"Foundations: Truth"

The word "truth" got swapped while nobody was looking.

This is Foundation 1 — the first in a new series of episodes that sit underneath everything else on TrapThink. Foundations aren't Monday drive-time content. They're floorboards. If you get this one, you'll hear every other trap on this show for what it really is.

Today we're tracking what happened to the concept of truth over the last thirty years. Not the political fights about specific truths. The concept itself. How it got moved. Who moved it. And what it costs a society when truth becomes something you possess instead of something you discover.

You'll hear:

• Oprah Winfrey, on a single Golden Globes stage in 2018, use the word "truth" two completely different ways forty seconds apart — and nobody flinched
• Kellyanne Conway invent "alternative facts" on Meet the Press, and Chuck Todd push back with a reflex that has since disappeared from American journalism
• Donald Trump, at a VFW convention, tell a crowd that "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening"
• Steve Bannon explain to PBS Frontline, in his own words, how flooding the zone works — and why he used it to govern
• Wesley Lowery at the University of Wisconsin redefine "objectivity" in a way that turned a profession inside out
• Katie Couric, on HBO, call for "almost deprogramming" seventy-five million American voters
• Mark Zuckerberg admit on Joe Rogan's podcast that the FBI pre-framed a true news story as Russian disinformation before it was published
• Matt Taibbi, under oath before Congress, name the word that governs the whole machinery: malinformation
• Dr. Anthony Fauci say two opposite things five months apart — and learn what happened to the people who noticed

This is a longer episode than usual. It earns it. Stay with it.

There's also a re-anchor at the end — what you do once you see the machine. I lean into the biblical framework a little harder than usual, because this is a Foundation and I'm not going to hedge. If you don't share the framework, you'll still get a structural argument that holds on its own terms. I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm asking you to go check.

Think deeper. Stay free. Stay unmanageable.

Transcript

Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Meghan Markle is speaking out in the new promo for her in Prince Harry's Oprah Winfrey interview. In the latest teaser for Sunday night's 90-minute special, the Duchess of Sussex didn't hold back when discussing the importance of speaking her truth. Oprah asked Megan how she felt about having the Palace's eyes on her as she gets candid. And she had this to say.

SPEAKER_15 0:39

Did you catch that? Let me let me play it again, one more time. And this time, listen for the word your.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

How do you feel about the palace hearing you speak your truth today?

SPEAKER_10 0:50

I don't know how they could expect that after all of this time we would still just be silent.

SPEAKER_15 0:57

There, did you catch it that time? Your truth. Not the truth, your truth. And Megan just rolls right past it, doesn't flinch, doesn't go, wait, what do you mean my truth? As opposed to whose? She just answers. Like Oprah asked her what she had for breakfast. And I don't blame her. By 2021, that phrase had been normalized for so long that nobody on that couch and nobody watching thought to notice, including me. I watched that interview when it aired. I caught a lot of things in that interview. I did not catch this. That's where we're starting today. Not with a lie, with a two-word swap. Truth got a pronoun attached to it. And the moment it did, it stopped being truth and became something else: a possession, a vibe, a personal accessory that matches your outfit, your truth, my truth, his truth, hers. And once everybody's got their own truth, guess what we don't have anymore? Now, before we go any further, I need to tell you what this episode actually is. Because this isn't my usual long form early week Monday show, in this case, Tuesday. This isn't a trap check. This isn't me pulling on some thread in the news cycle. This is, and I'm gonna use a word I never used before on this show, this is a foundation. A foundational episode. Meaning, if you get this one, you'll see every other trap I've ever covered on this show for what it really is. Every outrage supply chain, every editorial capture story, every identity laundering operation, every flood the zone moment. They all run on the same underlying move, and we're gonna name the move today. So this one's a little longer, this one's a little more dense. This one's gonna ask more of you than usual. I'd tell you to grab a coffee, but honestly, you're gonna want something stronger by the end, maybe a little Irish. And I'm gonna call this Foundation One, because I suspect there's gonna be more. There are three or four concepts running underneath everything on the show. Things I keep gesturing at and never fully sit down to name. Today we're gonna sit down with the biggest one, the one that makes all others possible. Truth. What it is, what it isn't, what happened to it, who did it, and most importantly, how to tell when somebody is running the swap on you in real time. Let's go.

Part One: The Swap

SPEAKER_15 3:26

Okay, let's actually dig in. January 7th, 2018, the Golden Globe Awards, Beverly Hilton, Oprah Winfrey is receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award, Lifetime Achievement, the highest honor the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gives out. First black woman to ever receive it. Room full of the most powerful people in American entertainment. Cameras are live, viewership is in the tens of millions. She gives the speech of her career, and in the middle of it, she does something I want you to watch very, very closely. She uses the word truth twice, back to back, 40 seconds apart, and she means two completely different things by it, and nobody in that room notices. The applause is the same for both. The camera doesn't cut. The coverage the next morning doesn't flag it. Nobody says, wait, what are we talking about? So here's the first clip.

SPEAKER_17 4:21

I'd like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, because we all know that the press is under siege these days. But we also know that it is the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice.

SPEAKER_15 4:44

Did you catch it? She's praising the press. She's saying the thing that saves us from tyrants and corruption and secrets and lies is the press's, and I'm quoting her exactly here, insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth. The absolute truth. Singular, out there, discoverable, not hers, not yours, not mine, just truth. The kind that exists, whether anybody's feeling it or not, the kind that journalists at their best go dig up, even when it's inconvenient. That's the old conception. That's the one Americans inherited from the Enlightenment, from the founders, from centuries of Western thought stretching back further than that. Truth is the thing you find, not the thing you bring. Okay, got it? Good. Now listen to what comes out of her mouth just about 40 seconds later.

SPEAKER_17 5:38

I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times. Which brings me to this. What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.

SPEAKER_15 6:00

Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. Same speech, same microphone, same woman. 40 seconds. And the word truth just did a complete 180. It went from singular, the absolute truth, which is out there, waiting to be uncovered, to possessive, your truth, my truth, the truth that lives inside you, that nobody else can access, that becomes real the moment that you speak it out loud. And nobody flinched. Nobody stopped her and said, Wait, Oprah, which one is it? Is truth the thing we dig up or the thing we generate? Nobody in the press the next morning said, Notice that she used two completely incompatible concepts of truth within the same minute? The room just applauded both times, the same way. Because by January 2018, at the elite level of American culture, the two had become interchangeable. You could use either one. You could use both in the same breath. It didn't matter. They were just words, noise that sounded nice. The distinction had been eroded to the point that even the highest paid communicator in American media could swap between both of them without friction. That's the swap. That's the whole move. And I want to be clear about something. This didn't start in 2018. 2018 is where it got canonized at a Golden Globe podium. But the groundwork had been laid for decades, and Oprah herself was the primary general contractor. Go back to the eighties and nineties. Oprah builds the biggest daytime talk show on television, and the entire format of the show, episode after episode, year after year, is built around tell your story, tell your truth, speak your truth, own your truth. Dr. Phil, The Secret, Eckhart Toll, Ayanla Van Zant, the whole stable, book deals, magazine covers, seminar circuits, all of it running on the same underlying message. The thing that will heal you, empower you, save you is your relationship with your own inner truth. Not the truth, but yours. Now I'm not here to dunk on Oprah. This is important. There's something genuinely valuable in parts of what she's doing. Telling someone who's been abused, who's been silenced, who's been told their experience didn't matter, telling that person your experience is real, your memory is valid, your story has weight, that's not a crazy thing to say. That's not nothing. That's an important corrective to a culture that had, in lots of cases, dismissed people's experiences wholesale. But and here's where the trap gets set. When you take your experience is real, which is narrow, defensible, psychologically healthy claim, and you stretch it into your truth is truth, which is a completely different and much broader metaphysical claim, you've done something the listener almost never notices. You've smuggled a cargo container through customs by declaring it as a paper bag. The valuable thing gets stretched into a dangerous thing using the same words, and nobody stops to check the paperwork. Because here's what your truth actually does once it's fully installed. Truth stops being a thing you discover. It becomes a thing you possess. And once it's a possession, like a car or a wedding ring or family heirloom, it can't be wrong. It can only be respected or disrespected. Think about what that does to a conversation. If I tell you the sky is green, we can have a conversation. You can point at the sky, we can walk outside together, we can look at a color wheel. One of us is wrong and we can figure out which one. That's how truth used to work. But if I tell you my truth is that the sky is green, now we're not having a conversation about the sky. We're having a conversation about me. And if you push back, you're not correcting a factual error, you're attacking my identity, you're disrespecting my truth, you're invalidating me, and suddenly you're the aggressor just for pointing at the sky. That's the swap. That's the whole episode in one sentence. And once you see it, once you really see it, you're gonna start catching it everywhere on cable news, in your family group text, in corporate HR trainings, in church sometimes, in your own mouth, probably, because we've all been breathing this air for thirty years and none of us got out clean. So we've got the swap, we've named it, we've heard it on tape. Now here's the question that makes this whole episode interesting. If the swap was only happening on one side of the political aisle, this would be a much easier episode to make. I could just point at the Oprah Golden Globes Coastal Elite Therapeutic Industrial Complex and say, look at what they did. Half the country would nod, the other half would dismiss me, and Trap Think would be just another show coded for one team. But that's not what happened. Because at the exact same time the therapeutic left was installing your truth, somebody else in a completely different part of American culture, wearing completely different clothes, speaking to a completely different audience, was installing the same move in reverse. And we're gonna listen to her next.

