Timothy Snyder and Bill Adair on the War on Truth & The Fight for Freedom

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How are you doing? Where are you?

I'm good. I'm done with my 13 U.S.
stops.

I'm in Toronto just at the moment.

Are you trying to escape tyranny?

Wherever I go, I don't seem to be able to escape it. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And the guy I'm talking to there is Tim Snyder, Yale history professor and the author of the bestselling book On Freedom.
I taped an interview with Tim last Thursday together with Bill Adair, founder of PolitiFact, the fact-checking website that gave us the truth-o-meter and the author of Beyond the Big Lie, The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy. We're gonna hear that conversation in just a moment.
But first, after we taped, something big happened. The Washington Post CEO and publisher Will Lewis announced that the paper's editorial board wouldn't be endorsing a presidential candidate for the first time since the 1980s.
Lewis wrote that the Post was returning to its roots, and this was about nonpartisan news, which was, I'm sorry to tell you, nonsense. Post owner Jeff Bezos also defended the decision, his decision clearly, in his own op-ed, claiming that it was necessary to win back public trust in the media.
He also denied that there was any quid pro quo. Okay, another badly written piece that was in desperate need of editing and, I'm sorry to say, Jeff, logic.
Tim Snyder's written about this kind of thing before and why it's exactly the wrong move if you want to avoid sliding into autocracy. So we got him back on the line to talk about it.
Thank you for jumping back on. You posted on your substack that this decision by the Washington Post not to endorse was straight out of the history books.
Actually, it is out of your book, too, lesson one in your book on tyranny. Do not obey in advance.
Talk about what it means and why you think that's what the Post has done here. Okay, so the principle is really straightforward and it's really important, which is that authoritarianism isn't about one omnipotent man standing at the center who has control over all of us.
Authoritarian regimes are built up collectively by people who make compromises, often subconsciously or unconsciously, because we have this human capacity to adapt. And the problem with that is that when we adapt in an unprincipled way, what we're doing is we're handing over power precisely to the people who are trying to accumulate it.
That's why anticipatory obedience is bad. And second thing is we have that as a history of the 20th century.
We know this is what happened in Germany in the early 30s. We know it's what happened in late communism.
There are countless other examples, but the reason why it's so poignant is that it was chronicled by the best and smartest writers of those periods so that we wouldn't do it in the 21st century.

And, of course, what the Post and the LA Times are doing is anticipatory obedience. It is obeying in advance, baldly on its face.
That's just exactly what it is. There's no other explanation for why they would do this so late in the game than that they are afraid.
And that when the least vulnerable signal their fear and obey in advance, basically they're telling everybody else to give up, which is the sadness of this. Right, because he's the most powerful people on earth, the richest and most powerful, I think the second richest man.
So what do you think of the op-ed by Post owner Jeff Bezos? I'll show my hand. I thought it was ridiculous and badly argued and badly edited, all kinds of things.
But he says the media has lost public trust, and this is an opportunity for the Post to show that it's unbiased. He's trying to make two arguments here that have nothing to do with each other.
He certainly could have made this decision months ago, or at the time when he's doing the endorsement saying, next up, we're not going to do it anymore, and here's why. Do you agree, is it better for the media to remain impartial? What does history tell us? Well, I mean, the thing that Mr.
Bezos wrote, it made zero sense on a lot of different levels. But let's entertain him for a second, because he's really rich.
Okay, let's do that. Let's do it together.
I mean, I couldn't help thinking reading it that there's no way this would have passed muster as an op-ed. And like that signals part of the problem that there's an institution at stake, which is the editorial board and its independence.
And what he did was override the independence of the editorial board. The editorial board could have said, we don't want to endorse somebody or starting next year, we're not going to endorse people.
And he could have said, you know, okay, fine, that's your decision. You're independent.
But that principle that the editorial board is independent has just been kind of steamrolled out of existence here. It's not even really acknowledged in what he says.
And then the factual part is also silly. I mean, he says the media should be relevant, but the time that the post was the most relevant was the eighties and nineties, which was after Catherine Graham allowed people to do serious investigative reporting reporting and during a period when the Post most certainly was endorsing candidates.
So, factually, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, I think he missed a chance.
I think he could have, if he was going to write an op-ed, he should have said, okay, I made a mistake. I'm going to fix my mistake.
That would have been great. But the fact that he's unable to do that and instead produces bad arguments just makes the whole thing worse.
Yeah. You've obviously never met him.
He never makes mistakes ever, just so you know. Just so you're aware.
He's told me that a million times. This was his modus operandi at Amazon when they made mistakes was not just to not admit a mistake but get pugnacious in response to errors, which were clear errors.
What was interesting is 21 Post opinion columnists signed a letter saying this was an opportunity for the paper to show its commitment to democratic values and the rule of law. Also, many people left the board, including David Hoffman, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year, writing about authoritarianism.
Apparently, they've lost over 200,000 subscribers. Talk about this pushback.
I just want to connect the two questions because his major thesis was that he was doing this to make the post more relevant. And if you're losing a couple hundred thousand subscriptions, that's not making the post more relevant.
and there was a deeper question as to what would make the post relevant i think the post becomes relevant in our age by doing things better not by doing things the same way that everybody else does them and that's a conclusion that he did did not draw in this. And the people who are criticizing him within the post and without generally would accept the argument that post should be doing things better, right? Not sliding, not obeying in advance, you know, not seeking some kind of imaginary middle or some kind of imaginary lowest common denominator, but supporting actual independent reporting and let people follow the facts wherever the facts take them.
And so I'm encouraged by the response. I think it's really important.
And it goes, and it's in within the post. It's also beyond the post and other newspapers, and it's in the public.
I mean, I think in the end, this will probably have the opposite effect, at least I'm hopeful have the opposite effect, because there are people outside newspapers can look at this and say, okay, do I want to live in a world where everybody is just submitting and then making incredibly bad excuses for it? And there are a lot of folks who don't want to do that. And the election right now is in this moment where we're talking about what tyranny would be like.
So I think it may end up – I'm hoping it will end up having the opposite effect. Let me link you with two incidents that actually just happened.
Obviously, the Madison Square Garden rally that Trump did. Obviously, Tim Walz tried to link it to the 1939 event at Madison Square Garden, the Nazi gathering.
Talk a little bit about what that does and the reporting around it. I think Tim Walz is right, but we don't really need Tim Walz to tell us this.
There's this weird thing where folks, at least some folks on the left, are really resistant to the notion that Trump represents some kind of current of American fascism. And it's resistance I've never really understood and don't claim to understand.
But I think at this point, Trump is kind of just trolling those people. I mean, he's like, he's deliberately putting himself in the place of Hitler.
And his people know about the Madison Square Garden 1939 rally. Of course, they know about it.
Everybody knows about it. I think this was meant as a conscience reference to it.
And I think he was just kind of calling out the cowardice of people who refuse to criticize him on this most basic point, which is that he is a very self-conscious American fascist. So, I mean, I think the reference is made by Trump.
It doesn't have to be made by Tim Walz. And of course, at the performance itself or at the rally itself, he's had many horrible appearances.
But this was one of the more horrible appearances where he is explicitly doing us and them politics and referring to parts of the United States as not parts of the United States and so on. Enemy within.
And which of all the statements that you've seen lately, of all the different words, which ones disturb you the most? What are the various things that are happening right now that you would point to? Obviously, the digital oligarchs playing a role, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos playing a passive role in a way, or explicit role. You have Patrick Soon-Shang at the LA Times doing a different version of the same things.
Are you worried more about the digital oligarchs or this language working its way into the system?

