Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
Robby Soave on Free Speech in the Digital Era
Join Roger in this week's Liberty + Leadership Podcast as he speaks with Robby Soave, senior editor at Reason and host of Rising on Hill TV. In this week's episode, they explore the importance of free speech, the dangers of censorship, and the relentless march of social media. Roger and Robby also discuss the harsh reality of media deception and the need for fact-checking, concerns over the monopolistic dominance of tech giants like Amazon and Google, and the wave of campus activism and its ramifications on free speech, a topic Robby explores intricately in his book, "Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump."
Robby also serves on the D.C. Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and is the author of two books, "Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump" and "Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future." As a journalist, Robby won widespread recognition for setting the record straight in two infamous cases of media malpractice: the 2014 Rolling Stone hoax article about sexual assault at the University of Virginia, and the 2019 incident involving Catholic high school students at the Lincoln Memorial. Robby is a graduate of the University of Michigan and a 2017 TFAS Novak Fellow.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by kglobal. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Hello and welcome. I'm Roger Rehm, and this is the Liberty and Leadership Podcast a conversation with T-FASS alumni, supporters, faculty and friends who are making a real impact in public policy, business, philanthropy, law and journalism. Today, I'm joined by Robbie Suave, senior editor at Reason and host of Rising on Hill TV. Robbie was a recipient of T-FASS's 2017-2018 Novak Fellowship and has since written two books, one covering the rise of campus activism, the other discussing the shifting opinions about tech and social media. Robbie has also written a number of award-winning pieces about media malpractice, demonstrating the high integrity he instills into his work as a journalist. Robbie, thanks so much for joining me today. It's great to be with you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.
Speaker 1:Robbie Suave. You were a 27-2018 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and, like many fellows, but not all, you turned your writing project into a book. The book is Panic Attack Young Radicals in the Age of Trump. I think you may have coined the word zillennials, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Did.
Speaker 1:I, I don't remember, I don't know that's to describe the millennials and Gen Z, and it's a much-used phrase now, but it's a fascinating analysis of both right-wing populism on campus and the woke progressivism that exists, and how they in a way play off each other. What inspired you to make that your project and write the book?
Speaker 2:Sure. I am so grateful to T-FASS and the Novak Fellowship for making it possible for me to do that work. I was a student at the University of Michigan from 2006 to 2010, where my Wolverines are having a great season.
Speaker 1:I'm really happy about it. Congratulations on the victory.
Speaker 2:The funny thing is the liberals, the left activists I knew on campus back then we had so many disagreements but I really appreciated how in favor of free speech they were, how important it was to not allow censorship, to support the First Amendment, even for clearly hateful views. What I noticed after I graduated from covering campus activism at Michigan and elsewhere from the 2010 to 2015 period is we started seeing a lot of intolerance of different viewpoints coming from that same ideological group that used to be so good on free speech. You remember the Nicholas Christakis encounter at Yale? Yes, charles Murray attacked at Middlebury. What went on at Mizzou? There was a series of events where I said, wow, something is really changing with young activists, that they don't value free speech in the same way. That's what prompted the book. I wanted to interview them and I wanted to understand where that came from.
Speaker 1:Could you just briefly summarize your findings in the book?
Speaker 2:Sure, what I found is, I believe there was a confluence of factors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lupianov talk about this too but there arose a kind of power in feeling victimized, frankly in feeling traumatized, and using that to delegitimize speech coming from the other side.
Speaker 1:That's a reaction to Trump I take it.
Speaker 2:It was a huge reaction to Trump. Trump elected in 2016. I think I covered in my book there were campuses that didn't close down classes after 9-11.
Speaker 2:They closed down classes after Trump was elected this was a similarly psychologically scarring phenomenon, but that was the idea that your discomfort. You had a right to weaponize that against speech. What's happened on campuses for the last 30 years or more is that a tremendous bureaucracy has grown to accommodate that feeling of weaponization. We're not talking about the faculty. I tried to disabuse, I think, people on the right of that notion that the problem is a leftist faculty is indoctrinating our students, the activists I talked with. They formed those views well outside the classroom, usually from other social associations. The problem was not the faculty. In fact, many of the leftist faculty were terrified of their students. They were afraid of saying something cancelable or triggering.
