(bright thoughtful music) (bright thoughtful music) - Right now, life in America feels like being stuck in a television reality show called "Survivor Truth or Dare: Democracy Edition", where a mashup of fact and fantasy is the new normal.

When I asked Nobel laureate Maria Russo what's at stake, here's what she said.

- When you don't have facts, you can't have truth.

Without truth, you can't have trust, right?

Without these three, you don't have a shared reality.

We cannot have democracy, we can't solve any problems.

That's the fundamental core problem that we face today, and it is existential.

- Joining us to discuss whether the battle for American democracy is really a battle over reality is our distinguished bipartisan panel.

Kurt Andersen, historian and bestselling author, whose latest book is "Evil Geniuses: the Unmaking of America: a Recent History".

Megan Garber, staff writer at "The Atlantic", Charlie Sykes, editor-in-chief of the website the Bulwark, and Ali Velshi, veteran journalist and host of the MSNBC show "Velshi", and we're thrilled to have everybody with us.

Everyone on this panel has plenty to say about how fake news, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories have become the new normal.

But Kurt, I'm going to start with you because you wrote a book called "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" seven years ago.

And you say, and I love this phrase, "America's promiscuous devotion to the untrue has been baked into our DNA over centuries,” and that “being an American mean believing anything you want to believe."

So why does it feel worse now?

- Because it's like a chronic condition that we've always had, I think, we Americans, that was always kept under proper control by experts, establishments of various kind, and between, you know, in various ways, the last 50 years, most recently and especially, the birth of the internet, it became an enabling infrastructure for this kind of fantastical belief in anything you want, and disbelief in anything you want.

That's the thing, it's this combination of crazy credibility and crazy skepticism.

And the internet, in addition to putting out all kinds of falsehoods of that kind, is able to recruit more people.

There've always been crackpots and nuts of various kinds, but they were limited to the John Birch bookstore in Omaha, Nebraska, where I grew up, or getting newsletters.

They weren't able to find each other by the thousand and million, as they are now.

- Ali, you are arguably one of the most versatile journalists on the air.

You do everything except sports and weather.

You're a foreign correspondent.

You host a show, you're a moderator.

And I guess what I want to ask you is, how has the co-mingling of entertainment and hard news really contributed to the unraveling of truth-telling in America?

- Well, in a couple of ways.

One is the degree to which there is so much entertainment that mimics news.

Obviously that's always been the case, but now this is sort of a sub genre unto itself, and that leeches into the internet and the experiences we have, and the fact that we can create, we can sort of take, I have one of those meta devices, you know, and it's augmented reality and it's really cool, but it's really weird, right?

There's this reality that's actually around me, and then this reality that I've invented.

I get it because I'm a man of a certain age, but if you grow up in this, or you've been in it for a long time, you can't tell the difference between what's fake and what's real.

And then we've created this need for having entertainment in our politics, in everything we do.

So now you've got the outcome of that.

You've got political actors, many of whom play to the idea that it is for entertainment value, and those who don't, some very good people out there who are in politics, who don't play to the entertainment value, don't score as well, they don't do as well.

They don't succeed in this front.

So I think we've literally mixed everything together.

And that device I have is the metaphor for the problems that we're headed into.

- Megan, the work you've been doing for "The Atlantic" was really one of the inspirations for this show, because you've written extensively about the blurring of the line between, you know, fantasy, and I don't know what, the facts I guess.

But basically you say that this is something that's gotten a lot worse.

And you make a very interesting distinction, which is that a republic requires citizens, entertainment only requires an audience.

And beyond that, and I want to put this up on the screen, Is this at the heart of why we don't speak the same language anymore, why we don't have a shared truth?

- I think it really is, and it breaks my heart actually, because I do think social media is so much a part of it.

And one of the paradoxes I think, that we're living through right now is, we have so many ways to talk with each other.

We have, you know, an unprecedented number of platforms for communication, and yet we've never been more isolated.

We've never been more lonely.

We've never been as separate from each other, in terms of our sense of the world and how it works.

And democracy requires community, it requires argument.

I mean, it's the First Amendment for a reason.

You know, the founders wanted us to be talking with each other, using our shared language, using our shared vocabulary.

And I think we're losing that very quickly right now.

And like Maria Russo said, if you don't have that, if you don't have the conversation, and then you don't have the facts, you can't have democracy and you can't have anything else, really, you can't have truth.

- We're going to figure that out today.

- Oh, we definitely are.

I'm excited.

- We're going to restore that.

Charlie, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had that rubric of, "You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts," well you know, that's gone, that's dead.

Basically now everybody feels entitled to both.

And you were on the inside as a radio host for 20 years, you were really a force in talk radio, and you wrote a book and you talk about, basically how the conservative, I don't know what, echo chamber basically blew up, how it's just spun out of control, talk about that.

- Yeah, and I have to say that, you know, even after all these years, I'm still shocked by that.

People have compared it to sort of, "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when one after another people began to believe, you know, the weirdest, craziest conspiracy theories.

And you know, and as Kurt mentions, this is a preexisting condition.

This has been around a long time, but it accelerated so quickly, really in the last decade.

And not just because of the internet, but also because of the tribalization of our politics.

