 If you're just joining, welcome to the Insurrection one year later, a forum examining what the events of January 6 means for our democracy and for the 2022 election year. A special thanks to McKinsey and company for their support. My name is Connor Goodwin and I'm an event associate with ProPublica. For those new to us, ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism. Today, we'll hear from a stirring, sterling panel of experts who will give us a brief update on where the prosecutions and house investigation into January 6 stands. Then we'll look ahead to potential vulnerabilities in the 2022 election cycle and reflect on how the media can improve their coverage of extremism. Our panelists will also answer your questions. To ask a question at any point, click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and type it there. Also, if you would like to enable subtitles, click on the closed captioning icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Now, allow me to introduce our speakers. Jocelyn Benson is Michigan's 43rd Secretary of State. In this role, she is focused on ensuring elections are secure and accessible. Jennifer Morrell is a partner at the elections group and election consulting partnership where she creates professional resources for election officials and counts on election and consults on election administration and auditing. Seamus Hughes is an expert on extremism movements in America and deputy director of the program on extremism at George Washington University. Kai Wright is host and managing editor of United States of Anxiety, a podcast about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future. Finally, our moderator today is Steve Engelberg, ProPublica's Editor-in-Chief. I'll let Steve take it from here. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm sure we all remember where we were a year ago today at this time. This panel, today we're going to delve into sort of what we've learned since then, what's happened since then. I thought I would just begin by sharing a story from today's Washington Post. A public opinion research laboratory Vanderbilt University has for a number of years been asking this question. Some people say that under some circumstances it would be justified for the military of this country to take power by a coup d'etat. In your opinion, would a military coup be justified when there is a lot of corruption? For many years that has actually been hovering around 25% of respondents said yes, they would agree to a military coup under certain circumstances. That number now stands at 40% of Americans, 54% of Republicans. I think that is an important bit of context as we begin the conversation today, which I look forward to. I'd like to start with Sheamus and just get a sort of factual update. The Justice Department recently put out a very long detail list of where the prosecution stand from January 6. What did it tell us? It told us that this is the largest investigation in the FBI's history. You're talking about hundreds of agents and U.S. attorneys around the country working on this. They've arrested, as of a half an hour ago because we had a new case, 706 people from 45 different states in D.C. The average age is 39. They range from 18 to 81. They come from all walks of life in terms of socioeconomic backgrounds. They're yoga instructors and structural workers, realtors from Texas, everything in between. The vast majority of them were not part of organized groups, so they weren't part of the oath keepers or the proud boys. Those are the more complicated cases that we've seen. We've also seen that the Department of Justice is not going to stop anytime soon. We've got about two cases a day since January 6. They're still looking at another 350 people for requests for the help from tips in the public, so we'll probably get the four digits of arrests, which is unprecedented for DOJ. The D.C. federal court system usually gets about 300 cases a year, 700 just for January 6 alone. They're completely overwhelmed on the number of cases that are happening now. One last thing I'd note is we're starting to see sentencing, and the sentencing tends to be shorter. Probation 30 days, 60 days, the occasional five years, but that's a reflection of DOJ clearing the decks and taking care of the lower level misdemeanor cases and then going to focus on the more complicated conspiracy charges in the spring, the oath keepers and the proud boys. So don't read too much into the sentencing quite yet. The one last thing I would note is if you look at the folks who got arrested or charged, they're pedestrian in nature. There's nothing particularly interesting about many of them. They tended to be almost organic on why they came to January 6. They were drawn obviously through politicians' calls from online environments from everything in between, but it wasn't like they were part of something organized, like the militia groups that we saw kind of walking up the stack formation on January 6. Great, thank you. I wanted to ask First Kite and then Jocelyn to talk a little bit about sort of the January 6 committee. Sometimes these congressional committees ask a lot of questions and hold endless hearings and don't turn up anything interesting. My sense is that we have learned some things from the January 6 committee and I'd be interested, Kai, in the broader sense of what they mean and then Jocelyn, if you could speak to specifics. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. The best way to understand it is actually quite familiar, or the way I understand it is quite familiar to many other congressional investigations and congressional hearings in general, which is just can we, can they reshape the public narrative on a given issue? And we've spent a better part of the past year. You know, it's been well documented the way in which the authoritarian movement in the Republican Party has shaped a narrative around this event. And there hasn't been a significant engagement at the national level to counter that narrative beyond a lot of hand wringing, you know, and so this is in some ways the first effort to move out of hand wringing space and establish a set of facts that we can all agree on about what's happened. Now, obviously, we are not going to all agree on those facts. That's just where we are as a country. The facts are not going to be agreed upon. And so I think the question is, can this committee and this process establish a shared understanding of it for people outside of the authoritarian movement that is overtaken to the Republican Party, regardless of your partisanship, if you're outside of that movement, you come to a shared understanding of the fact that it wasn't just what we're learning. It wasn't just that a bunch of people stormed the Capitol, but rather there was a well thought out, organized effort to overturn the results of the election and that it very nearly succeeded. I mean, that's one of the things that I think are the shocking findings we're hearing is how close it came to succeeding. And frankly, in ways in which the storming of the Capitol almost undermined its success, that absent bad violence, it's quite likely that the plan that the elected officials had laid out was going to carry out. So I think it's a fact-finding mission, what comes from those facts, who knows, but can you arrive at a shared understanding, at least amongst the people who don't, who