Part Two: The Mirror

SPEAKER_15 11:15

So somebody else. While Oprah is building the therapeutic empire, while Speak Your Truth is becoming the catechism of every morning show and every self-help book and every HR training from Santa Monica to Manhattan, something else is happening on the other side of American culture. And it's not happening in a Beverly Hills ballroom. It's happening in the basement of the American political press. January 22nd, 2017, meet the press. Chuck Todd is interviewing Kellyanne Conway. She's the senior counselor to the brand new Trump administration, which is at this point about 36 hours old. And the topic on the table is a fight about crowd sizes. Press Secretary Sean Spicer had the day before come out to the White House briefing room for the first time and given a statement about inauguration attendance that was, not to put too fine a point on it, demonstrably not true. Numbers didn't match, photos didn't match. It was a strange opening move for a new administration, and Chuck Todd is pressing Conway on why they'd picked that hill to die on. And then Kellyanne Conway says a phrase that nobody had ever said before on American television.

SPEAKER_03 12:23

Why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood. Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press opposite engaging.

SPEAKER_09 12:41

Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. What is it you're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is Alternative Facts?

SPEAKER_03 12:53

Alternative facts for the five facts he uttered. The weekend he gave Zeke Miller for the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts, they're falsehoods.

SPEAKER_15 13:05

Alternative facts. And Chuck Todd, God bless him, he's doing his job here. Chuck Todd pushes back immediately. Alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehood, he says. He's not letting her slide it past him. In January 2017, a mainstream political journalist still had the reflex to say, no, that's not a thing. Facts are facts. You don't get to rebrand them. Hold on to that reflex because it's gonna erode. We're gonna watch it erode across this episode. But right here in January 2017, it was still alive. Now, here's what I want you to notice about what Conway just did. Structurally, it is the exact same move Oprah made. It's the adjective in front of the noun trick. The truth becomes your truth. The facts become alternative facts. And in both cases, the adjective does the same work. It empties the noun out. It takes a thing that used to have weight and turns it into a category with variants. You got your facts, I got my alternative facts. Let's each go consult the ones that feel right. Different team, different vocabulary, different cultural register entirely. Oprah's in an evening gown making people cry. Conway's in a power suit sparring with Chuck Todd. But the move is identical. Put a modifier in front of a load bearing noun. Watch the noun quietly empty out. Walk away before anyone notices what you just did. And if this were just one weird press appearance by one political operative, we could call it an outlier, a bad day at the office. Sometimes people say things on live TV that they shouldn't say when it doesn't mean much. But that's not what happened. Because about a year and a half later, the most powerful person on earth stands up in front of a crowd of veterans in Kansas City and does the same move, except he takes it one step further. July 24th, 2018, Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, Kansas City, Missouri. President Donald Trump is giving a speech that's on its face about trade policy. He's going on about the European Union. He's going on about China. He's talking about tariffs and trade deficits and how foreign countries have been, in his words, ripping us off for decades. And he's right about a lot of it. But in the middle of it, he says this.

SPEAKER_05 15:26

Amazing. But remember they have the biggest, biggest, strongest, lumbiest, and they're doing a number. Just stick with them. Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. I mean, I'm a piece of an NBC today. NBC. Not just CNN. CNN's the worst. But missing a piece of an NBC. It was trouble. They were interviewing people. They probably go through 20, and then they pick the one that sounds like the worst. But they went through a group of people. In fact, I wanted to think I gotta do something about this Trump. And that piece was done by the lobbyists, somebody the people that they hired. It was a total setup. This country is doing better than it's ever done before economically. This is the time to take them off, to rip them off of we have to do them. You know, other countries have tamps on them. So when I say, well, I'm gonna put 10 months on them, pay them off some screaming, he's using tumor. China charges us when we make a comma 25% tariff. We charge them two and a half percent. Other than that, it's a fair deal. Okay, similar things with other countries like the European Union. They're big abusers, but it's all working out. And just remember what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.

SPEAKER_15 17:16

Okay, that's a long clip, and I don't know there's a lot happening in there, so let me walk you through it. First thing you heard, don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. And that's an old standard from Trump. We've all heard it a thousand times. It's been running since 2015. Media criticism. Tell your audience not to trust the other guys. Every politician does some version of it, it's not new. Then there's a whole tangent in the middle about the European Union and German cars and Mercedes and BMW. I'm not going to pretend that that was load bearing for the argument. That was just Trump being Trump, riffing with the crowd, getting the chant going, working the room. It's the texture of the speech. You kind of have to sit through it to feel how the next part lands, because then, right at the end, right when he's wrapping up the trade riff, he says, just remember, what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening. That sentence, that one is different. Don't believe the fake news is media criticism. It's a claim about journalists that they're lying, that they're biased, that they have an agenda. You can agree or disagree. I kind of agree. But it's a claim about a group of people. What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening. That's not media criticism. That's an instruction to distrust your own senses. The claim isn't that journalists are wrong. The claim is that reality itself, as it's reaching you through any channel, what you're seeing, what you're reading, isn't real. The signal is corrupt. The only reliable source of information is the man standing at the podium. That's an escalation. That's a different move than the media criticism. That's metaphysics. And I want to put this next to the Oprah clip for a second, because I think this is the beat the whole episode turns on. Oprah inflated the self up to the level of truth. Your truth is truth. What you feel is as real as anything out there. The internal becomes the external. You expanded, become the measure of what's real. Trump deflated external reality down below the level of the self. What you're seeing isn't happening. The external world is corrupt, unreliable, manipulated. Trust the man, not your eyes. The external becomes nothing. You, diminished, can only be saved by the authority in front of you. Opposite directions, same destination. In both cases, the external reference point, the shared world that exists, whether or not you're looking at it, gets dissolved. And once it's dissolved, you've got nothing left to measure anything against except whatever's being beamed into your chest at any given moment. Your feelings, his words, your truth, his frame. And I want to sit with this for a second, because I think a lot of people, a lot of people who consider themselves politically aware, who pride themselves on not being fooled, stop right there. They see one side do it and not the other. The person who caught your truth missed what you're seeing isn't happening. The person who caught Trump missed Oprah. And both of those people walk around feeling clear-eyed and informed, and both of them have missed half of what's going on. Because here's the actual question the one that makes this episode interesting, and the one that nobody in the mainstream media will sit with for more than 30 seconds. Why did both sides converge on the same move at the same time? Because that's what happened. Between roughly 2015 and 2020, the therapeutic left and the populist right, who agree on almost nothing, independently adopted and normalized moves that do the same structural work. They dissolved the external reference point from opposite directions, using completely different vocabularies, preaching to completely different audiences. And the thing that they ended up with, functionally, mechanically, in terms of what it does to a listener's ability to check claims against reality, was identical. That's not a coincidence, that's a pattern, and patterns have causes. Which brings us to the guy who, and I can't stress this enough, named the strategy out loud on camera years ago, and nobody took him seriously at the time because they thought he was just talking. But let's listen to him.

