Trump's Fact Eradication Program. Plus, How Jubilee is Transforming Political Debate

Why should anybody press numbers?

said the president right after he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for accurately reporting the job numbers.

A new low in the war on facts.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loeinger.

A rare coalition of private money and state power is trying to sue the watchdog Media Matters out of existence.

Tucker Carlson described what he viewed as the three biggest threats, and it was the Washington Post, the German government, and media matters.

And, you know, said, oh my gosh.

Plus, the YouTube channel Jubilee says it wants to bridge political divides, but its debate format looks more like a firing squad.

If Jubilee had come to me and said, you'll be debating one guy who says he's a fascist and another guy who tells you to get out of the country, I'd have said, I'll pass, thanks.

I'm washing my hair.

It's all coming up after this.

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From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Michael Loewinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Ever since I got into this business, there have been times that have served as sharp reminders that the mission is to speak truth to power.

But the current moment suggests that perhaps the more crucial mission, especially since power is no longer listening, is to speak truth to each other.

Not merely to inform, but to reassure you who listen that, no, you are not going crazy.

And by truth, I don't mean the higher ones, the moral ones.

I mean just plain facts.

That's why we decided to take a few minutes to contextualize the president's most ambitious and by far his most successful project, fact eradication.

So let's start here.

On August 1st, he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Hours after a stunning government report that the job market is considerably worse than previously thought.

President Trump posting on Truth Truth Social that the jobs report was rigged to quote make a great Republican success look less stellar.

Why should anybody trust numbers?

I believe the numbers were phony just like they were before the election.

So you know what I did?

I fired her.

Erica McIntarfer, a labor economist with 20 years of public service under her belt, she headed the team of statisticians responsible for revising the recent employment numbers sharply downward.

Philip Bump noted in his column that such noteworthy revisions often align with great economic upheaval, like the Great Recession in 2008-2009, and the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

So what was happening this past April?

President Donald Trump's slate of sweeping tariffs is set to go into effect later this week.

Stocks plunging Friday amid the tariff uncertainty and fears of looming trade wars.

When President Trump doesn't get the beautiful numbers he seeks, he offers alternatives, even if they defy the immutable laws of mathematics.

You know, we've cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%.

I don't mean 50%.

I mean 1,400, 1,500%.

In June, he claimed to have cut the price of eggs by 400%.

But a quantity cannot decrease by more than 100% of itself.

Even I know that.

And I don't have an uncle who taught at MIT.

As for matters of war war and peace.

A lot of very beautiful wars have been settled.

Odd word choice there.

India, Pakistan, nuclear.

Look at Cambodia, just recently when it was going to be a war.

I settled that up, and I settled it up with Trader.

The Nobel Prize.

So near and yet so far.

Because it's rigged.

Settle that one.

Kosovo, you know about that.

With Serbia.

I think I settled

averaging about a war a month.

While the U.S.

played a role in some negotiations and ceasefires, it didn't do it alone, and ongoing tensions and violence in those places suggest that such agreements do not amount to a durable peace.

He counts on us not to follow news of faraway places.

As for wars we can't help following, the ones he was going to settle on day one because the other guy was too stupid?

Well, of course it was sarcastic.

But you've now been in office for five months and five days.

Why have you not been able to end the Ukraine war?

Because it's more difficult than people would have any idea.

You think?

Meanwhile, the president's war on facts, which cannot be negotiated, is waged with addition and subtraction.

A report from the president's Make America Healthy Again Commission included citations to non-existent studies regarding such topics as children's asthma medication and mental illness.

Now, that's addition.

But these days, the chief weapon is subtraction.

The White House is taking another step to make it harder to find big, legally mandated scientific reports on climate change.

Several CDC pages have disappeared.

Key resources for healthcare providers are gone.

I am in Nashville, Tennessee, at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association.

Sadly, without a lot of the government statisticians that are usually here.

For the White House, it seems that public enemy number one is data.

The guardrails are gone.

Amy O'Hara is a research professor at Georgetown's Massive Data Institute and the president of the Association of Public Data Users.

She used to work at the U.S.

Census Bureau.

These institutions that have systems in place to provide reliable data about our workforce, about labor in the United States, there was a leader at the helm of that organization that was just following the rules, using data input, using existing protocols, providing information as they always did.

And because the numbers were apparently politically inconvenient, that person was told that they cooked the books and they could no longer serve in that role.

O'Hara says that the White House has also shuttered advisory committees.

Which were the channel people used to understand updates in methodology or new products coming out or the discontinuation of other products.

That has been shut down.

So all of those advisory committees, including an important one called FESAC about federal economic statistics, is one of the ones that were shut down.

They produced numbers that people now scratch their head and say, what is the accuracy of that number?

Can I rely on that number?

Ah, but that's a key component to the president's fact eradication project.

Convince Americans not to trust numbers or anything else.

Why should anybody trust numbers?

