Disinformation is everywhere, but what can actually be done about it?

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

Episode Summary

By necessity, monitoring and debunking disinformation has become a much bigger part of journalism and academia in recent years, but oftentimes the important work that people are doing on these matters is missing the larger context.

It is certainly worth reporting the truth when politicians, businesses, and activists lie about things. But what the public should also know is why this disinformation is being created. Almost always, it’s for political or religious reasons. And they are usually right wing reasons.

Unfortunately, this is a truth that many traditionally trained journalists and academics are still loathe to admit, nine years into Donald Trump’s deceit-filled political career.

One person who isn't afraid of telling the larger context of disinformation is my guest on today's episode, Samuel Spitale. He's the author of a very informative book called How to Win the War on Truth: An Illustrated Guide to How Mistruths Are Sold, Why They Stick, and How to Reclaim Reality.

The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.

Flux is a community-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please stay in touch.

Related Content

* Documentary filmmaker Jen Senko on how Fox News corrupted her father’s brain

* Big Tobacco pioneered the tactics used by social media misinformation creators

* Right-wingers depend on disinformation and deception because their beliefs cannot win otherwise

* Authoritarians think differently from others because they think truth derives from authority rather than reality

* Why America’s political polarization is ultimately an epistemic problem

* The economics of disinformation make it profitable and powerful

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

05:20 — The influence of marketing and PR

08:19 — Edward Bernays: The father of propaganda and public relations

12:21 — Marketing's hidden agendas

16:14 — The power of fear in media

22:03 — Fast thinking vs. slow thinking

25:36 — The Overton window and societal shifts

30:37 — The critical myth of right-wing populism

34:36 — Manufactured crises and moral panics

39:19 — Censorship through noise

42:16 — The danger of illusory truths

52:36 — The role of values over beliefs

01:01:39 — Promoting truth and critical thinking

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

Matthew Sheffield: [00:02:00] And joining me now is Samuel Spitale. Welcome to Theory of Change.

Samuel Spitale: Hi, thank you for having me.

Matthew Sheffield: So your book is a book about epistemology, but it is essentially a graphic novel in a lot of ways. So how, why did you decide to choose that as a format?

It makes it. More interesting.

Samuel Spitale: So yeah, when I pitched the book, I kind of pitched it as two different options.

It could be. Fully illustrated like a graphic novel. Or it could be more spot illustrated with just illustrations here and there. I knew I wanted a critical thinking learning tool that was a visual throughout the book and I knew I wanted a ton of charts and graphs and, other visual representations of data to show to illustrate a lot of the points.

And so, Fortunately, the publisher and the agent both thought that fully illustrated was the way to go. It would be the most accessible to the widest possible audience. And the other benefit is that it could add some levity and humor. To otherwise dismal economic theory and,

And humor helps the medicine go down, I guess.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, it, it definitely does keep it lighter in that regard. Yeah. All the, the cartoons. Yeah. So, so you're. What, what's your, your background in all this? Why, why did you, how did you get interested in these topics?

Samuel Spitale: Sure. So my background is I went to LSU, Louisiana state university in the manship school of mass communication.

And so my degrees are in advertising and media management. And then after college, I went to work for Lucasfilm and a kind of tangential space. In product development. But the older I got, the more my journalism roots and my writing roots kind of took hold. So I moved to LA to focus on storytelling and.

And around 2015, a lot of my writing kind of shifted more to real world, topics. And as I guess [00:04:00] the land, the political landscape and cultural landscape begin to shift. I found myself writing more and more about real world issues and. Seeing how many people believe things that were verifiably untrue my own family and friends included that I, I kinda became fascinated with, how, how do we penetrate these barriers of belief with, public at large, but you know, people in, my own family and friends and people in my bubble as well.

And so. I kind of went on this quest of figuring out all of all of the things that contribute to us being misinformed. And, my own background in media literacy and journalism obviously played a huge role. But I have an interest in psychology and sociology, which I read a ton of.

And so I feel like, those all helped paint a a picture of, all of the areas that we need to be informed or educated about in order to see how we're often sold things that aren't true. And so, this became the book and yeah, hopefully it works as a critical thinking learning tool.

And a primer in a lot of these areas that, the average person's just not versed in.

Matthew Sheffield: Mm hmm.

The influence of marketing and PR

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and, and one of those concepts that you discuss in the book length in multiple sections is the idea that No one wants to believe that marketing and PR affect them. And they don't, they think, well, I'm skeptical of the media.

And so therefore, I'm not susceptible to messages from others. And that's just not true of anybody.

Samuel Spitale: No, completely. And I even used to think that in, in college, like, Because even in school, we were taught that advertising and journalism or journalism, but like, advertising and public relations and marketing.

[00:06:00] Were taught to think of it in a very kind of narrow way, a very obvious way, like a movie trailer, or a billboard for, for whatever, for fast food, or, and those are very obvious examples of advertising. And we may or may not, be influenced by those clearly how do we find out a new movies coming out that we might want to see without advertising?

Oh, look, there's a trailer, there's a movie poster. That looks like something I'd be interested in. Whether we admit that, it's the advertising part that influenced us, or if the advertising was just an information delivery system you could debate, but what I find more fascinating the older I get is how, All of these forms of, communication have kind of been manipulated for bad.

And so, marketing isn't just, a new line of shoes or a new clothing store. It's, it's getting us to believe incorrectly that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Or it's, uh, it's all of these ways, I guess, political strategists and corporations have used these things in an underhanded way.

