Discussing disinformation and media with Matt Sheffield
Discussing disinformation and media with Matt Sheffield
How right-wing media polluted the information environment.
Appears in this episode
In this episode, right-wing media critic Matt Sheffield and I discuss the disinformation crisis and the climate change crisis, and how they are deeply intertwined.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Matt Sheffield started his first conservative media website, bashing news anchor Dan Rather for liberal bias, way back in 2000, and in subsequent years became a key figure in right-wing media criticism.
But the rise of Trump left him disillusioned and he has since become a prominent critic of right-wing media. He now runs a site called Flux dedicated to accurate, inclusive journalism.
Last week, Matt and I got together on one of these live Twitter Spaces things — a glorified conference call, basically, to which people can tune in and ask questions — and had a wide-ranging conversation about the disinformation crisis, how it manifested in climate change, and what can be done about it.
The audio was archived, available exclusively to Flux and Volts subscribers. I hope you enjoy it.
Matt Sheffield
We're doing a space tonight to discuss climate change and the birth of the disinformation economy. And David has been a longtime climate change correspondent and environmental columnist for a while, and he's also the proprietor and publisher, writer, et cetera, of Volts, a newsletter, which he started one year ago today, which he was just recounting that for our previous space, which I accidentally ended somehow. So your experience overall has been pretty good, you were saying? And I think I ended the space inadvertently right after you said you work better alone.
David Roberts
Yes —
Matt Sheffield
I inadvertently proved your point, I think.
David Roberts
Yes. This is why I don't talk to people. Yeah, it's been going great. I have found that readers are excited to go deeper and wonkier and share my obsessions. I'm sure different writers have different opinions about this, but I much prefer it over writing for a general interest publication.
Matt Sheffield
And you wrote a retrospective on your site today that — one of the things you said is that you appreciated not having to reintroduce topics over and over again in terms of — you assume that your current readers actually know who you are and something about the material, I guess.
David Roberts
Right, yes. It's the famed return to blogging. It is a persistent audience who will follow me over time and thus who I don't have to explain that climate change is bad in every post anymore.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. And I guess it's a way of trying to have a continued conversation rather than one that starts over de novo every time. Right?
David Roberts
Yes. And it's explicitly I mean, I did it knowing that I would be writing for a much smaller audience. It's not a mass audience play. It's very much for a self-selecting group of people who are more than average interested in my subject matter. So I think it can still have influence because I think the people who do read it are sprinkled throughout the world, the energy world, in high places. But I've basically transitioned away from mass writing, I guess is what I'd say.
Matt Sheffield
So now, before you were doing just for those again who hadn't seen what you were doing before you were working at Vox and then before that you were working at Grist, which is a website that's still out there doing climate coverage. How is it different now compared to your Grist days would you say?
David Roberts
Oh goodness. Well for one thing I didn't know what the hell I was doing back in my Grist days. I was hired at Grist as an editorial assistant in I think like 2004 with no background in journalism and no real background in environmentalism which is what Grist was supposedly about and knowing nothing at all about climate change or anything really. So the ten years I spent at Grist were in retrospect it's something I think journalists don't really get anymore these days, which was it was a place where I could labor in obscurity while I learned what the hell I was doing.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. And I think that's an interesting observation you make there because that is one of the things that's definitely very different about media now is that you and I are both Gen Xers in our forties and in the old days, the media industry was very sort of anti young people in terms of letting them have public facing work to a large degree. And so basically they had people work as research assistants or as publicists or something like that —
David Roberts
Or come up through local papers. I'm old enough to remember when the way you came up through the reporting game is through local papers. And it's interesting if you go through that route you're taught a certain set of skills and rules and norms but I wasn't taught those at all. I had never had any experience in that world at all. So all I was reacting to and sort of shaping myself around was what do readers like? What is helpful to readers? And if you just follow that string you don't end up in the model of the inverted pyramid, daily objective third voice — information is relevant.
You know what I mean? There's no spine to your research. You don't know what you're looking for. And this is the sort of feeling I get from reading lots of objective news stories. It's like a grab bag of facts. It's like a grab bag of true things. They're all true. But how do they hang together? What do they all mean? That's what's missing. And once you approach it that way, what is sort of my narrative here? What kinds of things am I researching? What kinds of arguments am I trying to make that helps you know where to dig and doing that over time informs you more fully I think, than you get informed doing objective style reporting.
Matt Sheffield
Traditional training with journalism has also it made it to the point of the topic today about climate change and disinformation. It made them very basically totally unprepared to understand how a gaslighting campaign was being built right in front of their eyes. They couldn't even see it happening. And you could argue that this was something that probably was first done by the tobacco industry in the 1950s and 60s when they did research that figured out that smoking causes cancer and how do we keep the public from knowing that? But basically that information, understanding how that happened and why it happened, it never really filtered down into elite journalism, I would say.
And climate change was kind of the next area where this —
David Roberts
It happens again and again and it happens — these critiques of the flaws of this style of journalism are things people have been saying for decades now. When I first started in this whole game in the early 2000s, it was sort of the rise of the net roots and the sort of famous like, oh, the bastions of the mainstream media are being stormed by these outsiders, all this blah blah, all this sort of utopian talk. But all these critiques of media that we're talking about here were around then the both sides saying, the sort of fetishizing of moderate being whatever happens to be wherever the two is between, where the two parties are.
David Roberts
All this kind of stuff has been around so long now that I've come to find it very difficult to believe that the people involved don't understand these critiques or don't know what's happening. They get it yelled — if nothing else, every time they go out on Twitter, that people yell it at them. So they've definitely heard it. The thing is, you have know, economists annoy me in a lot of ways, but one thing I sort of have picked up from economists is, it's helpful — one helpful lens on any situation is what is the incentive structure? What are people incentivized, what are people rewarded and punished for?
And you can do that sort of brain-dead, both sides, journalism forever. And there's never a penalty, there's never a downside. Like, you might have people like me yelling at you on Twitter, but in the world of media professionals, that will never count against you. Whereas if you betray an opinion or know, like we saw it during the Trump years, like, sometimes journalists would get really worked up and they'd be like, "I think taking kids from their parents at the border when they're seeking asylum and holding them in cages without telling them where their parents are is bad" and you know, the whole right would just jump on it.
They'd be like, "Oh, there's a biased anti-Trump reporter." And then of course, that would cause the editors and everyone to retreat, duly retreat, like they do every time. And just that cycle over and over again, over time means as a professional reporter in DC, as a professional politics reporter, doing the brain-dead objective, both sides, horse race, blah blah, blah, is without downsides. You can get ahead doing that. There's no risk to it. So unless they're sort of like gripped by a civic spirit or whatever, why would they stop?
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, no, I think that's right. And then besides, from what you're calling effectively market incentives, there —
David Roberts
There are social and reputational incentives too.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. No, I agree. And the other thing is that just in terms of how being a journalist works in the print business for a long time, there was this term that people use that "I have to fill the news hole." That was how they thought about making their product. But in retrospect, when you think about that phrasing, it's just basically you're going to fill it with what? By shoveling shit down the hole?
David Roberts
Well, imagine there being any space without news already in it anymore. Show me a news hole in the universe.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, no, that's fair. And yeah, like a lot of this stuff though. Yeah, you're right that those critiques have always been there, and I'd say they're still certainly relevant. I mean, just yesterday, Politico ran an article in which they criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for being Bluetooth phobic. Because she was concerned that Bluetooth has some security risks as a wireless technology. It actually does.
David Roberts
This is the nonsense things about that. You could go on forever. But just one note, like note that the whole critique from people like us of the mainstream political media in 2006 can be boiled down to two words: Her emails. Right. They spent an absurd amount of time on that ridiculous non-story, and that has become shorthand for the whole critique of mainstream media. So for them to go after Kamala Harris for information security specifically, not for breaching it, but for being too concerned about it, it's hard to interpret that as anything but a deliberate "Fuck you" to every media critic of the last five years.
Right? I mean, it's not just any shallow, stupid story. It's very specifically a shallow, stupid story that is the opposite they attacked the last woman for just as though to say as though to flag, "Yes, hell yes, we're going to do this again. Hell yes, we are."
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, well, and it's the opposite. Her behavior is the literal opposite of Trump because when Trump was the president, he had a standard issue iPhone that he was tweeting on and his Twitter account had I think the password was "Make America Great Again." So his Twitter account got hacked twice while he was the president.
David Roberts
The whole four years was among all the other things, it was one long series of sort of horrendous information security stories, leaks and breaches and like emails being Cc'd here and there and emails from illegal accounts. The media didn't give a shit because they never gave a shit about infosecurity. That's never what it was about. It was always retrofit from the narrative they wanted to tell.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, well, and I think the other thing is that there's this sort of desperate, rote idea of making — our job is to hold public officials accountable. And so they think, obviously that is a journalist job. But on the other hand, that shouldn't be the number one principle because otherwise you just end up with these ridiculous stories. So in other words, like the Harris Bluetooth story, basically our vice president is taking too much security. That makes no sense in any possible world except under the rubric of, well, our job is to criticize public officials.
David Roberts
Well, this is what accountability has become, right? It's shrunk to this ridiculous sort of brain-dead version of itself where these reporters just feel like I need to write negative stories about the administration. That's what tough journalism is. That's what real journalism is, just negative stories. And notice if you're not allowed to have any opinions about policy, or about whether it's good to jail children or about morality or about anything, you're not allowed to make any moral or ethical judgments. That means you can't hold a president or vice president responsible in those terms. Right? So the only terms you have to quote, unquote, hold them responsible are just these sort of shallow, like "Yesterday you said one thing and today you said something that sounds slightly different" or like "Oh, in the campaign you said you were going to unite people, but oh, look, people are still fighting" just the most sort of goofy, brain-dead versions of accountability you could imagine. To truly hold the president accountable means you got to care about something and understand something and desire one outcome over another, you know what I mean? And they're just not allowed to do any of that. So what there is of accountability ends up just being these sort of shallow gotcha gimmicky stories.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, no, exactly. And it is a very big contributor to how we got to this present situation where you have one party that has basically decided that if we lose elections, then we will end democracy. That's our belief now. And if moderation is simply splitting the difference between the two parties, well, then I guess that means ending democracy isn't good. But maybe just trimming it around the edges and curtailing it is okay.