want to be in a pro-democracy movement? Can we get on the same page? Jocelyn, you're in a seat in Michigan to sort of assure the integrity of the elections there, but I'm curious, watching this picture unfold from the January 6th committee, what has struck you that you've learned in the last year that you didn't know that you find striking? Well, I think, as Kai was saying, it's really about two things, truth and accountability, and to me, about really the circumstances surrounding the lie that led to the insurrection, which is really my memory of that day, was just sitting there thinking, this is all because of a lie. This is all happening because people lied, and because one candidate couldn't accept that he lost an election. And so to have a committee that is bipartisan, that is taking seriously the need for us all to be operating from the same set of facts in this era of disinformation was, I think, is critical in and of itself, and then, of course, the second piece is the accountability. The accountability that's not just legal, that, of course, in part of the Justice Department is pursuing, but that's also political. And the fact that we've got a major election this November, the first major election since January 6th, and to what extent can this committee reveal truths and advance a common set of facts for the electorate and promote accountability over that would lead to political accountability this fall for anyone who might have been involved in the insurrection, and I'll just kind of pinpoint or put an exclamation mark on it, but one of the things that just astounds me is that we had dozens of or 100 members of Congress sign on to litigation and other letters still calling for us to block the votes of entire states of American citizens. And that is astounding and extraordinary. And so I think for the very same body to seek accountability for even their own members or other political leaders who were a part of or who sent lies into the public that led to the tragedy at our U.S. Capitol a year ago today, seeing and enabling the electorate to, with truth and facts, seek political accountability this fall is critical. And if I could just add one thing to that, because it's hard for me to imagine that there will be accountability, right? That's just, you know, it's hard for me looking at the reality of our political board, that there's going to be a lot of accountability. I would hope that there will be, but I also think that there's a fundamental, there's going to be a long road to accountability if there's going to be one. And what I hope can come out of this process is at least getting a shared understanding of the gravity of the problem and a rethinking. We don't, I don't believe that we necessarily sort of walk around and act like there's shared understanding that like democracy is a value that we believe as Americans that, you know, we should have majority rule with a set of rules set in to protect the minority from majority overreach. And that's how, but I don't know that we actually have agreed on that fundamental principle. I don't know that as a society, we've actually had that conversation and agreed upon it. And I feel like I'm hoping that maybe in this year, if we don't get to accountability, we at least can begin to have that, and not to sound so Pollyanna, but have that fundamental conversation about why democracy and do we actually want one as a society? I'd like to turn to Jennifer and ask your specialist in elections. So what are the weak points that we learned about in 2020? I mean, I could recall here, ProPublica more now than six, eight years ago, people came to me and said, we should be covering the machinery of elections. I said, why that sounds so dull, who knew? So tell us a little bit about what we've learned from 2020. And are these things being addressed or are they being made worse? Yeah, thanks, Stephen. And just to remind everybody, in spite of extraordinary challenges created by a global pandemic, elected and appointed officials from both parties work together to mitigate what could have really been a crisis. They did this by instituting health and safety protocols, recruiting and training hundreds and thousands of new poll workers. They expanded early in absentee voting and offered other alternative voting options. They processed a record number of mail ballots, and for many of them, they became crisis communicators for the first time. In spite of this historic set of challenges, they delivered an election that was free of significant issues, an election that was secure, and really an election where a record number of Americans were able to vote. And the work to do this started well before 2020. Efforts were underway going clear back to the beginning of 2019, if not prior to that. And what we learned, the weakness that we learned is that despite all of this preparation, all of this hard work, we learned that it could all be undone, as Secretary Benson said, by a lie, by a surge of misinformation and falsehoods, however you want to categorize that. And whether it was, whether it's state and local election officials that I work with, talking about how they have been trying to battle that on their own or working collectively with their organizations, it has felt like putting out a forest fire with a garden hose. In fact, an election official yesterday posted on Twitter, I feel like I'm melting winter with a flashlight. And we mitigate some of the security risks that election offices face by having states and local jurisdictions individually own and operate their own voter registration systems, their own voting equipment. But I think the lack of national standards, when it comes to things like the registration process, how we issue and count and report votes really is a fundamental weakness that there certainly was a spotlight on that coming out of 2020. I think it was exploited. I think it will continue to be exploited until we can come to an agreement around some basic standards for election administration. And this includes everything from registering voters, ID requirements, ballot collection laws, even the timeframe for when mail ballots can be verified and opened and extracted. You know, we saw the effect of that as results were reported immediately in some states. It took longer in others where they couldn't start processing those ballots until election day. Certainly that contributed to some of the narrative around fraudulent ballots being dumped into the final counter votes been flipped. Not a new weakness that came out of 2020, but certainly one that continues to be important to think about is underfunding and understaffed election offices. We saw philanthropic efforts to mitigate some of that by providing grant funding and other types of support. But we've also now seen that used as fodder for further lies of misinformation around the validity of the election in states and jurisdictions where they accepted some of that help and support. We're certainly seeing states put restrictions on types of private grant funding and support, but they aren't proposing any real solutions. So I think that continues to remain a weakness. I think the troubling, really troubling aspect for me is somebody who's been a huge proponent of election audits is we saw the work that we've done around transparency efforts in election offices. So things like creating live video feed of ballot processing, just open