- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart and by Christine and Philip Dial.

- I'm Evan Smith.

She's a University of Michigan law professor and former US attorney who co-hosts the "Sisters-in-Law" podcast.

Her new book, "Attack From Within, How Disinformation is Sabotaging America" has just been published.

She's Barbara McQuade.

This is "Overheard".

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You really turn the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard".

(audience applauding) Barb, thanks so much for being here.

- Oh, thank you for having me.

My pleasure.

- Great to see you.

And congratulations on this book.

The timing is perfect for the moment we are in politics and for the moment we are in the information age.

- Yeah.

- This is the book that I wanna read and that everyone should read.

I don't understand how you had time to write it, given everything you do, it must have been like in the 27th and 28th hour of the day that you wrote this book.

Why?

Why take the time and add it to your pile of things?

- Well, at heart, I am a national security prosecutor.

That was my background.

That's what I teach at Michigan Law School.

And so it's been my area of interest really since 2017, 2018 when I started assigning to my students "The Mueller Report".

- Wow.

- And talking about those social media accounts that were fooling people and influencing American politics.

And so I saw that as a threat to our national security, and I wanted to share with other people what I am seeing.

And so I hope that if I can help people identify it, recognize it, we can defeat it together.

- Yeah, the first step is recognizing it and giving voice to it, and then you can solve the problem.

So I'm thinking about the framing for this book, and I can't think of a better framing than something you said to our friend Brian Stelter on a podcast recently, that we need to take back the idea that there is such a thing as truth.

We are at a point, first of all, thank you for saying that.

But we're at a point now.

(audience applauding) A few hands for the truth, but only a few, only a few hands for the truth.

We really are at a point now and have been for several years where truth is not truth.

Facts are not facts.

Reality is subjective.

It's kind of mind-boggling to think that this is where we are, but this is where we are.

- Well, we are ever since Kellyanne Conway talked about alternative facts, there has been this debate about, well, what is truth anyway?

What are you, the truth police, the information police?

But I learned in the research on my book that this is something that has operated in Russia now for decades.

This idea of the fog of unknowability.

And so in Putin's regime, one day I will tell you that the missiles were shot by Russia.

The next day I'll tell you the very same missiles were shot by Ukraine.

- Yeah.

- And on the third day, I will tell you they were shot by NATO.

And when people can't make sense of any of it, they begin to think, well, there really is no truth.

It's all PR, it's all spin.

And so they become exhausted and cynical and disengaged from politics altogether.

It's impossible to know anything, so why bother?

- Which, by the way, this is the point.

This is the plan working exactly as intended, right?

- Yes.

- That's what people do.

I mean, I have tended to believe that this is a relatively new phenomenon.

One way to think about it is, we're both old enough to remember when we all agreed on the basics, and then we diverged from there whatever the issue was, whatever the subject was, whatever the political moment was, we at least agreed on the foundation, even if we then separated.

Now, we don't even agree on the foundation.

But then I remembered Pat Moynihan saying years and years ago, before Donald Trump came across our radar screen as a potential presidential candidate.

"We're all entitled to our own opinions.

We're not entitled to our own facts".

He must be spinning in his grave right now, right?

That turns out to be a jump ball.

- Yeah.

No, I think that's right.

And it's this revisionist history and the idea if you repeat things enough, people will begin to believe them.

And as you say, it goes even back farther than that.

Hitler wrote about it in "Mein Kampf", that if you repeat a simple narrative again and again and again, people begin to believe it is true.

And so this idea that we're hearing now that January 6th was some sort of peaceful protest and referring to the perpetrators who are in jail as hostages, is really getting some momentum.

And it's a really frightening place to be, to try to look at that and spin that and revise history in that way.

- One of the best things about this book, and it's the first time I've seen anybody really take the time to do this, is to define terms.

To say, this is what disinformation is, this is what misinformation is, and how those things are different.

Do that for us.

- Yeah, so in my book, I define disinformation as the deliberate use of lies to manipulate and deceive people.

Misinformation, on the other hand, is when we hear those things and we believe them.

So it's sort of an unwitting spreader.

And in that way we can all exponentially amplify a false claim even if we're acting in good faith.

- Right, so disinformation is really lies.

So why not call it lies?

Why do we use this big fancy 25 cent word that sounds more academic and maybe doesn't really give people the same sense of urgency?

- Well, disinformation includes lies, but it also can include things that are sometimes known as reflexive control.