And you know, in that book, and that was written in 2017, which now feels like almost the before times, in a kinder and gentler era, I wrote about how shocking it was the to me, to watch the progression of people who decided that they were going to believe whatever they wanted to believe.

That it went from being an echo chamber into these hermetically sealed, you know, alternative reality silos.

And again, my experience was that for years I would, you know, get emails from people, who would you know, forward, you know, Uncle Otto's crazy email about Hillary Clinton killing people, you know, and you know, warehouses full of fake ballots and everything.

And I would push back, you know, send them saying, "Hey listen, you know, this is not true.

Here's a source that will refute this, you know, and let's keep talking."

And up until 2015, 2016, people would go, "Hey thank you, I appreciate that.

I'll tell Uncle Otto."

But very gradually, I began noticing people were no longer accepting anything from outside their world.

If it was not from risingeaglepatriot.com, you know, or breitbart.com, they were just rejecting it.

They were rejecting all of the fact-based media.

And by the time that 2016 rolled around, it was impossible to push back on these facts.

And then we have this perfect storm of the internet, which provides everybody their own adventure.

Choose your own adventure, choose your own reality, choose your own facts.

At the same time you have, you know, the growing partisanship, you have all the atomization that the internet caused, and then of course, the death of the mainstream media, not the death of, but I mean, the elimination of newspapers, another fact-based medium, which has really been one of the, I think, maybe underappreciated stories, that with the rise of digital news, the collapse of the local newspapers.

So all of this happened, and I will tell you, it continues to shock me, it continues to accelerate.

I think that in fact, it's much worse now than it was in 2017, and I think it's going to be worse over the next year, particularly now that we see what AI can do.

I mean, we used to worry about bots.

Again, bots are nothing compared to what's coming our way.

- Right, that's old school.

Go ahead, Kurt.

- I think it's important to say that yes, while it is partisanship, it is polarization, all those things, the internet, I think we need, however, as Charlie did in his book, and had done before, as he was turning against the MAGA-fication of his party, that specifically Fox News, it has to be mentioned as a driver of this, in terms of abandoning the attempt at fair-minded truth.

Now yes, MSNBC, which wasn't until later, a left version of Fox News, still isn't a left version of Fox News.

You know, if Fox News were as right as MSNBC were left, I'd be good.

I wouldn't ever be complaining about Fox News.

So I think we have to look at the specific drivers, rather than talk about as though it just happened because of this preexisting, you know, condition, which I wrote about.

But I believe it was Charlie Sykes too, who said in, if not in that book, elsewhere, that the right wing media, Breitbart et al, and all of the talk radio shows from Rush Limbaugh on, had reduced the immunity of people, conservatives and people on the right, to falsehood and to, you know, and again, to use that health metaphor of reducing immunities, I think is spot on.

- And I think this is a really important point.

One of the things that when people do, as an MSNBC guy, make the comparison, one of the things I remind people is that we're part of a large organization, NBC news, and we subscribe to exactly the same standards and practices, a little bit of the sausage being made, but I can't actually lie on TV.

Now, if you cross certain lines that Megan has written about, where the entertainment value is more important than the news value, and you're okay to stretch the truth or create your own truths, that's where you start, you've now mainstreamed this.

And Fox is very big, and Fox is very powerful.

It's got a lot of viewers.

So Charlie was never one of those guys, but there used to be things that happened on very fringe conservative radio shows, and once it would get there, and it would make its way to Rush Limbaugh, then it was a permission structure for Fox to put it on, and now those things that were on what used to be 4chan and 8chan, these conspiracy theories, there was a way to get them into mainstream media.

That still happens.

Some of those channels are gone, but it's still, there's this legitimization of conspiracy theories, in a world where we've mixed entertainment and information together, we can't distinguish.

- Megan, I want to talk about, when Charlie said that it's been escalating and it's going to get even worse, isn't part of the reason, Megan, that people know what they're doing, that people know better, that people know that what they're peddling is whatever, garbage, that they're just making it up as they go along.

It's strategic, that's what they're doing to basically bring people into the fold.

And that would expedite it clearly.

Have you found that?

- Yeah, I think so.

I mean, lies are a form of power, right?

They're very hard to combat, they're very hard to fight.

And I think certain factions of American politics and media have taken that to heart, and let it kind of run amok.

You know, it's interesting with Fox News in particular, which definitely is that sort of distillation agent, I think, of so many swamp lands, fantasy lands, et cetera.

You know, there's a debate about whether they can be called propaganda.

And to me, that debate, I mean, I think you can argue both ways, but most scholars of propaganda will say something to the effect of, propaganda is not so much about misinforming the public, as it is about suggesting to the public that shared information can't exist.

It's, it's about making people sort of give up on the idea of shared facts, and making them just sort of take refuge in cynicism, and entertainment too.

And I think Fox News does that every single day.

If you tune into a typical Fox show, it's really not about the facts, it's about owning the libs.

It's about being angry at what the Democrats have done to you.

It's about fearing socialism, even though socialism is never actually defined on the show.

It's just sort of treated as a boogeyman.

So I think you have this situation where Fox News is very much about, sort of the feeling of oppression, of victimhood, of you know, people have it out for you.

And it's not about the news at all.

