Discussing disinformation and media with Matt Sheffield

In this episode, right-wing media critic Matt Sheffield and I
discuss the disinformation crisis and the climate change crisis,
and how they are deeply intertwined.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


Matt Sheffield started his first conservative media website,
bashing news anchor Dan Rather for liberal bias, way back in
2000, and in subsequent years became a key figure in right-wing
media criticism.


But the rise of Trump left him disillusioned and he has since
become a prominent critic of right-wing media. He now runs a site
called Flux dedicated to accurate, inclusive journalism.


Last week, Matt and I got together on one of these live Twitter
Spaces things — a glorified conference call, basically, to which
people can tune in and ask questions — and had a wide-ranging
conversation about the disinformation crisis, how it manifested
in climate change, and what can be done about it.


The audio was archived, available exclusively to Flux and Volts
subscribers. I hope you enjoy it.


Matt Sheffield


We're doing a space tonight to discuss climate change and the
birth of the disinformation economy. And David has been a
longtime climate change correspondent and environmental columnist
for a while, and he's also the proprietor and publisher, writer,
et cetera, of Volts, a newsletter, which he started one year ago
today, which he was just recounting that for our previous space,
which I accidentally ended somehow. So your experience overall
has been pretty good, you were saying? And I think I ended the
space inadvertently right after you said you work better alone.


David Roberts


Yes —


Matt Sheffield


I inadvertently proved your point, I think.


David Roberts


Yes. This is why I don't talk to people. Yeah, it's been going
great. I have found that readers are excited to go deeper and
wonkier and share my obsessions. I'm sure different writers have
different opinions about this, but I much prefer it over writing
for a general interest publication.


Matt Sheffield


And you wrote a retrospective on your site today that — one of
the things you said is that you appreciated not having to
reintroduce topics over and over again in terms of — you assume
that your current readers actually know who you are and something
about the material, I guess.


David Roberts


Right, yes. It's the famed return to blogging. It is a persistent
audience who will follow me over time and thus who I don't have
to explain that climate change is bad in every post anymore.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. And I guess it's a way of trying to have a continued
conversation rather than one that starts over de novo every time.
Right?


David Roberts


Yes. And it's explicitly I mean, I did it knowing that I would be
writing for a much smaller audience. It's not a mass audience
play. It's very much for a self-selecting group of people who are
more than average interested in my subject matter. So I think it
can still have influence because I think the people who do read
it are sprinkled throughout the world, the energy world, in high
places. But I've basically transitioned away from mass writing, I
guess is what I'd say.


Matt Sheffield


So now, before you were doing just for those again who hadn't
seen what you were doing before you were working at Vox and then
before that you were working at Grist, which is a website that's
still out there doing climate coverage. How is it different now
compared to your Grist days would you say?


David Roberts


Oh goodness. Well for one thing I didn't know what the hell I was
doing back in my Grist days. I was hired at Grist as an editorial
assistant in I think like 2004 with no background in journalism
and no real background in environmentalism which is what Grist
was supposedly about and knowing nothing at all about climate
change or anything really. So the ten years I spent at Grist were
in retrospect it's something I think journalists don't really get
anymore these days, which was it was a place where I could labor
in obscurity while I learned what the hell I was doing.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. And I think that's an interesting observation you make
there because that is one of the things that's definitely very
different about media now is that you and I are both Gen Xers in
our forties and in the old days, the media industry was very sort
of anti young people in terms of letting them have public facing
work to a large degree. And so basically they had people work as
research assistants or as publicists or something like that —


David Roberts


Or come up through local papers. I'm old enough to remember when
the way you came up through the reporting game is through local
papers. And it's interesting if you go through that route you're
taught a certain set of skills and rules and norms but I wasn't
taught those at all. I had never had any experience in that world
at all. So all I was reacting to and sort of shaping myself
around was what do readers like? What is helpful to readers? And
if you just follow that string you don't end up in the model of
the inverted pyramid, daily objective third voice — information
is relevant.


