 First Wednesdays is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and by the Kellogg Hubbard Library with video production supported by Orca Media. Good evening. Welcome to another First Wednesdays program sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council. I'm Trauma Cone, Executive Director of the Kellogg Hubbard Library. We are the local hosts for this series. Before we begin, I'd like to read a note from the Vermont Humanities Council. On behalf of the council, I welcome you here this evening. We hope this talk will inspire you and help you to feel closer to the communities around you. The recent incidents in Pittsburgh and Kentucky that were motivated by hate remind us of the commitment that we made after the racist violence in Charlottesville last year. At that time, the Vermont Humanities Council drafted the following statement with our colleagues at the Vermont Arts Council. We are deeply troubled by the recent violence and expressions of hatred and bigotry that go against our fundamental ideals, the ideals that define our country. We know the arts and humanities have the power to create and nurture empathy, promote thoughtful reflection, heal and advance understanding among people whose lives are vastly different from our own. The staff and boards of the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Humanities Council rededicate themselves to the vital work of promoting inclusion, tolerance and understanding and building creative, healthy and welcoming communities for all. With that statement in mind, you will see that the council's programming in 2018 and 2019 calls for reflection and action to end hate and to promote inclusion. Tonight in Essex Junction, Nicholas Ma is discussing his documentary film, Won't You Be My Neighbor? It focuses on the life and work of Fred Rogers, whose iconic children's show was filmed in Pittsburgh. In fact, Mr. Rogers lived in Squirrel Hill, the site of last week's horrific attack on the Tree of Life synagogue. People of all races, classes, colors and creeds were inspired by Fred Rogers' kindness, compassion and empathy. Like him, we hope that our work will help build understanding and turn strangers into neighbors. That many Americans continue to experience hate and bias and that such violence appears to be escalating is deeply troubling and calls us to action. Please join with us to reject this violence and to work for a kinder and more thoughtful world. And thank you for being part of the conversation. In memory of all the victims of hate violence, but especially those we lost in the past few weeks, we say with our Jewish brothers and sisters, may their memory be for a blessing. Tonight's program has a very relevant theme, of course, news, fake news and democracy in America. The statewide underwriters are the Alma Gibbs-Donchian Foundation, the Wyndham Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Libraries through the Vermont Department of Libraries. The underwriter for this talk is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with Pulitzer Prizes. The host for this series is the Kellogg Harvard Library. Part of our role as hosts includes paying for part of the funding of the programs and I want to make sure you know that because many of you are donors and taxpayers who support our library and I think it's important for you to know how we spend our time and how we spend our money. And thank you for your support always. Tonight's speaker is Mark Potock. For 20 years he helped lead the Southern Parvati Law Center's work in monitoring the extreme right in the United States. Potock served as director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, editor-in-chief of its award-winning investigative magazine, Intelligence Report and later as senior fellow at the SPLC until leaving in 2017. He was a key spokesman for the SPLC and has testified before the Senate, the Helsinki Commission and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights as well as other important venues. Before joining SPLC, Potock, who was raised in Plainfield, Vermont, spent almost 20 years as an award-winning reporter at USA Today, the Emmy Herald and the Dallas Times Herald. Among other related topics he has studied the role of conspiracy theories, fake news and the press on far right. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. And I know for some of us the takeaway there is that in one sentence just about we have the Senate, the Helsinki Commission, United Nations, the High Commission on Human Rights and Plainfield, Vermont. Would you please join me in welcoming Mark Potock. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me, inviting me home again. And I want to say hi especially to my brothers and sisters, brother and sisters and father and old friends, mostly old. I thought I would talk tonight about not only fake news but fake news, conspiracy theories, propaganda. Those things are all kind of in the same world together. I'd talk a little bit for starters just to remind you some of what was said about Pittsburgh and about the Pipe Bomb Mail Bomber and so on. Run through some conspiracy theories and kind of common things we're seeing and then talk a little bit about the causes and perhaps things we can do to combat this sort of plague. I don't think I'm telling anybody anything new when I say that this talk follows by one day an election that was surely among the most affected or at least swimming in fake news and propaganda in the really modern history, perhaps along with the 2016 election of Trump. You know, my position, I'm speaking as a journalist for a long time, 40 years, 20 before the Southern Poverty Law Center and 20 running an investigative magazine. You know, I started at a little tough news bureau called City News Bureau in Chicago, which maybe some people have heard of. The main reason I mention that is because they had a wonderful saying there attributed to a now dead editor, a guy named Dorfman. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. That was our rule. And Paul Zambrakis, our editor, was very much a hard ass on this rule and of course we also had to memorize every street name in Chicago. So maybe more apropos to what we're saying. Jonathan Swift once wrote, you know, falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it. Even earlier, Francis Bacon in 1625 wrote an essay called Of Suspicion, in which he said, and this really relates to conspiracy theories, there is nothing makes a man suspect much more than to know little. That is I think especially so as I've learned really over 20 years at the Southern Poverty Law Center when it comes from authority figures. Also many studies have backed that up and I'll talk a little bit about that. But that is really perhaps my most important message tonight is that it really matters when people in the position of say Donald Trump or any number of others, including the Sean Hannity's of the world and so on. Those lies matter. They spread, they poison democracy in a really pernicious way. You know, we're right now in the middle of an epidemic of fake news, a propaganda of conspiracy theories in a way that we haven't seen. I mean, I feel like I have been trying to warn, you know, the world or the country or whatever of this for 25 years and it's only now in the last two or three become, you know, absolutely apparent to everyone that the SPLC or me personally or whoever, you know, it's no, we're not making up a story to frighten people and raise money. This is real. There is a genuine and scary resurgence of the right wing populism and arguably of proto-fascism. In any case, I just want to mention a little bit about first of all the mail bomber. Cesar Sayoc, the guy who sent all those mail bomb, pipe bomb, mail package. I think that, you know, despite what you heard on Fox News and in various other outlets, there's just no question at all that this guy's rage was channeled by Donald Trump directly. I mean, it's rare you get such a direct case. You know, as his lawyers said afterward, this guy is a very weak man, sort of weak character-wise. The lawyer described him as like a 15-year-old boy who needed a father figure and in fact his father did abandon him when he was young. You know, he's very much the kind of forgotten man, or at least saw himself that way, that Trump talked about when he first won office. You know, every single target, I'm sure everyone in the room realizes that was, every single person, every organization that was targeted by Sayoc had been vilified and demonized repeatedly in incredible numbers by Donald Trump. So just to mention a few of them, CNN was described as, you know, the enemy of the people, a place of hatred and extreme bias. You know, and you remember some of the doctored videos Trump produced of him, you know, having a train run over CNN and having him sock CNN in the face and so on. That was 63 times Trump went after CNN since the election. I'm excluding the campaign completely. George Soros, same thing again and again, you know, George Soros was financing the caravan. George Soros is bringing in MS-13, dangerous Middle Easterners. George Soros is leading an assault on our country. We need to send military to the border, which of course Trump has done. And you may have noticed that in the middle of all this, Donald Trump Jr., the son, retweeted a neo-Nazi post in which Soros was described as the Nazi who turned in fellow Jews. So without going into details, I