there are two sides of the same phenomenon i mean it's going back to the 1930s it's sort of funny

because in the 20s and 30s the the marxists said that fascism is about the oligarchs and back then

they weren't really right but it's funny how like and now they're of course completely discredited

but this is like a point which they had right, like a hundred years later, it is about the oligarchs and not all of them personally, but the ones who are putting themselves most in the public eye are either passively or actively pushing us towards fascism. And that's part and parcel, right? Because if we have oligarchic politics, that means that the federal government's not going to be able to do the things that it needs to be able to do to make people free.
It's going to mean we have a small dysfunctional government. And the way that folks are going to govern, Trump is good at this, but Vance is better.
The way folks are going to govern is they're going to say, well, of course, government can't really do anything, so let's fight each other. Which leads to my answer to your question, which is the most disturbing thing for me is enemy within and kindred expressions because that's a political technique.
It's designed to habituate us to the notion that, of course, there's no government which can help us. Our representation doesn't matter.
What matters is politics that begins with the enemy. It's very much what the Trump-Vance campaign has been doing, habituating us to the idea that politics starts from choosing an enemy and the enemy's inside the United States.
Right. I'm going to get to our conversation with you and Bill Adairn.
We talked about the war on truth. Do you see a connection to what happened here this week? I may have missed things this week, but the interesting thing about a newspaper like The Post is that it goes out and it finds surprising things that are factually true, and then we're all forced to adjust to it, and that's consistent with democracy, right? The pursuit of surprising factuality is consistent with democracy.
Things like oligarchs telling us we have to be prepared for an authoritarian regime, it's not only predictable in and of itself, but it's thoroughly contradictory to the spirit of fact-finding, which has to be one of independence and unpredictability, right? And likewise, there's something very predictable about us and them politics. It works in a kind of rhythm, right? It's like beating a pan, you know, like I choose an enemy, I create a fake crisis, I choose another enemy, I create another fake crisis.
It's very, very predictable, and it operates in the realm of the big lie, right? And so, on the one side, you have people saying, okay,

the media is not really for unpredictable fact-finding. On the other side, you have people

saying, we're all going to live inside a big lie. And those two things work together.
And you're

right. I mean, this last week, we see these two things merge into one stream.

Exactly. All right.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, Tim.
Yeah. Glad we could talk.
Well, Tim is 100% right. What's happening here is a really slow-moving traffic accident, and Jeff Bezos just contributed to it with the way he reacted to a bad decision he made.
All he had to say was, I made a mistake. But unfortunately, these people are not capable of doing that.
OK, now I want to get to my conversation with Tim and Bill Adair about how politicians use truth and lies to manipulate us and what we can do to change that paradigm. Our question this week comes from journalist and disinformation expert Sasha Eisenberg, author of The Lie Detectives in Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age.
As you can already hear, Tim is the bomb and Bill's a professional truth teller. Imagine that.
It's a great conversation and really important at this crucial moment. Have a listen.
All right, Bill and Tim, welcome. Thanks for being on On.
Glad to be here.

Thank you for having me.

