Combatting Disinformation

Combatting Disinformation with Lee McIntyre

Refuse Fascism Episode 191

Sun, Feb 25, 2024 4:42PM • 58:28

Lee McIntyre 00:00

A lot of people, including some very savvy journalists, misunderstand what we’re up against, and they keep talking about this as if it were a natural disaster. This is not a hurricane. This is something that is more akin to warfare. You can’t win an information war unless you admit that you’re in one. We are all the targets of this. Disinformation has three goals: One is to get you to believe a falsehood. The second is to be polarized around that falsehood and to distrust the people who don’t believe the same thing. The third is to make you cynical — to make you feel helpless and give up. That is exactly what a fascist wants you to do. Now is not the time to give up. Now is the time to absolutely fight as hard as we can over the next several months, or we’re in real trouble.

Sam Goldman 01:10

Welcome to Episode 191 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Lee McIntyre, research fellow at the Center for philosophy and history of science at Boston University, and the author of On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy.

Thanks to everyone who rates and reviews the show. Help get this show into more ears during a year when refusing fascism is most crucial. Review our show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. After listening to today’s episode, of course, click the share button in your app to send this episode to a friend and whatever other brilliant things you can think of to spread the show.

Before we get into the interview, as always, I wanted to touch on some developments from the week as they relate to the escalating fascist threat. The nationwide fascist assault against trans people, and trans youth in particular, turned deadly once more in Owasso Oklahoma. In 2022, the fascist social media influencer Chaya Raichik targeted a teacher at Owasso High School for supporting LGBTQ students. Last month, the fascist superintendent of schools in Oklahoma, who has described trans students as a threat, appointed Ms. Raichik to a state library board.

Meanwhile, in 2023, the Oklahoma State Legislature passed a law banning trans youth from using the bathroom appropriate with their gender identity. This and much more set the stage for the escalating bullying and eventual lethal assault against Nex Benedict, a non-binary student at Owassa High. Nex, a 16 year old high school sophomore, was beaten by three girls — classmates of theirs — in the bathroom of Owasso High School on February 7, declared dead on February 8. Since this brutal murder, the family had been forced to begin their own investigation, the school has attempted to cover its ass, an Oklahoma State Rep referred to Nex and trans students as “filth” they don’t want in their state. This is the tip of the iceberg of the violence promised by an unrepentantly cruel fascist movement. Nex should be alive and thriving, safe and supporting, cuddling their cat, playing Minecraft, and being a kid. Silence is complicity. It’s on all of us to protect our trans use. Get loud to stop the Christian fascist attacks on, and demonization of LGBTQ people.

Last week, I mentioned that the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos frozen in in-vitro fertilization procedures are “children” under state law, or as the court refers to them: “extra uterine children.” I wanted to touch more on what this ruling represents, the implications, and the theocracy at the heart of this that must be hammered at and opposed now. The highest court in Alabama has ruled that the loss of embryos — something you cannot do IVF without — is synonymous with child murder, threatening and end to the in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Alabama. The majority opinion repeatedly cites Dobbs for the proposition that “the unborn” are “living human beings.”

It is, thus far, the best model of enshrining in Christian Biblical beliefs as law. It is a horror in and of itself already. The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility paused IVF treatments stating: “Our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally, or face punitive damages.” It opens the floodgates to even more draconian abortion bans and restrictions on reproductive care and provides further momentum for Christian theocratic rule. Alabama chief Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker — FYI, he’s the former legal adviser to the grotesque former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.

He wrote a concurring opinion — this is Parker: “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God who views the destruction of his image as an affront to himself. Alabama sanctity of life statute recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life. That even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.” ‘God’ appears 41 times in his opinion, which draws its reasoning from the Bible. In particular, heavily quoting the book of Genesis and works from theologians like John Calvin. Yes, you heard all of that correctly: Chief Justice of the highest court in the state of Alabama, overtly citing biblical scripture and Christian faith to weaponize the law against women and LGBTQ people.

But there’s more to this story to unpack. There’s a prophecy movement that shapes Parker’s worldview that we must be aware of: The New Apostolic Reformation. Mike Hixenbaugh reported for NBC, “On the same day that Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice, Tom Parker, handed down an opinion declaring that fertilized frozen embryos are people, imperiling women’s access to in vitro fertilization treatments, he espoused support for a once-fringe philosophy that calls evangelical Christians to reshape society based on their interpretation of the Bible.”

Parker appeared on New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) prophet, proud Christian nationalist, Johnny Enlow’s Restore the Seven program, and during that program, advocated for “God created government and the seventh mountain mandate,” which is a blueprint for Christian domination over education, government, media, and more — really every aspect of what they see as American life — painting rulings, such as the one of IVF, as a spiritual battle of light versus darkness, the Anointed verse, the demonic.

