- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC, and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(dramatic music) (bell ringing) (audience chatting indistinctly) - Good afternoon and welcome to The City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that helped democracy thrive.

Today is Tuesday, April 30th, and I'm Mary Groth, director of member engagement and donor development at the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association.

Today is the City Club's Annual Forum where the Bar Association proudly partners to present a conversation that aligns with the nation's Law Day theme.

This year, that theme is Voices of Democracy.

In democracies, the people rule.

For nearly 250 years, Americans have expressed their political views and wishes by speaking their minds and voting in elections, yet the information we consume and a well-informed public is crucial to the health of our democracy.

These days, it seems like voters are more polarized than ever, and cannot come to a consensus on much of anything.

Added to this, rapid developments in technology, social media and artificial intelligence threaten to make problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.

Our speaker today, Barbara McQuade, knows real accessible solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law.

McQuade is a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School, and former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, where she served from 2010 to 2017.

Appointed by President Barack Obama, she was the first woman to serve in her position.

Her interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, data privacy, and civil rights.

Ms. McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee and co-chaired its terrorism and national security subcommittee.

As US attorney, she oversaw cases involving public corruption, terrorism, corporate fraud, theft of trade secrets, civil rights, among others.

Prior to this role, she served as assistant US attorney in Detroit for 12 years, serving as deputy chief of the National Security Unit.

Drawing from decades of experience in the field, McQuade's new book "Attack from Within" argues that American society is strategically being pushed apart by disinformation, or the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth.

And it comes at us from all sides, endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, workplaces, hospitals, and even in our capital.

With just a few months until the United States will hold its 60th presidential election, it is important that Americans know how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society, and how we can fight against it.

Moderating our conversation today is Carole S. Rendon, partner at BakerHostetler and former US attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.

Carol is the first woman to serve as the first assistant US attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, and later as the US attorney.

A passionate advocate for the community, Carol helped establish a number of coalitions and task forces, including the Northeast Ohio Cybersecurity Consortium.

In addition, Carol is a proud member of the Board of Directors of the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, and a former trustee of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association.

If you have a question for a speaker, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the secondhand of the program.

Members and friends of The City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Barbara McQuade and Carol Rendon.

(audience applauding) - So I'm delighted to be here today with my dear friend Barb, and I wanna start with just a very general question, Barb.

For those who haven't yet had an opportunity to read this must read book, can you tell us what the thesis of the book is?

And generally what it is that you're trying to address in "Attack from Within?"

- Yes, so I'd be happy to answer that.

But first, can I just say how thrilled I am to be here at the City Club of Cleveland?

What an amazing place.

And I have to say best tagline in America, the Citadel of Free Speech.

Bravo.

Well done.

That's a great line.

(audience applauding) I wished I'd thought of that.

It'd be like a great line.

I also note, however, Carol, that you do have a gong, and so I know that if my free speech should be too extreme, perhaps there is somebody ready to cut me off at least, or if I go too long, I think, is the only sin of speech here today.

But thank you Dan, and thank you Mary, and thank you Carol so much for inviting me here and moderating this talk.

So this book is, you know, an effort to provide some education to the public.

I consider myself an educator.

I teach national security law at Michigan Law School.

And since about 2018, I have been including in my national security course as assigned reading topics on disinformation, mostly originally coming from Russia, but now it's something I see coming at us from within our own country.

And so the goal of the book is to help people to identify it, to see it, to recognize it, so that we can defeat it.

But the thesis really is this that we have certainly seen, you know, lies, propaganda spin throughout American history in politics, but what we're experiencing now is a problem that is more acute than ever before.

And I think that is because social media enables people to send messages that can reach millions of people in an instant and that they can do so anonymously.

So that is fueling some of this disinformation.

The other I think is that we are a moment of extreme polarization, when some political operatives have pushed this idea that what matters most is our political tribe.

As long as our side is winning, that's all that matters.

It does not matter what we think about any particular issue.

We should not think independently.

Instead, we should think about what is it that our tribe wants and that is what we should advance, and that to me is the antithesis of democracy.

And so what I hope to do in the book is just to sort of open people's eyes to that phenomenon that's going on.

I trace the history, I trace the tactics, I explain why it works.

I discuss the harms to democracy and the rule of law, and I offer some solutions.

But I think that ultimately it's going to come down to all of us to decide that we want to take this back, that we care more about truth than we care about tribe.

- So let's take a step back.

(audience applauding) What exactly is disinformation?

- Yeah, and I think it's a great question because I think sometimes people think disinformation is anything you disagree with, and that's certainly not the case.

(laughs) One of the, unless we're talking about Michigan and Ohio State football, I mean, you know, I know I'm right.

- [Audience Member] Go Blue.

- Much love for all the Big Ten fans in the room.

Much love all.

We can all live together.

But disinformation, and I actually define disinformation separately from misinformation in my book.

I know a lot of people use them interchangeably and that's fine, but I wanted to define them separately because I wanted to discuss them separately, and so I needed to label both of them.

Disinformation for me is deliberately using lies, deception, misleading claims in an effort to manipulate the public.

So it could be an outright lie, but it could be something as simple as labeling somebody something they're not, like when President Trump refers to the people who are in jail for attacking the capitol on January 6th as hostages.

To me, that is disinformation.