will assure you that all of that is completely false about Soros. You know, Obama, Obama was an American, he was born in Kenya, you know, and when that was more or less shot down by the release of the long-term birth certificate, you'll remember that Trump said, well, anyway, he certainly couldn't have succeeded at Harvard and Yale the way he did, right? Obviously, there was cheating going on there. You know, he didn't need to say it's because he's black and quote, quote, low IQ individual. You know, 109 times he went after Hillary Clinton since the election as a criminal locker up and so on. And I'll just point out this sort of amusing side irony of, of course, this is all over the email server and, you know, just came out a few days in the New York Times that Donald Trump talks on his personal iPhone all the time and, you know, Chinese intelligence is sitting here listening to every word. So in other words, vastly more outrageous than anything Clinton did, but there it is. Maxine Waters 73 times he called her a low IQ individual. You know, he said at the rally in Nevada in the middle of all this in between the Pipe Bombs and the Pittsburgh Massacre, that the Democrats are quote, an angry, ruthless, unhinged mob. They're evil, they're destroying the country, they're wrecking the borders, they're backing MS-13 and so on. You know, again, these ideas come from someplace. In many cases they come directly from Trump, but the vast majority of things boil up from a different milieu. The world I've been studying, the radical right for the last 20, 25 years. That is really just to look at, let's look just at one example of Soros, the attacks on Soros. Soros really began in the neo-Nazi world and then was amplified by the whole right-wing media apparatus from Fox News to the Drudge Report and all the rest of it, Tucker Carlson and so on. But very quickly from there it has jumped out, and this is typical of much of the kind of propaganda I'm going to be talking about tonight, into the political world. So it wasn't so long ago that a former congressman by the name of Jack Kingston, Republican in Georgia, described Soros and other secret activists as being behind the Parkland High School shooting, the massacre in Florida in February 2018. Some of you may have seen in the papers that the vice president of Campbell's soup just had to resign. He's their chief lobbyist because he described Soros as having arranged, as he stated as a matter of fact, troop carriers and rail cars to help the caravan attack America. This supposedly military caravan that's coming up here, thick with tourists and gangsters and so on. A congressman named Representative Matt Gaetz, or another Republican from Florida, said just a couple weeks ago that caravan was funded by Soros. I will note for the record that he was re-elected last night. Pat Robertson of the Bible Network, same thing. Soros funded the caravan. I'm sorry, Bill O'Reilly, he's off the charts dangerous. Let me say as a quick aside about Bill O'Reilly, who I have a particular animus towards. I'm going to look at it right up front. Bill, a couple of things about him. First of all, Bill O'Reilly, some of you may remember, referred to a physician in Kansas by the name of George Tiller as Tiller the Killer. He did this over 200 times, and sometimes Tiller the baby killer. George Tiller was a late term abortion physician, who after all of this name calling by O'Reilly, which you never said a word of apology about, was murdered, shot to death in the foyer of his own church. It goes on and on. I told the story a little earlier tonight about Bill O'Reilly, completely concocting the story, I mean out of thin air. Bill O'Reilly, over 10 years ago. In which he said that there were hundreds of gangs of lesbian women armed with pink pistols terrorizing the United States by ordering sex toys on the internet and raping middle school girls with them. And there was more. It was very bad. But it turned out, I happen to know this story well, because we spent some time debunking it at the Southern Poverty Law Center. But let me tell you, this was concocted out of whole cloth. All kinds of film. It turned out that every piece of film they used in this piece was from a story that had nothing to do with lesbians or pink pistols or anything. O'Reilly, thanks to us, had to apologize the following day. About a five paragraph apology, explaining that he was wrong on every single score. There were hundreds of gangs, none were called the pink pistols, except for one in Texas or Colorado, I guess it was. They made a big apology to them. And it was kind of funny at the time. But these stories have an impact, right? It's not just a weird and wild story about pink pistols and lesbians. It's a vilification of lesbian women, which very much fits in with the kind of propaganda that comes from the whole Christian right about what those people do, what those LGBT people really do, how they're coming after your children and so on. And just to go on for a second about Soros, right? I mean, Alex Jones, you all know probably is kind of the conspiracy theorist and chief of the United States, Internet radio show host in Austin, who you will remember, Trump actually gave an interview to during the campaign and said to Alex Jones, you've got an amazing reputation, Alex. Well, Alex Jones has described Soros as fundamentally evil. Even Victor Orban, right, the premier of Hungary, is running a billboard campaign, which describes George Soros as the enemy of the state. Also, immediately after these bombs came out, I'm speaking of fake news, what you saw over a pretty significant portion of the right-wing media were the claims of false flags, right? That this was not real. This had been cooked up. One person even made the claim that it was the left, right? That somehow created this bombing campaign and aimed it all at the targets that Trump has mentioned so many times. You know, as an attempt to somehow vilify the right and so on. You know, one particular right-wing media pundit guy named John Cardillo said that it was Antifa, right? These were Antifa people who had really done the mail bombs. Michael Flynn Jr., the son of the former national security advisor, right? Trump's national security advisor described in a tweet as a total false flag operation. Somebody else, an anti-Muslim idealist by the name of Frank Gaffney said that this was all just a deflect from the leftist mobs, right? Jobs not mobs, that whole idea. You know, this slight awful irony in all of this is that when all of this came to light, and the Wednesday when all of the other bombs, aside from one that Soros became known, that day was actually supposedly Unity Day, which is a part of National Bullying Prevention Month. You know, their slogan being kindness, acceptance, and inclusion. So, what a world. You know, a couple of days later, of course, we had the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and you know, this guy was another guy who I would argue was very definitely influenced by the Trump milieu if in a less direct way than Donald Trump himself. You know, as he posted before he went in there, it's the filthy evil Jews bringing the filthy evil Muslims into the country. So it's the idea of the caravan, right? That somehow the powers that be, in his case, were real neo-Nazis, it's the Jews. But that the bad people, the left, the Jews are bringing in immigrants in order to destroy us in our society. It's true that the shooter, Robert Bowers, was mildly critical of Trump, but that was only because he was saying, you know, the Jews are still here. He's gotten rid of the Jews. So it wasn't that he was some kind of enemy of Trump as he was portrayed on Fox and some other venues at all. You know, he was clearly taking his cues from the radical right and views that have been amplified in a huge way by Trump. Immigrants are racists, they're killers, they're drug dealers, terrorists, and so on. Let me say just briefly in talking about, you know, the sources where these ideas come from, that there has been over the last really 40 years a kind of nozification of the American radical right. And what I mean by that is, you know, where the radical right was once dominated by Klan groups and so on, that were really aimed, you know, they certainly were not friendly to Jews, but their main target was not the Jews. But that has changed a lot, as I said in the last 40 years, that more and more when you look at radical groups across the board, even including groups like militia groups, the majority of them now see as the evil behind all other evils is the Jews, right, who are up to all of these bad things. The other thing I think to say about that particular attack is just to recall some of the things that Donald Trump did in terms of talking about the Jews. Yes, we know he has, you know, a Jewish daughter, a Jewish son-in-law, and so on. But let's remember that towards the end of the campaign, they ran an ad with the star of David, superimposed on a heap of money. This was Hillary Clinton, you know, who is outright anti-Semitism, that his very last ad in the campaign talked about the global power structure, said it has robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth. And this is, of course, while they're running pictures of Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairman, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein, the golden-sex CEO, all Jewish, of course. So, you know, I