David Roberts
Some Democrats say that democracy is good, critics argue otherwise.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, exactly.
David Roberts
Well, what I've seen happen is, and we saw this forecast a long time ago in the climate change space, is the thinking is basically what is good for us, our tribe, which is white Christian, rural and ex-urban conservatives, basically the Republican party has become quite monolithic in that respect. So what's good for our tribe? That determines not only what's politically good, that determines what's true. So everything else becomes subordinate to that. Including facts, including democracy, including truth. Everything has become subordinate to what it is in the immediate interests of our tribe. That's what I think you see reaching its sort of absurd reductio ad absurdum results before us now is right-wing media is just "What is true, is what is good for us." So what is good for us? That's what we're going to write. The whole notion of any metric of truth or even any conception of truth, that transcends tribe, that transcends partisanship has just completely fallen out of the picture now. It's just like, what do we need to believe? That is what we shall believe. It's frictionless.
Matt Sheffield
And as somebody who worked in that world for a number of years, all Republican operatives pretty much have this idea that everything is debatable, everything is subject to opinion. It's just a matter of opinion. And so when I was working at NewsBusters and places like that, the demand that we made to journalists was, well, you have to quote what the Republicans said about a thing.
David Roberts
Yes.
Matt Sheffield
And then also not specify whether what Republicans said was true or correct or not. At the same time, one of the things that sort of began my disaffection with right-wing politics was that while I was fine making that demand of people who were claiming to have no views or no opinions, I also felt like that, well, conservatives ought to try to have a mainstream media that reports things fairly and reports progressive opinions as well.
David Roberts
That's what Tucker wanted to do when he first started. Remember, he gave that whole speech. That was his original purpose, was it not?
Matt Sheffield
Oh, it was, yeah. And actually, I haven't mentioned this publicly, but I actually interviewed to be the managing editor, the first managing editor.
David Roberts
Well, you're lucky. Go on, I guess, because those original intentions got nuked upon first contact with the audience.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, well, no, and that's basically what happened with him, is that he tried doing some reporting on negative reporting about Republicans. And basically American right-wing epistemology is such that if you're a Republican, the only thing you can criticize another Republican for is not being right-wing enough. That's it. Every other criticism is unfair and illegitimate.
David Roberts
Yes, but over time this is what happened. Over time, it went from being unfair to therefore it is false. Right. You could say it's unfair and then you could actually go out and do some investigation and try to determine separately whether it's false. But nowadays it's just "That's bad for us, therefore it's bullshit." There's no middle step where they're like, "Oh, should we go find out?" It's just what they need to believe is what's true.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. And it did manifest in regard to the climate debate, because if you look at public opinion polls before the oil and gas industry began trying to manipulate public opinion through ideological groups and PR firms, Republicans actually were more concerned about protecting the environment than Democrats were, believe it or not.
David Roberts
We're talking about the media. Science in general is very widely trusted, especially used to be very widely trusted in the US. And environmentalism used to be a relatively bipartisan thing. They had to deliberately code it partisan. It did not enter that way. It's not intrinsically that.
Matt Sheffield
I mean, like Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, Republican president was the guy who created the National Park system. That was a very big tradition even in conservatism and certainly within the Republican Party. And so, like, actually weirdly enough, some of the right-wing anti-immigration groups actually grew out of conservative environmentalism because people were concerned that they were going to be overpopulating the United States. Immigrants were, and so we needed to keep them.
David Roberts
Give one thing I give Republicans credit for even like Inhofe early on, I think on some level, on some sort of brainstem level, conservatives like Inhofe appreciated the implications of climate change more fully than climate advocates did. Like, I think he recognized pretty early on, "Oh, this isn't going to be like traditional environmentalism." This is not a traditional conservation issue. If this is real, if this is true, then this means revolution. The facts here carry you to radicalism. If you accept these facts, you are carried inexorably to radicalism. So you have to refuse the facts. I think Inhofe was smarter in recognizing the end of that road than a lot of quote unquote moderates like McCain.
Matt Sheffield
That's an interesting observation. I think. yeah, he realized that there were a lot of implications for industry and Oklahoma being a big oil producing state. Yeah, he realized what that would mean.
David Roberts
Pull the string any direction you want. It means fossil fuel businesses and centers of the economy will be diminished and reduced in power. It means the whole world will have to cooperate if you want to solve it. It means you need stronger international agreements and maybe even some kind of international governance. You know what I mean? It leads away from nationalism and parochialism toward something like humanities get together and cooperate as one. And that's a very basic brainstem difference between conservatives and other people. And I just think Inhofe got wind of that early on. The people who paid more attention to climate change on the right were the ones, I think, to turn against it most sort of vigorously because they, I think, were smarter about where it would lead.
Matt Sheffield
And to that end, I guess early, relatively early on in some of the right-wing pushback against understanding climate science and acting in response to it, there was this scandal that it seems very quaint now that they cooked up a fake scandal that they called Climategate. Can you review what that was for people who weren't paying attention or don't remember that?
David Roberts
Yeah, it's funny because there's a much more recent model that's very similar that will be fresh in people's heads. So basically, somebody we never, I don't think ever found out exactly who, though. One just has to assume it was some sort of right-wing operator of some kind stole a bunch of emails from the scientists who work at the Tyndall Center, I think it was, or I forget, some center of Climate research. I think it was the Tyndall Center for Climate Research. And they stole thousands — in the UK. Thousands and thousands of thousands of emails.
Basically scoured through those emails to find not just points, but to find individual sentences and phrases that could, if you lift them out of context and give them a sinister interpretation, could make it look like the scientists were up to something shaky. And so you're right, it's sort of like it was a template for many, many right-wing faux scandals to come in that the right-wing media did a blitz on it. Questions raised, doubts, like this phrase, what do they mean by this trick? What do they mean they're going to run a trick on the data?
And the right-wing blitzed, media blitzed enough that the mainstream media had to sort of pick it up. Like, oh, everybody's talking about it now. You have to talk about this thing if everybody's talking about it. And so the mainstream media did its sort of "Scientists involved say this is all a bunch of horseshit, but critics say blah, blah, blah." And then eventually after the story had passed from the mainstream media and most people had forgotten about it, all the inquiries and investigations that were set up to put it to rest — and I think in the end there were something like seven or eight separate inquiries — all found that it was bullshit, all found that it was nothing, all found that you just get any database of thousands of emails and scour through it and you can find something that you can twist to look bad. But there was no —
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, and just to reference what the supposed malfeasance was, it was basically they were accusing people of having manipulated data and climate records and temperature data, basically. But as you said, yeah —
David Roberts
And this is important to emphasize because I think it also says something about right-wing scandals lately. It's not that there was a germ or a seed of wrongdoing that they found that they then blew up or enhanced or exaggerated. There was no seed. There was nothing there. The whole thing was spun up like cotton candy out of nothing. And that's sort of like — it demonstrated at the time. It demonstrated that they could do that. They're like, "Oh, we don't need to wait for a real scandal. We can just spin one up out of nothing anytime we want to."
And they've done it over and over and over again ever since. They did the same thing with the Democrats e-mails when that Russian hacker in his bedroom stole all the DNC emails. It's the same thing. You go through thousands of emails, you're going to find stuff you can spin to look bad, and by the time investigators or fact-checkers or whoever the hell show up, everybody's moved on and it goes down forever. Like Climategate is gospel on the right. It is in their holy books forever. The truth of all of that will never reach the right-wing base, and the middle doesn't care about it.
So it's like only the people who care on the left are ever going to even know that it was all bullshit.
Matt Sheffield
Well, and then, of course, that same playbook is being replayed right now with critical race theory. And that's why it's important for people who are journalists, mainstream journalists, to understand that you exist in a hostile environment and one in which your product is being attacked and you are being subjected to a manipulation campaign. And they don't even now seem to understand that because you're right that basically the goal of these strategies is to use biased right-wing media to create a story out of nothing or very little and then whip it up into such a fever pitch that mainstream journalists feel like they have to talk about it because, well, Republican elected officials are talking about it, so therefore, we have to talk about it.
And then they do, but they never put it in the correct context, which is, this is a public relations strategy and designed to manipulate the public. They never do that.
David Roberts
And there's a very strong bias, human cognitive bias, that is sort of summarized by where there's smoke, there's fire. We have a very strong bias to thinking, if everyone's talking about this, there must be something there. We have trouble not thinking that way even on the left, even after we've seen one after the other after the other, after the other of these bullshit things come up, even after we've seen QAnon and we've seen whatever, when Obama was going to launch a military assault from Texas. What was that one?
Matt Sheffield
The operation Jade Helm, I believe.
David Roberts
Jade Helm, you know, Sharia Law, you see them over and over again. But even now, just there's some part of your mind when you see a bunch of different stories on a subject, you almost can't help thinking there's something there. That's how they manage to associate Hillary Clinton with every human flaw, even diametrically opposed flaws, because if you just do it enough, even people who have no sort of primary opinion on the matter will just sort of absorb by osmosis. "Oh, I wouldn't be reading that she's shrill this often if there was something to that, or that she's weak or that she's tyrannical. She must be all the things."
Like people don't have a coherent, rational view of these things in their head. They just absorb ambiently from the media, what's everybody talking about, and this is what right-wing media hacked. And what they realize is now that the sort of grip of the gatekeepers is broken, right? There's no more scarcity in news, there's no more scarcity in information, so there's nobody gatekeeping anymore. Anything can make it into the public realm. And thus, if you want to create smoke and give people the suggestion that there's fire somewhere. You can do it just at will, right.