You know what I mean? There's no spine to your research. You
don't know what you're looking for. And this is the sort of
feeling I get from reading lots of objective news stories. It's
like a grab bag of facts. It's like a grab bag of true things.
They're all true. But how do they hang together? What do they all
mean? That's what's missing. And once you approach it that way,
what is sort of my narrative here? What kinds of things am I
researching? What kinds of arguments am I trying to make that
helps you know where to dig and doing that over time informs you
more fully I think, than you get informed doing objective style
reporting.


Matt Sheffield


Traditional training with journalism has also it made it to the
point of the topic today about climate change and disinformation.
It made them very basically totally unprepared to understand how
a gaslighting campaign was being built right in front of their
eyes. They couldn't even see it happening. And you could argue
that this was something that probably was first done by the
tobacco industry in the 1950s and 60s when they did research that
figured out that smoking causes cancer and how do we keep the
public from knowing that? But basically that information,
understanding how that happened and why it happened, it never
really filtered down into elite journalism, I would say.


And climate change was kind of the next area where this —


David Roberts


It happens again and again and it happens — these critiques of
the flaws of this style of journalism are things people have been
saying for decades now. When I first started in this whole game
in the early 2000s, it was sort of the rise of the net roots and
the sort of famous like, oh, the bastions of the mainstream media
are being stormed by these outsiders, all this blah blah, all
this sort of utopian talk. But all these critiques of media that
we're talking about here were around then the both sides saying,
the sort of fetishizing of moderate being whatever happens to be
wherever the two is between, where the two parties are.


David Roberts


All this kind of stuff has been around so long now that I've come
to find it very difficult to believe that the people involved
don't understand these critiques or don't know what's happening.
They get it yelled — if nothing else, every time they go out on
Twitter, that people yell it at them. So they've definitely heard
it. The thing is, you have know, economists annoy me in a lot of
ways, but one thing I sort of have picked up from economists is,
it's helpful — one helpful lens on any situation is what is the
incentive structure? What are people incentivized, what are
people rewarded and punished for?


And you can do that sort of brain-dead, both sides, journalism
forever. And there's never a penalty, there's never a downside.
Like, you might have people like me yelling at you on Twitter,
but in the world of media professionals, that will never count
against you. Whereas if you betray an opinion or know, like we
saw it during the Trump years, like, sometimes journalists would
get really worked up and they'd be like, "I think taking kids
from their parents at the border when they're seeking asylum and
holding them in cages without telling them where their parents
are is bad" and you know, the whole right would just jump on it.


They'd be like, "Oh, there's a biased anti-Trump reporter." And
then of course, that would cause the editors and everyone to
retreat, duly retreat, like they do every time. And just that
cycle over and over again, over time means as a professional
reporter in DC, as a professional politics reporter, doing the
brain-dead objective, both sides, horse race, blah blah, blah, is
without downsides. You can get ahead doing that. There's no risk
to it. So unless they're sort of like gripped by a civic spirit
or whatever, why would they stop?


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, no, I think that's right. And then besides, from what
you're calling effectively market incentives, there —


David Roberts


There are social and reputational incentives too.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. No, I agree. And the other thing is that just in terms of
how being a journalist works in the print business for a long
time, there was this term that people use that "I have to fill
the news hole." That was how they thought about making their
product. But in retrospect, when you think about that phrasing,
it's just basically you're going to fill it with what? By
shoveling s**t down the hole?


David Roberts


Well, imagine there being any space without news already in it
anymore. Show me a news hole in the universe.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, no, that's fair. And yeah, like a lot of this stuff though.
Yeah, you're right that those critiques have always been there,
and I'd say they're still certainly relevant. I mean, just
yesterday, Politico ran an article in which they criticized Vice
President Kamala Harris for being Bluetooth phobic. Because she
was concerned that Bluetooth has some security risks as a
wireless technology. It actually does.