That is an effort to frame those people as political prisoners instead of criminal defendants who've been charged with crimes.

So that's disinformation.

Misinformation is kind of its unwitting cousin.

And so it's when some of us see a claim that we believe to be true, even though it's false, and then we go on and spread it.

You know, Russia used to refer to people like that as useful idiots.

And sometimes people are very useful idiots, and it's easy to laugh at them.

But ask yourself if you've ever unwittingly spread disinformation, and chances are you may have done so.

I will confess to you that I have done so.

I can remember a time when I read something online, I'm an avid sports fan, and you know, social media knows how to micro target you by looking at all your preferences, and your likes, and your shares, and what you click on.

So they know me, they know us, Carol, better than we know ourselves.

They know how to push my buttons.

And so once I read something online that said "Patrick Mahomes," the great NFL quarterback, "has made an announcement that he will not play another down for the Kansas City Chiefs until they change their name to something that is not offensive to Native Americans."

And I thought, all right, way to go, Patrick Mahomes.

Putting your money where your mouth is.

It's a big issue, way to take a stand.

So I retweet that, put that out there, and then later in the day I'm talking to my husband and my son and said, "Did you see that statement by Patrick Mahomes?

What do you think?"

And they said, "Now, what statement?

What are you talking about?"

"You know, the thing about not playing another down, Kansas City Chiefs in America."

"I haven't seen anything like that."

And they're both pretty well informed.

I said, "Oh, come on.

Of course it is.

It must be true 'cause I read it on Twitter."

(audience laughing) I said, "I'll find it, I'll find the tweet, 'cause it was totally legit."

And I go in and I look it up and I find it, and there it is.

It's put out by ESPN, very credible source.

But then I read a little more closely and I see that the name of the account is Sprots Center, not SportsCenter, which is a true ESPN account, but Sprots Center.

So I realized I've been duped, I took it down.

But why does that work?

Because it kind of pushes our buttons.

It aims at feeling as opposed to logic.

It gets us excited about something.

Sometimes it's something we want to be true or we think is outrageous, and so we're inclined to share those kinds of things.

And so to me, that was a really great illustration of how it's very easy for us to fall prey to these tactics.

- So in your book, you also talk about what you describe as the authoritarianism playbook.

What is that?

And why is it something to be concerned about?

- This is a series of moves and strategies that have been used by authoritarians throughout history.

Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini have all used many of these same strategies, and we see them again today.

And they are things that are designed to push us apart, to divide and conquer, and to make us vulnerable to disinformation.

So for example, one of these great strategies is declinism, to suggest that society is going downhill.

Things are awful.

American carnage, a nation in ruins.

You know, cities that are crumbling.

And these are the same kinds of things, you know, Hitler talked about this in "Mein Kampf" and he used it after World War I to talk about the shame of the German people.

The world is laughing at us.

We're a failed nation, because it makes people feel bad, and then of course it makes people look for scapegoats.

And who is it to blame for all of these travails in our country?

And you know, for Hitler, it was to point to Jewish people.

Today, if it's Donald Trump, he points to immigrants.

If it is Ron DeSantis, he points to the LGBTQ community.

They're trying to groom your children for pedophilia.

For some it is the woke community, or it is DEI initiatives.

It is an effort to say they are to blame for your financial misfortune.

No discussion of corporate tax cuts, escalating CEO salaries, jobs that are sent overseas, a changing economy, a move from manufacturing to a knowledge economy.

You know, we'll put those things off stage.

Instead, we need to ramp up anger about this other, because we have to divide people, right?

If working class white people were on the same side as people of color, well then that could be a pretty big significant voting block, right?

But instead, let's keep 'em apart.

So how do we do it?

Life is awful and these are the people that we should blame for it.

By objective measures, American society is actually doing pretty well.

I know we have our problems.

We have real problems to address, like immigration and homelessness, and serious problems, but we're not gonna do that while we're fighting these culture wars.

But in fact, you know, the gross domestic product is up, unemployment is down, wages are up, crime is down.

A lot of objective measures say American society is much better today than it was four, and eight, and 12 years ago.

And yet this idea of American declinism is a classic tactic of authoritarians.

I'll mention just a couple of others.

One is repetition, right?

If we repeat things often enough, we believe it, even if it's not true.

It's why advertising companies have slogans, right?

Like "Coca-Cola, it's the real thing."

What does that even mean, right?

But you hear it enough like, yeah, I gotta have Coca-Cola, I gotta have the real thing.

Or "Nike, Just Do It."

"Got milk," right?

All of these things, they're easy, repeatable little phrases, and we hear them again today, right?

Drain the swamp, Stop the Steal, lock her up.

All of these little mantras are the same kind of thing, because then you start hearing it from lots of different parts of the echo chamber, and you believe it to be true.

And then finally, one of these tactics in the authoritarian playbook is to tell lies and to go big, because the bigger the lie, ironically enough, the more believable it actually is.

Hitler wrote about this in "Mein Kampf" and he said most of us are accustomed to telling little white lies, right?

We might tell someone, my sister might tell me my hair looks fine.

I know what that means.

Or my husband might say, "No, dear, that dress doesn't make you look fat."

Wait a minute.

(audience laughs) But we tell those white lies out of kindness or courtesy or love.