mean, to say there's been a kind of dog whistling, I think, is understating it quite a bit. At the end of the day, Julia Iofi, maybe some of you've heard of her, she's a very fine Jewish journalist, wrote, you know, about Trump and the whole question of, can you lay this at Trump's feet? You know, his role is to set the tone. Their role is to do the rest, meaning the killers, the shooters. You know, I'd note just one other thing briefly, which was in the same few days, we had a guy walk into Louisville Kroger supermarket and murder two black people because they were black. This was after he tried to get into a black church, but couldn't get in because they saw him banging on the doors like in Charleston a few years ago and tried to get in. They locked the door and so he went next door to the supermarket and murdered the first two black people he saw. And it is also right around the same time we saw two people murdered in a yoga shop. And, you know, this was by one of the so-called incel warriors, incel being short for involuntary celibates. These are the people who are mad because, you know, beautiful girls won't go out with them and by God they think they deserve that and they're owed that and maybe some of you remember, among others, Elliott Roger, the Santa Barbara mass murderer. He killed, I think, seven people, if I remember, in a rage because, you know, he's a virgin and women haven't given him what he wants and so on. And, you know, I mention this, it's not quite as off-topic as it sounds, maybe, in the sense that, you know, massaging a real life, violent hatred of women is much, much more a part of the radical right than it was even 10 years ago. So this whole men's rights movement, the incel warrior movement, and so on, along with Elliott Roger is all of this has really become a part of the radical right. And just the last few years in a very big way, and of course that's very much personalized in the person of Donald Trump who is, I think he goes without saying, quite a massaging of stuff his own. You know, at this point, I would say, you know, we are drowning really in a sea of fake news and conspiracy theories, as I think I tried to say at the beginning. I mean, this is something I think has been growing for quite a while. It didn't come out of absolutely nowhere, but it is really remarkable. And just to run through, I think I should tell you a few of these ideas that are kicking around and more than kicking around, they're really very much alive in the society. You know, once upon a time, the idea of white genocide, by once upon a time, maybe only seven or eight years ago, the idea of white genocide was an absolutely whacked out idea that originated on a real neo-Nazi right. I mean, these weren't politicians at all. These were people who marched around the swastikas on their arms. And it was a bit of a crazy idea because there's a genocide being committed against white people. What they really mean is that people aren't having babies that are 100% pure white. So, you know, every time a baby is born as, you know, 1% quote-unquote, non-white blood, that's genocide. Right? That's what's happened to white people. It's, you know, so it's a bit of a ridiculous fantasy. But, you know, it moved very quickly, as you know, from real neo-Nazi groups like the Daily Stormer, you know, an incredible Nazi site, right into the White House. Right? So, Trump is talking about the idea of white genocide. Excuse me for a second. Can we move the microphone? Sure, I'm sorry. Are people having a hard time hearing them? Sorry. You know, that is repeated by Tucker Carlson, people like that. Pizza gave, I'm sure everyone remembers, storming into Cosmic Pizza in Washington, D.C. because it was thought on the right that Hillary Clinton was secretly running a pedophile, a pedophilia ring out of this pizza parlor, for God knows what reason. And, you know, when they arrested the guy who fired off a shop, it didn't actually hit anyone and let him off into the police van. You know, he turned to the cops and said, well, that wasn't a hundred percent. Yeah, no kidding. You know, Alex Jones, we've mentioned already, Alex Jones is really the principal author of the idea that virtually every major terrorist attack of the last years, right? Oklahoma City, the Boston Marathon, Pulse Nightclub, all of that, these were false flag operations. And, you know, the idea of false flag operations really originates with the militia movement, even before Alex Jones. And, you know, this fundamental this kind of fundamental conspiracy theory which is that government is involved in these things to scare the hell out of the rest of us so that it can then pass the evil government, can then pass draconian anti-terrorism legislation, come in, take away all our guns, anyone who resists, thrown into concentration camps, and so on. So, you know, it's a big involved theory, but, you know, there are now hundreds of thousands, arguably millions of people who believe things like that, who believe that Sandy Hook was carried out by crisis actors and no children were really killed and so on. You know, and then there are those kind of incredibly pernicious and much older conspiracy theories or fake news, whatever you want to call it. You know, one of the most pernicious is the idea that gay men orchestrated the Holocaust. This began with a guy named Scott Lively, a quote on the Christian minister, who wrote this in a book called The Pink Swastika, in which he argued, you know, that the only reason that the Nazis recruited sort of dominant, gay men because they were the only ones who were vicious enough to carry out the kinds of things that they needed to carry out in concentration camps and so on. And, you know, again, I don't need to tell you, that's, you know, utterly false. The anti-Muslim propaganda out there is just, you know, drowning us. It is an incredible level. You know, in some ways, the most pernicious of those ideas have started with a guy named David Yarashelmi, who was a right-wing, very pro-Israeli, part of the Sabbath was moving all the way as an American citizen. David Yarashelmi came up with the idea that there was a secret plot to oppose Sharia law, Islamic, religious law, American courts. And that was way back in 2010. And for whatever it's worth, just to make one small point about this, after Yarashelmi did that and made this very public, the state started to adopt, or at least consider adopting, in my state, Alabama, for instance, has adopted the anti-Sharia law, this idea went all around the country. At the very same time in 2010, that was when a woman named Pam Geller was ginning up these big demonstrations in New York against the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. People probably remember the Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan. I mentioned that only because hate crimes against Muslims had been going down at that point ever since 2001, ever since immediately after 9-11. Obviously, there's a huge spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes then. They've been going down, down, down, down, down until 2010. And there were no Islamist attacks in this country or any major attacks in Europe in 2010 as it happens. So the two things that really happened were Yarashami's theory about Sharia law and, you know, all the noise about the Ground Zero Mosque. That resulted, or in any case, what happened was a 67% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes that year, according to the FBI hate crime statistics. So, you know, words have consequences. Just to go on quickly for, you know, there's some common core, it's an educational curriculum that was proposed, kind of standardized standards around the country. And, you know, one can argue foreign guests for various reasons, legitimate reasons. But in the South, particularly, common core is seen as a secret plot to impose, impose, essentially Marxist ideas on Southern schools and so on. There was a county commissioner actually who said kind of a music thing in Alabama where I live. You know, when I heard the words common core, I knew it was communism. Right, so that's what I'm thinking. You may remember that in Texas, a couple years ago, they had a military exercise which was basically an exercise for troops that were going overseas called Operation Jade Helm. It was going to involve some exercises in several Southwestern states, including Texas. Well, you know, this fit in to that old militia idea of, they're getting ready to impose martial law on us, they're going to take our guns and so on. And there was a lot of screaming about that. And as a matter of fact, there were people who made a claim that there had been something like 40 bluebell ice cream trucks which had been converted to rolling mortuaries to deal with all the bodies that were going to result when they tried to impose martial law and take our weapons. They also had a particularly whacked out theory about wallmarts in several states, abandoned wallmarts being connected by secret underground tunnels. So this is how the conspirators were going to carry out their un-American plans. And it goes on and on and on. What else? There is a theory called either the Plandatzlan or sometimes called the North American Union. But basically, the idea is there is a plot. The Plandatzlan is a plot on the part of Mexico to reinvade or to invade and reconquer the American Southwest. Take back 11 states in the Southwest. The NAU, the