David Roberts


This is the nonsense things about that. You could go on forever.
But just one note, like note that the whole critique from people
like us of the mainstream political media in 2006 can be boiled
down to two words: Her emails. Right. They spent an absurd amount
of time on that ridiculous non-story, and that has become
shorthand for the whole critique of mainstream media. So for them
to go after Kamala Harris for information security specifically,
not for breaching it, but for being too concerned about it, it's
hard to interpret that as anything but a deliberate "F**k you" to
every media critic of the last five years.


Right? I mean, it's not just any shallow, stupid story. It's very
specifically a shallow, stupid story that is the opposite they
attacked the last woman for just as though to say as though to
flag, "Yes, hell yes, we're going to do this again. Hell yes, we
are."


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, well, and it's the opposite. Her behavior is the literal
opposite of Trump because when Trump was the president, he had a
standard issue iPhone that he was tweeting on and his Twitter
account had I think the password was "Make America Great Again."
So his Twitter account got hacked twice while he was the
president.


David Roberts


The whole four years was among all the other things, it was one
long series of sort of horrendous information security stories,
leaks and breaches and like emails being Cc'd here and there and
emails from illegal accounts. The media didn't give a s**t
because they never gave a s**t about infosecurity. That's never
what it was about. It was always retrofit from the narrative they
wanted to tell.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, well, and I think the other thing is that there's this sort
of desperate, rote idea of making — our job is to hold public
officials accountable. And so they think, obviously that is a
journalist job. But on the other hand, that shouldn't be the
number one principle because otherwise you just end up with these
ridiculous stories. So in other words, like the Harris Bluetooth
story, basically our vice president is taking too much security.
That makes no sense in any possible world except under the rubric
of, well, our job is to criticize public officials.


David Roberts


Well, this is what accountability has become, right? It's shrunk
to this ridiculous sort of brain-dead version of itself where
these reporters just feel like I need to write negative stories
about the administration. That's what tough journalism is. That's
what real journalism is, just negative stories. And notice if
you're not allowed to have any opinions about policy, or about
whether it's good to jail children or about morality or about
anything, you're not allowed to make any moral or ethical
judgments. That means you can't hold a president or vice
president responsible in those terms. Right? So the only terms
you have to quote, unquote, hold them responsible are just these
sort of shallow, like "Yesterday you said one thing and today you
said something that sounds slightly different" or like "Oh, in
the campaign you said you were going to unite people, but oh,
look, people are still fighting" just the most sort of goofy,
brain-dead versions of accountability you could imagine. To truly
hold the president accountable means you got to care about
something and understand something and desire one outcome over
another, you know what I mean? And they're just not allowed to do
any of that. So what there is of accountability ends up just
being these sort of shallow gotcha gimmicky stories.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, no, exactly. And it is a very big contributor to how we got
to this present situation where you have one party that has
basically decided that if we lose elections, then we will end
democracy. That's our belief now. And if moderation is simply
splitting the difference between the two parties, well, then I
guess that means ending democracy isn't good. But maybe just
trimming it around the edges and curtailing it is okay.


David Roberts


Some Democrats say that democracy is good, critics argue
otherwise.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, exactly.


David Roberts


Well, what I've seen happen is, and we saw this forecast a long
time ago in the climate change space, is the thinking is
basically what is good for us, our tribe, which is white
Christian, rural and ex-urban conservatives, basically the
Republican party has become quite monolithic in that respect. So
what's good for our tribe? That determines not only what's
politically good, that determines what's true. So everything else
becomes subordinate to that. Including facts, including
democracy, including truth. Everything has become subordinate to
what it is in the immediate interests of our tribe. That's what I
think you see reaching its sort of absurd reductio ad absurdum
results before us now is right-wing media is just "What is true,
is what is good for us." So what is good for us? That's what
we're going to write. The whole notion of any metric of truth or
even any conception of truth, that transcends tribe, that
transcends partisanship has just completely fallen out of the
picture now. It's just like, what do we need to believe? That is
what we shall believe. It's frictionless.