You don't need anything to build on. And they just do it over and over again. And this is what I think the media denies its responsibility for and culpability for and just its involvement in is like even if your story on subject X is totally factual, just by putting another story about subject X out there, you are in some way or another telling your news audience that it is significant. More significant than other things that receive less coverage. You're contributing to the sort of atmosphere, the ambient atmosphere of information. And that alone is expressing a judgment.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. In a lot of ways, I think you could argue that we're kind of in a modern-day reincarnation of the time of the era of yellow journalism. And it's weird how when people are learning about that in history, or they're discussing it in some journalistic context today, that people are like, "Oh, I can't believe they were so dumb. It fell for all these ridiculous stories." But that's literally what's happening today. Just to review it, for those not familiar with that idea in the beginnings of mass print publications. So mass print newspapers in the late 19th century, you had this proliferation of newspapers, and anybody with somewhat large enough an amount of money could start one.
And so you had pretty much every local political party had a newspaper, and you had lots of local vanity newspapers as well, of eccentric, crank millionaires, and they were just churning out whatever the fuck they wanted. And it was this environment where there were no holds barred in terms of information, in terms of what you could say, and newspapers would routinely make up stuff and insert it into their copy.
David Roberts
People will believe anything. It's not sort of like, I think, polite to say this in these conversations, but your average schmo is just not going to go into media consumption with all these defenses up and sort of scrutinizing everything and double-checking everything. That's just not how people work. People will believe what they're told, basically from trusted sources, and they'll trust the wrong people. It's interesting. I was listening to a pod about McCarthy and the Red Scare and it was really interesting to me because that got going through what we would now think of as right-wing media, sort of pamphlets and obscure sort of crank radio shows and stuff like that.
And that fanned the flames and that sort of pushed it into the mainstream. And as we all know, it went incredibly far and hurt a lot of people's lives. But in the end, it was still possible for the mainstream gatekeepers to say, "Have you left, sir, no sense of decency?" And to shut the thing down, politicians and mainstream media outlets could basically agree to say, "This is too far. We're shutting this down." And that's how it came to an end. And today I ask you, like, if there was a comparable Red Scare, there's no one who has the power anymore to shut it down.
You could prove the charges wrong to any sort of empirical standard you wanted. You could get accurate information out there all you wanted, but you just can't stop anything anymore. There's no way to stop half the media universe from just churning it forever if they want to. So, I think we're going to see if we get Republican control of government again and Trump in office again, we're going to see something like that. And there will be no trusted institutions left that can step in and say, enough's enough.
There's no Walter Cronkite anymore who can step in and say, Vietnam's gone on long enough and crystallize the change in public opinion. There's no trusted institutions or people that are trusted across borders or across barriers anymore. So, something like the Red Scare today, I just think there'd be zero check on it. There would just be no way to ever stop it. It could go on forever.
Matt Sheffield
It would be probably the Antifa Scare, arguably.
Anna Tarkov
It never stopped, in a sense. Couldn't you say —
David Roberts
Well, they never gave it up, right? They never dropped anything. They never dropped anything. But there was a time they could be held to the periphery somewhat, or at least banished back to the periphery somewhat. There was still a mainstream.
Anna Tarkov
I think, unfortunately. I'm sorry, I've not introduced myself to anyone, but I'm Anna Tarkov. I'm an associate editor at Flux. Hi, David. Thank you for joining us. By the way, I'm sorry I wasn't here earlier. They can't put that genie back in the bottle, as you say. We have to think forward about ways that we can mitigate these types of things. And we've had people that have written things for our side, and we've hosted other types of spaces like this where we are trying to wrestle with this problem, as are, of course, many other of our colleagues and other people who are concerned about these types of things.
And yeah, I don't sadly, no easy answers, but I know that we often have talked about that maybe there could be some broad teaching of critical thinking somehow that a lot of people do come back to that type of thing.
David Roberts
I think that's so wrong. I don't know if you want to have this out here, but I just think that's the wrong direction to look. You're never going to create a society filled with rational people who assess with all these good cognitive habits. It's very difficult to do that, even for yourself, even to be that way for yourself. When you make a conscious effort, conscious constantly, it's never going to be. You can't look to the individual, I guess, is what I would say. This is a social phenomenon to me. All the questions about truth are downstream of questions about trust.
This is all about social trust. The great mass of people have never been scientific thinkers or rational or gone around gathering evidence and weighing the evidence before they draw their conclusions. Most people, most of the time, then and now, just believe what the people and institutions they trust. We need trustworthy institutions.
Anna Tarkov
I do agree with you. I think that we need actually, I would say a multifaceted approach, ideally. And I think that where I agree with you 100% in a way. I also come back to thinking that we're not going to get back to a Walter Cronkite reality, right, ever. So people have to of course, we're not going to turn everybody into a critical thinker and everybody into a brilliant parser of information or even the majority of people. That is impossible. I 100% agree with you. I think that what we can do, though, is in the people that are concerned about these matters as the minority though they may be, that if you can have people learn and exercise these skills, they can have influence on other people who are not brilliant critical thinkers or are able to.
I don't know if that can scale, but on a personal level, I've seen this work in terms of personal relationships, I'm a person who is, I'd like to believe, a good critical thinker, et cetera, and I can affect people in my life and people I come in contact with. And if we can have a again, it's a multifaceted approach that we have to take. One of the problems, of course, is the vast ecosystem of media and other types of actors who are committed to disinformation for various ends. That is a whole other area that —
David Roberts
If you look at the research on like if you look at the research on conspiracy theorists, like Q types, cult members, what you find over and over again from this research, from the disinformation research is it's super hard once someone has been sort of led down this path to get them back. Like, it's high touch, super emotionally intensive. It's a real one on one thing, and really the best you can do is cut off the supply. It's always a supply issue. There's a lot of poison that once it's out there, is just going to do a lot of damage no matter how much you're trying to inoculate people against it.
There's got to be some supply — there's got to be some control over supply.
Anna Tarkov
Yeah, a 100% a 100% —
David Roberts
This is a complicated question: Who do we trust to be that? And it's like the right-wing media spent decades very deliberately attempting like, I remember Rush Limbaugh saying this back in the early 2000s. He's like, academia, journalism, politics, and I forget what the fourth one was. These are the four pillars of deception, which basically means all the institutions are taken over by liberals and you can only trust us. And they've been saying that over and over for 40 or 50 years now. So the question is what institution gets to play the gatekeeper role anymore. Like, we don't trust mainstream media.
We don't trust science anymore. We're going to trust, like, we're trying to get Facebook to do know, we're trying to browbeat Facebook and Twitter into doing it, but do we really want them to be the hand on the supply side? You know what I mean? So there's just no way around the problem of trust. You have to have social trust if you want to have a shared reality that you're all inhabiting.
Matt Sheffield
No, you're right. One of the big issues is religion in regards to fundamentalism. We've talked about several instances of right-wing propaganda operations, such as lying about smoking or lying about the Iraq War, the first one, George W. Bush's Iraq War, and climate change. But I think if you go back even further, you could say that trying to cast doubt on belief in human evolution, that creationism is the original alternative fact. And so because of that, you've got this idea that a lot of people who are Christian fundamentalists in America, they feel like that they know deep down that — they believe the Bible is literally 100% true.
But they know that that's not provable. And they know that, in fact, there are a lot of things that disprove their ideas. And so it puts them in 100% tension with everyone else.
David Roberts
Yes, and also who is convincing within that world. If you have two guys telling you that Jesus spoke to them and told them to start a church and you should join it, which one are you going to believe? You're going to believe the one who's most charismatic. That's what the sort of coin of the realm is in fundamentalism, is charisma, because, like you say, there are no empirical and there's no outside empirical standards you can use. So it all comes down to charisma. And you see this now basically on right-wing media and in right-wing what's left, I guess, of right-wing intellectual circles is it's just performance.
It's just who's a good performer? That's what Ben Shapiro is. He performs argument, you know what I mean? Or performs investigation more than he actually does it. It's all who's most charismatic. I was thinking about that when I was listening to this podcast about Mars Hill. The Mars Hill Church super charismatic guy started it and ended up, you know, being an abusive dick. And I was thinking, that's like, who do you think are the charismatic people who talk loud and a lot and draw a lot of attention to like, those are scam artists. That's why there's so many scam artists on the right constantly.
Matt Sheffield
Well, and that's why I do think that progressive Christians actually are going to be integral to overcoming some of this disinformation, because progressive Christianity in the beginning of the 20th century and some even in the 19th century at the end, figured out that, well, the Bible doesn't appear to be literally true. It appears that there are multiple gods that were in the Hebrew Bible that were squished together and created a single one and that God had a wife and that these gods were members of a pantheon. So that's something — then they basically said, well, okay, that means it's not literally true, but that doesn't mean we have to not believe in God anymore.
It just means that this is a book that was created by flawed humans and we can still get things that we agree with out of it. And there's nothing wrong with believing in some of the ideas and rejecting ones that we don't like. And so that's a much healthier epistemology, and it's one that Judaism had come by a lot earlier than Christianity had. And so that's going to be a big part of helping people overcome some of their intellectual nihilism.
David Roberts
These are kinds of people who want this certainty and want this lack of ambiguity. That's what they're after. How do you convince them to be more cognitively flexible when the reason they came to fundamentalist Christian theology in the first place is that it's easy, very simple, easy answers and a hierarchy that puts them on the top. That's what they want?
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, well, no, that's true. The certitude is very comforting for people who want that. Ultimately, there's probably always going to be people who have that psychological need for certitude. But overall, though, for people who don't have that need, there has to be a better awareness of standing up for uncertainty, for standing up for pluralism, and understanding that these are things that they don't exist by themselves, that people had to fight for them and that you have to fight for them. These are not things that exist because, again, the story of humanity over and over in societies, over and over, is that the rule of the strong oppressing those who cannot resist them, that's the human story over and over.
