Advisory Opinions - Fact, Fiction, and the Fight

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

In this episode, David and Sarah continue their August tradition of looking outside the world of legal nerdery with Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of the book The Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch has been warning about the dangers to free speech for a long time. What is the state of free speech? And how much of a threat is illiberalism? Show Notes: -Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge -Rauch’s book Kindly Inquisitors Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. This edition, this is a special edition on two counts. One, we have a special guest, Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, winner of the 2005 National Magazine Award, author most recently of The Constitution of Knowledge, A Defense of Truth, author of a number of other books, and one which, of course, we're going to talk about as well as his most recent one. And this is also a great podcast, a special podcast, because you know what? I know Jonathan Rauch and Sarah does not.

David has only mentioned this over and over and over again, folks. It never gets old, Sarah. It does not get old. It's fantastic, in fact. But anyway, we're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk a ton about free speech, the culture of truth, and we're going to talk about free speech in a way that's a little bit different from the way we normally talk about free speech and advisory opinions. We're not going to be talking about the law. We're going to be talking about the culture.

And so I want to just start with, John, welcome. Thank you for coming on Advisory Opinions. And let's start with your most recent book, The Constitution of Knowledge. I guess the first question to ask is, what is the Constitution of Knowledge? So, every society, every tribe, large or small, needs some way to come to some kind of collective view of what's factually true and what's factually false, at least for public purposes. You know, is that a tiger in the bush or just a breeze or what's killing all our kids? What's the cause of all this disease? Is it that woman who looked at me? Did she hex me?

So this is very important. And typically through 200,000 years of human history, we solve this through wars and authoritarianism and ignorance and oppression. About 350 years ago, we invented a very, very different system. And it was basically, it said, we're going to have rules instead of rulers. We're going to have a big social network that's going to decide for us what's true and false. A lot of people checking for each other's errors, and that's the constitution of knowledge. It's the rules and institutions that keep us

collectively moored to reality and that resolve our differences of view civilly and productively. So what would you, I mean, we're just high level for right now, and then we're going to dive into some more specifics. But if you're, let's say you're the president of the Republic of Knowledge, and you are giving a State of the Union speech about the state of the Constitution of knowledge, where are we? I'd say we're troubled. Now, constitution of knowledge has been controversial, challenged, under attack since day one. You know, think Galileo and the church.

Right now, there are two challenges that are both pretty dire. One is dire because it's got the commanding heights of one of the two great political parties, plus its own media ecosystem, the MAGA grassroots movement. And that's the alternative reality and the application of Russian-style mass disinformation tactics in American politics by Trump and MAGA, now the Republican Party. That's something we've never seen in America. Trump and MAGA, now the Republican Party. That's something we've never seen in America, or if we have the most recent parallel would be the 1850s, which by the way, David and Sarah, in case you didn't know, it did not end well. A new take on the Civil War by Jonathan Rauch.

And this is just an unprecedented problem. 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen, which is completely false. A plurality of independents believe the election was either stolen or that we'll never know for sure. We don't have the immunities that other countries develop over time to mass disinformation being run against us by our politicians and parties. That's a huge problem. There's a second problem, which is more like corruption from within, and that's inside the reality-based community. That's the professionals and institutions and people who live according to the constitution of knowledge, the truth-seeking enterprises, the big four research, that's, science and academia and the rest number two is media mainstream media number three is law that's you guys and number four is government so those are

increasingly being taken over from within by certain points of view that operate um cultishly saying that there are views that you can't challenge, opinions that you can't question. And then you've got the rise of social coercion in the form of canceling, which is enforcing this politicization inside academia and now increasingly outside academia. So you've got those two things going on. If you force me to choose, I'd say easily the worst is the outside problem, the MAGA problem. Others disagree. So one of the things that you discuss in your book is the historical lens that other, you know, whether it's Nazism, Stalinism, they didn't last for long because they rejected the constitution of knowledge. They had this distorted reality and were trying to impose it on, you know, millions of people.

And eventually that will fall apart. I guess I'm wondering whether that's true. I mean, certainly, as you mentioned, we have, you know, at least tens of thousands of years of human evolution. And this constitution of knowledge has only lasted a few hundred years. It certainly hasn't always been everywhere. And I would say today, it's certainly, do you think it's even half of the world subscribes to this? I'm wondering whether we're still in the beginning of the constitution of knowledge and it's still battling to even take hold. Well, it's always battling to take hold because it's so counterintuitive. Think of all of the

esoteric ideas and professional standards and protocols that you guys had to learn to become lawyers and to practice law, how you write briefs, how you argue. And that's always challenging. It's even more challenging when the system is under attack. It always is, but it's really very directly under attack right now from both directions. So yeah, in terms of human history, this thing is brand new. Now it is 350 years old and it does, you alluded to this, Sarah, it does have the advantage of having reality on its side. This turns out to be the only system known to humanity that consistently can keep a society moored to reality. Because otherwise, sooner or later, they begin, people follow each other down their epistemic rabbit holes and bias confirmation, and then you get priests and dictators and politbureaus who say

what you have to believe. And the societies become rigid and, you know, they collapse if they're small, like Jonestown, and if they're big, like the Soviet Union. But they do a huge amount of damage along the way, and there's no guarantee that they come out the other side, you know, in a place that's got good liberal values. So what I stress throughout the book, throughout every podcast, is it's not just a marketplace of ideas where freedom is enough, where if you just have freedom, you have peer-to-peer conversations, you know, Twitter, Facebook, then the good ideas surface and everything comes out, right? That is not true. The constitution of knowledge, like the U.S. constitution, which it resembles in many ways, requires a lot of settings that you have to get right, a lot of norms, a lot of