records requests, post-election audits really become weaponized and be used by some in supporting the big lie. And finally, and I think most important of all, we saw election officials, individuals that are already used to long, thankless hours of work really pushed to the limit with an election that just doesn't seem to end coupled with an onslaught that continues to today of physical threats and verbal harassment. And if I'm emotional, it's because we're seeing those sort of stalwart knowledgeable veteran election professionals decide it's just too much and they're leaving. They're leaving the profession and now there's a real risk as to who will be stepping into those roles. We might not have the same courageous election officials running elections and holding the line the next time. I want to come back to you, Jocelyn. I think a little bit about that moment and it must have been a moment when the Secretary of State of Georgia was on the phone with the President of the United States and he asked, can't you just find 12,000 more votes? That conversation won't take place in 2024 because the Secretary of State of Georgia no longer is going to be involved in this process in the same way. Talk a little bit about these sort of state by state changes if you could. What do you see happening and what is the potential significance of them? Well, I think importantly, as we reflect on why democracy prevailed in 2020, it did so because good people on both sides of the aisle did the right thing. And one of the examples of that isn't just Secretary Raffensburger, but Al Schmidt in Philadelphia and a number of other election officials at the state and local level. And certainly what we've seen in the year since January 6 is the execution of a three-pronged strategy designed to ultimately position those who may oppose future election results to be in a place where they can successfully overturn them in, I believe, 2024. And that three-pronged strategy is really gets it and is exemplified by what you saw in Georgia. First, it's to keep the big lie alive, to keep that misinformation out there. That's why you see these forensic calls for forensic audits and false election reviews, to really just keep this conversation, this misinformation alive. And then secondly, to change the very policies, the laws that we and others worked to implement in 2020 to ensure that a record number of Americans could vote in that election, to make it more difficult for us to repeat that success, that secure, wide-turned-out election that was quite something to celebrate in 2020. Change the rules of the game to make it harder to vote, easier to overturn election results that people disagree with, that partisans disagree with. And that gets to the third prong, which is to replace a lot of the officials at the state and local level. That's why you see these threats of intimidation. That's why you see the changing of the authority of election officials in Georgia and other places. So to make it possible that if needed, a lever is available to block the certification of a legitimate election result simply because that particular candidate or party that doesn't agree with the results. So given that this is a multifaceted, multi-year, multi-pronged strategy to enable more levels, more levers to be available in 2024 to potentially block the results of a presidential election, what is needed in response is a national multi-year, multi-faceted, multi-pronged strategy to ensure good people on both sides of the aisle are still in place in 2024 to ensure that we're using the constitution or federal protocols and protections to perhaps lessen the impact of a lot of these changes we're seeing in states to make it more difficult for us to replicate the success of 2020, particularly the high turnout. And then of course, with regards to the big lie, stop giving platforms to people who are propagating misinformation, hold those accountable when they do. And I do, I think it was said earlier, there's sort of a cynicism around accountability. I think Americans have the opportunity to really ensure that accountability happens this fall, this November. And that's, that's the political accountability. What we have seen develop is not only everything I've just talked about, but that is become politically advantageous for people to hop onto the lying misinformation bandwagon because it amplifies their celebrity and enables them to raise money and enables them potentially to gain political power. Voters can stop that train by voting a certain, by voting in November to hold those accountable who do spread misinformation. And I'm very hopeful that these next 10 months will give us an opportunity to ensure that that happens. Well, let's talk a little bit about that. Shameless, I want to come back to you. Fundamentally, this doesn't work if this story, this narrative we call it the big lie, is not broadly appealing. Do you have a sense from your work and your research, why this particular thing is so appealing? I'll open that up to anybody here. Why, why does this work? Well, I think January 6th is a great example of, of a perfect storm, right? So you had politicians advocating for this to happen. You had a social media platforms who were behind the ball in terms of content moderation of domestic extremism on their platforms. They've been focusing on ISIS and al-Qaeda prior. They hadn't trained their folks up. They didn't want to touch the third rail of politics of doing this. You had, I think we also can't discount the role of the QAnon movement in all of this. When you look at the January 6th participants, I mean, conspiracy kind of rampant when you look at the court records. And that group was saying, this is the moment, this is the time. And so you, and then you had the FBI and the Capitol Police and DOD, nobody on the same page on terms of anyone in the outside, so this is going to be bad. And nobody on the inside really put all the pieces together, or at least anyone in the authority didn't think it was important enough to do so. And so that was kind of the perfect storm of it. So not only the social media aspect, but also the offline aspect and also just the moment, right? Now I'm going to try to play devil's advocate here just for the sake of a conversation, right? Which is if you look at January 6th, you know, 2,000 people at a rally, at least 1,000 people across the legal threshold to get, to be charged with a federal crime. But nobody really showed up on January 20th. And nobody showed up in the Justice for January 6th rally in the fall. And that's because it speaks to kind of a fracturing of the movement, meaning that kind of the cult of personalities that was running this are having a little bit of infighting. And also the soccer dads from Missouri are, the veneers off of this thing, right? So they know if they're going to show up, they may get arrested. And so you don't get kind of the, the merely curious in a way. Now that's the national level. At the state and local level, that's a different ball game, right? You're still having rallies at, at capitals. You're still seeing that, that kind of organizational at the, at the state and local level, but it's different than a national level too. I'm just curious, because I sort of use this analogy. I don't, I don't mean to, to bring up, you know, because when you bring, when you bring up fascism in Hitler, you've lost the argument, but