So today's October 24th. The episode will air less than a week before Election Day.
I just want to timestamp that for our listeners because we know a lot can happen in the end run of an election, especially one as fraught as this one and with so much misinformation, actually. and as two very astute observers of politics and elections and the political discourse,

I'd like to know what's your biggest hope right now and what's your biggest concern in the misinformation, actually. And as two very astute observers of politics and elections and the

political discourse, I'd like to know what's your biggest hope right now and what's your biggest concern in these final days. Bill, you go first and then Tim and explain why.
You bet. Well, first, Kara, thanks for having me.
I'm just worried about the lying. The lying's getting worse and we can see Trump laying the foundation for and using his accomplices to lie about if Kamala should win, he's lying about what might happen.
and we're really beginning to see a rerun of 2020 all over again,

seeing it in the last couple of days in Georgia.

And so, you know, so I really worry about that. And what is your biggest hope? My biggest hope is a really clear election where there's no doubt and, you know, where both sides make a clear statement, hey, the results are overwhelming here.
We're accepting the results.

What about you, Tim?

The biggest fear would be that regardless of whether the results are close, one side, and that would be the Trump side, disregards them, continues and amplifies the big lie of four years ago, sets off a process of violent protests and uses bogus or semi-bogus or mostly bogus state cases to throw them up to the Supreme Court, which issues, as they have been doing lately, a ruling which they essentially make up, thereby throwing the entire republic into chaos and perhaps leading to its destruction. That would be my greatest fear.
My greatest, my greatest hope is, is not that both, I mean, I'm, I don't, I just don't have Bill's capacity for hope. I don't think both sides are going to recognize the outcome of the election.
My biggest hope though, is that we have an objectively clear outcome and that Harris wins and that other ballot initiatives like, um, item one against gerrymandering in Ohio pass with clear majorities, thereby sending another signal that the voters want something and not something else, and that we're able to move forward to a 2025 where a bunch of new laws get passed and we end up living in a better country. Okay, which you don't sound very hopeful.
Your background is primarily in European and Eastern European history. Mine also, actually.
On freedom is historical and philosophical, but it's also grounded in current political situation.

And your last book on tyranny, you wrote about the rise of authoritarianism and predicted in 2017 that Donald Trump would try to stage a political coup, which he did. I oddly wrote a similar column for the New York Times around misinformation and its impact, predicting that he would cause that to happen in real life.
But talk about your background as a historian in making these predictions. I mean, I think being a historian helps because you're aware that many bad things have happened before, and you're aware of the range of human creativity when it comes to bringing down the rule of law.
If you work on the kinds of things I work on, you've seen a version of the movie a dozen times before and you can recognize certain patterns. I think being a historian not of the US, I mean, American historians help a lot too.
I'm an American, I'm a historian, I'm not an American historian. Being a historian of Europe, I think, has helped me because it's made me less of an American exceptionalist.
I hear Americans say things about how it hasn't happened here or it can't happen here, and I'm just baffled because things that happened in the U.S. in the 20s and 30s of the last century were actually kind of similar to things that happened in Europe.
We got lucky, frankly. and things that happened in the US in the 2010s and 2020s are actually kind of similar to things that happened in Europe.
We got lucky, frankly. And things that happened in the U.S.
in the 2010s and 2020s are actually kind of similar to things that happened in Russia in many cases. So I think not being a historian of the U.S.
makes me less of an exceptionalist and I think maybe more alive and to threats and less of a quietist. Mm-hmm.
We did get lucky, actually, many times by a very small margin, actually, which is where we are right now. Bill, you launched the fact-checking site PolitiFact in 2007.
So you and your team have been debunking political and truth for more than 15 years across administration. You have a truth-o-meter that ranks political statements as true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, false, and, of course, pants on fire.
Talk about why you started and why, despite you and your fact- checkers' best efforts, we're facing an epidemic of political lying. It's something I've been covering because I've covered the internet since 1997 and watched it develop.
Talk to me about that. You bet.
I started PolitiFact out of my own guilt. I had been a political reporter for the St.
Petersburg Times newspaper in Florida, and I had covered the White House and Congress and felt like we were not telling people what was true and what was not. And this was like 2003, 2004, and I had seen the increase in lies.
And this is, in a way, sort of the early days of the internet. And so, lies were not spreading that widely back then.
But there was definitely plenty of lying. It was the Bush administration and the Iraq War.
And there was a sense, I had a sense that we needed to do better as Washington journalists. So, I started PolitiFact.
It went very well. And there was this moment of hope.
You know, I remember talking to people at Google and they said there was this brief, bright moment where we really thought that the internet would be this network that would allow people to find the truth and would enlighten people. But of course, it didn't work out that way.
And like you said, between the companies that used algorithms in bad ways, the people who use those algorithms in bad ways, it didn't work out the way I hoped. And now fact-checking, even though there's more fact-checking than ever, it hasn't stopped the lying.
It hasn't even probably put a substantial dent in the lying. And the bad guys have found lots of ways to spread lies far and wide.
And we have a party, the Republican Party, that lies so much that it's a serious problem for our democracy. Tim, you write in the preface to On Freedom that we call America a free country, but no country can be free.
You only say people can be free. Explain what you mean by that, this definition of what freedom is, because you basically say Americans have been defining freedom incorrectly.
Yeah. So let me start with a big definition.
Freedom is about the good things in the world. Freedom is about the things that we like.
It's about the patriotism. It's about beauty.
It's about loyalty, integrity. And you're a free person if you have the ability to affirm the values you care about and realize them, make a difference in the world.
And so a land of the free would be a country where we work together to create the conditions in which people can do all of those things. So freedom has to be freedom to or freedom for.
Freedom from is a part of that. Of course, if you're in prison or if government is oppressive, then you can't get to freedom too.
But the reason why we care about the oppression or the reason why we want to tear down the wall is the person on the other side of the wall. Freedom is about the person.
So then in the US, we have this syndrome or this problem or this obsession where we limit freedom to being freedom from. And that has terrible consequences.
I mean, politically, it means that we're always saying that we'll be freer if we shrink the government. But if you just shrink the government, then power abhors a vacuum.
Other things fill up the vacuum. The oligarchs, the social media platforms, other unelected forces just fill up the space.
The other thing that happens is that negative freedom is a kind of proto-fascism because if you think that freedom is just about you against something, you against the government, for example, it's very easy to shift from that to you against your fellow Americans, you against the migrants, you against the black people, you against the Jews, whatever it might be. It slips very easily into a politics of us and them.
It's very relevant to,