Speaker 2:It was a minority of students using the administrative powers of the campus to enact vengeance against people they thought had wronged them or said something that made them uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:So it's a version of the administrative state, but here it's the administration of the university that has new departments, new offices that have been set up to protect students Right.
Speaker 2:What else? If you're a vice president of student life and sustainable diversity, what else is your job but to investigate complaints of hateful speech and bias? Every hundreds of campus set up these bias reporting systems where, if somebody says something you don't like, you're literally supposed to do the equivalent of calling 911. Of course, that was going to lead to an environment where free speech was being stifled and where people had to watch what they say People on all sides of the ideological spectrum. It's not again. It's just as many left people being canceled for talking about an older version of leftism that's out of step, sometimes on even gender and race issues, in addition to the conservative professors and speakers who were facing explicit threats of violence. That kind of thing.
Speaker 1:But you would. It's obvious that faculty also. There's been a change there, I think, with many faculty who in the past were liberals, who at least were old-fashioned liberals who believed in free speech, and maybe less of a commitment from some of the perhaps it's the newer hires in some of these more obscure departments that have been created in the last 25 years, but faculty that's pushed back on free speech as well.
Speaker 2:Certainly. Again, I think the activism and the social aspect and the administrative aspect I'm describing is the most important piece of the puzzle. It is true that in more of these kind of trendy grievance, studies-based discipline there are faculty who, I think, come out of this new tradition of activism that holds free speech, suspect, that are more likely to align with that. As you're describing, the older leftist kind of people who were active on Berkeley in the 60s. Well, they were fighting for free speech. Their whole thing was no one gets to tell the students where to organize and what to say, and that really endured for a long time and it's being lost. I mean, you can see it in the direction of organizations like the ACLU stepping back on some of their historical commitments, even to vile speech, even a Nazi speech. Would they make that same decision again? I think it's dicey. And you've had organizations like FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formally just concentrating on campus stuff, now addressing free speech more broadly because there's a vacuum. There isn't as much defense of it on the left.
Speaker 1:Well, your book was published in 2019. Do you think subsequently, well, or bringing it up to today, given the October 7th terrorist attack and the support we've seen on campus for Hamas, how is that impacting this in this campus environment? We've seen strong demonstrations in support of, certainly, the Palestinians, but even, in some cases, people speaking out in favor of the attacks or Hamas opposition to Israel's response. Is that going to change this environment in any significant way? I think, because we're even seeing, of course, efforts to. You've written about an effort to penalize a professor I've forgotten where who said something about we need to destroy Hamas. They're conservative donors who are, by right, withdrawing their money from university, which may be a healthy thing, but efforts to get groups off campus. I don't follow who those groups are exactly and maybe they don't deserve to be on campus, but I don't know if it's speech that's driving the opposition to them or the cause they support. But where are we today?
Speaker 2:Sure, there's a lot I could say on this subject and it is worth pointing out that the Israel-Palestine issue has always been one of the most bitter and acrimonious feuds on college campuses. That was true when I was at Michigan, it's true everywhere. It brings out a lot of really unpleasant debate. It is an issue of great importance to the left, the Palestinian cause. I think it's fine and healthy to have pro-Palestinian activism given what's going on. I agree with you that some of the activism certainly crosses the line into. I mean, you can read the manifestos from the Students for Justice in Palestine. I think it's the largest activist group on campuses on behalf of Palestinians. You read the toolkit they put out in response to October 7th. It was very clear to me it endorses the terrorist activity.
Speaker 2:I think that's contemptible and should be condemned. At the same time, I think they have the right to engage in that speech. I think some aspects some conservatives who ought to be a little bit more careful here have gone. Obviously you have a right to say they should be canceled, they should be unemployable. I'm not taking issue with that, although even there we ought to be a little bit careful. I would certainly be against banning them from campus. I think you can see it in how the candidates have reacted to this.
Speaker 2:Vivek Ramaswamy sounded very different on this issue from DeSantis and Nikki Haley. He's younger. I think he's more in step with where younger conservatives are. It is a big issue for young people on the right fearing that they're going to become unemployable or lose opportunities because their social media history is being searched and surveilled and things they said that were controversial were punished. I think he pointed out that Thomas Sowell always said if you canceled me for the views I had as a teenager, I would have never become this famous conservative economist. I would make a warning to people who want to assemble lists of all the crazy radicals, and also the people who want to not give their money to the universities anymore.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm all for that, but I was for that for a long while Now you're waking up to this, just now you realize that there's hostile values to classical liberalism being inculcated here. You've been asleep at the wheel, my friends. Is that fair?