- [Evan] Say about that.

- And that is an effort to tell you something, just to get you to react in a certain way even if you don't believe it.

So for example, this idea that Taylor Swift is a Psy-Op.

That the whole thing has been orchestrated, that we're gonna create this famous pop star, and then she's gonna get in a relationship with the most famous athlete there is and then that team is gonna go to the Super Bowl, and it's all been orchestrated because then she's going to endorse Joe Biden.

It's a fabulists kind of theme, but the idea of it is, it's forcing people to say the last thing now that she can do or wants to do is to endorse Joe Biden.

Because if she does, it just feeds into this conspiracy narrative.

And so she will be inclined to not endorse Joe Biden.

So in some ways it is beyond just lies, it's an effort to control our behavior.

- Yeah.

It's like reverse psychology.

- [Barbara] Exactly.

You tell your kids don't eat your peas if you hope he eats the peas.

- If you hope your kid eats the peas.

So are conspiracy theories, themselves, a form of disinformation?

I was trying to sort through where I would put the conspiracy theories that have become part of all of our lives.

I mean, common theme on this show is often the disappearance of news from a lot of communities in this country.

And what pops up in place of that is often disinformation and conspiracy theories and that tends to drive behavior.

So are conspiracy theories an outgrowth of disinformation?

- Yeah.

I think it's part of it.

I think that there are people who will push a conspiracy theory in an effort to either mess with people or advance a political or personal agenda.

And it is a way of manipulating us, too.

I have a chapter in the book about sort of the psychology of why all of this works.

And we're kind of wired to believe conspiracies.

Right?

Some people believe certain things.

And I happen to know that Elvis is alive in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in case anyone was wondering.

(audience laughing) - By the way.

- By the way, just so you.

- Just between us.

(audience laughing) - But we are wired to form patterns based on our observations.

It's a matter of self-preservation.

If we see dark clouds, we say, "I've seen that before, that means a storm's coming".

- Right.

- "I'm gonna take precautions."

But then there are those who really push us and stoke that fear to make us believe something really more calamitous is coming.

And so things like the COVID vaccine causes us to become magnetic or some of these other things.

- Or that there are gonna be chips in our heads.

And if that's ultimately the goal of giving us the vaccine is really so that we have, we're able to be tracked by Jeff Bezos.

- Yeah.

And you know, there's certainly like a little bit of basis for that, I mean, we have the Tuskegee experiments that might cause people to be suspicious and hesitant about vaccines, but rather than trying to assure people that this is in the best interest of public health, there are those driving those conspiracy theories, knowing that people may be susceptible to them and trying to manipulate us into believing these things.

- And there are, in fact, back to this idea of the lack of news in a lot of the country, there are communities that are particularly susceptible to this.

We know communities of color during the pandemic, here in Texas, when the electric grid collapsed, there was rampant misinformation in specific communities that caused people to do or not do things and really put lives at risk.

And in poor communities, regardless of race, there's often a susceptibility because there is no good information to push out the bad.

- And it also makes me think of one other thing that we are struggling with in society today, which is the decline of local journalism.

Which is why it's so important that we have organizations like "The Texas Tribune" and others to try to fill those gaps.

But I think it was Tip O'Neill who said, "All politics is local".

But it seems that today all politics is national.

- Right.

- We're all just reading the big headlines and we're all talking about the immigration issues at the border or what's going on at the Supreme Court and not so much what's going on in our local communities.

And that's where we can build community together if we know what's going on, if we can talk to each other, that's where we can really learn from each other, but instead we've seen the demise of those local news outlets.

And so instead we're fighting with each other about these big issues and feeling like we have no control over our own destinies.

- And don't necessarily trust the people telling us, unlike the people who are locally providing us news where we know them, often it's an intimate relationship.

It's a very different, it's a very different deal.

The consequences of disinformation spreading around the country, it seems to me are at least a couple.

First thing, maybe most obviously, is that it motivates people to act on the basis of things that are not true.

Like people take action on that basis.

That's like just sort of basic thing.

But you talk about January 6th in this book, you start the book with January 6th, you've mentioned it today.

Spurring people to violent action on the basis of disinformation, that is also legitimately the kind of consequence that we have to be on the lookout for.

- Yes.

And in fact that's, one of my worries as a national security prosecutor and professor is the effect this is having on public safety.