institutions, a lot of protocols. You have to understand what those are. You have to maintain them vigorously. You have to defend them. You have to understand what the challenges are. And we got to do that right now. And we're not doing a great job of it. I believe that if we do rally to the defense of the constitution of knowledge against these threats as a society, then we squash them like a bug. But there's no guarantee that we will rally. And that's why I wrote this book. So when you think about Donald Trump, do you put him in sort of this great man theory of history? He was a unique person to come at a unique time, or is he the symptom of things that were coming before it in terms of

the threat you believe he poses to the constitution of knowledge can i answer that question yes i love it both both are both are correct and what's correct here is is typically what happens in societies whose epistemic environment gets befouled and then corrupted and then verges on collapse. And that some things happened first that made us socially vulnerable. One was the general decline in trust in institutions. Another is the rise of conservative alternative media, starting with talk radio in the 80s and 90s.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, would rail against what he called the four corners of deceit, which he identified as academia, science, journalism, and government. You can't believe any of those people. You got, you know, Sarah Palin completely made up death panels in 2008 and proved that you could just get away with just totally making stuff up. And then the society, partly as a result of deliberate attempts to polarize us by opportunists like Newt Gingrich and people, you know, they're equally divisive figures on the left. Society got very polarized. A lot of that, I believe, was on purpose. It was done to us for power and profit. A polarized society is much easier to propagandize because the more willing you are to believe terrible things around the other side, the more open you are to conspiracy theories and fake news

and the rest. And the goal of propaganda, as practiced, for example, by Vladimir Putin, is to further polarize the society. That's why he does all those things in 2016 that stimulate protests artificially against each other on opposite sides of the same street. So you've got polarization and propaganda propping each other up. Then you get social media, which turbocharges it all. And boom, you've got a lot of gasoline on a big pile of wood. And along comes a match named Donald Trump. Trump is a master of disinformation. He built his career on it.

This is nothing new for him. I think he's genius level. I think he's the greatest since Goebbels. I think, you know, he's better than Putin and Putin is really good. And Trump is the first person with the audacity and the genius to realize, wait, I can take Russian-style firehose of falsehood, conspiracy bootstrapping types of tactics and apply them wholesale to US politics. No one had imagined doing this before. And he did it. That's why he was lying 10 times a day, 35,000 lies, according to Washington

Post fact checkers. This is why during the campaign, according to PolitiFact, 70% of what he says is false. It can be checked. The equivalent number for Hillary Clinton is 25%. I mean, if the guy's talking, he's probably lying. It's why he lies about the weather during his inauguration and the size of the crowd. It's why he changes the weather report about a hurricane, all of which is building up April of 2020. He knows he's likely to lose the election. He launches Stop the Steal. And that's an attack on mail-in voting. And that puzzles people like me and maybe you, you're thinking, you know, wait a minute, a lot of older people vote and mail balloting is, you know,

you want their votes if you're Republican. Well, he's not aiming at the election. He's aiming at the post-election. He's testing the message and the networks that he's going to activate the day after the election, organizing this narrative that it was stolen. And he even tells us that's what he's going to do. And that's what he does. So November 4th brings the beginning of the greatest onslaught of the greatest disinformation campaign America has ever seen. It's now been adopted by the Republican Party. It's not just Trump.

He's out of office. He's off Twitter. He's off Facebook. The base now is carrying these tactics forward in places like, you know, the bogus partisan audit in Arizona, my home state. So now we've got a permanent problem of mass disinformation as a regular feature of American politics and a mainstay of one of our two parties. Sorry, that was a long answer. No, no, that's, no, we, it comes down to yes. We brought you on the podcast to hear you talk. So that's a, no, all right. Well, interrupt me at any time, but, uh, so that's a good segue into, um, a couple of chapters that I found to be really interesting in some of the distinctions that you drew out. And so I'm somebody who's talked in the past about something called horseshoe theory, that when the two sides grow

more extreme, they grow more alike so that you will often see many of the same behaviors on the far right as you see on the far left and vice versa. And that's true. You do see some of many of the same behaviors. You do see canceling for example on the right just as we've seen canceling on the left but one of the things in the book that you did that i thought that really um sharpened some distinctions instead of saying that when the right and the left get too extreme they become more and more alike you showed some manifestations of how they're different in particular ways. And on the right, you talked about this sort of troll epistemology. In other words,

the firehose of, to avoid the explicit rating on the podcast, the firehose of bullcrap that has come from, you know, that Steve Bannon advocated, the sort of firehose of disinformation propaganda on the right, and then on the left, this wave of canceling. And let's sort of go one than the other. First, talk about what is this sort of troll epistemology, what is it, and what effect has it had on our culture? Can I just first say one word about what they have in common, these two? Because that's really... So there are three big messages in my book. We just covered the first, which is it's not a marketplace of ideas. It's a constitution of knowledge. The second is you're being manipulated. And the thesis there is that for very different

purposes and using some different methods, but the left and the right have in common that they're both engaging in high-tech, sophisticated information warfare. I call it epistemic warfare. So what's that? That's the organization and manipulation of the social and media environment for political advantage, specifically to dominate, divide, disorient, and ultimately demoralize your target population. That's what Putin was doing. It's, you know, what Goebbels and Hitler's doing, Lenin, all those people doing versions of that. It's very powerful stuff. It goes back a long time. But there are different ways to do it, and you can hitch it to very different ideologies and purposes.