Speaker 1:Right, that's fair, it's important. It's a distinction that many people have trouble making the distinction between speech, as hateful as it might be, and what I would say is harassment or violence, or even pulling down posters that are put up properly about the hostages being held by Hamas. I think some people don't make the distinctions. Groups that advocate that block Jewish students from getting out of the library at Columbia I think it was.
Speaker 2:George Washington University, they projected these hateful messages onto the buildings. Yeah, look, I would say there's certainly hypocrisy here, because university administrations took very seriously. They used claims of harassment against free speech a lot in the past, which makes me a little reticent. Now I want to hear what the actual criticisms are. But certainly we don't want campuses or anywhere in the country to become hostile places for people just because they're.
Speaker 1:Jewish, or just because they're Palestinian, or because they're conservative or libertarian? I recall your book sold very well and was favorably reviewed in many places. Were you surprised by all the attention your book generated when it was published? Because I think I'd moved up pretty high on the Amazon list?
Speaker 2:I was very happy about the reception it got. It got a lot of favorable reviews. Obviously, I'm hardly the first person to weigh in on what's going to notice that man. Those campuses do have some funny stuff going on. I tried to distinguish my book by actually talking to activists and there are a lot of interviews with them to try to understand where their ideas come from and what their theory of social change is.
Speaker 2:I think other books in this space concentrate on the. They make it all. It's all ideological, it's all about the indoctrination. I think a lot of these kids are just leveraging, using the systems in ways that are very obvious and easy for them to do so.
Speaker 2:If you give power, if you say the person who has authority to address this issue, the person we all have to take our cues from in an activist, in a social setting, is the person who has the most trauma, who is the most oppressed, who has the most things they can cite, you create pretty dangerous incentives, especially because it's not all just gender, race, all of that stuff.
Speaker 2:What a lot of activists who don't have, who are not minority or don't have different sexual preferences or something. Well, how can I be listened to if I'm just a straight white male. Well, there's mental trauma. You can say you have mental unwellness and I can't think of anything worse for society than reinforcing and rewarding people to self-identify as mentally unwell, which is not to say that mental illness absolutely exists and I'm glad it's been destigmatized and people who genuinely suffer from it can get the help they need. But we're talking about the most privileged people in all of America and all of the world elite university campus students with all the power and authority and financial prospects they'll have when they leave Harvard and Princeton and other places, saying that they are deeply unwell for a power status reason in their social activist circles. I think I explained that more than a lot of other reporters who looked at the issue.
Speaker 1:Well, you took a minute to recognize the value of the Novak Fellowship. Part of the program is intended to identify promising young journalists with not a lot of experience yet and by giving you the fellowship help you write something, preferably a book, that would help advance your career. Is that something that is very important as a journalist? To have your first book published and leads to other things?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I've always wanted to publish a book. I was so happy to get it published and I had gotten a before I had gotten the fellowship. I had gotten a publisher to agree to publish it, but what Novak was able to do for me was to supply me with editorial guidance through the expertise of the people involved and then also because of the very generous money of the fellowship, I was actually able to travel to the campuses in order to do those interviews. I was there for activist events on campuses and the publisher wasn't going to pay me to do those things, so I was able to take time away from my normal duties. That was all because of the fellowship and it really made it a stronger book. It separated it from books of just people opining on the wackiness of what they hear is going on in the campuses. I was actually able to go there.
Speaker 1:That's what we like, that you could do reporting for your book. Let's move forward to your next book. This one will probably stir the interest of conservatives who tend to fear Facebook and social media. It's called Tech Panic why we shouldn't fear Facebook in the future. I heard you speak on it recently and Subway had a chance to look at the book itself, and it is fascinating. What was your motivation, first of all, for writing it? Was it that you realized so many people were ready to shut down media and digital media and social media because they were so concerned about its impact on our culture?
