The Daily Beast Podcast - Rep. Jasmine Crockett Flames GOP for Crying DEI ‘Oppression’

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

Following Election Day’s Republican sweep, The New Abnormal co-hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie say it’s time for Democrats to ditch their “Republican-lite” strategy and let more rising party leaders like Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett “tell it like it is.” Plus! Renée DiResta, associate research professor at Georgetown University, delves into her new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Welcome back to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here.

Renee Doresta is an associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown, and she joins us today to tell us all about her new book, Invisible Rulers, the people who turn lies into reality. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Was that your Jesse impression? Clips. My Jesse impression is Seth Rogan's laugh. That's my Jesse impression.

There you go. Wow. Okay, so since Jesse's not here, I thought I'm going to be cool uncle this week and not torture you guys with horrible people. So the first clip we have today, Representative Jasmine Crockett talking about some stuff. And Andy, don't take offense, but I really want to say, I think white men are a problem. And you're telling him not to take offense why you're okay with it? I love this.

I think I'll be fine. Okay, good, good. I'm just trying to make a safe space here. Well, I never, I cannot. Well, all right, here we go. It's because you can then misuse words like oppression. There has been no oppression for the white man in this country. You tell me which white men were dragged out of their homes.

You tell me which one of them got dragged all the way across an ocean and told that you are going to go. at work. We are going to steal your wives. We are going to rape your wives. That didn't happen. That is oppression. We didn't ask to be here. We're not the same migrants that y'all constantly come up against. We didn't run away from home. We were stolen. So yeah, we are going to sit here and be offended when you want to sit here and act like, and don't let it escape you. that it is white men on this side of the aisle telling us people of color on this side of the aisle that y'all are the ones being oppressed that y'all are the ones that are being harmed

the immediate follow-up video was a white guy let me just tell you that representative jasmine let me take this please oh my god this is why she's wrong this is exactly what we're talking about so much. She's one of my favorites. She is one of my favorites. She tells it like it is. She speaks truth to power and she takes no bullshit. She is like a model Democrat. And I wish that the party would be modeled after her instead of what we have seen for the last, I don't know, fucking eons. So bravo to her. Look, I agree with all of that. And I think the party does need more of that. And unfortunately, it looks like the party is, as usual, going to learn the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris losing to Donald Trump. And they're going to decide they need to be even more

Republican light. And that absolutely sucks. But yeah, she's great. Well, I'm glad you both said that because I think we're going to just keep this train running of up-and-coming Democrats who need to be given bigger platforms speaking truth to power and things like that. So here is also Representative Summerlee talking. Instead, Republicans are trying to bastardize the term DEI to be a slur. When Justice Kadangi Brown Jackson was up for confirmation and when Vice President Harris was added to the ticket, they called them DEI hires. They want you to believe that a Harvard graduate with over 20 years of experience,

who happens to be a black woman, is not qualified, but a Fox News personality is qualified to run the Department of Defense and the WWE executive is qualified to run the Department of Education. Let's be real. there is an attempt to create a direct correlation between our race being a black person and our qualifications. So much to say that there is no way to be a black woman. There is no resume that a black person could have that would qualify them unless that black person is a Republican. And there is a quota there.

Oh, and just to be clear, all the black. Danielle, let me take this, please. Please, Andy. Go. Tell the world your thoughts. No, no. We have fun. You know, the fact is, is that the purpose,

I think of the white delusional thinking around DEI is in fact what Donald Trump is doing, which is that they don't need to be qualified. They don't need to do a damn thing other than be white, be wealthy, and be in the right circles. And so when pointing that out, those facts out that, oh, all of the things that were said about the vice president of the United States, who was beyond qualified for the position that she's just a DEI hire, but somehow a talking head at Fox can run the Department of Defense. Somehow a WWE executive can run the Department of Education. It's so laughable, right?

And that's why white supremacy in itself is like a fucking joke, right? And people need to not internalize the bullshit that is being put out because give me a break. If you want to run resume for resume with some of these people. And frankly, where are all of the black cabinet picks? We're all of Trump's blacks, as he likes to call them? They didn't seem to make the cut. It's a little weird that all his picks have been white so far. Again, she's absolutely right.

We've talked about this on the show before. DEI is a polite way of saying the N-word. It's like a socially acceptable way of saying the word that they really want to say. And probably within the next four years, we'll just be openly saying. Like, would that even shock us at this point if that word suddenly became a thing that they were just saying out loud again? I don't even think I'd be shocked by that at this point. Like I sort of expect it. Oh, this just in, guys, Tim Scott's going to be the, that's not true.