Matt Sheffield


And as somebody who worked in that world for a number of years,
all Republican operatives pretty much have this idea that
everything is debatable, everything is subject to opinion. It's
just a matter of opinion. And so when I was working at
NewsBusters and places like that, the demand that we made to
journalists was, well, you have to quote what the Republicans
said about a thing.


David Roberts


Yes.


Matt Sheffield


And then also not specify whether what Republicans said was true
or correct or not. At the same time, one of the things that sort
of began my disaffection with right-wing politics was that while
I was fine making that demand of people who were claiming to have
no views or no opinions, I also felt like that, well,
conservatives ought to try to have a mainstream media that
reports things fairly and reports progressive opinions as well.


David Roberts


That's what Tucker wanted to do when he first started. Remember,
he gave that whole speech. That was his original purpose, was it
not?


Matt Sheffield


Oh, it was, yeah. And actually, I haven't mentioned this
publicly, but I actually interviewed to be the managing editor,
the first managing editor.


David Roberts


Well, you're lucky. Go on, I guess, because those original
intentions got nuked upon first contact with the audience.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, well, no, and that's basically what happened with him, is
that he tried doing some reporting on negative reporting about
Republicans. And basically American right-wing epistemology is
such that if you're a Republican, the only thing you can
criticize another Republican for is not being right-wing enough.
That's it. Every other criticism is unfair and illegitimate.


David Roberts


Yes, but over time this is what happened. Over time, it went from
being unfair to therefore it is false. Right. You could say it's
unfair and then you could actually go out and do some
investigation and try to determine separately whether it's false.
But nowadays it's just "That's bad for us, therefore it's
b******t." There's no middle step where they're like, "Oh, should
we go find out?" It's just what they need to believe is what's
true.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. And it did manifest in regard to the climate debate,
because if you look at public opinion polls before the oil and
gas industry began trying to manipulate public opinion through
ideological groups and PR firms, Republicans actually were more
concerned about protecting the environment than Democrats were,
believe it or not.


David Roberts


We're talking about the media. Science in general is very widely
trusted, especially used to be very widely trusted in the US. And
environmentalism used to be a relatively bipartisan thing. They
had to deliberately code it partisan. It did not enter that way.
It's not intrinsically that.


Matt Sheffield


I mean, like Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, Republican
president was the guy who created the National Park system. That
was a very big tradition even in conservatism and certainly
within the Republican Party. And so, like, actually weirdly
enough, some of the right-wing anti-immigration groups actually
grew out of conservative environmentalism because people were
concerned that they were going to be overpopulating the United
States. Immigrants were, and so we needed to keep them.


David Roberts


Give one thing I give Republicans credit for even like Inhofe
early on, I think on some level, on some sort of brainstem level,
conservatives like Inhofe appreciated the implications of climate
change more fully than climate advocates did. Like, I think he
recognized pretty early on, "Oh, this isn't going to be like
traditional environmentalism." This is not a traditional
conservation issue. If this is real, if this is true, then this
means revolution. The facts here carry you to radicalism. If you
accept these facts, you are carried inexorably to radicalism. So
you have to refuse the facts. I think Inhofe was smarter in
recognizing the end of that road than a lot of quote unquote
moderates like McCain.


Matt Sheffield


That's an interesting observation. I think. yeah, he realized
that there were a lot of implications for industry and Oklahoma
being a big oil producing state. Yeah, he realized what that
would mean.