Like, I mean, today I probably feel like the biggest one is global warming. Many people still don't believe in climate change or the global warming is manmade. And that's because. The oil and gas industry has basically utilized the forms of mass communication to convince us that it's still a debate or the science isn't settled.

And so all of those ideas, the anti climate science messaging has all originated with the oil and gas lobby. And, it's no coincidence. They were the first ones to discover that global warming was happening and they were causing it. So, they kind of had to get in front of it. And so tracing the history of these messages or these things that we believe is always very revealing because, like [00:08:00] vaccines and autism or whatever it is.

Anything that's been debunked that people think may be an equally valid point, you can usually trace the inception where that idea came from, who sold it, And who stood to benefit from us believing the nonsense.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.

Edward Bernays: The father of propaganda and public relations

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and one of the people who really got all that started is something that you do talk about quite a bit that I think most people have never heard of a guy named Edward Bernays. Who was he?

Samuel Spitale: Yep. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. And I've always found Freud fascinating. So Freud was kind of the, the grandfather of psychoanalysis who believed that humans subconscious desires and motivations kind of drove them and explained everything about them. And Bernays basically took his insights.

Into psychology and applied them to marketing and advertising or public relations. And so he used these, kind of emotional manipulation quite successfully to get Americans to buy into things that we had not before. And, the most famous example of Bernays is getting women to smoke cigarettes because women didn't used to smoke.

But the cigarette companies, wanted to start selling to the other 50 percent of the population. So what Bernays did was kind of cash in on the women's rights movement and tied cigarettes to being torches of freedom. And so he had all these feminists smoke in like Easter parade. And it was a huge success and women started smoking cigarettes and then, suddenly lung cancer was an equal opportunity offender.

But Bernays, he, he did a lot. He got us to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, which we didn't do. He got architects to install bookshelves into new homes so that the people would buy more [00:10:00] books cause that wasn't something that they did prior, but the publishing industry hired him and yeah, there's just no shortage of products that he, got us to consume to increase sales, but he convinced us, kind of otherwise the hairnet and as another great example, like cafeteria workers didn't use to wear hair nets.

And so Bernays convinced health officials that it would be more sanitary. to wear hairnets not for sanitary reasons, but because the hairnet industry was losing sales. in the 1920s, I believe, when women were getting their hair cut into bobs. So they had less hair. So nobody was buying hair nets anymore.

So yeah, it had nothing to do with being sanitary. It was all to sell more hair nets.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And, and And it's important to note also that he was around before Adolf Hitler as well, and Hitler was, and Goebbels were interested in those techniques as well, and they put those into effect as well.

You want to talk about that?

Samuel Spitale: Yeah, I mean, they were so successful. Hitler or Goebbels, one of them had his book Propaganda, like, on their shelf, and they definitely used his techniques, the emotional manipulation. In riling people up to smear the Jews and to sell people on, the third Reich and the Nazi regime and their propaganda was so successful that propaganda basically became a bad name, bad word.

It became so soiled after World War Two that Bernays and, everyone else in the industry changed the name from propaganda to public relations. very much. So they basically just renamed it, or, but it was essentially still the same. And so, it, the, the principles of propaganda live on in all of its offshoots, public relations marketing, branding publicity all of those things are still propaganda.

They're all trying to sell us something. And whether that something is an idea or a belief or a pair [00:12:00] of sneakers, it's kind of all the same a political candidate foreign policy, whatever it is that's you know part of the part of looking at mass communications with a wider lens is Looking at the non physical things that can be sold through the use of propaganda.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and you even, I mean, you talk about the, the Tour de France.

Marketing's hidden agendas

Matthew Sheffield: I think most people don't know why that even exists. You want to just go over that real quick? I think that's an interesting little thing.

Samuel Spitale: Yeah, it was a publicity stunt. It was, I think the guy's name was Henri de Grange was like a newspaperman, and so he conceived the Tour de France as a way to sell more newspapers to cover it.

And then he eventually put his competitor out of business, but the Tour de France, has continued and now it probably operates more as, tourism for the country of France more than anything else. And, but yeah, so many things were conceived as marketing or advertising or publicity.

The coffee break was one of those that I didn't know of until I was researching the book. But basically when the, I think was it the Roosevelt administration that passed legislation that instilled a 15 minute break in the workday after so many hours, and so coffee, the coffee manufacturers got together and decided to christen it a coffee break as opposed to a tea break or a soda break so that people would turn to coffee for caffeine.

And hence we still today call it a coffee break. And that was an advertising initiative.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and, and yeah, and food has been a big yeah, food companies have been a big users of that, I think in large part, because I mean, their products are perishable, so they have to sell more of them.

And people have to buy them more frequently. And and you, you talk about. I mean, just like the idea that people think bottled water is good. Like, I thought that was a great example. A lot of people don't realize that bottled water is in many cases worse for you. Or the

Samuel Spitale: same, or it's just tap water that's been bottled.

Or the same,

Matthew Sheffield: yeah.

Samuel Spitale: The yeah, the main [00:14:00] difference is, is that tap water has to go through has to pass certain standards and is regulated, whereas bottled water is not. So, and then, so we're often made to think that tap water may not be safe and examples like Flint, Michigan, become very salient in our minds and kind of reinforce that idea, even if, it's a very rare example.

And so yeah bottled water I think now outsells soda which means a lot of plastic that is thrown into the ocean and is not recycled.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah And then on top of that Yeah And then on top of that also, a lot of these bottles are You know, filled with B they're made of BPA plastics and you're getting, you are getting microplastics in your blood from your water.