Part Three: The Named Doctrine

SPEAKER_15 21:31

His name is Steve Bannon, and before anybody listening tunes me out because of who that name belongs to, stay with me for 30 seconds, because I'm not here to tell you whether Steve Bannon is a good guy or a bad guy. I'm not here to litigate his politics. I'm not here to defend him or attack him. I'm gonna treat him for the purposes of this episode like a witness at the scene of a crime. What I care about is what he saw, what he did, and most importantly, what he said about what he did on camera years after. After the fact, when he had no reason to lie about it. Because here's what Bannon was. For the first seven months of the Trump administration, from January 2017 until roughly August, Steve Bannon was the chief strategist of the United States. He had an office in the West Wing. He was one of the two or three people closest to the president of the United States. He was, by nearly every account, the principal architect of Trump's first year media strategy. And in 2019, after he'd been pushed out of the White House, he sat down with PBS Frontline for a documentary called America's Great Divide. PBS Frontline, I want to emphasize this, is not a right-wing outlet. It's not OANN. It's not Breitbart. It's the flagship investigative documentary program of the American Public Television. Bannon sat with them voluntarily for hours. He wanted to explain himself. He wanted to get his side on the record. And somewhere in the middle of that interview, he tells the frontline filmmaker how he actually ran the job. I want you to listen for three things in this clip. First, his diagnosis of the American media, what he thinks is wrong with them. Second, his method for exploiting that diagnosis. And third, I want you to notice that he's not talking about what someone else should do. He's talking about what he did, past tense. This is not theory. This is operations. Okay, here we go.

SPEAKER_04 23:27

Number one is that the Democratic Party shattered. They don't know if they're coming or going, right? They got one group that's doing identity politics, another group that's a Clinton centrist. I said, we've broken them right now. They have no idea. They're going to have their own internal civil war, right? They'll keep them occupied for a while. So what we've got to do is just hit, hit, hit, and keep it. It's momentum, momentum, momentum. The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. And the one thing they'll mainly focus on is either they do the horse race, or once the horse race, who's in's, who's out? It's like the high school, who are the cool kids in the cafeteria, right? Because it's easy. It's the reason they do the horse race stuff all the time, right? And they won't do the basic, what are the core things that are going on in the country? I said, all we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things, they'll bite on one and we'll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never, we'll never be able to recover. But we gotta start with muzzle velocity. So it's gotta start and it's gotta hammer muzzle velocity.

SPEAKER_15 24:33

Okay, let's break this down. Diagnosis. Bannon says the media is dumb and lazy. He says they can only focus on one thing at a time. He says they chase the horse race. Who's up, who's down, what's the drama, what are the cool kids in the cafeteria saying? Because it's easy and it sells. He says they won't do the real work, which would be covering the structural stuff that's actually going on. Now, whether you agree with that diagnosis or not, understand what it does for him. If the media can only focus on one thing at a time, then you can overwhelm them by giving them more than one thing. That's the whole insight. The attention bottleneck is the vulnerability. Method. Every day we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one. We'll get our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. That's flood the zone. Bannon elsewhere in the same interview uses another phrase, muzzle velocity, meaning move fast enough that the debunking never catches up to the next story. By the time the New York Times has written a corrective, you're already three news cycles down the road. The fact check comes out on day four. Nobody reads day four fact checks. The damage was done on day one. And listen, I want you to sit with what this actually is, because a lot of people, when they hear flood the zone described this way, they nod along and think, yeah, that's what politicians do. They spin, they distract. That's nothing new. No, stop. This is not spin. Spin is when you put the best face on bad news. What Bannon is describing is different. He's describing a strategy that exploits your attention architecture. He's not trying to convince you of anything. He's trying to exhaust you. The goal isn't to win the argument. The goal is to make the argument itself impossible. Because here's what happens when you flood the zone with three things a day. The listener, the citizen, you start to disengage. You can't follow it all, you can't check it all, and at some point you throw up your hands and say, everybody's lying, I don't know what to believe. And that, right there, is when the strategy has won. Because once you've decided everyone's lying, you've stopped checking. And once you've stopped checking, the flooder can say anything, literally anything. It doesn't matter if it's true, it doesn't matter if it's false. It doesn't matter if it contradicts something they said yesterday. It's just more water in the flood. And now we need to ask the hard question, the one that makes this section of the episode more important instead of just interesting. Bannon named this doctrine on camera to PBS in 2019. That clip has been available to watch for years. Journalists have seen it, politicians have seen it, platform executives have seen it. And I want you to ask yourself, has the American media landscape got less flood the zone since 2019 or more? Because here's the uncomfortable truth. Flood the zone is no longer a Republican strategy or a Democratic strategy. It's not even a political strategy anymore. It's just the water. Everyone swims in it. Your cable news swims in it, twenty-three stories an hour, each replacing the last before your brain can process it. Your Twitter feed or X feed, that's what we're calling it now, is Flood the Zone by design. TikTok is flood the zone in motion. Even the fact checkers are flood the zone now. Six corrections a day, none of them landing, the next scandal already loaded in the chamber. Bannon didn't invent this. He noticed it. He named it. He weaponized it. And then everybody else on every side in every industry that touches your attention adopted the same method because it works. Because the media attention environment he diagnosed is the same environment everyone else operates in. And in that environment, flood the zone isn't just a strategy available to bad faith actors, it's just the default. It's the path of least resistance. You have to work against it to do anything else. Which brings us to the institutions that were supposed to sort signal from noise. The institutions whose entire job was to not get flooded, to slow down, to check, to publish the day four correction with the same prominence as the day one scoop. I'm talking about journalism, the press. The thing Oprah was praising at the Golden Globes when she used the phrase absolute truth. Remember her saying that? About the press's insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth? Yeah, about that.

Part Four: The Refs Join the Game

SPEAKER_15 28:57

Okay, so here's where we are. We've got the swap, we've got the swap happening on both sides, and we've got a former White House chief strategist on camera to PBS telling us exactly how the Flood the Zone strategy works and admitting that he used it to govern. Now, if you're building a functional society, there's one institution whose entire job it is to protect against this. One institution whose existence is justified precisely because people in power will always lie. And somebody has to check. Somebody has to slow down, somebody has to publish the correction, somebody has to make it costly, socially, professionally, reputationally, to flood the zone. That institution is journalism, the press, the fourth estate, the reason the First Amendment exists, the thing Oprah was gushing about at the Golden Globes when she praised their insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth. So, question for the back of the room If journalism was the immune system, what happened to the immune system? Because I'll tell you right now, if this whole story ended with the bad guys lied and the good guys caught them, we wouldn't be making this episode. The episode would have ended in twenty seventeen, when Chuck Todd looked at Kellyanne calmway in the face and said, alternative facts are not facts, they're falsehoods. That was the immune system working. That reflex, the institutional reflex, that was still alive in January of 2017. Over the next four years, that reflex broke down. And I want to show you how, using one person who articulated the breakdown really clearly, not because he's a villain, but because he's actually one of the smartest people who participated in the shift. And he explained what he was doing. His name is Wesley Lowery. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He worked for the Washington Post, he worked for CBS News. He was a major byline on the Ferguson and Baltimore stories that defined a lot of 2014 through 2016 American journalism. And in October of 2020, he sat down for a formal conversation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specifically at their Center for Journalism Ethics, to make his case for something he'd been pushing for a couple of years already: a shift in how the profession thinks about objectivity. Now, I'm going to set this up fairly because Lowry's argument is actually more sophisticated than the version of it that goes viral. He's not a crazy person. He's not saying throw out journalism. He's saying the word objectivity has been doing work it was never designed to do, and the profession needs to reckon with that. And there's a version of his argument that is honestly correct. He's right that some forms of objectivity, in practice, have become performative neutrality. He's right that false balance can be its own distortion. He's right that journalists are humans, and pretending that they're not is its own kind of lie. So I'm going to play you his strongest statement of the case, not the weakest, the strongest. Listen carefully and listen especially for when he uses the word objective and what he means by it each time.