- Charlie, I want to talk about the whole big lie thing, because this is something that probably could be the best example of what we're talking about today, which is that people who know better, and only because democracy's really at stake, is this really a huge problem.

By repeating something often enough, an enormous amount of people in this country now believe that the election was rigged, that Joe Biden's not a legitimate president.

But you know, in terms of tearing down institutions and trust, now these people you know, we all know, know better.

Is there no, I know this sounds naive, it's very naive, actually.

Is there no conscience at all about what they're doing?

- Well, I think that's asked and answered, isn't there?

I mean, look at what's happened just in the last three years.

You know, think about what everybody thought and believed on January 7th, 2021, and think about what's happened, the number of lies that have been put out there, even though they have been refuted over and over and over again, even though the documentation is not ambiguous in any way whatsoever, and yet belief in the big lie has now become basically dogma.

It's become an absolute litmus test.

I mean, I think the psychologists and political scientists are going to be studying this phenomenon for years, because as Megan said though, I think one of the key things to understand, is that this kind of propaganda is not designed to convince you of A or B.

It is to basically make you doubt your ability to know the truth at all.

It is the annihilation of truth.

And I think that's what we're seeing here.

And I mean, it is absolutely breathtaking to watch this.

And it's one of the reasons why I think a lot of folks wake up every day and look around at their country and think, "Have I taken crazy pills?

You know, I mean, how can people believe this?

You know, am I the crazy one?

Are you the crazy one?"

But I think that a lot of people, whatever their conscience tells them, this is what they feel they have, this is convenient for them.

And you know, a lot of this is just pretextual.

You know, "I'm going to believe something as a pretext, to you know, be part of my tribe, to push back against it."

But you know, by the way, I want to agree with what Kurt said before about Fox News, and in terms of big lies, some of us thought that there was a moment of accountability, when Fox News had to write out a check for $787 million, because they had lied so egregiously and aggressively about the election.

And yet that doesn't seem to have had any effect on the other liars out there, or on this culture of lying.

- Kurt, I want to go back a little bit, because you talk about how initially there was a devotion in this country to religious and intellectual freedom, and how that gave way to people feeling they had a right to customize reality, to make it whatever they wanted to make it.

And what was the inflection point?

- Well, there are several.

I mean, there was from the very beginning, with this extreme Protestant group, the pilgrims and the Puritans who followed, who founded, who were the settlers, the first Europeans here to settle, had a religious belief in their right to have their own truth.

And that extended beyond religion, eventually.

Back when, "I believe what I believe, and I have a right to believe it, however at odds with empirical reality it might be.” Fine, if that's your religious belief.

As Thomas Jefferson wonderfully said, "I don't care if my neighbor believes in no gods or 15 gods, as long as he doesn't break my leg or pick my pocket, fine by me," which is my belief about American tolerance and what American tolerance was.

In your church, in your home, go crazy, literally or figuratively.

Eventually, and really not until the last, you know, 50 or 60 years, did it reach a tipping point, did it become, and in no small measure by the believe anything you want, you find your own truth, 1960s and '70s.

But I would say that was the kind of cultural, intellectual tipping point to subjectivity rules, and the internet gave it sort of a superpower.

And here we are.

And the other thing that I think is important in this history to talk about, in terms of how it happened, is there was an anti-establishment, anti-intellectualism as part of the American character from the beginning.

Again, it was kept under control, by say our intellectual founding fathers, you know, and by various establishments over the years, for better or worse.

But once we had, you know, let it all hang out-ness, as a kind of dominant cultural paradigm starting in the late 1960s, it frankly went too far.

And in that case, what began as a kind of cultural left impulse, has redounded to be on the right, to put us where we are today.

- I want to talk about how, I mean, social media, you know, social media is the source of all evil actually, a lot of people think, but in the case of folks who want to, you know, censor things or ban books, or other-ize people, it's like rocket fuel.

And you know this better than anybody, because of the Velshi Banned Book Club that you started.

What is the end game here?

I mean, what?

- Well, it does seem to be a whole lot of validation that's going on.

I was a very early adopter of social media, and I, like Charlie, used to engage with everybody on it.

And I loved when people would take issue with something I said, and I would also, you know, try to get involved in a dialogue.

And there was a really useful part of social media for a while as a news reporter, where you would find things out first, or you'd get insights into things, or you could confirm things.

And now we're in a world where all the people who did that, in many cases, the providers of news or the people who were getting information, real information from social media, have decided to abandon that.

And I'll give you our colleague Brian Stelter, who's a media commentator, made the point after the attack on October 7th, 2023 in Israel.

He said, "For the first time after a major event, I didn't turn to social media for information, because I wasn't going to get information from social media.

I was going to get a lot of opinion."

And we've moved into a world in which social media creates a demand on you to have an opinion very, very quickly about things that you may not know much about.

So the net value of it has diminished, and as a result, a whole lot of people who are very active contributors, particularly on what we now know as X, but what was Twitter, have just left.

Or they exist, but they don't participate in the robust debates that Charlie was talking about, because it's not worth anybody's time.

And what you left with is a whole lot of people on that platform and other social media platforms who are still there, who don't understand that the curation and the editing is gone.

Now it's just, it's a lot of nonsense.