No, this wasn’t some one-off. Parker has a long history of friendship and allegiance with key players in NAR, being connected with that movement for a long time. As religious scholar and previous guest on the show, whose episode we’re going to link into the show notes Matthew D. Taylor, has exposed on the socials, Parker joined a dedicated NAR prayer call about the state of Alabama last year, himself invoking NAR apostle prophet, Dutch Sheets, to describe his understanding of the judiciary. Parker describes judge’s — in this call — role as a forecast role in the “revival” in this nation, and his outreach to fellow judges as part of helping spark that revival. His friendship with and his referencing of the most influential, most connected NAR apostle, the most decisive figure in mobilizing Christian fascists on January 6th, should not be shrugged off.

Elie Mystal argued this well in his piece in The Nation, stating: “and what’s happened is that the clergy has left the pews to invade the courts. The priests and deacons and ministers of our time, are using the bully pulpit of the judiciary to impose their version of God’s will on the rest of us. And there God is spiteful, bigoted and misogynist.” Some are confused about the GOP focus on IVF, when isn’t IVF something that helps people become mothers? Something that these Christian fascists are hell bent on mandating?

Amanda Marcotte for Salon, clarifies: “One would think that people who are always yammering on about how a woman’s greatest purpose is giving birth would celebrate those who endure IVF, which is both painful and expensive, just so they can have a baby. But, no, the Christian right wants to end IVF for two reasons: First, because of the bottomless misogyny and homophobia that fuels the movement. Second, because the end goal for the Christian right is to turn the U.S. into a theocracy, and banning IVF helps them get there. It’s important to understand that what the Christian right really wants is not motherhood per se, but a social order where women are second class citizens. They take a dim view of not just abortion and contraception, but all reproductive technologies that make it easier for women to exercise autonomy over their lives.”

To those who are willingly placated by some GOP members empty support for IVF in the aftermath of this decision, don’t believe the b.s. You cannot have advocate laws and training fetal personhood — life begins at conception — without accepting the horrific consequences that entails — most essentially, that a clump of cells has greater rights than women. We are then told not to fear because the attorney general in Alabama said they won’t prosecute — accepting, once again, the unacceptable: Promises with no permanence or guarantee: Oh, the Supreme Court could intervene [chuckles]. The very court that presented this pathway to the states?

And let’s be clear, if the Democrats can’t retain the status quo presented by Roe v. Wade, how are we to believe that just by virtue of voting in November, we can reverse this tide? And let’s not think that this is limited to Alabama, or that somehow it’s out of step or scope of the overall Republican trajectory. As put by Sarah Posner: “This theocratic dystopia is not an outlier confined to a single state, but rather a roadmap should Donald Trump return to the White House.” Just listen to Trump speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville, Tennessee, just days after the Alabama decision:

Donald Trump 11:45

You’re the people we want to hear from, the pastors and the ministers and the rabbis. The people in this room are the people we want to hear from, and they have to have a political voice. You know, if you think about it, you have men, you have women, and you have religion. If you’re looking at it, you have more than the men, you have more than the women. You have such power, but you really, you weren’t allowed to use that power, and you’re now allowed to use it. I get into, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used it before.

Sam Goldman 12:17

This is the essential element here. The threat and our immediate responsibility is stated succinctly by Elie Mystal, once again, for The Nation: “We are entering a new dark age. One where, like the last one, science, education and facts mean nothing, and Christian myths and legends are given the force of law. I don’t know how to stop them, but I think the first step is to recognize and name what they’re doing.”

We’ll likely have more to say on CPAC in future episodes, but the fact that there is barely a peep in the media about this and not a commensurate reaction from all the decent folk — that the positively horrific utterings of Trump and the mega movement are just shrugged off — is something that really must be reversed. This is how CPAC kicked off — this is Jack Prosobiec speaking:

Jack Prosobiec 13:13

All right, welcome. Welcome. I just wanted to say welcome to the end of democracy [chuckles]. We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will we will endeavor [Steve Bannon guffaws in the background.] to get rid of it and replace it with with this right here [holds up his fist], who will replace it with this. [Steve Bannon: Amen]

Sam Goldman 13:31

The “this,” to be clear, is a fist. It is the result of Trump, again and again, allowed to openly threaten his enemies without consequence. His allies and advocates able to overtly declare their intentions without fear of any repercussion. Trump and the fascist movement continue to set the terms, and the Democratic Party leadership continues to conciliate and accommodate, paving a clear path for the fascist return to power. Their revanchist plans are out in the open. Trump is telling you clearly just listen to this from his CPAC speech:

Donald Trump 14:06

Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me. It’s true, it’s true. At the ballot box this November, it’s you and the people. You have to be, and will deliver a reckoning like they haven’t even imagined before. We’re going to straighten out our country. We’re going to bring our country back for hardworking Americans. November 5th, it will be our new Liberation Day [cheers build], but for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and sensors and imposters, who have [tone escalates in anger] commandeered our government it will be their judgment day, their judgement day [more cheers].