And so when you have people undermining public confidence in law enforcement or undermining confidence in the courts, or suggesting that our elections have been defrauded, people get angry, understandably.

And so there will be somebody, you may not know who or when or why, but somebody is going to be spurred to action and is gonna decide to take the law into their own hands.

And so I think vigilante violence is something we can expect.

In my home state of Michigan, there was a plot to kidnap our governor.

- Governor Whitmer.

That's right.

- When she imposed lockdown orders during COVID-19, people who had been told it was a hoax and a fraud and it would end by Easter and all these other things were very angry that she had shut down businesses in our state.

And so they plotted to kidnap her and put her on trial and engage in a citizen's arrest.

The man who broke into Nancy Pelosi's home and hit her husband in the head with a hammer, is somebody who was angered and thought he needed to take the law into his own hands.

And then of course, the January 6th attackers were so stoked by their anger that they thought their democracy was being stolen, that they thought they had to use force, brute force, to stop that certification.

And so this disinformation gives people not just license to engage in violence, but almost compels them to engage in violence.

The idea that the ends justify the means because our country has spun so out of control.

- So of course, we ideally, in the legal system, hold the people who take that violent action accountable.

There've been how many number of people associated with January 6th who have now been arrested and incarcerated.

Some of the other cases you mentioned, the gentleman who attacked Mr. Pelosi, but how about the people who spread the disinformation to begin with?

Where are the consequences for that?

I guess that, in part, is what the series of cases around the former president are about?

- Yeah.

- Is there a legal case to be made against someone who knowingly, knowingly spreads disinformation?

- Yeah, so what's challenging about it, and of course we do have several indictments.

The one that I think is the most consequential is the federal election interference case.

- Yeah.

- And if Donald Trump is elected president, then I think he likely will dismiss the case and prevent it from going to trial.

So we need a couple things to happen.

One is either that the case goes to trial before the election or Donald Trump is defeated in the election.

- But you believe as someone who understands how the law works, that there is at least the theory of a legal case here against someone who spreads disinformation for the purpose of inspiring that kind of violent action that takes place.

- I absolutely do.

Even before that indictment was filed, I wrote a piece in the blog called "Just Security" arguing for the exact theory that was charged.

Not that I'm any mind reader, but it's actually a very common charge that prosecutors use, which is conspiracy to defraud the United States.

And that is anyone who uses fraud to interfere with the proper functioning of the administration of a government act.

So right here, the proper administration of the peaceful transfer of presidential power was something that was interfered with by fraud.

And so, to me, that seems like an obvious charge.

Of course, there's a lot of legal challenges in terms of obtaining a conviction because our system is designed in a way that makes it better that 10 guilty people go free than that one innocent person be convicted and so we have a lot of due process.

- But there's a path, there's a path forward.

- Absolutely a path to that.

So unless we see abuse of power by the next president, I think that case will come to trial.

And Donald Trump and others will get a fair trial, and the people will get to see that evidence as we saw during the January 6th hearings that the Congress put forth.

- Well, I'm glad you bring up the January 6th hearings, because I wanna talk about what happens when we call out disinformation.

There are a series of consequences of disinformation being out in the bloodstream, and then there are consequences of calling it out.

One of the consequences for, these days, Republicans calling out disinformation by other Republicans, is they lose elections or they're put in a position of having to retire from the office that they hold because the pressure and the abuse of them is so great.

Liz Cheney, speaking of those hearings, is a great example.

Five minutes ago you would've thought most conservative person in the entire world, right?

Daughter of the former Vice President, voted the right way on every other issue with the people who now point fingers at her except for the one thing.

- Yeah.

- That caused her to have a primary opponent in Wyoming, supported by the former president and she was soundly defeated in her reelection.

This maybe dis-incentivizes some people.

- Oh yeah.

- I mean, you've gotta put career over country.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I think she's a great example and this demonstrates the point between there's a difference between having a conservative political viewpoint as Liz Cheney does, and having political integrity, which she also has.

And those are two very different things.

It, to me, is shocking that so few people have followed the path of Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger.

- Adam Kinzinger is an example of somebody who wasn't defeated, but who decided not to run.

- Yeah, he realized it was an unworkable choice to be able to continue serving in this capacity.

And yet there's so many who have gone along with the disinformation and the idea of a stolen election.

I mean Donald Trump is not the only person referring to January 6th defendants as hostages.

- Right.