And so having pluralism, having markets of some kind, these are all creations, artificial creations of governance and of democracy. And so you can have your beefs with it, but ultimately the other systems just don't work as well. But you have to fight for what you have.
David Roberts
Although I would say, and this harkens back to something I said earlier about Inhofe sniffing out the implications of climate change before other people, I sort of think it's a little bit similar with empiricism, and it's a little bit similar with capitalism. If you really let capitalism run, it is utterly destructive to local cultures. It famously sort of standardizes everything. Wipes out and workers move, and it breaks up these communities. This is something I think you're seeing, like Rubio and Hawley get a little sort of hint at these days. Like unrestrained capitalism is totally toxic to any parochial culture.
And it's true also of empiricism. Like, if you follow that string, any parochial belief or superstition you have is going to eventually go down. I can understand why some people are just like, "No, I'm not going to take step one. I'm not going to take step one down that road because I see where it goes."
Matt Sheffield
There is perhaps some positive, though, in terms of focusing on educational initiatives that if you look at younger Republicans in office at the national level, obviously a lot of them are pro QAnon and whatnot, but there actually are some of them, like Matt Gaetz even, who actually believe that climate change is real, believe it or not. And their ideas of how to respond to that don't necessarily make sense, but they are different and this is something that more conventional older Republicans regard them with suspicion because of that. I don't know if you've seen Gaetz talk about climate change at all, have you?
David Roberts
Yes, I've been keenly following this sort of nascent Republican attempt to claim to have an answer to climate change. But from what I can tell, Gaetz's thinking and the thinking of that whole caucus is almost purely 100% political i.e. it's not good for Republicans anymore for the division to be Democrats want to do something about this and Republicans don't. That has come to be viewed unfavorably. So they need to pull yet another scam on the mainstream media. They need to offer up something that looks like another side so that they can change the story from Dems want to do something Republicans don't to Dems and Republicans disagree on exactly what should be done about climate change. Which is the kind of story that they can ride forever, like they can delay climate action forever under cover of that story. Pure denialism has come to be kind of a PR disaster. But the two side story, as they're well aware, you can get away with that infinitely.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, well, is that progress, though, do you think?
David Roberts
I almost think I go back and forth on this, but I almost would have told you 10 or 15 years ago, I mean, I was saying this a long time ago, that denialism is stupid. They caught the denialism tiger by the tail and suffered for it. They should have pivoted to bullshit faux solutions a long time ago because that would have served to — they only became the bad guy in this debate because of the denialism. If they could have just smoothed it out with both sides nonsense from a much earlier point, they could have gotten away with delaying substantial action forever without as much political flak.
I think this was always the smart pivot on their part. They should have done it a long time ago. I don't know if it's progress because once again, what media that people read or see on cable news is going to tell the American people these solutions that they are putting forward are horseshit — they will not do anything and they will not solve the problem, this is not a good faith policy proposal. Who will say that that's the truth? But who will say that such that any of the sort of casually interested Americans will ever hear that?
Matt Sheffield
That's the sort of thing that we need people to say on these cable news shows and whatnot where they routinely create these false equivalences or set up these panels. And a lot of times the guests may not even know very much about the topic that they're being asked to talk about. And so I've seen many times where you have some far-right activist who's got a complete set of answers just that they don't make sense logically or with the facts, but they at least are short enough to be able to fit into the sound bites. And these debate segments, they're not accomplishing anything and in fact, I'd say they're harmful.
David Roberts
It gets back to the performance. As I was saying earlier, who wins those is who's the most sort of charismatic shouter. And so to get back to incentives, that whole ecosystem, the incentives in that genre are for bullshitters.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, well, and then I guess the other sort of unfortunate dynamic is that if you look at the — and I stopped watching them a long time ago — but the political Sunday morning shows where they've got this fetish for, this obsession with trying to find the reasonable Republican. They're continually putting Chris Christie on the air, or they've been trying to turn Asa Hutchinson from Arkansas lately, but they don't know how to talk to them. And so while they might be not a raving anti-vax lunatic, they're perfectly willing to enable the raving anti-vax lunatics. And these people like Chuck Todd and these other hosts, they have no idea how to speak to them.
They seem to think that their only mechanism is seemingly trying to attack people for hypocrisy and that's it. Or trying to get just asking the same dumb question, well, was the election stolen? What do you gain by asking that question every time? If you know what they're going to say, then don't invite them on the program because you are not going to persuade them of anything.
David Roberts
The only thing that should be asked is what would it — like, this wasn't enough, this wasn't enough, this wasn't enough. What would be enough for Trump and his base to do? Is there something they could do that you would decry or denounce? Just in theory, let's try to set a bar beforehand this time, right. Let's set a few markers in the sand beforehand this time, so that when all these collaborators travel past them, at least they're on record saying they wouldn't.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. Instead of asking about 2020, you should ask them, is overriding the votes of a state wrong? Having a state legislator override the vote of the voters wrong? That's what they need to be asking.
David Roberts
Yes. Or if you're a member of the House of Representatives, would you vote to take the decision out of the hands of a state and just give the electors to Trump, which of course the House of Representatives absolutely can lawfully do and we have every reason to expect will do in 2024.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. And then at the same time, while they could do better in terms of how they speak to far-right people and their enablers, the press hasn't really communicated the urgency of the upcoming 2022 and 2024 election. And that was a huge thing with this whole critical race theory panic. Is that just like the Climategate emails or just like the Hillary Clinton emails that — they're designed to sort of make everyone else throw their hands up and just be disgusted or confused and then also rev up the raving lunacy base. And so if you look at polling of Democratic voters and independents or moderates, they're very disengaged right now and that's by design on the part of the radical right.
David Roberts
I keep reading about the Republicans looking for more Youngkins right, just sort of like how to be —
Anna Tarkov
Respectable Trump
David Roberts
yes, how to be a Trump in the sheets but then sort of a moderate in the streets. But the problem is that takes like and I guarantee you here's a prediction, the next Youngkin, whoever it is, part of how they will attempt to signal their moderation to the middle, to the media, will be to say reasonable sounding things about climate. That will be one of the sort of flags that they can wave at the middle while winking at the base. The next Youngkin will be, quote unquote, good on climate. That's my prediction.
Anna Tarkov
Yeah. And I think that it's important to note that not only does it not fill me with hope that people like Matt Gaetz believe the climate change is real, and I think the reason for that is very important to remember that they're quite organized, worldwide, extreme right fascist movement. And we are going to have, and already are having climate refugees from the Global South. And I think that believing — I read this article once where it was like what happens when the right starts to believe in climate change? And a lot of the things are quite bad.
David Roberts
It's going to be super ugly and that's coming soon too. I don't think that's very far away. I mean, if you think about it, if you try to put yourself in the mind of a reactionary and you find out that there's this global problem, the way to solve it is either to sort of cooperate with people across the world in a sort of global governance where you make present day sacrifices for future generations. Which doesn't sound like them. Or you could just build walls, pull up your borders, hoard the remaining oil and natural gas under the ground and try to basically lifeboat it.
And that will be the conservative response to climate change. It'll be what they call ecofascism, it'll be border restrictions and it will be marginalized communities being forced to again pay the price for it.
Anna Tarkov
Exactly. There's a book what is it called, Tropic of Chaos? I have not read it yet. Yeah, it was recommended to me by a journalist friend who said that this is already — we're seeing this type of thing across the world already, where there are all these opportunists who are taking advantage of already, these, again, disadvantaged and mostly communities of color all across the world. And it's only going to get worse, as you say. And already again, we are seeing that already in the US. It's not an accident that we've already had this type of rhetoric about walls and locking countries down to immigration and that sort of thing.
David Roberts
Look at how COVID played out too. It's a perfect — Look if you are just assessing COVID logically, empirically, you immediately come to the need for communal activity, right? You have to act together, you have to make sacrifices for one another like you have to act with solidarity. That's the only way to solve it. But is that how people reacted? Like, was that people's natural instinctive reaction? Basically, when people get stressed out and uncertain and anxious, they don't get more progressive. That doesn't make them into cosmopolitans. The more stressed and anxious and uncertain and frightened people get, the more small c conservative they get and the more open they are to those kinds of arguments. That's what I fear.
Anna Tarkov
It has gone both ways, I would say. Of course, I'd say definitely much more on the side of the people who are, as you were talking about. But there was a moment I don't know if we're past it. I really hope we're not past it. But in the spaces I'm in and I know a lot of organizers and a lot of people who are really on the front lines of working for various types of social change, including climate change. And I think that we have seen the other side of the coin, so to speak, where people have pulled together in a lot of places.
There have been all these flourishing at one point of mutual aid efforts and all these types of things and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, it's an open question whether it's going to persist or not. As we've been saying, there's a lot of people who are very apathetic right now, especially people who are more moderate or less politically engaged, whatever you want to call it. I want to just again bring in something you were saying before too, about how unfortunately the march of capitalism that must ever continue is a big hindrance to all of this. Because people who are, I have a friend who calls it "shit life syndrome," is her term for people who — because in our society, it is so hard for many people that — it is so hard for them just to make it to put food on the table, to put a roof over their heads, to pay for things that you don't have time to participate fully in democracy and you have no inclination to do so when you are trying to figure out how you're going to pay your rent or etc.
David Roberts
Right, and if politics does nothing for you, you're much more likely to. When someone comes along and says, "Hey, fuck all these people, I'm going to blow it up," you're like, "Yeah, whatever."
Anna Tarkov
Yeah, that sounds good. And I don't do anything for me because why would I? They've never done anything for me and they've not helped me.
Matt Sheffield
Michael Moore in 2016, he predicted that Donald Trump was going to win on the idea that a lot of people just feel like they have no control over their lives and they just want to blow the system up.