We have to fight an uphill battle against all these accusations, which we're trying to undermine our credibility.

Andreas Giorgio is a visiting lecturer and scholar in statistics at Amherst College.

In 2010, he became head of the first independent statistical agency in Greece, Elstat, which then issued a report showing Greece's huge deficit was even worse than previously reported.

In fact, the deficit, as a percent of the GDP, which is roughly defined as the value of all goods and services a country produces during a specific time, had reached completely unsustainable levels.

It reached 15.4% of GDP.

Members of the EU are required never to exceed 3%.

And the debt increased by 11.7% of GDP, which meant that the debt-to-GDP ratio for Greece reached 126.8% of GDP.

This, of course, meant that the fiscal picture was even worse.

than anticipated.

This at a time when Greece was already in a major debt crisis.

All this landed very hard on the people of Greece.

The unemployment rate passed 25% in the following years.

Since the deficit was so out of control, Greece had to adopt tough austerity measures.

Rising politicians in Greece, seeking a scapegoat, rallied around the idea that the statistical office had put Greece in the eye of the hurricane.

The prosecutor for economic crimes began a preliminary criminal investigation against me on the basis of statements that were made by various people, including politicians.

The theory was that Greece was somehow subject to some conspiracy and that statistics had played a role in that.

He spent the next 14 years battling criminal and civil investigations.

He was sentenced to jail.

He never served time because he was able to get his cases overturned.

But at one point, he took a case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, where Greece was convicted for not providing him a fair trial.

This allowed Georgio to reopen his case in Greece.

He has another hearing on it in the Greek Supreme Court next month.

His goal?

Full exoneration.

That is very important, not just for me personally, but for Greek statisticians and statisticians everywhere that want to follow the rules.

It has been, of course, a difficult time for me and for my family.

My father suffered quite a bit.

It might have contributed to my father's passing.

The family had run entirely out of money to pay the lawyers.

Eventually there was crowdfunding, people helped us a lot, and also a very good legal firm in Greece offered to take over the cases at no cost.

It would have cost me millions of dollars to be here.

And it has definitely, you know, caused a lot of problems for me too, especially as a...

until very recently as a single father of a little girl.

But I can tell you that it was the good fight.

I'm glad that I did it.

The good fight is still very much a fight all around the world.

Like in Brazil.

Bolsonaro, the president there, fired the head of INPEC, the agency that controls the satellites of Brazil and produces the statistical data on deforestation, among other things.

So it produced figures that showed that deforestation increased significantly in 2019 when Bolsonaro was in office.

And Bolsonaro didn't like that and fired the chief of the institution.

Then we have the case where Erdogan in Turkey fired the head of the Turkish Institute for Statistics, the agency that produced inflation figures.

He felt that the inflation figures were overstated.

So you have this string of interventions and interferences.

These are harmful to official statistics and to this important information that is the basis on which society carries out not only its economic affairs and its social affairs, but it's also its democracy.

They are extremely essential for democracy and for accountability of the politicians.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday about a leaked draft report that shows the administration is planning to eliminate or downplay accounts of prisoner abuse, corruption, LGBTQ plus discrimination, of course, and other alleged abuses.

The White House says the reports will be shortened for, quote, readability.

Right.

But even when defending facts, one has to concede that data can be cold.

And it's well understood that the bigger the number of afflicted people, the less sympathy they engender.

It's a paradox Stalin understood when he famously said, a single death is a tragedy.

A million deaths is a statistic.

But despite all that, the truth is, numbers, stats, facts, to coin a phrase, are people too.

Coming up, why are Elon Musk's ex, the FTC, and multiple state attorneys general trying to destroy a media watchdog group?

This is on the media.

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No, but we're gonna be in Namibia.

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This is on the Media.

I'm Michael Loewinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Media Matters for America is an avowedly liberal watchdog group that follows and fact-checks right-wing outlets like Fox News Channel, Newsmax, Steve Bannon's War Room, and the Tucker Carlson Show, places where the lies and misdirection that inform American policy and American life pick up steam.

So it was inevitable that when death came knocking for the organization, it would be someone like Elon Musk holding the scythe by way of a lawsuit or a barrage of them.

Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for a reported $44 billion,

renamed it X, and promised to ease up on its content moderation.

Free speech, you know?

Let everybody's freak flag or Confederate flag fly.

But when Media Matters published a series of investigations in November 23 that showed that ads on on X were appearing next to anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi content.

This, by the way, after Musk claimed that he had new tools in place to assuage advertisers' fears that their content would show up next to such extremist posts, Media Matters showed that these tools weren't working.

So, companies like Sony, Apple, IBM, and Warner Bros.

pulled their ads from X, costing Musk an estimated $75 million.

You know, cause and effect is a little unclear because that was the same week that Musk embraced the white genocide conspiracy theory.

So that's what the fight about discovery is now, is what was really motivating a lot of these advertisers' decisions.

