Episode 58: We need to make truth our national purpose, featuring Barb McQuade.

Deborah Holdship
Hi, I’m Deborah Holdship, editor of Michigan Today.

Back in the before times: Before cable news introduced the 24-hour news cycle. Before the news became some sort of profit center. Before the Internet connected us to an onslaught of endless information, it used to take a lot more effort and time to spread lies and wreak social havoc. As consumers of news, modern Americans demand instant gratification, even as we stagger under the mental weight of information overload. Where once a delay in a publication meant the quest for accuracy, now it stokes suspicion of a cover up.

In her new book, Attack From Within, out in February, my guest, law professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barb McQuade, notes that American politics has us mired in a cult of victimhood, an endless soap opera of heroes and villains, sustained drama and constant conflict. Humans are wired to believe things are happening with purpose, not just by chance, and thus we are vulnerable to all manner of manipulation, conspiracies, and disinformation.

Ironically, it’s our undying commitment to the 1st and 2nd Amendments that make Americans most vulnerable to domestic chaos, McQuade says. One person’s content moderation is another person’s censorship. One person’s right to bear arms is seemingly another’s right to organize a militia and overturn an election. Bias is natural, of course, but the worst bias is the my side bias, says McQuade, most starkly demonstrated in the political arena before and since the November 2020 election. We become blind to the flaws in our own arguments, while the opponent’s flaws are positively blinding. To make matters worse, efforts to debunk falsehoods tend to reinforce them.

McQuade believes that if we dissect and label these insidious disinformation tactics as old as Sun Zoo in The art of War. We can render them less effective.

Her book offers some practical solutions to our current dilemma. It’s tricky, though. With democracy comes social progress. Social progress creates uncertainty, and uncertainty makes us susceptible to manipulation. Our conviction that democracy will always be there is naive, MQquade says. It’s the relentless assault on truth but that we are experiencing now that leaves us paralyzed and passive as democracy dissolves. Here’s Barb McQuade.

Barb McQuade:
Yeah, there’s an old quote by Justice Jackson and the Supreme Court who says we have to use some practical wisdom to make sure we don’t convert the Bill of Rights into a suicide pact. And it it seems like we are on a collision course with that. And I think we live in a world where, you know, truth is used as this, almost cosmic Concept, Religious concept. You know what is truth? Truth is unknowable. Well, maybe so, but facts are knowable. Facts are black or white. Facts are the light was red or the light was green. And I think we have an obligation to be truthful with one another and then to debate our views on people have very different views and that’s all understandable. Whatever political viewpoints you may have, we should all agree that truth matters, and we should be able to have accurate facts that we can rely upon. And then we can have meaningful debate about how we want to govern ourselves.

It is this abuse of our rights through disinformation to lead us over the abyss.

AUDIOCLIP: “You can’t handle the truth.”

DH:
Disinformation has always existed and you take it all the way back to Sun-Tzu and the Art of War and the whole thing. Talk about how dramatically different it is today than, say, back in the beginning of the country when different politicians, you know, had their own press outlets to harass and attack each other.

BM:
I think technology is what has completely changed the game. Not only can anybody adopt a false persona online and say whatever they want, they can also use these bots, you know, essentially artificial intelligence, to amplify the message, so it looks like that message got a million likes and is a very popular idea, when in fact it might just be one person.

One of the things the Mueller Report found was that there was a an account called 10GOP that looked like it was a grassroots organization of the Republican Party in Tennessee. In fact, it was Russian operatives who were throwing all kinds of things out there. And it it attracted lots of followers. And the agenda it was pushing kept getting more and more extreme.

DH:
We remember that dramatic stuff. And so people who want to play with your mind are gonna push that button, I guess.

BM:
The purveyors of disinformation know what they’re doing and it goes back, as you say, not decades but centuries. And there are a number of cognitive forces that are at play that they use and manipulate. You know, one is just sort of fear of a changing society, of this sort of, you know, doom and gloom that everybody has a little bit with regard to the what the future might present, but, you know, people who engage in disinformation will paint a very dire picture of what that future might look like.