Sam Goldman 14:51

Once more, this is being minimized and deflected — reduced to Trump being Trump. But in the real world, Trump being Trump is a really fucking big problem. We cannot allow it to become normalized that a tried and true fascist is the nominee for one of the two major political parties in the most powerful, most violent country on Earth. He’s the nominee for a fully fascist party; a party that has time and time again, proven its willingness to dispense with the rule of law and the norms of a peaceful transition of power that refuses to accept any loss. And he’s the leader of a base that has time and time again said yes, to doubling down on the most vicious white supremacy, xenophobia, patriarchy, and that’s more than willing to carry out violence when they deem it necessary or useful. Trump being Trump? Yeah, that’s a problem.

Along with their cruelty, there are enormous amounts of fascist disinformation targeting the fascist base, compelling them to join, fight, recruit and live for the fascist cause. From the outside, it’s totally unhinged, but while lots of good people use that very bonkers-ness to laugh at the fascists and shrug them off, the lesson that we should be taking is that, to paraphrase Voltaire, those who can make them believe absurdities can make them commit atrocities. But the fascists employ disinformation far beyond their base. They target others for other purposes: to confuse, placate, immobilize those who aren’t paying attention; to turn the differences and diversity amongst their opponents into insurmountable rifts; to undermine not just individual facts, but the notion of objective reality itself to destroy hope. And its goal isn’t just misleading individuals, but reshaping all of society. We are all susceptible and are much too complacent.

Much of what I just laid out is touched on and expanded on the conversation you’re about to hear. But I also want to draw listeners attention to the broader American mythology which lays the foundation I believe, for much of the fascist manipulation and which itself is detrimental to the goal of a better world in my opinion. It’s easy for many to laugh at how belief in America’s innate goodness informs the battle cries of “America First” and “Make America Great Again,” but that belief in America’s exceptionalism also enables a lot of other myths and disinformation to thrive across much of the political and social spectrum.

This belief lies at the root of such common beliefs that fascism can’t happen here, or [mocking tone] can’t happen again; that American institutions and the constitutional order will somehow stop fascism without any sacrifice or struggle, and that the best we can hope for is a reversion to the status quo — a status quo that produced this fascist menace. It’s imperative, I feel, that we drop the tautological fallacy that America is a force for good in the world, and therefore, what America does in the world is good. We have been indoctrinated to believe that even the most demonstrably heinous acts of massive violence that fill the history of this country have some redeeming value, because they support “freedom.”

This myth cannot lead to more freedom, but it has led — and I believe can only lead — to untold horrors. Meanwhile, this problem is not confined to a political campaign of disinformation in the way we’ve been trained to compartmentalize politics from everything else. This movement has coexisted with a whole culture and media that has been training millions in a mode of thinking of what benefits me is true because I want it to be so, or what benefits us is true because we want to be so, with no criteria of actual evidence. This way of thinking decimates our ability to seek out what’s true, and shred any notion of sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. With that, here is my conversation with Lee.

Today I’m pleased to be speaking with Lee McIntyre. Lee is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, and a lecturer in ethics at Harvard Extension School. He is the author, most recently, of ‘On Disinformation,’ as well as the best selling books, ‘Post Truth’ and ‘How to Talk to a Science Denier,’ along with 11 other works of fiction and nonfiction. You’ve probably read his work in places like The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Newsweek, could go on and on. He is an analyst and investigator with Mental Immunity Project, whose mission is to equip everyone with the skills they need to spot and shed the worst kinds of information: extremism, hate, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, propaganda, etc. Welcome, Lee, thanks for coming on.

Lee McIntyre 20:03

Thank you so much for having me appreciate it.

Sam Goldman 20:06

Today, while I really want the bulk of our conversation to be based on what we do when faced with those who are seemingly immune to facts or evidence, I do want to start with what it is that we face. I was hoping that you could tell us a little bit more about the distinction between misinformation and disinformation, and their significance right now, in today’s political landscape.

Lee McIntyre 20:38

How we got here, it’s really important, because disinformation is used by people who want something. Misinformation is an accident, it’s when somebody believes something false, but it’s a mistake. But disinformation is a lie, it’s when somebody wants something, and they intentionally are putting it out there in the world, not only to get somebody to believe a falsehood, but to polarize them around a factual issue, so that they can begin to distrust and even to hate people who don’t also believe the same falsehood.

One way that we arrive in this situation, just the facile way to describe it, is: Well, people don’t believe facts or people have lost trust. But the really important question there is: Why don’t they believe facts? Why have they lost trust? And the answer is because somebody doesn’t want them to believe those facts. Somebody wants them to distrust the people on the other side. That’s the goal of the disinformer. This is something that authoritarians and autocrats and fascists discovered a long time ago; if you can control the information source, you can control the population.

So this is a very dangerous time because I think that a lot of people, including some very savvy journalists, misunderstand what we’re up against. They keep talking about this, as if it were a natural disaster. Using the word misinformation, I think, is to pretend that this is a hurricane, and we don’t know where it came from, and of course, it’s dangerous, but put your head down, and we’ll try to get through it. This is not a hurricane. This is something that is more akin to warfare, and it’s created by people on purpose to get what they want.

