Attack from Within How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America

Finally, our Friend of Pivot is former U.S. Attorney, Barbara McQuade, who's written a new book, "Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America." Barbara explains how she thinks disinformation can be defeated.

As Barb says in her new book, Attack from Within, even as authoritarians claim the mantle of law and order, they work the fairness and independence of the judiciary undermine the credibility of the courts and judges in the eyes of the public.

It's called Attack From Within. How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.

It comes out later this month.

Disinformation is the deliberate use of lies to manipulate people and advance an agenda.

Misinformation is kind of its unwitting cousin. We hear something we think it's true, but it's a lie, and we amplify the claim exponentially.

These are deliberate efforts to stoke division in society.

One of them is this idea of declinism, society is going downhill, everything's awful, cities in ruins, American carnage.

And in fact, if you look at the data, crime rates are down, the economy is up, all of the indicators are actually on the upswing.

disinformation is the deliberate use of lies to manipulate people and advance an agenda.

Society is going downhill. Everything's awful. Cities in ruins, American carnage.

if we can talk about the society as being down, then it allows us to say, well, these extreme times call for extreme measures.

We care about being loyal to the team. ...loyalty to the team becomes more important than truth.

we're the party that's going to make you safe because we're preying on your fear.

Disinformation is the deliberate use of lies to manipulate people and advance an agenda.

Misinformation is kind of its unwitting cousin. We hear something. We think it's true, but it's a lie and we amplify the claim exponentially.

One of them is this idea of declinism. Society is going downhill. Everything's awful. Cities in ruins. American carnage.

These are some of the same tactics that Hitler talked about in Mein Kampf and used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

One thing that really resonated to me is tribe over truth.

So we thought it would be a good time to talk about your book given that the Supreme Court is weighing a challenge to some laws that were in some respects designed to facilitate disinformation on social media laws that sought to ensure social media companies weren't censoring anti vaccination posts or election denialism and at the beginning of the next sitting the court is going to be hearing a challenge to some government action that is designed to combat disinformation there the government encouraging and calling for companies to remove vaccine disinformation from websites plus with the recent immunity actions pertaining to another thread in the book disinformation threat to democracy seemed like a great time to talk about attack from within so first question in the book you identify some of the tactics of disinformation you know that proponents of disinformation use could you run us through a few of them

I'll share just a few of them so you know one is this idea of repetition that if you repeat something often enough people will tend to believe it so you know we heard Donald Trump talk about stop the steel just this weekend I heard Steve Bannon at the CPAC conference getting the crowd to chant trump one trump one trump one and this is a tactic that goes you know back to the dawn of human history Hitler wrote about it in mind comp the idea that you need simple repeatable statements that people hear again and again and then if they hear it not only from a single source but they start hearing it from other sources it becomes self affirming that people start hearing this thing and think it to be true so that's one another is the big lie make of lie as big as possible and certainly we've heard you know the the stolen election was trump's big lie at just as we had you know Hitler's big lie and what Hitler wrote in mind comp was the reason a big lie works better than small lies is because of human nature we all you know engage in small lies from time to time my sister might tell me yeah your hair looks fine or my husband might say no dear you know that dress isn't make you look fat but we we engage in those white lies out of a place of kindness and courtesy to other people but what Hitler wrote in mind comp is that most people could never imagine that someone would have the audacity to lie about something of such significance and for that reason in an ironic way the bigger the lie the more likely we are to believe it and then just one more I'll mention Leah and that is this idea of destroying the concept of truth and this is something that I think we are seeing I'm hearing an awful lot of from the right I did an interview today with someone who said well who's to say what's disinformation anyway you know the idea that there really is no such thing as discernible facts or evidence or data and this is something that Putin in Russia uses it is sometimes referred to as the fog of unknowability to give inconsistent statements about something to say on one day you know the rockets were shot by Russia and the next day the rockets were shot by Ukraine and the day after that the rockets were shot by NATO and people you know eventually get throughout their hands and they say I don't know what to think they're angry they become cynical and finally they become numb and then disengage from politics altogether because I don't know what to think and that is incredibly dangerous for a democracy to have people disengaged from politics so those are just some of the tactics yeah the book covers many more and I'm going to ask you about some of them because when you were giving your first answer talking about simple lies that are just like repeated again and again to reaffirm them I couldn't help but think in your description about the overly simplistic claims that some in the Republican Party or the conservative legal movement have talked about the courts right you think about originalism the idea that our Constitution is just what the original meaning of the document is it's simple right it's overly simplistic and it doesn't capture a lot of constitutional law but they keep saying it right and that has helped kind of give it traction you know in the courts and the broader you know public in some respects but okay so in the book you also talk about the causes of disinformation you know some of which are global and some of which are more particular to the United States so what are some of the causes of you know disinformation that you go over in the book

the insurrection theory of the second amendment which was a framing I loved and how the court has taken again this constitutional provision built a story around it that isn't really rooted in real history and has the potential to do real violence right and cause real problems to our system of government

