about that. And even now, like, I mean, you, so when we should get into more specifically the things that happened to you, but before the right wing targeted the Stanford observatory and you yourself you were trying to have dialogue with.
People who were saying these things about, we’re being censored. The big tech is out to get us, et cetera. And you ask them, okay, well, so what kind of rubric do you want? How should we deal with this stuff? Obviously I assume you don’t think that. Telling people to buy bleach and drink it for to cure their toenail fungus or whatever.
They will say they don’t agree with that stuff. But then when you ask them, okay, well, so what should we do? We never got a response.
Renee DiResta: No, there’s never really a good answer for that. I mean, one of the things that [00:34:00] long before joining Stanford, starting in 2015, I started writing about recommendation engines, right?
Because I thought Hey, the anti vaccine groups are not outside of the realm of acceptable political opinions. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be on Facebook. There is something really weird about a recommender system proactively pushing it to people. And then when those same accounts, like I said, I joined a couple of these groups with a, totally different new account that had no past history of like my actual interests or behavior.
So at this point, clean slate account join those groups. Like I said, I got chemtrails, I got flat earth got nine 11 truther, but then I got pizza gate. Right. And then after I joined a couple of pizza gate groups, those groups sort of all morphed into QAnon. A lot of those groups became QAnon groups.
And so QAnon was getting pushed to this account again, very, very, very early on. And I just thought like, We’re in this really weird world. It became pretty clear, pretty quickly that, that QAnon was not [00:35:00] just another conspiracy theory group, right? That QAnon came with some very specific calls to act that QAnon accounts, like, sorry, QAnon people adherence is the word I’m looking for committed acts of violence or did weird things in the real world.
And you see Facebook classified as a dangerous org and begin to to, to boot it off the platform, but in the early days, that’s not happening. And I thought it’s, it’s weird when the nudge is coming to encourage people to join, as opposed to people proactively going and typing in the thing that they know they want to find and that they’re consciously going and looking for.
Like that’s two different behaviors. You sort of push versus pull, we can call it. And I did think, and I do think that as platforms serve as curators and recommenders, running an entire. Essentially social connection machine that is orienting people around interests and helping them find new interests does come with a set [00:36:00] of, ethical requirements.
And so I started writing about like, what might those be? Not even saying I had the answers, just saying like, is there, is there some framework, some rubric we can come up with by which we have that. In the phrase that eventually came to be associated with that, that idea was freedom of speech, not freedom of reach, right.
That you weren’t owed a megaphone. You weren’t owed algorithmic amplification. There was no obligation for a platform to take your group and proactively push it up to more people, but that in the interest of free expression, it should stay up on the platform. And you could go do the legwork of, growing it yourself if you wanted to.
So, that was the That was the idea, right? The question of like, how do you think curation should work? Like something is being up ranked or down ranked at any given time, whether that’s a feed ranking or a recommender system or even a trending algorithm. So what is the best way to do that? And, and I think that is still today the really interesting question about, [00:37:00] how to treat narratives on social media.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And it’s one that the right is not participating in at all. Not at all. And so, I mean, and that’s, and the reality is these decisions will be made whether they participate or not, like they have to be made. These are things that exist and these are businesses that have to be run and they will be made.
So, and it’s, to me, I thought, It’s, that’s been the most consistent pattern in how reactionary people have dealt with you over the years is that they don’t actually talk to you in a serious way. It’s easier to say like, oh,
Renee DiResta: it’s all censorship, that, that’s a very effective, it’s very effective buzzwords, very effective term that you can redefine, censor, it was a nice epithet you can toss at your opponent, but it no, it misses the key question.
I think it’s worth pointing out by the way, that like every group at some point has [00:38:00] like felt that they have been censored or suppressed in some way. By a social media algorithm, right? It’s the right has made it the central grievance of a political platform, but you do see these allegations with regard to like social media is suppressing marginalized communities, right?
That is the thing that that you hear on the left and have heard on the left for a very long time. Social media during the October 7th, the, the day sort of immediately after October 7th in Israel, there was an entire report that came out. Alleging that pro Palestinian content was being suppressed.
Unfortunately, the methodology often involves asking people, Do you feel like you’ve been suppressed? And it’s, stupid. It’s a terrible, terrible mechanism for assessing these things. But but it, but it is, at least one way to. See where the pulse of the community is. People don’t trust social media platforms.
They’re, just not unreasonable, right? They’ve done some, some, some pretty terrible things. You do see, the platforms as they [00:39:00] sit there trying to figure out what to up rank or down rank the loss of like the, the lack of understanding and the lack of trust come, come into play.
Did you see God, it was yesterday. It was like libs of Tik TOK going on about how chat GPT was suppressing the Trump assassination because she was using a version that were the, that had been trained on material prior to the Trump assassination happening, right? And so it was such a ridiculous, like just this grievance, but oh my God, the engagement, the grievance gets.
And again, okay. People on the internet, they believe stupid things, but then, then Ted Cruz Amplifies it sitting congressional regulator, Congress, Senator Ted Cruz is out there amplifying this stupid grievance based on a complete misunderstanding of the technology she’s using. And, and, and he sees it as a win.
That’s why he’s doing it. And, and it’s like so [00:40:00] paralyzingly stupid actually, but you know, this is where we are.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.
Douglas Mackey and what trolls do
Matthew Sheffield: Well, and there’s a guy that you, you talk about in the book that I think a lot of people he kind of fell off the radar because he got arrested the guy who whose name is Douglas Mackey.
He went by Ricky Vaughn on the internet. on Twitter and he went on trial for creating a deception operation to tell black voters to not vote on election day. And in what was it? 2016. And yeah. And so he went on trial because that is a crime. And he. Got convicted of it and he got sentenced as well.
So, but in the, in the course of the trial some of the other trolls and, and it’s fair to say these people are neo Nazis that they, that’s who they worked with and Mackie was working with Weave, who is a notorious neo Nazi hacker and anyway, but one of the other trolls involved with this who went by the name microchip he said something that I thought was, was It’s [00:41:00] very frank description of what it is that they’re doing.
He said, my talent is to make things weird and strange. So there is controversy. And then they asked him, well, did you believe the things you said? And he said, no, and I didn’t care. And that’s, that’s the problem. Like, how can you have a shared reality with people who that’s their attitude? And I mean, you, you can get into that sort of toward the end, but I don’t know.
It’s, it’s, it’s a question that more people should think about.
Renee DiResta: You should write a book about it.
It’s a, it’s a hard one. I get asked a lot of the time. In the, the stories that like the stories about me, right. The weird conspiracy theories that I’m like some, that, that the CIA placed me in my job at Stanford.
Man, I’ve had some real surreal conversations, including with like print media fact checkers. I got a phone call one day that was like, Hey, we’re doing this. You’re a supporting character. [00:42:00] You’re tangentially mentioned, but Hey, I need to ask the, the person is saying that. The CIA got you your job at, at Stanford.
And that seems a little bit crazy. I was like, it’s more than a little bit crazy. A little, little bit’s not quite it. It’s I didn’t even know that counts as defamatory because it sounds cool, but, but it’s f*****g not true. And and you, and you find yourself in these, like these situations where, I was like, I’m actually, I’m, I’m frankly floored.
That I am being asked to prove that that is not true when, like, what, what did, what did you ask that guy? Did you ask him for some evidence? Did you ask him, like, what are you basing this on? Like, some online vibes, some shitposts from randos, and then you decide that, that this is enough for you to say the thing.
I am the one who has to prove the negative, like it’s the weirdest, like the, the, I felt like, I was actually really irritated by that, to be honest, I was just like, what kind of information environment are we in where where I’m being asked [00:43:00] to deny the most stupid, spurious allegations and nobody is asking the people pushing them for the evidence.
And that’s where I did start to feel like Over the last, year or so, like I’d sort of gone down this, this mirror world where, the allegation was was taken as fact and, the onus was on me to disprove it. And that’s just not a, it’s not a thing that, that you can do really.
That’s unfortunately the problem. So,
Matthew Sheffield: yeah.
How Elon Musk and Jim Jordan smeared anti-disinformation researchers
Matthew Sheffield: Well, and and that certainly snowballed eventually. So they, they. These bad faith actors went from ignoring your questions about moderation standards and epistemology and to starting to attack you and other people who study disinformation and misinformation.
And you, you and others were figures in the Twitter files. Yeah. Elon Musk and his I guess now former friends mostly seems like [00:44:00] but what, what was the, I guess maybe do a little brief overview of that. And
Renee DiResta: yeah, so we had done a bunch of work yeah, public work. It was all over the internet in 2020 looking at.
What we called misinformation at the time, but became pretty clear that it was like election rumors, right? It was people who were trying to de legitimize the election preemptively. And we had a very narrow scope. We were looking at things that, as like, Mackey’s things about vote on Wednesday, not on Tuesday kind of stuff.
So we were looking for content that was trying to interfere in the process of voting or content that was trying to de legitimize voting. And so we did this very complicated comprehensive. Project over the course of about August to November of 2020, tracking these rumors as they emerged with a bunch of students working on the project, really very student driven.
We connected with tech platforms every now and then to say things like, Hey, here’s a viral rumor. It seems to violate your policies, have at it, do whatever it is you’re going to do. We connected with state and local [00:45:00] election officials occasionally, mostly to say things like they would reach out sometimes they would we called it filing a ticket.
They would sort of file a ticket. And they would ask about content that they saw that was wrong. Right. And so that was stuff like Hey, we’ve got this person, this account, it’s claiming to be a poll worker. We have no record that anybody with that name is a poll worker, but it’s saying a lot of stuff that’s just wrong.
And we’re worried that it’s going to undermine confidence in the vote, like in that district. So that was the kind of thing that we would look at. And then we would send back a note sometimes saying like, here’s what you should do with this. Here’s what you should do with that. And the so that was the, the process that.
That we went through with all these rumors. So, and then in 2021, we did the same kind of thing, but with vaccine rumors. And in that particular case, obviously it wasn’t state and local election officials. We would just track the most viral narratives related to the vaccine for that week. Published it PDFs, every PDF once a week on the website, completely public.
Anybody could see them. And that was, and then we would send them to people who’d signed up for our mailing [00:46:00] list, and that included public health officials some folks in government, anybody who wanted to receive that briefing, which was just a repurposing of what was on the website. So those were our projects.
And they were refashioned by the same people who tried to vote not to certify the election or tried to overturn the election. And some of the kind of right wing COVID influencers. As they were reframed as not academic research projects, but as part of a vast plot to suppress all of those narratives, to take down and delete all of those tweets, to silence conservative voices.