I'm lying. Tim Scott's not anything. Oh, okay. I was just going to say the faceless policy, like literally black faceless man that decided to run for, he's going to be absolutely nothing except a mascot. Tim Scott's so unexciting. I couldn't even think of a fake agency for him to run. Yeah.

God. Moving on here. Do you guys know what November 20th is? when we're recording this that would be yesterday but trans remembrance day yes yes yes and so because they love to honor tradition and celebrate in the house nancy mace and mike johnson decided to do the most horrible shit she ran around and put you know women only uh signs on the bathrooms all to ostracize sarah mcbride incoming congresswoman first openly trans woman in congress and yeah obviously whenever something really stupid like that

happens i run through my list in my head of the uh the people the people i want to hear talk about it And you guys know where I'm going with this, because the first person I went to was, what's AOC got to say about this? What Nancy Mace and what Speaker Johnson are doing are endangering all women and girls. Because if you ask them, what is your plan on how to enforce this? They won't come up with an answer. And what it inevitably results in are women and girls who are primed for assault because people are going to want to check their private parts in suspecting who is trans and who is cis and who's. doing what. And so the idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trow in front of who? An investigator? Who would that be in order because she wants to

suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting. It is disgusting. And frankly, all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn't wearing a skirt because they think she might not look woman enough. People have a right to express themselves, to dress how they want, and to be who they are. And if a woman doesn't look woman enough to a Republican, they want to be able to inspect her genitals to use a bathroom, it's disgusting. And everybody, no matter how you feel on this issue, should reject it completely. What are they doing?

They're doing this so that Nancy Mays can make a buck and send a text and fundraise off an email. They're not doing this to protect people. They're endangering women. They're endangering girls of all kinds. And everybody should reject it. It's gross. Thank you. Thank you.

Uh, yeah. Yes. See, this is the problem. This is... No, no, no, no. This is why Jesse plays clips to antagonize you guys. No, it's true. It's true.

I agree with you guys. We all just sit here and feel happy and then... It needs to be framed like this more. It shouldn't need to be framed this way. It should just be framed as these people are bigots and bullies. But that's not enough for some folks. And for those folks, I think it needs to be emphasized more the way AOC did that ultimately what we're talking about here is genital inspections. And in a lot of cases,

as if doing that to adults isn't bad enough, in a lot of cases we're going to be talking about kids. We're going to be talking about young girls who maybe want to play on a sports team in high school or junior high. And some parent decides that that girl, based on no information or whatever, some parent decides that that girl is trans. Well, the only way to check that, quote, unquote unquote, is to do a genital inspection. And is that really what people in this country want? I would like to think the answer to that is hell no. So I really do think that, you know, her framing it like that, not at the expense of pointing out how morally wrong it is, just period, but also making people understand the ramifications of what they claim to want and what they claim

they're doing in the name of safety. Yeah. And, you know, and I said this before, is that this is segregation. This is what segregationists do. The target may change, right, throughout the generations, right? It was, it was black people, Jewish people, then it's trans people, then it's immigrants, then it's back to black people. Like, the target changes, but the tactics remain the same. This is segregation. Nancy Mace is a segregationist. Mike Johnson is a segregationist. The Republican Party are a party of segregationists, and no one should stand for it. No one should. So Bravo to AOC, more Democrats should have and should continue to come to the aid of Sarah

McBride because this is segregation. And today it's her and tomorrow who is it going to be? Renee DeResta is an associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. Before that, she was the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. And she's the author of the fantastic new book, Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies, Into reality. She joins me now. Renee, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So let's start with the basics.

Who were the original invisible rulers? Yes. So the phrase comes from Edward Bernays in a book called Propaganda, written in 1929. And Bernays wrote this book after serving as a propagandist in World War I for something called the Creel Commission. So his job was to sell the war to the American public. And, you know, propaganda at the time was the word wasn't a pejorative yet. This was, again, prior to World War II, where that shift starts to happen.