I think, Bill's important work and the work of journalism in general, because freedom,

if freedom is just freedom from, then who cares about the truth? It's just whatever I feel. It's my impulses.
I'm banging my head against the wall. But if freedom is freedom too, then we have to

live in a world that we can understand, a world which is intelligible. It means that freedom

involves factuality. It requires facts, which means that together we have to try to create

Thank you. to, then we have to live in a world that we can understand, a world which is intelligible.
It means that freedom involves factuality. It requires facts, which means that together we have to try to create a set of institutions where people who search for facts get paid, where this is a credible and regarded as a very important and honorable, even a heroic profession.
Because only with the facts can you defend yourself as a citizen, and only with the facts can you make policy. So, creating factuality is a part of positive freedom.
Absolutely. Which is why I had you two together.
I feel like these books are linked. Tim, you write, in Dehumanizing Others, We Make Ourselves Unfree.
Bill, you have a really good example of this. A through line in your book is the story of author and counter-disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz.
I've interviewed her many times. Tell us what happened to Nina and the disinformation governments board, possibly the worst name for a government agency ever, and was very easily used by malevolent players like Jim Jordan and others to really slay her essentially publicly.
So talk about why her story in your book is significant.

So, my book has a few case studies of people who are affected by lies in one way or another. I have a guy who fell for lies and chose to storm the Capitol.
I have a couple of people who chose to lie and then one who recanted and stopped lying. But Nina, as you noted, is a real powerful story of someone who was lied about.
She was a victim of lying. So she was, as you said, the head of the Disinformation Governance Board, this agency within the Department of Homeland Security, and it was supposed to be sort of a coordinating council.
But the department did a terrible job announcing it. And so, the Republicans filled the void by lying.
They lied about the board. They lied about Nina.
And— It's a little like death panels and Sarah Palin, as you recall. Exactly.
That's a great analogy. And they called it the Ministry of Truth.
They said that it was going to censor the internet. They said Nina was going to censor your tweets.
They made up all these things. They found on the web all sorts of videos.
And they basically turned her life upside down. It led to death threats.
So I follow her story, and she's a very compelling character because she did nothing wrong. They just lied and lied and lied.
And it showed how Republicans will just lie to score political points to raise money with their supporters.

They tried to raise money with supporters using her and their lies about her.

And then finally, she sued the Fox News channel to try to recoup something for all the pain she had been through.

So one of the things you're talking about here, and Tim, you know this as a historian, is dehumanizing the other. This is not new.
Burning women as witches. I note quite a bit that I just interviewed Yuval Harari in The Hammer of Witches, which was a big, giant book of lies.
But it goes all the way up through history. And as you noted, factuality is one of the building blocks of freedom.
But your criticism of social media when it comes to undermining freedom extends beyond how it's used to spread lies. You argued it makes us less sovereign, more predictable, less mobile, despite having mobile devices.
And you blame the digital oligarchs, specifically, for example, Elon Musk recently. Talk about the role social media plays in limiting freedom.
I have called it en enragement equals engagement and this is what they want to do on purpose so talk about what the social media sites have done here okay i'm going to take a deep breath and a big step back and try to link to something that bill was talking about and and and make your point about humanity in a different way the people who really care about the people who really care about freedom of speech are going to be generally warm, happy people. The people who talk about freedom, who are angry, who are trying to shout other people down, who are trying to bully, those people don't actually care about freedom or about freedom of speech.
That's a first indicator. Freedom is a very humane thing.
You can only really be a free person if you care about the freedom of the freedom of someone else and you can only really be a free person even an individual if you can listen to other people about yourself and so all the various levels of bully that we have on the various platforms political or social who are trying to shout others down or bully them those are not free people and the thing that they're spreading is not freedom and it's certainly not freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is about the person.
It's not about the algorithm. So the reason why we have freedom of speech is not so powerful people can say obnoxious, mendacious things.
The whole tradition of freedom of speech is about the person. The reason why you have freedom of speech is because you take a risk when you speak truth to power.
That's it. That's why we have it.
And so when you get to the point where we say free speech, and what we mean is an oligarch with a social platform can spread a single lie a quadrillion times, we've gotten it turned around 180 degrees. Freedom of speech is precisely for the person who doesn't have the platform, for the person who is taking a risk.
It's not for the rich and the powerful. They will be incidentally protected, but it's not about them.
It's about the people who don't have a voice precisely. And so, it all connects together because what the platforms do to us is they aim for the bits of us that are most predictable, the fight or flight part of us.
They bring out the parts of us, which Vaclav Havel called our most probable states. They make us caricatures of ourselves, and the way that they get us to engage is by making us the least engaging humanly, the least engaging versions of ourselves.
And then that generates, so then we become essentially minor parts, minor key parts of algorithms. We use our emotions to help the algorithms anger other people, which is the profit model.
But meanwhile, what that does to us is that it changes the way that we engage with other people. We become less patient, we become less able to listen, we become less attentive to values.
And of course, it's values, positive values, integrity, patriotism, loyalty, these things, which are at the heart of freedom. Instead, we become people who are constantly not just intolerant, but rejecting what other people say, not able to listen to it, and therefore we become less capable of democracy.
Well, let's talk about these digital oligarchs. And Musk is obviously one of the moment, just a recent Bloomberg article, billions of anti-immigrant things that he's been pushing and pushing himself on his own platform that he bought, which is the reason he bought it.
What does that do when that happens? Does it have a real impact or does it drown out the, or is it noise in a lot of ways? Yeah, I mean, let me just make first the political point about the sort of the libertarian to fascism pathway that we've got here, where people who call themselves libertarians within 15 seconds are saying fascist things, right? And there's a logic to that, and the logic is negative freedom. If you say, I'm just against stuff, it's very easy to then say, well, the stuff I'm against is a government that tolerates people I don't like.
And therefore, actually, it's the people I don't like.