David Roberts
Well, that's one of the many frustrating self-reinforcing cycles that it's so easy for conservatives to launch. Right? Like they can make you feel anxious and then you become more conservative and then they pass crappy policy that makes you even more anxious. It seems like everything they start ends up working to their favor and it's so difficult to start the opposite kind of — it's so difficult to start a self-reinforcing positive cycle where people build on something together and it's reaffirmed and they benefit from it and so they have more trust and so they build more together.
It's very hard to get that kind of thing going, especially when you have basically half the media and one half of your entire society trying its best to make everyone feel shitty and anxious.
Anna Tarkov
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's a lot of at least I'd see some possible promise or a good idea in the sense that there are people that talk about for example, everyone has like a different lens that they view a lot of these issues from where people, of course, will look at multiple viewpoints. But a lot of time people have one that they focus in on more than others, depending on the person, the commentator, the journalist, whoever. And I do think that there's a lot of validity to the types of people that say that one of the ways to get out of a lot of these problems is that we need to have a culture of accountability for people in positions of power which we have not had for I don't know how long.
David Roberts
That is the central characteristic of American public life from the time I have been old enough to be aware of it is: Shitty people doing shitty things and facing zero accountability. I mean, over and over and over and over and over again. I can't imagine, like, people born after me, younger people, have never literally never seen anything but that in American public life of just like the shittier you are, the more you benefit, the more you get ahead. And that's just incredibly toxic for trust, like I said, for social trust.
Anna Tarkov
Yeah. And the troublesome thing is that not only some people respond to that with, of course, apathy, as we've said. They look around and they say, "Well, nobody faces consequences. There's nothing I can do. Certainly my vote doesn't count as much as someone who can hire wealthy lobbyists, etc. Why bother?" Which I can understand how people can get to that point very easily. And then the other thing is that there are people who then they valorize and want to emulate these types of people because getting rich, etc.
David Roberts
Fuck. Yeah. Well, and what else is whiteness but the promise to middle and lower class people that they can get a little taste of that, a little taste of what it's like to be on top and to not be accountable and to be able to do whatever you want and no one can stop you. Whiteness is just like you can have this version of it. Yes, exactly.
Anna Tarkov
That's right. And that's why people hold on to that. Above — people are always so mystified why these people are voting against their economic self-interest. Well, it's not that hard to figure out, really.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. And then also they have other interests as well. So if you feel like you can never exist in the market, you just resolve that well, yeah, I'll just always be whatever my current job is. Then you can seek different incentives. So maintaining white supremacy or Christian supremacy, those can become things that are valuable to you and will provide a psychic fulfillment.
David Roberts
The thing about the reactionary mind is based in hierarchy. Everything's about hierarchy. Every relationship is one of dominance and submission. So in every relationship, you're either on top or on the bottom. So all whiteness is, and to a certain extent maleness too, right, is a guarantee that no matter how low you are in society or in the economy, you're still above black people, you're still above your wife and kids, you still are the king of a little kingdom of your own. And that's in your interests. I mean, they're not wrong about that being in their interest.
Matt Sheffield
It's true. But just going back to the climate topic here for a bit. So, I think one of the developments there have been a number of recent developments in terms of bringing the costs of renewable energy, particularly solar, down, and China has really doubled down on a lot of manufacture of that and trying to deploy it. Do you think that those developments might move towards some more positive outcomes for the environment?
David Roberts
Yes, yes. I think what we're going to see is China responding somewhat rationally to economic incentives, which just mean everybody looks at sort of like, what's China's latest proclamation? And we judge them by that. But if you look over the last ten or 15 or 20, 30 years, their level of ambition on clean energy and on climate just keeps going up and up and up. It's never as fast as people want, but it's only moving in one direction. And that's because all the prices for clean energy are moving in one direction. And it's suddenly known whoever gets there first in terms of the materials and the manufacturing of these components of a clean energy future is going to economically benefit. China is racing — this whole thing in the conservative circles are like, "China's not doing anything. Why should we?"
It's so dumb. China is investing trillions of dollars to try to capture these markets. These markets and solar panels and wind turbines and everything. Like, China's going as fast as it thinks it can, literally. And while still maintaining social stability, it's racing.
Matt Sheffield
And to understand that this is infrastructure, manufacturing, supply chain. Like, again, that's their supposed obsession with that now. But the reality is if you actually care about supply chain issues, then you need to be militating for massive investments in green energy.
Yes, which is what Democrats are trying to fucking do with the Build Back Better bill as we speak, there are literally provisions in that bill specifically designed to stand up domestic supply chains for EVs and turbines and solar panels. And it's going to dump billions of dollars in there. And then someday those facilities are going to benefit red states, and there are going to be red governors taking credit for them. You'll see that in a few years.
Yeah. Well, ultimately it's possible that some right-wing billionaire might find the light might finally go off in his head, "Oh, I can make a ton of money off of green energy." And in fact, there was somebody, Boone Pickens, who had invested lots and lots of money in wind and natural gas, but then he died. And nobody kind of stepped into that space after he was deceased.
David Roberts
Or if you're a right-winger, you can take some comfort in the fact that it seems to be in America, if you become a billionaire, you become a right-winger sort of automatically, which is what happened to Elon Musk, you know, who came in talking about saving humanity from climate change and now has become a fucking deficit scold. So don't worry. Right-wingers like money brings people in your direction.
Anna Tarkov
I mean, I strongly believe that someone can't be a billionaire without being some sort of an asshole. But structurally, in order to amass billions of dollars, I don't think that it's possible to do that while being a completely ethical and moral person. It's just not —
The real chicken and egg question. They seem to both, like — they get grosser the richer they get and the richer they get, the more it makes them gross. Who knows where it starts.
Matt Sheffield
All right, well, this has been a great discussion. We're going to open it up in just a little bit here to audience questions. If anybody has a question, feel free to use the raise your hand option as we get toward the end here. So I'm just going to go back and I'll put a link in the show notes to the piece that and I mentioned it earlier on Twitter, but I'll mention it again after we're done here. So David wrote a piece in 2017 about Donald Trump and tribal epistemology and just kind of closing the loop a little bit on some of what you were saying that in this essay.
I'm curious what you think of it now that you were talking about the problem of disinformation to some degree at the time, you were talking about has to be solved on the demand side. But you did say, and I'll quote from you because I'm sure you don't have it memorized, you said, "If it is solved, it will not be, in my view, on the demand side," you said, "but rather to do it to change the incentives of disinformation." What do you mean by changing the incentives to produce disinformation? What does that mean?
David Roberts
Well, just to put in the most basic possible terms, you should feel like it is a risk to lie about something in public. You should feel like if you are exposed as lying in public, whether you're in the media, whether you're a politician or whatever, you will receive disapprobation for that social disapprobation. Your reputation will be hurt, it will affect your subsequent life opportunities. It feels really dumb and simple to say that, but we've somehow constructed a system now where there is zero downside for lying. There's literally nothing that happens to you. Your lie might not get believed, it might not work, but you don't ever suffer for it.
This is what Trump demonstrated. Just make up one thing after another. Some of them will hit, some of them won't, but why not just keep trying? You can do some of that with economic incentives. You can do some of that, I think, with government regulation. But ultimately that kind of has to be like a social thing. Like you need to just restore respect for truth as a social norm, as a shared social baseline.
Matt Sheffield
How do you do that, though?
David Roberts
Fuck if I know, I was worried you might ask.
Matt Sheffield
I will quote from the last headline, sub headline in your piece. Your headline was "The answer is: ha ha, just kidding."
David Roberts
Right? Because I don't know the answer. I mean, if you read my sort of gloomy outlook, I try to think about is there historical precedent for a culture, a society or culture that has become this cleaved in two with one side against another inhabiting different realities, wanting different having different visions of the good and of a good society and just having different beliefs about what is real and what isn't. Like what exists and what doesn't healing itself in some way other than collapse and violence.
Anna Tarkov
That's a very a good question.
David Roberts
Never mind, like, an unlikely answer. I don't even have a candidate answer at all. I don't even know what it would look like. I don't know how you would go about doing that. It looks very gloomy to me, especially in light of social media, et cetera, et cetera, because if you had your hand on, like I said before, if you had your hand on the supply, if you had some effect over what could get into the public square, then at least you'd have a place to focus your efforts. But nobody's got their hand on that anymore.
Everything's flooding in. There's no way to keep anything out.
Anna Tarkov
Yeah, again, like I said before, I think it has to be a multifaceted approach, right? There's no, like, silver bullet, sadly. If we knew what it was, someone would have done it by now. But what I mean by a multifaceted approach, it's like you're saying, I think there are a lot of different factors, a lot of different things that can be done and that haven't yet been done or tried, or at least not — for example, I mean, there are groups that advocate for tougher regulation by the FCC, for example, in terms of somebody not being able to buy up 500 radio stations and TV stations and etc., and broadcast the same message on all of them, that's like a pretty big thing that could potentially be done.
That was, again, it requires the will. It requires somebody to take the lead on actually doing something like that. As far as on the individual population level, where, as you said, I'm somewhat pessimistic in the sense that I don't think we're going to solve it either. We can teach people critical thinking, we can do this, we can do that, we can try to have people that are trusted, that check facts, etc., but I don't think we're going to ever get back to a point where we once were. But I think that on the political side of things that then what has to happen is that there has to be a recognition of the fact that there are these — as you said, there are people who live in these alternate realities.
And maybe the only thing we can realistically do is to keep people who are not living in the real reality out of power as much as humanly possible.
David Roberts
Well, you're getting at the biggest central challenge here, which is in practice, anything that attempted to restore accuracy or that tried to enforce accuracy would in practice, mostly be aimed at conservatives. In practice would mostly be shutting down conservative voices or blocking conservatives from being on Twitter or whatever. Because it's conservatives that are doing most of the lying and it's no coincidence. So it's like the fear of being partisan, the fear of seeming like you're on one side or the other, has paralyzed every institution that could do anything about it to the point of uselessness. And I don't know the way out of that.