It was seen as actually the obligation of the government to communicate sort of, you know, the facts to the people so that they might be informed. And Bernays, after leaving, becomes the father of public relations. That's the sort of title kind of assigned to him a bit later in life. But he becomes a PR guy. And in that capacity, he switches from, you know, selling wars to selling products. And he writes a lot about the importance of appealing to people in their, members in their capacity as like members of a group, right? Connecting their identity to members of a group and creating demand to those two things simultaneously. And so the invisible rulers that he talks about

are the kind of PR agents and the people whose job it is to create demand for products or, you know, create demand for ideologies. And he calls them the invisible rulers and he has a sentence in there describing invisible rulers as the people who control the destinies of millions. And a little bit later talks about how our minds are made up largely by people we've never heard of, that the people who sort of frame stories and get them into the media, frame slogans and give them to politicians, like these are the people who control the public mind. And that's where the term comes from. So we have the rise, obviously, of print media going way back. And then that's followed by the rise of radio and then television. All of this, as it happened, meant the rise of sort of a media elite,

where a small number of people had outsized power to shape public opinion, or as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman termed it in 1988 to manufacture consent, or I guess to put it more bluntly, to propagandize the masses. And then came the internet, which at first seemed to be the solution to all of this, open everything up. But as you write, rather than put an end to propaganda, the internet put the power to create it in everyone's hands. Yes. So the same way you have media, you know, there's content, right? There's journalism. There's persuasion content. This is distinct from what we think of as propaganda, usually, particularly now and after World War II, the term has a very pejorative meaning, right? It's people who are trying to manipulate you, people who are trying

to deceive you. Chomsky and Herman's book, so the manufacturing consent, that phrase, too, actually comes out of the 1920s. That comes from a phrase by Bernays's frequent kind of contemporary and debater, a man named Walter Lipman, who in this capacity at the time, again, this question of how do you create informed citizens? The argument that Lipman makes, again, is that in order to manufacture the consent of the governed, the government has to be doing communication and doing propaganda. And there's a lot of debates that are happening around this time about what are the ethical ways to do that. John Dewey, and what are known as the Lipman-Duey debates, is actually making the counterpoint saying, no, no, no, that's very paternalistic, it's very manipulative.

The role of shaping the public mind should fall to the free press. So then you take that 60 years into the future or so with Herman and Chomsky. And what they're saying is that, you know, while that might be the ideal, that is not what is actually happening. And so the book Manufacturing Consent, there's a lot of critiques, right? About, you know, they were writing from a very kind of leftist political alignment, a very deep distrust in American government, a deep distrust in, you know, maybe government writ large in a lot of ways. But what they're writing, the thing I really like about the book is it describes a system of incentives. And it makes the argument, I think, that the outputs that you get are a function of the system of incentives. And actually, they have

they describe it as five filters. And the first filter ownership of the media is exactly what you mentioned, right? That the evolution of broadcast media from the sort of pamphleteering era of, you know, the early printing press to the very consolidated, you know, three networks of the broadcast television, you know, kind of kind of time is a story of very, very consolidated ownership. Very few people having the power to push back. You have kind of plucky independent media, but they're not getting the reach. They're not, they're not actually getting their, you know, their stories, their truths out there into the world. Whereas the mainstream media, which is often centrally owned, is filtering its information,

it's self-censoring in a lot of ways in order to produce stories that are appealing to the owners. Another filter he talks about is advertisers. If your paper is largely powering itself on advertisements from pharma, maybe you're not going to cover pharma quite so strictly. He talks about sourcing. If your paper is reporting on stories about the government, are they really going to be unsparing if it makes one of their frequent sources suddenly look bad? Right. So the book manufacturing consent argues that a system of incentives leads to a system of outputs. And the goal that I had in writing mine was to say in this media environment, where it is decentralized, you know, where people have more power than ever before, there are still incentives. And so you should still recognize that this means that propaganda has evolved again. And we need to be a little bit better about understanding those incentives to be informed consumers. So in the evolution of propaganda, again, using the word maybe even as in a non-progerative sense,

who are the invisible rulers now? So this was something I kind of went back and forth on because influencers today are so visible, right? So I thought about it from the standpoint of, you know, first I went out and I said, I want to write a book about propaganda. And I heard from many agents and publishers, nobody wants to read a book about propaganda. And I was like, well, come on, they should. They should. You know, I find it fascinating, right?

We're living in this world where, remember the kind of early internet pioneers, right? John Perry Barlow and folks writing about how we were going to enter this golden age of citizen journalism, the idea that we were all going to have the power to get the truth out there into the world. And if you look at it now, like, that's not what happened, right? Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to write about this era, this moment. I am, by the way, like, pro-influencer.