And as this rumor about our work snowballed, it eventually reached the point where, somebody went on Tucker Carlson to say that we had actually Stolen the 2020 election, that this was how we had done it. We had suppressed all of the true facts about voter fraud and all the other things. And as a result, people hadn’t voted for Donald Trump.
So it was just complete surreal nonsense. But again, [00:47:00] having rumors about you on the internet is an inconvenience. It’s an annoyance. You get death threats, people send you crazy emails. But what happened that was really troubling was that sitting members of Congress took up the cause and people who had subpoena power then used nothing more than, Online lies about our work to demand access to our emails.
So the way that this connects to the Twitter files is one of these individuals, a right wing blogger who created this website that he called the foundation for freedom online. It was basically just him began to write these stories about us. And then he aggressively repeatedly over a period of almost two months, tried to get Matt tidy to pay attention to him.
And eventually, in March of 2023, he connects with Tybee, who’s been doing several of these Twitter files, in a chat room in a, in a, sorry, in a Twitter spaces kind of voice chat. And he tells him, I have the keys to the kingdom. I’m going to tell you about that CIA [00:48:00] woman who works at Stanford who has FBI level access to Twitter’s internal systems.
And now these are words that mean nothing. Like what the hell does FBI level access mean? And I never had access to any internal system at Twitter, but again, it doesn’t matter because he peaks Tybee’s interest, connects with him. And then all of a sudden, Jim Jordan is requesting that Tybee come and testify about the Twitter files.
And rather than testifying about the things that are actually in the Twitter files, he and Michael Schellenberger, who’s the co witness, start to just regurgitate the claims about the mass suppression of conservative speech that this individual has written on his blog. So there’s no evidence that is actually offered, but in response to the allegation being made, Jim Jordan then demands all of our emails.
And so all of a sudden, Matt Tybee and Michael Schellenberger say some stuff on Twitter and Jim Jordan gets to read my emails. And that’s really all it takes. And that was the part where I was like, wow, we are really I maybe rather naively [00:49:00] thought that, There was like more evidence required to kick off a massive congressional investigation, but that’s not how it works today.
Matthew Sheffield: Well, and, and, and ironically, it was named by the done by the House Committee on Government Weaponization. That turned into nothing but weaponizing government. Yeah. I
Renee DiResta: mean, the whole thing is I mean, honestly, it should be kind of depressing to anybody who you, when you, when you realize that it’s really just norms that are keeping the wheels on the bus.
And that when you move into this environment where the end justifies the means that there is this, Very little in the way of, of, guardrails on this sort of stuff, except, basic decency and and or more and more Machiavellian terms, like a sense that this is going to come back and bite them, but it’s not, it’s not going to at all.
Nothing is ever going to happen either to the people who lied or to the bloggers or to the Twitter files guys, or to the members of Congress who [00:50:00] weaponized the government to target the first amendment protected. Research of random academics. Nothing is going to happen to any of them. There will be no consequences.
And that’s when you start to realize that there’s really very little that is we, we’ve, we’ve created a terrible system of incentives here. Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And and what’s, what’s awful is. I think that even now after what happened, so I mean, we need to say that, after all the, the legal threats and there were other ones as well the Missouri versus Biden case and some of the other ones that targeted the Stanford Internet Observatory.
I mean, the goal was to shut
Renee DiResta: the
Matthew Sheffield: program down and they succeeded.
And yet I don’t, I feel like that generally speaking, people outside of the people who directly work in this area. I don’t think that there is any concern about [00:51:00] this problem at all, or
Renee DiResta: this is where what I’ve tried to do, like, I’ll be fine.
I’m not worried about, like, me. But,
Conspiracy theories don’t have to make sense because the goal is to create doubt
Renee DiResta: One of the things that one of the people that I spoke with when it all began to happen, when the first kind of congressional letters showed up were some of the climate scientists like Michael Mann, I referenced in the book who had been through this with his own sort of fight in the pre internet days of 2012.
But again, when he had done research that was politically inexpedient, right, showing that that, the sort of hockey stick graphs. Around around climate change and kind of human human impacted climate change. And he wound up getting hauled in front of congressional hearings, having his email gone through, a whole bunch of different things happened to him.
And one thing I was struck by was how familiar the playbook was. Right. And I read Naomi book, merchants of doubt. And she also goes into it with regard to [00:52:00] scientists who are trying to say, Hey, it looks like tobacco is really not great. It looks like it might cause cancer, and this sort of retaliation.
And and, and what you see from the companies where they say, like, we just have to discredit the people who are saying this, right. We don’t have to offer, we don’t even have to bolster our facts. We just have to attack these people that that’s, what’s going to work, right. Smearing them is the most effective thing to do here.
We just have to create doubt, a lack of confidence in what they’ve done and said. We have to turn them into enemies. And you see that model of this smear working very, very well whenever there is something that is politically inexpedient. And again, the people who were quote unquote investigating us were the people who were very angry that we had done this very comprehensive kind of, A research project tracking the big lie and the people who propagated the big lie were the ones who were mad at it.
And once they had gavels, they retaliated. That’s how it works. The the problem is that playbook is very effective. It’s very [00:53:00] hard to respond to rumors and smear campaigns. Institutions are notoriously bad at it. And so the question then becomes like, which field gets attacked next? And that’s where, what I think like the focus shouldn’t be on us or SIO or, any one institution that’s experiencing this, it should be on how effective that playbook is.
And the thing that we need to see is people doing more work on countering the effects of that playbook on pushing back on smears on fighting much more aggressively. When Congress comes calling in this way and that, that I think is the the, the key takeaway from like, from my cautionary tale.
The desperate need for a “pro-reality” coalition of philanthropists and activists
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. There’s just so much that needs to be done and, and there’s so much money that is being out there to promote falsehoods to the public. Because the issue is that for, reactionary media, reactionary foundations, organizations, they don’t engage in general interest.[00:54:00]
Like public philanthropy. So in other words, they’re not out there, feeding the homeless from their foundation or, helping people register to vote or, various things like that. Or, funding cleanup projects or, or something, they’re, they’re not doing that.
And so we’re, and so all of their money is focused on altering politics. Whereas, The people who are, the non reactionary majority, the philanthropists, they have to support all these other institutions, like the Red Cross or, all these things that are not political. And so the philanthropy is, is split, but it’s also missed.
Like, they don’t understand that you have to actually create things that are In favor of reality and anti the, the, the, because like, basically what we’re, emergence of a, of an anti epistemology
Renee DiResta: and.
Matthew Sheffield: And to me, the, the analogy that I use sometimes with people is HG [00:55:00] Wells his novel, the time machine.
And at some point in the future, the humans in that area had speciated into two groups and there were the, the uh, Eloy that lived uh, um, during the daytime and, you know, they had solved all problems for themselves and scarcity and whatnot. But they were totally unaware that there was this other Group of post humans who lived at night and preyed on them.
And like, I feel like there’s so many knowledge workers and institutions. They don’t realize that the, that, we’re living in an information economy where there are predators.
Renee DiResta: It’s a good metaphor for it. Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: And they’ve got to, they’ve got to wake up to that because everything that they do is actually under attack.
If, if not now, it will be later. Everything has a liberal bias in this worldview and no matter who it is. Like, I mean, it started with. Then it went to journalism. [00:56:00] Then it went to, now it’s with the FBI is liberally biased and agency created by a far right Republican J Edgar Hoover and never run by anyone who was a Democrat.
registered Democrat, but it’s liberally biased. It’s liberally biased. And police are that now the woke military, like everything is liberally biased. And like, until you realize there are people out there that want to completely tear down all institutions. then you’re, you’re not going to win. I don’t, I don’t know.
It’s kind of depressing.
Renee DiResta: I mean, that was the the one thing I wish I’d been more direct on in the book was, was actually that point, right? It’s the uh, the need to understand that that it, it, it comes for people and that. You don’t have to do anything wrong in order for it to happen. I think, I think there’s still a, you know, even like my parents, I was like, Oh, I got a congressional subpoena and [00:57:00] Stephen Miller sued me.
And they’re like, what did you do? And I was like, no, that’s not how this works. Because, because they, they live in a time when. Or they, their, their model of politics is still this, obviously if you’re being investigated, like there’s some cause for it and, and, and I’ll confess also that I, I really did not realize how much things like lawsuits and everything else were just.
Stuff that you could just file and that you could just, gum up a person’s life with meaningless requests and all these different procedural, all the procedural drama that went along with it. And, I, we found out that Stephen Miller had sued us when Breitbart tweeted it at us.
And I remember seeing that and being like, is this even real? It don’t, doesn’t somebody show up to your, to your door with papers or something? And my, my Twitter sued, like, how does this work? But they were doing it because they were [00:58:00] fundraising off of it. Right. The the, the groups that were part and parcel to the lawsuit.
And I thought, Oh, I get it now. Oh, that’s so interesting. I always thought that. The, the legal system was maybe biased in some ways around some types of cases, you read the stats about criminal prosecutions and things, but I’d never paid that close attention. It wasn’t really a thing that that I followed and and then all this started and I thought like, Oh boy, wow, there’s really it’s really a whole lot of interesting things about this that I had no idea about, and I guess I’m going to get an education pretty quickly.
Proctor and Gamble, one of the earliest victims of disinformation
Matthew Sheffield: Uh, yeah, well, but at the end of the book, you do talk about some things that have worked in the past. And I mean, and it is the case, I mean, unfortunately the legal system has been badly corrupted by politicized and ideological judges. But nonetheless like you talk about one instance that I, that is kind of entertaining about Procter and Gamble.
Renee DiResta: Oh yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: Conspiracy theory in the 80s against them why don’t you tell us about that?
Renee DiResta: [00:59:00] Yeah, this was one of these satanic panic type things. There’s a allegation that their logo which was a man with sort of stars in his beard had six, six, sixes in the curly cues and was evidence of some sort of satanic involvement.
And what’s interesting about Rumors, which is just these, unverified information. People feel very compelled to share it. It’s interesting. It’s salacious. And what you see is this rumor that they’re somehow connected to Satanism begins to take off. And the challenge for them is like how to respond to it.
And this was, it’s actually not the most uplifting story because what you see them do is they try to put out. Fact checks, right? They try to explain where the artwork came from. They are looping in they loop in some prominent evangelicals of the time, trying to get them to be the messenger saying, no, this is, this is not real.
It comes out that actually Was it I think it was Amway, right. That one of their competitors was behind this in some way was, was actually trying to promote, it was trying to, it [01:00:00] was sending out these, these rumors was like giving it to their membership, calling people and these sorts of things they wind up suing, they wind up suing the, the people who were spreading the rumors but ultimately they do eventually abandon the logo, which is the, the sort of depressing part of the story for me which is that it speaks to, if you don’t deny it, It’s, it doesn’t go away, right?