You just saw them run the whole scam on Facebook again, just like they did on mainstream media, like browbeating Facebook, claiming to be discriminated against, demanding to be represented on any sort of council or panel or whatever, and they've absolutely run the scam on Facebook and now are allowed to say whatever they want on Facebook. And Facebook has put hardcore right-wing propagandists on their sort of truth committee or whatever it was. What institution can escape that bind?
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, although, I mean, to be fair to the other social network, Facebook from the very beginning was proto-fascist with Peter Thiel on the board.
David Roberts
Yeah, I don't think they had very far to travel.
Anna Tarkov
Exactly.
Matt Sheffield
Well, I mean, no, you're right, a lot of this it has to be a combination effort. And this is something because the disinformation economy is very distributed. It can't be attacked in a head-on fashion and successfully. And I would say so before I started Flux, I worked at the Hill doing polling for them. And one of the things that we always polled on was Donald Trump's approval rating. And it was very different from other presidents in that he had this strong floor of support that seemed very consistent, but to a large degree, that floor of support —
we asked people, do you strongly approve somewhat disapprove or strongly disapprove of Trump? And there definitely were a substantial number of people who strongly approved of Trump, but there also were for a long time, people who only somewhat approved of him. And those people figuring out what makes them do what they do and what motivates them may be the key to overcoming a lot of the social impasses that we have. And that's why I mentioned progressive Christianity.
Anna Tarkov
Well, on the one hand, yes. And on the other hand, isn't it partially a pandering to those people that has caused the media to take this approach where we have to prove that we're not partisan?
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. Understanding and — understanding them, but not pandering to them. Yes, good point there.
David Roberts
To again and again, if you look at the sort of academic research on public opinion, and what you find over and over again is that people basically take their cues from elites, they basically take their cues from people they trust that are in leadership positions in what they consider their tribe. And that's sort of one of the most basic features of public opinion. It's one of the most basic features of human thinking. Which leads me again and again to the conclusion that there's just no way to solve this from outside the conservative movement. It's got to reform itself from within somehow, because it's completely sealed everyone else out.
Like, what else can anybody do? No one else is trusted inside it. And when will that happen? And what reason would they have to reform? They're winning. It's working. They change what they're doing.
Matt Sheffield
That's a great point. But ultimately they are damaging the things that they suppose that they're trying to protect. So, like, for instance, if you look at belief in Christianity in the United States, it's gone down as right-wing Christianity came to the fore on the Republican Party. Belief in the Bible has gone down. And even like Orthodox Judaism is losing members now compared to Reform or Conservative or actually Conservatives lost as well. Reform is the only type of Judaism that's growing in. And that's also true with regard to Christianity is that there are a lot of people out there, these fundamentalist right-wing Christianity sects, they're losing members as well.
So like Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons or Southern Baptists, they're all losing members in western countries. I think that understanding — that's why I said understanding what motivates me and then trying to have the people who are concerned, rather than leaving and becoming Democrats, just try to stay and fight for reason within their own party. And that's a hard ask, I understand.
David Roberts
It is. I mean, if you look at the dynamics of fundamentalist movements or fascist movements, they all have a kind of arc, right? They all start with a broad appeal, usually as a backlash against some regime or elite or some bloated, whatever, and then it's just the mentality. They have to get more and more extreme, build clearer and clearer walls around them, and they shrink, right? I mean, this is what happens. They shrink and get more extreme and shrink and get more extreme and then end up imploding and bringing some substantial chunk of society down with them.
That's sort of the arc I think you would expect this to have is more and more people get shut out, you know, like you see, like Liz Cheney, what happened to Liz Cheney. Like more and more people will get sort of declared apostates and booted until the thing shrinks down, until it can't really but that will be an ugly, ugly, ugly process. And maybe you could reverse it. Maybe Republicans of goodwill could throw themselves on the tracks and try to stop that process from happening. But I don't have a lot of hope.
Anna Tarkov
I often come back to the fact that while you can't necessarily get people to think critically, I think that it's more achievable to get people to work — deep canvassing, have you heard of that? Where you go and you talk to people not about a specific issue or a specific candidate or a specific policy, but you try to reframe their thinking about various things. For example, I know of, and this has been empirically studied and it seems to work. So it's something that unfortunately, I don't think is employed as often because a political campaign isn't going to; they're going to go and talk about their candidate.
A political party typically is not going to engage in that sort of thing either because they want their candidates to win, et cetera, or to promote their policies or whatever the case may be, or their brand. This is what Democrats stand for. This is what Republicans stand for. And so I think things like that show a lot of promise. It's just a matter of them being employed more.
David Roberts
Well, and think about it when you leave that house. I believe that this is what I mean by sort of high touch intensive interaction or intervention. I believe if you can get in the house with people and talk with them over time and establish a human connection, you can invoke different frames. You can get them to think about things in a different way.
Anna Tarkov
Exactly.
David Roberts
But then you leave the house and you're gone. And Fox is still there, and Fox is there all the time, 24 hours a day, day and night, leading them back the other direction. So we can't go deep canvas everybody. We've got to get a voice of reason inside the house.
Anna Tarkov
You have to work all the different sides.
David Roberts
Yes.
Anna Tarkov
Matt, do we want to do questions? Let's do it.
Matt Sheffield
All right. We're going to open it up to the audience here real quick.
Anna Tarkov
If you haven't used spaces before, you have to request.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, okay. And actually, it looks like we have a request here. I mentioned this at the beginning, but if you weren't there at the beginning, this is a recorded Twitter space. So if you don't want your voice to be recorded, then you may not want to ask your question. But I did want to disclose that to everybody. Henry Elsewhere real quick. I have added you as a speaker. Go ahead.
Henry Elsewhere
Hey, how's it going? I'm curious, have you seen I believe it was in China, this kind of like, might actually be the carbon capture technology we're looking for. I just want to know if you'd seen it and if you had any thoughts on it. I heard there's a bunch of VCs that are super stoked on it because they're like "Oh, we only need like a 25 x 25 miles area with these carbon capture plants set up and they basically turn it into fertilizer." I don't know if you're familiar with this or not, but kind of interesting if it works.
David Roberts
Yeah, I can say a few things. I don't know what specific technology you're talking about, but this is a super active area of research and there are a bunch of different interesting directions people are pursuing. There's mineralization, which might be what you're talking about, where you absorb the carbon into minerals, which basically render it stable and then just throw them down on the ocean floor or bury them or mix them in with fertilizer because they're a good fertilizer. There's a bunch of different carbon capture machines. All I would say is that carbon capture is going to be a marginal contributor.
Even if you take the sort of International Energy Agency as gospel, it predicts a lot of carbon capture, but still, carbon capture is going to be dwarfed by solar and wind and batteries and all the normal stuff. So I feel like the tech community and the VC community have gotten themselves sort of geeked up in kind of a Star Trek way about this because they love the idea of advanced super technology that no one's invented yet and can magically solve things. But the fact is, we have the stuff we mostly need and it's mostly political and social resistance that's stopping it. And it would be nice if some of those tech and VC people got in the arena and advocated for policies that got the first 80% of reductions done before we start worrying about these technologies, we need to do the last 20%. That's what I would say generally about carbon capture.
Matt Sheffield
Okay. All right, thanks for that. All right, Nelson looks like he got his Internet connection resolved. So go ahead, Nelson.
Nelson
Yeah, sorry about that. We were talking earlier about one way for people to become more interested in the truth or more interested in the left and its policies is for the truth to help them. For the left and its policies to help them, right. And it seems to me that there's a lot of things like the Green New Deal, et cetera, that have the potential to directly aid people in their lives. But I think a problem is taking credit for it, right. If it is not reported on as actually helping the people's lives, or if the effects are downplayed or accredited to Republicans, for instance, then it seems to me that you will not get the desired effect of people becoming invested in the truth or progressive policies.
So I guess I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how to, supposing that we do succeed in improving people's lives, getting credit for that and using that to move progressive policies forward further, right? It seems like, can we get more progressive media? Can we yank the current media, give more credit where it's due? What do we do?
David Roberts
Yeah, that's a fantastic question, which I could go on about at length, but I'll try to be concise. First, I would just say, didn't the poll just come out not very long ago that a substantial number of people who got the childcare tax credit checks think they came from Trump? Something like 30 ish 40 ish percent of people in the country? So you're right that there is no this sort of naive version of this notion that Dems have that like, oh, if we change material circumstances in a positive way, it will redound to our political benefit.
That is naive because as you are sort of indicating here, even people's experience of their direct own lives and circumstances is mediated in some sense. Like they don't bring meaning to these things inherently. They find out from the voices and media around them what these things mean, what's the context for them, like who's responsible for them, all these kind of questions. So there's nothing unmediated. You can't just change material circumstances and expect that to do the political work for you. I think Obama found that out, he lowered most people's taxes, and yet to this day, most people believe he raised their taxes.
So, I would say two things. One is, when you think about interventions that can improve people's material circumstances, think not only in economic terms like Obama did, but also in social terms. What is a change in their circumstances that's so big and obvious that they can't miss it? You know what? And Trump grasped this in his little lizard brain, which is why he held up the checks until he could sign them. Do you guys remember that? He didn't send out relief checks until he could sign, but he got that. So, you need to do things, one that are big and dumb and clear and unambiguous enough that they're easy — if you do talk about them, you can cut through the fog a little bit and just make it clear.
And things, I think, like EV tax credits. If we're going to give people $3,500 back on the purchase of an EV, that $3,500 check should come with, like, Joe Biden's smiling face on it saying, "Thanks to the Build Back Better Act, here is your $3,500." That kind of thing. Like, Dems need to think more crudely almost about public policy and quit this technocratic fiddling with tax write-offs and tax deductions and capped tested tax benefits, all this shit. No one knows. No one ever finds out about any of that stuff, even if it does help. So, do some big, dumb things is step number one.