Angelo Carazon is the president of Media Matters, which was initially sued by X in 2023, first in Texas, then in Ireland and Singapore.

Then, following X, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey both opened investigations into the nonprofit.

Media Matters sued everyone back, including X, saying that the social media platform's own terms and conditions required X's legal actions to be launched exclusively in California.

The judge agreed, halting the Ireland case.

Both the investigations by state AGs were also shot down.

down in court.

A lot of times people compare this to Hulk Hogan's litigation against Galker that was financed by some billionaires that ultimately bankrupted the company.

And I understand why that's a comparison, but this is so different because that was just a civil lawsuit.

There wasn't a combination of private power and state power to target Gawker.

That's what's happening here.

How have you done in court on these challenges other than that very important decision in California?

So the decision in California was one success.

The other thing I would note is that our lawsuit against both state AGs was successful.

Paxton and Bailey, Texas and Missouri, those are no longer on the table.

That's correct.

They were shut down.

We received an injunction against them and Andrew Bailey asked to settle with us so that he didn't have to go through a discovery.

So that was closed.

Paxton appealed the decision that we received in the district court level to the circuit court, the D.C.

circuit court.

And the D.C.

Circuit Court upheld the lower court's decision in our favor.

And the other thing is the substance of these rulings, judges, whenever they look at this, often describe it as a campaign of government harassment, which is how the D.C.

courts had described it.

Whenever they touch on the merits, the underlying facts, they always describe them as either meritless or baseless.

And what's so incredible about all of this is that we barely had a moment to enjoy the relief of not being under state scrutiny.

Because just as we were putting to bed the civil investigative demands from the states, this FTC one was now blossoming.

Tell me about the Federal Trade Commission case.

What are the grounds?

I don't know.

What do they say then?

We're a non-profit.

We don't engage in commercial activity.

The FTC doesn't even have any real authority over us.

We're not in trade.

We're not in commerce.

I mean, what information did they want?

They want to know information about funding sources in some cases.

They want to know who's worked here for the past six years.

They want to have insight into the editing process and how the reporting and journalism gets done.

They want all kinds of communications that we've had with third parties.

It seems to be one about retaliation.

And the other part that I think reinforces that is that, you know, Andrew Ferguson, who's the chairman, you know, has talked about these concerns around what they call advertiser boycotts.

There was a recent merger between two very large media buyers.

And in their approval of that merger, the FTC, they said look we'll approve this deal but only under the following condition you're no longer allowed to remove ads based off of politics or ideology meaning really yes this is news to me i mean it's such an incredible sort of tell or reveal there if this is a purely free market capitalist society they should be able to put their money wherever they want they're not just trying to change politics now project 2025 showed us that and steve bannon i think describes it so effectively is that politics is downstream from culture and for them, so much of the work is being done to reshape and transform our culture.

This is very similar to what we're seeing with colleges, right?

And very similar.

You know, it's like, well,

you have to pay all these funds for the damage that you did with your DEI policies.

Because of the work that we do, which is reporting and research and sort of illustrating these trends in the media landscape, there are many people on the right that really truly despise us.

And it's worth keeping in mind that so much of the Trump administration is pulled from the right-wing media fever swamps.

Three of Andrew Ferguson's senior people that he brought on board to the FTC have all attacked media matters vigorously in the past, you know, describing us as a cancer and all sorts of other things, saying we should be in jail and prison.

The FTC says that you're engaging in collusion and that this needs to be investigated, that you're trying to disrupt the marketplace under consumer protection laws.

That's what they would argue, but it's very similar to what the state AGs were claiming:

we were interfering with commerce in their respective states, and that's why we needed to be investigated.

It is a strong testament.

You know, the advertising industry is not small.

You know, it's a multi-billion dollar.

This idea that somehow we're the wizard behind the curtain is part of the right-wing narrative.

I mean, Tucker Carlson once described what he viewed as the three biggest threats, and it was the Washington Post, the German government, and Media Matters.

And you know, I said, oh my gosh, you know, or I remember when Roche Limbaugh at one point, and again, this is somebody that had, you know, 20 million listeners, he was lamenting that we were, quote, in the midst of mob rule run by the trolls at Media Matters.

In their minds, you know, we are just so overwhelming.

So hydra-headed.

Yeah.

So how are you going to be able to pay your legal bills?

You've observed that in any other environment, you would stop doing what you do, focus on beating back the legal assault, and then pick up on the work after the lawsuits were settled.

But now

you're being expected to do both at the same time.

I think that's a fair expectation.

Our biggest study that we've ever produced in 21 years in terms of its reach actually came out this year.

while we were under this litigation.

We did a massive thing with the New York Times shortly before the 2024 election that looked at YouTube YouTube election misinformation for six months was this huge thing that they published in coordination with our research that was in the midst of this litigation.

Our supporters have mostly stayed with us, but we haven't received support from the major foundations and new people that care about civic spaces.

And that's really what this fight's about.

Right.