it is true historically that the big lie does have this root in the 20th century. And you know, Hitler's argument was that the, the Aryan people were superior. And yet they had lost World War I. So there had to be an explanation. It sort of fit into something, which is we were stabbed in the back at home by the cosmopolitan. We didn't really lose the war. It was taken away from us. How does this big lie in your, in your sort of sense of American culture and history fit into, fit into a larger context? I think the better comparison, well, that's good and cares to do. But as you point out, if you go there, you're already lost. Yeah, but, but, but a really quite happy comparison is rather the Confederacy. And, you know, here in the United States, and many historians have at this point pointed out, you know, most prominently, maybe David Blight at Yale, but many have pointed out that the modern Republican Party has essentially become the Confederacy. And the Confederacy is also, was also rooted in a big lie and the lost cause mythology. And the purpose we should remember of the lost cause was to undermine democracy. That was the whole idea of this mythology was to, was to undo the democratic gains of reconstruction. And, you know, similarly, this modern Confederacy has a lie to undo democracy. I think that is important context and important history for a number of reasons. One, it is helpful to understand just how well this can succeed and how grave we're talking about it took nearly 100 years to undo the lost cause. Arguably, it was the 1965 Voting Rights Act as the closest is the first time we got to a place where we were undoing the lie and undoing the work that the lie of the Confederacy was doing despite having lost the Civil War 100 years previously. They controlled democracy in the South and made it an anti-democratic region for 100 years. Not coincidentally, I would argue one of the rallying moments or one of the inaugural moments of this current authoritarian anti-democratic movement is that when the Supreme Court got rid of essentially the Voting Rights Act in 2015 and all but name, they both were anti-democratic movements and they can succeed wildly in our country. In fact, for the vast majority of our country's history, it's actually a short period of our country's history, where pro-democracy forces have been ascended. So that is a thing and it has all been rooted in a mythology that allows then, and we've seen, I think, happily, I've seen since January 6th, a much greater literacy and understanding in the general public and in the media conversation about the technical part of democracy. And the fact that we are in a place where there is a loud but actual minority of people is a minority of U.S. residents that believe any version of the big lie and that even support the Trump movement in general. It is a loud minority that has outsized power within our existing system and have figured out how to hack that system to have minority instead of majority rule. So we've seen a broader conversation about that from a technical perspective, but I don't think, and this is what I was saying about the House panel, I don't think we've taken in the principle of that. We haven't had enough conversation amongst those of us who are in a pro-democracy space, regardless of our partisanship about the principles of democracy and why they're important and the threat we face now from, again, people who are sitting elected officials who are in an anti-democratic movement regardless of their political party. Let's come back to solutions for a moment. Jocelyn, you mentioned the need, I think, at a federal level to have some standards and guardrails here. As we all know, due to the gridlock in the Senate and Senator Manchin's viewpoint, that bill is stalled. Do you think it will be unstalled? And if it's not, where does that leave us? We're sort of witnessing the unfolding of that right now as we have really the past year, and I know there's lots of hope that we can see some movement enacting federal protections, not just in protecting people's access to democracy, but protecting against elections subversion as well. And so I think we've seen the general uptick in energy and focus, particularly amplified by the President's remarks today in some sort of reclaiming of the federal role, historic federal role in creating a baseline of protections for all U.S. citizens to have access to democracy in a way that's protected and equal for all. And so I do remain hopeful. I think this is the most important issue of the year, and I think we're going to continue to see that amplified. And I'm of the view that we want to see some federal protections in place by this fall, but we also just want to see some federal protections in place. We're just going to meet them, and I think a lot of the public who's had to do this is someone who's spent almost the better part of two decades now advocating for a strengthened Voting Rights Act, seeing years and years of the Supreme Court weakening it, reauthorizing and strengthening that is critical in and of itself. And if it doesn't happen by this fall, then let's make sure it happens by 2024. So there's a sense of urgency, but there's also, I think, a higher need to see something happen and something enacted. And my hope is that there can be something party lines to support basic federal protections for all citizens that Democrats are willing to just go go it alone and utilize the authority that they have to enable the passage of important voting protections for all. Jennifer, what's your sense? You know I have the awesome opportunity to work really closely with local election officials and one of the things I hear repeated most often is they field calls from voters that sound like this. I trust the work you do but I don't trust what's happening in this neighboring county or in this other state. Tell me you know help me understand why what they're doing is so different and so I think again not to harp on it but the creation of national standards and I'm not talking about the federal government taking over but simply just creating a floor where when I register to vote how I register to vote what the requirements are to do that when I can cast a ballot when those things can become equitable across all 50 states when that local election official can say with confidence the way they do it in Michigan the way they do it in Georgia is exactly the same way we do it here it mitigates some of those opportunities to spread those lies and misinformation. But again there's a political reality here isn't there so one party would seemingly potentially benefit from the system exactly as it is. I respect both of your your optimism but are they really going to vote to dismantle a system that seems to be working pretty well for them? I think that history teaches us they will or they will be compelled to if citizens demand it I mean it wasn't it wasn't President Johnson who passed the Voting Rights Act you know at the risk of losing the South for a generation as he said it was citizens who gathered in Selma and demanded federal rights protection federal voting rights protections that led to the creation of the Voting Rights Act so you know to me this really you know there's an opportunity for citizens to prioritize democracy and what history teaches us is that only when that happens do the elected officials the politicians follow suit I mean