SPEAKER_08 32:02

The word objectivity has also, which really fundamentally means fairness, right? That we're writing things that are objectively true, has suddenly gained all of these additional words that are not really synonyms. So sometimes we talk about objectivity, but we also talk about balance. Or balance and objectivity are not the same thing, right? That if you have a true thing, you don't balance it out with just as much of the wrong thing. That doesn't make it objectively true, it makes it false, right? We talk about neutrality. Well, for me, as someone who's spent a lot of time covering violence or murders, if I write a piece about a murder and you walk away from it with neutral feelings about it, with a neutral conclusion about whether or not this murder was good or bad, I would suggest I have failed to impress upon you the objective truth of the thing that I'm writing about, right? So balance, neutrality, those things have nothing to do with objective truth and objective fairness.

SPEAKER_15 32:58

Okay. Replay that one in your head for a second if you need to. Here's what just happened. Lowry started by defining objectivity as fairness, writing things that are objectively true. Good so far. That's the classic definition. The one journalists have operated under for a century. Then watch this. He uses an example. If I write a piece about a murder and you walk away from it with neutral feelings about it, I would suggest I have failed to impress upon you the objective truth of the thing. Did you catch the move? Because this is, and I'm not exaggerating, the same move Oprah made, except on a different floor of the same building. Oprah took the word truth and moved it from external and singular to internal and possessive. Lowry just took the word objective and moved it from the process of reporting to the feeling of the reporter. The journalist's moral reaction to the story is the objective truth of the story. If you walk away feeling neutral, the journalist has failed, not at impressing facts on you, but at impressing his conclusion on you. Watch what that does. Under the old model, the journalist's job was to collect the evidence, interview the witnesses, check the claims, and put it in front of you so you could form a conclusion. The journalist's feelings were irrelevant. In fact, they were a hazard. The whole point of the objectivity process was that it was designed to work around the journalist's feelings. Because the journalist is a human being with biases. That's why you have editors. That's why you have sourcing standards. That's why you quote multiple perspectives. The system assumed the individual was flawed and built around that assumption. Under Lowry's model, and again, Lowry is articulating something that a lot of newsrooms were already doing by 2020. The journalist's moral conclusion becomes the objective truth. The reader who doesn't share the conclusion isn't reading carefully enough. The reader who pushes back isn't questioning evidence. They're resisting clarity. And look, Lowry picked the easiest possible example. Murder is bad. Obviously, nobody disagrees. He knew what he was doing when he chose that example. It's the case where the moral claim is so universal, it's basically not a moral claim anymore. It's just fact. Murder is bad, is indistinguishable from the sky is blue for any functional member of society. But here's the problem. The cases where moral clarity in journalism actually matters are never the murder cases. They're the contested ones. Is the protest violent or mostly peaceful? Is this immigration policy cruel or necessary? Is this election integrity concern legitimate or conspiracy theory? Is the public health measure science or politics? Was the lab the source of the virus or wasn't it? Those are the cases that shape how millions of people understand their country. And in those cases, by Lowry's logic, if the reporter walks in with a moral conclusion and delivers it with clarity, and you walk away neutral, the reporter has failed. You weren't persuaded. You weren't properly instructed. You didn't get it. That's not journalism anymore. That's advocacy dressed in a press badge. And I want to say this clearly, because I don't want anyone to mishear me. I'm not saying Wesley Lowry is a bad journalist. I'm not saying he's acting in bad faith. Actually the opposite. I think he means every word of what he said. I think he believes that covering injustice requires moral clarity. And I think he's willing to defend that position publicly. That's admirable in its way. He's not hiding the move, he's making it openly. But the institution that hired him and the institutions that followed his lead adopted the move and then pretended that they didn't. And that's the problem. The institution kept the old labels, objectivity, fairness, balance, just the facts, while installing the new operating system underneath. A reader in twenty twenty two who picked up the New York Times assumed he was getting the old product. He was getting the new one, same logo, but a different machine. Now that's the theoretical version of the shift. Let me show you the practical version. January 15th, 2021, real time with Bill Maher. This is nine days after January 6th, the January 6th. Eight days after the Georgia Senate runoff. The country is at a level of political tension that it has not been at in living memory. And Bill Maher is interviewing Katie Couric, who was not some random pundit. Katie Couric anchored the CBS Evening News. She ran today on NBC for 15 years. She interviewed Sarah Palin in 2008 in an exchange that became genuinely historic. For decades, Katie Crook was the friendly, trusted face of mainstream American broadcast journalism. She's not fringe. She's not experimental. She's the establishment. Listen to what she says and listen in particular for one word she hedges with. You'll know it when you hear it.

SPEAKER_11 37:57

Okay, and as much as I'm worried about these loons who break into government, I'm actually more worried about the loons who did get elected. Because I I mean, what do you do about these people? There's 147 Republicans in Congress who still don't concede that Trump lost the election. What do you do about people who are in the government who don't believe in our way of government?

SPEAKER_01 38:22

It is so shocking. Not only do are they not conceding, Bill, but there's thoughts that there might have been some collusion among members of Congress. Some are refusing to go through magnom magnometers or whatever you call them to check for weapons. They're not wearing masks during the siege. I mean, it's really bizarre, isn't it, when you think about how AWOL so many of these members of Congress have gotten. But I also think some of them are believing the garbage that they are being fed 24-7 on the internet by their constituents. And they bought into this big lie. And the question is, how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump?

SPEAKER_15 39:06

Almost. She said almost deprogram on HBO in prime time to an audience that applauded, but I cut that out. And I want to sit with that word almost, because I think it's the most important word in the whole clip. That almost is the thing that tells you she knew. On some level, some journalist reflex buried under 30 years of career, the same reflex that Chuck Todd still had in 2017. She knew what she was describing was not a thing journalists say. Deprogramming, that's a word from the cult recovery industry. It refers to an intensive, coercive process of forcibly changing someone's belief structure. That's not a neutral term. It's not even close to a neutral term. You don't de-program people you disagree with, you deprogram people whose minds have been captured by an outside force that has removed their agency. And when you apply that word, even with the softer almost to 75 million American voters, you're no longer doing journalism. You're doing diagnosis. You're declaring half the electorate mentally ill, captured, in need of intervention. You're sorting humans into sane and not sane on the basis of their political preferences. And the person doing it is the person who, for decades, was the face of the institution we were supposed to trust to sort truth from falsehood. This is the Lowry model arriving. This is what moral clarity over objectivity looks like when it leaves the journalism school seminar and walks around in prime time. Couric has a conclusion. The conclusion is that Trump voters are an occult. And because she has a conclusion, and because by the new standard, her moral conclusion is the objective truth, any reporter who walks away from the story with neutral feelings about Trump voters has failed her professional duty. Do you see what just happened? Do you see what the swap did? The institution that was supposed to be the immune system against the flooded zones and polarized truth claims became a source of flooded zones and polarized truth claims. The referees joined the game, and when the referees join the game, there are no referees. There's just more players. Which is a disaster for a functioning society. But it's also an opportunity, a massive commercial opportunity for anyone with a platform big enough to replace the referees. Because now there's a vacuum where the immune system used to be. And there are some very large companies who were more than happy to step into that vacuum.