North American Union is the idea that there's a secret plot among the elites, right? The people in government and other world elites to merge the United States, Canada and Mexico. And this is going to be in order to ring the last drop out of blood out of the regular guy, the poor workers out there. And other terrible things are going to happen too like we're going to be forced to spend the a meadow. They're going to take away the dollar. So I have to spend this nasty piece of currency. Agenda 21, probably a lot of people in this room know that. I mean that is essentially a toothless UN plan that dates back to the Rio Summit I think in 1992 if I remember. And you know what it basically said was we should plan for the 21st century. We should encourage communities to plan for preservation of global resources and so on, right? It's smart planning. Well this very quickly became first in the world of the John Birch Society, the group that accused President Eisenhower of being a communist agent and so on. Agenda 21 was seen as a plot and described as a plot to impose Marxism on the United States. The incredible thing about it is that when Mitt Romney was running the Republican Party actually adopted that as part of its national platform before Romney was actually nominated. So this actually appears at one point in the Republican platform. Agenda 21 is a plot to impose Marxism and socialism on the United States. So let me not go on because it's kind of a long, long list. Well, I'll mention one last one which is birtherism and we all know about Donald Trump's role in birtherism but it also started very early on on a website run by an ex-sudo journalist named Joseph Farrah called World That Daily and that is the home of Trump Corsi who wrote the big book on Obama really Kenyan and so on and just to let you know what kind of site it is we were talking earlier this evening with another group about evaluating sources and so on World That Daily is also well known among some of us as the organization that produced a six-part series on how eating soy causes homosexuality. So those are the kind of groups we're talking about. I mean a lot of it is amusing and I guess I mean it is amusing but my God the proportion of this stuff that is believed by people who are in office right now a number of whom won the election last night is incredible. So just to go way back historically obviously propaganda fake news false reporting false accusations to start with Trump or this century I mean you know you go back to the beginning the bloodline the Jews are secretly abducting killing Christian children and draining their blood to make matzah for the festivals and so on. I mean that's it right that's the bloodline but you know but also what people may not remember I just have to remember this from books I read in college is you know how partisan the newspapers were during the colonial era you know vicious attacks on one another but of course the newspapers then were seen very differently right they were not seen as purveyors particularly of facts they were the opinion of this particular party or this group of people so it was a bit different but those papers were filled with rather amazing vitriol. There was a case I was just telling you for amusement's sake because you do not really have much to do with the radical right but the New York Sun ran a famous really an infamous series in 1935 and I'm sorry in 1835 The Great Moonhooks and this was millions of Americans believed it that they had discovered life on the moon there's old civilization and it went on and on and on and on and I guess the only lesson of that is how gullible people were so people who wrote the story actually wrote it as a joke and there are all kinds of clues within the story but you know like with War of the Worlds an enormous number of people thought it was true you know and then you think of other things like the Spanish-American War started essentially by fake news promoted by William Randolph Hurst the turn of the century of this last of the 20th century this is the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which you know was the premier anti-Semitic text right in which Jews are planning in a you know secretly in a graveyard to destroy the Christian world and so on through the Red Scars right the 1890s 1910s and 1950s again and again even more recently you know the so-called war on Christmas right I mean you would think of John Gibson on Fox News but in fact it began quite a little while ago with Henry IV the infamous anti-Semite in the 1920s who actually first made the claim that Jews were conspiring against Christmas so you know my only point is that there's been a lot of this throughout our history but in the last century or so things changed quite a lot I mean the New York Times was started in 1896 pretty much explicitly to combat this kind of coverage right these kinds of falsehood explicitly announced themselves as this would be a fact-based newspaper right it was not going to be a bunch of tall tales and that's what you read in the paper you could trust and you know I'm not going to make the argument that the New York Times has always been a perfect purveyor that obviously it was a new kind of journalism and really led to a different news world at least for quite a little while certainly they weren't perfect the New York Times and other major papers of the early 20th century but they were good in the sense well let me say another way you know if you think back to the 1960s the country was very much divided very much polarized I guess you could argue about whether it's worse now or not but you know we're fighting over desegregation over Vietnam over counterculture over smoking dope and you know sex and so on and you know we're fighting but if you think back to that time I think you will realize that there was nothing like this going on in the news media or in any kind of media meaning every you know there were three networks at that time they all basically reported more or less the same news they're one or two newspapers in most towns again they were pretty much operating off the same factual basis so I'm not saying that there weren't some strange stories but I am saying that you know what was happening then was the big argument was happening in the country but it was quite different than what we're living through now in that people were more or less arguing not about the facts but about what they think should happen next or which way the society should go they at least more or less agreed on what was happening and I think obviously television cameras during the civil rights movement were incredibly important to that right they just forced the fact on the northerners yet it's something really horrible on south right you couldn't argue with pictures of those four little girls in their white dresses laid out you know in the anti-chamber of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Burma County so I talked briefly and I apologized to people who heard this a little earlier this morning but let me just say briefly that at that time there was a big argument about okay we're seeing the very beginnings of the kind of the rise of radical right the American Nazi Party was really the first major fascist post-war organization in this country it was led by an old naval commander named George Lincoln Rockwell and they were really they were uniformed Nazis they lived they were headquartered in Arlington, Virginia right outside of D.C. and Rongwell had about a hundred quote unquote stormtroopers and they would dress up in you know stormtrooper outfits SS camps and brown shirts and all that you know tall white tall black boots and all the rest the fake Nazis at the time what I want to tell you about is briefly the major Jewish agencies in America adopted a policy trying to contain this kind of small but scary resurgence of anti-Semitism by adopting what they called a quarantine policy and what that meant was they went around from newspaper to newspaper to television owner and essentially pleaded with the owners of these of these media not to cover Rockwell and you know it was simple it's like look you know there's 50-100 guys they're out of their minds you give them any press it just helps them there's no reason to help and it's not going anywhere and they were quite successful the quarantine policy really worked back then you know whatever one thinks about free speech or whether it was a good thing or not it was actually pretty effective for a while but really two things happened one Rockwell started to understand he needed to be more and more and more outrageous they do things like this is the year of you know Volkswagen buses painted with you know psychedelic paint you know naked hippie girls and all the rest so he he cooked up a hate bus he got a Volkswagen bus yes we hate you know we hate you know Blacks, Jews etc those not the words he used so that happened the other thing that happened that was much more important was of course ultimately the media developed into what it is today right huge multi-sourced right I mean there's talk radio shortwave radio you know the internet social media goes on and on and on and on so all I'm saying is that now at this point the idea of trying to pursue policy of quarantine it's ludiverse right I mean even if you don't have any sort of ethical problem with it or political problem it's totally impossible I mean you can't suppress news like that so