And because you have that belief. So in some ways it could be worse for you. And obviously, everybody has different water where they live. So I'm not going to say that it's better everywhere, but. Yeah. And but you also talk about Chilean sea bass. Like, I think that's something that's one I had not heard of.

That's, and it's kind of funny. Well, you want to talk about that?

Samuel Spitale: Yeah, sure. So yeah, the there was a fish called tooth fish that had a very bad name. And they wanted to sell more of it. So they basically rebranded it as Chilean sea bass, even though. It's usually not fished out of the sea. It's not a bass and it doesn't come from Chile.

I think everything about it is misleading.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. It's common.

Samuel Spitale: Yeah. And and actually something, I don't know, I don't think it made it into the book and I may have put it in the audio book if I had room, but one of the reasons it took off is because I think it was mentioned in Jurassic park. Chilean sea bass is used or eaten or something I read or heard.

I

Matthew Sheffield: vaguely recall it because they have a restaurant in there. Yeah,

Samuel Spitale: right. And so I, yeah, I don't remember how it's used, but apparently that coincided with a huge boom in Chilean sea bass on restaurant menus. And it was in more in demand, which is interesting. Yeah. Interesting. I don't know if [00:16:00] haven't researched it to see if.

If it was just randomly put in the film or if, it was paid to put in the film or somebody did it on purpose to try to sell more sea bass, either would, neither would surprise me.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.

The power of fear in media

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and some, and obviously politics is, is one area where marketing and propaganda are heavily used.

And there was a recent episode in one episode there was a recent moment where I thought it was interesting that the propaganda about bottled water and right wing propaganda came together at a conference put on by the Turning Point USA group. And there was a commentator who works for them named Alex Clark.

She was pitching, A water, bottled water company called Freedom 2. 0. And I'm actually going to play the clip just so you can see it. I don't know if you, if you got a chance to see it yet, it's absolutely hilarious. Water can make a

Alex Clark: statement. What if it could symbolize your commitment to values like freedom, individuality, and self reliance?

Freedom to owe water isn't just about what's inside the bottle. It's about the message It sends with every sip with labels like this water isn't free, but your speech is it's not just refreshing It's rebellious and it's unapologetic to drink this in public. Can you freaking believe it? But that's where we are It's a reminder that even the most ordinary acts like Taking a sip of water can be infused with meaning and purpose by choosing to drink freedom 2 0 You're not just choosing a brand you're choosing to stand up for what you believe in try freedom 2 0 and tag me in your instagram story For repost hold on drink break Wow Wow, it's like all

Samuel Spitale: yeah, it's like all of

bernay's I mean, it's not even subtextual. It is just, yeah, right. Yeah. Making all of these claims that have nothing to do with water whatsoever.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And it's funny for those who are listening that. Just wanted [00:18:00] to note for you guys that when she, when she says drink break at the end there, she actually does not drink.

So, yeah. Yeah. And but, but, but, and it, it's relevant to point that out though, because I, I think people who have more reactionary political opinions, they don't understand that their viewpoints are actually almost. Like they are fed to them almost entirely. The things that they believe are not true.

The things that they. Want or, or generally because of fear. And you do talk about that, the idea of using fear as a, as a, as a marketing tool as well, and that that's something that people should be aware of in the media that they look at.

Samuel Spitale: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like when I'm asked what's one of the best ways to not be deceived or to recognize questionable social media posts or information is.

notice when media messages appeal to your negative emotions and fear is probably at the top of the list, fear, anger. So anytime a politician or, a partisan media outlet is trying to invoke fear or anger in you, you are more than likely being manipulated. So if a politician is running on solutions to problems, for instance, so like let's use immigration as an example, if a politician is running on immigration reform and solutions to the immigration problem, then they're usually Appealing to our positive emotions and solving that problem.

We need to do this. We need to do this. We need to do this but if they're only running on Fear of immigration fear of immigrants taking our jobs fear of immigrants bringing crime without proposing solutions Then they're just trying to Cash in on the problem and [00:20:00] manipulate us. So one of the best things we can do when it comes to politicians and political advertising is notice who is running on concrete policy solutions to solve our problems and who is just trying to cash in on the fear or anger over the problem.

And. Right wing media is probably one of the worst defenders for fear mongering and making us hate someone because it works because fear and anger and hate trump all other emotions. So when propagandists appeal to fear, anger and hate, they're doing it very manipulatively. Because they know that if we're fearing criminals are fearing immigrants being criminals or taking our job, like those emotions will override critical thinking.

And you, you see it so often these days, Fox news is one of the worst offenders too. Because. Their so called news is very fear laden. It directs anger at an adversary. It makes you fearful of people who are not like you, which means, immigrants or gay people or black people or Jewish people or whatever it is.

Directing anger at an adversary. stirring up hate or resentment. All of these are red flags that you're being manipulated. They're all out of Hitler and Goebbels playbook. So be aware of when, talking heads on partisan TV or directing your fear or anger or hate at someone they're usually trying to manipulate you real journalists don't need to resort to emotional manipulation, Walter Cronkite, Edward R.

Murrow, these guys were monotone and stoic and delivered information. So whenever strong, negative emotions become part of a newscaster's delivery, They're probably up to no good. [00:22:00]

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And I, yeah, I think that's right.

Fast thinking vs. slow thinking

Matthew Sheffield: And one of the other kind of tools that you advise the reader about is the idea of distinguishing between fast thinking and slow thinking and that each of them has their place.

In our lives, our daily lives. But if we have, if we're engaging only in fast thinking that that's not going to be helpful so what is the distinction there between fast and slow? If you could, if you're

Samuel Spitale: sure. So yeah, fast thinking and slow thinking comes from Daniel Kahneman who was a behavioral economist Nobel prize winner.