But that's what the left and right have in common. That's, I think, a breakthrough idea of my book, because I don't think people have put this together in the context of epistemic warfare. So what's the right up to if Trump is right? I don't know. David, you tell me if Trump is right-wing in any real sense. I draw a distinction between right-wing and conservative. They're definitely not conservatives, but okay, we'll call them right-wing. Populist, nihilistic, something like that might be better. So the tactics they're using manipulate us

are using manipulate us by weaponizing certain cognitive vulnerabilities. One is bandwidth. It turns out that if you throw enough stuff at people at such a rate that they can't possibly process it and keep abreast of it, they essentially kind of lose the ability to decide what's right and what's wrong in that situation. So the old style was censorship, right? You tell people what they can say and everything else is banned. That doesn't really work in this environment. It never really worked that well. But the scarce resource today is attention. So what Steve Bannon, Trump's advisor, said is we know how to do the real enemies, the media, we know how to deal with them. We flood the zone with shit. This is what Vladimir Putin does. You put out so many false, half-true, exaggerated,

conspiratorial narratives out so fast over such high volumes on so many channels that the media can't possibly keep up. By the time they've knocked one down, 10 more have come out. And people hear this stuff again and again. They become cynical. They don't know what to believe media can't possibly keep up. By the time they've knocked one down, 10 more have come out. And people hear this stuff again and again. They become cynical. They don't know what to believe anymore. But this stuff begins to lodge. There's something called the familiarity heuristic. The more often you hear stuff, the more you tend to believe it. So the media become overwhelmed. The public become confused. People think they don't know which end is up anymore. Round researchers have called this the firehose of falsehood tactic. So that's what Trump is doing. You know, he's tweeting out eight times, seven, eight times a day when he was on Twitter that the election was stolen. It doesn't matter. You can launch 60 lawsuits, however many they are.

It doesn't matter that they can tell a consistent story, be consistent or logical or plausible. The point is just to pump the bullshit out there, just swamp the pumps in the system so that institutions and people can't keep up. They also use trolling. That's attention hijacking. Another epistemic flaw that we have as humans is we can't help but defend our reputations and our groups. So when we're brazenly insulted, we rise to our defense. Well, that allows these guys to hijack our attention, dominate the media in ways that they couldn't. As Hitler said in Mein Kampf, it doesn't matter that they laugh at us or insult us as long as they can't stop thinking about us. That's what Trump is doing. There's

another one, conspiracy bootstrapping. That's what Trump's doing in all those realities when he says, well, you know, people are saying, I don't know what they say. David, David French has sex with chickens. Well, I don't know if that's true, but boy, there might be something there, don't you think? And then it gets amplified through conservative media, and then it goes out into the broad public, and they love it, and they say, no, it's not just chickens, it's also lizards. And then they say, well, this should be investigated.

And mainstream media say, why, it's not true. And then they say, aha, you're covering it up. It's very hard to deal with this because if you debunk it, you further insinuate it. You make it more familiar and thus it becomes more believable. If you ignore it, it continues to spread and people assume it's true. Very sophisticated stuff. In a democracy, the only really good way to deal with these tactics is not to use them in the first place. It's prevention. And that's what we did until 2060. Jonathan Rauch advocating for abstinence-only education. Love it. And really, David,

those chickens, they have not consented. That's where I think the real problem is. Just for the record, I did make that up. I have no first-hand knowledge. I have no first-hand knowledge of David French's sex life with animals, but I will say, can anyone prove beyond a doubt that it's not true? I didn't think so. Yeah, no, I have no evidence on that. But so if you go through the history of, let's just take American politics, you're going to find versions of this going back forever, right? No, no, nothing like this. Bastard children and pamphlets describing sex with animals of various founding fathers. And what makes this different? So, yeah, there was some, as Bill Clinton once said, the lies,

the squirrel-less lies in the 1800 presidential campaign, as he once said, what I think he said, curl the eyelashes off a frog. Or maybe, was it curl? Curl the hair on a dog's back. Anyway. So, yeah, Paulette, there's always been some of this. There's a lot of media in the U.S. was just riddled with fake news and extreme partisanship. And it took a lot of effort to get out of that. It took a couple of generations to fix that. That shows the good news is it was fixable. And I think this is too. The bad news is it takes a while and a lot of damage like maybe the spanish american war can happen along the way um so yeah there's nothing new about these tactics um they're and in in their modern form using mass technology they still date back 100 years to you know radio what is new is that you have to think, go back to the 1850s to see their mass application

in a systematic way, in an effort to divide and dominate the country. Before the Civil War in the 1850s, some forces in the South, and they're nameable, there's a good book about them by Paul Sterobin, you can name these people and their organizations set out to basically, they wanted secession to happen. So they began a propaganda campaign, basically wallpapering the South with leaflets about how the North was determined to launch war and sweep down and destroy the South's way of life and stoke paranoia and division. And they also use violence. and stoke paranoia and division and they also use violence um and it worked you know other things going on but but so that was used then then you get you know 160 years or whatever um but even so i don't think even in the 1850s you see anything on the scale of the firehose of falsehood that MAGA has launched

in the past five years, and especially the last year. I mean, weaponizing the courts, right-wing media, the political bully pulpit, with the base actually now taking the lead, plus the presidency for four years, that's unprecedented. It is, you know, when you talk about the 1850s, when I was researching my own book, multi-book plug now from momentary transition from yours to mine, one thing that did stick out to me

was the propaganda campaign in the 1850s and then how it reached a crescendo around the Harper's Ferry raid and the Brown subsequent, you know, John Brown capture and execution and how the Southern propaganda machine used the abolitionist admiration for Brown as a hook to launch the idea that the South, that the North wanted the South dead. Didn't, didn't just want to quote unquote, you know, to end the way of life, but wanted to kill, wanted mass death in the South. And there was even in the Texas secession documents, um, a reference to a conspiracy theory, a reference to the idea that the North was seeking abolitionists and the North were seeking to poison Southerners. was designed to whip the South into what McPherson called in his fantastic one-volume history of the Civil War, an unreasoning fury.