I say because you know that's been what I've thought for 20 years and certainly what SPLC has been about is the idea you know you've got to give the public you've got to give people tell them what these groups are really all about tell them you know tell them that world that daily believes that you know eating soy causes homosexuality so they can then evaluate the rest of the things that WND world that daily has to say so that said let me talk a little bit about the kind of causes I mean you know ultimately especially with regard to conspiracy theories you know it's obvious we live in a more and more and more complex world and I don't think it's unkind or untrue to say you know conspiracy theories are an easy way for simple minds to make sense in a very complicated world right it's all everything's got a cause things don't just happen you know there's a reason for everything and it ultimately goes back I would say that you know what we're talking about fake news conspiracy theories and so on has come back just with a vengeance in the last 30 years and I guess we've already talked about a whole bunch of examples of that I think that you know some of the reasons are sort of technical the internet obviously has allowed you know these voices that didn't really have any way to reach the public to get all over the world so that's been very important obviously the internet you know diminishes any kind of inhibition so you can call so and so whatever you like because they're not there and you don't have to sign what you said and so on the internet also helps people who felt very formerly isolated you know the lone clansmen and you know in some in Michigan somewhere who finds out now by the internet he's not right so it allows real movement building and also the internet has helped in this whole sort of margins to the mainstream idea this development that I've tried to describe a little of how you know ideas move from the extreme right to sometimes sort of interlocutors like the middle like the amendment groups and on into the political world and ultimately in this case in many cases up to the White House I think though probably the most important probably the most important factor in all of this though has been the role that you know politicians pundits and preachers had played in terms of amplifying this kind of news and legitimizing it let me say a couple things about you know the link between sort of propaganda and action first of all for instance earlier this year the University of Warwick put out a study in which it found that Trump tweets about various enemies and hate crimes against those groups Muslims gay people immigrants or highly correlated which doesn't necessarily prove causation but they're highly correlated which very much suggests causation I mentioned already well no this is something I did mention but two things when Trump was elected you may remember that there was immediately a kind of Trump effect so that right after he was elected the two months of file there was something about attacks of various kinds on all kinds of minorities all the people including women for being women as women all kinds of people who felt that you know the barriers had been lowered this is what the president believes this is what the major candidate for the presidency believes and now it's okay so you know we saw things like some of you may remember that right after not quite right about two months after Trump was elected there was a homeless Latino man in Boston who was spotted by a couple of brothers returning late at night from a Red Sox game who saw him and beat him up with lead pipes broke his fingers urinated on him and then were arrested a few minutes later and said to the cops arresting them well this Donald Trump says he's our enemy and so it's okay and then they also went on to complain that some of the white people will ever get arrested in this country you know why don't they arrest minorities and so on so one thing we saw related to that so that's right after the election the other thing that I think relates to the same idea pretty strongly is that we saw the exact same thing in the United Kingdom after the Brexit vote I mean if you think about the Brexit vote the vote to leave the European Union it was very much the same voters the same kinds of people who voted for Trump people who came from well in their case the North counties you know these poor deindustrializing areas of troubles white working class and so on in any case immediately after the Brexit vote there the United Kingdom saw the exact same thing that we saw that Trump was elected a huge rash of hate crimes of halal grocery stores being burned to the ground you know people being attacked on trams and so on to step back just a minute at the very beginning of Trump's campaign which was 2015 of course I'm sure everybody remembers how he started with the speech Americans are rapists and drug dealers you know they're not something that's their best and so on the very that year hate crimes anti-Muslim hate crimes went up 60% pretty clearly as a result of that there is another interesting study of a couple of years go 2017 by the professors in the University of Chicago from Northwestern UCLA and it's a sort of complicated study to describe and I won't it's too complicated but what they found was that they were asking people if they would give a donation to an anti-immigrant hate group and this particular hate group had said something like America has to retain a European majority a European American majority this was essentially flat out you know pro-white anti-non-white racist group what they found was that if these people these subjects in the study this was during the campaign before Trump won if they were told that Trump would definitely win well if they thought that Trump was not going to win they were told that there's no chance he can't win by the researchers then only 34% of them would have okayed a check off on their check to this group alright so 34% of them would have supported this anti-immigrant hate group if they were convinced Trump was going to win in other words he would win and his views saying immigrants are scum and so on were public then 54% would be would say yeah it can be public right you can tell the world that and you know and I'll approve that so you know what it shows obviously it's just that idea of you know giving somehow legitimization the guy at the top says it's okay you feel that it's now okay to say these things what else obviously Fox News played an incredibly important role in this at least in my opinion there have been lots of fun studies about Fox News but you know the kind of the bottom line was from the 2015 studies that showed that people who watch Fox News are less informed or rather more misinformed about the world than people watch zero news at all right they pay no attention to the news so I said kind of tells you what you need to know about Fox obviously Russian interference played that importance but who knows another study from MIT earlier this year they found that essentially it was looking at how lies and falsehoods travel amongst people amongst communities what they found was that a false story reaches 1500 people six times faster than a true one they also found that falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true ones and they looked at the theory which of course a lot of people thought that these were bots that these were automatic functions that were happening and these false stories were simply being amplified by robots so you couldn't really make much of a statement about it but it turned out that that wasn't true because when they analyzed what the bots were doing what they found was bots amplified true news vastly more than they amplified falsehoods so the bottom line was that they found human beings this is because of human beings human beings prefer novelty they like emotion-based news and these are the kinds of ideas that travel the fastest you know finally talking about causes for you know both fake news and so on and what it causes in terms of crime and so on you know I just say looking at the very big picture historically you know we are living through I mean many times giving another talk just about the rise and fall and I'll say you know people like to believe that these are much crazy people or they're like Bill O'Reilly they're just making money off of sort of provoking these ideas and scape-engaging I mean these taxes and so on but I would argue that there are actually huge historical factors at work that we are going and really what I'm talking about in a sense is globalization there are huge changes happening in this country and in the European countries that are going through these same struggles with the rise of the radical right you know I'm sure I don't need to tell you that by the year 2044 they're now saying non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority in this country so you know we have been a 90% white country from the colonial era until the early 60s and you know now it's only now we're getting to change we're now I think about 63% but in a very short time whites will be simply another minority and that you hear it in the news you hear it even listening to politicians now it used to be that people didn't really talk about that very openly but now you hear politicians actually talking about that in worried terms the other pieces or another piece of globalization is of course