David Roberts


Pull the string any direction you want. It means fossil fuel
businesses and centers of the economy will be diminished and
reduced in power. It means the whole world will have to cooperate
if you want to solve it. It means you need stronger international
agreements and maybe even some kind of international governance.
You know what I mean? It leads away from nationalism and
parochialism toward something like humanities get together and
cooperate as one. And that's a very basic brainstem difference
between conservatives and other people. And I just think Inhofe
got wind of that early on. The people who paid more attention to
climate change on the right were the ones, I think, to turn
against it most sort of vigorously because they, I think, were
smarter about where it would lead.


Matt Sheffield


And to that end, I guess early, relatively early on in some of
the right-wing pushback against understanding climate science and
acting in response to it, there was this scandal that it seems
very quaint now that they cooked up a fake scandal that they
called Climategate. Can you review what that was for people who
weren't paying attention or don't remember that?


David Roberts


Yeah, it's funny because there's a much more recent model that's
very similar that will be fresh in people's heads. So basically,
somebody we never, I don't think ever found out exactly who,
though. One just has to assume it was some sort of right-wing
operator of some kind stole a bunch of emails from the scientists
who work at the Tyndall Center, I think it was, or I forget, some
center of Climate research. I think it was the Tyndall Center for
Climate Research. And they stole thousands — in the UK. Thousands
and thousands of thousands of emails.


Basically scoured through those emails to find not just points,
but to find individual sentences and phrases that could, if you
lift them out of context and give them a sinister interpretation,
could make it look like the scientists were up to something
shaky. And so you're right, it's sort of like it was a template
for many, many right-wing faux scandals to come in that the
right-wing media did a blitz on it. Questions raised, doubts,
like this phrase, what do they mean by this trick? What do they
mean they're going to run a trick on the data?


And the right-wing blitzed, media blitzed enough that the
mainstream media had to sort of pick it up. Like, oh, everybody's
talking about it now. You have to talk about this thing if
everybody's talking about it. And so the mainstream media did its
sort of "Scientists involved say this is all a bunch of
horseshit, but critics say blah, blah, blah." And then eventually
after the story had passed from the mainstream media and most
people had forgotten about it, all the inquiries and
investigations that were set up to put it to rest — and I think
in the end there were something like seven or eight separate
inquiries — all found that it was b******t, all found that it was
nothing, all found that you just get any database of thousands of
emails and scour through it and you can find something that you
can twist to look bad. But there was no —


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, and just to reference what the supposed malfeasance was, it
was basically they were accusing people of having manipulated
data and climate records and temperature data, basically. But as
you said, yeah —


David Roberts


And this is important to emphasize because I think it also says
something about right-wing scandals lately. It's not that there
was a germ or a seed of wrongdoing that they found that they then
blew up or enhanced or exaggerated. There was no seed. There was
nothing there. The whole thing was spun up like cotton candy out
of nothing. And that's sort of like — it demonstrated at the
time. It demonstrated that they could do that. They're like, "Oh,
we don't need to wait for a real scandal. We can just spin one up
out of nothing anytime we want to."


And they've done it over and over and over again ever since. They
did the same thing with the Democrats e-mails when that Russian
hacker in his bedroom stole all the DNC emails. It's the same
thing. You go through thousands of emails, you're going to find
stuff you can spin to look bad, and by the time investigators or
fact-checkers or whoever the hell show up, everybody's moved on
and it goes down forever. Like Climategate is gospel on the
right. It is in their holy books forever. The truth of all of
that will never reach the right-wing base, and the middle doesn't
care about it.


So it's like only the people who care on the left are ever going
to even know that it was all b******t.


Matt Sheffield


Well, and then, of course, that same playbook is being replayed
right now with critical race theory. And that's why it's
important for people who are journalists, mainstream journalists,
to understand that you exist in a hostile environment and one in
which your product is being attacked and you are being subjected
to a manipulation campaign. And they don't even now seem to
understand that because you're right that basically the goal of
these strategies is to use biased right-wing media to create a
story out of nothing or very little and then whip it up into such
a fever pitch that mainstream journalists feel like they have to
talk about it because, well, Republican elected officials are
talking about it, so therefore, we have to talk about it.