And he discovered that the brain kind of operates and with two systems and ones fast think what I call fast thinking, which he did to fast thinking and slow thinking. So fast thinking is very intuitive. It's reactionary. It's emotional. It's you see a, see a red light and it means slam on the brakes.

You don't have to think, it's automatic. It's an instinctual intuitive. Or you hear a rustling in the woods and think it could be a bear. So, you look for a bear. It's, I like to think of fast and slow is like Lisa Simpson, Homer Simpson. So, you, Homer Simpson is very fast thinking, like he sees doughnuts and he immediately starts drooling, he's using, he's kind of ruled by his emotions.

He's not pausing to think critically about anything. He's just jumping right on in. Whereas Lisa Simpson is very reflective and considerate and she stops to analyze and. think about things more critically. And that's slow thinking, slow thinking takes time. We often don't have time to think critically about everything.

We rely on shortcuts in our mental system that so we don't have to think, it makes life easier. Like the red light mean slamming on the brakes. So, but the problem with fast thinking is that, advertisers and political strategists, they're very aware of this and that's why they appeal to those negative emotions because the negative emotions Trump positive emotions, they [00:24:00] Trump critical thinking.

And as long as you can, kind of appeal to our fight or flight response, which is. When you're intuitively fearing for your life, like, like the bear in the woods or a snake in the grass if you can make people afraid or angry or whatever then they don't stop to engage in critical thinking or slow thinking.

And so belief, so when we, we buy into beliefs, that's usually fast thinking because beliefs circumvent thinking a belief isn't a belief is almost the opposite of thinking sometimes.

Matthew Sheffield: And so it's a shortcut is basically what it's shortcut.

Samuel Spitale: And if you could sell someone on a belief, then it doesn't matter what facts are.

And that's often what we see happening because if that belief is then tied to anger, resentment. Hate, fear, whatever, then it makes it more, makes it stronger and more resistance, more resistant to all the facts like, in vaccines and autism is a great one. If you're, it's, it's so easy to be concerned for your kids.

And if you could do something as simple as not vaccinating them, then it makes you feel like you have a little control over your life. And so the fear that a vaccine could have a damaging effect, is very powerful. Even if statistics and data and research says the opposite, that feeling is going to trump that.

And so that's the danger with misinformation that feeds on those negative feelings. Easy to manipulate people in that way. I mean, that's what Hitler and Goebbels did, stirred up the negative feelings in people. They stopped thinking and they just, subscribe to those.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.

The Overton window and societal shifts

Matthew Sheffield: And and, and sort of expanded to the societal concept or scale, there's this idea of what's commonly referred to as the Overton window, and I think that that's, that I think is understanding that concept a really important way of understanding why American politics is so different.

[00:26:00] from other industrialized countries in terms of health care in terms of other social welfare spending and regulation of large businesses things like that What do you think?

Samuel Spitale: Oh great So I guess for the overton window for people that aren't familiar with that term It describes basically the range of ideas in a society there that are acceptable at any given time so You know, like, during, Hitler and Goebbels time, fascism became a very acceptable idea.

And that idea was not acceptable in the years after world war two, but we, see that it's slowly becoming an acceptable idea again, which is very scary. And I think a lot of these right wing extremist views that were previously unacceptable have been promoted and normalized in a way where the Overton window is kind of reversing and we're seeing that with.

Overturning Roe v. Wade the in vitro fertilization putting Christianity like in schools, the Christian nationalism movement, all of these things have been slowly moving the Overton window backwards. And so. We're seeing a lot of a lot of things kind of regress and it's kind of scary.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and, and part of that also is the idea that. The, the pretense of balance that they demand, like that's very important to controlling how the Overton window moves. Because if you can say that every discussion has to include all, Two sides of a story then that means that discussions about Civil rights activists have to include people who are in the KKK It means that discussions about hate crimes need to include neo nazis.

And we have to make sure that they're not censored, right?

Samuel Spitale: Pretense, right pretense balancing I think is what they call it right and it's that global [00:28:00] warming you have a scientist on there discussing global warming. And so you threw in You Someone who you know can hold the alternate view even though there really isn't an alternate view you know makes for good television, but it does not make for a good society and so Yeah so yeah, no the overton window, we we kind of have this naive notion that you know what the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice and that Things get better with time and more equal, more free more democratic more equality, but that's not always the case.

And we're really witnessing a backsliding of all of this the last 10 years. , we've seen it with the rise of populist demagogues all over the country, all over the country, all over the world. Like we just saw it with the elections and, uh, in Europe the last week.

The back, the backsliding, so it's, it's a real threat and it means that I guess, the average voter, the average person can't just be disengaged and lazy because you always have to be fighting for things that improve the world or make it better. Because if you don't, then, the bad actors are going to do what they can to, hoard power and wealth.

I project, I just watched the John Oliver thing earlier today. The project 2025 has bit on that and project 2025 is seriously scary. Uh, talk about democratic backsliding. It is. a unapologetic plan to dismantle democratic norms and give an elite, group of people more power and reverse the rights of, women, minorities, gays

um,

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, consumers and employees.

Yeah,

Samuel Spitale: everyone. It's taking power. It's very anti democratic. And so they do not want everyone to be equal. So I often think of and even, you think of politics this way, but, look at most arguments or debates or [00:30:00] policy discussions as does whatever the solution or the, the policy offered, does it give power?

more power to people who already have it in the hands of a few, or does it try to make society more equal and more democratic or protect people that don't have many rights already? And a lot of the things being proposed and discussed these days are taking power away from the little people and from people that barely have any power and putting it in the hands of Yeah,

The critical myth of right-wing populism

Matthew Sheffield: well, and one way of doing that is that they have pushed the idea that They are populists, actually that you, you constantly see Donald Trump supporters refer to him as, he's, he's the populist president.