take Michigan for example you know we had you know new expanded rights for our voters and an independent redistricting commission in our state that when I was elected my charge was to implement those changes didn't happen those pro-democracy expanded access changes didn't happen because politicians passed laws they happened because citizens voted in overwhelming numbers on both sides of the aisle to amend our state constitution to create an independent citizens redistricting commission to mandate that we allow people to register to vote up to an on election day and allow for absentee voting so you know history and even modern history shows and really underscores that when citizens demand an accessible secure democracy and utilize the tools of democracy to get us there through direct democracy or otherwise we can actually see those changes and that's why to me the more people are engaged and embrace the sense of urgency that this moment does provide us with and does really you know exude then we can actually you know see changes but we shouldn't expect the changes to happen at the federal level the protections enacted in the absence of citizen voices from across the country really calling for them and the thing about that you know and I agree with the secretary about what history teaches us in the back I hate to be the like you know the sky is falling Debbie Downer here but like history also teaches us that in those moments it is the house is on fire what anti-democratic forces throughout the history of the United States have been willing to do everything up to and including widespread violence to prevent democracy and so it is not coincidental that we arrive now at a moment with this ascended anti-democratic moment at a point where people feel like they're surrounded by violence political and otherwise I do not think that is a coincidence it the the there's no question that the way in which social change of any kind in the United States has happened but certainly around democracy has been through intense insistent refusal to back down movements of people who have been removed from democracy who have said well I will not be removed I will be part of it whether it was people of color women go down the list but it has every time been met with extreme violence and we have every time had to go through a period of extreme violence to get to the change it has worked this is buddy I mean again the history shows us that the Voting Rights Act might have been one of the most successful pieces of legislation in the history of American life you know I mean it the the democracy expanded wildly between 1965 and roughly now we were in a period of expansion and that was what but we had agreed as a society on the idea of democracy and that's why I keep returning to that is I don't know that we have agreed on that as a society anymore I don't know that the that there is as mass a movement of people who say you know what that democracy is important not being a democratic or a republican but democracy is important to me and so I am prepared to fight for democracy in the way that the anti-democratic forces are very very clear that they are prepared to fight up to and including violence for anti-democratic movements. So if I could I'd like to turn for a moment to my line of work the media we're always a good punching bag and I'd like to invite everyone on the panel to take a shot now I would like to ask you Sheamus first of all what what what intelligent media coverage look like that might reach some of the folks that you've been studying and at least if not get them exactly lined up with where Kai just said at least give them pause I mean is the media doing its job can we do it better what would it look like? I'm sorry I welcome the opportunity to take a swing um no I listen I think some of this is not of your own making so there is something we said about the oversaturated oversaturization of media so you know today there's going to be what seven different documentaries released on on January 6 and it just becomes the background noise of it in many ways the other thing that we can't discount is it was really being two different realities right so you have you know folks that read the court records see the videos the day and and see the world as it is and then you have others that say that was a false flag operation government ovaries is a protest that went a little bit awry and this is this is completely nonsensical it's going to be very hard to get people into echo chamber um a little bit more than we are now I don't quite know how to get there but I do know what my responsibility is and what other responsibility is is you know just the fact spam so on extremism.gw.edu we've got all of the court records of the 700 people have been arrested it's just there we don't kind of put our finger on the scale of of opining on those things we provide the information to the public and to be fair the the public's responded 300,000 hits in the last year people are hungry for just kind of information to make their own assessment now there is something to be said about looking you know we're all going to be sitting around a table and next thing's giving in your uncle's going to say something crazy you need to look at them as a person and not as someone who's saying something that's not right and and if we look at the people as humans and have human interactions with them and not kind of ostracize them in a way understanding that their views will minimize you and and positions and things like that we just have to power through that in some ways we're talking past each other right now now that's a lot of responsibility for the folks to believe in the truth and a lot of biting your tongue sometimes and swallowing your pride and it's probably not fair but I think it's the only way to get through it there's also a not insignificant responsibility for social media companies in this space and if you if you're going down a rabbit hole of a Q and on Facebook page and then before you know you're at a January 6 rally like that that's because the algorithm got you there and and we need to have responsibility of that too and there's a way in which I'll take a shot at us you know you know and me included you and me include like there there's a way in which we have trained everybody to be polite political operatives instead of citizens we the way that we talk about elections the way we cover elections they report on them is through the lens of partisanship and that and I don't have a necessarily a solution I'm only diagnosed the problem because the reality is that you know our political system is defined by these two political parties but our constant repetition of that framework for how citizens are supposed to engage through politics is which team they're on and arriving at the absurdity of like everyday voters triangulating themselves and like trying to pick their candidates based on who they think somebody else is going to vote for and all of this instead of our job should be facilitating a saying hey democracy elections is a time where we facilitate a conversation about what kind of society we're going to have so but that is more costly to do as journalists it takes the more resource intensive and it's more dangerous to do right because we will alienate some people by saying well you know we need to talk about whether or not this is okay what you're talking about we need