Part Five: The Machinery

SPEAKER_15 41:40

So the immune system was drifting. And when an immune system drifts, pathogens multiply. That's true in a human body and it's true in an information ecosystem. When the institution tasked with sorting signal from noise stops doing that job or starts doing a different job it wasn't designed for, the things that the system was supposed to keep in check start to spread unchecked at scale. Now, if you're a very large company that owns a very large platform, and by platform, I mean a piece of digital infrastructure through which a meaningful fraction of human communication now flows, you have a decision to make. You look at the landscape, you see that the referees left the field, you see that your platform is now the single biggest venue for political speech in human history. And you ask yourself, what's my role here? There are honest answers to that question. An honest answer would sound like we're a distribution system, we're a pipe, speech flows through us. We don't arbitrate truth. We can't. We don't have the competence, we don't have the legitimacy, and we don't have the constitutional authority. Go fight it out yourselves. That is not the answer the platforms gave. The answer that the platforms gave starting around 2017 and escalating every year through 2021 was we will adjudicate, we will partner with fact checkers, we will flag, we will throttle, and we will remove, we will ban, and we will do it in coordination with government agencies who have flagged content for us. I'm gonna show you what that looks like. And here's what's interesting about how we're going to see it. We're not gonna see it through a leaked document or a whistleblower. We're gonna see it because the CEO of the largest speech platform in human history went on the biggest podcast in the world and just described it out loud, conversationally, like he was describing how a sandwich got made. August 25th, 2022, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and threads. He sits down with Joe Rogan for episode 1863 of the Joe Rogan experience. Three hour conversation. Rogan at one point asks him about the Hunter Biden laptop story. Remember that story? October 2020, three weeks before the presidential election. The New York Post publishes reporting about materials allegedly recovered from a lack of. Laptop belonging to the son of the Democratic nominee. The story gets throttled on Facebook, gets locked on Twitter, becomes almost immediately one of the most controversial content moderation decisions in internet history. Rogan asks Zuckerberg about it, and Zuckerberg answers. I want you to listen for four specific things in this clip. First, how Zuckerberg describes the FBI coming to Facebook before the story existed. Second, how he explains Facebook's fact-checking protocol. Third, what happened to the story's distribution during the window it was being reviewed? And fourth, and this is the strangest moment in the whole interview, listen to the metaphor he reaches for at the end to describe what happened. It's going to be almost three minutes, so settle in.

SPEAKER_12 44:59

Yeah, we had this too. Yeah, so you guys censored that as well?

SPEAKER_14 45:02

Aaron Powell So we took a different path than Twitter. I mean basically the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, um just so you know, like you should be on high alert. There was the we we we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump of of um uh uh that's similar to that. So just be vigilant. So our protocol is different from Twitter's. What Twitter did is they said you can't share this at all. Um we didn't do that. What we do is we have um if something is reported to us as potentially um misinformation, important misinformation, we uh we also third-party fact-checking program, because we don't want to be deciding what's true and false. And for the I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being um being determined whether it was false, um the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it, you could still consume it.

SPEAKER_12 46:10

So when you say the distribution is decreased in the How does that work?

SPEAKER_14 46:14

It basically the ranking in Newsfeed was a little bit less. So fewer people saw it than would have otherwise. So it definitely By what percentage? I d I don't know off the top of my head. But it's it's it's meaningful. But I mean but basically a um a lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that that was the case. Um you know, obviously this is a hyper-political issue, so depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn't censor it enough or censored it way too much. But we weren't sort of as black and white about it as as Twitter. We just kind of thought, hey, look, if if the FBI, which you know I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it's a very professional law enforcement, they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.

SPEAKER_12 46:58

Aaron Ross Powell Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?

SPEAKER_14 47:03

No. I I don't remember if it was that specifically, but it was it basically fit the pattern.

SPEAKER_12 47:07

Aaron Ross Powell When something like that turns out to be real, is there regret for not having it evenly distributed and for throttling the distribution of that story?

SPEAKER_14 47:21

What do you mean evenly distributed?

SPEAKER_12 47:22

Aaron Ross Powell I mean evenly in that it's not suppressed. It's not suppressed. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_14 47:27

Yeah. I mean it's it sucks.

unknown 47:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_14 47:29

Yeah. I mean because I mean it turned out after the fact, I mean the fact checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false.

SPEAKER_15 47:36

Okay. Four beats. Let me walk you through them. Beat one. The FBI came to Facebook. Zuckerberg's words, some folks on our team, it was like, hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. There was we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump. That is pre-framing. The FBI didn't come to Facebook with evidence of Russian disinformation. They came with a warning that the thing that was about to happen was Russian disinformation before the thing had happened, before the story had been reported. The frame was installed in advance. And I want you to sit with what that means, because if you tell the largest speech platform in the world in advance that an imminent story is likely to be foreign propaganda, you've just pre-committed that platform to a specific interpretation of the story once it appears. The platform is now on a hair trigger. The moment the story breaks, they're not evaluating it fresh. They're matching it against the template the FBI installed weeks earlier. That's not law enforcement. That's narrative management. And it's being done by the largest law enforcement agency in the United States in private conversations with the largest speech platform on earth before any crime has been committed and before any story has been published. Beat to Zuckerberg explains Facebook's fact-checking protocol. Listen to that exact wording. We also use this third-party fact-checking program because we don't want to be deciding what's true and false. Stop right there. Because that sentence contains a very elegant dodge that almost nobody catches. Zuckerberg says Facebook doesn't want to decide what's true and false. Okay, that's a reasonable position. Facebook isn't the Ministry of Truth. Good so far. So what does Facebook do instead? It outsources the decision to a third-party fact checker. But and this is the important part that nobody presses on. Facebook decides which fact checkers to use. Facebook decides which fact checker's rulings get applied to which posts. Facebook decides what algorithmic consequence follows from a fact checker's ruling. Facebook decides when to override a fact checker and when to escalate and when to appeal. In other words, Facebook didn't stop deciding what's true and false. It moved the decision one desk over and pretended the new desk was independent. But the new desk operates inside Facebook's building, on Facebook's rules, with Facebook controlling all the meaningful variables. It's the same decision, just laundered through a shell. That's the move that got installed at every major platform between 2017 and 2021. Not we decide the truth, never. We partner with independent fact checkers. Very different vibe. Same mechanic. B3. During the five to seven day window that the Hunter Biden laptop story was being evaluated, Zuckerberg says the distribution of the story was reduced. I'm quoting the ranking in the newsfeed was a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise. Rogan asks, by how much? Zuckerberg doesn't know. But Zuckerberg acknowledges it was, and this is his word meaningful. Let me translate. Not banned it, not removed it, just turned down the volume, throttled the signal. The story was still there. You could technically find it if you went looking, but fewer people did because fewer people saw it. And that throttling was invisible. No warning labels, no notice to users, just less of it in your feed. That is the invisible, frictionless, deniable version of censorship. You don't have to ban a story. You just turn its volume from ten to three. It's still technically there. You can't say you censored it, but the impact on public awareness is identical to banning it. Beat four. And this one is look, this this is the part I think reveals everything. Rogan asked Zuckerberg whether the Hunter Biden laptop story turned out to be true. And Zuckerberg admits the fact checkers look into it. No one was able to say it was false, which is a very carefully worded way of saying the story was true. The story we throttled was true. The Russian propaganda frame the FBI installed in advance was wrong. The people who were flagged for sharing the story were flagged for sharing true information. And then Zuckerberg reaches for a metaphor. Listen to what he reaches for. He says, it sucks. Though I think in the same way that probably having to go through like a criminal trial, but being proven innocent in the end sucks. Like it still sucks to have that you had to go through a criminal trial, but at the end you're free. I need you to sit with this metaphor for a minute because it's one of the most revealing things I've ever heard a tech CEO say. Zuckerberg is comparing a true news story, getting throttled on his platform on the basis of a government warning that turned out to be wrong to a defendant in a criminal trial. The story is the accused, the throttling is the prosecution, the fact check is the verdict, and when the verdict comes back and the story is found to be true, well, you can't unsue somebody. Sorry, the story had to go through the trial, but hey, at the end the story was free. Do you see the architecture of that metaphor? Speech, by default, is on trial. Platforms are the courts. Government FBI flagging is probable cause. Fact checkers are the jury. And any piece of information you try to share is, in Zuckerberg's own framing, a defendant. Until proven innocent, guilty. And even after proven innocent, damaged by the process. That's not how free speech works in a free society. That's how speech works in a managed society. And it just got described out loud, conversationally, by the CEO of the largest speech platform in human history on the biggest podcast in the world. And and this is the part that should make your eyes widen. Almost no mainstream outlet picked it up. Zuckerberg said the machine out loud, and the media that was supposed to notice was too busy doing moral clarity. Now, one platform, one admission, you could argue maybe this is just Facebook. Maybe this is just the Hunter Biden laptop. Maybe this is just a one-time thing. Maybe it's not a pattern. Except the same thing was happening at Twitter. And at Twitter, we have documentation. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, one of the first things he did was open the internal files to a handful of independent journalists, a process that became known as the Twitter files. And over the following months, those journalists published thread after thread showing that what Zuckerberg had described at Facebook was also happening at Twitter. FBI requests, DHS flagging, CIA involvement, State Department involvement, lists of accounts, throttling, suspensions, coordination with academic institutions, coordination with think tanks, an entire apparatus. The reporter who documented most of it called it the censorship industrial complex, operating in coordination with multiple federal agencies, targeting accounts, suppressing content, shaping what hundreds of millions of Americans saw on their feed. Now this whole thing became politically explosive for predictable reasons. It got covered by right wing outlets as a scandal. It got covered by left wing outlets as a nothing burger. It got dunked on and dismissed and celebrated and misrepresented across every seam of the American media ecosystem, which is exactly what you would expect to happen when the machinery of narrative management gets exposed. The narrative managers go to work on the exposure itself. But on March 9th, 2023, the two reporters who had done the most work on the Twitter files, Matt Taibi and Michael Schellenberger, were called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government under oath, on the record, in a House hearing room, and each of them got five minutes to give an opening statement before the partisan cross examination began. I'm going to play you Taibi's opening statement in full. It's about five and a half minutes. And I want you to listen to it carefully, because Taibi, in this statement, accomplishes three things that almost nobody else has managed to articulate this clearly. First, he names a word, a specific word that, once you know it, you cannot stop seeing it everywhere. Second, he preempts the partisan frame. He explicitly documents that the Twitter files targeting hit people on both the political left and the political right. And third, he names what this whole machine actually is. Not just a set of practices, a category of information governance that didn't used to exist. Okay, here we go.