Speaker 2:Yes, I wanted to push back on the push for regulation for social media companies. That's coming, of course, from the progressive left, from the Elizabeth Warrens and maybe Klobuchar and Joe Biden's, but also, frankly, it was increasingly coming from conservative Republicans, from Josh Holley's and J D Vance's and Donald Trump himself and Ted Cruz. I thought these arguments were pretty unpersuasive and I wanted to look at some of them and I, like other people in libertarian contrarian the right, I understand how social media has made moderation decisions that have harmed us. I've spoken out against them, I've written against them, I've dealt with them personally. I've had reasons been impacted by it. My YouTube show at the Hill has been impacted by it.
Speaker 2:So this is not an apologist for big tech perspective. There's been a lot of stuff they've done that's not good. But two things. One is at the same time, we have to recognize that social media has been good for non-liberal perspectives, for contrarians, for independent thinkers, for conservatives. Think of all the media organizations, your daily wires, your daily collars, your break-barts, your federalists' reason, etc. That have thrived because of Facebook, frankly, and because of Twitter and because of YouTube. So if we broke those companies up, it'd be shooting ourselves in the foot. I suspect Elizabeth Warren knows that, which is why this is such an appealing idea to her.
Speaker 2:And then the second piece of it is that, as time goes on, the more we see of the bad things that social media has done, the more we learn that government bureaucrats told them to do it, and so there is certainly a problem. But it's not a problem of Twitter and Facebook freely choosing to do things I think are bad. They were dictated to them by the CDC and the State Department of the FAA. It sounds conspiratorial, but it's all been verified and publicized. We all know it's true. So I'm mad about that and we got to work on that problem, but that's not a problem. The companies are the last link in this chain of censorship. They didn't want to do a lot of this stuff. They fought it frankly and then they got. They got. They caved eventually, but we need to fight that.
Speaker 1:I'm not alone and worrying about the impact of social media on, say, my grandchildren I'm an old fogey here and of another generation and I see my kids on their phones all day or my grandkids rather, it makes you worry or young people in general, not so much my grandkids they are not at that much, but I got to clear the record so my daughters don't have to say that to me. But in your book you offer a very balanced and thoughtful analysis of this and perhaps would make the case that the impact of social media isn't as strong as some people fear that. Kids involved in everything from gaming to being on social media. It's not going to turn them into subservient citizens who just follow the dictates of the state or something. But what should we worry about? This or not?
Speaker 2:I certainly think-.
Speaker 1:Obviously, government doesn't necessarily, shouldn't be playing a role, even if we are worried.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's the main thing. I mean. We don't want to turn government into the parent of everyone, because kids are different and I certainly think there are some young people for which social media has been a bad influence, particularly too much social media. I absolutely support empowering parents, individual parents, to make better choices for their family members keep the phones out away during the dinner table, bedtime, etc. Maybe they shouldn't be in classrooms. I'm so open to all of those arguments that Jonathan Haidt will make, but the problem is that every kid is different and every family is different, and a lot of young people are using social media in healthy ways to communicate with their friends, to learn news.
Speaker 2:I mean my YouTube show. It's on YouTube. You can see clips of it on TikTok and Instagram. Reason makes videos that are on those platforms. I want young people to be consuming that content. I think it's fresher and more diverse, more ideologically diverse, than what they would be getting if they just had to watch CNN all day or Fox or whatever the cable news is. And that speaks to the fact that all of these same criticisms of social media were made of video games before that, the TV before that, the radio before that, the written word in the time of Socrates. This goes back. There's nothing.
Speaker 2:He didn't make it, he didn't survive it, right it didn't work out for him, but people have fretted about the impacts of new communications technology on society for a long time. That doesn't mean all of the concerns are unfounded, but I think the downsides are overemphasized and you better have very persuasive evidence that social media is massively harmful before I want to hear any arguments that the government should be doing something about it and arguments that will certainly run up against the First Amendment. I mean the Supreme Court under Scalia said the state of California couldn't restrict sales of violent video games to minors. That was a conservative author decision and I fundamentally don't see what's different about social media.
Speaker 1:So you don't worry that Amazon and Google are going to take over the world and run our lives in the future, like some, I mean.
Speaker 2:I don't want anyone to run my life, but Amazon understands me and what I want a lot better than US Congress does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no. But you hear, of course, concerns by many on the right who think we need to bring antitrust enforcement against some of these big companies, and I've argued with them that if you look at, take a snapshot of the Fortune 500 25 years ago, 50 years ago, the year it was first put out, the companies that were in the top 100 then barely make it 25, much less 50 years. They're merged, they're out of business. And so I went out on a limb in one discussion with some people and said I don't think Google even be around in 50 years.