But what Hitler wrote is that most of us could never imagine that anyone would have the audacity to tell a lie about something of great significance.

And then we project onto other people that same moral line that nobody would lie about these things, you know?

So for Hitler was all about, you know, the influence of Jewish people and the global, you know, control over the economy and all of these awful things.

You know, and today, of course, the big lie is election fraud, that our elections are rigged, and there is no such thing as democracy, and you have no control over who you choose at polling places.

The lies don't even have to be consistent.

The lies are intended to exhaust you, because if you are exhausted, you become cynical and numb, and then finally disengage from politics altogether.

Who can even pay attention?

They're all a bunch of crooks.

It's all PR.

I'm just gonna focus on what I can control, my family, my job, and that's it, and that's the challenge.

That's what authoritarians want is to have you voluntarily seed your power by staying home on election day.

- So one of the things that you talked about earlier in your own sort of spreading inadvertently of misinformation- - [Barbara] I was a useful idiot, I'll confess.

Let's face it.

- Is the impact of technology, social media, Twitter, Facebook, the microtargeting of people.

How does that interplay with both disinformation and your concerns about the rise of the authoritarianism playbook?

- Well, it allows, you know, the internet is a wonderful thing, right?

There are people streaming this talk today, which I think is amazing.

I'm sure all of you have been on, you know, Zoom or other virtual conversations with people from all over the country, all over the world.

Amazing that this technology allows us to do that.

But we've also reached a point where technology has grown and has some collateral consequences that I think we did not anticipate 20 or 30 years ago.

You know, there's this Communications Decency Act of 1996 that made internet service providers immune from legal liability for any content that is posted there.

And the idea was to foster innovation, so that they didn't have to worry about, you know, some joker writing something that was false and they had to police all that.

They didn't have the resources to do it.

And so that in theory makes a lot of sense.

But today the world has changed a lot, and I think we need to think differently about the way we think about social media and the way we regulate it.

When you go back to 1996, it's sort of like when raising a baby alligator in your bathtub, right?

It's adorable when it's this big, but today it has grown into a man eating predator, and I think we need to think differently about how we regulate social media.

And I'll just give you some examples.

Again, in this class I teach at Michigan Law School, one of the things I assigned to them to read is the Mueller report about the 2016 election interference from Russia.

I think most of us, when we hear about the Mueller report, think about what it did or did not conclude regarding Donald Trump, and that's not the point of it.

I actually have them read different excerpts about the Russian influence campaign.

There was ultimately indicted a group called the Internet Research Agency, which was a group of operatives in Russia who set up fake accounts online, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of these different social media accounts, posing as members of different groups.

And they did it many, many months in advance of the election and posted all kinds of interesting, reasonable things designed to attract members of particular groups.

So there was one called Blacktivist who said interesting things about issues that might be appealing to Black voters.

There was one called United Muslims of America.

There was another called Tennessee GOP that posed as a grassroots group of Republicans in Tennessee.

There was another called Heart of Texas that posed as conservatives in Texas.

Whole bunch of 'em, and they would diligently post every day, and they talked about all kinds of ordinary things.

And then as the election approached, starting saying things that were more and more outrageous in an effort to either just sow division in society, like what are the fault lines in society?

Abortion, guns, immigration, affirmative action, LGBTQ issues, whatever it was, and then really start saying outrageous things about those, so that people would see this and believe that the United Muslims of America had said this outrageous thing, when in fact it was some guy in a hoodie in Moscow who had said this.

Ultimately, the biggest example that I think could have been influential was Blacktivist who had hundreds of thousands of followers shortly before the election started posting claims like, "Hillary Clinton has never done anything for our community.

We should send her a message by staying home on election day, and letting her know we will not be taken for granted.

She's gonna win anyway, but here's a way we can send a strong message."

You know, if only even a handful of people heard that message and heeded it in a swing state that was decided by a narrow margin, it could have had an actual impact on the outcome of the election.

So these are just some of the ways that illustrate the ways that social media is being used to manipulate us in ways we don't even understand.

- So one of the things you talk about in your book that I found really interesting is the specific impact of disinformation on particular pillars of American society, public safety, national security, democracy, free speech.

Can you talk a little bit about how you see disinformation affecting some of the things that hold our society up and in place?

- Yes, so, you know, first democracy, the ability to vote, because without democracy, everything else falls aside, right?

The power of the vote.

But we are seeing false claims of rigged elections being used to pass laws that make it harder to vote.

In Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin laws have been passed since 2020 to prevent voter fraud, even though all of the lawsuits, all of the audits concluded that there was no fraud in the 2020 election, even in Georgia, where the governor there, Brian Kemp was a real hero I think on January 6th and stood up to efforts by Donald Trump to overturn the outcome of the elections in Georgia, and said then that their election was fair and accurate and secure.

He signed legislation making it more difficult to vote in Georgia, and when asked why, he said, "Well, because of all the fraud."

Which is it?

But, you know, curtailing early voting, fewer places to deposit your ballot, even making it illegal to provide food and water to people waiting in long lines to cast a ballot.

And where are those lines long?

Not in my community, probably not in the communities of some of you, but in poorer communities where it's harder to get volunteers to show up in staff polling places, where resources are more scarce.

Those are the places where the lines are hours long, and now they can't receive food or water or else it's a crime.