to talk about what is we will have to actually draw conclusions about what is right and wrong and and that will alienate some people so it's commercially dangerous and so instead we everything is filtered through this partisan framework and we've taught people to be partisans instead of citizens and and then that in that in fact everything about our conversation about democracy so I don't know how we get out of that framework but I think that is the the the first sin of me I have a little bit different take and I think the media has done a great job over the last couple of years of really digging into the operations the mechanics of election administration and the rights and responsibilities of voters we've certainly seen lots of good information pushed out it's not getting where it needs to go and so thinking about ways to sort of tap into um local journalism and tap into community amplifiers community stakeholders those that are going to be able to sort of get that message to the last mile I think is critical and and I don't know that we have the solution there yet um when it comes to like staying Kai sort of thinking about your comments I guess one thing that keeps coming back to me is um I don't know we can be completely a political I think we have a responsibility right now in this moment to call this what it is and we need more of you saying we have a domestic threat problem we have a domestic terrorism problem because we've certainly seen when we've used that verbiage nationally uh we've we've been able to respond as a nation um to foreign threats um in a way that um has been effective we really have to keep hammering home that we have a domestic threat issue and how are we going to address that there's a lot that's being said and um so I would just add kind of a long term piece to this because I think there's a lot that's been said a lot that will be talked about in terms of the media's role in in this era of disinformation and in promoting gage citizenship but we have to recognize the long-term disinvestment in local media as Jennifer pointed out and the long-term disinvestment in in just media general I first ran for office in 2010 and uh more than half of the media outlets and particularly all local that I used to communicate my message I have now have now either been um eliminated or have been assumed by a larger entity uh which then gets to this sort of larger messaging challenges the second is the disinvestment in civics education that's happened over decades as well uh which has made it more difficult for citizens to become um trained to sort of critical thinkers in an early age and connect that to civic engagement so there's kind of long-term pieces as well and then the other piece is that we can't you know you know forget that this is all happening in the context of not just a time of great uncertainty with the health challenges and the economic challenges but also the the increasing diversity of America and the as of you know the deeply unresolved conflicts around race and racial justice that have evolved and and affected all of these conversations in different ways and so I think I see a lot of the the attacks on democracy today is in some ways a reaction to the increasing diversity of the electorate and a strategy around that that we've seen evolve throughout the history of our democracy um but I sorry I think those elements as well should be on the table and considering all the different solutions but and that we have to look at long and short-term solutions and I have a lot of long-term hope because of the increasing diversity of our country because of the opportunities to invest now in civics education and opportunities to create an informed electorate for the future and also I hope because of other ways of of of communicating that are also developing that could be more grassroots perhaps through social media or perhaps just you know other ways to reinvigorate community conversations that enable local conversations and local educational efforts or media to fill the gap that that has been as of yet filled by national outlets like Fox News and perhaps you know through the localized increased localized conversations reinvigorate conversations based around truth and not partisanship and not talking points and all the rest that you see on the national networks well I I could sit here for the next two hours and ask you all questions and we wouldn't run out of them but I'm going to bring Connor on and we have a large number of questions from the audience we'll get to as many of them as we can Connor over to you thanks Steve before we turn to audience questions I just want to know I dropped a link in the chat there for an event survey we really appreciate your feedback this first question is for you Jennifer so is there any pending legislation in congress that would prevent states from overturning the results of a legitimate election and if so what can what can citizens do to support that no but there there needs to be congress really needs to reform the electoral count act they need to make it explicit that the vice president does not decide which electoral votes to count in and to that states that whole popular votes to choose their electors cannot later go back to their state legislature and select their own electors I think it needs to clarify that congress is not the place to relitigate challenges that have been raised or could have been raised in the courts during the state certification process I think the ECA which which by the way until a couple of years ago I didn't know a lot about and I think that's because it's worked for us for a long time due to social norms of just abiding by the rule of law where challenges to the outcome of elections are handled by state courts and by state election officials like secretary Benson the process has been that after all avenues to challenge an outcome have been exhausted that when the electors are certified by the state and the vice president then opens and counts those votes the house resolves any disputes but the state certified slate of electors is conclusive when it's delivered by the safe harbor deadline however we saw the ambiguity of the ECA gave room for Donald Trump to try and pressure state legislators to select their own slate of electors we know that the Trump campaign had several slates of Trump electors cast public votes I think some of those happened in Michigan on the required day and promoted this idea that vice president Pence or congress could certify these fraudulent electors or at least delay the counting of the electoral votes and and this is in part what fueled the riot at the Capitol on January 6 and it's continues to fuel the narrative of a stolen election so I think we need to be clear that 2020 and 2021 to some extent we're a playbook so reforms like that reforms things like the electoral count act they have to happen now I don't see any reason why we should get bipartisan support for that but if we don't make that change I'm certain we're going to see another attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities in that piece of legislative law and secretary how severe are the voting restrictions that are being passed in various states they're they're severe in a number of ways because they all trend towards making it more difficult for people to to vote in in in some ways by changing avenues that people have been utilizing to vote