The rumor continues to, to sort of ossify and spread. If you do deny it, people aren’t necessarily going to believe you. You try to bring in your various advocates who can speak on your behalf. You aggressively sue the people who you know, who, who it turns out are, are doing this to you. And we’ve actually seen that happen more, right?
Some of the election rumors dominion, of course, one that that settlement from Fox news, I think trying to, I don’t remember. I think smart Maddox yet to be decided. But you have this this challenge of how do you respond? And yeah, I, I kind of wish they’d stuck with the logo, but I don’t know that that was the, one of these sort of canonical case studies and the challenge of responding to modern rumors.[01:01:00]
The covid lab leak hypothesis and how content moderation can be excessive
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and I mean, one of the things you do talk about also a little bit is understanding that These rumors and, falsehoods that are circulated in many cases, they are based on real beliefs that are not related or real concerns that are maybe even legitimate concerns and that trying to just immediately cut off those topics from discussion, that’s not, that’s not going to be effective either because, and I think probably the best example of that is the.
Is the belief that the, the SARS CoV 2 virus, was created in a, in a weapons laboratory hypothesis, like it wasn’t like when I first heard that I was like, oh, that I don’t, I would love to see the evidence for that. Like, that was my reaction for it. Yeah,
Renee DiResta: I didn’t, I didn’t think it was that outrageous a claim.
Right. I so the first, the first. I wrote an [01:02:00] article about this. The bio weapon, right? That it was a bio weapon was part and parcel. Like these two things emerged almost simultaneously. And I wrote about the bio weapon allegation because China made bio weapons allegations about the U. S. Even as this was happening.
So I was talking about it as this, like this sort of interesting great power propaganda battle that was that was unfolding. And what was interesting was that the Chinese To support their allegation, we’re not picking from American loons, right? They were grabbing these, like these American lunatics who were like upset about Fort Detrick.
Those were the people that China was pointing to saying, look, some people on the internet, some Americans on the internet are saying that COVID is a bioweapon created by the United States. And that was where they went with it. And I thought it was very interesting that our. Kind of online conspiracy theorists were split between like who had created the bioweapon.
This is, this is very common. I find in conspiracy theories today. like superposition, you’re [01:03:00] like waiting for the observable thing to like collapse reality down into one state, but you have these, these sort of two conflicting explanations growing simultaneously until all of a sudden everybody forgets about one.
So we do move past the idea that the U S created it and we zero in then on the On the, that China created it. And what’s interesting though, is that the lab leak doesn’t require the bioweapon component. The lab leak is the accidental release. And that I was like, okay, yeah. So it’s in the realm of the plausible, but it gets caught up in social media moderation policy.
And I think that there was a huge own goal in my opinion, because I think if you are making arguments. For what kind of content should be throttled or taken down right when you, when you go through the rubric of like how the world should be moderated, if you’re making an argument that something should be throttled or taken down, particularly taken down, there’s a massive backfire effect to [01:04:00] doing it.
And so the only time I think it’s justified is if there’s some really clear material harm that comes from the information being out there or viral or promoted. And so I do think something like the false cures can be done. can rise, to that level at certain times, but the lab leak hypothesis, like it was really hard to, to find a thread in which it was overtly directly harmful in a way that a lot of the other COVID narratives were.
And so, I felt like it, it undermined like legitimacy. In content moderation by being something of an overreach with no discernible justification. And I, that was my I think I write this in the book, right? I just thought it was one of these things, it’s not like the others, as you look at this very long list of policies and, and and rubrics.
And for that one to be in there, I think it was like, Marginally grouped in there under the allegation that saying it was a lab leak [01:05:00] was racist. And even that, I was like, I don’t know. I’m pretty center left, like , I’m not seeing it. Like where’s the, where, where are we getting this from? So that, that one I thought was
Well, or
Matthew Sheffield: I mean, yeah. Or they, it was an inability to understand it. Yes, you can use that in a racist way. But the idea itself is not implicitly racist it’s just not, and, and, and they did, and Twitter did the same kind of overreach with regard to Hunter Biden’s laptop. Now I should say that I personally was involved in the back end of that, along with other reporter friends of mine that
Renee DiResta: we were
Matthew Sheffield: all trying to get that, that data when they started talking about it.
Rudy’s people wouldn’t give it to anyone. Really? That’s
Renee DiResta: interesting. I heard that Fox, like hadn’t Fox turned it down? That was the story that I heard about that one.
Matthew Sheffield: They did also. Yeah. They refused to run it. And and then when ran a story about it. [01:06:00] The evidence that they offered for it was nonsense.
It was a reassembled screenshot of a, of a, a tweet. Like, that’s basically what it was. And like, they didn’t, in other words, there was no, there was no metadata that was provided. There was nothing, there was no source of information. Of anything. It was literally just screenshots of iMessage, which anyone can make those.
Like that’s not proof of anything. And the fact that Rudy was vouching for it meant probably less than zero.
Renee DiResta: We didn’t work on that. I mean, it’s funny because like what, like I said, the election integrity partnership, the work that we did was looking at. Things related to voting and things related to de legitimization.
And that was out of scope on all of it. So my one comment on that, my one public comment on that was actually in a conversation with Barry, with Barry Weiss. When I said as the moderation decision was unfolding, I said, I think it’s, I think it’s real overreach here. I don’t think this is the right call.
It’s [01:07:00] already out there. It’s a New York Post. Article at this point, it’s not the hacked materials policy by all means, the nonconsensual nudes, like moderate those away, like a hundred percent. That is not a thing that nobody opts into that by being the child of a presidential candidate. That was, I think completely the right call was to, to remove the nudes as they begin to, to, to make their way out.
But the article itself, I said, okay, this is really an overreach. What Facebook did was they temporarily throttled it. While they tried to get some corroboration of what it was, and then they let it, they let it go. Right. And that is, I think, a reasonable call compared to to where Twitter went with it.
But I mean, these are the, what you see in ironically the Twitter files about this is you see the people in Twitter trying to make this decision with incomplete information. And they’re, they’re not out there saying like, man, we really need to suppress this because it will help Biden or we really need to suppress this because like, F Donald Trump, you just see them trying to, trying to make this call in a, very sort [01:08:00] of human way.
So the whole thing, I thought the Twitter files, the one thing that I thought was really funny about it was the way it tied into the Twitter files was So nothing to do with us again, nothing. They decided that like Aspen Institute had held this kind of threat casting, what if there is another hack and leak in the 2020 election thinking about the hack and leak that had happened in 2016, right?
The Clinton emails on the The Podesta emails and the DNC, DNC’s emails. So they were like, okay, so this is, one of the scenarios they come up with is that there is some hack and leak related to Hunter Biden and Burisma. And that was the scenario that they come up with. So this then comes to figure into the, the sort of conspiracy theory universe is like, Oh, they were pre bunking it.
They knew this was going to happen. And the FBI in cahoots with Aspen in cahoots with Twitter tried to. Tried to get them to do this. And that was the that was the [01:09:00] narrative that they, that they ran with. And I thought, I wasn’t at that round table, but that, that tabletop exercise, but like scenario planning is, it’s a pretty common thing, right.
Most political groups, Game out various scenarios. It was just sort of weird to me that that that became the, that there was like this, they had to come up with some cause to justify Twitter’s moderation decision instead of just reading what Twitter itself said in the moment, which is like people trying to figure out what to do and really not knowing.
So come up with a whole conspiracy theory about it.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And. And, and, and I guess we, we, we should say that, if it, if they had just let it go the way, not done anything to it, that it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but like now there’s this giant mythology built around it that, the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed.
And that is the reason that Joe Biden won in 2020. And it’s like, No one voted for Hunter Biden. [01:10:00] And like the idea of, presidential relatives who are screw ups, like that’s Super common. Well, that’s just, that is a thing in and of itself. You’re not voting for the relatives, but yeah, it just, so it’s again, like these are not, they’re not good faith arguments that we’re, that they’re making here.
And I think we should point that out even as we do criticize Twitter for doing the wrong thing.
Renee DiResta: That’s a good point. And I I don’t know what, this is one of these things where Maybe, there’s been bad faith politics before, but as I was going through, like, historical research and stuff, trying to figure out how do people respond to rumors?
How do they respond to smears? That question of, like, what do you do with the bad faith attacks is one that I don’t think I’ve seen a whole lot of Like everybody is very good at documenting that they are bad faith, documenting the rumor, documenting who spreads it and how and all that other stuff.
But that response [01:11:00] piece is what is still missing that sort of calm strategy. Like, how do you deal with this? Cause I know I feel when I get asked about. These, these crazy, Twitter files, b******t claims about the CIA placing me in my job. I’m like, is it even worth explaining the grain of truth underlying the fact that I once worked there 20 years ago?
Or, because it, it feels so pointless when. I wonder sometimes if the appropriate responses, that’s bad faith b******t. And I’m just not going to deal with it again. If you want to read about it, go read it on the internet. I actually really don’t know at this point what the what the appropriate response strategy is.
I know people think that, that, that we should know. I know we tell election officials and public health officials and things like respond quickly, get the facts out there, but that. That doesn’t necessarily. Diminish or respond to the bad faith attack. It’s simply putting out alternate information and hoping that people find it compelling.
So. [01:12:00]
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, no, it is a, it’s a problem. And I mean, it’s honestly, I, I feel like the solution part, even though you do talk a little bit about it in the book that that’s probably its own. Yeah,
Renee DiResta: I think so too.
Matthew Sheffield: Probably
Renee DiResta: that’s the next book I’ll go reach out to all the people who’ve been smeared and no, I think about remember the book, so you’ve been publicly shamed.
That’s sort of like, gosh, when did that come out? That was that was when, remember, I think it was Justine Sacco’s her name, right? She made that AIDS joke on the plane, got off the plane and the entire world had been as Justine landed yet. That was one where I think it gets at this question of what do you do when there’s a mass attention mob, right?
That’s sort of online mobbing. But that question of how do you respond to bad faith attacks? I think is of the, one of the main ones for our politics right now. Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: It is. Yeah. And yeah, getting people to realize that Alex Jones was right about one thing. There is an [01:13:00] information war and only one side has been fighting it though.
JD Vance couch joke illustrates real differences between left and right political ecosystems
Renee DiResta: And so, yeah, anyway, but we, uh. we started a whole conversation about Kamala and the coconuts on the couch. I know we’re like coming up on the, on the hour here, but the sort of, I, I’ve been. No. Really entertained. I have to say by, by watching that whole the the sort of instantaneous vibe shift, the JD Vance is weird as the message, not even, we’re going to go through his policies and fight them point by point, no, just like the whole thing is weird, that’s it just diminish it, brush it off, ridicule it.