Sam Goldman 22:32

That last part, the metaphor you were using was really, really helpful in clarifying. As you were talking about why we got here — how it serves those who wish to spread lies — right now, I can’t help but think — the first thing that comes to mind — is this “great replacement theory” garbage, or the rhetoric that you hear around immigrants, and “invasion” — all that kind of straight up disinformation. But we also see it, and you’ve written a lot about it, affecting the public health or science spaces, where it has equally as lethal implications as lying about whole sections of people. I wanted to ask you specifically, when it comes to the MAGA era that we’re in, the Trump era that we’re in, while disinformation is new, is there a way in which the terrain around truth and falsehoods has been transformed by Trump and to the MAGA movement? Or the MAGA leaders, I want to clarify that.

Lee McIntyre 23:40

You’re right, it’s not new. This playbook goes back at least 70 years, if not thousands of years, back to the first conspiracy theories. It’s important to realize that Trump is following a playbook that was really invented by the modern science deniers. This goes back to something that Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway talked about in their wonderful book Merchants of Doubt, where they showed that the earliest science deniers in the modern era were the tobacco companies, because they had something to lose. They wanted people to continue to smoke cigarettes and there was this study that was going to be published in the 1950s, which showed that cigarette smoking was linked to lung cancer. They couldn’t have that. They wanted to fight it. They wanted to do something about it, so they hired a public relations expert, who told them to fight the science, which they did through public relations, not through science. If they had the evidence, they would have showed it. But they didn’t, so they fought it through public relations.

That blueprint turned out to be the blueprint for the next 70 years of science denial about climate change, about vaccines, etc. There were some cognitive scientists who studied this and determined, in fact, that there are five steps that every science denier follows. Just very quickly: they cherry pick evidence, they believe in conspiracy theories, they rely on fake experts, they engage in illogical reasoning, and they think that science has to be perfect in order to be credible. So, it’s actually fairly easy to locate a science denier, because they fulfill all those five steps.

What I noticed in the very modern era, that is the era since Trump, he follows that same blueprint. So here I was, as a philosopher of science, studying science denial — flat Earth, vaccine denial — and then I noticed, son of a gun, he’s doing the same thing; he’s creating denial in the exact same way that the climate deniers did, the same way that the tobacco companies did. And why? because it worked. It’s really easy to sneer and to laugh at that, because it is ridiculous, but does it work? Yes. The tobacco companies sold cigarettes for the next 40 years until they were busted with a $200 billion fine, and then went ahead anyway. Has it worked for climate denial? Yes, it has.

So I think that Trump picked that up, that blueprint, and said: This doesn’t just work for science, this works for anything — any facts that I want, I can deny and create a bunch of dupes who will believe it — then I’ve got a team of people who will believe anything that I say. And boy, you don’t have to read very far into Hannah Arendt to know that’s the road to totalitarian rule; that’s the road to fascism. What’s new, other than Trump, if you look back at the tobacco executives, how did they conduct their public relations campaign? They had to take out full page ads in American newspapers and try to find people. What do you do now? You’ve got the internet. It’s just so easy. That old quotation, I was forget as well, Rogers or. Mark Twain who said that a lie gets halfway around the world while the truth is still getting his shoes on.

Well, now, my goodness, social media is the propagandist’s best friend. Propaganda has existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but it’s the amplification that’s different now. It’s not the creation of disinformation, it’s not the belief of disinformation, it’s the amplification, because now — it used to be that information warfare was warfare — was huge government to government, or sometimes on populations — but now it’s used on domestic populations by leaders of those people. That is very new. Propagandists have known that, but the ability to spread that lie and to amplify it just makes the job so much easier.

Sam Goldman 27:49

One thing that you were saying made me think about is that misinformation — accidents — and disinformation — explicit lying — usually target specific facts, whether it be around climate change, around COVID, or various vaccines. But it seems to me that it also trains people to think in irrational and oftentimes, ways that I would say are oppressive, which bleeds into bigger problems. As I was talking about earlier, when you’re talking about immigration, whole people being demonized. Do you see that happening? And beyond just training people to believe things that aren’t true, how does disinformation, train people to think?

Lee McIntyre 28:32

It’s a great question, because it’s not just a corruption of one belief, it’s a corruption of the process by which true beliefs are formed — especially when you’ve destroyed trust. Think about what happened with anti-vaxxers during the pandemic. Anti-vax was science denial before then, but it became politicized, it became polarized politically, and then with worse ramifications beyond that. Then it’s team building. Then it’s not just: Oh, we believe falsehood about this particular thing — it becomes: “We believe whatever the leader of our team tells us to believe.” It’s easy to think that it’s just micro targeted, and sometimes it is, because this information is usually targeted around the specific thing that you care about — Does smoking cause lung cancer? Is climate change real? Is the earth flat? Those are the questions around which people have denialists beliefs, because those are the areas that they’ve been targeted for with disinformation.