Because they're afraid, because they don't know about it?

Why?

I think it's a combination of a few things.

One, I think, is legitimate fear.

Musk himself has threatened retaliation against individuals, or at least that's the perception that exists in many.

It's like, like, oh, I don't want to touch that.

My gosh.

The other part is the Trump administration has all of these big players are folding and it gets where you say, how could you possibly win this fight?

If CBS had to cave, if ABC had to cave, what chance does Media Matters have?

You know?

You say that to get to the finish line, you need five or six million bucks.

You also say that if this were happening in 2017,

you'd have it.

You'd be resistance heroes.

If this was 2017 and the Trump administration was attacking us like this, we would be resistance heroes because back then it was considered a badge of honor.

It was a demonstration that you were standing up.

And the fear, it was present, but it wasn't front and center.

Now, I think within the first few months, the Trump administration has successfully illustrated to many that they're serious, that they will punish you.

I often imagine a scenario in which George Soros and Barack Obama were going after a right-wing media figure like a Charlie Kirk, that they were both putting all these resources into trying to destroy and announced it, that their plan was to destroy Kirk.

It would be the biggest story ever.

And every potential right-wing donor would be out there saying, no, no, no.

Not even because they necessarily want to defend Charlie Kirk or stick it to Obama and Soros, but because they would say, we cannot let that tactic become acceptable.

And I think that's my big warning for everyone is that if you don't take this tactic and show that it doesn't work, they'll just keep using it over and over and over again.

And every time they use it, it will become sharper.

You know, one of the incredible things that came out of the Paxton investigation or the lawsuits around that is there was this argument in court that his team was making that essentially amounted to the fact that if anybody in Texas reads a news article that has any effect on anything related to Texas, that they have the authority to go out there and investigate all the reporting leading up to it the journalists their notes their research that was the case they made that was one of the arguments that they were making at the time is it all centered around this nexus of consumer protection and what did the judge say I mean the judge obviously didn't accept it because they lost but I think it shows the point of fighting because even then when we sued the AGs first you know we had very similar questions is this worth the money shouldn't you just try to negotiate shouldn't you wait until they fight you in their state courts?

And the answer to that is no, because it's seeding the ground to this encroachment and attack on basic, not just freedoms, but basic civic rights.

I know resources are constrained across the board, but for me, this is not a resource problem.

Unexpectedly, though, some figures and groups on the right have offered media matters, some grudging respect, and even in a few cases, support.

This is the one thing that has been pleasantly surprising.

We've had had conservative, right-leaning organizations that have filed briefs on our behalf, basically saying, Hey, you should support Media Matters here on this issue because it is a free speech issue.

And you're talking about groups like there are some organizations that have been funded by the Koch Network.

Another group is Fire, which is a free speech organization that in the past I would have described it as a conservative organization.

And outside of the amicus brief, which is, I think, a very formal thing, even people like Steve Bannon, who've been acknowledging our sophistication and contributions and maybe even appreciating our toughness a little bit.

That's the stuff that it's like, well, at least they're being consistent.

We've seen so many figures, they just capitulate to Trumpism, right?

When you're in this type of work, so much of the work becomes the fight itself.

You lose sight that you're not just stuck in trench warfare indefinitely, that actually some of the people you're engaging with are honest brokers too, even if you disagree.

And as terrible as all this has been, and it has been almost entirely terrible, some of those bright spots have been reminders that even when it feels like so much of our culture is being transformed in the most destructive ways, there are actually strange bedfellows that align around the basics of what our country is supposed to be.

And you think you can survive?

Yeah, I mean, the short term is that, look, money is the hard part, and there may be some more curveballs, and it may get worse.

We are in a posture now of finding a way to balance this complicated legal attacks, this multi-front battle, and our mission.

And I don't want to sacrifice any more of our mission.

I do believe in persistence.

I could go back to a laundry list of things that always seemed impossible when we first started them, and then in six months became more real and more possible.

And then in a year after that, it happened.

And so I think my own experience has said, yeah, you know what?

We're on firm ground and you can keep hitting us, but I think we have a path ahead.

Angelo, thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Angelo Carazon is the president of Media Matters for America.

Coming up, the biggest debate show that's not a debate.

This is On the Media.

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This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, two veterans of Middle East Peace Talks explain why the two-state solution is a thing of the past.

It was treated as being something that can be dealt with rationally, and that was a big, big mistake because

rational and cool has nothing to do with the conflict.

Hussein Aga and Robert Malley join me on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loewinger.

The latest episode of South Park just so happens to perfectly set up a piece that we've been working on.

Hello and welcome to the third annual Charlie Kirk Award for young master debaters.

More and more young people today are learning to fight for America through master debation.

Not only were you featured in this episode, Charlie, your name was in bright lights as the Charlie Kirk Award.

It was basically an entire homage to the genre that you've popularized.

The real life Charlie Charlie Kirk, a far-right podcaster known for arguing with liberal college students, was showered with praise from his co-hosts.