An unreasoning fury. And that has been, and we'll go to the cancel culture side of this for a minute, but that phrase, unreasoning fury, has really stuck in my mind as I've watched a lot of what happens on troll epistemology really resonated on that front. Yeah, they're hijacking your brain. And they're also hijacking the left's brain because the left becomes so horrified and alarmed at what they're hearing. the left becomes so horrified and alarmed at what they're hearing. If you had a rigorous marketplace of ideas, the bullshit that MAGA spouts every day, it wouldn't rate a page six story in the newspaper. But we can't stay away from it.

And another point you make, David, is so important, which is there is this story you hear today, this kind of narrative. So we kind of had this coming because our institutions failed us as a society, you know, Vietnam War and inflation and 9-11 and the Iraq War and then the financial markets and our institutions failed us and people cottoned onto that. And so our society didn't have working institutions. No wonder people got mad and upset. And I don't really think that's the big story here. I think the elephant in the room is this was done to us. We weren't just walking in the park one day and this mysteriously started to happen. Namable agents making money off this and making political hay off of this discovered that

these are powerful weapons and began using them in the 90s and deployed them very effectively. And we're still kind of a naive population in two senses. One is the epidemiological sense that, you know, as Americans, we've never had to deal with Russian-style mass disinformation, polarization, attention hijacking, you know, we've, as Americans, we've never had to deal with Russian style, mass disinformation, polarization, attention, hijacking, trolling, conspiracy, bootstrapping, all that stuff. Um, so we don't, you know, we, we're like, what, what's going on? But the second way we're naive about it is, is we kind of haven't really figured out this is Americans deliberately doing this to other Americans.

We are being targets. This is epistemic warfare, but only one side realizes it. I want to talk, though, you say that you don't think that those failures of institutions led to this, but when you, for instance, mentioned Rush Limbaugh and talk radio,

what gave them that opening, though, was a sense that academia or the media had a specific partisan bias and a desired partisan outcome, and that whenever possible, they would shade what they were presenting as fact, in fact, to help get that outcome. And doesn't that provide this opening? And doesn't that then feed into the cancel culture on the left, which is fuel for the right to have some of this as well, so that you can't really separate the two from each other? They're feeding one another. Well, no, you can't separate them. You're right. And you never can separate them, right? There's always material for propagandists to work with. There's never a shortage of problems with institutions or with society that they can exploit. You know, we can talk about the decline of organized religion as a factor. We can talk

about the stagnation of working class white male wages. We can talk about attacks on masculinity. And we should talk about and will talk about the left and cancel culture and the crazy stuff, intolerance stuff that it got up to. So there's never a shortage of materials to work with. But to me, the biggest single change isn't that there are materials to work with. But to me, the biggest single change isn't that there are materials to work with. It's that you get this group of people who have this aha moment that they can start deploying methods to exploit those materials in new, high-tech, accelerated, and very sophisticated ways. I want to make sure we get to the cancel culture on the left that you mentioned at the very

beginning and why that is a threat as well. Because to me, it seems like a really fundamental part of this. Yes, you have distortion on the right or propaganda or reality denying. But if you can't even discuss the ideas or debate new ideas because of, you know, homogenous thinking on the left, then how do we ever get back to where we were? I don't know about getting back to where we were. So there's two branches of that comment that we could pursue. So you tell me which one to do, or maybe both in which order. One is what's going on with the left? What are these tactics, the information warfare tactics that they're using? And then the second is how do

we deal with those tactics and other tactics? As you say, how do we get back where we were, though that's not really the way I would put it. It's more like how do we adapt and move forward? But which of those should we talk about? Let's take them in the order you just presented. Okay. You're making that easy. You're very organized. You must have gone to law school. Okay. You're making that easy. You're very organized. You must have gone to law school. So, all of the tactics that I mentioned the right is using can be used by the left, and historically they have been. The left, though, has a different set of materials and positions to work with. They don't have alternative media channels. They don't have control of a political party. Some would argue they do, but I think they don't. What they do have is a lot of dominance, a strong position on sort of the cultural commanding heights, and in particular academia. commanding heights and in particular academia so what we see is a kind of manipulation i call it consensus spoofing and this is when an actually really it can be a quite small number of people

a faction use tools that allow them to use coercion, social coercion, other forms of coercion, to create the impression that they're a much larger, more dominant group than they really are. Now, this again can be done by anyone. A classic case is anti-vaxxers, who really showed the way into starting 2014 on how you can make a small fringe group look online like a big mainstream group with devastating consequences that we see right now. But how did the left do it? Well, they said, okay, we're going to organize on campus. We're going to weaponize course evaluations, protests, going to call for investigations, anti-harassment codes, Title IX, everything we can find to make life miserable for people who disagree with us. And we're also

going to make it so they won't even know what is safe to say. You can get blown up at any time. We're going to have this concept of microaggression, something that's so small and trivial, yet still nuclear that it can destroy your reputation. So we're going to create a blanket of chilling in which no one's ever really sure what they can say and create a kind of fear, a kind of terror. A small group, it turns out, if it's organized and effective, can do this. And they get two things out of this in terms of the payoffs. One is just the chilling itself. On a lot of campuses now, it's very hard in many environments to have a full-throated conversation of questions like you know black on black crime or uh or abortion or

gender all kinds of things so they get some silencing and that gives them power but the second thing they get is consensus spoofing and And this is built on human psychology. We're all little kind of walking antennas that tune into understanding what are the people around me believe and perceive. And then we tune ourselves to match that because, you know, we die in our evolutionary environment if we're constantly at odds with people around us or if they they're all telling us something is true, and we don't believe them, chances are there are more of them, chances are they're likely to be right. So by spoofing consensus, by making it appear that in fact the beliefs of a fairly small group are the beliefs of everyone around you, you actually mess with people's minds.