I think it's fantastic that you have people who can earn a living and grow communities and communicate with the public. And so the same way, you know, Chomsky reinforced that he was not anti-media. Like, I am not anti-influencer. I think it's great. But I think we also need to see the downsides. And so I wanted to write about the role of political influencers as those opinion shapers, right, as the people who set the memes, as the people who drive the narrative. Like, look at the story of eating the pets. I feel like that, you know, it happened after the book came out. But if it happened before the book came out, it would have been a case study in the book. Because it's a moment where people who understand discourse and vibes and appealing to identity and

telling, you know, and coming up with the metaphors and the content and the visuals that distill everything down to that one catchphrase that make people feel riled up and activated, because that's what propaganda does more often than persuasion today. It's riling up people who are already there. That's the kind of content that we should see as modern propaganda. And when you have the influencers and the extremely online and the sort of, I describe them as like highly factional crowds, right, the people who have their preferred emoji and bio and you know, and you're there as like a warrior, you know, for your squad. When you have that dynamic, what you see is political elites picking it up and making it mass national news. And in that case of eating the pets, as everybody is like

making their pictures of Donald Trump waiting into the water to save the ducks and the cats, right? That content is picked up by J.D. Vance, who connects the dots to the bigger story, right? This is not about eating the pets. Like, that's the online meme, but this is really a story about who is America for. How do we think about immigrants? How do we think about others? How do we think about communities and transformation? And how do you, honestly, in some cases, pray on fear of that, right? And so it becomes this incredible propaganda moment. And Donald Trump says it out loud in a presidential debate. And there you see something very interesting. happen, which is you see in Google search trends, it reflected that a whole lot of people

have to go and search what the hell does eating the pets mean because those who are not extremely online all of a sudden have this phrase introduced to them. And it becomes this, you know, two-week media cycle where then broadcast and mainstream media are covering it. And as it's being debated, that content is then shared back down into the online cloud, right? And that's the, so I'm trying to describe this, you know, influence or algorithm crowd as a, as a system of propaganda creation and dissemination. Again, I'm not saying this in like a normative chastising kind of way. I feel like a lot of what I'm trying to do is just describe it. Just say, here is how it works.

Recognize it when you see it. Yeah, writ large, I suppose, it's sort of value neutral. And then it's a question of bad actors. But there is also this, as you described it in the book, you talk about this. confluence of sort of influencers, algorithms, and online crowds. And explain how this sort of unholy trinity works together. Well, so I've been a social media researcher for about a little over decade now. And I got into this because, you know, I'm a mom. And in 2015, I got very involved in wanting to improve vaccination rates in California. So I was a pro-vax mom. And this was around

the time of the measles outbreak at Disneyland. And I wanted to, get a pro-vaccine message out there. And again, there was a very specific goal, which was to call attention to this law that we wanted to see past and to make people call their, you know, their congressman and support. This is in California. So a very niche audience, very specific bill, very clear objective. And then we realized that there was no pro-vaccine infrastructure on social media, that algorithms on Facebook in particular were actually referring people to anti-vaccine content, that when I went to try to run ads to kind of like reach people to call their congressmen, about our bill, if I typed vaccine into the kind of categorization, you know, where you can

devise your custom audience on Facebook, it would only surface anti-vaccine terms because people were identifying themselves as anti-vaccine on Facebook, but nobody was identifying themselves as pro-vaccine. So you had both behavior, right? There was no crowd. There was no group of people who were like, you know, pro-vaccine emoji and bio. And they certainly weren't writing like pro-vaccine warrior mom into their Facebook job description. Remember when you could do that? And people did. So they were just like, Mama Bear telling the truth about vaccines. Like, that was all anti-vaccine stuff. I felt like, okay, we're sort of like structurally disadvantaged here.

And the other thing that the anti-vaccine movement had was people who were members of the crowd, but who were very, very good storytellers, very compelling speakers, knew how to create content, knew how to read the vibes, knew how to use social media. And this is what an influencer is, right? It's, again, funny enough to connect it back to Bernays, it's a term that comes out of marketing. influencer was what brands who wanted to reach particular niche groups of people called the people with big audiences who could do that. So again, you have this relationship between that power to like, you know, push shoes and the power to push an ideology or to get people paying attention

to your cause. And I felt like, okay, there's no pro-vaccine influencers. What are we going to do? So for me, it was this realization that you can't separate these three things. The influencer, the algorithm, and the crowd, this is a triad. These three. things can't function without the other. The algorithm cues off of the behaviors of users. Things don't just magically go viral. People take an action and then the algorithm picks up on it and then the algorithm pushes it out to more people. Right. So that's inherently not just an algorithmic process. It's the intersection of algorithms in large groups. What is the content that they're pushing out? Oftentimes that comes from an influencer because the influencer