You've transformed the entire dialogue that exists in America between young men and crazy, woke, psychotic young people.

Because even scathing satire from South Park is attention.

And in 2025, attention is everything.

It's taken over TikTok.

It's taken over all social media.

It's true that political debates, and not just among right-wing outrage merchants, have become one of the major ways that people engage with the news.

There was the nearly five-hour Israel-Palestine debate on Lex Friedman's podcast last year.

Was Palestine the only spot of land on earth?

Yes, basically that was the problem.

The Jews couldn't end up with the people.

What about the United States?

And there's Piers Morgan's YouTube channel, uncensored, which routinely devolves into shouting matches between pundits.

He just called me a pervert.

He will be sued now

for defamation.

And we will be able to resolve this.

In a court of war,

I guarantee you that he will be sued.

In my understanding, you are a pervert woman.

Some of these debates are clearly designed for sensationalism and partisan polemics.

Some are more educational.

Some even try to crown a winner, like the Monk Debate, a semi-annual Canadian event that recently hosted Ezra Klein and Kellyanne Conway.

The golden age of America is upon us.

I see the small businesses that feel they can survive and thrive with less regulation, with lower taxes, with more energy independence.

No, I don't think we're in a golden age.

I almost don't think it needs to be argued this heavily.

Are we even in a decent age?

These spectacles, of course, are hardly new.

For precedent, you could point to the televised Gore Vidal-William Buckley debates of 1968, which were ostensibly rarefied policy discussions that still went off the rails.

Now, listen, you're right.

Or early panel shows like CNN's Crossfire, which in 1982 famously hosted the KKK's national leader.

Wait a minute, Mr.

Richard.

You believe in the final solution, which is black repatriation to Africa.

I'm not going to be cut off.

I'm not going to be shut off either.

You're running around on a bed sheet.

I don't have the bed sheet.

But at least in terms of scale, pure metrics, nothing to date has transfixed viewers quite like Jubilee, a YouTube debate channel that the Atlantic compared to the Jerry Springer show with Gen Z Appeal.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

They don't know.

Do you think 300,000 minors are lost in America?

Are you crazy?

Millions, tens of millions of people watch Jubilee.

They've got billions of collective views at this point.

Jubilee is a YouTube behemoth.

Taylor Lorenz is a tech journalist who writes the User Mag newsletter.

She's been following the meteoric rise of Jubilee.

And whether you love it, hate it, or you've never heard about it before, Jubilee has become an undeniably important forum for changing hearts and minds.

Its founder, Jason Y.

Lee, came up with the idea for the company after the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Jason was surprised by what happened with the election and also just trying to make sense of what was happening with the country.

I saw huge polarization on both sides.

It was very jarring for me.

Jason speaking with Taylor Lorenz on her podcast, Power User.

I felt like there was just this huge white space in the center for young people, which was about empathy, about dialogue, about nuance, which unfortunately at that time, and unfortunately now, it felt like we weren't seeing.

So I had this crazy idea at the time where, like, could we create a media company that is not about featuring just the left side or just the right side, but featuring true human voices and finding some kind of middle ground there.

And I decided to raise a small round of capital and launch Jubilee Media.

He ended up raising $650,000, telling investors that he thought filming tough conversations could be hugely lucrative.

And he was right.

One of our first big shows that we created was a show called Middle Ground.

What it would do is it would bring together two quote-unquote opposing sides, but rather than just squaring off for a Fox or CNN style debate or kind of everyone yelling at each other, we said, is there a way for us to find middle grounds between conservatives and liberals or between Christians and atheists or even between flat earthers and round earthers.

I'm what you call a globe denier.

This is a brilliant opportunity to speak.

We've been suppressed, censored by mainstream media.

Alternative media is just a thing of beauty for me.

This is one of three flat earthers who debated three scientists in what's become the most popular episode of Middleground with 31 million views.

My point is that these experiments clearly show that the Earth is globe.

And you don't need to go outside the globe to see it's global.

It's a thing.

You told me you want the evidence.

The critique of you guys, which you've seen, is like, are you kidding me?

You're putting a flat earther out there, like, as though this is a reasonable point of view.

Semaphores Ben Smith interviewing Jason Lee on the Mixed Signals podcast.

I think that the Flat Earther one is the one that we had to discuss quite a bit about, like, hey, where are the bounds by which we wouldn't go?

But one of the principles we talk about a lot of Jubilee is what is this idea of what we call radical empathy.

For example, there was a woman who was really incredible.

She lost her husband.

And when her husband was on his deathbed, he became like a full-on flat earther.

So my husband actually brought home this movie talking about how the moon landing was fake.

Once he had passed, I think that she feels like this is like part of her way to connect with him, right?

Again, does that make me believe that the earth is flat?

Absolutely not.

But do I understand or have some sort of empathy towards like that experience?

I'm like, yeah, I do.