He's the people's president. He represents the people. And what it is, though, it's a substitution. It is what you call in the book an illusory truth because basically they, they have taken, the, the original meaning of populism, which is Pushing for ideas that benefit the many against uh, you know, encroachment from wealthy people.

And invert and change it from that to saying that populism, no, that's actually about. Whether you believe things that are not scientific and that you have you know If you think evolution is not true Or you think that the bible is literally true or whatever it is You have these beliefs that are unscientific and you know are unprovable and or at the very best and at worst are well, they're pretty easily disproven If you have these untrue beliefs And you want to hold on to them.

That is what populism is in their minds. And so they push that to their, to the audience and they really have embraced that. It seems like,

Samuel Spitale: yeah, there, yeah. I feel like the the part of populism that they've really [00:32:00] embraced is, manipulating the masses through. Through emotions, more demagoguery than yeah, populism, but you know, the appealing to the common people, but using lies and distortions and negative emotions to do so.

And so because it really is the only people that are going to be rewarded with another Trump presidency, or it will be just like the first Trump presidency, only the rich and powerful, but you have to manipulate the little people in the masses in order to do that. Yeah. Because if you were to, campaign or like, oh, I'm rich and powerful and I want to give all my rich and powerful friends more money and power and screw everybody else, like nobody's gonna vote for that.

So you have to lie and manipulate and how do you lie and manipulate people to vote against policies and individuals? That are not in for them And that's by lying and misleading and I feel like I've been watching that for years, but now it is just so distilled

Matthew Sheffield: and

Samuel Spitale: And that's probably one of the more infuriating, parts of it all is that The people that would elect Trump and vote for Trump and support him are the people that will be hurt most by his policies.

And so they're, middle America, red States, they have a right to be angry. But none of the solutions that would help, help them or the economic system or their areas. are right wing policies. And that's probably the most infuriating part. Right wing policies typically only benefit the rich and powerful.

Matthew Sheffield: And, and it's also that, they, they will, try to get people to blow up the importance of concerns that they might have, which, let's say they're, they might be relevant to some people. So like, if you're, a high school [00:34:00] cisgender girl, you are directly impacted to some degree, perhaps on whether transgender girls are allowed to participate in your sport, but the percentage of people that for whom that is a concern.

Valid and real concern is almost zero because you, the, the percentage of people who are trans in America is about 0. 01%. And, and then, you

Samuel Spitale: know, Extremely small, and the trans, extremely small, and the percentage of that that is interested in playing sports is even more miniscule. And it's right.

Manufactured crises and moral panics

Samuel Spitale: It's, it's like all of the, the book banning the critical race theory, the EDI, it's all of those attacks are very planned and very orchestrated. And they all involve manipulating people and getting to believe things that are untrue for political power. And Chris Rufo is like such an instigator in chief there.

It amazes me how. You have these basically, trolls on social media that can create a moral panic around a non issue and use it to wield power in a way that strips rights away from people that are Takes power away from people who already don't have much power. And removes their voice and And they have been extremely successful with it that it's scary and that's the real cancel culture going on is not um You know, it's silencing voices that have struggled to have a voice for a very long time Especially, gay and lesbian transgender minorities It's a backlash to the rights and the social awareness Of that, the demographics lack of rights.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, exactly. And it's, I mean, [00:36:00] and the reality is that even if, if every trend, trans woman or girl was playing sports and if they won all the matches, like That's not going to happen, number one, and it doesn't happen. And there's a reason that you only see specific one or two individuals who are paraded constantly in right wing media, because there aren't any other ones who are winning.

They never talk about that. So, but, but let's say even if that were happening, these are children's games. That You're, you're, you're going to penalize people's daily lives based on being upset about children's games. Like it's, it is so absurd. And, and they do this with everything, like telling people that that they should be concerned about about immigrants taking their jobs when in fact the jobs left because.

The companies that, that the right wing promoted outsource the jobs. They're not there to be taken in the

Samuel Spitale: country or they pay so little Americans can't afford to do those jobs like crop picking. Yeah. And that's, the, the, the immigrant one is a great example because never do those politicians that claim that Ever blame or hold the companies accountable for hiring the immigrants or the day labor You know like if they were serious about solving that problem Then they would make those companies pay livable wages for the crop pickers, but we rely on that immigrant labor because it's so cheap and so but you know all of these examples are all manufactured crises that Basically a morally bankrupt political party has to create in order to move the needle because their policies do not work for the American people and they can't campaign honestly on them.

And so it's all [00:38:00] manipulation tactics. So once you, can interpret things as a power play that the powerful will do whatever it takes to maintain power, then all of the bad acting is explained. Because if you don't have facts on your side, if you don't have equality or democracy or any of those things on your side, then you constantly have to create BS basically to anger people, make them fearful to exploit, and I say this as a registered independent, like it's not like, I'm from a very conservative red state.

And it's it's, it's such a shame how so many cultural myths and distortions from, from right wing politics continue to work against the common people's best interest. Because we're still in the South, when I go home, it's still, the misbelief of welfare Queens.

And the poverty class still believes that minorities mooching on the welfare system is enough of a reason to, dismantle social service programs when they're the ones who would benefit off of from them. And yeah, we just, we so often have the wrong arguments and the wrong discussions because of the, the bad actors making sure we're talking about the wrong things.