And when we’re bombarded by images from around the world of real tragedy and real suffering, it’s easy — our emotions really do come come up to the forefront there. And so we are kind of conditioned to be susceptible to disinformation and then, you know, using some of the same strategies that Hitler used. In Mein Kampf he described it as the “big lie.” And he said most people may lie about very small things: does this dress make me look fat? Little things, white lies. Most people will not say a lie so audacious that it just couldn’t be believed. And so, you know, this idea that in Germany that Jews were the source of all evil, and these ideas today, like a stolen election, it’s such an outrageous thing to say that normal people would never make up such a lie. Who would lie about such a thing?

And so that is part of what people prey upon, yeah, knowing that these forces are at play, they are playing games with us. But it’s a it’s a really deadly game.

DH:
So if people feel the need to reclaim the government, it feels like they’re doing something righteous.

BM:
Well, you know, they cobble together just enough pieces of the Declaration of Independence and conflate it with the Constitution. You know, we don’t like tyrants and we like rebellion, right? And we had a revolution over these things. But if you look at the Constitution, it makes it clear that insurrection is frowned upon. It’s a crime. The president is allowed to call up militias to put down insurrections. And so the idea that the Constitution in some way promotes the rights of the citizens to overthrow the government is just not consistent with the language of the Constitution or what’s in our statutes. The militia described in the Second Amendment is today’s National Guard. It is not, you know, a group of knuckleheads who like to shoot things in the woods. And people who use that to support these militia activities are really playing with fire. It’s a very dangerous thing — the idea of vigilante violence, that private groups can take the law into their own hands, makes all of us very unsafe.

DH:
That whole “us against them,” this false binary… The world is so much more complicated than that.

BM:
If I can convince people that there’s only two sides to an issue, and then I can paint my opponent as so outrageous and evil and to demonize them, then I’m the only alternative left. And of course, the reality is there are lots of choices in this world. It isn’t a red team and a blue team and that’s it. You know, most of America is really quite moderate and we have the capacity to appreciate the nuance. But I think in our complex world, we rely too much on proxies to tell us what to think about things instead of learning all those facts for ourselves.

DH:

So now we can’t even rely on what we see because of what technology has wrought.

BM:
In some ways, technology has been a challenge, but I also think it can create some opportunities. You know, for example, I think we could use artificial intelligence to help to detect falsity in the news. You know, whenever there is a news story, maybe it can flag other news stories that give us accurate facts about those things so that we can find other sources that are perhaps debunking what we’re reading there. Maybe artificial intelligence can be used to detect bots on the Internet, to detect accounts that are not in Tennessee, where they say they are but are in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

So yeah, I think that there are ways you can utilize technology. What we really just need is the political will to do it. You know, we need to unite and make truth our national purpose. And if we do, I think there are a lot of things we can do to use technology, to use government regulation. You know, we’ve really left social media wide open. We’ve got this Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that immunizes social media platforms. And I don’t know if we need to repeal it, but yeah, we could certainly regulate to require verifying the identity of people on social media, Putting some transparency in who’s paying for ads on social media, all of those things would allow us to make more informed decisions as we assess the accuracy of information that’s online.

They also think that paywalls are something that is posing a really big challenge in the news environment and that is something that regulation could perhaps address. You know, journalism has really struggled to figure out how to monetize its product and how to stay profitable so that they can continue to produce news. And I think it’s one of the reasons we have seen a fall in local news coverage, which is so important as well. You know what’s going on at the local school boards and and the health boards, those employees are being demonized over what they’re trying to do. And that’s so important. And so I think we need to figure out how we’re going to monetize and subsidize, financially support local news and avoid this paywall where we risk creating a class of informed versus uninformed people based on who has the ability to pay. One proposal that’s been floated out there is everybody gets a certain amount of credits that they can use. So we still have a marketplace of ideas, so to speak, but everyone has free access to decide what they want to read. And it could be a way of funding good journalism.

DH:
Well, I so appreciate your role in the media explaining the law. You know, you’re an educator who can just go on there and say, well, what this person is saying doesn’t make sense because this is what the law states. I think that’s so helpful. It’s so important.

BM:
Yeah, I, you know, I I try to make my legal analysis, really just explaining. From time to time on various news networks you will see people who have very shrill opinions. And as a consumer of news, that’s not really what I want to hear. I want to understand the news and it can be very complicated and so, I think, cable news, at least, is at its best when it brings in experts who do not have a political agenda, who are just trying to explain — because the world’s a complicated place. But I really appreciate when there are complicated issues going around the world, that we have former ambassadors and university professors who can come on and help us to process these things.