- Megan, you also talked about something else that was really historical in the sense of, in the mid 20th century, there was an historian, Warren Sussman, who talked about, and I find this fascinating, the shift from people who wanted old fashioned values, like character values, like diligence and sense of duty and integrity.

Suddenly it shifted to, who's a great entertainer?

I want a date to the prom, you know?

It's like, it became all about that.

It became about presence and charisma and personality.

What was the inflection point there?

- He attributes it pretty directly to the rise of mass media, specifically the rise of the radio.

And you know, suddenly people who had mostly gotten their news from newspapers in the past, were getting their news from these unbodied voices who were compelling, not because necessarily of the stories they were telling or the information they were sharing, but because of their charm, you know, and because of the way they could sort of present themselves over the airwaves.

And you know, when you live in that every day and you sort of, in your house, there's this reality that, you know, the more charming story is the better story, that becomes part of how you see the world.

And yeah, so ever since then, and it only got more escalated with television, and then definitely with social media, our standards, I think of what it means to be a good, successful person have somewhat shifted.

- Charlie, you did do talk radio for a long time, and you've done a bit of a mea culpa in terms of, I guess going back to those days, not really understanding maybe the impact you could have on stoking polarization or dividing people, or, and I'm using today's terms.

I mean, you weren't really maybe as aware, none of us were, of the full impact this could be having on people.

What would you do differently?

I mean, do you feel any sense of ownership in terms of helping to build this contagion?

- Oh, absolutely.

You know regrets I have, I have more than a few.

And also regrets about, you know again, you know, why didn't I see this happening?

You know, why did I not understand that the people who were next to me, you know, were not exactly who I thought they were?

I mean, we always knew that we had the crazies, you know, the crazy uncle.

We thought that they were kind of like the drunk at the end of the bar at the corner, that the center would hold.

And this was an illusion, this was a delusion that was going on.

You know, for a while I thought that what we were doing was providing the other side of the story, that we were pushing back against, you know, another narrative, assuming that people would then have two different versions, that they could make up their mind.

What I didn't see was the way that we were creating these alternative reality silos.

And Kurt made a reference to something that I said, I think was back in 2016, sort of the shock when I realized, you know, conservatives have been, you know, complaining about the bias of the media for years.

This goes way back into the 1950s, 1940s.

But what had happened, I think, was that we had succeeded in destroying all of the credibility of the fact-based media.

So the immune system of the right to fake information was destroyed.

All of those guardrails were down.

And all of us participated in that to some extent.

But again, you know, my delusion was to think that, you know, conservatism was about these ideas, like, "Well, this think tank is doing this, and George Will is writing this, and look what Charles Krauthammer said."

And as George will told me, shortly after the 2016 election, it turned out that those of us that actually cared about some of these esoteric conservative ideas were a much smaller band of brothers and sisters than we thought they were.

There were something out there, some molten reality, that somehow we had been blind to, or had blinded ourselves to.

- And we have to, I think point out, as we all have in our various ways, when we talk about entertainment, entertainment in this context, is talking about, "Oh, how can we make money?

How can we make money doing this?"

And that becomes the imperative above seeking the truth or ideas.

I mean, and so I think when we're talking about the, you know, alternative facts world, the post-truth world, there are the true zealots and the true nuts, who believe sincerely their nuttiness and their zealotry and their conspiracy theories, and then there are the people who don't, who we saw, for instance, all of the Fox News anchors during that Dominion trial, admitting to themselves that, "We don't believe this, this is nonsense, this is nonsense," who are doing it for the money.

So I think it's not always easy to distinguish the pure grift from the madness, from the rejection of empirical reality.

But I think it's important to see that there are two things going on here at once.

- And it blurs with each passing day.

That's part of the problem.

And so it's on all of us who are in this industry, who are journalists, to sort of decide where we need to be in this reality.

We all have to, in the same way that every American needs to think about democracy as existential, every journalist needs to think about our contribution to the discourse as existential.

Because at this point, you're not just talking to the people that you may have been in the '50s or '60s or '70s.

You're talking to a super-polarized audience that wants to hear what they want to hear, and they want to hear it fast.

So just like there's a slow food movement, we need a slow news movement.

- Slow news.

- Right.

We need people to say, "Hey, I have no idea about this topic.

I'm not going to post about it first.

I'm going to read something about it first, and then I might read something else."

- Yeah but you know, when somebody says they don't know something, everybody's like, "What do you mean you don't?"

I mean, we expect, and ask them, "What do you mean?"

- We have created a world in which you should know about things, that there's no reason you should know about.

Everything should be an invitation to learn more.

But we are in a world where opinions form faster than you could possibly intellectually conceive of them forming.

And then it informs our decision making, and it informs our politics, and it informs our news.

It just becomes the cycle, where you've got to get something very fast.

- I read a little bit about you saying you had a little bit of regret about starting, whatever number of years ago- - Absolutely, absolutely.

And I was working for, you know, CNN.

We weren't even thinking about counter narratives, but it is a combination of the entertainment value of it, when you're on cable TV, and the idea that you identify what polarizes people and figure out what that bubble is, and then reinforce it.

So we all did it, it wasn't just a thing on the right, we all did it.

And the only reason- - Oh, sure.