I think Jason is naive.

I think that it is a monster that Jason does not realize he's created.

And I think he is deluding himself into thinking that it's a lot less harmful than it is.

Taylor Lorenz.

I think it's more of a YouTuber brain.

What is YouTuber brain?

YouTube rewards rage bait.

Mostly the entire internet rewards rage bait.

That's what algorithms reward.

And so if you can create these viral clips of people saying extremely shocking things, you will succeed.

And if you're making millions and millions of dollars, it's really hard to change course and say, actually, I want to make less money.

Jason Lee did not respond to our request for an interview.

If he had, I would have asked him about the channel's most successful format, the one that's generated quite a bit of controversy in recent weeks, a show called Surrounded, which is this round-robin debate-style video where it's one person in the middle and then a group of 20 people that disagree with them around them.

Hello, everyone.

I am Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, and I am surrounded by 20 woke college kids.

I'm Ben Shapiro, and I'm co-founder of The Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show.

And today I'm surrounded by 25 Kamala Harris supporters.

The Ben Shapiro episode was the fifth most viewed piece of political content on YouTube during the election.

Democrats and non-partisan experts have also starred in surrounded videos, though they tend to get fewer views.

I'm Pete Buttigieg, and today I'm surrounded by 25 undecided voters.

I'm Dr.

Mikhail Varshovsky, better known as Dr.

Mike across social media.

I'm a board-certified family medicine physician who makes content online improving health literacy.

And today, I'm surrounded by 20 vaccine skeptics.

That Dr.

Mike video, which has 10 million views, is interesting for a few reasons.

The way the format works is that the high-profile person in the middle, in this case Dr.

Mike, starts each round of the debate by stating a prompt.

My next claim is that RFK Jr.

is a public health threat.

And then, on the count of three, the 20 anti-vaxxers can race to a seat in the middle to challenge him.

Leading to this exchange.

How is it that he's a villain?

How are we a villain?

If some of these vaccine creators and scientists are the ones saying we should not get

is there anything I could say today that would change your mind?

I'm just asking your opinion.

I'm asking you a question.

Probably not, because I actually read and study.

I would like to give you my knowledge, my experience, and what I've seen in the hospital system.

But if you're telling me right now, no matter what I say, you're not going to change your mind, is there any value to that?

That clip pretty much sums up the entire one and a half hour video.

Every time Dr.

Mike attempts to debunk medical misinformation, his opponents cut him off or ignore him, talking about how they'd done their own research and didn't trust mainstream science.

One comment under the video that received 143,000 likes reads, quote, this didn't feel like a debate.

It feels like 20 people venting as if it's therapy.

After the video came out, Dr.

Mike revealed that it was his idea.

He pitched this video to Jubilee.

I was watching Jubilee and saw a 20 verse one episode and I said, wow, wouldn't it be a good idea if it was a doctor versus anti-vaxxers?

The only accurate way.

to report that one out of four Americans are skeptical of global warming is to say a poll finds that one out of four Americans are wrong about something.

John Oliver, speaking on his HBO show in 2014.

A survey of thousands of scientific papers that took a position on climate change found that 97%

endorsed the position that humans are causing global warming.

And I think I know why people still think this issue is open to debate, because on TV, it is.

He then brings out two people for a mock debate.

Bill Nye, who believes climate change is real, and a denier who doesn't.

The problem here, Oliver says, is that a split-screen TV debate implies implies that these two positions are equal.

A mathematically balanced debate about COVID-19 vaccines would look the same way because an estimated 97% of medical scientists say those vaccines are safe.

And yet, Jubilee flipped it.

20 so-called skeptics were pitted against one expert because that's more provocative.

And there are other ways the channel's producers stack the deck for drama.

Take the February episode of Surrounded titled One Conservative versus 25 LGBTQ plus activists.

So I saw that they were casting for a Jubilee video.

So I sent in my application and that's pretty much how it started.

Stasia Underwood is a 26-year-old activist who's received a lot of attention online since appearing in that Jubilee video.

My intention

was to hopefully meet some more trans women and I knew that it was a huge opportunity.

I knew that it could bring me a lot of exposure, negatively and positively.

Did the producers tell you anything about who you'd be speaking with?

Just that they'd be conservative.

I had no clue.

I definitely wasn't expecting it to be somebody that was so

hateful.

My next claim is that transgenderism should be eradicated from public life entirely.

The conservative in the middle turned out to be Daily Wire host Michael Knowles.

Stasia sprinted for the chair in the middle.

Hello.

Hello.

Which she says was scripted to make it look like she was competing with other people.

My first thought was that it was absurd because transgenderism isn't real.

We are transgender people.

How are you going to get people to stop being trans?

I think we're going to tell boys that they're not girls.

So we're going to tell boys that they're not girls, that they're going to listen.

Yeah, basically.

Daily.

Yeah, that's what we've done for most of history.

I can promise you to God that I didn't listen.