Maybe that’s the Maybe that’s the answer. I’ve been watching again, not because of any particular interest in, the candidacy as such, but the sort of meta question of the, the mechanics of the messaging in the race, I think are really interesting.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and yeah, the couch rumor I think is it has been illustrative of how different that each side [01:14:00] of the spectrum handles things that are jokes or memes that, on the right, they believe them.
If there’s, I mean, gosh, there’s. Just so many examples of that. I mean, there was never any evidence that Barack Obama was born. Nobody ever, they didn’t even, like, I never even heard anybody talk to Kenyans, administrative, they didn’t even bother to provide evidence for it. And yet, They believed it.
And, and then like the thing with JD Vance and, and his alleged proclivities for intercourse, intersectional in course, intercourse that, people on the, on the political left, they knew it wasn’t true and they said it wasn’t true, but they were just like, But we’re, we’re going to, but we’re, it’s fun and we’re going to talk about it because it fits within a larger point and this guy is a very strange individual and and like that it is, it is a flipping of the script that has just been [01:15:00] enraging because, I mean, and I think Jesse waters the, the Fox host.
And actually, I guess I’ll play the, let me see if I can get the clip here so I can roll it in the show here. So yeah, like Jesse Waters, the Fox News Channel host, he was, he was outraged, almost like on the verge of tears, frankly on his program this week as we’re recording here, I’m going to roll it.
Jesse Watters: They’re accusing J. D. Vance. Of having sex with a couch, not on a couch, with a couch.
Notice
Democrats: they Who’s that? And now
Jesse Watters: they’re calling him weird.
Democrats: I don’t think Kamala Harris is going to pick anyone as weird and creepy as J. D. Vance. Frankly, J. D.
Renee DiResta: Vance. Just dumb Vance is pretty weird.
Jesse Watters: It’s not just a, a, a, a weird style that he brings.
It’s that this leads to weird policies. They’re just [01:16:00] weird.
Democrats: Donald Trump and his weirdo running mate. More extreme, more weird, more erratic. The agenda, the way they talk. people, the way they address people, it is bizarre. And so it’s weird.
Renee DiResta: It is weird.
Jesse Watters: Democrats made up a story about JD Vance having sex with a couch and called him weird 150 times this weekend.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. So, and it’s, it’s funny because Not only is, is he mad that people on the left copied the Fox News business model in a parody. Like, that is literally what Fox News has done for 30 years, is traffic in things they know to be false but also present them as true. Like, you, in his montage there, he didn’t present any Democrat who said that J.
D. Vance had sex with a couch. [01:17:00] Nobody said that. And so, yeah, yeah. And then, and then he, and he lied though. He said, Democrats came up with this, that they’re the ones who said JD Vance had sex with the couch. And that wasn’t true. Like he’s calling people liars. And he can’t even get his basic facts straight.
Like to me, this is, you couldn’t get a better illustration of the information economies of both sides of the aisle.
Renee DiResta: I was surprised that that they went for it. I was actually curious to see how he was going to respond per like our chat about how do you respond to smears and bad faith attacks and things like this?
It’s not, it’s not quite the same as a bad faith attack. It’s like when you’re memed, right? It’s slightly different. process. But the but he said nothing. And that was interesting to me because that provided an opportunity for John Oliver to say, well, he didn’t deny it. Right. But then if he had denied it, then that would have been, you’re kind of damned if you do damned if you don’t.
So I thought, okay, well, he’s going [01:18:00] to, I was actually waiting for him to get in on the joke. Right. That, that, to to post something sort of funny or like make himself part of it. So I’m like Ikea catalog picture or whatever, but that’s not what happened. And I thought this is really interesting.
Cause it’s I, I don’t know. Generally speaking, feel like a lot of the right wing influencers are generally better at sort of flipping the script and making the meme work in their favor. But this time that wasn’t the direction it went. So it’s been interesting to see how the, how the different sides are acting in this, around this kind of stuff this time.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, it has. And I mean, and I think it also, it is illustrative also that, with, with Joe Biden out of the race and the much younger Kamala Harris in the race, that it’s. It has energized a lot of younger people who are politically left that are just like, they didn’t want to make memes for Joe Biden because.
He wouldn’t understand them. And neither would his advisors. Like, even if they had made him [01:19:00] that Biden, people wouldn’t have really picked him up or in an effective way. I don’t know. So it’s definitely been kind of a, a funny break from the traditional disinformation beat. Yeah, I
Renee DiResta: know. It’s the generational shift, I guess, in the, how that how that’s used, how, a younger flavor of institutionalist, if you will, is, is going to, to pivot it.
So I guess we’ll see.
Transparency is integral to information quality
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, all right. So I guess uh, we’re getting to the end here. Just to go back to solutions here. There’s ultimately, I think the solutions have to be broader and more education oriented, rather than technology oriented, because these are not technology problems. These are epistemic problems. One of the things is probably going to have to be essential and you do talk about it quite a bit is, is transparency that, you know, transparency has to be done at both by the social media companies, but also by the [01:20:00] governments that people need to know what’s going on. And ultimately that’s is the source of a lot of these informational problems is that when there’s no one providing information.
Then people who are making s**t up, they’re the one, they’re the only ones that are there. So they’re going to get believed in some sense, just regardless of quality.
Renee DiResta: This was the interesting thing for me as the smear campaigns were starting with us and my stuff was the.
Canonical comms response is like, Oh, you don’t answer. You don’t say anything. You, you wait for the news cycle to move on. I don’t think that that works in this information environment anymore. I think that the, the, that, that narrative battleground is constantly going, it’s constantly happening.
And if you’re not contributing to the directly as yourself, honestly you’re, you’re missing an opportunity to [01:21:00] authentically communicate your side very directly. And, and this is where I, I think that the more top down model of institutional comms, whether it’s in, COVID or elections or, attacks or any of it, any, any of the different Things that, that I talk about in the book the idea that you kind of wait patiently for mainstream media to reach out and you give a quote, and then that is how truth is established and narratives are formed.
It’s just a very old way of thinking about it.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah all right, well, we could probably do this for a lot longer, but I’m sure this is not a Joe Rogan podcast. I’m not,
Renee DiResta: I’m not not going to subject everybody to three hours. Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.
So, but so for people who want to uh, Keep up with your stuff. What’s your recommendation?
Renee DiResta: Yeah. So I am on Threads, Blue Sky and Mastodon. I have a newsletter now. I only post occasionally when I think something interesting has happened, like JD Vance and his couch. But yeah those are the, the ways [01:22:00] to, to stay in touch.
Matthew Sheffield: Okay. Cool. And the book is Invisible Rulers. Oh man, I don’t have the chyron the people, I’m trying to read it off your shoulder here. Why don’t you tell us the name?
Renee DiResta: Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: Say the name of the book again so everybody will get it.
Renee DiResta: It’s “Invisible Rulers. The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.”
Matthew Sheffield: Okay. Well, thanks for being here again!
Renee DiResta: Thanks for having me.
Matthew Sheffield: All right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for discussion and you can always get more if you go to theory of change that show.
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That’s much appreciated. Thanks a lot and I’ll see you next time.
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Award-winning activist and author, Soraya Chemaly, discusses her new book, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, and dismantles long-standing notions about what resilience is, while challenging us to rethink how we employ resilience as a source of grit and strength both within ourselves and for others.
From this Episode:
The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma
Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger
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Dr. Regina Davis Moss, the CEO & President of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, discusses the urgency of advocating for reproductive justice ahead of this election, the organizations decision to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and the history of the Reproductive Justice movement which marks its 30th anniversary this year.
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I Am A Reproductive Voter Campaign
Report: Lives and Voices of Black Families in 2024
Reproductive Justice Policy Agenda
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Audio Chapters
0:00 — Everyone knows Republicans are weird and creepy, and now everyone is actually saying it
04:15 — Republican hypocrisy and scandals
08:37 — Trump’s dilemma in picking a young Republican leader: They’re all nuts
10:29 — Eric and Donald Trump Junior reportedly are the main reasons JD Vance is the Republican veep nominee
13:31 — JD Vance's insult of childfree adults is his “deplorables moment”
17:11 — Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan shows that many right-wing men view women as property
22:12 — Has the weird Republicans message broken the “both sides” lie?
28:04 — Other Republicans keep trying to copy Trump, but without any humor or detachment
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Episode Summary
By necessity, monitoring and debunking disinformation has become a much bigger part of journalism and academia in recent years, but oftentimes the important work that people are doing on these matters is missing the larger context.
It is certainly worth reporting the truth when politicians, businesses, and activists lie about things. But what the public should also know is why this disinformation is being created. Almost always, it’s for political or religious reasons. And they are usually right wing reasons.
Unfortunately, this is a truth that many traditionally trained journalists and academics are still loathe to admit, nine years into Donald Trump’s deceit-filled political career.
One person who isn't afraid of telling the larger context of disinformation is my guest on today's episode, Samuel Spitale. He's the author of a very informative book called How to Win the War on Truth: An Illustrated Guide to How Mistruths Are Sold, Why They Stick, and How to Reclaim Reality.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
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Related Content
* Documentary filmmaker Jen Senko on how Fox News corrupted her father’s brain
* Big Tobacco pioneered the tactics used by social media misinformation creators
* Right-wingers depend on disinformation and deception because their beliefs cannot win otherwise
* Authoritarians think differently from others because they think truth derives from authority rather than reality
* Why America’s political polarization is ultimately an epistemic problem
* The economics of disinformation make it profitable and powerful
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
05:20 — The influence of marketing and PR
08:19 — Edward Bernays: The father of propaganda and public relations
12:21 — Marketing's hidden agendas
16:14 — The power of fear in media
22:03 — Fast thinking vs. slow thinking
25:36 — The Overton window and societal shifts
30:37 — The critical myth of right-wing populism
34:36 — Manufactured crises and moral panics
39:19 — Censorship through noise
42:16 — The danger of illusory truths
52:36 — The role of values over beliefs
01:01:39 — Promoting truth and critical thinking
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
Matthew Sheffield: [00:02:00] And joining me now is Samuel Spitale. Welcome to Theory of Change.
Samuel Spitale: Hi, thank you for having me.
Matthew Sheffield: So your book is a book about epistemology, but it is essentially a graphic novel in a lot of ways. So how, why did you decide to choose that as a format?
It makes it. More interesting.
Samuel Spitale: So yeah, when I pitched the book, I kind of pitched it as two different options.
It could be. Fully illustrated like a graphic novel. Or it could be more spot illustrated with just illustrations here and there. I knew I wanted a critical thinking learning tool that was a visual throughout the book and I knew I wanted a ton of charts and graphs and, other visual representations of data to show to illustrate a lot of the points.