You don’t find very many chemotherapy deniers or air jet travel deniers or electricity deniers. I’m sure you can now, and you’ll get mail about it, but those are not as prevalent as the other ones because people have been radicalized with disinformation about the other ones. Yes, they are particularly prevalent about the areas in which they’ve been targeted, but a terrible thing happens, because once somebody loses their trust in scientists to tell them the truth about the COVID vaccines, then they’ve maybe lost their trust in scientists to tell them the truth about anything. Look what’s happened to community health workers.

Look what’s happened to election workers. Look what’s happened to science. People are starting to lose their trust in very solid, long standing traditional institutions, because they no longer trust the people who make them up, because they’ve been radicalized around that. That, to me, is the really scary part. If somebody just doesn’t believe something that turns out to be true, and they’re not disinformed, maybe you can give them evidence, and convince them to change their mind, but if they’re radicalized to distrust and to hate the people, maybe even have a conspiracy theory about the people who they think are lying to them, they’re gone. That’s very hard to get back.

Sam Goldman 31:01

It’s deeply, deeply troubling. In this moment, I agree. Certain pieces of disinformation have been taken up by tens of millions of people in this country, like the Big Lie, for example, and it seems like the problem gains a whole new magnitude when the lies are believed by whole families, whole churches, whole towns, and then backed up by media amplification and social media algorithms. I’m wondering: What do we need to know about, I guess, the bubbling, that insulates this kind of disinformation?

Lee McIntyre 31:38

It’s frustrating, because, I said before, there’s a team building aspect to this. So much of our belief is not based on facts. It’s based on identity, and it’s based on community. We like to believe what the other people around us believe — and there’s probably a good evolutionary reason for that. So it feels really uncomfortable to be that person who says: No, you’re all wrong. I’ve come to think that there are levels of belief. When you say somebody believes something, okay, believe it to be true. But maybe, in part, that’s just because they’re not bothering to question it because nobody around them questions it.

Sam Goldman 32:16

You spoke somewhat to this, but perhaps there’s more that you wanted to say, on the cognitive biases, or vulnerabilities maybe is a is a better way to put it, that disinformation campaigns exploit. If we know them, are there ways that we can guard against them?

Lee McIntyre 32:36

The one that everybody already knows is confirmation bias. If you know what you want to be true, you’re going to be very motivated to go out and look for evidence to backup the fact that it’s true, rather than to look for evidence to refute that it’s true and therefore change your mind. I wrote an earlier book called ‘Post-Truth’ that has a whole chapter on cognitive biases, and these are wired into the human brain for hundreds of thousands of years. There’s a big academic debate about why – what’s the evolutionary advantage? – because they wouldn’t be there if there weren’t an evolutionary advantage.

This is kind of fascinating, but I won’t get us into the weeds on that. But the idea is, yes, you can inoculate yourself to certain cognitive biases simply by knowing that they exist. I’ll give you an example: One is called anchoring bias. Anchoring bias is when the first thing that you hear is the thing that you’re more likely to believe is true — that’s your starting point. Which is why when you’re going in to buy a car, the first thing that the salesperson wants to do is to show you the sticker price, because then that’s the anchor, and then you’re going to bargain down from the sticker price. They don’t ask you how much do you want to spend on this car? because then that’s your anchor, and they’re going to have to pull you up from what you just said.

Knowing about anchoring bias is really a great thing before you go in to buy a car because then you’re less likely to fall for that trick. My friend Andy Norman’s book, ‘Mental Immunity,’ talks about these biases and talks about ways for people to help themselves and then maybe help others in identifying these. It’s not that we can get rid of these biases, it’s that by understanding how they work, we’re less likely to fall for them. The dis-informers, the propagandists, know these very well. The repetition effect: Why does Trump say over and over “It’s a witch hunt,” “it’s a hoax”? Because that’s an ear worm; that gets into people. The repetition effect is a cognitive bias.

I myself fell for that one time. I was driving around my neighborhood and it was just before an election, and I kept seeing signs for this one candidate and I thought: Well, that person’s gonna win. No, absolutely not, because not only was I just seeing signs in that one part of the neighborhood, I was seeing the same sign every day. That’s ridiculous, right? I’m looking at the same exact sign because I passed the same corner every day. But seeing that sign every day, sort of, without thinking about it too much, made me think: Oh, that person must be popular. They weren’t, that might have been where they lived, and that was the only sign in town for them. Those kinds of things, once you’re aware of them, it’s part of your toolkit to keep yourself from being taken advantage of.

Sam Goldman 35:29

I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about other ways that we could cultivate mental immunity. If there’s strategies that we could employ to strengthen our critical thinking skills, and therefore resist more of this disinformation.