Yeah, well, because we live at a time that is affirming the transgender delusion.

What was the kind of digital afterlife of the video?

How did it affect you specifically?

I knew that it was going to be viral.

I didn't know that I was going to go viral.

My video is right now, currently still sitting at like 14 million views on the TikTok page on Jubilees.

My clip was the most viewed of the whole segment.

I got so many hate comments, but I was expecting that.

So, that wasn't really what took me by surprise.

It was the Daily Wire posting me, making sure that it ended up on certain sides of the internet.

But also, I definitely received more of a following on my social media i have been invited to do multiple other shows i was on pierce morgan uncensored there has been some huge things that have come out of this do you feel like all of the hate that you got was it worth it

yes i think yes and i think no i think i could have gone without the death threats Would you still have participated in the debate if you'd known about the prompts and the identity of Michael Knowles ahead of time?

I would not have participated, not with Michael, but I chose to go on Jubilee.

I could have walked out.

And that's something that we all have discussed with each other recently is like,

we probably should have walked out at a certain point when he was saying things like the eradication of trans ideology.

But we all sat there and we all participated.

So I think it's all dependent on what you're willing to put up with and what you're not.

I spoke with another guest on Surrounded who feels he was misled by Jubilee and is now reflecting on whether participating was worth it.

I'm Mehdi Husson.

I'm a journalist.

I'm the editor of Zatayo and today I'm surrounded by 20 far-right conservatives.

Mehdi is a natural fit for this kind of thing.

Back when he had an MSNBC show, he was known for his tough interviews.

He also literally wrote a book about debate called Win Every Argument.

I began by asking him which of the previous Jubilee videos made him want to jump in the ring.

I watched a lot of the right-wing ones.

Most of the Jubilee videos are right-wingers versus woke kids or liberal students or Harris supporters.

And there's only been a couple of kind of quote-unquote progressives who have done it.

Sam Seder, a good friend of mine at the Majority Report, did it.

And Sam is the one who told me, like, it's worth doing it.

It's worth going into this lion's den.

It's a new audience.

It's a younger audience.

They need to hear our arguments.

Who approached who?

How was it presented?

What was the conversation like before you showed up at the studio?

The Jubilee approached me.

They pitched it as, you know, 25 Trump supporters, MAGA supporters.

The name changed over time.

It ended ended up being 25 far-right conservatives.

To be fair to them, that should have been a tell to me.

I mean, which people self-identify as far-right?

I'm for defending the traditional demographics of this country, which is majority white.

This is Connor Estelle, who began his debate with Mehdi Hassan saying he didn't care if Donald Trump defied the Constitution.

How would Connor's America look?

What would it look like?

Well, quite frankly, I think we would deport people who shouldn't be here.

How do they not deport it?

What does the government look like?

I would say, quite frankly, it's under a sort of benevolent leader such as

it could be a kind of aristocratic class, could be someone who picks the autocrat.

Frankly, the people.

I mean, we could hold a vote on it, Kingsworth.

Isn't that democracy?

Well, sure.

You can have a vote to get to that state.

And then no more votes afterwards.

Absolutely.

100%.

Wow.

And if that autocrat kills you and your family, you're fine with that.

Well,

I'm not going to be a part of the group that he kills because that's the whole thing.

How do you know?

He starts going on about General Franco, and I'm thinking, wow, this is kind of insane stuff.

General Franco, who murdered many innocent people, thousands of people in the White Terror.

He starts quoting Carl Schmidt.

I say, you're quoting a Nazi theoretician.

And then I'm thinking, whoa, where are we going here?

I frankly don't care being called a Nazi.

I didn't say that.

I didn't

say that.

I said, are you a fan of the Nazis?

Well, they persecuted the church a little bit.

I'm not a fan of that.

What about the persecution of the Jews?

Well, I mean, I certainly don't support anyone's human dignity being assaulted.

I'm a Catholic.

But you don't condemn Nazi persecution of the Jews?

I think that there was a little little bit of persecution.

So I have to rename this show because you're a little bit more than a far-right Republican.

Hey, what can I say?

I think you can say I'm a fascist.

Yeah, I am.

Then I kind of realized that, what am I doing here?

I don't debate fascists.

I've had a very strong, consistent, anti-fascist platform since the day I became a public figure, a broadcaster.

It's easy clickbait, but I try and avoid climate deniers and election denies simply because I think journalists should have some attachment to reality.

I'll be honest with you, if Jubilee had come to me and they didn't, but if they'd come to me and said, you'll be debating one guy who says he's a fascist and another guy who tells you to get out of the country, I'd have said, I'll pass, thanks.

I'm washing my hair.

There was one YouTube commenter who put it this way.

It's never been easier to understand the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany.

And that comment got 162,000 upvotes under your video.

So what do you make of this idea that there's some kind of educational or even journalistic value in platforming this stuff?

I get it.

And it's appealing to some people, but there has to be a red line, right?