I mean, ask yourself, what could possibly motivate this, right?

And I think it is an effort to prevent certain groups who are likely Democratic voters in states with Republican legislatures from casting ballots.

If fewer people come out and vote, then our side wins.

Again, it's all about the team.

I mean, the same with gerrymandering and trying to push one team or the other, whether it's Republican or Democratic gerrymandering, it is a terrible thing because it enables one party to put a thumb on the scale.

And so I think all of these ideas about rigged elections, I think one of the things we're gonna see this election cycle in form of disinformation are efforts to influence the outcome, just as I talked about with these fake accounts online, to undermine public confidence in the outcome, it was rigged, but also just to dampen turnout.

You may have read that in the New Hampshire primary election, someone sent robocalls with an AI generated voice that sounded like Joe Biden that was designed to, you know, even with all the catchphrases like malarkey and all of his favorite Joe Bidenisms.

And he said, "Hey, Democratic voters, Joe Biden here.

Don't waste your vote in the primary, save it for the general election."

Like, which alone is nonsensical, right?

But I mean, if you receive that call and you are perhaps a lower information voter, and it sounds like Joe Biden, you know, maybe you heed that call.

And you know, this was an uncontested primary.

What happens if in the fall people get calls like that?

Or imagine getting a call that says something like, "This is a call from your polling place, the power is out, and so you've been asked to vote on Wednesday instead."

If even only a few people believe that to be true and stay home, that could be very problematic.

So that is a way it's harming democracy.

I'll mention just one other, which is the rule of law.

Since we're lawyers and we're here for Law Day, I think one of the things we have seen in recent years is an attack on law enforcement and an attack on our courts.

And all of those things undermine public confidence in some of those institutions that are designed to keep us safe and to protect us and to resolve our disputes.

You know, we are permitted to protest peacefully all day, but when we cross the line and we start harming someone else, the place to resolve those disputes is in the courts and not on the streets.

And yet we hear people like Donald Trump saying that the FBI is a disgrace, even falsely accusing them of planting evidence during the search at his Mar-a-Lago home.

Calling judges election interferes simply for being randomly assigned to preside over his cases.

Law clerks getting death threats because they are doing their jobs and assisting a judge in handling issues in the courtroom.

All of these things are undermining the rule of law.

Threatening jurors, threatening witnesses, that has a chilling effect on people's willingness to go in in court, and serve as a prosecutor, or a judge, or a juror, or a witness.

And this is a form of vigilante violence.

I think the ultimate example of that is what happened on January 6th when people decided they didn't like the outcome of the election, and decided to take the law into their own hands and use brute force to try to stop the certification of that election.

That puts us in a very dangerous place because the rule of law says we resolve our disputes in the ballot box and in the courtroom and not on the streets.

- So I wanna make sure before we turn it over to the audience for questions that we have an opportunity to hear some of your thoughts on solutions to this very difficult problem.

- Well, I'm pleased to say that the longest chapter of my book is the one on solutions, because it's a lot of doom and gloom before we get there.

But I do think that there are solutions.

You know, I am a believer that any problem created by humans can be solved by humans, and this certainly is one of those problems that is a social problem, and it's something that we can solve ourselves.

So some of them require some government intervention, but of course, who is the government?

It's us, right?

We are a government by and for the people.

And so I think there are some reasonable things we can do to regulate social media that would not run afoul of the First Amendment.

It's not censorship, it's not content based, but focusing on process.

I think there are a lot of things we can do to focus on process that would enable free speech online because it would declutter all of the fake accounts that are out there.

So one thing I think we could do is regulate the algorithms that are there.

That's the computer code that tells the messages what priority they should show up on our feeds.

We know from a whistleblower who testified before Congress, she was a former data scientist who worked for Facebook, we know that Facebook programs those algorithms to drive content to the top of our feeds that's designed to generate outrage because when we're outraged, we're more likely to stay online longer, and the longer we stay online, they can show that data to their advertisers and they can make more money in advertising.

That was the big disclosure that Francis Haugen made when she testified before Congress.

But we've given them this legal immunity but we can provide exceptions, right?

Except for when the social media platform itself has designed algorithms designed to do these things, there can be legal liability if they're using them in a way that manipulates the public.

I think that is a reasonable regulation.

I think we could also regulate the way they scrape our private data and then sell it to data brokers, and commercial enterprises, and political operatives.

As I said, they knew like who they were targeting when I got the Patrick Mahomes message, right?

I like and share about him all day.

These days, I'm getting a lot of advertisements to buy Detroit Tigers baseball caps.

They know.

They know what I want, and yes, I do, I do want to a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.

But they're sending those things to us.

You know, if you wanna join a social media platform, you really have to just check the box yes or no, it's all in or all out.

And there is some legislation pending in Congress right now about protecting our data privacy, which gives me a little bit of hope that this is a place where we will reach some solutions, because it's that ability to micro target us that makes us susceptible to disinformation.

And sometimes it's because we're being so micro-targeted, we don't see what other people see in their own feeds.

From time to time my sister will say, "Oh, did you hear about this?"

Like, "No, wait, where'd you see that?"

"It's all over social media.

Everybody's talking about it on social media."

And I'll say, "I haven't seen anything like that," because she is micro targeted to receive different messages than I am.