Lee McIntyre 35:46

One of the very best ones goes back to Socrates. Just constantly ask yourself: What if I’m wrong? How do I know what I know? What’s my evidence for it? Is this something that I want to believe it’s true, or that I actually have evidence is true? Just to be in that frame of mind, to question your own beliefs, and to make sure that you’re not just falling for motivated reasoning or confirmation bias is really one of the most essential ones. That’s the one that’s drilled into you in philosophy graduate school; this idea that intellectual humility, that you might not know. Montaigne, that great essayist and philosopher, believed in this so much that in his study, in his house, he had carved into the beams of the ceiling the phrase, “what do I know?” And because he sees it every day, like I saw that political sign, maybe it has an influence. What do I know? Do I really know what I think I know? Or am I just going along with the crowd? Or am I just going along with what I wanna believe?

It’s a very painful psychic thing to question your beliefs because your ego is at stake. You know: How can I be the kind of person who falls for something that’s not true? How can I be the somebody who’s that easily fooled? It’s a great way to strengthen yourself to just ask that, even about small things, and then maybe work your way up to the big things, because we really don’t know that much. When you look back to the environment in which human brains evolved, our brains evolved to do very specific tasks that don’t have a lot to do with higher order critical reasoning. So we can work on it.

Sam Goldman 37:32

I was thinking about the ways that we can inoculate ourselves that you spoke to. But then we can do all this work individually and know all these things and then we go and have dinner with our family, or sit in a college class and hear people spew things that go against all reason, evidence. What do we do?

Lee McIntyre 38:00

You know when you’re sitting on the plane, and they say to put on your own oxygen mask first before you help those around you? Once you’ve got your own oxygen mask on, what can you do to help other people? The first thing is not to run away, not to shy away from those conversations, because the best possible way to convince someone to change their mind is to talk to them face to face. That builds trust. It’s harder to hate somebody harder to get angry at somebody if they’re being respectful. That’s important, too, you have to listen and be respectful and be calm in these conversations. It is very hard to convince somebody to change their mind, but it can be done.

The interesting part is, if you look at the literature on this (and I’m not aware that this has been studied scientifically, but I’m talking about the anecdotal literature), the people who do change their mind, it always happens in the same way, it happens because someone that they love and trust took the time to talk to them patiently and didn’t push them and didn’t insult them, and then the person came around and convinced themselves. It’s when we’re isolated and fearful and angry that we refuse to change our mind. If the model of talking to somebody who disagrees with us is to ram the facts down their throat, and if they don’t believe them walk away because they’re not worth talking to, it will never work.

But what can work, though it also is rare, is to engage somebody in conversation. I went out there and tried this. I was fascinated with the scientific studies that talked about debunking the false information. Debunking is a great strategy if you can do it, but it waits until the person already has heard the dis- or misinformation. There’s a strategy called pre-bunking — Sander van der Linden, Stephan Lewandowski, John Cook, and some other folks, cognitive scientists are working on this now — and that’s a much better strategy, because then you’re telling the person in advance what to look out for. Like, you know somebody’s going to buy a used car and you say, “look out for the anchoring bias.” And they say, “what’s that?” And you say, “let me tell you about anchoring bias.” And then they go in there and they’re inoculated, they’ve pre-bunked anchoring bias, they’re not going to fall for it.

There is some empirical work on debunking and pre-bunking working. Sometimes we have to deal with the people who are already down the rabbit hole and all we can do is debunk; it’s too late to pre-bunk with them. But we can also deal with the people who haven’t been infected yet, and try to create a better information environment for them by pre-bunking, by keeping the relationship. So I went out there and tried this myself, I went to a Flat Earth convention. 650 Flat Earthers were there. I remained calm, and respectful, and kind, and kept my mouth shut and listened to them.

But then, after the whole day went by, I said: Look, I’m a philosophy professor from Boston, I study logic, and I want to talk to you about this, because I don’t think you’re correct. And then they start defending themselves with all sorts of examples from physics, which I know to be false, but I’m not a scientist. They’ve read Newton — if they don’t trust me, they don’t trust Newton, Galileo, what am I going to say? So I said: Oh, whoa, I don’t want to talk about what you believe, I want to talk about why you believe it, and I want to ask you a very important question. Is it okay, if I asked you a philosophical question? I’d get their consent, and I’d say: Your beliefs are based on evidence, right? Absolutely. You’ve been in the seminars, you’ve seen what evidence we have. Okay, so this is not a faith-based belief for you? No, absolutely not. Absolutely based on the evidence. We’re more scientific than the scientists.

And then I would drop the bomb: Okay, so tell me what evidence I could present to you theoretically, if I had it in my back pocket, that would get you to give up your beliefs. And they couldn’t do it. None of them could do it. And that I think, at some level caused them to be uncomfortable in the fact that they couldn’t answer that, because any scientist can answer that, but they couldn’t. So by being calm and respectful face to face, and just asking those kinds of questions, I’m hoping that maybe some of them later changed their mind. Nobody did it on the spot. It’s pretty tough when somebody flies in for a flat earth convention, they’re surrounded by hundreds of other people, to tear off their lanyard and say: What a fool I was! Nobody’s going to do that. But will they overtime change their mind with the right approach? I think it can be done.