And so, Fortunately, the publisher and the agent both thought that fully illustrated was the way to go. It would be the most accessible to the widest possible audience. And the other benefit is that it could add some levity and humor. To otherwise dismal economic theory and,
And humor helps the medicine go down, I guess.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, it, it definitely does keep it lighter in that regard. Yeah. All the, the cartoons. Yeah. So, so you're. What, what's your, your background in all this? Why, why did you, how did you get interested in these topics?
Samuel Spitale: Sure. So my background is I went to LSU, Louisiana state university in the manship school of mass communication.
And so my degrees are in advertising and media management. And then after college, I went to work for Lucasfilm and a kind of tangential space. In product development. But the older I got, the more my journalism roots and my writing roots kind of took hold. So I moved to LA to focus on storytelling and.
And around 2015, a lot of my writing kind of shifted more to real world, topics. And as I guess [00:04:00] the land, the political landscape and cultural landscape begin to shift. I found myself writing more and more about real world issues and. Seeing how many people believe things that were verifiably untrue my own family and friends included that I, I kinda became fascinated with, how, how do we penetrate these barriers of belief with, public at large, but you know, people in, my own family and friends and people in my bubble as well.
And so. I kind of went on this quest of figuring out all of all of the things that contribute to us being misinformed. And, my own background in media literacy and journalism obviously played a huge role. But I have an interest in psychology and sociology, which I read a ton of.
And so I feel like, those all helped paint a a picture of, all of the areas that we need to be informed or educated about in order to see how we're often sold things that aren't true. And so, this became the book and yeah, hopefully it works as a critical thinking learning tool.
And a primer in a lot of these areas that, the average person's just not versed in.
Matthew Sheffield: Mm hmm.
The influence of marketing and PR
Matthew Sheffield: Well, and, and one of those concepts that you discuss in the book length in multiple sections is the idea that No one wants to believe that marketing and PR affect them. And they don't, they think, well, I'm skeptical of the media.
And so therefore, I'm not susceptible to messages from others. And that's just not true of anybody.
Samuel Spitale: No, completely. And I even used to think that in, in college, like, Because even in school, we were taught that advertising and journalism or journalism, but like, advertising and public relations and marketing.
[00:06:00] Were taught to think of it in a very kind of narrow way, a very obvious way, like a movie trailer, or a billboard for, for whatever, for fast food, or, and those are very obvious examples of advertising. And we may or may not, be influenced by those clearly how do we find out a new movies coming out that we might want to see without advertising?
Oh, look, there's a trailer, there's a movie poster. That looks like something I'd be interested in. Whether we admit that, it's the advertising part that influenced us, or if the advertising was just an information delivery system you could debate, but what I find more fascinating the older I get is how, All of these forms of, communication have kind of been manipulated for bad.
And so, marketing isn't just, a new line of shoes or a new clothing store. It's, it's getting us to believe incorrectly that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Or it's, uh, it's all of these ways, I guess, political strategists and corporations have used these things in an underhanded way.
Like, I mean, today I probably feel like the biggest one is global warming. Many people still don't believe in climate change or the global warming is manmade. And that's because. The oil and gas industry has basically utilized the forms of mass communication to convince us that it's still a debate or the science isn't settled.
And so all of those ideas, the anti climate science messaging has all originated with the oil and gas lobby. And, it's no coincidence. They were the first ones to discover that global warming was happening and they were causing it. So, they kind of had to get in front of it. And so tracing the history of these messages or these things that we believe is always very revealing because, like [00:08:00] vaccines and autism or whatever it is.
Anything that's been debunked that people think may be an equally valid point, you can usually trace the inception where that idea came from, who sold it, And who stood to benefit from us believing the nonsense.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.
Edward Bernays: The father of propaganda and public relations
Matthew Sheffield: Well, and one of the people who really got all that started is something that you do talk about quite a bit that I think most people have never heard of a guy named Edward Bernays. Who was he?
Samuel Spitale: Yep. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. And I've always found Freud fascinating. So Freud was kind of the, the grandfather of psychoanalysis who believed that humans subconscious desires and motivations kind of drove them and explained everything about them. And Bernays basically took his insights.
Into psychology and applied them to marketing and advertising or public relations. And so he used these, kind of emotional manipulation quite successfully to get Americans to buy into things that we had not before. And, the most famous example of Bernays is getting women to smoke cigarettes because women didn't used to smoke.
But the cigarette companies, wanted to start selling to the other 50 percent of the population. So what Bernays did was kind of cash in on the women's rights movement and tied cigarettes to being torches of freedom. And so he had all these feminists smoke in like Easter parade. And it was a huge success and women started smoking cigarettes and then, suddenly lung cancer was an equal opportunity offender.
But Bernays, he, he did a lot. He got us to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, which we didn't do. He got architects to install bookshelves into new homes so that the people would buy more [00:10:00] books cause that wasn't something that they did prior, but the publishing industry hired him and yeah, there's just no shortage of products that he, got us to consume to increase sales, but he convinced us, kind of otherwise the hairnet and as another great example, like cafeteria workers didn't use to wear hair nets.
And so Bernays convinced health officials that it would be more sanitary. to wear hairnets not for sanitary reasons, but because the hairnet industry was losing sales. in the 1920s, I believe, when women were getting their hair cut into bobs. So they had less hair. So nobody was buying hair nets anymore.
So yeah, it had nothing to do with being sanitary. It was all to sell more hair nets.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And, and And it's important to note also that he was around before Adolf Hitler as well, and Hitler was, and Goebbels were interested in those techniques as well, and they put those into effect as well.
You want to talk about that?
Samuel Spitale: Yeah, I mean, they were so successful. Hitler or Goebbels, one of them had his book Propaganda, like, on their shelf, and they definitely used his techniques, the emotional manipulation. In riling people up to smear the Jews and to sell people on, the third Reich and the Nazi regime and their propaganda was so successful that propaganda basically became a bad name, bad word.
It became so soiled after World War Two that Bernays and, everyone else in the industry changed the name from propaganda to public relations. very much. So they basically just renamed it, or, but it was essentially still the same. And so, it, the, the principles of propaganda live on in all of its offshoots, public relations marketing, branding publicity all of those things are still propaganda.
They're all trying to sell us something. And whether that something is an idea or a belief or a pair [00:12:00] of sneakers, it's kind of all the same a political candidate foreign policy, whatever it is that's you know part of the part of looking at mass communications with a wider lens is Looking at the non physical things that can be sold through the use of propaganda.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and you even, I mean, you talk about the, the Tour de France.
Marketing's hidden agendas
Matthew Sheffield: I think most people don't know why that even exists. You want to just go over that real quick? I think that's an interesting little thing.
Samuel Spitale: Yeah, it was a publicity stunt. It was, I think the guy's name was Henri de Grange was like a newspaperman, and so he conceived the Tour de France as a way to sell more newspapers to cover it.
And then he eventually put his competitor out of business, but the Tour de France, has continued and now it probably operates more as, tourism for the country of France more than anything else. And, but yeah, so many things were conceived as marketing or advertising or publicity.
The coffee break was one of those that I didn't know of until I was researching the book. But basically when the, I think was it the Roosevelt administration that passed legislation that instilled a 15 minute break in the workday after so many hours, and so coffee, the coffee manufacturers got together and decided to christen it a coffee break as opposed to a tea break or a soda break so that people would turn to coffee for caffeine.
And hence we still today call it a coffee break. And that was an advertising initiative.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and, and yeah, and food has been a big yeah, food companies have been a big users of that, I think in large part, because I mean, their products are perishable, so they have to sell more of them.
And people have to buy them more frequently. And and you, you talk about. I mean, just like the idea that people think bottled water is good. Like, I thought that was a great example. A lot of people don't realize that bottled water is in many cases worse for you. Or the
Samuel Spitale: same, or it's just tap water that's been bottled.
Or the same,
Matthew Sheffield: yeah.
Samuel Spitale: The yeah, the main [00:14:00] difference is, is that tap water has to go through has to pass certain standards and is regulated, whereas bottled water is not. So, and then, so we're often made to think that tap water may not be safe and examples like Flint, Michigan, become very salient in our minds and kind of reinforce that idea, even if, it's a very rare example.
And so yeah bottled water I think now outsells soda which means a lot of plastic that is thrown into the ocean and is not recycled.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah And then on top of that Yeah And then on top of that also, a lot of these bottles are You know, filled with B they're made of BPA plastics and you're getting, you are getting microplastics in your blood from your water.
And because you have that belief. So in some ways it could be worse for you. And obviously, everybody has different water where they live. So I'm not going to say that it's better everywhere, but. Yeah. And but you also talk about Chilean sea bass. Like, I think that's something that's one I had not heard of.
That's, and it's kind of funny. Well, you want to talk about that?
Samuel Spitale: Yeah, sure. So yeah, the there was a fish called tooth fish that had a very bad name. And they wanted to sell more of it. So they basically rebranded it as Chilean sea bass, even though. It's usually not fished out of the sea. It's not a bass and it doesn't come from Chile.
I think everything about it is misleading.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. It's common.
Samuel Spitale: Yeah. And and actually something, I don't know, I don't think it made it into the book and I may have put it in the audio book if I had room, but one of the reasons it took off is because I think it was mentioned in Jurassic park. Chilean sea bass is used or eaten or something I read or heard.
I
Matthew Sheffield: vaguely recall it because they have a restaurant in there. Yeah,
Samuel Spitale: right. And so I, yeah, I don't remember how it's used, but apparently that coincided with a huge boom in Chilean sea bass on restaurant menus. And it was in more in demand, which is interesting. Yeah. Interesting. I don't know if [00:16:00] haven't researched it to see if.
If it was just randomly put in the film or if, it was paid to put in the film or somebody did it on purpose to try to sell more sea bass, either would, neither would surprise me.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.
The power of fear in media
Matthew Sheffield: Well, and some, and obviously politics is, is one area where marketing and propaganda are heavily used.
And there was a recent episode in one episode there was a recent moment where I thought it was interesting that the propaganda about bottled water and right wing propaganda came together at a conference put on by the Turning Point USA group. And there was a commentator who works for them named Alex Clark.
She was pitching, A water, bottled water company called Freedom 2. 0. And I'm actually going to play the clip just so you can see it. I don't know if you, if you got a chance to see it yet, it's absolutely hilarious. Water can make a
Alex Clark: statement. What if it could symbolize your commitment to values like freedom, individuality, and self reliance?