And so very, very quickly, people go from saying, oh, I'm just a classical liberal.

I just want negative freedoms to being let's build a wall or Hitler is good.

Right.

That happens very, very, very quickly.

How important are their roles at this moment?

Obviously, Musk is giving money.

He owns the platform. He's incredibly loud and incredibly mendacious, as you say.
Almost constantly, consistently flood the zone. Steve Bannon talks about this, you know, the flooding of the zone.
It's all the same stuff, and it all harkens back to the Nazis. It harkens back to so many different movements that do this.
Yeah, I mean, it harkens back to the Greeks who said 2,500 years ago that the problem with democracy is that the rich people will have control of the propaganda and they will tell things they know to be lies to anger us. And, you know, we have this mistake, I believe, you know, you're the expert here, but I believe we have this great mistake of conflating these platforms with technology.
I mean, these platforms are incredibly low technology. They're incredibly dumb, actually.
They just run very, very quickly. And they're dumb also in the sense that they appeal to the dumbest parts of us and they make us dumber, right? So, they're dumb in every possible way.
They're just very fast and very appealing. And so, what they amount to is a kind of megaphone for the worst individuals of us, right, like Musk, to appeal to the worst parts of us to lead to the worst possible outcome.
Rather than focus on the individual, I think we should focus on our mistakes. These platforms should have been regulated.
We should not be making heroes of people who made money just because they got into the right niche at the right time. And we should be remembering that the people who are the real heroes are the ones who are trying to spread the facts, the ones who are trying to speak truth to power.

So I think it's very dangerous.

And I think if 25 years ago we had said we're now going to create a situation where pro-fascist oligarchs are going to directly intervene in elections by throwing money around in swing states, that would have been dismissed as a fantasy.

But here we are. Here we are.

Yeah, here we are. Here we are.
Yeah, here we are.

We'll be back in a minute.

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Call 1-844-4-OTESLA or visit Otesla.com for prescribing info, info about cost, and more. Tim, one of the things you write is our social media nemesis is thinking without being a thinker.
It is conspiracy theorizing without there being a conspiracy theorist, although I think that's precisely what they are, actually, precisely what they're doing. I'm trying, I mean, you've been thinking about this stuff hard for a really long time.
I'm trying to find a language to describe what that thing is on the other side of the screen when you're on social media. And there is thinking being done there.
And it's a thinking which extracts from us, right? It draws into our ability to interact, to respect, but it poisons that. It makes it its worst possible version.
And there is thinking there, but there isn't a thinker in the sense that there isn't something, there's no entity there that has values of any kind. And so, we are eroded by our engagement with that thing.
And what tends to erode are the values. And so we end up as a kind of husk of ourselves where we like the machine doesn't have values, and then we end up dismissing people that do.
And so we get to the style of politics, which Trump is good at, and Vance is actually better at, where it's all about just dismissing anyone's ability to do anything which possibly could be good, right? It's a form of bullying, which is basically just a rhetoric of impotence. You can't do anything.
I can't do anything. Elect me to office so we can show how nothing is possible.
Right, right. No, it's a very dark version.
Bill, one of the things, Elon, for example, Elon Musk, came up in 155 fact checks on PolitiFact, most of her amplification, only about five of his actual statements have been run through the truth-o-meter, 100% false, by the way. You know, he's obviously become the center of this at this moment, given the money he's putting in.
You talk about patterns and type of lies you're seeing, and you had noted in the beginning of your book about Mike Pence, who seemed like a reasonable person and then increasingly got sucked into that until he didn't, right? Until he decided against it. You said the book isn't about Donald Trump, but isn't it at this moment in time? Well, it definitely is about at this moment in time.
But, you know, I think what we're seeing is a gradual erosion with lying over the last 25 years that I've seen as a political reporter. When I started covering Congress, it was definitely the case, even in the late 90s, that Republicans lied more.
You could see it. Gingrich.
Exactly. So, you know, starting in the early 90s, Newt Gingrich cemented the culture of the Republican Party.
And it got worse and worse and worse. And I think you're right.
I mean, I think that the moment now with Donald Trump has created this explosion of lying. Add to that Musk and X.
And, you know, he has used X in terrible ways to spread disinformation, to amplify it in ways we never could have conceived five, 10 years ago. So, it's gotten much worse.
The primary pattern that I focus on in the book, the topics that they lie about, I talk about fear and how lies often tap into fear. And this is something that Tim talks about in his book, that there's this tendency to really tap into people's fear.
Lies are much more effective when they do that. And I think that's why they keep coming back to immigration.
They keep coming back to immigration as the immigrants are coming to hurt you. The immigrants are coming to steal from you.
And that happens again and again. Um, that's also, it's, it's, um, lies are often about race.