Speaker 2:You're right, you're probably right. The change in the tech space is even more dramatic than normal companies. People talk about the dominance of Facebook. That you know. It's in the subhead of my book. But even that feels a little stale now because it's a year and a half later and I don't think people are as worried about Facebook as they were then because it's kind of it's not appealing to young people anymore. There's so much it's ephemeral. New things take off. I you know, when I was a young person so a while ago it wasn't that long ago it was all my space and AOL, instant messenger. I couldn't imagine as a teenager living without those services. They are deader than dead. You can't even. They don't exist. Essentially, then it was Facebook and now it's. You know, now it's something else. By the time they get around to. If they were crafting some anti-tik-tok legislation, there will be a new thing by the time that. That is it. It is a self-correcting problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and when these technologies first arrive, we're so excited about it. I mean, I remember when Amazon came along. You may even mention that in your book. You know we were. You can get something shipped. You buy it online. It shipped you in a few days or in 24 hours, and now even the same day, and it opens the whole world to you. Every book you want to find is on there. It was this thing that we were all celebrating.
Speaker 2:They have perfected the art of meeting human need and progressives want to destroy them. And I don't. I understand why progressives want to destroy them. I don't, for the life of me, understand why substantial numbers of conservatives are motivated by this, are going along with this. These are institutions that are doing more good for humanity than any others. And there are issues, but like, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
Speaker 1:Now, in addition to your work on these books, your work at Reason, you host Rising on Hill TV. How has that been? You know, doing television versus kind of the traditional reporting you've done?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really enjoyable. Writing is always my first love and I've you know, I've worked at Reason for 10 years now and over time I've done more and more video, including For Reason, in part because, I mean, this speaks to the conversation we were just having but the changes in social media Facebook has pivoted away from news in recent years. It used to be very easy to go viral for a written piece on Facebook. That has died off for all media institutions, not specifically for the ones I'm involved in that's across the board, and so YouTube is a more reliable generator of traffic. It's easier to get people to pay attention to a video you make.
Speaker 2:So I've started doing more of that for Reason and for this show that I host for the Hill, which is a debate show with a right and left perspective. I'm, you know, right-leaning libertarian or libertarian from right-wing media, and my co-host is a far-left, bernie Sanders former press secretary, and we have it's a debate show. We have arguments on Israel-Palestine, we have some angry arguments, we yell at each other, but I think why it's successful and people watch it is there's very little of that anywhere else in media. I mean these so-called debate shows. They don't actually feature debates. People news is dying in part because it doesn't feature real argument. It's just somebody telling the audience exactly what they want to hear. That's true of right, center, left, et cetera. And what both Rising and, I think, reason do is try to feature provocative, interesting content that there's a massive online audience for. That your traditional publishers have not tapped into.
Speaker 1:So if people listening want to watch that, they just put Rising into their YouTube channel browser and they can subscribe or listen to some episodes.
Speaker 2:Yep, it's for the publication in the Hill and if you search it you'll find it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good, that's great. Now you've had at least two I'm sure more, but two very noteworthy experiences exposing media malpractice. I'll call it One involving the Rolling Stone and the story they did about an alleged rape at the University of Virginia on the campus there. Can you talk about that, and what led you to kind of expose the truth about that?
Speaker 2:Sure, I'm happy to. That was my first major success story. I got a lot of attention for it. It was written here at Reason in 2014 or 2015.
Speaker 2:This massive reported piece in Rolling Stone about a really horrifically described gang sexual assault at the University of Virginia. I read it and I thought about it for a while and I identified, based on the reporting I've been doing on campuses and on sexual misconduct. There were a lot of problems with the reporting on it and what was described was so awful. It was ripped from a horror movie. Specifically, the detail was the victim did not describe being drugged or intoxicated. I've never seen a single one of these cases where you have a fully conscious victim attacked by a group of people. What if she went straight to the police? She knew who they were.