SPEAKER_13 56:36

Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, members of the Select Committee, thank you for having me today. My name is Matt Taebe. I've been a reporter for 30 years and a staunch advocate of the First Amendment. Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone Magazine. Ranking Member Plaskett, um, I'm not a so-called journalist. Uh I've won the National Magazine Award, the IF Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books, including four New York Times but New York Times bestsellers. Um I'm now the editor of the online magazine Racket on the independent platform Substack. I'm here today because of a series of events that began late last year when I received a note from a source online. It read, Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation was going on at Twitter? A week later, the first of what became known as the Twitter Files reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a Vegas lot machine, uh, as the just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements. But it wasn't until a week after the first report, after Michael Schellenberger, Barry Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the files, that we started to grasp the significance of this story. The original promise of the internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere. What we found in the files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role. We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election when we read things like flagged by DHS or please see attached report from FBI for potential misinformation. This would be attached to an Excel spreadsheet with a long list of names whose accounts were often suspended shortly after. Again, Ranking Member Plaskett, I would note that the evidence of Twitter government relationship includes lists of tens of thousands of names on both the left and right. The people affected include Trump supporters but also left-leaning sites like Consortium and Truth Out, the leftist South American Channel Telesaur, the Yellow Vest movement. That in fact is a key point of the Twitter files, that it's neither a left nor right issue. Following the trail of communications between Twitter and the federal government across tens of thousands of emails led to a series of revelations.

unknown 59:17

Mr.

SPEAKER_13 59:17

Chairman, we summarized and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter file stride, which was also released to the public this morning. We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at state, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same thing, including Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership, NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index, and many others, many taxpayer funded. A focus of this fast-growing network, as Mike noted, is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. That last term is just a euphemism for true but inconvenient. Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism. Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for de-amplification or deplatforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xander, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, baseless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge. As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment and deprivation without due process is horrifying. Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people's last line of defense in such cases. But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not yet been taken. Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought policing system. I'm running out of time, so I'll just sum up and say it's just not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is it is, however, possible becoming uh technologically uh possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we're looking at. This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions. Uh the First Amendment, an American population accustomed to the right to speak, is the best defense left against the censorship industrial complex. If the latter can knock over our first and most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have no serious opponent left anywhere. If there's anything the Twitter files show, it's that we're in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all democratic rights are impossible. Thank you for the opportunity to appear, and I'd be happy to answer any questions from the committee.

SPEAKER_15 1:02:10

Malinformation. That's the word. Taibi said it. That last term is just a euphemism for true but inconvenient. Malinformation is information that is true and also disfavored. Information that is true and also targeted for suppression. Information that is true and also appears on lists shared between government agencies and private platforms for purposes of throttling, flagging, or removal. And I want you to sit with what it means that this word had to be invented. Because language doesn't invent new categories unless the new categories are doing work for someone. We had a word for false information for centuries, lies. We had a word for misleading information, propaganda. We had a word for information stolen for strategic purposes, espionage. Those categories existed because the problems existed and the language adapted to them. Malinformation is a new word. It was coined in this exact usage somewhere around 2019 or 2020 as part of a growing vocabulary developed by academic institutions, government agencies, and NGOs working on disinformation research. And it was coined specifically because the old categories weren't sufficient. The old categories all had one thing in common. The information in them was false. Lies are false. Propaganda is distorted, misinformation is wrong. But the people building the censorship infrastructure kept running into a problem. Some of the information they wanted to suppress was true. The Hunter Biden laptop was true. The vaccine side effect reports were often true. The lab leak hypothesis turned out to be plausible and possibly correct. The Fauci mask reversals were real. And you couldn't classify any of these under the old categories. Because the old categories required falsity. These weren't false. They were just, from the platforms and agencies' point of view, inconvenient. So they invented a new word, malinformation. Information that is true but disfavored. And once you have the word, you have the category. And once you have the category, you have the justification for suppression. That is a civilization level move. That is not a normal thing to do. No functioning free society has ever had a formal category for information we suppress because it's true but we don't like it. That's the kind of thing that requires an authoritarian government with no regard for basic epistemic freedom. Or, and this is the modern version of it, it requires a public-private partnership sophisticated enough that nobody's sure who's actually making the suppression decisions. And Taibi, in his opening statement, nailed the pattern perfectly. The targeting was bipartisan. Trump supporters got hit. The yellow vest movement in France got hit. South American leftist news channels got hit. American left wing sites like Consortium News and Truth Out got hit. The machine isn't ideological. The machine is just the machine. It flags what it's trained to flag. It throttles what it's flagged. And whether what got flagged happens to be true or false, popular or fringe, left or right, the machine doesn't care. The machine is doing something more fundamental than ideology. The machine is managing reality. That's what Zuckerberg described in the criminal trial metaphor. That's what Taibi described in the malinformation framework. Two different platforms, two different witnesses, one system. And here's the part I want to sit with before we go on, because this is heavy. For most of modern history, lying has been understood as a specific thing. Saying something you know to be false, that's the basic definition. That's the one kids learn in kindergarten for crying out loud. And when you lie in public life, there's consequences. Reputations get damaged. Careers end, newspapers print corrections, the ecosystem has immune responses for lying because lying is a well defined category of harm. What we just described is not lying. What we just described is an architectural management of what counts as knowable, not lies, something worse than lies in a way, because lies can be refuted by evidence, and what we just described suppresses the evidence. And the reason it's so difficult to fight this is because everyone involved can honestly say they didn't lie. The FBI didn't lie when it warned Facebook about Russian disinformation. The fact checkers didn't lie when they rated the laptop story as missing context. Context is always missing from any story technically. Zuckerberg didn't lie when he said Facebook doesn't decide what's true. He just set up a structure where somebody else decided and he enforced their decision. Twitter didn't lie when it said it respected free speech. It just put certain speakers on quiet lists that throttled their reach. The Aspen Institute didn't lie when it ran a tabletop exercise about a hypothetical future Hunter Biden leak. It was just exercise. Every individual link in the chain can honestly say they didn't lie. And the chain, taken as a whole, produced an outcome that no one in a free society would have consented to if it had been proposed openly. That is the machine. That is the architecture. And it's running on you, on me, on all of us, every day. And the worst part is what it does to the people who notice. Because noticers, the people who catch the swap, the people who notice the throttle, the people who remember the original Fauci clip, the people who remember that the laptop was real, they become a problem for the machine, and the machine has a name for them too. We'll get to that next.