And then step number two is just talking about it a lot. And that involves two things. One, some message discipline on the left. Which, how do you do that? I don't know. Two, it involves what is the information infrastructure that gets those messages to the ears and eyes of voters? And that is the biggest question in my mind facing the left today, is that they don't have one of those, right? You have a right-wing media dedicated 24 hours a day, all year long to making them look like shit no matter what they do. And then you have a mainstream media who, as we were discussing earlier, views its role as, quote, unquote, adversarial, hold people accountable, which in their translation means just writing negative stories over and over and over again.
So when you have a Democrat in office, the entire media landscape is dedicated to writing negative stories about them and making them look bad. And that's why that explains so much of what we see around us now. So, what is the left's machine to push back against that? Is it a cable channel? Is it a radio station? Should we send hip-looking young people out on TikTok to do — I'm half joking, but I saw a handsome young man on TikTok the other day with an incredibly articulate little presentation about zoning, about upzoning and its climate benefits. I was like, shit, yes. If they're out there watching TikTok. Let's send some people onto TikTok. I don't care where it is. But Dems have got to stop relying on the mainstream media to carry their messages to voters. It just doesn't work. It's a game of telephone, but that never reaches the voters. So, I wish I had a better answer on the latter half of that question because it is everything. That's everything. How to build that machine, but I don't really know.
Matt Sheffield
Well, I think no, that's a great point, David. And that's actually one of the things that we're trying to do with Flux is to A, get people on the political left aware that this needs to happen and then B, build it up to whatever degree that we can. And the reality is that it shouldn't be one thing.
David Roberts
Right.
Matt Sheffield
Progressive philanthropy has this obsession with, well, we need to have only just one thing. That's just this massive thing. And the reality is that's not what you're up against and that's not what you should do.
David Roberts
Guerrilla warfare that's out on the streets, right? Corner to corner in all the places.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. You need to be helping people, help you get the word out. Progressive philanthropy, there's a lot of problems with it.
David Roberts
If I had to trace the problem to one factor above all, it's our shitty billionaires. Right-wing billionaires are legendarily patient with their capital and generous and will just like — if you want to get on that gravy train, you can and live on it for the rest of your life just doing nothing but being a hack, going out on TV and saying the message over and over and over and over or writing it over and over and over again. And the left's billionaires are terrible. Terrible. They do these one-off campaigns. They do these deliverables.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah. Or they make for-profit investments in media. I mean, if you look at so many left-of-center media outlets in the United States, they're for-profit, and that makes no sense at all. If you actually believe in your ideas, you can't put pressure on them to be commercially viable. That's just —
David Roberts
And this is a good way of framing this that I ask people a lot of times. So the public has this mistaken belief that the federal budget is like your kitchen table budget. Right. This is long-standing —
Anna Tarkov
Huge problem.
David Roberts
Yes, it's a huge problem, and it's been a problem forever because it really makes the public fundamentally misunderstand what the federal government does, like, what the federal government is for. It's a very terrible misunderstanding that hurts progressive policy. But anytime you bring that up and I've brought it up to numerous Democratic politicians and sort of like pollsters and advisors and whatever, and they all say the same thing, which is, "Oh, well, that's very old and deeply rooted and we're in the middle of a campaign and we don't have time to re-educate people about the basics like that. We just have to work around their misunderstanding. We have to do the best we can do in light of their misunderstanding" and that's true on a bunch of different issues. And so then I come to the question whose job is it to change the public's view about that like that and many other things but just choose that? Whose fucking job is that? Is it think tanks? Is it some kind of media? Is it some kind of paid PR? I don't know what it is but, like —
Matt Sheffield
It's certainly not going to happen by itself.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's not going to happen by itself. And the right has numerous organs devoted full time to convincing people that government sucks and it can't do anything right. Who does the left have devoted to convincing people that government can work and that it's responsible for most of the good things we have in our life in America and etc., etc. Who's out there educating them on basic true facts about the world and no one can give me an answer.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, that's a know we try to explore a lot at Flux. So for people who are not following us on Twitter, I invite you to do that. And flux.community is our website address as well. And yeah, right now we don't have anybody raising their we actually do we have a profile name here so go ahead and you can take your turn unmute yourself.
Diana
Hi. This is actually Diana. Thank you. I just want to say thank you. Your conversation here has been awesome and I really appreciate learning so much from you guys. I'm trying to be one of those people that is having those one-on-ones with people in my community a little bit. I have an EV and I know it's not perfect for the environment of course, but it's progress. However, from my neighbors, I've had comments I really didn't expect things like, "Hey, it'll take too much for the grid to handle and we can't have everybody driving an EV."
And comments like the debate about the post-use pollution of the vehicle and the battery and then they go to I say, "Well it's better than the pollution." So then they turn around and talk about the mining process for the battery and it seems like I just can't win. So I'm just wondering somehow they win the argument. I don't know where to go with it. And I was wondering if people are hearing that and it's been the same different people, but it's always the same exact lines. Are they getting this from somebody or are they all coming up with that?
David Roberts
The thing, they're all getting it from the same that's why they all sound the same is because they're all getting it from the same places. All these same arguments. Like I can mark as someone who is, let's say, too online, extremely online and involved in these particular subjects, I can sort of tell when a new talking point goes out. A talking point like "The grid can't handle all the EVs at once." That was nowhere, and then all of a sudden it was everywhere. I don't know the mechanism like what Alec or what think tank guy dreamed it up or how these things start, but clearly the word went out and I was getting Twitter randos yelling at me, using almost identical language one to the next.
So the answer to are they all getting in the same place? Is yes. And the other thing is, I can tell you from a history of arguing about climate change in very similar ways, with very similar people who were getting their information from very similar outlets, is that there is no winning, there is no end to it. Because they weren't arguing against climate change, because they had any genuine spontaneous feelings or thoughts about climate change. They just knew it was a lib thing. They knew — and you're supposed to own libs, and people like us, conservatives, don't believe that bullshit.
And so they would try this argument and you shoot it down and they try that argument and you shoot it down, and then they'd go back to the first argument and you're like, wait, I shot that down. And then they drift off to some third argument and eventually you realize — in my case it took like ten friggin years — eventually you realize this is not a good faith exchange. We are not on a journey together to try to find the truth together. That's not what's happening here. They view their jobs as pissing me off and wasting my time.
Them changing their mind based on evidence is not in the cards. It is not a possible outcome here. And so a lot of times you just have to choose not to engage or disengage. I don't know exactly if there's a rule to tell the difference between what's good faith and what's not, but like a lot of these, you're going to run into a lot of this about electric cars. Now that they're threatened by electric cars, the coming global growth of electric vehicles is the number one thing that is going to diminish oil demand in the near term and is going to fuck the industry all up.
They're officially scared now, so you're seeing these Anti-EV arguments roll out and the fact is, yes, if every car converted to EV tomorrow, it would overwhelm the grid. Luckily, that's not going to happen and it's impossible. What's actually going to happen is the grids are going to be getting greener and being bulked up while electrification is happening. They're going to proceed in parallel and nobody is going to — no grid operator, like there's no forecast for the sale of EVs that has them rising so fast that they overwhelm grids in a way that we can't anticipate and deal with.
So that's just like disingenuous. It's disingenuous. It's just one of these made up arguments that's made to waste time. And it's the same with you here. Like, oh, you're just charging off the grid and the grid is coal. So really you're just emitting just as much elsewhere. Well, first of all, no, it's not just as much. Even on a coal intensive grid, an EV is better by pollution in pollution terms. And as I said, we're greening the grid as we speak. The US grid is getting cleaner and cleaner and cleaner, which means if you buy an EV and you're charging off a grid that's getting cleaner, in environmental terms, your EV is getting cleaner every day.
Right. Like an internal combustion engine you buy is as dirty as it is forever. But an EV literally gets cleaner every day as the grid gets cleaner. So it rises with the grid. There are answers to these things if you go out and look for them. I'm just skeptical about whether the kinds of people you're interacting with are ever going to care if you can shoot down their latest —
Anna Tarkov
Yeah, I want to underscore that for anyone else listening because this is a common theme that comes up not just in talking about climate, but every other progressive issue, right. Is where people believe that they can argue on the facts and give people statistics and studies and information that they view as empirically sound or scientific and that this is going to change their mind. Unfortunately, that's not how human psychology works. That's not how people's political beliefs are formed or how they work typically.
David Roberts
There's a great fact I like to share, which is that several studies and surveys now have found the same thing, which is that the most hardcore climate deniers, like old school "climate is not happening deniers" are the ones who know the most about climate science. They're not dumb, they're not ignorant like that. I think that's really important to understand. They often know more about climate science than your sort of average person off the street who just accepts what the scientists tell them, you know what I mean? They learn more about it in order to debunk it.
Right. It's not a matter of ignorance. It's all about ideology and motivation.
Anna Tarkov
Yeah. And that's why you have to parse whether someone is talking to you in good faith or not. And it can be hard to do it's easier in person than online, for sure, I will say.
Matt Sheffield
But it definitely is true. It definitely is true that some people are sincere in their question asking. As somebody who was a conservative for most of my life. People, I was able to change my mind so I can say that. All right, well, so we're going to do — give people two more chances to speak. So Gene, we tried to bring you in earlier but I don't know if you were hearing us or not. So we're going to let you have a chance and then if you're not able to speak, then we'll move to Kent.
Gene
I actually hit that by mistake. Sorry.
Matt Sheffield
Okay. All right. I'll remove you from the speaker then. Okay.
All right, so Kent, you can go ahead then. This is the last question here.
Kent
Okay. Yeah, there's a point here that — I live in a rural area. I'm a blue-collar infrastructure worker, retired. I worked on dams and all kinds of projects. But anyway, there's a point here where we need to decide, are we going to save the environment and the planet, or are we going to change the minds of the people that are fighting us? And I live here, and you ain't going to change these people's minds until they realize that there's money to be made and even the small-time farmers — I just sent a link to a couple of you about Sherman County, Oregon.