Freedom to owe water isn't just about what's inside the bottle. It's about the message It sends with every sip with labels like this water isn't free, but your speech is it's not just refreshing It's rebellious and it's unapologetic to drink this in public. Can you freaking believe it? But that's where we are It's a reminder that even the most ordinary acts like Taking a sip of water can be infused with meaning and purpose by choosing to drink freedom 2 0 You're not just choosing a brand you're choosing to stand up for what you believe in try freedom 2 0 and tag me in your instagram story For repost hold on drink break Wow Wow, it's like all
Samuel Spitale: yeah, it's like all of
bernay's I mean, it's not even subtextual. It is just, yeah, right. Yeah. Making all of these claims that have nothing to do with water whatsoever.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And it's funny for those who are listening that. Just wanted [00:18:00] to note for you guys that when she, when she says drink break at the end there, she actually does not drink.
So, yeah. Yeah. And but, but, but, and it, it's relevant to point that out though, because I, I think people who have more reactionary political opinions, they don't understand that their viewpoints are actually almost. Like they are fed to them almost entirely. The things that they believe are not true.
The things that they. Want or, or generally because of fear. And you do talk about that, the idea of using fear as a, as a, as a marketing tool as well, and that that's something that people should be aware of in the media that they look at.
Samuel Spitale: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like when I'm asked what's one of the best ways to not be deceived or to recognize questionable social media posts or information is.
notice when media messages appeal to your negative emotions and fear is probably at the top of the list, fear, anger. So anytime a politician or, a partisan media outlet is trying to invoke fear or anger in you, you are more than likely being manipulated. So if a politician is running on solutions to problems, for instance, so like let's use immigration as an example, if a politician is running on immigration reform and solutions to the immigration problem, then they're usually Appealing to our positive emotions and solving that problem.
We need to do this. We need to do this. We need to do this but if they're only running on Fear of immigration fear of immigrants taking our jobs fear of immigrants bringing crime without proposing solutions Then they're just trying to Cash in on the problem and [00:20:00] manipulate us. So one of the best things we can do when it comes to politicians and political advertising is notice who is running on concrete policy solutions to solve our problems and who is just trying to cash in on the fear or anger over the problem.
And. Right wing media is probably one of the worst defenders for fear mongering and making us hate someone because it works because fear and anger and hate trump all other emotions. So when propagandists appeal to fear, anger and hate, they're doing it very manipulatively. Because they know that if we're fearing criminals are fearing immigrants being criminals or taking our job, like those emotions will override critical thinking.
And you, you see it so often these days, Fox news is one of the worst offenders too. Because. Their so called news is very fear laden. It directs anger at an adversary. It makes you fearful of people who are not like you, which means, immigrants or gay people or black people or Jewish people or whatever it is.
Directing anger at an adversary. stirring up hate or resentment. All of these are red flags that you're being manipulated. They're all out of Hitler and Goebbels playbook. So be aware of when, talking heads on partisan TV or directing your fear or anger or hate at someone they're usually trying to manipulate you real journalists don't need to resort to emotional manipulation, Walter Cronkite, Edward R.
Murrow, these guys were monotone and stoic and delivered information. So whenever strong, negative emotions become part of a newscaster's delivery, They're probably up to no good. [00:22:00]
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And I, yeah, I think that's right.
Fast thinking vs. slow thinking
Matthew Sheffield: And one of the other kind of tools that you advise the reader about is the idea of distinguishing between fast thinking and slow thinking and that each of them has their place.
In our lives, our daily lives. But if we have, if we're engaging only in fast thinking that that's not going to be helpful so what is the distinction there between fast and slow? If you could, if you're
Samuel Spitale: sure. So yeah, fast thinking and slow thinking comes from Daniel Kahneman who was a behavioral economist Nobel prize winner.
And he discovered that the brain kind of operates and with two systems and ones fast think what I call fast thinking, which he did to fast thinking and slow thinking. So fast thinking is very intuitive. It's reactionary. It's emotional. It's you see a, see a red light and it means slam on the brakes.
You don't have to think, it's automatic. It's an instinctual intuitive. Or you hear a rustling in the woods and think it could be a bear. So, you look for a bear. It's, I like to think of fast and slow is like Lisa Simpson, Homer Simpson. So, you, Homer Simpson is very fast thinking, like he sees doughnuts and he immediately starts drooling, he's using, he's kind of ruled by his emotions.
He's not pausing to think critically about anything. He's just jumping right on in. Whereas Lisa Simpson is very reflective and considerate and she stops to analyze and. think about things more critically. And that's slow thinking, slow thinking takes time. We often don't have time to think critically about everything.
We rely on shortcuts in our mental system that so we don't have to think, it makes life easier. Like the red light mean slamming on the brakes. So, but the problem with fast thinking is that, advertisers and political strategists, they're very aware of this and that's why they appeal to those negative emotions because the negative emotions Trump positive emotions, they [00:24:00] Trump critical thinking.
And as long as you can, kind of appeal to our fight or flight response, which is. When you're intuitively fearing for your life, like, like the bear in the woods or a snake in the grass if you can make people afraid or angry or whatever then they don't stop to engage in critical thinking or slow thinking.
And so belief, so when we, we buy into beliefs, that's usually fast thinking because beliefs circumvent thinking a belief isn't a belief is almost the opposite of thinking sometimes.
Matthew Sheffield: And so it's a shortcut is basically what it's shortcut.
Samuel Spitale: And if you could sell someone on a belief, then it doesn't matter what facts are.
And that's often what we see happening because if that belief is then tied to anger, resentment. Hate, fear, whatever, then it makes it more, makes it stronger and more resistance, more resistant to all the facts like, in vaccines and autism is a great one. If you're, it's, it's so easy to be concerned for your kids.
And if you could do something as simple as not vaccinating them, then it makes you feel like you have a little control over your life. And so the fear that a vaccine could have a damaging effect, is very powerful. Even if statistics and data and research says the opposite, that feeling is going to trump that.
And so that's the danger with misinformation that feeds on those negative feelings. Easy to manipulate people in that way. I mean, that's what Hitler and Goebbels did, stirred up the negative feelings in people. They stopped thinking and they just, subscribe to those.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.
The Overton window and societal shifts
Matthew Sheffield: And and, and sort of expanded to the societal concept or scale, there's this idea of what's commonly referred to as the Overton window, and I think that that's, that I think is understanding that concept a really important way of understanding why American politics is so different.
[00:26:00] from other industrialized countries in terms of health care in terms of other social welfare spending and regulation of large businesses things like that What do you think?
Samuel Spitale: Oh great So I guess for the overton window for people that aren't familiar with that term It describes basically the range of ideas in a society there that are acceptable at any given time so You know, like, during, Hitler and Goebbels time, fascism became a very acceptable idea.
And that idea was not acceptable in the years after world war two, but we, see that it's slowly becoming an acceptable idea again, which is very scary. And I think a lot of these right wing extremist views that were previously unacceptable have been promoted and normalized in a way where the Overton window is kind of reversing and we're seeing that with.
Overturning Roe v. Wade the in vitro fertilization putting Christianity like in schools, the Christian nationalism movement, all of these things have been slowly moving the Overton window backwards. And so. We're seeing a lot of a lot of things kind of regress and it's kind of scary.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and, and part of that also is the idea that. The, the pretense of balance that they demand, like that's very important to controlling how the Overton window moves. Because if you can say that every discussion has to include all, Two sides of a story then that means that discussions about Civil rights activists have to include people who are in the KKK It means that discussions about hate crimes need to include neo nazis.
And we have to make sure that they're not censored, right?
Samuel Spitale: Pretense, right pretense balancing I think is what they call it right and it's that global [00:28:00] warming you have a scientist on there discussing global warming. And so you threw in You Someone who you know can hold the alternate view even though there really isn't an alternate view you know makes for good television, but it does not make for a good society and so Yeah so yeah, no the overton window, we we kind of have this naive notion that you know what the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice and that Things get better with time and more equal, more free more democratic more equality, but that's not always the case.
And we're really witnessing a backsliding of all of this the last 10 years. , we've seen it with the rise of populist demagogues all over the country, all over the country, all over the world. Like we just saw it with the elections and, uh, in Europe the last week.
The back, the backsliding, so it's, it's a real threat and it means that I guess, the average voter, the average person can't just be disengaged and lazy because you always have to be fighting for things that improve the world or make it better. Because if you don't, then, the bad actors are going to do what they can to, hoard power and wealth.
I project, I just watched the John Oliver thing earlier today. The project 2025 has bit on that and project 2025 is seriously scary. Uh, talk about democratic backsliding. It is. a unapologetic plan to dismantle democratic norms and give an elite, group of people more power and reverse the rights of, women, minorities, gays
um,
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, consumers and employees.
Yeah,
Samuel Spitale: everyone. It's taking power. It's very anti democratic. And so they do not want everyone to be equal. So I often think of and even, you think of politics this way, but, look at most arguments or debates or [00:30:00] policy discussions as does whatever the solution or the, the policy offered, does it give power?
more power to people who already have it in the hands of a few, or does it try to make society more equal and more democratic or protect people that don't have many rights already? And a lot of the things being proposed and discussed these days are taking power away from the little people and from people that barely have any power and putting it in the hands of Yeah,
The critical myth of right-wing populism
Matthew Sheffield: well, and one way of doing that is that they have pushed the idea that They are populists, actually that you, you constantly see Donald Trump supporters refer to him as, he's, he's the populist president.
He's the people's president. He represents the people. And what it is, though, it's a substitution. It is what you call in the book an illusory truth because basically they, they have taken, the, the original meaning of populism, which is Pushing for ideas that benefit the many against uh, you know, encroachment from wealthy people.
And invert and change it from that to saying that populism, no, that's actually about. Whether you believe things that are not scientific and that you have you know If you think evolution is not true Or you think that the bible is literally true or whatever it is You have these beliefs that are unscientific and you know are unprovable and or at the very best and at worst are well, they're pretty easily disproven If you have these untrue beliefs And you want to hold on to them.
That is what populism is in their minds. And so they push that to their, to the audience and they really have embraced that. It seems like,
Samuel Spitale: yeah, there, yeah. I feel like the the part of populism that they've really [00:32:00] embraced is, manipulating the masses through. Through emotions, more demagoguery than yeah, populism, but you know, the appealing to the common people, but using lies and distortions and negative emotions to do so.
And so because it really is the only people that are going to be rewarded with another Trump presidency, or it will be just like the first Trump presidency, only the rich and powerful, but you have to manipulate the little people in the masses in order to do that. Yeah. Because if you were to, campaign or like, oh, I'm rich and powerful and I want to give all my rich and powerful friends more money and power and screw everybody else, like nobody's gonna vote for that.