Censorship through noise

Matthew Sheffield: yeah, well, and also it's the idea of of what Steve Bannon has called flooding the zone with s**t. Yeah, and basically putting out so much, so many falsehoods, so many things that people just They just either give up paying attention at all, or they just say, well, I don't know what truth is anymore.

So I'll just believe whatever feels good.

Samuel Spitale: Yeah. Political scientists call that censorship through noise. If you can flood the zone with enough noise. Then basically you're censoring, [00:40:00] the truth tellers and the, the you're censoring the facts. And so we're, we, we witnessed that all the time with, Fox news championing stories that are non existent and, right wing media, yeah, there's just so much of it.

And it does, it blurs the line, it blurs the it blurs the facts because if all you're getting are the constant lies about this and that, election fraud is one, the 2020 election is one of the biggest ones right now if that's all you're getting, then, you don't know what to believe, it's it becomes an illusory truth if you hear the BS often enough, it Then it becomes top of mind and you assume, because that knowledge is readily available, even though it's not knowledge.

That you assume it must be true. Like the welfare queen is another example. We've heard of welfare queens for so long. We assume that must be true. And it really never was. Welfare fraud is extremely rare. Just like voter fraud. Voter fraud is basically non existent. But because the right mentions it so often, we think it's a thing.

It's not a thing. And what drives me the most when I watch the news and I see. People, you'll notice that the, the the leaders on the right, the political strategists and the talking heads on cable news will often say, Oh, this percentage of Americans think don't have faith in our elections or believe the election was whatever.

They'll use that quote a lot to basically speak a lie because they can't say they know it's not true to say That the election was fraudulent or there was voter fraud. So if they convince their base that it exists, then they could then quote the majority of the base who think that and present that as if it's an issue.

And it's a way to mislead without lying which drives me crazy. Like I just want one of the anchors to call them out [00:42:00] and say yes But 85 percent of your demo believes that only because you keep telling them that and that's not true So why not?

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, and we know that they know it's not true because of the Dominion lawsuit that they Explicitly said behind doors.

The danger of illusory truths

Matthew Sheffield: We think this is nonsense these things that trump is saying but we're going to keep saying anyway, because our viewers want to be lied to I mean that's That is the danger of society right now is the the idea of illusory truth that people they they want to be lied to and it's It's a problem completely.

Samuel Spitale: You know, it reminds me of a quote that I think benjamin carter had in a book He wrote about fascism You said that basically Nazi Germany happened because a majority of its citizens deeply believed things that were verifiably untrue. And we're witnessing that like right now.

And it's not just that the common people believe things that are untrue. It's that, there's a group of powerful people and their leaders that knowingly lied to them and refused to correct them. And that opportunism is dangerous. And so there's no accountability and they know that because they don't, in the old days you only had the three big, networks.

And so, Nixon had to face accountability because all of the news media was holding him accountable. But we don't have that anymore. No one ever has to go on unfriendly media and be held accountable. They now choose to only go onto media that will help them continue to lie. And that is a huge problem for an informed electorate.

Matthew Sheffield: It is. And and I guess the way that that happens is. I mean, it goes to a more basic [00:44:00] general human problem, which is that the person that we should be the most skeptical of is ourselves. And that, as Socrates it was famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the problem is most people don't want to examine.

Samuel Spitale: It's also

Matthew Sheffield: scary to examine.

Samuel Spitale: It is. And, our psychology basically, does not work. In favor of examining, like our brain is very resistant to changing our mind and admitting that we've been duped or misled. And that's why so often they call the, Trump's following a cult is because once you're in a cult, you cease to think critically and you just believe everything.

Because if you. If you start to question one thing, then it opens the door for you to question everything. And so, our constitution basically, wants to, we, we want to save face. We don't want to admit we're wrong. And we sure as hell don't want to admit that we've been duped and suckered.

And so, it's, it's going to be very hard to deprogram these people, if that ever happens. Something dramatic or drastic is going to have to happen. Like I, I do often wonder, if, if on January 6th, if Mike Pence say would have been hung or if someone, if someone of note would have died or been harmed.

If that would have changed the conversation, like, that would have made it way harder to deny and to rewrite history. And what's scary is that it may take something like that, turn the tide of all of this. Because, to a large degree, there has been zero accountability for all the lies of the last eight or 10 years for the right.

Yeah, for

Matthew Sheffield: the [00:46:00] primary lighters. Yeah,

Samuel Spitale: The primary, right. But, even, I mean, but even with Fox News, they're still around, they're still lying. So even the dominion settlement, has not made them change their stripes. And there has not been any accountability in high office, the Republican party has failed to impeach Trump at every opportunity, they have, there's just, there's a still a huge lack of accountability and it's just a shame that, it, we may have to have a replay of the 1960s before the tide changes, like, I mean, look at JFK had to die.

Martin Luther King had like there, there was a lot of civil strife and a lot of The hate had to go somewhere and the hate did lots of people died before it come Well people

Matthew Sheffield: had yeah people had to see that it was actually real and dangerous And the same thing with world war ii. I mean like that, right?

Before so the World War two in the depression, those two things are what put fascism at bay in the United States for, 80 years, basically. And because people saw what happens when you believe things that are lies.

Samuel Spitale: I actually just watched that Netflix, the new Netflix, docu series of Hitler and the Hitler's rights to power and the Nuremberg trials or whatever.

And it was like six episodes or something. And what's interesting is, I mean, there are a lot of parallels obviously. But what's interesting is that, Hitler just kept getting emboldened. Like people would just bend over, bend over and, and it, it just made him worse.