It went for Trump by 52 points, went from the poorest county in Oregon to one of the richest in less than 20 years by embracing wind energy. And the turbines are on farmers' land, and there's one farmer up there that gets $82,500 a year off her wind generators, which provides her money for next season's seed and maybe a new tractor that needs to be replaced that kind of thing. Dead Trumpers. But there's a point where if what we need to do, like here in Oregon, I can't put solar panels up. I've got five acres. I can't put up any more solar panels than I use for electricity.
So I can't actually produce electricity and get a wholesale price for it of whatever excess I make. And that would at least add to the grid. And the people that are fighting this really embrace that kind of thing. And so it's just a point where we got to decide, how are we going to do this? I mean, there's a big black cloud out there that we're charging towards, and we're all preaching to the choir, and that includes me. And so when I go out and I'm talking to my friends around here, they used to tell me that the Green New Deal wouldn't let them grow their cows.
They couldn't make hay. They couldn't drive their trucks to go get their cows. Beef was going to be outlawed. I mean, it was just insane. So I carry a couple of copies of the Green New Deal in my pickup, and I've got them all highlighted and marked up with all the pertinent things. It's only 14 pages. I'm sure everybody here has read it. And I go through it with them and say, look, here's what it says. There's a lot of good points in here. And then I talk to them about Sherman County. They just put in a large, huge, about a square mile solar farm here.
I can see it from my front yard. And people at first fought it and fought it, and now they're going, wow, that's pretty cool. There are some good things happening out there. It isn't all doom and gloom. We stopped the Pembina gas pipeline that was supposed to go through Oregon from Malin all the way to Coos Bay. They've completely abandoned that project. So that was just the people here. And you know what? It was all Republicans who stopped it because it was going to go through their land. It was a NIMBY thing. I know it seems really hard and it seems like all of these things are immovable, including us, but there is a way to get around this, maybe just at least as part of the energy part of it.
It's kind of like Tom Sawyer when he talked. We've all read that when he talked to all of his neighborhood friends to paint his aunt's fence instead of him because it was so much fun.
Matt Sheffield
That's a great point, Kent. Let's give David a chance.
Kent
Sure, not a problem. I just wanted to say there are some things out there that are happening that aren't just bad.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, no, thanks. Thanks for that.
It's a really great question and a bunch of good points. Here's one thing I would say. If you can try to project yourself back to before you heard anything about the Green New Deal and empty your mind about it and think about what was the spirit of the Green New Deal as offered by the people who came up with it. And I mean in the contemporary context, the sort of contemporary left that came up with it, the whole point and motivation behind it, well, part of the motivation behind it is we got to address climate change.
David Roberts
That's one thing. But the other thing is this transition is going to happen because of economics. And we specifically want to make sure that we don't discard communities, particular communities or that particular communities don't get ground up in the wheels while we're changing as has happened during previous energy transitions. So specifically we have all this stuff in here for farmers, like all this stuff in here for agriculture, all this stuff in here to transition and help coal workers and natural gas workers that are left behind. One of the whole motivating spirits of the Green New Deal was a rural, friendly, working-class, friendly transition.
That was the damn point. And of course, if you could get out to those rural people and the farmers and the ranchers and get them away from Fox and talk to them for a while and show them what's in it, you could talk them around to that. But the fact is, after the Green New Deal — and I wrote about this study — after the Green New Deal was introduced by AOC and her cohort, in the following six months, Fox mentioned the Green New Deal more than all the other networks combined, like twice as much as the other three big cable networks combined. Why?
Because they recognized it had potential symbolic potential. Like they recognized you could make it into a symbol of something different than previous environmentalism, something more worker-friendly, more justice-oriented than previous transitions. They recognized the threat and they went right after it to destroy it. They very deliberately mounted a campaign to lie to their listeners about it and tell them it bans beef and bans — yes, they on purpose killed it. And I come back to the question I come back to over and over, which I've come back to a bunch on this call. Whose job is it to mount a similarly comprehensive, loud, repetitive, ubiquitous campaign on behalf of the Green New Deal, to support it, to lend it positive, symbolic connotations and —
Matt Sheffield
On non-ideological grounds?
David Roberts
Yes. So the left isn't unified to do it. We don't have a machine on Fox or talk radio. So what AOC does is give a press conference to the friggin mainstream media and then just is dependent on them to convey it to their listeners, which they don't. So naturally now public opinion is against the Green New Deal because one side went after it and one side didn't support it. And that's true for everything. There's nothing that's intrinsically going to appeal to farmers or rural people. It's all got to be somehow delivered to them and conveyed to them.
And the only people they listen to are Fox and right-wing radio who's lying to them actively about it. So basically, all problems on the left and all problems in the climate, left too, come back to this. Like we just don't have any control over the information atmosphere. And Fox can pollute anything it wants. It can turn those rural people against anything it wants. Right now, just as a funny example, Democrats are saying let's bulk up the IRS enforcement a little bit so that we can make rich people pay the taxes they owe. You would think that would be the most obvious, non-controversial, you're like, who could be against that?
Literally, who could be against that? And somehow right-wing media has got such a lock on their audience that they've figured out a way to convince these poor people that giving the IRS more enforcement power is just going to somehow hurt them. Even people who don't pay tax because they're so poor now believe they're against IRS reform. Which just goes to show there's nothing so obviously good that Fox can't pollute it.
Anna Tarkov
Well, David, the IRS is the government. The government's bad.
David Roberts
And why is that? Because they've spent 40 years saying that half their messages are already baked in. Everyone's already pre-convinced. I mean, I remember when the cap and trade bill came out in 2009 and the pro-climate people are like, well you see, there's these permits and then you trade the permits and then you can trade them in for an auctioned value. And then the right comes in with Fox and says "tax". Boom. Debate was over. Bill was dead because they had already everybody on their side already knows what a tax is, right? They know exactly how to fight that.
They know exactly how to think about it. They know exactly what they're doing with that.
Matt Sheffield
I'm sorry. They also have made the infrastructure. In real estate the number one rule of real estate, commercial real estate, is location, location, location. But the number one rule of persuasion is presence, presence, presence, presence. If you are there and if you're there, you don't even have to have good arguments, just the fact that you exist and are there and people can see that you're there on the cable. Like a ton of people came to watch Fox News just because they were flipping the TV. They didn't, you know, actively seek it out. They had never even heard of.
So, you know, just being out there all the time and that's something positive that we can think of as well as we come to the end here. That being out there on the regular, it is persuasive. If people encounter — some people will never change their minds, but other people, if they encounter ideas enough in enough different places from different people, eventually they can rub off in some fashion. And that's something that happened in a good way with the fight for same-sex marriage. And generally speaking, there's been a greater acceptance for LGBT rights and existence. So good things can still happen even in a system in which the deck is stacked.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, the left does have enormous cultural power. The right is not wrong about that. They're not wrong when they freak out that the left owns Hollywood, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if everyone on the left decides at once, like they seem to about gay marriage, then that will seep through culture, right? It'll come out through sitcoms, you know what I mean? Like in movies, it becomes ambient in culture. If the left really is gripped by something, it can make it ambient in culture and change minds about it. The question is just like, how do you do that on purpose?
How do you herd those cats on purpose? And no one knows?
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, well, it begins with enough people having the will to do it. And that only begins by conversations like this and writings like everybody here today that getting people to understand that this has to be done and we have to move toward a more change-oriented politics. Really, I appreciate you joining us today, David. And just to recap for everybody, so the conversation today, this was a recorded Twitter space. So patrons of David's and patrons of Flux, it will be available to you after this is over if you weren't able to make it. So I encourage you to subscribe to David's site or to join Flux on Patreon.
And David, did you have any concluding remarks you wanted to say?
David Roberts
No, other than everyone should subscribe to Volts.
Matt Sheffield
And your website address is impossible to forget. So go ahead.
David Roberts
Is volts.wtf.
Matt Sheffield
Yeah, you can't forget that one. That will be seared into everyone's mind today, hopefully. All right, David. Well, thanks for being here, everyone, and we'll see you next Tuesday at 03:00 P.M. Pacific, 06:00 P.M. Eastern Time. So thanks, everyone.
David Roberts
All right. Thank you, bye.
Matt Sheffield
Bye.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.
Discussing disinformation and media with Matt Sheffield
I have just listened to the first 35 minutes of your conversation on disinformation and the media with Matt Sheffield. I probably won't listen to the remaining 90.
Here's why: I am a veteran of 41 years in the MSM. Retired in 2012 after a career largely in print, but also online in the last 15. I was a reporter, editor, publisher and ran an international news service. And I continue to be an avid consumer of news, local, state and national in far too many media.
The two of you bring up some good points, but sadly you fall victim to one of the syndromes you discuss: thinking that people in the past for some reason failed to realize problems you see clearly today.
Let me assure that professional MSM journalists have been wrestling with issues like gaslighting, the belief that only negative stories are "real journalism," "gotcha" journalism, highly publicized charges of wrongdoing that found the be worthless after the media spotlight has moved on.
I actually laughed outloud when I heard that "the MSM don't realize that they are operating in a hostile environment."
Anyone who is a thoughtful practitioner of the art of trying to tell people on a daily basis the truest version of what is going on in the world today that they can come up with in the minutes, hours or days they have to acquire and tell the story has wrestled with these problems within the first 6-18 months of getting into the biz. News staffs, media schools and foundations have been wrestling with these questions since at least 1970 -- when I was hatched from J-school.
The reason these problems have not been solved, though many remedies have been and continue to be tried, is that they are hard problems that have a lot to do with the way the human brain works.
Does this malfeasance still occur? Absolutely! For example, I have thought that the "dump on Kamala" stories were probably ginned up and sold to various political writers by the same shop that came up with the stories about Hillary's emails.
Let me just say from the vantage point of experience that the solution is NOT to ditch objective reporting and replace it with a diet based solely on opinion. The challenge -- today as it has been since at least 1970 -- is to persuade the public to actually read/watch/listen to those followup stories and analytical pieces.
terrific interview - maybe long but worth it.