Speaker 2:According to the story, it was her date who led her into this. She knew his name. His name wasn't reported in the story but according to it it wasn't a hazy. I was 3 am, I was drunk, I don't remember it was no, she knew who did it. Then the question became well, why isn't there a statement from this person? Was he not asked about it? Why was he not referred to the police. It turned out she made him up and the reporter did not verify. There were so many ways the reporter in question for Rolling Stone could have verified that this was entirely made up. She described in the story the reaction her friends had had. Well, later the friend said none of this ever happened. The victim, jackie that was her pseudonym went to elaborate lengths to deceive Rolling Stone and they fell for it hook, line and sinker. Initially I got a lot of criticism for saying that I think there's something suspicious about the story because it was like you're not supposed to question when people say those things, but it very swiftly.
Speaker 2:It fell apart utterly. And then Rolling Stone ended up getting sued by the fraternity, by one of the deans on the campus who was portrayed villainously. She sued successfully number of successful lawsuits and that reporter has never written anything since.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you've had other examples where you've at least been working to hold reporters accountable, right.
Speaker 2:Yes, I've done a lot of media criticism that came. That was part of the my next big one, which was the Covington Kids, the Lincoln Memorial. Everybody has kind of heard of that one by now. I got really lucky in that case because at the time I sat down to write something about that story about the kids being supposedly they hit a harass this Native American man and they were conservative kids with MAGA hats.
Speaker 2:They were there for a pro-life rally. Supposedly they were racially insensitive to this Native American man At the time. I sat down to write something about it and it was based on a short video clip on Twitter. The longer video footage had just been published by some random account and I happened to see it and I watched the whole video footage. As you're watching it, you just have that like your eyes open wide and you're like what? Like there was so much else going on, including this other group of crazy people black.
Speaker 2:Hebrew Israelites. If you live in DC, you've probably run into them in gallery place or Chinatown every now and then. They shout derange things at women and Jewish people and gay people and white people. It's a crazy group. They had been actually been harassing the conservative boys for like the better part of an hour and then the Native American man entered this fray for reasons that don't really are not understandable, but the boys certainly did not harass him. The main alleged culprit, this Nick Sandman kid who was, you know, stared him down and got in his way. It's just crystal clear. It didn't happen that way whatsoever and it's textbook example of. You know, don't believe a out of context short video clip. You know, maybe wait for more, for more feedback. And then, yeah, I was really glad I did it. It became the defining article of my career and did lead to even the mainstream media admitting in several cases that they jumped the gun on that. Cnn admitted that.
Speaker 1:Washington Post, I think, settled right Undisclosed settlement with the law. Yes, there were several lawsuits.
Speaker 2:I mean that was a different case than the Rolling Stone case. In the Rolling Stone case they could have known if they had done better reporting. In this case, I do feel a little bit better for the media companies. They were straightforwardly deceived by that Native American man. He gave quotes, he mischaracterized the situation to these media outlets and then they had to pay for it. I don't know how you feel about libel laws. I think he should have had to pay for it.
Speaker 2:He's the one who said something that was untrue. They said he said this yeah, so you've got to be aware of the harm of the false witness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Now, recently you exposed an organization called the Global Disinformation Index, which was fascinating when I heard you talk about it. It's been written about recently. Could you talk about that entity, which is funded by our State Department?
Speaker 2:Yes, isn't that nice, our government funding.
Speaker 2:Funding all these organizations that are hostile to us. This is part of this misinformation fighting network of groups that have a lot of bearing on the situation in social media, because what we found out is that social media companies face tremendous pressure to take down provocative content, to take down content about COVID that I think is perfectly defensible and reasonable to discuss, having to do with lab leak origins, vaccine policies, masks, those kinds of things, election stuff. It turns out there's a bunch of groups that are, in some cases, government funded, and the Global Disinformation Index was one of them, a British group that was pressuring advertisers to stop working with media companies that have content that is conservative or is that? It was COVID-contrarian, or a bunch of other things. Among the groups listed as most dangerous on their handout was Reason where most dangerous.
Speaker 1:Badge of Honor. Badge of Honor. Yeah, I don't know if I want this to, that's right.
Speaker 2:But the reasons they gave for us being a dangerous site were that they took issue with our commenting policy, which I wasn't clear. I think they just that we had a commenters' policy. They claimed we don't have authorship information, but all of our articles are authored. They said we didn't have a corrections policy, even though Catherine Maggie Ward, our editor-in-chief, is one of the most militant corrections enforcers I have ever worked with. It's downright annoying. The most minor things need to be publicized Error. This has been fixed. Other media institutions I've caught them stealth editing over and over again when they change something in the article without telling you it's been changed.