I am a ardent defender of the first amendment I think the first amendment is what protects us from powerful voices and allows us to protest our government and the things we talked about when our institutions fail us and so it's a really important right but I think that because we have this right that is so cherished by the left and the right it can sometimes be used as a handy shield to call anything that in any way limits speech as censorship and of course like all rights the right to free speech can be regulated I mean you cannot engage in threats that is a crime even though it is speech you can't commit fraud that's a crime even though it all is all about speech right I tell you I want to sell you some swan planed in Florida that's speech and so that can be regulated it has to you know comply with strict scrutiny that the name of this podcast that there's a compelling governmental interest and that the limits are narrowly tailored to achieve those interests but I think you know what we're seeing now in these cases that were just argued before the Supreme Court about these laws enacted by states designed to stop what they call censorship by social media platforms in my view in fact these state laws are not preventing censorship they are violating the first-minute rights of the social media platforms whoever right to take down content that they believe violates their terms of service users sign an agreement that has certain terms of conditions that community standards that there will be moderation so that people won't be harassed and bullied and threatened when they're online and won't be exposed to disinformation about COVID vaccines or stolen elections or other things and so you know in an effort to stop those things the states of Florida and Texas have called that censorship and said that they are silencing conservative voices well yeah conservative voices that are lying and and it's not opinion certainly if somebody has a very conservative or viewpoint done something let's hear it let's debate it let's hear it out let's try to you know reach common ground and solve problems but if there are things that are factually demonstrably false you know that COVID vaccine will make you magnet it for something like that there's no place for that in our serious discourse and in addition to the causes of disinformation and the tactics of disinformation the book also gets into some solutions we are not going to canvas those in depth but I very much encourage our listeners to check out Barb's book attack from within how disinformation is sabotaging America in order to learn more about disinformation and what to do about how to address it

In 2017, she was among the U.S. attorneys forced to resign under the Trump administration. Today, she's a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and author of Attack from Within, How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, and the forthcoming book, The Fix, Saving America from the Corruption of Mob-Style Government.

Barb is author of the book Attack from Within, How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.

Yeah, I think one of the things, as Joyce just said, is this effort to undermine respect for the rule of law, people choosing their political tribe over the truth or over the law.

And what that has a tendency to do is to cause a loss of respect for the rule of law. When people believe that the law is simply one more partisan political tool, it loses all of its value.

And ultimately, that leads ordinary people to feel that they don't need to obey the law or even vigilante violence to achieve the result they can't get through the political process.

This idea of--that law enforcement has been weaponized simply to go after Donald Trump I think is incredibly dangerous, investigating the investigators.

Her new book is entitled Attack from Within. How disinformation is sabotaging America.

Former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuaid, thank you very much. Her new book is entitled Attack from Within. How disinformation is sabotaging America.

The new book Attack From Within how disinformation is sabotaging America is on sale today.

Congratulations. Great to see you, Barbara.

Barbara Quaid is a law professor at the University of Michigan, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, a legal analyst for NBC and MSNBC and the author of Attacks from Within which methodically dissects the domestic disinformation threat and proposes a raft of solutions.

This information is a serious threat to American national security, I've seen the threat evolve from al-Qaeda to ISIS to cyber to Russia to disinformation coming from within our own country.

And in 2017 I started teaching this national security course and in probably about 2018 I started teaching the Mueller report as part of the national security class on disinformation.

Misinformation, as I define it, is the unwitting spreading of disinformation. So plenty of people read something online, they assume it to be true, and they pass it on.

And I think all of us have likely been what some people refer to as useful idiots or unwitting dupes from time to time with and I realized I had been duped.

A significant number of Americans don't seem to care anymore whether a statement is true what seems to matter instead is whether any given message is consistent with their worldview.

Attack from Within, How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.

We heard Republican voters in Michigan's Barbara McQuaid, writes in her new book, Attack from Within,

author of the book Attack From Within, How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.