- I remain in this business now, is so that I can be here long enough to undo- - Oh, good.

- [Ali] Some of the damage that I contributed to.

- That's very encouraging, I like that, okay.

No, because I remember when infotainment was introduced and we were all like aghast, like, "What is this," you know?

"It's like you're going to mix entertainment and the news."

I mean, it's like sacrilege, but it is a business clearly labeled.

And as Kurt said, it's in the business of making money.

Megan, did you have a thought on this?

- Yeah sure, I mean, a couple of things.

So one thought that occurs to me is, so the scholar Neil Postman talks about entertainment as a super ideology, you know, as this ideology that sort of transcends everything else.

And you know, it's both Republican and Democrat.

It's just, it's sort of in our bones in a way, as Americans.

And I think that we're seeing that in the worst possible way now, because so much of the way, the expectations that we have about how politics work and how people should interact with each other and understand each other, are inflected with entertainment, I think, in terrible ways.

So I think for example of, during the first Trump impeachment trial, many politicians, high-ranking politicians, many of whom had legal backgrounds, argued against the evidence being presented as part of this sort of ultimate trial as, "This is boring."

That was literally what politicians were saying, "This is boring, snooze, no one's watching this," et cetera.

And it just, it sort of haunted me because I thought, you know, my expectations were already very low.

But when you have people who theoretically should be modeling discourse for us, behaving like that and equating import with razzle dazzle, you know, that's a really bad state of affairs.

So, yeah, I think one thing I would actually hope for, just you know, as media people, as politicians, and as citizens, is that we could actually become a little bit more comfortable with a little bit of boredom, you know?

And which would include admitting, you know, "I don't know that, I'm going to go read quietly to myself and learn," and then- - "And I'll get back to you in a few days, or a week, with my take on it."

- Yeah, exactly.

- I'm going to get Charlie to jump in, but go ahead Kurt, you go first.

- Well, on the other hand, I mean, one way in which I was very happy to see, you know, the House January 6th committee, ordinarily people and an institution committed to tedium, and occasional theatrical, you know, grandstanding, actually saw that in order to get this story across to the American public in a meaningful way, they had to create a show.

And you know, you have to fight fire with a certain kind of fire, and I think they did a great job.

And of course, to my mind, you know, that didn't lead to misinformation or disinformation, or entertainment values suppressing good, solid facts.

They just did what was necessary in these days to get everybody's attention.

And I think it was- - And it worked.

- It did work.

- I mean, the ratings on that were, were boffo, as they would've said in a- - And I think the impact.

Even you look at the, even though Donald Trump's approval ratings and disapproval ratings have been fairly straight ever since he left office, there was an interesting uptick in disapproval and downtick in approval, right after, you know, as the January 6th committee- - That was all going on.

- Happened.

And you know, one looks at that and has to think, maybe that was the one moment when people, or some small fraction of people said, "No, I'm not buying this anymore."

- Charlie?

- No, I agree with that completely.

But let me throw out, just like a different take on all of this.

And again, this is not a justification for all of the lies and the disinformation out there, but also I think we'd remiss not to talk about the collapse of credibility of many of our elite institutions, and which creates that opening for people to know, what's the real story?

What's the true information, what are the hidden facts?

What are they not telling us?

So we've had decades of the government lying to us, you know, the media occasionally, I think there's asymmetry, media will get things wrong, and then most of the fact-based media will correct it.

But you know, there has been a crisis of credibility, crisis of credibility of the medical community, crisis of credibility of, you know, economists, of big business.

So there's a lot of people out there who are thinking, "What's really going on?"

So one of the things that's happened is that people have tapped into that, that's the conspiracy theory, like, "You can't believe anything they tell you, and this is what's really happening."

And so yes, we have this absolute flood of disinformation, but it takes place in a period in which many of those institutions that used to be, you know, the trusted purveyors of information, have been discredited, sometimes justifiably, because of, you know, we've all lived through all this era, and sometimes, you know, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly.

But that's part of the story as well.

And so if we're ever going to put this back together again, then the imperative for each of these institutions to be as truthful and accurate and dependable and credible as possible, because again, life is not fair.

You know, any mistake they make, any sort of a lighting of the truth will be weaponized against them.

And this is just part of the story and the times that we live in.

- This is the precursor, though, what Charlie talks about, to every disaster in modern human history.

It's not an American concept.

It was the precursor to Hitler.

It was the precursor to what Hitler created.

It was the precursor to what Mussolini created.

It was the precursor to Rwanda.

It was the precursor to the Balkans.

It's the precursor to the Ukraine.

It's the idea that there is a they, 'cause my first question is, who's they?

And Charlie's right, he named them.

It's government, the trust in government.

Every survey we look at, trust in government is down.

Trust in media is down.

Trust in science is down post pandemic.

In other words, in the very moment that that trust should have been growing, it's down.

I don't blame any of the doctors or the scientists.

We are just in this place where that mistrust accelerates.

And when you do that, you create not just an opportunity for critics and conspiracy theorists, you create an opportunity for their leaders, the people who manipulate them.

So when we talk about the leaders in America who are manipulating people through distrust and through misinformation, there is an audience that is ripe for this right now, and it is not a uniquely American phenomenon.