Like every time he was not held accountable. Either by his own party or the public or other countries like we're just caving. Then he just kept seeing what he could get away with and we've been watching that play out with trump and you know kind of the entire republican party. And well, and

Matthew Sheffield: that's yeah And that, sorry, and that is the thing about, about, about authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism requires [00:48:00] conservatism to ascent. It cannot win without it, because there aren't enough authoritarians out there with these viewpoints. They cannot win democratic elections. But if they can get, if they can steal the identity of conservatism and make conservatives think that they are at such a risk of, like this whole idea, and it's very common in sort of right wing post libertarian spaces, like Christopher Rufus, who you mentioned, like, they, they, they tell people that the woke people, they're different from the liberals who you knew before.

They're, they're so much worse. They're so much more evil. They're so much more violent. They're so much more, and none of that's true. But, but what it does, the reason they say those things, and the reason that Fox, so Fox is constantly using phrases, trying to say that Democrats are communist, Democrats are, are fascist, Democrats are, Antifa, killers, zombies, Black Lives Matter, wants to blow up the cities.

They, they, they use that fear as a way to create assent from conservatives. So that they can justify their authoritarian power seizures, that if you feel like the BLM Antifa super soldiers are going to murder you every time you go downtown, to deposit a check or something or go, go to lunch then.

That will justify them saying, Well, then this is why we have to send the police and militarize our cities. And we need to build these camps for for unauthorized immigrants. And I mean, that's what this is about is building that assent from conservatives and conservatives need to wake up to that and understand you are being manipulated.

Samuel Spitale: Yeah, absolutely. It's that the whole rejectionist voting or positive polarization, as long as you can. Smear the other side or smear your opponent or get people to hate your opponent. You don't have to s stand for anything yourselves, or [00:50:00] you don't have to reveal, you don't have

Matthew Sheffield: to offer anything.

Yeah, don't have to offer

Samuel Spitale: anything. You don't have to reveal what you're really up to like, and Yeah, as long as you can, direct your anger and an imaginary boogeyman. And that's right, what we're seeing, I, I always when I look at the social media posts with stuff, like the examples you gave, it's like count the ad hominem attacks,

Matthew Sheffield: like,

Samuel Spitale: like, you, you're on the wrong side of an issue.

If you have to use six adjectives to describe how bad someone is without actually saying what they've done, like, and it's just all fear mongering, there's no truth to it. It's. Stats and data are not on their side. Just maligning people for, stirring the hate again.

The appeal to negative emotions. Um, but yeah, there are so many boogeyman that the right use that most of the right actually can't even define what they are if they had to, you had to, you had the question of what is woke. What is Antifa? They probably, they definitely would have an intelligent answer, but they probably wouldn't be able to answer all.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, well, and, and it is interesting that some of these, epistemic problems, like they existed, In the, the worldwide left when the USSR was around, out there pitching an authoritarian form of communism. And you did have people who, who really did actually had.

Put it into their heads that the USSR was a humane And positive, entity that was out there for peace anti imperialist You know all this stuff and none of that was true and so That stuff kind of got burned out on the on the american left with the collapse of the soviet union But none of that nothing like that has happened with the right in the united states for them to understand that the stuff doesn't work For them.

Yeah,

You

Samuel Spitale: Right. And it's, yeah, I just, yeah, I don't know what, what, what it'll take [00:52:00] to to to change and deprogram such a large swath of the American public.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, it's a, it's a serious thing to be concerned about. And, but I mean, you do, at the end of the book talk about some, in the conclusions.

And one of them that I think has a lot of merit is the idea of getting, getting people to excuse me, I gotta say that again. But at, but in the end of the book, you do get into some of ideas about, the methods or ideas that could be useful to counteract some of these ideas. And obviously.

Good education system is obviously going to be pivotal to that.

The role of values over beliefs

Matthew Sheffield: Um, but another one is getting people to understand that, to think about that values are better than beliefs and that beliefs are things that can change and that there's nothing wrong with them changing. As long as you understand what it is that you want, like you should want values rather than beliefs,

Samuel Spitale: right?

Absolutely. Values psychologist Adam Grant, argues this and, our values are our core principles, whether that's fairness or altruism or honesty or integrity. And, we should be basing our identity on our values and those kind of principles as opposed to, our tribal loyalty or our belief.

Because our beliefs can very often be wrong, but, if you value, life, for instance, if you're pro life and you really value life, then, what are the policies that prove that? And, restricting healthcare or abortion access isn't really one of those policies. Like, and, if you're pro life, Then that means you should be, you should support then universal health care or free childcare or a strong social safety net.

That would encourage, people to have more Children. It would be that's the number.

Matthew Sheffield: That's the number one [00:54:00] reason they don't because they can't afford to. Right. That is the number one reason.

Samuel Spitale: And it's just so, like I, the pro life or pro choice debate is to me one of the most infuriating because when you What I'd like to say is, okay, you want to make abortion illegal.

How does that solve the problem of abortion? Because regardless of it's legal or illegal, abortion statistics are virtually the same across countries that are legal or illegal. So you're not stopping abortions. You're just making it unsafe and dangerous. And, we know what would, what would lead to fewer abortions, birth control, free contraceptives.

A strong social safety net, a stronger less inequality. So that

Matthew Sheffield: sex education,

Samuel Spitale: sex education, poverty stricken, having a chance at a better life because the majority of babies that are aborted or in the poverty class, and like the free economics guys point out that. When you restrict abortion access, then the poor who won't be able to have an underground abortion as easily as the middle class and the upper class, then they'll have more babies and those babies will be trapped in intergenerational poverty.