MSNBC Audio: “Barbara, what should we expect today? And should we expect the court to actually hold Donald Trump accountable? …. “

BM:
So, you know, the 1st Amendment is all about protecting the content of what we say. It’s very difficult to tell platforms what they can and can’t say in terms of content. But it’s these algorithms. You know, there’s a woman named Francis Haugen, who was a whistleblower of Facebook who testified before Congress. When you get all that suggested content, that is coming from algorithms. But one of the things that she exposed with Facebook was they created all of these various reaction emojis. You know, there used to be “like” and then they added “dislike” or “hate.” And they found when people disliked or hated something is what kept people online longer. And so if you want to keep people on the platform, then you want to promote these things that create outrage. It will cause people to stay on the platform longer, look at the ads, and they will make more money. And so that is something that I think those algorithms, at the very least, even if you want to control what the algorithms are, disclose what the algorithms are, right? So that a user can say, ohh, I don’t want to use the one that is deliberately ginning up my outrage. I’ll go to the other one where I can just have a normal conversation.

DH:

Wow. And so that doesn’t seem to be asking too much.

BM:
Yeah, even Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, has said that we really ought to reimagine social media as a utility, something that’s run by nonprofit organizations as opposed to a handful of billionaires. Right? You know, we’ve got billionaires calling the shots and deciding what these things should be. And, you know, guess what their motive is? Profit. Well, if we want to have a more altruistic motive and one that brings information to the people, maybe a little regulation could go a long way.

DH:
You talk about conspiracy theories. We are so drawn to them because we’re trained to look for connections and patterns in what we’re looking at. And then the world is so crazy and we want to simplify an otherwise very complicated reality. And so we’re just primed for it at this point.

BM:
You know, human nature is, as you say, is wired for conspiracy theories and it is what has helped the species to survive. The example I cite is when we see, you know, gathering storm clouds. We recognize: Ohh, that must mean a storm is coming. I better prepare for a storm. We’re also wired to win arguments, because in society, if we want to succeed, we have to live in social groups. And so we’re wired to win and to be very stubborn about our cause. It makes us care more about winning than it does about being right. It makes it very difficult for people to admit they were wrong and to change their minds.

So once you fall for disinformation or a candidate who is pushing disinformation, it’s very difficult for us to say: Oh my gosh, you’re right. That candidate was an absolute liar. And I’ve changed my mind.

And so I think what we need to do is to, you know, reach out when someone is wrong, you know, give them some grace. Yeah, to come back to the fold as opposed to, you know, spiking the football and saying I was right, you were wrong. Yeah, that’s not the way to achieve unity.

DH:
And the problem is too, once you realize you’re wrong, it shakes your confidence in your ability to suss out the truth.

BM:

You know, the goal in Russia is to confuse people, to bombard them with false claims. It may be even inconsistent claims. Consistency doesn’t matter. And the idea is to just get people so confused that they become cynical and then eventually numb and say: You know what, I’m just checking out. I’m not going to participate in elective politics. I’m just gonna take care of my day-to-day life. I’m gonna feed my family. I’m gonna work my job. But politics is just too much for me to deal with.

And you know, we can’t be  a democracy of self-governance if we cede all of our power to those who are trying to manipulate us. So there are a lot of ways we could do it to make sure that we are getting access because one of the things you point out is the way we have now arranged ourselves into these bubbles. You know, former Congressman Justin Amash, who’s a graduate of Michigan Law School, was holding a town hall when he was a member of Congress in West Michigan. And he was trying to explain to his constituents why he had voted in favor of impeaching Donald Trump. He is a Republican. And he was stunned to find out that some of his constituents had never really heard a lot of the news about why he had taken the position that he had. All they heard were sort of the pro-Trump reports. And so he said it was very eye-opening to hear how, you know, people were just so unaware of the news because we’ve arranged ourselves into these red spaces and blue spaces where we never hear the other side of a debate.

DH:
What are your impressions of media today? How have you seen it evolve?

BM:
The best parts of it are still good human reporters, journalists who really care about this idea of accuracy a friend, Joyce Vance, she is a former US attorney and law professor and she has a Substack called Civil Discourse. And one of the things that she wrote about recently that gave me some hope is that there is a new research study that shows that when people are exposed to sort of the other side of the story, they will actually moderate their opinions. And so that says to me that we just need to reach people so that people can hear all sides of a story and then form their own opinions. So that’s really good.