I mean, my own sister with whom presumably we have a lot in common, even she's getting different things than I am.

And so it's difficult to debunk things you never see.

I also think, Carol, we could eliminate bots online.

You know, bots are these artificial intelligence generated fake accounts that look like real users.

They have names like Patriot Girl and, you know, they're nothing but, or no such thing.

And they are programmed to argue with you, right?

If you take a stand on like free speech is great, they'll come after you and, you know, call you a censor or whatever it is.

And they'll go back and forth and if you engage, you realize you're arguing with software, so I don't recommend it.

But they also serve the purpose of when there are those fake accounts set up, like Blacktivist, or United Muslims of America, or Tennessee GOP, they will like and share those messages times a million, so that they end up in everybody else's feeds because they appear to be very popular, far more popular than they are, right?

Those are some government solutions.

I think there are other things that we can do as well.

One is to educate the public to be better consumers of media and better aware of our own civics.

I know Mary told me about how we've got bar association programs right here in Cleveland that are going out into schools and teaching kids about civics, because so many of our schools are really dropping the ball in that regard.

I have read that we spend as a country 5 cents on civic education for every $50 we spend on STEM education.

Now, STEM education is certainly important and probably the equipment costs more than just being able to read about civics.

But 5 cents, come on, we can do better than that.

And then also media literacy.

In Finland, they have started doing media literacy because they have been bombarded with disinformation from Russia for decades.

And so in their schools they teach kids about getting a second source before you assume something is true.

Don't rely just on the headline, read the whole story before you believe what you've read.

Understanding the difference between causation and correlation.

Looking at data sets.

What is a meaningful sample set?

Was the sample set of this study 2 million people or was it two?

'Cause that can make a big difference in whether the results are reliable.

But finally, I think the biggest solution can start, right, with ourselves, and that is by not allowing the ends to justify the means.

I mean, whatever your political affiliation, ask yourselves when was the last time you reconsidered your own position on issues like abortion, immigration, LGBTQ rights, guns, whatever it is.

And maybe we ought to think about things and think about whether there's room for compromise, because when we demand political purity on either side, all we will get is warring factions.

To really achieve any kind of advancement in society requires some sort of compromise.

And so I ask that you consider making sure that you place truth above tribe.

(audience applauding) - So before we turn it over to the audience, I wanna ask you one more question.

In your book, you talk about a trip you took to Ireland in the midst of a referendum on whether or not the constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland should be revoked.

Serious hot button topic.

And what you saw there was very different than what we see here in America when we're talking about hot button topics.

So I wanted you to tell us a little bit about that trip and how it's influenced you and your thinking and your writing of the book.

- Yeah, thank you for raising that.

You clearly have read the book, Carol, because that comes at the end, so I'm impressed.

Show off.

(audience laughs) No, I happened to be in Ireland with my family.

My son was studying abroad there in, I think, did I give the year?

Was it 2019?

Maybe 2018.

The before times.

And this issue, you know, in a country that is an official Catholic country, they were considering a constitutional amendment to repeal the prohibition on abortion.

And I thought to myself, oh, boy, this is gonna be ugly.

I don't know if this is gonna be a good time for us to visit there.

I mean, they might have civil unrest, there might be rioting in the streets.

I can only imagine how ugly this is all gonna get.

And instead you'd walk down the street corner and the loveliest people would be standing there with a pamphlet, and they were on the yay and the nay side, and they'd say, "Excuse me, would you like to learn more about the issue?"

And they'd have a pamphlet and I would, you know, I would listen on both sides of the issue, and they would very politely engage with me.

If I asked a question, they would very politely answer it.

And it was not disagreeable whatsoever.

Ultimately, the ban passed by an overwhelming margin in every single county in Ireland, where it is now permissible to obtain an abortion.

But I was really struck by the civility of it all, and it really told me something that it doesn't have to be this way, the way it is in this country.

And in fact, is it this way naturally or is it this way because we have people sowing division in society for their own gain?

Whether it's a political gain, whether it's a profit gain.

Hello Fox News.

(audience laughs) Whether it is a personal career gain, right?

Elise Stefanik, congresswoman who's vying to be the vice president who parrots Trump's phrase about hostages.

Do you think she's smarter than that, right?

She knows better.

But she is posing, right, to say I'm on this team.

I'm on Team Trump, team MAGA, pick me.

If instead we form our own independent thoughts and we think for ourselves.

I think we can resolve our disputes the way they do in Ireland, right?

At the ballot box through civil discourse.

But I think it starts with all of us and not allowing these forces that are working to sow division in society to defeat us.

- We are about to begin.

(audience applauding) We are about to begin the audience Q&A.

For our live stream and radio audience or those just joining, I'm Carol Rendon, partner at BakerHostetler and former US attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, and moderator for today's conversation.

Joining me for The City Club's 2024 Law Day Forum is my dear friend Barbara McQuade, professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School and former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, and those joining via our live stream at cityclub.org or radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speaker, please text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

And with that, may we have the first question, please?

- Thank you.

Would you talk about how this whole thing of misinformation and disinformation is creating a suspicious, untrusting society?

And so I didn't make the call and I do that all the time now, I think twice before I move forward on things like that.

And it's caused me, and I don't like the feeling of being suspicious and not trusting anything.

So can you talk about what that's doing to society?

- Yeah, thank you so much.