Part Six: The Cost

SPEAKER_15 1:07:50

Here's the thing that happens when the machine runs. It doesn't hit big important people. Big important people can mostly take care of themselves. They have PR teams, they have lawyers, they have friends at other platforms. When the machine comes for them, they all know who to call. The machine hits ordinary people. It hits the guy at the office who posts a news article to his Facebook page and suddenly gets a warning label. It hits the grandmother who remembered something from last year and said so in a comment and got a 30 day suspension. It hits the nurse who had a question about a medication and asked it in public and got dragged. It hits the pastor whose sermon got clipped and context collapsed. It hits the doctor who deviated from the approved statement and found his medical license under review. Yeah, that happened. It hits you quietly, without ceremony, without you necessarily even noticing at first that it's happening. One day a post gets fewer likes than usual. Your reach feels smaller. People that you used to talk to stop responding. You think maybe you said something wrong, maybe you're being paranoid. You shrug it off, and the machine hums on in the background, doing its work, and you go about your day. Until the day the machine does something to someone you trust, and then everything changes. I want to show you what I mean with a specific case, and I want to be careful with it because it's a case that most people have already formed strong opinions about. So I'm going to ask you to set your opinions down for a minute and just listen with fresh ears. The man's name is Dr. Anthony Fauci. And regardless of what you think of him personally, and I know some of you have strong feelings in both directions, what I want to show you is not about Anthony Fauci. It's about what happened to the people who remembered the things he said. Two clips, same man, about five months apart. The first one is from 60 Minutes, March 8th, 2020. Dr. John LePuc is interviewing Fauci about the emerging pandemic. The topic is masks. Listen to what Fauci says. Listen to how confidently he says it. Listen to the qualifications he adds. Listen to the interviewer asking if he's sure. Because people are listening really closely to this right now, he says.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:02

There's a lot of confusion among people and misinformation surrounding face masks. Can you discuss that?

SPEAKER_07 1:10:08

Aaron Ross Powell The masks are important for someone who's infected to prevent them from infecting someone else. Now, when you see people and look at the films in China and South Korea, whatever, everybody's wearing a mask. Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks. You're sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Right now, people should not be walking. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face. Trevor Burrus, Jr. And can you get some schmutz sort of staying inside there? Of course. Of course. But when you think masks, you should think of healthcare providers needing them and people who are ill. The people who, when you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks, that's fine. That's fine. I'm not against it. If you want to do it, that's fine. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:17

But it can lead to a shortage of masks.

SPEAKER_07 1:11:21

It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.

SPEAKER_15 1:11:26

Okay. So remember that. The year is 2020, early in the pandemic. The authority figure on American infectious disease is on 60 minutes. In a lab coat, telling Americans that there is no reason to walk around with a mask. He's acknowledging that masks might make people feel better. He's allowing that they might block a droplet. He's adding that there could be unintended consequences. People fiddling with them, touching their faces. And he's landing on a practical concern about mask supply for healthcare workers. Got it? All right, good. Hold on to it. Five months later, August of 2020, ABC World News Tonight. David Muir is interviewing Fauci about the reopening of schools. Here's clip two.

SPEAKER_16 1:12:08

And now we've learned that nine students and staff have already tested positive in that school alone. Do those images concern you? And should all students, should all students in this country be wearing masks?

SPEAKER_07 1:12:19

You know, I'm one, and I've said it for so long, David, that I really do believe if you if and and it's part of what I call a comprehensive way to really avoid the things that you were just referring to. There should be universal wearing of masks. There should be the extent possible social distancing, avoiding crowds. Outdoors always better than indoors, and be in a situation where you continually have the capability of washing your hands and cleaning up with sanitizers. When I see sites like that, it is disturbing to me.

SPEAKER_16 1:12:52

So when you hear this local guidance coming from some schools that mask wearing will be uh voluntary for students in those schools, you disagree with that. You say universal mask wearing.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:07

I could give you my opinion. Right.

SPEAKER_16 1:13:09

You just said you just said universal wearing of masks.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:13

I would I I feel that universal wearing of masks is one of five or six things that are very important in preventing the upsurge of infection.

SPEAKER_15 1:13:24

Same man, same confident delivery, same steady tone, same lab coat energy, and this time universal mask wearing for students in schools. And when Muir catches Fauci hedging, Muir presses, you just said universal. And Fauci, credit to him, doesn't back down, reaffirms. Universal masks. One of five or six things that are very important. Now, here's where I have to be really careful. Because there is a version of this section of the episode that is a cheap, easy, partisan-friendly dunk on Anthony Fauci. That version would go something like, see, he lied, he flip-flopped, he can't be trusted. The science was political the whole time. That version is available. A lot of people have made that version. It's been monetized many times by many people. That version is not the trap think version. Because here's the honest truth. In March of 2020, Fauci said what he said for a mix of reasons. Some of them were legitimate. Mask supply for healthcare workers was a real concern. Some of them were medical. The state of the evidence on masking was genuinely evolving, and some of them have been wrong in hindsight. All of that can be true. And the charitable read, the one a reasonable person could extend, is that information changed, the science updated, and Fauci updated with it. That's how expertise is supposed to work. That's actually a good version. Fine, grant him that. I'm happy to. But that's not the story. The story is what happened to the people who remembered the first clip. Because by the time the second clip aired, something had shifted in the culture. Not officially, nobody announced it. There wasn't a press release. But somewhere in the interval between March and August of 2020, the first clip had become, in the language we learned in part five, malinformation. True but disfavored. Still accurate as a record of what was said, no longer acceptable to bring up. And the people who brought it up, who did the most basic thing in the world, which is to remember what an authority figure had said on television five months earlier, and compare it to what the same authority figure was saying now, well, those people found themselves in a strange new position. They weren't debating policy. They weren't attacking science. They were just remembering with receipts on camera, on the record. And they got flagged on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, in family group chats, in workplace Slack channels, in church lobbies. They posted the first clip and the platforms added a warning label, or throttled the post, or suspended the account, or removed it entirely. The fact checkers, the ones that Zuckerberg told us about in part five, the ones that were independent but operating inside the house, adjudicated that posting a 2020 clip of Anthony Fauci in 2021 was quote unquote missing context or misleading, or in some cases flat out false. Because of course it wasn't false. The man said the words, the tape was real. 60 Minutes had aired it. The archive existed, the transcripts existed. I just pulled it. But bringing it up in 2021 in a country trying very hard to mandate masks for school children and vaccines for workers was now a problem. And the system found ways to make it a problem for you personally. That's the cost. Now I want you to zoom out for a minute because this isn't just about one clip, and it isn't about Fauci. It isn't even just about the pandemic. This is about what happens to a person's relationship to their own memory when the machine tells them that their memory is misinformation. Think about what that does to somebody over time, over hundreds of small interactions. You remember a thing that happened, you bring it up, you get flagged. You're told the thing you remembered either didn't happen the way you remember it or shouldn't be mentioned. You get the label, the warning, the throttled reach, the cool-off period from your friends, the raised eyebrow from your sister-in-law at Thanksgiving, the dismissal at work. And at some point, slowly, quietly, without even realizing it's happening, you stop trusting yourself. That's what the machine does. Not in a dramatic way, not in a way you can point at, not in a way that makes for a great news story, but in thousands of small erosions every day to millions of people. Your own memory, the most basic building block of who you are, the thing that lets you know yesterday is connected to today and today is connected to tomorrow. Well, that becomes unreliable because the machine has told you over and over that your memories are malinformation. That's why people feel crazy. That's why we're all so tired. That's why your cousin won't talk to you anymore. That's why your mom thinks the news is lying to her and doesn't know which news. That's why the guy at the grocery store looks haunted. The machine isn't just managing what you can say. The machine is managing what you're allowed to remember. And when you can't trust your own memory, can't trust the basic continuity of your own experience, you can't be a citizen in any meaningful sense. You can't deliberate. You can't weigh evidence. You can't hold institutions accountable. You can't do the basic work of being a person in society. You can only comply or disconnect. And most people are choosing disconnect. That's what the last five years have actually been. Not a political crisis, not a misinformation crisis, not a polarization crisis, though it looks a lot like that from certain angles. What it actually is is a memory crisis, a continuity crisis. Can I trust the sequence of events I have personally witnessed crisis? And when enough people stop trusting their own memories, you don't have a country anymore. You have an audience. So now what? That's the question this episode has been walking toward the whole time. If the swap happened and the flood happened and the journalism drift happened, and the machinery got built and it's running on you every day, and if you can feel it chipping at your memory and your attention and your trust, well now what? Is there a way out? Is there something, anything to anchor to? I think there is. And it's not clever. It's not a seven-step program, it's not even a hack. It's the oldest idea in the world, and it's been waiting here the whole time. Let's talk about it.