You know, one of the things that could be helpful is implementing this equal time rule on social media with flags, you know? If there is an ad for a candidate X then maybe AI sends you in your algorithm is something from the opponent of candidate X so that you get to hear the response to the statement.

AUDIO: Hitler freaking out

We have been through a lot of these things before, and you know, what has often saved us are our institutions. But now we’re seeing a real attack even on our institutions themselves. And so I think the historical perspective is a real cautionary tale.

You know, in my book I cite some of the tactics used by Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini and I think we can learn from those that. Look at these tactics. These are, you know, kind of almost simplistic little tools. They worked then, and it’s still working now. If we can raise our awareness of that history, I think we can use it to build some resilience toward the future.

DH:
Well, and that’s where you’re saying to spark a national debate and a nonpartisan debate.

BM:
We have to start from the same place. That we agree on certain facts. You know, throughout my career as a lawyer and as an officer of the court, you owe a duty of candor to the court. You have to accept the facts even when they are not to your liking. So often the public is going along with the con because they want to see their side prevail. If the politician shares our agenda – and maybe we believe everybody’s corrupt — I might as well vote for the guy who shares my values, even though he’s corrupt. And we have to get beyond that.

DH:
That commitment to truth and accuracy. I don’t know. How are you finding your students?

BM:
Right now I’m teaching a great course in national security and civil liberties, and it talks about the tension between protecting the public and honoring our civil liberties, including this issue about the First and Second Amendments — honoring those rights, but at the same time not letting them be used against us as a weapon.

Just yesterday I had two former FBI agents who studied disinformation, a lot of Russian disinformation, speak to the class about this and it’s absolutely fascinating to hear. This used to be something that Russia did to us to try to manipulate us on the world stage, and now we have domestic actors stealing from that playbook and doing it within the United States.

DH:
Did you say that we need a statute regarding domestic terrorism, like we have yet to create something like that? To put domestic terrorists in a category unto themselves, as opposed to murderers, or … ?

BM:
Currently, if someone uses explosives to blow up a building, you can charge them with a federal offense. But you can’t if they engage in a mass shooting or if they engage in a vehicle ramming, not a federal offense. And so I think just to close that gap and to indicate that there is a moral equivalency between domestic terrorism and international terrorism. I think that would be a very good thing that would allow not just punishment after the fact, but prevention before the fact.

DH:
So if they’re trying to stop something before it happens, a lot of times people would equate that with, you know, unnecessary interference in someone’s life or something.

BM:
The Justice Department and the FBI came up with a number of internal guidelines that prohibit that kind of investigation based on people’s exercise of their First Amendment-protected activity, i.e., people who are protesters or writing op eds cannot be investigated for that purpose. It’s really planning of violence that would be the trigger for an investigation. And I think that sometimes because of that fear of what happened in the 60s, and it’s an absolutely legitimate position to be opposed to what the FBI was engaged in at that time, sometimes that causes people to go so far in the other direction and say, well, that’s all hands off then. Yeah, well, that can’t be the case, right. You can plot, you know, a violent attack just because it’s a domestic actor instead of an international actor? You know that that should not be the case.

We can have it both ways. We can make sure that we are protecting civil liberties by not starting investigations based on First Amendment-based activity, but instead, anything based on violence I think should be fair game. And there should be a responsibility by the FBI to investigate those kinds of cases.

DH:
You know, I like hearing you say we can have it both ways.

BM:
One of the things we need to do is invest in social capital by getting out and joining and belonging and seeing our common humanity, you know? It happens in faith communities, it happens in labor unions, it happens in sports leagues. Wherever you can get out and see that there are people from across the political aisle but with whom you have more in common than you have difference, then I think it makes it much harder for authoritarians to demonize other people.

We need to get out of our little bubbles and get out there and embrace humanity. And I think that would go a long way toward solving some of these problems.

DH:
Well, as we embark on a wild election year, I hope we are able to navigate the murky waters of disinformation and work together as fellow Americans to uphold and protect our unique form of sel -governance. I appreciate Barb’s practical and measured approach and highly recommend her book no matter your political affiliation. All right, that’s it for now. Congratulations to our national champion football team and as always, go blue.