by mail or absentee particularly senior citizens and others for years causing which will cause a lot of confusion in the next election about how to vote if the way of voting has changed so if that's one reason it's harmful the second is that it's making it many of the many of the changes are making it harder for us to run elections and also harder for elected election administrators to preserve and protect the the accurate results of the election by enabling partisans to block certification for example we're seeing that in michigan the potential for that in michigan we're seeing that in other states as well so it's this combination of really two pernicious things that deeply harm our ability to ensure that the will of the people is preserved and comes to fruition in the results of elections and ultimately who has governmental power by limiting and working to decrease turnout through policies that research and data has shown have that impact and then secondly you know again making it more more easier for harder for us to run elections easier for partisans to overturn the results and then all of that is kind of combined in this ecosystem we're now in of misinformation meaning a lot of the policies then voters are not hearing the actual policies that are being enacted they're hearing it through a partisan lens or through a misinformation lens like this will create more secure elections when at least in michigan the pro the quote-unquote pro security changes would actually not add security provisions at all but they certainly would make it more difficult for us to administer the secure protocols that we already have so all that to say is it's all the reason why we need good election administrators and both says the i o in place and by good election administrators i mean simply professionals who put their work to ensure democracy works for all above any party or partisan affiliations or goals we've had that by and large for most of our democracy with some exceptions and i worry that we may see a replacement of a lot of those professionals with partisans in the future and that's again what some of these laws potentially enable yeah um shameless could you tell us about what role did social media platforms like facebook and parlor play in the organization of january 6 and the spread of disinformation and also like how they might be held accountable and changed yeah an outsize role is the short answer for two reasons right the first reason is for the prosecution if you look at the 700 people who've been prosecuted 80 of them have been prosecuted for the use of their own social media accounts so these are folks that were live streaming their crimes in real time that's not because they're bad criminals although they are bad criminals it's also because they didn't think they were doing wrong right so they thought the republic was getting taken over and they should live stream the revolution um so those mainstream platforms allowed for them to get a farther reach than they normally would the other thing to be said is is deplatforming does work if you look at just a purely putting inside whether you know the public policy questions of of allowing a billion dollar company to decide what free speech is but let's put that aside for a moment or maybe deplatforming's perspective it works we see that the number of extremists are joining groups like boogaloo boys or oathkeepers or proud boys goes down dramatically when they get pushed on to telegram and so maybe they go on encrypted apps maybe they could become a little bit harder but the radicalization pool shrinks and the mobilization pool maybe gets a little bit deeper but it's it still shrinks nonetheless i'm not confident there's going to be a much of a reckoning of the role of social media i'm also a little concerned that sometimes we blame social media and and ignore kind of the offline dynamics that because it's easy to blame facebook and and twitter for the world's ills and not because you know generally we should just be better people and that's hard work um so i'm not confident that that congress is is in a place where they're going to get anywhere near um some level of regulation on this i just i don't think they've got the staffing to to understand how these programs work i don't think they have the the ability to to cross the the the aisle to to roll out their sleeves and get anything done um so it's gonna have to kind of fall to civil society um to provide some level of pressure and that's again we hear this a lot it's always civil society we have got to inform our our citizens and things like that and we take away the responsibility from our elected officials sometimes on that and that that feels frustrating to me um but i think it's a reflection of where we are yeah can i ask seamus a follow-up question that the the deplatforming works is that do is that a shared finding like is that is that something that is now people understand widely in congress and in social media companies that that's true or so in a in a narrow question extremism groups or extremism movements deplatforming does work we've got studies and upon studies whether you look at isis or white supremacy or things like that that the number of supporters and recruits goes down dramatically when you get them off mainstream the lack of better work platforms now the larger question about you know politicians and public officials i'm not sure there's enough academic research behind that for extremism at large yes i mean i would just say as somebody who's pretty pro first amendment sitting where i'm sitting kai you would agree with this i'm a little uncomfortable when a sort of important politician is taken off a platform by you know the head of facebook or the head of twitter i understand um the value of this but i i think we get ourselves into some very tricky territory on the other hand there are people of significance in these parties who are advocating things that aren't true and you know so that i think that is a really troubling question uh for you know if you believe in free speech and of course they're they they have you know in essence weaponized the free speech argument to say things you know that aren't true war is peace um up is down elections are rigged um kai this question's for you um so you mentioned a little bit earlier comparing uh uh you know the big lie to the lost cause and this this reader wrote in asking if you think uh the big lie is going to persist uh like this lost cause did um and like if so like how might you undo a lie of such scale i guess they'd give me a noble prize if i could answer it well um i i all i can say and this is it's not a happy answer um you know that uh history suggests um at great cost um you know uh the previous big lie that constricted our democracy took a hundred years to undo um at least uh it took my parents generation being willing to give their lives in many cases um uh and certainly their bodies be subject to violence and all kinds of grave mortal threat um it took um people all over the country uh who had nothing directly to lose to decide that they also were going to put themselves in great moral threat mortal threat in order to undo the lie um and yet and still uh it took a hundred years and um and you know ultimately uh a really smart piece of legislation um that came to to fruition as a consequence of all of that work um but it is not a small thing to undo um and