Um, I spend a fair amount of time in the book dealing with the lies about Obama and the lie that he was born in Kenya, the lie that he was a Muslim. And so that's deep.
Now, on Mike Pence, it's interesting because he was somebody I knew well, he was a neighbor, and I watched his decline from the time that he was a backbench Republican, not really anybody that anyone noticed. As he rose through the Republican ranks, I noticed that he was lying more and more.
He became Trump's vice president. He became an enabler.
He became an enabler of this epic liar. And then, of course, in the moment when he's needed most, certified Joe Biden's victory.
But, and many people didn't notice this, after that, still pays lip service to the big lie about the election and says, you know, there were a lot of concerns about the election and whatever. So Mike really had an opportunity to be principled and stand up against Trump's lies,

and he didn't.

And so in the book, I'm pretty hard on him because I really think he could have shown

that he was, as he actually sold t-shirts that said this, that he was the too honest candidate. And I don't think he was.
He wasn't. Yeah.
Yeah. No, he wasn't.
Of course, Pence, this big lie. Pence is, of course, part of the story.
Tim, Donald Trump has been compared to famous authoritarian dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini. He's openly placed strongman of today, Russian President Vladimir Putin, obviously, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
One of the commonalities between Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia, as you describe in your book, is the idea of the big lie. And you define it as an untruth that is too big to fail.
Talk about big lies in those regimes and the connection to Donald Trump's big lie. And obviously, the racist undertones are there, as Bill is pointing out, not unsimilar to Hitler's.
So let me try to make a bridge between what you and Bill were just talking about, because as Bill's been speaking, and it kind of has to do with the arc in his book, there's a background issue here, which is the habit of both sides in American journalism. That is the notion that neutrality means that you decide that the truth has two sides and if you present both sides, then somehow you're being truthful.
And that is just logically, it's never made any sense logically. It just doesn't.
And what Trump has done is in a sense, take that assumption and weaponize it. Because if we're gonna both sides, that means that when one side gets worse, it becomes the job of the journalist to pretend that the other side is also worse.
And so no matter how bad you get, the other side gets presented as being just as bad. But you, meanwhile, are the ones who are actually using the black magic of the big lie for political gain, right? So then what is the black magic of the big lie? When I applied the term big lie to Trump back in November 2020 about the election, what I had in mind was Hitler's advice.
And Hitler's advice is, if you're going to tell a lie, tell a lie so big that your supporters won't believe that you would deceive them on that scale. Yeah.
This is a Bannon thing, a Goebbels thing. A Goebbels thing, really, and then a Bannon thing.
Yeah, exactly. But Hitler is actually our source for the term big lie.
And of course, that's very relevant to the fascism discussion to which you're referring. But the way that a big lie works is that, that like, once people accept it, it becomes, it's so big that it's hard to get out.
And because it's so big, you can also live inside it. And the way you live inside it is that you alter everything else, all other stories, all other facts, so that they fit this bigger story.
And a big lie, when it works, also creates an us and them because the people who are on the outside trying to tell you the truth, trying to spread the facts, are going to become your enemies because they're making you very uncomfortable. And so, what I expected back then, and which has turned out sadly to be the case, is that the big lie will then define American politics.
It's not just one falsehood among many. The scale of it becomes psychology, becomes sociology, and then it changes everything.
There's also little bits of truth in it. There's tiny bits of truth in it, right? Tiny scatterings that they're able to hold on to as they're climbing up this mendacious mountain, essentially.
Exactly. It's like little bits coming out of the wall of this horrible black thing they're scaling.
Yeah, that's what Hannah Arendt said. It's the story that draws you in, right? There are little bits of truthfulness around it, but overall you're drawn into a story, which is what a big lie is.
Yeah, we'll get to Hannah at the end, but go ahead. It always goes to Hannah.
Yeah, well, she deserves it. But in the end, though, as we saw on January 6th, and as unfortunately we're going to see again, it has to lead to violence, because the only way you can make falsehoods on this scale true to yourself in the end is going to be by hurting people who are resisting you or hurting people who are trying to defend the truth.
And then this links back to the fascism discussion because the fascists, although they didn't have social media, obviously, were very aware of the ability to bring people into stories with tech, the Germans with radio in particular. And they very consciously tried to tell lies that had this effect of creating an us and them, which created the conspiracy in which we're always the victims no matter what we're doing.
And a story big enough that people could live inside. And so I think that's a very legitimate way to link the centuries.
It's good that you note the technology. It is the technology.
Mussolini owned a newspaper. Henry Ford newspaper.
Radio. They backed a lot of that stuff.
But, Bill, you were talking about this January 6th Capitol. It's another big lie.
It's become part of the myth, despite video footage, testimony from neutral officers of law who were injured at the Capitol, journals investigating. Bill, as someone who's worked for years to refute false claims and state truths, how do you explain people not believing their own lying eyes, I guess, you know, as the song goes? What happens there? I have relatives that do this, my mother in particular.
I think, well, Tim was just alluding to this. I think it is the, it's repetition, and it's a lot of what was done in Germany.
It's repetition, it's targeting. I think the other thing that in Germany was really effective was targeting individuals narrowly.
You know, that even in the 30s, they were very good at targeting markets, you know, targeting parents, targeting mothers. And so take that through now to the people who took part in January 6th and conservative audiences today.
By repeating again and again, well, they didn't have guns. Well, they did have guns.
But by repeating that over and over again, people were like, they didn't have guns. I do think the repetition of the lies has created this alternate reality about January 6th.
And even rebranding. In my book, I followed someone who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.
And in talking with him over probably a year, he referred to himself as a J6 defender. So instead of someone who's convicted of storming the Capitol and served 45 days in jail, he's a J6 defender.
So, you know, they've sort of used a variety of techniques to create this whole new reality. Right, which is not uncommon.
So every week we get a question from our guests from an outside expert. Have a listen.
Hi, I'm Sasha Eisenberg. I'm a journalist and author of The Lie Detectives, in search of a playbook for winning elections in the disinformation age.
The big question I would like to ask is how the two of you think we should reconcile what Professor Snyder calls the pursuit of truth with our understanding of how the algorithmic internet works. Often, drawing attention to lies with the goals of calling them out or fact-checking them can just end up helping to amplify or spread the original content to people who might never have encountered the original without it.
Should that be a concern of ours? And how do we balance those goals? Okay, essentially, why are we fact-checking? Because it'll make people believe the lies we're fact-checking, right? So, I'll go first in that I think the research on fact-checking is actually pretty encouraging. The research says that when people get corrections, the term that social scientists use for fact-checking, that it really does help to correct people who had believed the falsehoods.
So that belief that it makes people double down is based on some old research that has since been debunked by subsequent research. I think the bigger issue that Sasha's getting at, though, I don't think fact checking is working because, one, there's not enough of it.
And also, I think there are issues that it's not getting to the audiences that need it in the form that it needs to get to them. So, we need to rethink all that.
We need to think about how fact-checking should get to people. All right.
What about you, Tim? I'm going to take a slightly different angle. Number one, I think for fact-checking to work, we have to have a broader culture of affirming truth as such.
Number two, people are going to believe fact-checking if they have more local reporting. Because when we starve them of factuality in general, as we've done in the last 15 years by letting investigative reporting and local reporting die, then the notion somehow that their people have facts becomes much harder to accept.
The third thing, which I think is really important, is that fact-checking be automated so that when social media platforms, for example, spread a lie, they then in an automated way have to spread the correction as well so that the corrections actually reach people in a predictable, large-scale way. And then finally, I do take the