So they come to feel isolated. If they stick to their preexisting view, they feel ashamed of it. I must think there must be something wrong with me. They will begin to change their minds or at least suppress their opinions. You get what sociologists call spirals of silence. This then feeds itself. The more people are chilled and intimidated, the more they assume other people disagree with them, and the more they become shamed, isolated. So you can manipulate the whole environment this way and create situations where people think that, you know, a fairly common sense proposition to most people, like people, humans are sexually

dimorphous, becomes something people are afraid to say or even think. Yeah, you know, one of the things that's fascinating to me, so I've, I've been in, in this segues into your previous book, Kindly Inquisitors. And when, when did you write that? Was not that 93? Yeah, 93. 93. So you have the book that, that the book of eternal life, because book that book will not it's you know you write a book and you kind of hope for it can be a part of the conversation for six months nine months a year 18 months if it's really hits but your book kindly inquisitors has been part of the conversation kind of humming there in the background for almost two decades now.

Almost three. Yeah, goodness. 28 years. Yeah. So it's been in the background of the conversation for almost three decades now. And one of the things that you talk about going all the way back in Kindly Inquisitors was what was happening on campus. Because this was the era, you wrote it at the era of the speech code, when colleges were writing speech codes,

passing speech codes proudly. You know, they were explicitly attempting to limit speech. Now they got a lot of court cases that ran against them over the intervening quarter century. So they don't really like to write speech codes anymore. But are we seeing the culmination of a lot of the trends that you identified, the magnification of some of the trends you identified in Kindly Inquisitors there on campus and moving out from campus into corporate boardrooms?

Or has something changed? I'd love to get your take on that, because you're a former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, so you were in the thick of all this. When I wrote Kindly Inquisitors, things were the same but also different. They were the same because we were already seeing some of the corruption of what I think of as liberal science, constitution of knowledge, I call it now, inside of academia. But it was different because it was more driven by ideology, by theory,

a lot of it coming out of the legal academy. And it was often driven top-down by administrators who were grappling with this problem of, you know, so-called verbal harassment or discriminatory harassment on campus, and they were writing speech codes. What changes between then and now is that now the pressure on speech and thought and inquiry on campus is much more bottom-up. It's frequently, it's generally, in fact, driven by students who are using social media against other students.

Frequently, it's fairly small numbers of students. Polls show that about two-thirds of American students now are reluctant to express their true political views for fear of social consequences. By the way, the same is true of 60% of the U.S. public. So this is not a campus problem anymore. A lot of people, a third of Americans are worried about jeopardizing their job or job prospects if they're truthful about their politics. But so now this is enforced much more from the bottom up. It's more like what Tocqueville described when he came to America in 1835 and what John Stuart Mill described in 1859.

in 1835 and what John Stuart Mill described in 1859. Both of those two people, interestingly, said the biggest threat to freedom is not from the government, not from government censorship, it's from social censorship. And that's the world we're living in now. And that's harder to deal with in some ways, because, you know, David French french at fire can launch a lawsuit against a speech code but he can't launch a lawsuit against peer pressure on campus right yeah that that's something that you know i was just in an event with greg lukianoff who is the current president of fire and he said almost verbatim exactly what you said for the first 15 years of fires existence on 20 years of fires existence the censorship we were dealing with was top down it was administrators punishing students it was administrators punishing faculty and then around 2014 2015 it began to switch and when it

switched it switched dramatically um and you know one of my concerns is that the law of free speech will ultimately follow the culture. It's not right now. The law is about as protective of free speech as it's ever been. But ultimately, over time, you won't just lose the culture, you'll lose the law. They won't be at odds with each other for very long. Yeah, I think that's right. And the law can't really do anything to protect the culture of fact. So I tell people, the constitution of knowledge is not just free speech. It's freedom of speech, yes, but it's also discipline of fact. And discipline of fact is what guards academic disciplines, the reason they're called disciplines, against politicization.

academic disciplines, the reason they're called disciplines, against politicization. You know, what you say has to be actually true. It has to actually check out. And we're seeing increasingly inside and outside of academia, people saying stuff that's truthy, meaning, well, it should be true or something like it is true, or it tells a generally true narrative about injustice and oppression in our society. You know, the Stonewall riots were initiated by trans women of color. Well, no, they weren't. That's not true, but most people believe it, and you'll find it in the New York Times, because people kind of think, well, if it's not true, something like it is true. So that kind of corruption is cultural, and there's absolutely nothing the law can do about that. is cultural. And there's absolutely nothing the law can do about that.