I remember in Russia, in Ukraine, talking to the kids of parents who lived in Russia and asking them, "Why do your parents have such bad information?"

They were living in Ukraine saying, "We got bombed," and the parents would be saying, "That's propaganda."

And I said, "Can your parents get better information than they get, or is it because of the type of TV they get in Russia?"

And they said, "Everybody's got a VPN.

Everybody knows how to get better information.

People choose to get the information that makes them most comfortable."

- That they want, right.

Well, we're now to the how-to-fix-it stage of this.

Buckle your seat belts.

Yes, how to fix it.

To kick this off, here's one of our former guests, sociologist James Davison Hunter, who coined the term ‘culture wars█ 30 years ago, reminding us what's at stake in the battle over reality.

- We are at risk of losing our democracy.

It's important to remember that some kind of solidarity is essential in any kind of society, but in especially a democratic society.

And if solidarity can't be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively, that is a fact.

- Kurt, I'm starting with you here because- - For the solution?

Well, Jane- - No, no, no, but you, let me start with something.

You know, we've had people like Tim Snyder from Yale who wrote "On Tyranny", his plea to try and bring back local news.

This is always something that's a campaign he talks about.

A lot of people feel that would help things.

But you know, the journalists have lost jobs faster than coal miners.

I mean, they're really, it's been a terrible, over the last two decades to see what's happened.

Local news has dried up, we know this.

What seriously, what can maybe mitigate some of this horror show that we're witnessing?

- My basic belief is that we can try to stop it where it is, as best we can.

And as Ali was just saying very eloquently, you know, not only every journalist has the, I think, obligation to sort of plant the flag and stand up for empirical reality, whether it's inconvenient to their preexisting opinions or not.

But heads of corporations, heads of all kinds of institutions, as Charlie was saying, universities, who you know, one could say about some of the complaints about universities is that they are uncomfortable with certain facts or opinions, you know?

And I think, that's the way you can do it.

I don't think it's going to be rolled back.

I just do not think, I mean, I would love to be wrong.

I would love to have my children and grandchildren, should I ever have the latter, see that Grandpa was wrong, and he said in 2025, "Oh, it's never going to get better."

But I don't think it is.

I think the best we can hope for is it to not get worse, by individually doing what we can in our little worlds.

Now one thing I will say, the moments when I think, "Ah, it's not as bad as all that."

There are small towns, small towns in Connecticut and elsewhere, and all over the country, where Republicans and Democrats are getting along okay.

- Exactly.

- You know, these national, fraught, cultural, "I'm going to kill you," "No, I'm going to kill you," issues do not have that kind of salience in many, many places.

So, as bad as this is, I think the people in a town who are arguing about whether the snow is getting plowed quickly enough, are not arguing about those facts.

The snow is either getting plowed or it isn't, do you know?

So as I spend time talking to people in small towns, both the one where I live halftime and others, I'm encouraged that in a way it's not as bad as all that, which I'm not saying is a reason to get complacent and say, "Oh it's still," you know, "it's still Main Street USA, it's still wonderful."

I'm just saying it's not as far gone as social media and cable news would lead us to believe.

- Because when you get down to shared concerns, like whether the snow is plowed, basically it's not red or blue, it's, "Is the snow plowed?"

- That, and just literally walking down the road, running into the guy who voted for Trump, and you have a conversation about whatever you're having the conversation about, you're not hating each other.

You know, you're getting along.

You know, even though you both think that the other one is, you know, doesn't know what he or she is talking about.

But you know, so it may well get worse before it gets better, but I do think it's possible to sort of, we can get hysterical about how bad it's become, and which isn't to say we don't all have a kind of sacred obligation to do whatever we can in our small or larger way to not make it get worse.

- Can I just pick up on the small?

I think the answer's small.

- That's right.

- I think there's two things you have to remember.

Be small and be courageous.

You cannot solve Russia-Ukraine, you cannot solve Israel-Gaza.

You cannot solve the potential collapse of democracy in the United States, or the honesty of the media.

But what you can do is get a library card.

What you can do is make sure you are registered to vote.

And if everybody, if we just did that, if everybody made sure on voting day that they made sure one other American voted with them, if everybody did something to support their local news, because can you imagine?

And I started in local news and I didn't like it very much, and now I want to go back and I want to be the guy who walks into a city council committee meeting where they say, "Oh the reporter's here, we can't lie.

We can't do that," right?

I would go back and do it all over again, but support your local news.

You talked about Tim Snyder.

These are all things on Tim's list.

Do small things that are a little bit outside your comfort zone, and you fix it.

- People think they don't matter.

- They matter.

- You know people say, they don't- - They're the only thing, in my opinion, the only things that matter.

- I agree with you.

Okay, we agree.

- Right?

You cannot solve the big things that are depressing.

You can solve something very local in your community.

- And it makes you feel good.

Megan, let's talk about the sort of corrosive, again, going back to social media.

Now you've got AI.

- (groaning) Yes.

- And people are like already terrified about that.

They don't understand it, they don't know it's going to do, but they're already terrified.

You cover the intersection between tech and culture.

Where do you net out?

- Oh, I mean, I'm very pessimistic, I think slash a little bit- - Oh great, yeah.