point that it's important, even as we fact-check, that we try to tell the story in different ways

too, not just oppose the thing that's been said, but talk around the thing that's been said as well

to give people other things to go away with besides the up or down on its truthfulness. We'll be back in a minute.
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Not available in all states. Last week, we at Today Explained brought you an episode titled The Joe Rogan of the Left.
The Joe Rogan of the Left was in quotations. It was mostly about a guy named Hassan Piker, who some say is the Joe Rogan of the Left.
But enough about Joe. We made an episode about Hassan because the Democrats are really courting this dude.

So Hassan Piker is really the only major prominent leftist on Twitch,

at least the only one who talks about politics all day.

What's going on, everybody?

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They want his cosign.

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streaming on YouTube, TikTok, and especially Twitch.

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Yeah, I was listening on stream and you guys were like,

hey, you should come on the show if you're listening.

I was like, oops, caught.

You're a listener.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I am.
Yeah.

Thank you for listening.

Head over to the Today Explained feed

to hear Hassan Piker explain himself. I'm Claire Parker.
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So in that regard, a lot of it is very much organized by countries like Russia, Iran, China. And it's been a huge issue in the past two elections.
It's an inexpensive way of creating discord. They lost the shooting war, and now they're winning the cyber war, for example.
And with AI, we're seeing more disinformation campaigns. Tim, you are very tech critical and call it a digital oligarchy.
How do you look at these bots, AI bots, and their impact on quality going forward? How do you see this trend if it continues? Obviously, they're having even more information that they have more control over in a way that's even more amplified and able to manipulate people. I mean, conceptually bringing it back to the main argument of the book, we're not going to get out from under this so long as we remain in a negative freedom framework, so long as we think the only problem is the government, we're never going to politically solve this.
And so long as we were in a negative freedom framework and we say, well, you know, everybody's opinion is because everybody else's, there's not really any truth or really any values, then we won't have the moral or political attraction to actually get at this, which is one of the big reasons, as you know, because you read the book, I'm trying to change the notion of freedom because it's actually, not only is it correct, I think it's politically much more effective when we broaden freedom so that it means things like facts matter and that we develop as humans. Because that's the answer to your question, what AI is accelerating, in addition to accelerating climate change, this is all connected, but one of the things that AI is accelerating is this process of bringing out the worst in us and making us more and more and more dependent or having shorter and shorter attention spans are becoming more and more like the people that we were like anyway, becoming less and less credible as agents in history or agents in our own life.
And that makes democracy and things like this less plausible to us as we evaluate the way we live or as we look around to other people. So I think this is very much a situation where you have to have the ideas and then you have to mobilize the laws that already exist, like the Sherman Act or pass new laws, to get the platforms under control and to take seriously also the ideology behind it.
Because both in the case of Russia and in the case of the platforms and the people we're talking about, the notion is nothing's really true, nothing really matters. Therefore, our massively amplified message is just as good as any other message.
We're not going to get around that without saying that there are facts and that people have a right to them. Bill, talk about this, you know, unwillingness not to push back on lies.
On some level, it is sometimes the people's fault, right? Like we blame government or Elon Musk or whoever. Tom Nichols wrote in Atlantic, some Trump voters may believe his lies, but plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach turning so that reelecting him can be fully realized act of social revenge.
Harris cannot propose any policy, offer any benefit, or adopt any position that competes with that feeling. And I think, let me quote Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism, what commits as the indoctrinated are not facts, not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part.
Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency. I think that kind of says it, the problem, the enemy is us, correct? Bill, you start with that one.
Well, I have a similar quote from her as my epigraph. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage beforehand of knowing what the audience wishes or expects to hear.
So, you know, it's the same point. It's that the audience wants this.
And so, yes, I do think lies work because they strike a responsive chord. But I don't think we're going to defeat lying by telling people you need to be smarter.
I think we need to change the incentive structure in our political ecosystem and get some courage from the tech platforms or even— Good luck. I've been trying for years.
Well, you know, so Zuckerberg was courageous enough to try the third-party fact-checking program on Facebook and now on Instagram. And so if he could do that in a broader way using advertising rates, what about rewarding politicians who lie less and charge them lower rates? He doesn't want to decide.
But what he did with the third-party fact-checking program was bold, and I'm sure he wants to probably quit the whole thing. He does.
But if we could get some courage there and an acknowledgement that this is the serious problem that it is, you know, that could have an effect. Now, the other idea that I propose in the book, because I do think we need to do more than just try to fact check our way out of this problem.