So, you know, y'all are talking about this, first of all, how it works on college campuses, and that often in the context of, as you said, gender or abortion or sort of these hot-button cultural issues. But for me, the version of this that stands out as being most dangerous, version of this that stands out as being most dangerous, most pernicious, was the example from last year moving into this year of how the coronavirus started. And the acceptance in science, and I agree it was entirely through this concept of conformity, that someone raises the idea that it could have escaped from a lab. That is immediately shouted down, not with facts, but with that's racist or just the statement that there is consensus that it's not true. A handful of scientists backed that up while all of the other scientists stay silent. And a year later, you know, those scientists start speaking up. And now even the government is saying, you know, well, we'll look into this possibility. And in the meantime, we've lost a year plus to investigate something that actually affects the world economy,

world health, variants that are now spreading. I mean, the damage is so much beyond these cultural debates that I think at some point we roll our eyes at as being, you know, a very on-campus phenomenon. Well, the big point you're making is certainly true, which is cancel culture is not a campus phenomenon. It's a cultural phenomenon. which is cancel culture is not a campus phenomenon, it's a cultural phenomenon. You know, ask someone like David Shore, who is a actually left-leaning socialist, who simply, you know, last summer, summer of last year, just tweeted out an accurate account of a piece of academic research about the counterproductivity of violent protests politically.

That academic research, by the way, was by an African-American scholar. So he tweeted it out and he lost his job because of a cancel campaign. People said it's intolerable. They targeted his boss. They actually tweeted to his boss, come get your boy. There are lots of stories like that. Lots of people are now worried about losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their friends, their reputations. And they don't know what can set this off. So all of that is bad. It is not just a campus phenomenon. It's especially, I think, insidious on campus because campuses, universities are supposed to be dedicated to the open pursuit of knowledge. That's why we have them, to do good, high-quality research, to challenge everything, to encourage students to talk about propositions,

even propositions that will seem offensive and hateful. So, Sarah, all that is right. And to David's point, today's students are tomorrow's judges, and the law will inevitably follow that campus silence as well. So I do see the larger problem of the campus, but to me, it almost makes it too small of a problem. of the campus. But to me, it almost makes it too small of a problem. Well, the second half of what you said, I won't dwell on it, but you have come to the right place, or maybe from your point of view, the wrong place. Because if you Google my name, Jonathan Rauch, and persuasion, and Wuhan virus, you will see my article arguing that everything you just said is basically wrong, that the Wuhan lab situation is

a success for mainstream journalism, not a failure, that the story that was told in February and March and so forth of 2020 was the well-supported consensus story at the time. It was based on a lot of good science, and it is still probably true that that virus did not originate in a lab. And yes, some people jumped too quickly to think it was too sure, but a lot of the news coverage got it right. A lot of the news coverage got it right and said that it may have originated in a lab. It may have leaked from a lab, but not as a result of being deliberately created by humans. Two different propositions. So anyway, a lot of places got it. A lot of places got it right. And then why does this new story surface? Because mainstream journalists at places like the Wall Street

Journal stay on the story and say, hmm, there's more to it. Let's look into it. They then surface the second account of facts, bring it to people's attention. People go, oh yeah, this needs a second look. So liberal science, the constitution of knowledge is not unique because it doesn't make mistakes. It's unique because it makes its mistakes so quickly and then finds them so quickly. So other systems take not just a year, 10 years 100 years or forever to surface their mistakes circle back and say wait a minute there's more evidence our system did that we should be celebrating that so i agree with the overall idea that we should be celebrating that it only took a year if i agreed with your initial premise

that the reason we got it wrong was simply that science got it wrong. I wish I believed that to be the case, but I don't. Instead, I believe that there were a number of scientists who felt like they could not speak up at the time because of the current culture. And that at that moment, anyone who was questioning

whether this was the fault of the chinese government was deemed as racist yeah i don't think i think there may be something to that from some scientists but take it up with anthony bauci who just said a few weeks ago that it is um the possibility that this originated and spread from from a lab is very, very, very, very remote. He used four varies. So most scientists still don't think that's what really happened. One thing that did happen, which I will cop to, is a lot of people at the time said if Donald Trump is saying it, it's probably wrong. And it's probably another conspiracy theory.

And so they're dinging the media for that. conspiracy theory, and so they're dinging the media for that. My view here, I'm something of an outlier, but my view is, look, Donald Trump is a deliberate agent of mass disinformation. He does this on purpose, and given his record that, say, in 2016, 77.0% of his checkable statements were wrong, it is rational to assume when he uncorks this theory that it is a lie. That should be the starting point for journalists and for that matter, for scientists. But you also, for instance, you use the fact-checking thing, and I've let it slide a few times, but I'm going to... Okay, push me on that.

I'm going to push you on that a little, which is, that's part of the problem, is that nobody trusts the fact checkers anymore because, and as listeners probably know at this point, I worked on Carly Fiorina's campaign. Part of her stump speech was to say that she went from being a secretary to a CEO. And that was part of her narrative that got fact checked by the Washington Post and they found it false because she did not go directly from being a secretary to CEO. And in fact, she held positions in between. So if we're using that, they told you that, right? That was part of the fact check. Yes. But you're using this like broad percentage and they know under that Carly Fiorina's personal narrative is a hundred percent wrong. So I can break it down for you.

The PolitiFact stack, I'll have to go look up the number, but I can in seconds. It breaks it down between completely false, which I think is about half of that total, and mostly false. But there's a whole set of ratings. I didn't include somewhat false. I counted those in the, or partly true. I just, the 70% is the ones that rated mostly or entirely false. The Fiorina thing, I don't think would be in there.