economics what happens to people and people are hurt I'm not one who believes that globalization is really stoppable it's this huge force I just don't think you can decide that's not going to happen but the reality is is that huge swaths of workers I mean if you were in the car if you're in the auto industry or in steel or in textiles you're not doing well and that is because of globalization that is because of certain kinds of jobs to other places also at the same time huge cultural changes right and just to use the simplest example you know who 15 years ago could have imagined that same sex marriage would be legal in 50 states in this country I mean I never thought I'd ever see a black president so you know these are huge changes and I would argue that there's some similarity historically to what's going on now not between now and the 30s in Germany you know the immediately pre-fascist period but more like between now and the 1920s in the United States you know I think maybe some people have a kind of false idea of the 20s that it was all you know speakeasies and you know good looking flappers and you know a lot of a lot of drinking and all that and fun which was a part of what happened in the 20s but you know what people I think don't largely remember is that the 1920s began with a terrible collapse of farm prices in rural America so rural parts of this country were in bad trouble the 1920 census was the first census that showed a majority of Americans were now urban dwellers rather than rural so it was this huge transformation from a country that was essentially rural to one that was becoming industrialized and urbanized you know communities obviously rural communities were falling apart people in the cities were very much alienated living in their little places at the same time you know women were given the right to vote women were entering the workplace sex was more out of the open in many ways in terms of you know that world flappers and the jazz age and all of that and other things were happening too prohibition you know large levels of Catholic immigration to a country still dominated by Protestants the Scopes trial in 1925 so traditional religions also under attack so there are these huge you know really sociological you know economic changes that are happening that are very big that you know leave a lot of people feeling left behind you know in case of the 20s it kind of culminated in a sense with the passage of the 1924 immigration act which is the racist quota system which was in place until 1965 which heavily favored you know essentially all a little out in with northern European whites right so I mean even southern Europeans were you know too non-white for us back then and it was only because of the 1965 immigration act Ted Kennedy's reformed the immigration system that the country is now as diverse as it is the other piece of what was going on back then that's very similar to what's happening now is that in 1910 and 1920 those were the highest proportions of foreign born people in this country in our history so 1910 was the all time peak 14.7% now we're almost there and we're going to surpass it it looks like we're going to hit 15 and a half or something like that before long next couple of years so you know all of these things I think you know contribute to this field and you know this isn't the country I grew up in you know other people are taking over and so on and in the case of the 20s as I said you know it produced this terrible immigration act which you know when LBJ signed the 65 act getting rid of it to talk about it as un-American talk openly about it as a racist you know millstone that had been around our neck all that time so I think we're in a similar time and you know we had Donald Trump as a president arguably as a result of all that's going on so you know just talk briefly a little bit about consequences of all this hate crimes are going up you know sometimes you'll hear some reporting in the press that I think kind of overhypes the hate crime numbers because we don't really know the FBI hate crime statistics are very weak but there's one thing there's no question about is that in the last years we've seen a rise especially in anti-Muslim hate crimes and also anti-Latino hate crimes that's clear another thing to say is that terrorism has reached a very bad place with regard to terrorism and terrorism specifically from the right the ADL just recently put out a report showing that you know 18 of 34 quote unquote extremists were laid murders last year were by right-wing extremists so for ever since 9-11 obviously 9-11 is a different story but ever since then we've seen more of a threat and more death more killings in general from the radical right rather than from Islamists Muslim extremists whatever you call them and you know this is denied all the time by Donald Trump by people like Peter King Peter King's a congressman from New York who you may remember held a series of hearings which were essentially you know what's wrong with Muslims they were purported to be a series of hearings on terrorism that there was a big fight over whether and should you include the Democrats were saying let's look at all forms of terrorism and King just simply denied that there was such thing it was an amazing thing because on the day the first hearing opened King gave a little opening speech in which he talked about how there are no neo-Nazi there's no neo-Nazi terror or any kind of white supremacist terror in this country it was funny because at that very day they arrested a guy in Idaho who had attempted to kill about a thousand people marching in Martin Luther King March earlier that year on MLK Day with a huge bomb that he built which they actually discovered and were able to dismantle so I'm saying this he's utterly full but this is the kind of thing that you see again and again and again you know increasingly you know I think it's I don't think I'm saying anything revelatory to say that you know violence is seen as an answer by very large swaths of people and I think I would argue strongly that Trump is very much one of those responsible for this I think many people don't remember that during the rallies during Trump rallies it happened in Mobile, Alabama again where I live Trump literally encouraged violence I'd like to sock him in the face at one point you may remember there was a young black guy black lives matter guy being let out of a stadium by the cops and this man came up and sucker punched him right in the stomach very you know really a nasty attack and Trump at that point told the audience that he would pay the legal expenses of anybody who got in trouble for beating up the people at his rallies you know you also probably remember what he said about cops cops ought to be more rough right when they're arresting these black kids you know they ought to smash their heads on the way they're putting them to the car and so on so it goes on and on and you know just before the midterms you know he praised this guy Gianforte right the Montana congressman who body slammed a reporter was asking him a totally legitimate question about health care so you know we have a guy sort of violence promoter and chief who really has played that role so you know we're also seeing obviously polarization in a way that we haven't seen in a very long time I just think last night everything you read about the election reinforces that that you know it wasn't only you know women and people of color and so on who won right on the Republican side it was anybody who's a little bit moderate who lost and it was the hardliners who won the McSally's of the world so you know I don't think there's any question that were even more polarized than there were a couple of years ago so you know we're in a place where I think it goes without saying that these things are a genuine threat to democracy that the press is incredibly important in terms of providing people with real information and the press is under attack here in Hungary and Poland in Russia my god you know in much of Europe you know remember that when Trump calls the press the enemy of the people that was a phrase coined by Joseph Stalin that's where he's getting his ideas from God knows where he thinks he came from again you know so I would say this is not Germany in the 30s but maybe it is a great deal like the United States in the 1920s meaning you know we still have a choice right I mean the US in the 20s ultimately did not go down the fascist road although we had quite a lot of proto-fascist groups in the teens and 20s so we're at that place and let me in that context just say briefly that you know again to return to the roles that leaders play we know the role and we've talked about some tonight that Trump has played but it's maybe worth remembering that Bush you know I was no fan of George W. Bush but it is worth remembering that immediately after 2001 after the 9-11 attacks Bush came out and said not once but many times repeatedly Muslims are not our enemy Arabs are not our enemy our enemy is this very specific group it's called Al-Qaeda and then he stood in the National Cathedral in all kinds of religious settings like that his arm around some Imam that kind of thing and you know while that looks all like a bunch of feel good sort of frippery actually it was incredibly important I've already talked about hate crime numbers but you know when 9-11 happened to the surprise of absolutely no one anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States when I began a court to somewhat shaky FBI stats 1600% you know it just doesn't seem like much of a surprise right 3,000 people have just been murdered in this unbelievable way what was incredible was that a mere three months later right when 2002 begins the FBI stats for that year they go calendar year by calendar year show that in 2002 again anti-Muslim hate crimes dropped by 67% I think that's rather remarkable that's quite a drop the bodies are almost still cold we're still warm in lower Manhattan and so on so again I'm starting that works both ways a leader can make a big deal of difference in both ways so to sort of end up what can we do I think I've tried to say in a lot of ways that words matter words have consequences, facts matter and that for journalists this is the core duty of the journalist to bring the real facts to people this is very much what not in my work but the SPLC's work at least tried to be about it I know SPLC is known for suing hate groups out of existence and so on but that was like a very small portion of the work much more of it was outing people for their lives and often politicians because they're in effect enabling the groups so if they say gay men or child rapists that's not a harmless statement in fact it's incredibly volatile and it's one people believe so facts matter journalists matter north of St. Louis news is something that someone wants suppressed everything else is just advertising no kidding we're left to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government I should not hesitate to prefer the latter Walter Littman said there can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil and I don't think I need to tell you we're awash in devils right now so you know general public I mean I think that you know ultimately the only real answer is for people to be as educated as possible to be critical thinkers to learn how to think and evaluate what's going on in the world around them because you know you can't get all your facts from Wikipedia and you sure as hell can't get your facts from Tucker Carlson or Fox News or else you're operating in the wilderness you don't know what is really going on so you know I think it's important for the public to understand that journalism is to democracy to understand the difference between news and opinion to understand the sources that people are using to back their claims and to demand some transparency from journalists in terms of understanding how they're saying you know this is the 6,254th lie of Donald Trump or whatever it is you know I guess I would just say as a last sort of concluding that you know sad to say human beings are not very perfect animals to put it mildly you know and I think that what we do is what we try and do or better angels whatever is to build up civilization and apparatuses like the free press to essentially help us do better you know I think you know Thomas Hobbes gave this infamous famous sort of wonderful remark Thomas Hobbes the English philosopher saying you know man in a state of nature right without civilization is solitary poor life in state of nature is solitary poor nasty, brutish and short so you know what I'm saying is that you know if we abandon the norms of civilization that's what we have to look forward to you know I just as a very last thought you know I think sometimes I hear the news today they're all talking about civility and let's be nice and norms and so on and in a sense it sounds like real tripe I mean it's like oh my god civility I mean it just seems like so much to understate what's going on here and yet I think that that really is civility but you know these norms of civilization really are what hold us together and I think you know it's that or the abyss and so with that upbeat note let me say thank you and I guess if there are questions I'm not quite sure how we're going to work on this if Mark calls on you would you please stand up if you can and speak loudly we don't have a remote microphone in here and it can be hard to hear in this room and my hearing is particularly terrible so does anybody have any the mainstream media has dealt with Trump's lies and you know I mean I think pretty well we were discussing this a little earlier tonight I mean I won't forget right after Trump was elected I think that's when it was when the other times finally ran a story saying Trump lied and then they had a whole separate story about this idea that they were saying you know not that they didn't have facts back up they didn't have a whole lot of lies and so I think the major press has done it rather well in that way and you know it's something I mean I think the Washington Post Back Checker did just report today I think that number is right something like 6,240 lies since he took office he forgot the campaign it's rather amazing could they do better? yeah but I think that the main problem it's Fox News, it's Tucker Carlson and it's an enormous apparatus and you know it's been called a macrochamber and it is kind of except that the ideas so many of them really originate in groups that are you know want to send genes to gas chambers I mean really groups that are really out there so you know I mean I think I just think the Washington Post and the New York Times have broken almost every major story about every really critical story and you know one thing I mentioned this earlier tonight you may remember a few weeks ago the Times did a huge takeout on how Trump and his daddy made all this money by being gangsters was the answer and you know Trump said at the time he says boring story and you know the sad thing is there's something to it right and not a lot of people are there's like a 20,000 word story and you could see it got no traction not really that's never been the version yeah and it was on the website forever right it just could get people to read it yes sorry no I just we can't hear what the question is I just said they they reprinted I was just supporting this point that good journalism doesn't always get the attention of the public they did 14,000 word story on the Trump fraud and then they reprinted it as a special insert on a Sunday after that and very little to talk about yeah wow that was a lot to digest anyway I've been a supporter of some poverty loss seminar for decades and I'd just like to thank you and that something about the SPLC for the important work you've always done and especially important today I'd say it was a lot to digest I don't think you've ever explicitly stated what the mission of the some poverty loss center is and I'm familiar with that but I've been a reader of your newsletter magazine for a long time I've seen your picture I don't know but maybe you could state that anyway my question really has nothing to do with any of that and by the way when you're talking about the 20s again and again you didn't mention that it was the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan in Vermont it was the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan everywhere I mean there were 4 million members of the Klan in 1925 there were 40,000 members in the civil rights movement and there are no near 4,000 today so yeah it was by far the people of the Klan family should have said that and they were very instrumental so I just want to thank you again for everything you have done my question has nothing to do with that it has to do with your Vermont connection which I wasn't aware of for tonight I assume you're related to the artist and the prototype of when Klan yep that's my father right there thank you so if you could maybe elaborate on that a little bit and uh he's a great man very handsome the girls come from everywhere to see him no I mean we moved here we're not natives not real natives we moved here when I was 8 which would have been 63 I guess and I lived here I went to marsh plain elementary school for a couple of years this hippie school parents cooperative free schools in the free school in playing field and then I went off to college and I never came back but nothing but my wife and I were thinking of moving back it became old and gray looks like everybody else is up here too and Southern Power Emissions said I'm not sure I can it's like promoting equality something else fighting hate seeking justice something about equality I'm not much of an advertising pal but yeah SPLC has done a hell of a lot and I left about a year and a half so I have to work on my own for about a year and a half but I mean it was after 20 good years I don't have anything bad to say about them at all yeah I think you share my college I think you might be called CORE which is a society unfortunately made it but here's the problem that I think you know you're talking about the truth the facts etc this audience I don't see anybody in that generation of 20 year olds or whatever they don't make the newspapers they don't listen to the news they don't watch it they don't even know who talked across them they don't listen a fire human being what I'm saying is I mean I couldn't deal with this for a number of years as a teacher there they barely know what's going on in the world and I really emphasize that so they wouldn't even know if it was fake news because they're not aware of it I think there's a lot true to that but I would say one thing I feel like 10 years ago journalism was the terrible trouble of course it was the peak of newspapers being