- Scared.

So I'll just put those cards on the table.

I mean I think, so to Charlie's point, I was thinking about, you know, I've gotten so many emails and reaction to stories that were told truthfully, that that informed me, "No, the people you're talking about were crisis actors," or, "No, the video you're referring to is a deep fake," and you see this kind of thing over and over again, I think in media, where A, people don't understand really how at least honest journalistic outlets operate.

To your point before Ali, like you know, the idea that if we knowingly lied, we would be fired instantly.

But half the country, if not more, doesn't realize that, and they just think we're just spouting whatever we want to willy-nilly, you know?

So that's one problem.

But also, I think there are so many ways now to sort of give reality plausible deniability, if you want to.

So if, you know, there's something that makes you uncomfortable that's a truth, and it is reported truthfully, you know, by journalists, many people will simply say, "No, nope, crisis actor.

Nope, deep fake.

No, AI.

No, doctored photo," et cetera.

And that's a very hard thing, I think, to get past.

And one thing I do want to say in terms of solutions is- - You have a good solution?

- Not a good one necessarily, but I have- - You have like, a mediocre one?

- I have a little one.

- Okay.

- No it's actually, I mean, it's a small one actually, but I agree, like those are going to be what we need.

It's just media literacy.

I mean, I've just been struck by how few people just sort of don't understand, and how few people understand the way that just good journalism works, you know?

The reporting that's required, the news gathering, the on the ground, talking to people, all of these things.

And I think a lot of the public just assumes journalists are simply making up stories.

- Well- - You know, and yeah.

- I mean, it's been denigrated for how long?

I mean, we've been in this business and I've heard constantly that it's the media's fault.

The media's- - Well, you know- - It's an easy statement.

- It's an easy statement.

- Well, and what is called the, the range of what is called the media and the news media, has extended to these crazy extents where it didn't used to.

And there are lots of bad things about, when there were only four networks and two news magazines and so forth.

But, you know, news media was, for better or worse, constrained.

And even if they were perpetuating patriarchal, capitalist, sexist world in many ways, as they were, there was still, in terms of factual reality, a norm to, you know, as everybody is saying, to try to find the facts.

Now a guy, a person in their basement, as Donald Trump once said, a 300-pound guy in his bed, can be a member of the media.

And again, I was thinking when Meghan was saying, like a democracy or republic needs citizens, yes.

But we have citizens where everybody can be famous for 15 seconds every single day on TikTok, on their social media platform of choice.

- Now we're going to switch to Charlie with the political arena and something, maybe some reform in the electoral process, that might sort of curb the fabulists and the extremists.

And what about the whole notion of, you know, getting rid of the primary system, these closed primaries, and having ranked choice voting?

I mean, wouldn't this weed out some of the, I don't know what to call them, the passionate extremists?

- Well, we can get really wonky here, since we've been talking about being boring.

Yes, I'm a big fan of ranked choice voting, but I'm not naive enough to think that that's going to solve it.

I don't think that there's really very many systemic changes that are you know, until we deal with this sort of, you know, fundamental cultural problem out there.

I mean, I don't want to say, you know be hopeless, but I have, you know, everything that everyone has said, I think has been very, very important.

I agree with Megan that things are going to get worse.

That you know, that in fact, there's really reason to be concerned.

I agree with Ali that we need to think small about this, you know, don't think there's some legislation that's going to fix it.

You know, but Kirk also got me thinking about the fact that every time that, and by the way, you know, talking about a guy in their basement, I'm in my basement right now, so I felt seen, just so you know.

- It's a nice basement.

- But yeah, but it's, you know, that every time when I, on occasion, when I leave my basement and go out and you know, get off Twitter, get off social media and meet people in the real world, it's kind of eye opening to realize that, hey, you know, people are like, you know, average people, like do deal with one another.

They are decent, they are reasonable.

Reality matters to them, they're raising their kids.

They understand that they want the engineer who built their kids' schools to be reality and fact-based.

So you know, let's remind ourselves once in a while that our politics is almost uniquely toxic in our society.

I mean, this is so weird that we have standards of performance that we have in business, in schools, in sports, that we completely then throw out when it comes to politicians.

I mean, in some ways, we save our lowest possible standards for our politics, which is part of the crisis of democracy.

Because rather than, I mean the founding fathers, I think, and I don't think they were naive, but I think that they thought that, you know, public service and democracy would attract many of the, you know, honorable people.

They had the checks and balances.

I don't think that we ever envisioned the point where some of the worst people would be attracted to our politics, and that politics would bring out absolutely the worst in all of us.

Now again, I understand that politics has never been pristine, but I do find if you spend time with real people and you don't talk about politics, it can go this far to restoring your faith in your fellow American.

But it's going to be a long slog, and I completely agree that we have to start small.

- That's because you live in Wisconsin.

I mean, people are really nice in Wisconsin.

- They are awfully nice.

- We actually are almost out of time, but Charlie, I do want to ask you this question about your father, who was a contrarian and a journalist and a professor.

And when you gave his eulogy, you talked about how he had taught you to hit a baseball and handle a tennis racket, but that the most important thing was the competitiveness of the clash of ideas, was something that really mattered.

Here's my question.