Speaker 2:That is a routine practice in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Atlantic. We don't do it because Catherine doesn't allow it. And you say we're a dangerous news media outlet for not having better policies on this.
Speaker 1:How dare you? Catherine, by the way, is a former Robert Novak journalist and fellow as well.
Speaker 2:Exactly yes, and we are grateful at Reason to have many former Novak fellows among our midst.
Speaker 1:So you looked into this, so I criticized.
Speaker 2:I tried to get in contact with them. They didn't answer, and then what I did was I got in contact with a journalist named Ann Applebaum, who was listed on their board of advisors and she's a principal journalist. I don't agree with all of her foreign policy. Washington Post affiliation in the past yes has written very eloquently about the eagles of communism.
Speaker 1:The gulag yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, she's great. So I asked you know well, given, given especially that what this group has said about the lab leak theory being despicable, and if you're talking about this, your racist and conspiracy theory, given what we've now learned, the energy department has just said this is the more credible theory would you, you know, would you counsel this group that you're the advisor for to to kind of like to say they shouldn't do that anymore, they shouldn't punish Advertisers, should not refuse to work with media outlets to talk about it? She responded to me what are you talking about? I don't. I'm not an advisor to this group. So they had listed her name, as she said. She had one conversation with them ever. They had listed her name as an advisor, like that kind of sounds like their author.
Speaker 1:The disinformation.
Speaker 2:People are doing disinformation. Immediately after that, they took her name off their website. So the point is a lot of these gatekeeping organizations that say we're identifying misinformation, which is always being used now as a pretext for censorship, are no better at fact checking than anyone else, and they ought not to to be engaged in this sort of work. Every time I hear the word misinformation, a red flag goes off for me. Now what are you really saying? Are you saying someone had an opinion you don't like? More times than not, that's what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, have you tried contacting other members of their so-called advisory board? It was just her. I think it was just her. No, I think they took the whole page down, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:And they're just, by the way, they're not the only organization doing this. The media matters is put a lot of pressure on on X now and so on, and there are some really suspect practices. That takes good independent reporting to do. Gabe Kaminsky at the Washington Examiner has done a lot of great work on it. There are other people writing about it, but it's a. It's a. It's fertile ground for uncovering some really ungood work.
Speaker 1:Well, tell me what a typical day is like for you and your on your work day, are you?
Speaker 2:It's busy so I get up at 6 30. I hit the gym, I have breakfast. I review the topics I'm going to discuss on my YouTube show Rising. I go there about nine. We tape Rising from 10 am to 1 pm, monday through Thursday.
Speaker 1:So it takes up a chunk of time. It's a lot of prep plus three hours of taping.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a full time job. It's that we make a lot of content and then after one o'clock I come here to Reason. I catch up on the work I have to do here, which involves writing. I do a little bit of editing. I edit Lenore Scanesi, who does the free range kids stuff. I'm now the editor of Reason's Crossword, which runs on Fridays.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, I saw that in the recent issue.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, we're very happy to have added that feature. That's a great feature. And then I, once, once or twice a week, I make a video for Reason as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, I got the latest issue today in the mail and I saw the cover was Florida.
Speaker 2:All about Florida. It has a Florida crossword in it.
Speaker 1:Okay, good, good, I look forward to reading it. Want to give us a sneak preview of what the piece on Florida's about. Maybe you haven't read it yet.
Speaker 2:The main piece on Florida, is that the one by Eric, I believe. Well, I saw it on my mail stack when I left to come to the studio. There's a lot of reporting in there about the economic situation in.
Speaker 2:Florida and if it, you know, matches what the narrative is about Florida. Obviously Ron DeSantis, a Republican candidate, very associated with Florida and has been a very successful Republican and is known for a lot of things, that that we applaud the COVID, some of the COVID, mandate, resistance, the economic situation. But then also, you know, we want to be fair and we want to hold him accountable in areas where we think he's been been less good. But certainly I think Florida is better model for the country than California.