So the parents will earn less money and the on and those children will grow up unwanted and unloved, which means they'll have more psychiatric disorders. And they'll turn to crime if they're in a poverty, poverty stricken area. So more unwanted children means more crime, more societal damage down the line.

And so, again, our values, do we, if we value life, then what are we going to do to protect life? And and it's, but it's, it's not really what it's about. Pro life is just a marketing slogan, it's branding,

Matthew Sheffield: For controlling women.

Samuel Spitale: For controlling women, and that's what it's always about.

Yeah. I just, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and another example, though, about, just to go back to the values [00:56:00] of why people should think about that is that when went back when there was the controversy of. Whether there should be same sex marriage The most common talking point against it was to say that you will destroy the institution of marriage If you allow people of the same sex to get married and So that hasn't happened Yeah, it it and and the intervening years have proven that that's not the case at all and in fact that if you Want to support families and you want to help society be more stable Then you should allow more people to get married.

It's good for society if you just you say You

Samuel Spitale: know, it's right and which that argument always struck me as just ludicrous But it also infuriated me when I would hear them talk on the news and you'd have two people arguing why no one ever said, well, Canada did it years ago. How has it destroyed the sanctity of marriage in Canada?

Like, like I, the questions I would want to say. To put them on the spot. No one ever says but right. It had been legal in many countries and, it didn't change anything.

With gay couple getting married in no way will affect anyone else. Period. Like, does your marriage affect anyone else?

Like, yeah, it's just so ludicrous. But it's an excuse for hate because. So many things are power and hate and yeah,

Matthew Sheffield: but you, you, you did highlight another thing that I think is also important. And that is so authoritarianism requires the, the tacit endorsement or sometimes endorsement of in tacit or, or explicit the endorsement of conservatives.

But it also requires people who are in the center to left to give them undue respect and to do what you were saying, to not actually force them to say what they want and to not, and to never make them actually come [00:58:00] confront things that they don't think about. That doesn't happen. Like when you, when you go on, look at these news shows on cable TV or, the Sunday political shows.

The debates that they have are not debates. They're not, they basically are, somebody gets to state their opinion and then someone, and then the host says, okay, now let's hear someone else's opinion.

Samuel Spitale: Now you read your

Matthew Sheffield: point pre

Samuel Spitale: prepared. Yeah. It's yeah.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.

Samuel Spitale: Drives me crazy. That it's probably my, I mean, when I watch CNN, that's probably my biggest complaint is that, you have the two political pundits.

Each basically just, reading their talking points pre approved by their party. And it's like, I don't need to hear either of those. We know it like, like again, if I, if I was the journalist having the panel, I would only have the experts, like if we're debating climate policy or something, like, why do you give a s**t what either political party's doing?

You only need the climate scientists there. Like, your job is to relate information to the viewer. And the political pundits are not relaying information. They're just giving you their opinions and, creating the pretense of balance when one may be lying through their teeth and the other one's just, creating excuses for their incompetence.

Yeah, I just, the, the entire that idea of just letting, two sides debate and spread lies drives me crazy. Because they don't and

Matthew Sheffield: the fact that, yeah, and, and like they don't so George Conway, the, the former Republican legal activist, he, he's a CNN commentator and he won recently called out one of the people that he was talking to you, he said, you're, you're just flat out lying.

That is a lie, what you just said, and the, the anchor who was there in that discussion and we'll, we'll play the clip for the audience so they can hear it. But. The anchor was angry at him for saying something that everyone knew was correct. That this [01:00:00] guy who was there was, was lying and that he wasn't acting in good faith.

But, and, but, so that's part of why the authoritarianism is metastasizing so much is that the people who try to cloak it in sort of reasonable terms Are never confronted about it and the people and so as a result the people who share those views They never are confronted by them either. And so they have this this you know these these alternative facts as his now ex wife Kellyanne Conway famously said or what you call in the book, the, these illusory truths, that cutting, cutting taxes increases revenue or that transgender people are coming after cisgender people.

Like none of these things are true, but in, unless you make the proponents confront reality, then they're just going to continue spreading lies and people will continue to believe it because. They don't see it like in the right wing media as you said, you know They never are they're not interested at all in fair and balanced presentation.

They're not interested in debates They don't ever book anyone who disagrees with them on their programs And then at the same time they demand that the all the other shows book them So so it's a completely completely one sided presentation of, of, of, of, of discussion and it's got to, it's got to stop.

Yeah,

Samuel Spitale: it's a bit, it's a propaganda outlet. Like it's telling people what to believe and what to think. And not giving them the tools or information to think for themselves.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, exactly all right.

Promoting truth and education

Matthew Sheffield: Well, so this has been a good discussion So for people who want to check out the book and keep up with you.

What's your recommendations for them?

Samuel Spitale: Yeah, yeah So the book is called How to Win the War on Truth: An Illustrated Guide to How Mistruths Are Sold, Why They Stick, and How to Reclaim Reality. And my website is samuelcspitale.com and I actually just started an educational [01:02:00] YouTube channel that is at How to Win the War on Truth, where I basically take a different topic and kind of, debunk the misinformation and clarify things. So, yeah, hit me up on any of those and check out the book.

Matthew Sheffield: SAll right, sAll right, sounds good. Thanks for being here.

Samuel Spitale: Thanks for having me.

Matthew Sheffield: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation. And of course, you can always get more episodes. If you go to theoryofchange.show, you can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes of this program.

So thank you very much and I'll see you next time.

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