Are we ever going back to the integrity within that whole notion of ideas and truth?

Do you think that's possible?

- It's essential, we have to.

I can't predict what's going to happen, but if we're going to have a healthy democracy, if we are going to be able to keep the republic that they gave us, we're going to have to go back to that point where we can have these vigorous discussions, the vigorous debates that go on, and they have to have a shared reality, you know, at some level.

There's no path forward in which we keep our democracy if that doesn't happen.

- You know, I want to go back to Tim Snyder for a second, who pointed out that in 1930 in Germany, the expectation would've been that the 20th century was Germany's century.

It was a more scientifically, artistically advanced culture than anything else in the world.

Not even America was there.

The 21st century should be America's century.

It can still be America's century if we don't mess it up, but the time to not mess it up is running out.

- Megan, I want to ask you about something that you wrote about that's fascinating, that entertainment has become just such a thing that people want to live in it, they want to be totally immersed in it, and they're going to get help from Facebook, AKA Meta, and TikTok, and they're actually trying, I don't even know how this is possible.

I don't even talk to Siri, so of course, I don't know this is possible.

But what are they trying to do, this immersive entertainment thing?

- Yeah I mean, it's basically, it's this idea of, yeah, living in your entertainment, being surrounded, so that your entertainment is not separated by a screen like television.

The word tele means distance, right?

And so the technology is named for the distance that you have to the screen.

Meta and the metaverse basically is trying to work in the opposite way, where you get to live within the entertainment, you get to inhabit your fun.

And I don't really feel qualified to talk about Facebook's financial future and their bet on the metaverse and all of that.

But I think what's very clear is that we are effectively living in the metaverse right now, with or without technology.

We are surrounded by screens so completely, that the logic of the metaverse, which is just endless entertainment, you know completely- - Surround sound.

- Surround sound, exactly, all of that.

That's just our reality, and I think it inflects everything.

It affects the way that we interact with each other.

I think, you know, at worst, it makes us see each other as not people, but as characters in a show, you know?

And everything just becomes this endless stage.

It's like this, you know, very perverse twist of all the world's a stage, you know?

And I think that's what the metaverse does beyond the technology, it's cultural.

- I wonder what Walter Cronkite would say about all this.

- Mm, yeah, yeah.

- Ali, instead of a last question for you, as you may know, we wrap up "Common Ground" with a silver lining moment that leaves our viewers with a sense of hope.

Today you are the silver lining, and we're honoring the enormous public service you're providing with the Velshi Banned Book Club, which educates, enlightens, and inspires your audience.

And one of the first authors you featured was George M. Johnson, who wrote "All Boys Aren't Blue".

And I read that you were profoundly affected by the reaction you got to that interview, tell us why.

- It was book number one for us, in, I guess it was 2022, remarkable.

George M. Johnson has written this book, it's an exposition, it's autobiographical, about a gay Black person.

And we certainly understood why it was banned in various places, and why it was so interesting, and the literary strength of the book.

But I invite my viewers to respond to what they thought about the book.

I got viewers who are older, white, straight viewers who said they'd never met a queer Black person, and thought that this was a remarkable window into an experience that they wouldn't have known otherwise.

People identified with the book, who I don't know that George was intending to identify with the book.

The idea that people were curious about reading these banned books for exactly what these books are banned for.

They're meant to make sure that people don't learn about stories like George's or everybody else's.

And the viewers, and they still do, they gravitate now to these books that somebody wants to ban to find out, "What are you keeping from me?

What is it I don't know, that I'm going to know if I learn that book?"

And George was the first example of that, and it's been over a year and a half now of doing that, and finding the same reaction that if you ban a book, it's actually going to make people want to read the book.

- And then people send you socks.

- I've got socks.

I've got my banned book socks on right now.

These are the un-banned books.

And then here you got the blacked out.

It's a losing battle, it's very dangerous if it happens to continue to ban books.

It's really, again, it's a precursor to some of the worst things that have happened in this world's history, but in America it's going to be a losing battle, it is.

People are catching onto the idea, that first of all, your kids, you can ban the book if you want.

The kids can get all the information they want anyway on the internet.

But the concept of going after school teachers and going after librarians who curate and give kids who need information access to that information, that is a parent and a family's right to decide, not the state's right to decide, and people won't stand up for it.

- You sound so sure about it, you sound like- - Yeah, I'm actually really confident.

I'm confident that efforts to take people's rights away in America in the last few years are going to come back really hard to bite those who will take their rights away.

Even if you don't want to read George M. Johnson's book or anybody else's book, and you wouldn't want your kids reading it, Americans want to preserve the right to make decisions about their body, their children, what they read, and the choices they make politically.

I think in the end, Americans will rise up to the challenge.

And we've seen it in recent elections where they've said, "Nuh-uh, I may not want something, but it's my right to decide."

(audience applauding) - You're amazing.

We're out of time, so I'm tagging out now.

Thank you, thank you, you guys.

Grateful to extraordinary guests doesn't begin to say it, for their insights and inspiration, and to you for joining us today.

Until we see you back here next time, from the Frederick Gunn School in the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut, for "Common Ground", I'm Jane Whitney, take care.

(bright thoughtful music) (bright upbeat music) (bright thoughtful music)