so i i it brings me you know no rhetorical joy to you know to signify in that way but history tells us that we are at the front end of a very long and very difficult fight here um and that we best get our minds and our hearts around that um if we are going to if we're going to preserve what democracy we had let alone continue expanding it to people who still remain outside of it even before we got to the big lie yeah um and to close out i'd like to switch gears a bit um one listener wrote in asking wanting to know how january 6 affected you personally so i was hoping you're just like yeah share share how this affected you and perhaps your your sense of american identity that's for me well i think uh we can go around yeah i well it's funny because i had spent the previous i don't know six months interviewing smart people who were saying this is coming um you know uh because of the you know the nature of my job but i just i i was mostly struck by the slow moving disaster of it um that so many people had said in great predictive detail that this was going to this is where we were headed um and it felt and still feels a little akin to climate change for me you know of like uh ever it's established these facts are established this problem is coming if we don't act um and yet action did not come fast enough and and i would all say like again i want to both Jennifer and the secretary pointed out rightly that people made good made the right choice and that prevented it from being a lot worse um and good and we should celebrate that but my main reaction on january 6 was like boy this we saw this coming you know um and that was so is frustration and terror at the idea that how predictable it was you know and i'll add to the other sort of perspective there and that you know from the moment the polls closed and we had a remarkably smooth election we were and i was entirely focused on that up until and and then making sure we got the results out there as soon as possible because i was concerned that as much time lagged between when the polls closed and when our results were announced that would create a space for misinformation to flourish but i believed that once our results were announced that would have minimal work to do after that not just work i mean we have election work but just in terms of you know battling misinformation and then that didn't happen and then we had to fight for the local certification of our elections based on misinformation and we got that then we had to fight for the state certification of our election in michigan and we got through that then we had to fight to make sure that uh an alternate false legislative electors that showed up with our state capital uh to claim that they were the true trump electors uh in a state that voted for for biden should be you know moved forward and so we got through that and protected the electors and then sent that to the national archives signed the forms that nighting got them out it was sort of every step of the way i kind of thought okay that's it we did it and we can move forward to preparing for the next round of elections and in january 6th i stopped thinking that at any point this battle was over in 2020 and i realized both that there was no bottom to how far people were willing to go to seize control of our republic and the presidency and i vowed to never lose sight of that again and to instead see this as the beginning see january 6th is the beginning of exactly what it's become a multi-year multifaceted multi-prong effort to dismantle our democracy in our country for multiple reasons uh and uh in in part because the increasing diversity of the electorate i believe so all that to say is that it really was a turning point for me in seeing the long-term strategy here and then recognizing as kai just point out that the clues were there all along and just as they are now the the efforts of dismantle democracy are happening in the broad daylight on in every state in this country and at the federal level and that's why we all must demand that democracy be the most or saving our democracy be the most urgent issue of our moment of this time of this election cycle and prepare to be in this fight at least through the next presidential election if not beyond jennifer sheamus you want to you guys want to add in sure you know 2020 felt like a marathon it felt like giving everything for me i had all the time energy commitment i could muster in helping support election officials in these really tedious boring minute details of a very complex process helping them to perfect those and communicate those with this i guess naive sort of idea that in doing so we would increase trust and we would strengthen the validity of the outcome of the election and watching all of that on on january six be replaced by by something much simpler this idea of theft where there were were no facts there were no there was nothing supporting that i was valid similar to the secretary was was disheartening but it also has sort of changed my perspective in that this isn't just something this isn't an election problem this isn't an election official problem this is a this is a national problem that needs all of us it needs solutions from from sort of every corner every organization every institution if we're going to turn this around and so well for out for for a moment there on the six i felt quite alone and deflated i also now feel energized i guess in thinking that i've got you know this magnificent sort of like group of of organizations and individuals that i can link arms with in in sort of figuring out how we're going to turn this around i hate following all of those things i think they're they're deep and and so a little background i mean so i spent 20 years in national security space um and i don't necessarily get scared easily but i definitely get concerned every once in a while and and as kai mentioned we were very concerned on late up to january six i didn't think anyone's really paying attention to the way the level they needed to um so you know january six happens i was a i'm a former congressional staffer i spent six years in the senate um i was always taught and always had the moment of kind of reverence when you walk on the senate uh floor or the house gallery you know these hollow grounds that great men and women who walked on and so when i saw the crowds go in there um frankly it frustrated me it offended me and so i thought it wasn't behooved me to do something about it and so um that night we want we got together as a as a group at the gw and said this is gonna be a lot of misinformation and disinformation at the very least we can provide the public with some level of of facts um and just hope for the best and so that's when we launched the the database and have all those court the 30 000 pages of court records there and things like that i am not naive enough to think that that's going to change anything in the near term but i do think we responsibility to history to at least document it and and hope that the better angels of our natures um went out great well that's all our time for today uh i want to thank each of our panelists jennifer secretary jocelyn shamus and kai for an insightful conversation thanks to steve for moderating and to mckinsey and company for their support and of course a big thank you to everyone who joined us for this important conversation i hope to see you all next time