also serves today as the gatekeeper. If they see something that's interesting and they they hit that retweet button or reshare or they make a TikTok, you know, stitch about it or whatever, their large audience of people are going to see it and then it's going to, you know, again, this process will begin again. And the influencer is incentivized to produce content both for the algorithm, right? Listen to YouTube creators for our audiences, but for the algorithm as well. And so these things functioned together. Yeah. And one of the things you wrote about that period when you were dealing with this is sort of how flat-footed the CDC and organizations like that, were, and there's a quote you have from a CDC employee who basically just said,

ah, those are just some people online talking about the anti-vaxxers. And it's just, it's wild how much they underestimated what was going on. Well, you have these moments where you just realize like, oh my God, they just don't get it. And so we did, by the way, we did pass that bill in California. It was a really, really hard fire. It was my first time being doxxed. It was a, you know, it was a rather formative experience, to be honest. And since we were the first state that had passed a pro-vaccine piece of legislation in ages, and since kind of all of America was watching at that point, this was the subject of national news, this bill, and people were really debating what it was going to accomplish and so on

and so forth. We did get invited to come present at this conference, and something just down at the CDC. And we talked about this. I still have that deck. And, you know, and I was saying things like, look, here's a network graph. Like, you know, again, my background's in kind of quantitative network analysis and things like this. I said, like, here's a network graph of the people in that conversation. Here, off to the side, with no high centrality nodes, not engaging with the other members of the communities, nobody here has a large following. Here over here is public health. Like, you guys have got to realize you are not even in the conversation, right? And I was telling them things like, you know, 0.05% of the participants made 80% of the tweets, you know, these things that have since been born out

in social science research over the course of the next decade were things that we were just watching, you know, me in particular as the sort of frontline person who was trying to understand the opposition and the network that they had. And I felt like I'm like laying it out for them. Please understand what is happening here. And the response I got was, well, it was a very interesting presentation, but those are just some people online. And I've never forgotten that. I will never get over that, actually. Yeah, there's a thing you wrote, you said of that period in your life, you said it felt like you were seeing the future. And I think we've obviously seen how much you were seeing the future, which is for us, the now. Can you talk about what happened to the Stanford Internet Observatory

and to you over the past few years? Oh, man. Well, here's the now also on that front. I came to academia in a fairly non-traditional way, right, more through activism and the sort of kind of frontline, you know, Oson and things like that. So Alex Damos started SIO in 2019. at Stanford and, you know, reached out to me about joining. And I thought this could actually be really interesting. You know, it's becoming an interesting field. It's so impactful. So, you know, we did a ton of research. I'm super, super proud of all the stuff that we put out. Everything from child safety, understanding emerging technologies like AI, the impact that they were going to have, you know, another crisis that's unfolding now, ways in which state actors used social media platforms.

You know, we worked with Twitter with Facebook on an analyzing state actor foreign interference stuff. And one of the things that we did in 2020 was a project called the election integrity partnership. And that was a consortium of four institutions, us and University of Washington Center for an informed public were the kind of two academic institutions at the center of it. And the work that we did attempted to set up channels of communications so that as, you know, we said, we're going to watch narratives about voting. This was the first presidential election since the Russian interference.

We thought, okay, there'll probably be foreign trolls in there. We want to be able to follow narratives as they go viral on social media. And we want to be able to have open channels of communication. So again, we had worked with Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of them on state after takedowns for a long time. So we said, okay, we can connect with them. We wanted to be able to help state and local election officials. Like, an election official's job shouldn't be sitting around watching what people say on

social media. They have elections to run. That is their job. And so we connected with a nonprofit called the Center for Internet Security. that had essentially its membership in this thing called the election infrastructure ISAC were all of the state and local election officials across all 50 states, all parties represented in there. And so we said, okay, cool, we're going to set up like a triage where if something is going viral that appears to be false or misleading, we can communicate either with the platforms

or we can communicate with the state and local election officials and we can just run this, you know, kind of like a triage center to help get good information to the public as quickly as possible. And we did a similar project the following year in 2021, doing the same thing with vaccine narratives. That one was slightly different in that we just kind of aggregated the top vaccine narratives of the week. It was kind of impossible to tell what was true or false at that point because COVID was evolving so rapidly and so were the vaccine stories. So we posted those as briefings on our website. Now, fast forward a couple years. And in late 2022, just as the house was, you know, kind of looked like it might flip, this think tank.