- Elise Stefanik, Congresswoman from New York, is someone who has really flipped the way she governs in what I see as just naked careerism.

I am willing to say things that are not true just to advance my own career.

Marjorie Taylor Greene does the same thing.

We had Senator Ted Cruz from here in Texas, and Senator Josh Hawley in Missouri, Ivy League-educated lawyers who most certainly knew better, but also refused to certify the election on January 6th, for the reason that some people believed that the election was fraudulent.

- Well, that was then.

And of course, here we are sitting here four years later and the polls show that a third of the public and two thirds of Republicans still, despite any evidence, believe that the election was stolen.

That disinformation campaign on that one subject is continuing to be successful.

- Yeah.

I think one of the things that is so challenging for us in our times is we have such information overload, with the ability to, who would've thought we have information at our fingertips, that we would be less informed today than maybe we were a few decades ago.

But there's so much out there that I think we now will cede to proxies what to think, to tell us what to think, so we look for credible voices out there to help us navigate the landscape, because there's just so much information.

And then you have people putting out blatantly false things online, some of whom are even doing it under a false persona and we tend to believe it.

Some of the things that are in "The Mueller Report", there were accounts run by Russian operatives.

- Right.

- With names like Blacktivist and United Muslims of America and Heart of Texas and then on the eve of the election, Blacktivist, for example, says "Hillary Clinton never did anything for us and so we should make sure she knows that she should not take us for granted.

We can send her a message by not showing up to vote for her."

- You make the point in this book that one of the problems going forward with disinformation is that any guardrails that ever existed on social media to possibly prevent this kind of disinformation have largely been obliterated by new ownership.

And sort of new policies for what we're permitting to get online, I mean, that's not helping.

- No, you mentioned earlier when we were backstage, this piece in "The New York Times" today.

- Today.

- That talks about this idea of any effort to regulate social media is called censorship.

- Or to combat disinformation, right?

You are censoring conservatives if you do that.

- Yeah and it's an attractive argument because people on the left and on the right, and everybody in between, revere our First Amendment right to free speech, as do I, as I'm sure you do as well.

And so when you throw out the word censorship, everybody recoils in horror like, "Oh no, I don't wanna be a censor, I can't be a censor".

But of course anybody who understands the constitution knows that the First Amendment rights of free speech and free press, like every other right in the Constitution, is not absolute.

- Yep.

- They may be regulated by time, place and manner.

You know the old adage, you can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater or a crowded studio like this one.

- Right.

- Because you have to read the Constitution, not in a vacuum, but in coordination with all the other provisions of the Constitution and so it's not a suicide pact.

We have a right to reasonable regulation as long as there's a compelling governmental interest that is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.

And so things on social media that, for example, take down things that are dangerous to public safety, like quack cures for COVID, is in the public interest to take that down or the idea that an election was stolen without any evidence.

How do you fix that?

It's challenging because sometimes disinformation online has a grain of truth, but is instead misleading.

But I still think there are ways to do that by pointing people to accurate information or regulating the algorithms that are designed to generate outrage as opposed to providing facts.

- So is the media business partly responsible for this?

I mean, I appreciate what you said about the undermining of faith and confidence in institutions, including the press, but also courts and so on.

That's partly what's going on here.

Partly we have a media literacy problem in this country.

- Yes.

- The inability of people to distinguish good information from bad.

But I wanna self-flagellate here and say that we, in the media business, over the last four years, particularly, did not do a good enough job of calling BS when BS needed to be called, on pushing back against this stuff.

There tended to be more of a, "Well, that's another point of view, so we have to give it airtime" or put it in our pages.

Would you agree with that?

- I do.

And with some exceptions, I don't fault the media.

I think that they are relying on years of training and experience to tell both sides of a story.

But both sides of a story rely on both sides coming to the table in good faith.

- Good faith and with facts.

- Yeah.

Right?

And so people have different views of things, but we all agree on the same facts.

And so then along comes Donald Trump, in the campaign starting maybe 2015 and starts saying things that are blatantly untrue.

And the media is very reluctant to use the word lie.

They will just say, "Here's what he said", and then maybe they will point out some other facts that allow a reader.

- And sometimes in saying what he said, which was not true, they're ultimately amplifying it.

- Absolutely.

- Right?

- Yes.

And so, we know in the days leading up to the 2016 election, news stories all about Hillary Clinton's emails occupied the headlines greater than any other issue that was being discussed at the time.