Sam Goldman 42:48

There’s those one-on-one encounters, which I’m not recommending that everyone engage in. It’s not right for everyone to engage in at all times. If you’re a person who is up against family members, for instance, who believe that your very identity is a crime, I’m not suggesting you have a loving and patient conversation with people who wish that you as who you are don’t exist

Lee McIntyre 43:12

That you walk away from and I’m not recommending…

Sam Goldman 43:15

No, I know you’re not. I just want to make that very clear that both of us aren’t. It’s not for all times for all people. But there’s what we can do on that individual, in person, real space, to try to get people to see not just what they’re thinking is wrong. But why are you thinking what you’re thinking is true? There’s that work. What I was wondering, and I know that our listeners have been thinking a lot about is: how do we do that in a bigger space that is beyond those individual conversations that we have, as valuable as they might be. But what would it mean first? And then how do we wage more of a society wide struggle for truth and evidence-based epistemology?

Lee McIntyre 44:00

You have asked such an important question. And I wish you had asked me that question three years ago, because I would have gotten to where I am now faster, because that question turned out to be the one that made me realize that I had to take another bite at the apple. Because after the Flat Earth convention, after I spoke with some climate deniers, other sorts of deniers, I realized this is not a scalable solution. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t part of the solution. And by the way, there are folks out there like Darrell Davis, who is an African-American musician, who befriends Ku Klux Klan members, and convinces them to give up their beliefs. And at the end of it they give him their robe. 200 people he’s done this with. There’s another book called Rising Out of Hatred, about a hardcore member of the white supremacy movement, who was converted by a group of Jewish students in college who invited him to Shabbat dinner knowing who he was.

So this can be done. It’s not for everybody. And I’m not recommending everybody do it. But you’re absolutely right that the one-on-one whack a mole strategy is really not equal to the task. And that’s why I wrote my new book, because when the pandemic hit, I thought: Okay, here’s the analogy. We have to deal with the people who are sick, we must. But can we also keep people from getting sick? And talking to the people who are already infected with the ideology, with the false belief, is important. How do we keep them from believing the false ideology? Well, pre-bunking is one way. There are other ways. And that’s when I wrote my new book On Disinformation, which I felt like was the last piece of this puzzle that I’ve been working on over four different books now. So it’s a short pocket-sized manifesto of answers, of practical steps that we can all take.

What came to me was this denial doesn’t come out of nowhere. Denial is created by dis-informers, it starts with the dis-informers, and it goes through that amplification. And then it’s believed by a certain number of people. You can’t necessarily get a dis-informer to stop from lying, because it’s in their interest. You can’t pass an American law to get Putin to stop, not gonna happen, you probably couldn’t pass an American law to get Tucker Carlson to stop, not going to happen. We know from cognitive bias and history that the believers are going to believe what they’re going to believe. Where do you stop it? Amplification. You stop the amplification.

I think that the main thing that we need to do to solve the disinformation crisis that we’re now in is to spread the word to people who are involved in social media, major media, and partisan media that there’s a distinction between mis- and disinformation, and that there is somebody behind this. The problem here is the incentives. Government, major media, social media – who’s coming to save us? I don’t think any of those three, because they all have incentives not to do anything about this problem or not to take this problem seriously. And so what I really recommend in my book, is how to put pressure on them. You might ask, what power do we have as individuals? Well, as an individual, I don’t know – I write books, and I speak and try as an individual to make a difference.

But what really counts is when hundreds of thousands or millions of people are all on the same team. And everybody grabs an oar and pulls in the same direction. Like the Women’s March, like the March for Science. Remember, after Trump was elected, all of these people came together to resist and I think that was part of why he didn’t get away with more than he did. And I think that we can do that now before the next election to get hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to understand the threat that comes from disinformation, and not let networks get away with making that confusion. I’m not talking here about Fox. Fox are liars and it’s been proven in court. We know this. I’m talking about major media. I’m talking about CNN, I’m talking about MSNBC, I’m talking about major media. What’s their incentive? Ratings, engagement, not to be accused of being partisan, of having political bias.

What do they do with that? They try to tell both sides of the story. They treat politics as if it were a sporting event. They keep booking known liars on their program to spew their propaganda, because they don’t want to, as journalists, be accused of being partisan. But they’re doing horrible damage because what they’re doing is amplifying the disinformation. They don’t say: what you’re saying is provably untrue. And here’s the evidence. I mean, sometimes they do. Jonathan Swan did that when he was interviewing Trump. That’s how you should interview Trump. Like you would interview Saddam Hussein or Qaddafi, where you know he’s a dictator or wannabe dictator, he’s going to lie.