Speaker 1:But yeah, he and Governor Newsom recently locked horns over that issue. Yes, I don't know if you caught any of that, but yes, I did to catch a lot of that it wasn't fun to watch, but it was a little bit interesting.
Speaker 2:It was, Although I wish to, I wish. It almost felt like it was ganging up on Newsom, because Hannity has the same. You know, you want to independent moderator. You want a moderator on each side, like we do on my YouTube show.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So if they want to reprise that debate, reason or rising would be forums welcome to have them.
Speaker 1:Well, have you started thinking about another book, or do?
Speaker 2:you know, that's not been that long? It's not been that long I have thought about another book.
Speaker 2:I would like to actually write a book specifically about the misinformation stuff I was just talking about I think there's a lot more to dive into there how that's being used as a pretext to violate free speech rights, where the concept even comes from, because, honestly, it's like a military term about disinformation is trying to deceive, you know, make them think the Normandy landing is occurring over here. Right, it was, it's a military term that has now is now being used by the mainstream media to describe just everything they disagree with yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm interested in digging into that more. That doesn't work out. Yeah, I have some fantasy novels, some sword and sorcery I would always love to publish. I don't know if Novak Fellowship has a specific fantasy no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:you could fund one though.
Speaker 2:All right with my profits from my fantasy book. I would love to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the disinformation. You know, I've seen that. You've, we've all seen that. I think even with the newspapers that I don't know if it's 10 or 15 years ago or more, they started fact checking. You know, the fact checking is often skewed in a direction where it's used not to really check facts. Yes, Unfortunately, but the best fact checking.
Speaker 2:It's funny to compare Twitter X and Facebook on the fact checking. Facebook basically outsourced fact checking to third party activist groups that are terrible, that are very low quality and routinely actually introduce errors when they try to fact check things. This has happened at Reason this happened to John Stossel, it's happened to me where they'll flag an article, they'll blur it, they'll say this article is false because it makes X claim and they'll say what the claim is and I'm like that claim does not appear anywhere in this article. That's just your.
Speaker 2:You're misinforming again. You who say you have expertise in this are doing the misinforming, and if you try to push back when that happens.
Speaker 1:they don't respond probably To me they respond.
Speaker 2:I wrote a book about it. I have contacts there. I can go to high up people. This is not an avenue for regular people out there when you're censored, but I was able to do it and they they, they corrected it.
Speaker 2:They said you're right to compare that to a function I love on Twitter, now called X. The community notes button is very useful. It's more like Wikipedia. It's allowing the users to to do fact checking and have it be curated and then if you don't like that fact check, you can fact check that fact check you get. There can be a whole discussion where people are kind of like like what happens on Wikipedia, which is people complain about it and it is certainly capable of being inaccurate and biased, but it is.
Speaker 2:It is more trustworthy than than if you think of it as social media, than a lot of social media in general it tends to. With a lot of community involvement, user involvement. It's almost a market procedure. The the truth has a greater chance to rise to the surface. So that's what's going on on X right now. It is very useful. You'll see claims that are bad or images coming out of Israel, palestine. I see a lot of claims that you know this, this is a victims that just got bombed in Gaza, and you'll see community notes will say actually, this is an image from an earthquake in Syria five years ago, like, and then you'll and you know that's true, because then people are responding to that, saying it's true, and if it's wrong, people call it out and it gets de prioritized.
Speaker 2:Letting the users have this power in a in a sort of market or even democratic way works Deputizing ideological so called experts to decide what's true and not does not work.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's, that's outstanding comment. Yeah, well, I think. On that note, I think we're running out of time, but this has been very interesting. Your books are both great. I think our listeners should take a look at both of them. I'm partial to panic attack because we help fund your work on that, but tech panic is a timely book, just out earlier this year, I think and they should watch rising and follow you with Reason magazine. In fact. I want to say thank you to you and your colleagues. We're here at the Reason Studio recording this podcast today. They've been very generous and let us use their studio, which is a few blocks from the T-Fast headquarters and a great place to record these podcasts. So Robbie Suave is my guest today. Thanks so much for being with me.
Speaker 2:My pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast. Please don't forget to subscribe, download, like or share the show on Apple, spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you like this episode, I ask you to rate and review it, and if you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast at T-Fast dot org. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at K-Global Studios in Washington DC. I'm your host, roger Rehm, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.