kind of appears out of nowhere. You know, you can throw together a website, say, you're a think tank and like, bam, your think tank, you know. So the think tank called the Foundation for Freedom Online starts going through our reports on these projects, which are both like 200 pages long. They've sat on the internet. All of the briefings for the Verality Project sat on the internet. There were blog posts. I mean, we worked in real time. All this information was out there. And they reframed it as this was a cabal to censor conservative voices. This was a cabal, this was how the election was really rigged. That's where they take it, right? That we were actually secretly an organization that had been set up, funded by the federal government,

by the Department of Homeland Security. They claimed none of this is true to take direction from the FBI, the CIA, the DHS, and all these entities, and to tell platforms to take content down. So they alleged that the government had created us as some sort of cut out to demand takedowns from the government so that the government could censor disfavored speech. Now, the government at the time was the Trump government in 2020, you'll recall. But again, things don't have to. Right. You know, so all of a sudden, this, you know, fake think tank is calling for its one guy

writing a blog with no evidence at all. But he positions himself as if he's some sort of whistleblower who, you know, has inside truths. And he starts demanding that congressional committees with subpoena power. investigate us. So one of the challenges with the story is that you have to explain so much. And when you're explaining, you're losing. So they make the allegation, they say this insane thing. And then we have to write all of these lunatic debunking pieces that are thousands and thousands of words long to try to get through every random allegation that comes out, you know, in these like

fake think tank quote unquote reports. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has bought Twitter. They're doing the Twitter files. And this guy who created the think tank reaches out to Matt Taibi and Michael Schallemberger and says, you know, you guys think you know the truth with the Twitter files. But let me tell you, you need to be looking at Renee Duresta, who has secret FBI level internal access to Twitter's internal systems. And I'm like, what the fuck does that even mean? You know, what is this? is FPI level access. These words are gibberish. They're gibberish. But, you know, this is happening in Twitter spaces. And Matt Tybee's like, wow. You know, I was like, wow. Okay. And you think at some point that, like, again, the facts are going to come out. But no, all of a sudden, Jim Jordan invites them to come and

testify in a congressional hearing. And they just regurgitate the claims from this blog saying that we censored 22 million tweets. Like, wrap your head around that. 22 million tweets. I've got new from the internet. What were the tweets about? Well, they were about SharpieGate. They were about Dominion. I mean, everybody knows the story of Dominion. It cost Fox News like $700 million. Right. But they're saying, like, they nuked entire narratives from the internet. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, the 22 million number, it turns out, came from a page in our report where we added up the number of tweets in the most viral narratives. We did this after the election. We went back and we looked and we said, what were the big rumors that went more viral than

anything else? And two things were true. One, they were not led by the Russians. They were domestic. Two, they came from Donald Trump himself most of the time. It was the inner circle of political elites who were running a propaganda campaign to claim that the election was not free and fair. Unfortunately, since this was domestic speech, they began to allege that we had secretly tried to suppress it, that we had deliberately targeted conservatives, and that when we occasionally flagged content for social media platforms. There were about 4,000 URLs in total. We had been participating in this vast cabal. So that's the story. Jim Jordan has these people there to, you know, to articulate this under oath in a congressional hearing. And then we get a letter about a day

later telling us that we're now under investigation. And then we get a subpoena maybe a month later. And, you know, and then for the next little over a year and a half now, Congress has just been sort of subpoenaing us and we got sued by Stephen Miller and a couple of other people associated with the administration. And, you know, it turns out that they just kind of like bleed you dry with legal fees. And SIO dissolved in part because Stanford just decided that this kind of work was no longer worth doing. And it caved to that political pressure. Anybody familiar with the history of McCarthyism or the House on American Activities Committee like recognizes this for what it is, which is that nothing that you turn over will ever exonerate you. But they, you, not,

just bleed you dry procedurally and with frivolous accusations. And when no 22 million tweets were produced in all of the material we turned over to Jordan, nobody ever accounted for that. Nobody ever apologized. Nobody ever said, hey, we got it wrong. Instead, they just moved the goal posts and found some niche thing that they could complain about. And that is how these investigations function. It's absolutely unbelievable. The book is Invisible Rulers, the people who turn lies into reality. Renee Duresta, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

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