Part Seven: The Re-Anchor

SPEAKER_15 1:19:43

So here we are. We've walked through the swap where truth became your truth and nobody flinched. We've walked through the mirror, where the same move showed up in reverse on the other side of the aisle. We've walked through the named doctrine, where a White House chief strategist admitted on camera that flooding the zone was the operating method. We've walked through the journalism pivot, where the referees joined the game and stopped calling fouls. We walked through the machinery where platforms and government agencies built a system for architecturally managing what counts as knowable. And we've walked through the cost where the machine reaches into your memory and makes you doubt what you personally witnessed. Now the question that's been sitting in the back of the room the whole time what's the opposite of all this? If you've been listening, really listening, you should be feeling something kind of uncomfortable right now. Because every single thing we've diagnosed in this episode has one structural feature in common. In every case, truth got moved somewhere it didn't belong into the self, into the feeling, into the conclusion, the algorithm, the flagging cue, into the fact checker's ruling. In every case, truth got collapsed down from something external into something manageable. And once it's manageable, someone is managing it. And the someone doing the managing is never accountable to you. So opposite. If the problem is that truth got pulled inside, pulled into the self, pulled into the machine, into the algorithm, then the opposite by definition is truth that stays outside. Truth that does not belong to you, truth that you cannot manage, truth that you don't generate, truth that is simply there, whether you feel it or not, whether you endorse it or not, whether the platform flags it or not, whether the fact checker agrees with it or not. Truth is something you find, not something you bring. This is not a new idea. This is actually one of the oldest ideas human beings have ever had about what truth is. It shows up in the pre-Socratic philosophers, it shows up in Plato, it shows up in the Hebrew prophets, it shows up in the whole architecture of Western thought from before the Common Era through to, I would argue, about 45 years ago, when the slow dissolution we've been tracing this episode really began to pick up speed. And I want to name it directly, because this is what I'm calling a foundation episode, and I'm not gonna hedge. The biblical conception of truth is that it is external, given, and discoverable, not generated by you, not voted on by us, not adjudicated by an institution. Truth is a property of reality, which is a property of creation, which is a property of the one who created it. Truth is not mine, it is not yours, it is not ours, it is his, capital H. And we discover it, or we refuse to, but we don't make it. That is not a power we possess. Now, if you're a listener who doesn't share that framework, stay with me because you don't have to accept the theological claim to see what the structural claim does to the problem we've been tracing. The structural claim is truth is located outside the observer, anywhere outside. That alone, just that, just the location, breaks every single move we've diagnosed in this episode. Oprah's your truth doesn't work if truth is external. Conway's alternative facts doesn't work. Trump's what you're seeing isn't happening, that doesn't work either. The fact checker's algorithm doesn't work. Malinformation as a category doesn't exist. Every single move in this episode requires truth to be manageable, which requires it to be inside the system managing it. Put it back outside, and the whole apparatus collapses. That's the philosophical claim. And you can accept just that much if you want. But I'm gonna go further because this is a foundation episode, and I told you I would. The reason the biblical framework is the strongest version of this claim is that it doesn't just locate truth externally, it locates truth in a person. Two thousand years ago, a Jewish rabbi stood in front of his disciples and made what is structurally the most radical claim about truth that any human being has ever made. He said, I am the way and the truth and the life. Sit with that for a second, because you've probably heard it so many times it doesn't really hit anymore. He didn't say I know the truth, he didn't say I teach the truth, he didn't say I point to the truth. Those are all smaller claims. Those would make him a philosopher or a teacher or a prophet. What he said was something categorically different. He said truth is a person, specifically him. Which means truth isn't a concept you argue about, truth isn't a feeling you have, truth isn't a proposition that a committee votes on, truth is someone you meet or refuse to meet. And if that's true, even if the possibility of it is taken seriously, every single move in this episode becomes nonsense. You can't have your version of a person, you can't have alternative facts about a person, you can't throttle a person on a platform, you can't flag a person as malinformation. A person either is or is not. A person is either met or is not met. A person, a real particular historical person, cannot be managed into irrelevance by a fact checker in Menlo Park. That's that's a different kind of anchor. That's not a concept you hold. That's something that holds you. And I want to be clear about the cost because this re-anchor is not comfortable. Meeting truth is harder than having your own. That's the whole reason the swapped work for 30 years. Your truth is portable. Your truth fits in your pocket. Your truth never disagrees with you, never embarrasses you, never calls you to repentance, never asks you to change. Your truth is the easiest companion you'll ever have. External truth, whether you take the biblical version or just the philosophical version, is harder. Because external truth can say no to you. It can tell you the thing that you wanted to believe isn't so. It can refuse to confirm what you feel. It can cost you friends, cost you careers, cost you comfort, it can demand you give up something you've been holding tightly for years. That's why people traded it away. That's why an entire culture quietly said yes to the swap. Because the swap was easier. But easier isn't the same as better. And what we just spent this entire episode documenting is what happens to a civilization that trades external truth for managed truth. You lose your memory, you lose your continuity, you lose your ability to be a citizen, you lose your trust in your own senses, you lose slowly, gradually, in thousands of small erosions, the thing that makes you a person. So here's the invitation not to agree with me, not to become a Christian on the spot, just go look. Go read what he actually said. Go look at the historical record, go check the sources, treat it like journalism, because the person being claimed is historically attested and what he said is documented. And you can actually go see for yourself. That is not sermon. That is the most trap think kind of thing I could possibly ask you to do. Go check the source. Check it yourself. Don't take my word for it. Don't take anybody else's word for it either. And if what you find when you go look turns out to be a person, a real person making real claims with a real historical footprint, then everything changes. Not just for you. For every future episode of this show, for every swap you'll see in the news this week, for every flood you'll wade through in your feed tomorrow, for every machine-managed assertion you'll be told is true or false by an institution that would prefer that you not check. Because once you know that truth is something you meet, not something that you have, not something the machine decides, not something the fact checker adjudicates, you stop being manageable. And an unmanageable person is the The single thing every part of the architecture we described in this episode is built to prevent. Be unmanageable. That's the episode.

Closing

SPEAKER_15 1:28:11

This has been foundation one: the swap, the flood, the machine, the cost, the anchor. If you heard anything in here that you'll still be thinking about tomorrow, good. That's the job. Bring it up at dinner. Send this to somebody who will push back on it. Argue with me in your head or on your commuter. Go to my website and argue there. That's how foundations work. They're not drivetime content on your way home. They're floorboards. You walk on them for years without noticing, but everything you build sits on top of them. There'll be more foundations. I suspect three or four. Identity, outrage, authority. Maybe want to have it named yet. We'll get there. But for now, go look. Go check the source. Go meet the person. Don't take my word for anything. Think deeper. Stay free, and stay unmanageable. I'm Darren. Thanks for listening.