I proposed like a Grover Norquist for lying.

If we could have a pledge against lying, I think that might affect the volume. Oh, wow.
Okay. Tim, what is your suggestion for fixing it? There is a dystopian nature to this, that it's overwhelming.
It's flooding the zone. The people on the one side now are actually far too powerful to be stopped, and they have the threat of violence hanging over if they lose, for example.
I'd love to get your sense of what the positive thing that could happen or the positive thing we could do in the face of this. Okay.
Again, let me try to bridge from what we're just talking about because I find it so interesting. On Hannah Arendt, it's really important that she's talking about loneliness.
She's making the distinction between solitude, we should be able to be solitary. And one of the things that the internet has done to us is that it's engineered loneliness.
And our loneliness makes us vulnerable. And we need to think about freedom in terms of liberating ourselves from that and making sure that we have these human connections because human connections are necessary for freedom.
An optimistic thing here, though, is that there is survey data, which I cite in the book, to the effect that people actually want to be told the truth, right? So it would be perfectly consistent with people's own expressed desires if social media were tilted in such a way as to favor, for example, locally reported investigations. In chapter four of my book, I have a whole very long section called the Charter for Fair Transparency, which I recommend what I think are the legislative changes which would address and I think maybe even solve the kinds of problems we're talking about.
But in terms of a brighter future, I think, I mean, the funny thing about the moment we're in as far as I'm concerned is that it's what's totally untenable. The one thing which is impossible is the status quo.
Like, we're not going to hover here for very much longer. We're going to tilt one way or the other, I think.
And so the optimistic version is that we have, you know, we could get what I think of as the low tech, the social media stuff we're talking about, under control in some way. We could focus on the actual high tech, which gets people moving around and alive in the world.
We could think about freedom in a different way, which opens up the future. Because this low tech that we have now, it closes us down.
It keeps us focused not only on us and them, but on a kind of eternal present. When we can break out of that and our other problems, we could see that actually America could be a much, much, much better country than it is right now, which it could be, right, if we could break through.
And I think part of the breakthrough has to do with the idea. And if once you turn the idea around, and instead of freedom being something narrow and angry and only about the enmity, but instead about the openness, the human contact and the possibility, I actually do think we could really get somewhere much, much better.
But I do have the technical details, and those are also in the book. Yeah.
Go ahead, Bill. Well, I love Tim's answer.
I think the greatest threat to democracy are people who blindly go along with lies. I think about a person I interviewed when I was the editor of PolitiFact who was passing along lies about Obama.
And I asked them why this was a guy who had a internet radio talk show. It was what he called at the time was really a podcast.
And I said, why are you just passing along these lies about Obama? And he said, I'm passing them along in case they might be true. And I think about that moment a lot because it's that willingness from people to go along with lies and spread them that I think really threatens things.
because it's not just him. it's millions and millions of people who echo these lies every day that really threatens the stability of our democracy, particularly when it comes to voting and elections and what we're about to face here on November 5th.
Absolutely. So last question, each of you, who is the greater threat to democracy and freedom right now? If you were to pick a figure.
Well, you know, clearly Donald Trump is an epic liar and his lies about the election have begun already. And it's really scary when we think about what could happen after the election.
I mean, the greatest enemy to democracy in the United States is obviously Donald Trump, although I think J.D. Vance is a little bit underrated.
I would agree. And maybe closer to power than people generally think.
The greatest external enemy of democracy in the United States is Vladimir Putin, for all the reasons I've talked about in other books. But the main threat to democracy is always going to be people who don't want to be free.
Because democracy means ruled by the people, and that means to be a people, you got to want it. You have to go out there and do the things that you can do.
And if I could leave any message for the few days we have between now and election day, it would be that, that we all have a few things that we can do, and we got to go out there and do those things. Okay.
I'm going to let you go. Thank you, too.
I really appreciate it. Let's hope for a free and fair election.
Thanks for putting me in touch with Bill, and thanks, Cara. It was really, really good to be able to have this conversation.
Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
On with Cara Swisher is produced by Kristen Castro-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.
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