I take your point. There are problems with fact-checking as there is with all journalism. But if it's showing its work and is trying to be accurate, and there are people looking at it, it's better than nothing. And it's actually usually pretty good. And making the point that, okay, Carly Fiorina's, it's not quite the way it sounds, that's legit, right? As long as they're not giving it a pants

on fire rating. And it turns out, if you look at the original fact check in the Wuhan lab case, the one that I think it's politifact or was it one of the others, eventually partially retracted. What it in fact said was correct, which is that most scientists believe that this did not originate in a lab. It might have. It's unlikely. But what almost certainly did not happen is that it was deliberately engineered in a lab. It might have. It's unlikely. But what almost certainly did not happen is that it was deliberately engineered in a lab. So basically, that fact check got it right. It got the emphasis wrong at the end of the day, we think. But frankly, Sarah, I think what's going to happen is if we ever know, if we ever do find out, it's going to turn out to have emerged from a wet market in Wuhan, China. I think the odds are with you on that.

Let's move on to a really interesting discussion. No, no, no, this is good. I'm a bit over the top on that one because I think so many people are getting a bum rap. Yeah. Let's move on to, you had a really interesting dialogue with Andrew Sullivan. All dialogues with Andrew Sullivan are interesting. I think that's safe to say. So I loved your review of his book.

You get it exactly right. It's, you know, it's, now we're going to go to the third book, no, fourth, after also kindly Inquisitors. Yeah, Andrew's book is a walk down memory lane that is really remarkable. Um, about 30 years of his writing in, in, uh, in real time, how he processed the world in real time. It's just absolutely fascinating. But anyway, you had a really interesting discussion with Andrew, who is also a stalwart advocate of free speech. He's somebody who has raised the alarms on the right going all the way back to the Bush administration and when he coined a term that I hated so much, Christianists, to describe what he saw as an emerging intolerant movement in the religious right. So he's been calling out potential problems with the authoritarian right.

He has experienced cancel culture in the authoritarian left. And y'all had this really interesting discussion about what are you more concerned about, the right or the left? And if you could kind of walk us through that discussion that you guys had, I would urge folks to listen to the podcast, but walk us through that discussion a bit because I thought that was really fascinating. Yeah, it was quite a conversation. It got pretty intense and he later told me that he got more emails coming out of that podcast conversation than any other as of that time. So I'll first give his point of view, because I think I can state it pretty well, because there's a lot to it. and a lot of people on the center right believe is that the threat of radical wokeness,

successor ideology, whatever you want to call it, that brand of left-wing illiberalism is really the biggest problem right now. And the reason for that is, number one, it controls the cultural commanding heights. It's got the universities, which are training the next generation. It increasingly has the high schools and even some elementary schools. It's now got newsrooms, magazines like the one that let Andrew go. It's moved into corporate HR departments. So it's got all of that. And that's going to have ramifications for generations. Number two, unlike MAGA, Trump, and all that, it has an ideology, a totalistic, unfalsifiable ideology in which you're racist no matter what you say or do,

and you're having an unending kind of, it's neo-Marxist in its structure because you're going to have this unending revolution of constant social change, constant new demands. And it's totalistic because you can't disagree with it. And so for these reasons, this thing is really toxic. Whereas with MAGA, you've got, you know, Trump's a sinister character, but he's also kind of a clown and kind of gets in his own way all the time. And they don't really have an ideology. And we saw how effective their attempt at a coup was, which is to say not very. And so what we really should be worried about is the incursion from the left. Would that seem like to Sarah and David, does that seem like a fair summary of that side? Yeah, I think so. And he also argues that we're in the basically second half of the fourth quarter the left

has pretty much already taken over and it's it's pretty much too late he should fight anyway but it's really too late so there's a profound gloom and pessimism about where the culture is so i have some problems with that one One is empirical. I think that where the cultural left is concerned, we're in the first half of the second quarter and our team is only now getting suited up and getting out on the court. They took us by surprise. You know, these ideologies had been brewing in academia a long time, but we kind of said, well, you know, nutty academics are always there. We did not realize that ideologies of extreme illiberalism would pop out of academia and organized, motivated, equipped, prepared, it can easily route a much larger force that is disorganized and surprised and unprepared, and that's what happened. you're seeing pushback that's itself dangerous and illiberal in many ways. I don't like that, but we can't say that there's no opposition. And we also see a lot of civic groups that are organizing against it. That's where my hope lies. Stuff like counterweight support and foundation

against intolerance and racism and the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and the Academic Freedom Alliance and FIRE is getting active on this this stuff so our team is getting suited up um a second disadvantage the left has is that their ideology is just wrong it's just out of touch with reality you know america is not the most racist society it's ever been or the most racist side in history or racist from top to bottom and most people don't believe that and they never will because it's not true so there's only so far they can get with that before I think it starts to fall apart. So I'm not poo-pooing it. I'm just saying there's some natural limits on the thing. On the other hand, we now have a situation where an entire political party and its base,

not just its leaders, but its base, in fact, especially its base and its own media ecosystem, are now essentially dragging the politicians behind them in an escalating spiral of alternative reality, justifying political violence. justifying political violence. We may be on the cusp of seeing just out-and-out endorsements of political violence. We're now seeing efforts to politicize vote counting, elect people who will promise, basically, to count votes a certain way. We're seeing mass disinformation as an institutionalized tool. I think we have to view the Republican Party now, unfortunately, as an institutionalized propaganda organ. I mean, I hate to say that. I deeply, deeply regret it. I'm center-right. I have supported, voted for, argued for many Republicans, but those are not the Republicans in charge.

for, argued for many Republicans, but those are not the Republicans in charge. And these people could be, this group could be in power four years from now. If they come back, we'll see a renewal and expansion of mass disinformation. You know, it could be much bigger than we saw before. We're going to see weaponization of election miscounting. And I think, you know, this is speculation. David, you tell Sarah, you guys are legal guys. I think we'll see the one thing that if Trump gets another term that we did not see the first time around, which will be open defiance of court orders with the support of his base and his party.