plowed under by competition from online sources and so on and I think it's changing I mean I do not a lot but some speaking colleges I just think they're more and more young people now getting into it now I agree with you I can't talk to my own son about politics because some of the things he says you know I have to tell him how ridiculous it is and it's for that reason the only thing that he gets it's real news it's vice news and all the rest is you know stuff on YouTube so I can't remember when I'm sorry when what was commercials and so we had magazines called ad busters and I can see the point of the New York Times article and just truth and people don't read it some people don't read it but is there any way of creating another medium that would mock these lies that you may have that is so ridiculous there's really a short version of that well I mean that's very much what I was about with the intelligence report our magazine that's very much what I tried to do with the intelligence report it's a fairly big magazine we have about 400,000 paper readers I don't know how many online maybe a couple millions sort of mock and tone you know but I mean look there have been a lot of attempts I mean Al Gore tried to build a radio network and it really fell apart you know now I guess we have MSNBC so that's better than anything sort of anything at the other end from Fox you know I think in many ways that a lot of the future is probably in these things like pro-publica I mean these nonprofit collectives to provide good news that's really a good example but there are a number of these efforts so I don't know what the future is and how they're going to do but you know when we were building up the intelligence report when I was there 20 years that's very much what we had in mind we wanted to be part of a new kind of press that wasn't necessarily a for-profit newspaper in our case we were a nonprofit so yeah the stories that you shared the stories that were shared earlier about conspiracy and the hatred that stands from them is rather poignant but there's a word that you used earlier in your talk that keeps bouncing around in my head and that is gullibility you said that as humans we tend to be rather gullible and toward the end of your talk a little bit about what we might need to combat such gullibility might you talk about that a little further especially in regard to the divide there are many divides actually the divide between red and blue the divide between north and south but that gullibility that seems to keep us from being able to work well together well I mean what I was saying is that's a bit of human nature that these sexy false stories travel faster than other kinds of stories so that's a problem that's hard to get around I mean I look I think at the end of the day and I'm going to just barely refer to this but at the end of the day it's sort of citizenship then I mean you have to learn to be a critical figure I mean it doesn't mean you have to be a news nut you have to learn everything about every race that's happening in every state but it means you have to learn to separate I don't know we were having the same conversation I said earlier right before this and in some ways you know I think it's pretty easy right when you start to look at what some of these websites claim to see that they're false on the other hand obviously there are a bunch of people who take them completely seriously and answer the question is I read a study you mentioned this too earlier but I read a study pretty recently which basically made the case that as soon as you say to someone you know you must be a racist because you voted for Donald Trump or you must hate women that's it right no more information is accepted from you so that's not really my style I'd rather tell somebody what they are what to their face but apparently the science is it's not of convincing people of anything and you know I mean I will tell you this is sort of the secret but I've been talking to a guy who's a very major Nazi leader argued the most important one in the country in the last 20 30 years for about a year of that and you know we still can't really talk about the holocaust right his father was in Waffen SS right and you know so we'll see but that I don't know if that's useful or not but while it's a little disheartening because boy that sure sounds like the slow way just tell a person just how dumb they are how wrong they are it doesn't work so you know I guess that's one piece of the answer yeah I'm sorry are there any properties about an internet which have a lot of fake news what in the internet do you see as characters that have exploded the amount of fake news well almost everything about it I mean you know look at the way most of the I mean I said I write for the Daily Beast so you look at the Daily Beast it's basically a news aggregator they run a lot of their own stories but like so many of these places they don't quote news or stories from other places so you know a very small proportion of these sites that are giving news actually report that or they might make a phone call or something so how's that kind of partly that sort of half-assed journalism that half-assed excuse for journalism to pose as real journalism and then you know obviously it also allows un contradicted fossils all the time right if you're on the Daily Stormer website well you need to let anybody on to say that the Holocaust really did occur or something like that and it's the same with all of these other groups I mentioned like the Family Research Council American Family Association which you know are seen in much of the country as great Christian defenders of the family right, period without any caveats at all which I argue you know there are liars who spent all their time defaming a large group of very vulnerable people and absolutely shameless about it so you know there's that since I mentioned earlier the anonymity I mean when Julia Ioffe the Jewish writer I mentioned you know she had to be about her house after she published you remember she published a very mildly critical portrait of Melania Trump and also Melania who her parents were and so on and you know she had pictures of her in the gas chamber center you know death threats from her home and so on so I mean I think I'm not entirely down on the internet either I mean one of the things we were talking about again earlier in the meeting was the I'm sorry it was Wikipedia I think Wikipedia has gotten much better you know it's not you know it's not a source you could rely on like encyclopedia or something and if you have any get up and go you know you follow a few of the links you know it's pretty easy to understand if they've got it right or wrong on a particular point so you know it's not all bad but yes I didn't be internet absolutely makes this stuff possible and it makes it travel faster I mean you know a minute man didn't hear about the planned odds by meeting Glenn Spencer his you know trailer in southern Arizona they read about it on the internet upside it looks like he's a real organization and he has this you know one little rabbit you know anti-Semitic immigrant hating none right but via the internet you know it's now believed the planned odds lot is now believed I think literally by a few million people one more question one more question what role do you think that public education system has in giving our students to be critical well I mean it has the biggest role really important role I mean I'll just answer with one little example which is you know I live in south now right south Alabama can't get any deeper than that and you know southern schools still teach the civil war in a way that's unbelievable because it's not true right so it is still taught very much as the lost cause you know it's still very rarely will you hear in a public school in Alabama that the civil war was over slavery and I'm sorry you know no matter you know if you read any kind of serious history there's just no question right it wasn't the industrial system it wasn't tariffs it wasn't you know the imposition of godless materialism the Yankees it was the slave system and you know and so that goes that goes on to cause all kinds of other things I mean in this memorial controversy you know Nathan Bedford forest is painted as a hero in the south even in public schools and it's true that if you know anything about it Nathan Bedford forest was a hell of a capital channel I mean an amazing warrior and the worst kind of human being I mean he had been become a millionaire before the civil war run the slave yard in Memphis an infamously brutal slave yard he presided over the massacre over several hundred surrendering black union troops this was an illegal massacre they had already lifted the white flag in Fort Pillow Tennessee and then after the war forest became the first national leader of the Klan but you don't hear any of that right in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia public schools you know what you hear is the idea that well you know maybe slavery had something to do with it maybe but you can barely mention but you know essentially the civil war was this noble fight from people with great principles and that's just one example but you know that's the kind of that does not help you be a critical thinker because it's absolutely false from A to Z for us we got to hear a lot of things about news and fake news and real things thank you very much Mark