It's such a great question.

And that really is an issue, this idea that I've seen so many false claims, and I am aware of this problem of disinformation, that I need to be skeptical of everything and I don't know what to believe.

And that really is one of the tactics of disinformation.

I talk about this in my book.

There's a researcher named Peter Pomerantsev who has studied media in Russia, and he said this is a big part of the Russian media ecosphere, and that is to bombard the public with conflicting claims.

So one day, you know, Putin will say the missiles came from Russia, and the next day the missiles came from Ukraine, and the day after that, the missiles came from NATO.

And people will just shrug and say, you know what?

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

And the other thing is to suggest that everyone in government is corrupt, because the goal isn't to suggest to you that Putin himself is not corrupt.

He's wheeling and dealing with oligarchs.

It is to convince you that everyone is corrupt, and if everyone is corrupt, you might as well just deal with the one who will bring you the most prosperity because everybody's corrupt.

You know, I think we're seeing this in our own country where everybody gets impeached.

If everybody gets impeached, then impeachment doesn't mean anything, right?

Because we're impeaching the Homeland Security Director, and some want to impeach Joe Biden, and you know, we will devalue the idea of impeachment, just like you with the 40% discount, and so that impeachment loses any meaning whatsoever.

And that's part of the goal, to destroy the concept of truth so that people are exhausted, don't know what to believe and disengage from politics.

I don't think there's an easy solution to that 'cause I think it is a part of the goal of disinformation.

But I'm hopeful that if we can engage in some of the strategies that I suggest in the book on social media and elsewhere, then we can reduce some of those things.

I think you're right to be skeptical, to require additional inquiry to find out if this is valid, but we don't wanna become so cynical that we don't believe anything.

When Carol tells me to have a nice day, I don't wanna say, "You don't really mean that, do you?"

Thank you for that great question.

- Yes, I have a question about some of videos and speech, especially the politicians.

Would there be any way to quote unquote watermark the videos or put in some type of either visual and sound, so if they're ever separated that it goes blank or whatever, some type of fraud detector?

- Yeah, that's such a- - Thank you.

- Such a great question.

You know, with artificial intelligence, the ability now to generate deep fake videos, I am very worried about for this election cycle.

You know, you can create a video making it appear that someone is saying something they never said, or doing something they never did, or photos designed to generate outrage, right?

When Donald Trump was first under indictment, there were all those photos of police officers tackling him to the ground and arresting him.

You know, I don't know who's putting those out, but clearly designed to, you know, create a false impression that wasn't true.

So can we somehow choose what's authentic and what's not?

You know, the problem is those things are just generated by AI.

There is a researcher at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who is doing some research on using AI to detect AI.

Isn't that great?

And right now, I think some trained eyes can spot things because sometimes faces don't look quite right, or I think fingers are often problematic, right?

They put like an extra finger on a hand, or they're not great with certain details.

But I think there's some like real room for some serious research there of AI to detect AI.

And although I don't know that people would be successful at the highest level, like if somebody puts up a fake Joe Biden speech, it seems pretty easy to debunk that, that people would be out there quickly saying this is fake, this didn't happen.

Where I really worry about it is lower level races.

I mean, imagine if it's a city council race or a county level race where all of this stuff just goes to, you know, the likely voters of the opponent, and so the candidate themselves never actually sees it, but they're saying all these outrageous things, or just to the swing voters.

I worry that at that lower level, it could be really devastating, and local politics, you know, matters incredibly.

It's incredibly important to the way we live.

So thank you for that question, but I'm hopeful that the answer to AI may lie in AI.

- Hi, Kerry Burns, chief strategy officer at the Bar Association.

Thank you so much today for being here.

I mean, you truly have nailed the Law Day theme, so thank you so much both of you for being here.

My question, and it's a little Bar Association specific, but you talked about the authoritarian messaging, and it's simple, and it's distilled down to simplistic language, understandable.

And I think as lawyers sometimes we get lost in the process and the systems, and even you describing the elections process and the court process.

Our messaging sometimes is a little more heavy handed than Stop the Steal or, you know, the hostages in jail.

And so what are your thoughts on how we can more simplistically bring these ideas to the general public?

- Yeah, I'm of two minds on that.

On the one hand, I totally get what you're saying and I even illustrated that, right, with the advertising slogans of "Got milk" and "Just Do It" and those kinds of things.

They're memorable and they're lasting.

But another side of me is actually a little bit resistant to that, and I wanna recognize that politics is nuanced.

And so maybe the way to push back of that is to say politics is more nuanced than a bumper sticker.

Maybe that's the pithy line.

And to ask people to educate themselves, and to learn the issues, and to think beyond the party line on a particular issue, and that you should have a variety of views on all kinds of issues.

I can remember when I was in college and kind of first forming my views on certain kinds of issues, my classmates and I did not line up like down any one political spectrum.

You know, I thought about one thing about guns, I thought another thing about affirmative action, another thing about, I dunno, tax policy, military intervention, right?

I just, I thought about each of those issues independently of the other.

And now I talk to my students and they are 100% lined up on the conservative side or on the Republican side.

- I wanna talk about the rule book.

So I think the vast majority of us believe in the rule book, the whole framework, and we try our best to maintain the fidelity of that rule book.