So you have to lie and manipulate and how do you lie and manipulate people to vote against policies and individuals? That are not in for them And that's by lying and misleading and I feel like I've been watching that for years, but now it is just so distilled
Matthew Sheffield: and
Samuel Spitale: And that's probably one of the more infuriating, parts of it all is that The people that would elect Trump and vote for Trump and support him are the people that will be hurt most by his policies.
And so they're, middle America, red States, they have a right to be angry. But none of the solutions that would help, help them or the economic system or their areas. are right wing policies. And that's probably the most infuriating part. Right wing policies typically only benefit the rich and powerful.
Matthew Sheffield: And, and it's also that, they, they will, try to get people to blow up the importance of concerns that they might have, which, let's say they're, they might be relevant to some people. So like, if you're, a high school [00:34:00] cisgender girl, you are directly impacted to some degree, perhaps on whether transgender girls are allowed to participate in your sport, but the percentage of people that for whom that is a concern.
Valid and real concern is almost zero because you, the, the percentage of people who are trans in America is about 0. 01%. And, and then, you
Samuel Spitale: know, Extremely small, and the trans, extremely small, and the percentage of that that is interested in playing sports is even more miniscule. And it's right.
Manufactured crises and moral panics
Samuel Spitale: It's, it's like all of the, the book banning the critical race theory, the EDI, it's all of those attacks are very planned and very orchestrated. And they all involve manipulating people and getting to believe things that are untrue for political power. And Chris Rufo is like such an instigator in chief there.
It amazes me how. You have these basically, trolls on social media that can create a moral panic around a non issue and use it to wield power in a way that strips rights away from people that are Takes power away from people who already don't have much power. And removes their voice and And they have been extremely successful with it that it's scary and that's the real cancel culture going on is not um You know, it's silencing voices that have struggled to have a voice for a very long time Especially, gay and lesbian transgender minorities It's a backlash to the rights and the social awareness Of that, the demographics lack of rights.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, exactly. And it's, I mean, [00:36:00] and the reality is that even if, if every trend, trans woman or girl was playing sports and if they won all the matches, like That's not going to happen, number one, and it doesn't happen. And there's a reason that you only see specific one or two individuals who are paraded constantly in right wing media, because there aren't any other ones who are winning.
They never talk about that. So, but, but let's say even if that were happening, these are children's games. That You're, you're, you're going to penalize people's daily lives based on being upset about children's games. Like it's, it is so absurd. And, and they do this with everything, like telling people that that they should be concerned about about immigrants taking their jobs when in fact the jobs left because.
The companies that, that the right wing promoted outsource the jobs. They're not there to be taken in the
Samuel Spitale: country or they pay so little Americans can't afford to do those jobs like crop picking. Yeah. And that's, the, the, the immigrant one is a great example because never do those politicians that claim that Ever blame or hold the companies accountable for hiring the immigrants or the day labor You know like if they were serious about solving that problem Then they would make those companies pay livable wages for the crop pickers, but we rely on that immigrant labor because it's so cheap and so but you know all of these examples are all manufactured crises that Basically a morally bankrupt political party has to create in order to move the needle because their policies do not work for the American people and they can't campaign honestly on them.
And so it's all [00:38:00] manipulation tactics. So once you, can interpret things as a power play that the powerful will do whatever it takes to maintain power, then all of the bad acting is explained. Because if you don't have facts on your side, if you don't have equality or democracy or any of those things on your side, then you constantly have to create BS basically to anger people, make them fearful to exploit, and I say this as a registered independent, like it's not like, I'm from a very conservative red state.
And it's it's, it's such a shame how so many cultural myths and distortions from, from right wing politics continue to work against the common people's best interest. Because we're still in the South, when I go home, it's still, the misbelief of welfare Queens.
And the poverty class still believes that minorities mooching on the welfare system is enough of a reason to, dismantle social service programs when they're the ones who would benefit off of from them. And yeah, we just, we so often have the wrong arguments and the wrong discussions because of the, the bad actors making sure we're talking about the wrong things.
Censorship through noise
Matthew Sheffield: yeah, well, and also it's the idea of of what Steve Bannon has called flooding the zone with s**t. Yeah, and basically putting out so much, so many falsehoods, so many things that people just They just either give up paying attention at all, or they just say, well, I don't know what truth is anymore.
So I'll just believe whatever feels good.
Samuel Spitale: Yeah. Political scientists call that censorship through noise. If you can flood the zone with enough noise. Then basically you're censoring, [00:40:00] the truth tellers and the, the you're censoring the facts. And so we're, we, we witnessed that all the time with, Fox news championing stories that are non existent and, right wing media, yeah, there's just so much of it.
And it does, it blurs the line, it blurs the it blurs the facts because if all you're getting are the constant lies about this and that, election fraud is one, the 2020 election is one of the biggest ones right now if that's all you're getting, then, you don't know what to believe, it's it becomes an illusory truth if you hear the BS often enough, it Then it becomes top of mind and you assume, because that knowledge is readily available, even though it's not knowledge.
That you assume it must be true. Like the welfare queen is another example. We've heard of welfare queens for so long. We assume that must be true. And it really never was. Welfare fraud is extremely rare. Just like voter fraud. Voter fraud is basically non existent. But because the right mentions it so often, we think it's a thing.
It's not a thing. And what drives me the most when I watch the news and I see. People, you'll notice that the, the the leaders on the right, the political strategists and the talking heads on cable news will often say, Oh, this percentage of Americans think don't have faith in our elections or believe the election was whatever.
They'll use that quote a lot to basically speak a lie because they can't say they know it's not true to say That the election was fraudulent or there was voter fraud. So if they convince their base that it exists, then they could then quote the majority of the base who think that and present that as if it's an issue.
And it's a way to mislead without lying which drives me crazy. Like I just want one of the anchors to call them out [00:42:00] and say yes But 85 percent of your demo believes that only because you keep telling them that and that's not true So why not?
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, and we know that they know it's not true because of the Dominion lawsuit that they Explicitly said behind doors.
The danger of illusory truths
Matthew Sheffield: We think this is nonsense these things that trump is saying but we're going to keep saying anyway, because our viewers want to be lied to I mean that's That is the danger of society right now is the the idea of illusory truth that people they they want to be lied to and it's It's a problem completely.
Samuel Spitale: You know, it reminds me of a quote that I think benjamin carter had in a book He wrote about fascism You said that basically Nazi Germany happened because a majority of its citizens deeply believed things that were verifiably untrue. And we're witnessing that like right now.
And it's not just that the common people believe things that are untrue. It's that, there's a group of powerful people and their leaders that knowingly lied to them and refused to correct them. And that opportunism is dangerous. And so there's no accountability and they know that because they don't, in the old days you only had the three big, networks.
And so, Nixon had to face accountability because all of the news media was holding him accountable. But we don't have that anymore. No one ever has to go on unfriendly media and be held accountable. They now choose to only go onto media that will help them continue to lie. And that is a huge problem for an informed electorate.
Matthew Sheffield: It is. And and I guess the way that that happens is. I mean, it goes to a more basic [00:44:00] general human problem, which is that the person that we should be the most skeptical of is ourselves. And that, as Socrates it was famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the problem is most people don't want to examine.
Samuel Spitale: It's also
Matthew Sheffield: scary to examine.
Samuel Spitale: It is. And, our psychology basically, does not work. In favor of examining, like our brain is very resistant to changing our mind and admitting that we've been duped or misled. And that's why so often they call the, Trump's following a cult is because once you're in a cult, you cease to think critically and you just believe everything.
Because if you. If you start to question one thing, then it opens the door for you to question everything. And so, our constitution basically, wants to, we, we want to save face. We don't want to admit we're wrong. And we sure as hell don't want to admit that we've been duped and suckered.
And so, it's, it's going to be very hard to deprogram these people, if that ever happens. Something dramatic or drastic is going to have to happen. Like I, I do often wonder, if, if on January 6th, if Mike Pence say would have been hung or if someone, if someone of note would have died or been harmed.
If that would have changed the conversation, like, that would have made it way harder to deny and to rewrite history. And what's scary is that it may take something like that, turn the tide of all of this. Because, to a large degree, there has been zero accountability for all the lies of the last eight or 10 years for the right.
Yeah, for
Matthew Sheffield: the [00:46:00] primary lighters. Yeah,
Samuel Spitale: The primary, right. But, even, I mean, but even with Fox News, they're still around, they're still lying. So even the dominion settlement, has not made them change their stripes. And there has not been any accountability in high office, the Republican party has failed to impeach Trump at every opportunity, they have, there's just, there's a still a huge lack of accountability and it's just a shame that, it, we may have to have a replay of the 1960s before the tide changes, like, I mean, look at JFK had to die.
Martin Luther King had like there, there was a lot of civil strife and a lot of The hate had to go somewhere and the hate did lots of people died before it come Well people
Matthew Sheffield: had yeah people had to see that it was actually real and dangerous And the same thing with world war ii. I mean like that, right?
Before so the World War two in the depression, those two things are what put fascism at bay in the United States for, 80 years, basically. And because people saw what happens when you believe things that are lies.
Samuel Spitale: I actually just watched that Netflix, the new Netflix, docu series of Hitler and the Hitler's rights to power and the Nuremberg trials or whatever.
And it was like six episodes or something. And what's interesting is, I mean, there are a lot of parallels obviously. But what's interesting is that, Hitler just kept getting emboldened. Like people would just bend over, bend over and, and it, it just made him worse.
Like every time he was not held accountable. Either by his own party or the public or other countries like we're just caving. Then he just kept seeing what he could get away with and we've been watching that play out with trump and you know kind of the entire republican party. And well, and
Matthew Sheffield: that's yeah And that, sorry, and that is the thing about, about, about authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism requires [00:48:00] conservatism to ascent. It cannot win without it, because there aren't enough authoritarians out there with these viewpoints. They cannot win democratic elections. But if they can get, if they can steal the identity of conservatism and make conservatives think that they are at such a risk of, like this whole idea, and it's very common in sort of right wing post libertarian spaces, like Christopher Rufus, who you mentioned, like, they, they, they tell people that the woke people, they're different from the liberals who you knew before.
They're, they're so much worse. They're so much more evil. They're so much more violent. They're so much more, and none of that's true. But, but what it does, the reason they say those things, and the reason that Fox, so Fox is constantly using phrases, trying to say that Democrats are communist, Democrats are, are fascist, Democrats are, Antifa, killers, zombies, Black Lives Matter, wants to blow up the cities.
They, they, they use that fear as a way to create assent from conservatives. So that they can justify their authoritarian power seizures, that if you feel like the BLM Antifa super soldiers are going to murder you every time you go downtown, to deposit a check or something or go, go to lunch then.