And when that happens, when any of that happens, but especially if all of it happens, democracy in America, as we know it, is over. So I think that's just a much more dire threat right now. And I get it, the left is a problem, but it's cancer, right? It's kind of eating away from the inside. This other thing I think is a heart attack, but you tell me. Oh no, that's exactly what I think. But I want to end on a much happier note. Can we hear what David thinks first? Oh, no. Which side does he take on the Rausch versus Sullivan debate? Sorry, Sarah, I had to do that.

I tend to take your side of it, although I think it is close. side of it, although I think it is close. I like that analogy between cancer and a heart attack because the thing that frustrates me about the debate is it feels like if you say, okay, well, I think if the right is worse, then the next follow-on is then why are you talking about the left? This is the way the online discourse works. It's tell me who's worse and then talk about only that which is worse. But I like the difference between the cancer versus heart attack analogy

because you can talk about a heart attack being immediately fatal and the necessity to guard against that, but nobody would then say also ignore the cancer. And so I like that kind of analogy. I think that analogy is right. And I think that for the first time in my life, I can imagine a scenario where the United States breaks apart in the relatively near future. And it goes through a rerun of 2020, it stopped the steal,

but with more competent and ruthless operators. But so yeah, I agree with you overall, but I like the phrasing and the way you did not fall for the trap of saying, well, because I think one is more serious, I'm going to just talk about the one and let the other thing that I think is less serious fester. I think it's got to be a both and approach.

So that's my response. But Sarah, you've got a lighter windup question. So it's got to be lighter. Your standard has to elevate the conversation from cancer and heart disease. That's right. So I think the only thing off the table is Nazis, Hitler, and I'm good. The bar has been set really low.

All right. I think that Jonathan and I have the same current crush. And I just wanted him to talk about, I mean, I'm using the term crush. I don't think it's his term, but I have a big professional crush on the director of the National Institute for Health, Francis Collins. I think he is sort of the best person out there

who says when he doesn't know something, says when he got something wrong or said something in a slightly imperfect way. But Jonathan has a crush on him. Again, my term, not his. I'll take it. It's true. I have a crush on him. For slightly different reasons. So I wanted us to just like gush about Dr. Collins for like the end of the podcast. So do people know who Francis Collins is? Generally, anyone who's listening to this podcast knows that not only is he the director of the National Institutes of Health and thus

arguably America's top scientist, would that be fair? I think that's fair. He is also the mastermind of the decoding of the human genome. And he is a devout Christian, which makes him a great puzzle to me as an atheistic homosexual Jew, how you can decode the genome and be a great scientist, not just a good scientist, but a great scientist, and also believe that Jesus died on the cross and then came back to life after being dead. Because that can't happen, right? It can't. He's my team's LeBron James. So keep going. You've talked about it in this beautiful way though, where like you

say that maybe you're colorblind in the way that you walk through the world. That's what I had to learn from Francis Collins, not only Francis Collins, others, people like Pete Wainer and Pastor Tim Keller and David French, for sure, David French. I have had to learn that if people with minds like that and wisdom like that can understand the world the way they do, and I can't, maybe there's something wrong with me. Or not wrong with me, because I'm actually very content being an atheistic homosexual Jew. I wouldn't change any of that. But maybe they perceive things in ways that I don't, that are advantageous to them, and maybe I'm missing something. And I concluded

that being an atheist, which I have been since the age of five or six, I tried to change it at one point, I couldn't. But I concluded that it's a little bit like being colorblind, because you can go through life, you can be colorblind, have a perfectly good life, perfectly great life, not even feel disabled in any way, yet still not perceiving some frequencies that other people can perceive. And so the way I think of it now is that Francis Collins, who can do great science on weekdays and then go to church and pray devoutly on weekends and not feel a conflict, has the ability to perceive frequencies in life, dimensions of faith that I don't and can't, and that that's to his benefit probably because he has access to two worlds

and I have only access to one. So that counts as a crush. I have one. I also just want to point out that also he has conducted himself with such grace and dignity and effectiveness throughout this crisis, not only getting the vaccines out there,

playing that part, but in his public face, he has been so honest, so humble, just a model. Yeah. So this podcast really like, yeah, we talked about all this other stuff that's important, quote unquote. But actually, this is the first meeting of the Francis Collins Crush Fan Club group. And we will have elections for president next week. Tune in again later. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This has been the conversation that I hoped we'd have.

I really appreciate it. And listeners, go check out the book, Constitution of Knowledge. You're not going to regret it. And also, kindly inquisitors, it's a prophetic work, quite frankly. It's one that's had a lot of legs for more than a quarter century for really good reasons. So check out Kindly Inquisitors, Constitution of Knowledge. Thank you so much for joining us. And please, as always, go rate us on

Apple Podcasts, subscribe, and check out thedispatch.comcom and we will be back on Thursday. And we'll take a quick break to hear from our sponsor today, Aura. Ready to win Mother's Day and cement your reputation as the best gift giver in the family? Give the moms in your life an Aura digital picture frame preloaded with decades of family photos. She'll love looking back on your childhood memories and seeing what you're up to today. Even better, with unlimited storage and an easy to use app, you can keep updating mom's frame with new photos. So it's the gift that keeps on giving. And to be clear, every mom in my life has this frame. Every mom I've ever heard of has this frame. This is my go to gift. My parents love it. I upload photos all the time. I'm just like bored watching TV at the end of the night. I'll hop on the app and put up the photos from

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