There's a whole group of people who maybe do a cost benefit analysis and say, I'm gonna violate the rule book, but knowingly, and I know there might be consequences.

But I think what we're dealing with now are people who deny the premise of a rule book.

They're suggesting the fact that they don't, they're outside of that rule book.

And so I guess where my question comes in is those of us who want to maintain a fidelity to the rule book, it doesn't seem like, we're staying in that framework, and we're not being really effective in addressing the people who consider themselves outside the rule book.

- [Barbara] Yeah, such a good question.

- And I wanna know how you might suggest we do that and still maintain our fidelity.

- Yeah, such a great question.

Yeah, thank you.

I often hear people say we need to fight fire with fire.

They use these pithy phrases, they aren't afraid to violate the rules.

I think the best way to fight back of that is to demonstrate outrage for violating the rules.

As a lawyer, you know, as people who defend the rule of law, that's everything.

Process is everything.

You can have whatever view you want in this world about anything, but you have to follow the rules.

And I think we need to suggest more outrage for those people who do abandon the rule book.

You know, there's this idea sometimes that the ends justify the means, by any means necessary, that is contrary to the rule of law and the idea that we can have whatever views we want, but we have to resolve them in courts of law, and then we have to accept the consequences, even when they go against us.

The remedy there is to lobby for changes in the law.

We have the power to do that through peaceful protests, through letters to the editor, letters to our members of congress, through our own efforts to run for public office.

We can do those things to change the law, but we have to comply with the law.

And I think we should call out as traitors to our country the people who think they're above the law.

And there are plenty of them in elected office who I think are not being fooled by disinformation.

I think they know very well that certain things are not true and they're willing to go along with the con, because they believe it will advance either their political agenda, or their personal agenda, or their personal careers.

Those people are disloyal to the United States and the promise of the rule of law.

(audience applauding) - Hello, my name is Christopher Salary Jr.

I'm a ninth grade student at MC2 STEM High School.

My question for you is, how have, what is your opinion on AI deep fakes?

Do you think they've been used for a more positive aspect or a negative aspect?

- Yeah, thanks for that great question.

And man, ninth grade, I'm very impressed with you having the nerve to stand up and ask a questions.

Well done, sir.

Yeah, AI.

I think all technology is both a tool and a weapon, and that we should not denounce it just because it can do frightening things.

You know, TNT was invented to be used in demolition of buildings for construction projects, and it was used to build, you know, the Transcontinental Railroad, and all kinds of important things.

It can also be used as a bomb to kill people.

And so I think that we take, you know, good inventions and we try to use them for the best utility in society, and we try to pass laws that will prevent people from using it as a weapon to hurt people.

I heard this interesting comment recently, which is the person who invented the plane also invented the plane crash.

Ooh.

(audience laughs) You know, true enough, but does that mean we don't have planes, right?

We have planes and we accept the fact that from time to time, they will crash.

You know, we hope not too often, but it's a reality.

And I think the same is true with artificial intelligence.

I think it can be a great thing.

I think it can be a very helpful tool to all of us as we go through society.

But I think we have to think really thoughtfully about how we make sure it's not abused by people who wanna use it as a weapon.

Sometimes we can't even see all the ways that it'll be abused, and so I know as a prosecutor, we were often chasing the latest scheme because there was always some criminal mastermind who outsmarted us and we were always one step behind.

But at least we were only one step behind, right?

I think sometimes people are like, "Oh, AI too complicated.

Who can figure that out?"

And I think we need to, we need to try to keep up.

They may be always, you know, one step ahead where there is some disruptive, you know, scheme being used, used in a particular way that's harmful.

But I think we can channel that so that it can be used as a tool that can really benefit all of society for learning, for advancement, for medicine, for scientific discovery, all kinds of great things.

But we can't let, you know, the tail wag the dog.

Thank you for your great question.

- You know, there's no one today like a Walter Cronkite, or a Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings.

I never knew how they voted because we just weren't really aware.

And now, and we just tune into our Fox or our MSNBC and hear our tunnel vision.

And it seems to me, even though I listen to MSNBC, there's so much editorializing, it's sort of inherent in everything that is said.

And it used to be, there used to be a slogan that's saying, "This is an editorial."

We used to have a crazy lady in Cleveland called Dorothy Fuldheim who used to do these crazy commentaries.

- They're all laughing a little too hard at that.

- But it was always like an editorial and you knew it was an editorial.

Now it's so baked into what they're saying.

- I agree, yeah.

I agree with your observation that it seems that objective journalism is a relic of the past, and instead, I think most news outlets of repute, whether it's MSNBC or "The New York Times" or "The Washington Post" are printing accurate information, but they are no doubt engaging in editorial discretion and choosing what they're going to post online and not.

Fox News I will put in different category because they paid a quarter of a billion dollar settlement to Dominion Voting Systems for airing false and completely baseless claims that their voting machines had flipped votes from Trump to Biden.

Sued for defamation and in that lawsuit, the evidence came out that the executives and hosts knew that their claims were false, which is why they had to pay that $700 billion.

I would've thought that would've cured them.

But about a week later I saw something online like the scroll underneath a picture of Joe Biden that said "Wannabe dictator tries to jail rival."

So I don't think that they've been cured.

I think the money's just too good, right?

The profit, giving people what they want to hear.