That will justify them saying, Well, then this is why we have to send the police and militarize our cities. And we need to build these camps for for unauthorized immigrants. And I mean, that's what this is about is building that assent from conservatives and conservatives need to wake up to that and understand you are being manipulated.
Samuel Spitale: Yeah, absolutely. It's that the whole rejectionist voting or positive polarization, as long as you can. Smear the other side or smear your opponent or get people to hate your opponent. You don't have to s stand for anything yourselves, or [00:50:00] you don't have to reveal, you don't have
Matthew Sheffield: to offer anything.
Yeah, don't have to offer
Samuel Spitale: anything. You don't have to reveal what you're really up to like, and Yeah, as long as you can, direct your anger and an imaginary boogeyman. And that's right, what we're seeing, I, I always when I look at the social media posts with stuff, like the examples you gave, it's like count the ad hominem attacks,
Matthew Sheffield: like,
Samuel Spitale: like, you, you're on the wrong side of an issue.
If you have to use six adjectives to describe how bad someone is without actually saying what they've done, like, and it's just all fear mongering, there's no truth to it. It's. Stats and data are not on their side. Just maligning people for, stirring the hate again.
The appeal to negative emotions. Um, but yeah, there are so many boogeyman that the right use that most of the right actually can't even define what they are if they had to, you had to, you had the question of what is woke. What is Antifa? They probably, they definitely would have an intelligent answer, but they probably wouldn't be able to answer all.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and, and it is interesting that some of these, epistemic problems, like they existed, In the, the worldwide left when the USSR was around, out there pitching an authoritarian form of communism. And you did have people who, who really did actually had.
Put it into their heads that the USSR was a humane And positive, entity that was out there for peace anti imperialist You know all this stuff and none of that was true and so That stuff kind of got burned out on the on the american left with the collapse of the soviet union But none of that nothing like that has happened with the right in the united states for them to understand that the stuff doesn't work For them.
Yeah,
You
Samuel Spitale: Right. And it's, yeah, I just, yeah, I don't know what, what, what it'll take [00:52:00] to to to change and deprogram such a large swath of the American public.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, it's a, it's a serious thing to be concerned about. And, but I mean, you do, at the end of the book talk about some, in the conclusions.
And one of them that I think has a lot of merit is the idea of getting, getting people to excuse me, I gotta say that again. But at, but in the end of the book, you do get into some of ideas about, the methods or ideas that could be useful to counteract some of these ideas. And obviously.
Good education system is obviously going to be pivotal to that.
The role of values over beliefs
Matthew Sheffield: Um, but another one is getting people to understand that, to think about that values are better than beliefs and that beliefs are things that can change and that there's nothing wrong with them changing. As long as you understand what it is that you want, like you should want values rather than beliefs,
Samuel Spitale: right?
Absolutely. Values psychologist Adam Grant, argues this and, our values are our core principles, whether that's fairness or altruism or honesty or integrity. And, we should be basing our identity on our values and those kind of principles as opposed to, our tribal loyalty or our belief.
Because our beliefs can very often be wrong, but, if you value, life, for instance, if you're pro life and you really value life, then, what are the policies that prove that? And, restricting healthcare or abortion access isn't really one of those policies. Like, and, if you're pro life, Then that means you should be, you should support then universal health care or free childcare or a strong social safety net.
That would encourage, people to have more Children. It would be that's the number.
Matthew Sheffield: That's the number one [00:54:00] reason they don't because they can't afford to. Right. That is the number one reason.
Samuel Spitale: And it's just so, like I, the pro life or pro choice debate is to me one of the most infuriating because when you What I'd like to say is, okay, you want to make abortion illegal.
How does that solve the problem of abortion? Because regardless of it's legal or illegal, abortion statistics are virtually the same across countries that are legal or illegal. So you're not stopping abortions. You're just making it unsafe and dangerous. And, we know what would, what would lead to fewer abortions, birth control, free contraceptives.
A strong social safety net, a stronger less inequality. So that
Matthew Sheffield: sex education,
Samuel Spitale: sex education, poverty stricken, having a chance at a better life because the majority of babies that are aborted or in the poverty class, and like the free economics guys point out that. When you restrict abortion access, then the poor who won't be able to have an underground abortion as easily as the middle class and the upper class, then they'll have more babies and those babies will be trapped in intergenerational poverty.
So the parents will earn less money and the on and those children will grow up unwanted and unloved, which means they'll have more psychiatric disorders. And they'll turn to crime if they're in a poverty, poverty stricken area. So more unwanted children means more crime, more societal damage down the line.
And so, again, our values, do we, if we value life, then what are we going to do to protect life? And and it's, but it's, it's not really what it's about. Pro life is just a marketing slogan, it's branding,
Matthew Sheffield: For controlling women.
Samuel Spitale: For controlling women, and that's what it's always about.
Yeah. I just, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: Well, and another example, though, about, just to go back to the values [00:56:00] of why people should think about that is that when went back when there was the controversy of. Whether there should be same sex marriage The most common talking point against it was to say that you will destroy the institution of marriage If you allow people of the same sex to get married and So that hasn't happened Yeah, it it and and the intervening years have proven that that's not the case at all and in fact that if you Want to support families and you want to help society be more stable Then you should allow more people to get married.
It's good for society if you just you say You
Samuel Spitale: know, it's right and which that argument always struck me as just ludicrous But it also infuriated me when I would hear them talk on the news and you'd have two people arguing why no one ever said, well, Canada did it years ago. How has it destroyed the sanctity of marriage in Canada?
Like, like I, the questions I would want to say. To put them on the spot. No one ever says but right. It had been legal in many countries and, it didn't change anything.
With gay couple getting married in no way will affect anyone else. Period. Like, does your marriage affect anyone else?
Like, yeah, it's just so ludicrous. But it's an excuse for hate because. So many things are power and hate and yeah,
Matthew Sheffield: but you, you, you did highlight another thing that I think is also important. And that is so authoritarianism requires the, the tacit endorsement or sometimes endorsement of in tacit or, or explicit the endorsement of conservatives.
But it also requires people who are in the center to left to give them undue respect and to do what you were saying, to not actually force them to say what they want and to not, and to never make them actually come [00:58:00] confront things that they don't think about. That doesn't happen. Like when you, when you go on, look at these news shows on cable TV or, the Sunday political shows.
The debates that they have are not debates. They're not, they basically are, somebody gets to state their opinion and then someone, and then the host says, okay, now let's hear someone else's opinion.
Samuel Spitale: Now you read your
Matthew Sheffield: point pre
Samuel Spitale: prepared. Yeah. It's yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.
Samuel Spitale: Drives me crazy. That it's probably my, I mean, when I watch CNN, that's probably my biggest complaint is that, you have the two political pundits.
Each basically just, reading their talking points pre approved by their party. And it's like, I don't need to hear either of those. We know it like, like again, if I, if I was the journalist having the panel, I would only have the experts, like if we're debating climate policy or something, like, why do you give a s**t what either political party's doing?
You only need the climate scientists there. Like, your job is to relate information to the viewer. And the political pundits are not relaying information. They're just giving you their opinions and, creating the pretense of balance when one may be lying through their teeth and the other one's just, creating excuses for their incompetence.
Yeah, I just, the, the entire that idea of just letting, two sides debate and spread lies drives me crazy. Because they don't and
Matthew Sheffield: the fact that, yeah, and, and like they don't so George Conway, the, the former Republican legal activist, he, he's a CNN commentator and he won recently called out one of the people that he was talking to you, he said, you're, you're just flat out lying.
That is a lie, what you just said, and the, the anchor who was there in that discussion and we'll, we'll play the clip for the audience so they can hear it. But. The anchor was angry at him for saying something that everyone knew was correct. That this [01:00:00] guy who was there was, was lying and that he wasn't acting in good faith.
But, and, but, so that's part of why the authoritarianism is metastasizing so much is that the people who try to cloak it in sort of reasonable terms Are never confronted about it and the people and so as a result the people who share those views They never are confronted by them either. And so they have this this you know these these alternative facts as his now ex wife Kellyanne Conway famously said or what you call in the book, the, these illusory truths, that cutting, cutting taxes increases revenue or that transgender people are coming after cisgender people.
Like none of these things are true, but in, unless you make the proponents confront reality, then they're just going to continue spreading lies and people will continue to believe it because. They don't see it like in the right wing media as you said, you know They never are they're not interested at all in fair and balanced presentation.
They're not interested in debates They don't ever book anyone who disagrees with them on their programs And then at the same time they demand that the all the other shows book them So so it's a completely completely one sided presentation of, of, of, of, of discussion and it's got to, it's got to stop.
Yeah,
Samuel Spitale: it's a bit, it's a propaganda outlet. Like it's telling people what to believe and what to think. And not giving them the tools or information to think for themselves.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, exactly all right.
Promoting truth and education
Matthew Sheffield: Well, so this has been a good discussion So for people who want to check out the book and keep up with you.
What's your recommendations for them?
Samuel Spitale: Yeah, yeah So the book is called How to Win the War on Truth: An Illustrated Guide to How Mistruths Are Sold, Why They Stick, and How to Reclaim Reality. And my website is samuelcspitale.com and I actually just started an educational [01:02:00] YouTube channel that is at How to Win the War on Truth, where I basically take a different topic and kind of, debunk the misinformation and clarify things. So, yeah, hit me up on any of those and check out the book.
Matthew Sheffield: SAll right, sAll right, sounds good. Thanks for being here.
Samuel Spitale: Thanks for having me.
Matthew Sheffield: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation. And of course, you can always get more episodes. If you go to theoryofchange.show, you can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes of this program.
So thank you very much and I'll see you next time.
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This Doomscroll episode is available on video as well as audio, and as per usual, it is not “safe for work.”
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Republicans are flailing trying to attack Kamala Harris
03:56 — Ted Cruz says she can’t have his cheeseburger
06:22 — Speaker Mike Johnson begs Republicans not to make racist and sexist attacks against Harris
07:34 — Old JD Vance remarks about "cat ladies" cause controversy
13:01 — Kamala Harris doesn't laugh properly, Republicans say
20:19 — JD Vance is the most unpopular veep nominee ever
24:04 — Trump campaign's lawsuit against Kamala Harris
26:34 — Global temperature record hit twice in one week
29:00 — NJ Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez says he'll resign after bribery convictions
31:32 — Benjamin Netanyahu's congressional publicity stunt fizzles
35:28 — Rupert Murdoch is suing his adult children to keep Fox News from becoming centrist after he dies
37:14 — Billy Ray Cyrus insults daughter Miley on leaked audio
38:16 — JD Vance saddled with uncouched lies about his heterosectionality
Cover image: Donald Trump nodding off during his son Donald Trump Jr’s speech to the Republican National Convention. July 17, 2024
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