When Nancy Pelosi's husband was attacked by this hammer-wielding intruder, there were jokes that Donald Trump Jr posted suggesting, with zero facts, a nefarious cause based on a relationship that didn't exist that actually contributed to that attack.

The media starts reporting that.

And so people are not disciplined enough to read the details and say, "Well, he just said that and it's not true".

They just read the substance of it.

And in the back of their head is, "Well, I heard this thing."

- It gives legitimacy to it.

- It does.

And so I think that the press needs to avoid being manipulated and used to amplify false claims and needs to stand down when there are.

Now on the other hand, it is tricky to figure out how to get this right because right now we've got Donald Trump out there at all these rallies saying some really outrageous things.

- I mean, just can't even believe it.

- And if you don't cover it, then people won't know about the outrage.

Like, a moment of honor for the hostages who are still being held before the national anthem, referring to.

- Referring to January 6th.

- January 6th.

Talking about a blood bath as he's discussing the auto industry.

And so people need to know these things.

And so I think we'll come to a place of equilibrium, I hope, where the press does report on what's being said, but also provides some real time fact checking.

But I think it's tricky to do.

I know that when Donald Trump appeared at a CNN Town Hall, he speaks in such word salad that it can be really challenging to fact check in real time.

But I imagine a day, Evan, when it looks something like this, someone's interviewing him or he's talking and it's like sports commentary, right?

Where somebody says, "Okay, now in my experience that one right there, that's not true".

Here are the facts and you've got it down there.

So you have to have real time analysis, I think, to be able to debunk some of the lies that are coming.

- It's something tough to pull off successfully.

So we have a couple minutes left.

What is the McQuade plan for fixing all this?

- [Barbara] Yeah.

- Because surely you have one.

- I do, in fact the longest chapter in the book.

- Yeah, see.

(audience applauding) - Thank you.

- Great.

- The longest chapter in the book is on solutions.

Some are government-based solutions and some are things we can do as individuals.

So things like regulating algorithms is something we surely can do that would prevent the generation of outrage, which is something that's happening online.

Campaign finance reform, that would allow us to see where this dark money is coming from just by providing disclosure and transparency.

(audience applauding) Promoting media literacy and Civics education.

Right now we spend 5 cents, (audience applauding) for Civics, for every $50 we spend on STEM education in our schools.

And so we need to do better on Civics education.

But here's the part where we all come in.

One, being a citizen in this country requires the responsibility of being an informed citizen so that we can cast our votes in an actual factual way.

That's our duty.

But the other is we need to choose truth over tribe.

I think sometimes we have divided ourselves into tribes of blue team and red team and we so want our side to be right that sometimes we're willing to go along with whatever our side says.

- Look past the truth, right?

- Yeah.

To win the debate.

And I think that we need to realize that real social progress comes from compromise and nuance and seeing the areas of gray and admitting when we have a point that is weak.

As a prosecutor, I knew that my credibility depended on occasionally conceding when there was a weak point, but pointing out that the facts that were in favor of a policy were what mattered more.

And so we need to recognize that if we're gonna really solve problems.

- It occurs to me, we have one minute left, that people are looking at this election as the point at which we decide are we going to walk back from the brink or not.

The reality is that regardless of the outcome of this election, we're still gonna have this problem.

- Sure.

- Right, this is not about the outcome of this one election.

This is a problem that's gonna be with us.

- I think that's right.

And you need only look at the 2020 election, right?

I know we said all the same things leading up to that.

And in fact, for the past four years, we've seen the same kind of attack on information.

I think as we continue to work through social media, we're kind of in the teenage years of social media, we're still figuring it out.

And unless we come up with real regulation there and a real commitment to truth, we are gonna find ourselves still in this situation.

But I think we can do those things.

We can come up with reasonable regulations for social media and I hope that if people are willing to recognize these tactics of disinformation, we can defeat them together.

- I'm gonna let us end on an upbeat note.

That's it.

Barbara McQuade, thank you so much for being here.

Great to be with you.

Thank you.

(audience cheering and applauding) We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests and an archive of past episodes.

- I do think this divide and conquer strategy is an effort to separate working class white people from working class other people by othering them and keeping working class white people in the fold.

Because if but for this disinformation about the economy and what's really in your financial best interest, those groups would all naturally band together and defeat corporate interests.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart and by Christine and Philip Dial.

(bright tones)