What are we going to do now?

Is Jubilee going to have one Jewish person versus 20 Holocaust in ours?

Like, where do we draw the line?

Literally, a Jubilee producer told a writer at the Atlantic that they had considered that topic.

Oh, wow.

I didn't know that.

I was just being sarcastic.

I guess this is where we are.

Are you happy with how the video turned out?

That's a tricky question.

Are you happy that you did it?

I don't know the answer to that latter question.

I'm reserving judgment on that.

I'm going to wait and see.

I'm not going to be fake modest.

Clearly, millions of people watch that.

Millions more people now follow me and Zatayo.

So in terms of grabbing attention, that worked.

And that was one of the reasons I did it.

I'm not going to lie to you.

Of course, the idea of appealing to a younger audience who probably have never heard of Zatayo or me was appealing.

And clearly that worked.

People are now have heard of me who have not heard of me.

So in that sense, it worked.

And now people can say that's cynical, that's self-serving, whatever.

After the video came out, Connor, the self-described fascist, did his own little podcast tour.

You are in some serious trouble in your personal life over this.

Am I right?

That is correct.

What happened?

Well, unfortunately, I lost my job as a result, and no one really is to blame for that.

It's just the manner in which you're canceled for voicing any heterosexual, Christian, moral belief.

He ran with the cancel culture story and raised nearly $40,000 on a crowdfunding site.

A huge boon for a guy who to that point, like some of the other Jubilee participants, had been struggling to break through as an aspiring right-wing influencer.

What do you make of the argument that any good that came of your appearance, you know, the millions of teenagers who didn't know who you were but now do,

what do you make of the argument that that is all negated by the exposure that these aspiring right-wing influencers got?

These people who need to be canceled in order to get famous in their circles?

Is the juice worth the squeeze here?

No, it's a very good question.

I don't know the answer to that question.

I think it's a very fair criticism, and that's why I reserve judgment on the whole thing to see what the longer-term fallout is than just a week of 10 million views, but more like what is the longer-term fallout for some of these influencers?

It's a two-point process.

One is, should Jubilee exist?

Because it already does, regardless of Maudie Husson.

Yeah, yeah.

But if it does exist, should someone like me who knows how to debate go on and debate these freaks?

In addition to the views on the actual Jubilee YouTube video, these debates have like this long afterlife as video clips.

And I've often seen each side of the debate more or less declare victory with their own communities.

Is there something about just the way that social media is wired, what the algorithms reward, that undermines the very idea that a side can win with a persuasive argument?

That's a great question.

It's something I've struggled with a lot, which is you can win a debate as I have and then see the other side clip something completely out of context to make it look like that was the moment.

And people don't watch the whole hour and a half.

They watch two minutes in their feed or 30 seconds in their feed.

It is a problem, no doubt about it.

I'm not sure what the solution is.

I don't think we should stop debating issues because people can spin it the way they want.

One of the reasons I did Jubilee again, and time will tell, is I would argue that most people, most normal people who watch something like that will come away going, wow, A, those guys are crazy and extreme.

B, Mehdi clearly won that debate.

C, we need to worry about our country.

In your book, you respond to this idea of we're living in a post-truth culture, which is a kind of resounding conclusion that many people came to after the 2016 election.

But you cite some data to back up the idea that people's minds can still change.

After this latest election, after the dark turns we've seen in our politics since you wrote that book, do you still believe the facts can change minds?

Yes, but not for a lot of Americans.

The debate is not whether it can change minds.

The debate is how many minds can it change.

I think that audience is a shrinking audience.

I have to be honest with you.

I think that audience grows smaller by the day.

But look, I do believe people's minds can change.

Just look at the polling.

Trump has just won an election, right?

That's deeply depressing for someone like me.

Having said that, he's also the most unpopular president at this point in his presidency in living memory.

Why is that?

Because people's minds have changed since the election.

People have either seen him do bad stuff or have felt him do bad stuff or have accepted the argument from those of us in the media or Democrats that he is doing bad stuff.

So his numbers have plummeted on the economy, on immigration, on multiple issues.

So I do think that's an interesting test.

What happens in the midterms and the next presidential election if we have free and fair elections again in this country.

It'll be interesting to see how many minds have been changed.

It's a dwindling number for sure, but it's still a number that's worth reaching out for and persuading.

Mehdi, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Medi Hassan is editor-in-chief and CEO of Zatayo.

Welcome to the channel, guys.

Looks like a lot of whiny babies have a problem with what I say, so prove me wrong.

Did you call the girls' soccer team a Marxist indoctrination factory?

That is correct.

We actually beat the floors for nothing, you know.

You can whine about American oppression all you want, but you're using an iPhone made by the free market to complain about a system that gave it to you.

Girls have it way easy in America, and that's just the truth.

Roll student totally homed!

That's it for this week's show.

On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candace Wong.

Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering from Jared Paul.

Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers.

On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loewinger.