And stop with the hyping of the horse-race polls, or the pretending that this is a normal election. This is not a normal election. I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush. Some journalists get it right and some don’t. Nicolle Wallace 4pm on MSNBC, she by and large gets it right. I’ve never heard her use the term “misinformation” when she means “disinformation.” Andrea Mitchell – I cannot watch her because she spent so much time beating up on Biden to make up for all the beating up on Trump to try to show that she’s objective. I mean, she’s not the only one. There are a lot of folks at MSNBC that are really enraging their audience. CNN [is] worse. Now with their new head of programming, they’re now trying very, very hard to play it right down the middle which means that all of these journalists who know better keep having the liars on their program.

As Stuart Stevens said in his recent book, “how do you tell both sides of a lie?” You can’t book liars. Just stop. It’s ridiculous. Soledad O’Brien, who used to be on CNN said it best: “stop booking liars on your program.” And now how can we influence networks? Oh, my God, write to their advertisers, protest, push back. We can do the same thing with social media. Look how much revenue Twitter has lost since people started pushing back on the advertisers. And don’t just push back on the advertisers push back on PayPal and Akamai and Amazon Web Services and all these companies that without which Twitter and Facebook would fold, you know, overnight. Say “I saw disinformation on Twitter. And I don’t like it. And I noticed that PayPal, you do business with Twitter? And if you continue that I’m not going to use PayPal anymore.”

How many letters like that? Would it take before they took it seriously?And politicians is the last part of it. How many letters does it take to a politician to convince them? ‘If you don’t take this issue seriously, you’re gone.’ But who writes to a politician about disinformation? Well, I do. In my book, I’m recommending 10 steps that ordinary citizens can take and I just told you three of them. And the most important one is, you can’t win an information war unless you admit that you’re in one. Stop thinking this is a natural disaster. We are all the targets of this. We can all fall for it. There is disinformation out there right now [that] we’re all falling for because we don’t realize that it’s disinformation. We need to be much more wary of what we see on social media and regular media.

Sam Goldman 44:34

As we close out our conversation, I wanted to give you the opportunity if there was anything that you want to share with our audience, about your writing about mental immunity project or related topics, any final thoughts or messages you’d like to impart?

Lee McIntyre 50:18

Keep reading, I see some really nice books on your shelf behind there, one by Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works. Wonderful. There’s so much that you can read that can help you to understand what’s going on, you know, the history of this, I mean, stay engaged, there’s one message I want to close with disinformation has three goals. One is to get you to believe a falsehood. The second is to be polarized around that falsehood and to distrust the people who don’t believe the same thing. The third is to make you cynical, to make you feel helpless, and give up to say in this storm in this infodemic. I can’t fact check everything. How do I know what’s true? You know, I hear one thing on one network one thing on another, I’m just going to give up and stop believing anything. And that is exactly what a fascist wants you to do.

I wish I had right here in my hand, a quotation from Hannah Arendt and I’m gonna butcher it. This wasn’t in Origins of Totalitarianism. This was in 1974, when she was doing an interview on Origins of Totalitarianism. And she said more, more or less, I’m paraphrasing here. “When you lie to somebody constantly, the consequence is not that they believe the lie. It’s that they stopped believing anything.” They kind of give up their faculty for critical thinking, for questioning for judging. And with people like that. You can do anything that you want. That’s the real danger of the moment that we’re in. It’s not that somebody’s going to take a falsehood for true, or even a truth for falsity. It’s that they’re going to give up on the notion of truth and falsity. They’re going to start to think that it’s indeterminable.

And when it’s indeterminable, when there’s no such thing as falsehood, then there’s no such thing as blame. There’s no such thing as accountability. And isn’t that exactly what the fascist wants, giving up on the concept of truth? I’m afraid of Trump being elected for many reasons. I just read an article in The New York Times today about how people who are fighting back against Trump are exhausted. And I understand that, but when you’re exhausted, maybe you feel like you want to give up now is not the time to give up. Now is the time to absolutely fight as hard as we can over the next several months, or we’re in real trouble.

Sam Goldman 54:55

Absolutely. I want to thank you, Lee for coming on for sharing your expertise. Is your perspective, your work your time with us? We’re gonna link to your book and the mental immunity project in the show notes. Is there any other place that you want to direct people to learn more about your work?

Lee McIntyre 55:13

You can go to my website, LeeMcIntyreBooks.com. It’s got links to my speaking schedule to other things that are published to all my books. Yeah. Lee McIntyre books.com. And it’s also got links to all my social media handles, so you can hear my latest hot take on whatever’s in the news. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on your program. Really great questions, and I really enjoyed it.

Sam Goldman 55:37

Thanks so much. As I’m now making point to say in almost each episode, Trump can win fascism can seize and consolidate power. But the operative word is can that doesn’t mean that it will, the future is unwritten, we can stop them. Right now, you can share this podcast with one five or 5000 people, you know, we can do every little thing in our power to escape reality. Or we can take action to wake people up to this reality. We can make peace with fascists and their enablers and people who can’t find it in themselves to give a damn or people who just want to turn inward and ignore it all. Or we can build up strong communities among people who share our values, who together recognize the very real threat of this 21st century American fascism, who encouraged each other to take action to change the course of history. It’s up to you. It’s up to all of us.

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