I don't have an easy solution for that, but my solution for that is to seek media from a variety of sources.

- And I had a question about the interaction between state legislatures and education.

Here in Ohio, we clearly have a super majority with an agenda, and it's weighing in more and more sort of along the lines of Florida with the curricular issues in public education.

I have a unique interest in this because I'm a retired teacher after 34 years, and when I retired I decided to run for the state legislature.

So I guess what I'm asking is what do you see as the inherent opportunities and also potentially the inherent dangers of political involvement by state legislatures in public education?

- Yeah, such a great point.

I'll say two things about that.

First, I'll answer your question directly and then I wanna talk generally about state legislatures.

So specifically the question, I think we have seen this, right?

Florida's a really great example where they had like the Don't Say Gay Bill where teachers were not permitted to talk about sexual orientation in class.

You know, not that they're discussing it with their first graders, but you know, if a teacher has a picture of her wife on her desk, is she allowed to acknowledge who that is?

Or, you know, when somebody asks why Billy has two dads, right?

We're not allowed to talk about that which strikes me as, you know, the antithesis of education.

And I mean, there's an opportunity, 'cause if you don't tell 'em in the classroom, they're gonna find out on the playground and it's probably not gonna be right.

So it seems like it's a missed opportunity.

But then even at the higher levels, you know, the idea that they pushed out the AP course on African American history.

The idea that we don't wanna teach people about our past because that will make kids hate America.

Like, you know, we have some problems in our history, we should learn about it, we should talk about, we should learn from it, right?

Teachable moments.

The, you know, banning of books that address issues of race or sexuality because it might turn kids gay.

I mean, it's all based on such nonsense.

And I think one issue is, I'm sure there's some politicians who genuinely believe what they are saying.

I think there are others who are fearmongering in a really desperate pandering of votes, which is really pathetic, but I think that's some of what goes on as well.

And I think they gin up some outrage from parents about what's going on.

I believe that you can defeat a lot of disinformation with good information, and so providing information to members of the community about what's really happening is one way to push back against that.

I mean, if people truly want to ban certain books in a state, it may be difficult to get around that other than, you know, lawsuits have been successful in some of these places.

But oftentimes the best solution for bad information is more good information.

So I would suggest that of trying to defeat false claims with true claims.

And then just a word about legislatures.

I think here in Ohio you've got an effort underway, similar to one we had in Michigan where we had a program called Voters Not Politicians, in an effort to defeat gerrymandering.

And I know that's afoot here in Ohio, which I really applaud.

And can I tell you, in Michigan, I didn't know whether this would be successful.

I was not personally involved in it, but I saw people, oh, is he getting close to the gong?

Oh god.

(laughs) (audience laughs) Where, you know, through true grassroots activism, this group Voters Not Politicians, you know, pushed back against gerrymandering, and got a constitutional amendment passed through a ballot initiative that won by a resounding margin that created an independent citizen commission to draw district lines for both congress and state house and senate seats.

And the first election we had after that, for the first time in 40 years, the state legislature flipped from Republican to Democrat.

And that was, and you know, not that I wanna favor any one particular party over another, but it allowed people to take back their political power by drawing these seats in a way that didn't have gerrymander, you know, with all the crazy, you know, zigzags and other things.

Like, you know, they just drew blocks, like, okay, these four counties, boom, you're a district.

These three counties, boom, you're a district.

And they just drew 'em up without regard to politics.

And when you do that, you know, it turns out that voters have more power in that way.

So I really applaud that effort.

And regardless of your political persuasion, I would encourage everybody to get involved in that effort because that is something that will truly restore democracy to the people.

(audience applauding) - Barbara, thank you very much.

Carol Rendon, thank you very much as well.

And thank you all for joining us at The City Club today.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, chief executive here.

And just a reminder that forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like all of you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at cityclub.org.

Our forum today is part of our city, part of our Authors in Conversation series, which is presented in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Special thank you as well to the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association for your support in today's forum.

Please join me also in welcoming students joining us from MC2 STEM High School, Brookside High School, and Charles F. Brush High School.

Thank you all so much for being a part of this today.

(audience applauding) Also, a special welcome to guests at tables hosted by BakerHostetler, the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, and the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland.

And thanks also to our bookseller Mac's Backs on Coventry in Cleveland Heights.

(audience applauding) Pretty sure they're in the room.

And Barbara McQuade, our author, will be signing books afterwards in our library just outside.

Quick note about some upcoming forums.

Tomorrow we'll be at the Happy Dog in Gordon Square for our final forum for the season, in our Happy Dog Takes on Everything series.

Richey Piiparinen will talk about his latest book that links his fight against cancer with Cleveland's fight for revival.

The plain dealer Steven Litt will moderate.

And on Friday, May 3rd, we hear from the leadership of four Cleveland nonprofits who received transformative gifts in the latest round of funding from Mackenzie Scott.

So we'll hear from Birthing Beautiful Communities, the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland, Towards Employment and Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation.

Tomorrow night at the Happy Dog is free, by the way.

Friday, you can still get tickets for the next couple of days.

And thank you so much all of you.

That brings us to the end of our forum.

Once again, thank you, Barbara, thank you, Carol.

Thank you all members and friends of the City Club.

Our forum is now adjourned.

Have a great day.

(audience applauding) - [Narrator] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.