And then they do, but they never put it in the correct context,
which is, this is a public relations strategy and designed to
manipulate the public. They never do that.


David Roberts


And there's a very strong bias, human cognitive bias, that is
sort of summarized by where there's smoke, there's fire. We have
a very strong bias to thinking, if everyone's talking about this,
there must be something there. We have trouble not thinking that
way even on the left, even after we've seen one after the other
after the other, after the other of these b******t things come
up, even after we've seen QAnon and we've seen whatever, when
Obama was going to launch a military assault from Texas. What was
that one?


Matt Sheffield


The operation Jade Helm, I believe.


David Roberts


Jade Helm, you know, Sharia Law, you see them over and over
again. But even now, just there's some part of your mind when you
see a bunch of different stories on a subject, you almost can't
help thinking there's something there. That's how they manage to
associate Hillary Clinton with every human flaw, even
diametrically opposed flaws, because if you just do it enough,
even people who have no sort of primary opinion on the matter
will just sort of absorb by osmosis. "Oh, I wouldn't be reading
that she's shrill this often if there was something to that, or
that she's weak or that she's tyrannical. She must be all the
things."


Like people don't have a coherent, rational view of these things
in their head. They just absorb ambiently from the media, what's
everybody talking about, and this is what right-wing media
hacked. And what they realize is now that the sort of grip of the
gatekeepers is broken, right? There's no more scarcity in news,
there's no more scarcity in information, so there's nobody
gatekeeping anymore. Anything can make it into the public realm.
And thus, if you want to create smoke and give people the
suggestion that there's fire somewhere. You can do it just at
will, right.


You don't need anything to build on. And they just do it over and
over again. And this is what I think the media denies its
responsibility for and culpability for and just its involvement
in is like even if your story on subject X is totally factual,
just by putting another story about subject X out there, you are
in some way or another telling your news audience that it is
significant. More significant than other things that receive less
coverage. You're contributing to the sort of atmosphere, the
ambient atmosphere of information. And that alone is expressing a
judgment.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. In a lot of ways, I think you could argue that we're kind
of in a modern-day reincarnation of the time of the era of yellow
journalism. And it's weird how when people are learning about
that in history, or they're discussing it in some journalistic
context today, that people are like, "Oh, I can't believe they
were so dumb. It fell for all these ridiculous stories." But
that's literally what's happening today. Just to review it, for
those not familiar with that idea in the beginnings of mass print
publications. So mass print newspapers in the late 19th century,
you had this proliferation of newspapers, and anybody with
somewhat large enough an amount of money could start one.


And so you had pretty much every local political party had a
newspaper, and you had lots of local vanity newspapers as well,
of eccentric, crank millionaires, and they were just churning out
whatever the f**k they wanted. And it was this environment where
there were no holds barred in terms of information, in terms of
what you could say, and newspapers would routinely make up stuff
and insert it into their copy.


David Roberts


People will believe anything. It's not sort of like, I think,
polite to say this in these conversations, but your average schmo
is just not going to go into media consumption with all these
defenses up and sort of scrutinizing everything and
double-checking everything. That's just not how people work.
People will believe what they're told, basically from trusted
sources, and they'll trust the wrong people. It's interesting. I
was listening to a pod about McCarthy and the Red Scare and it
was really interesting to me because that got going through what
we would now think of as right-wing media, sort of pamphlets and
obscure sort of crank radio shows and stuff like that.


And that fanned the flames and that sort of pushed it into the
mainstream. And as we all know, it went incredibly far and hurt a
lot of people's lives. But in the end, it was still possible for
the mainstream gatekeepers to say, "Have you left, sir, no sense
of decency?" And to shut the thing down, politicians and
mainstream media outlets could basically agree to say, "This is
too far. We're shutting this down." And that's how it came to an
end. And today I ask you, like, if there was a comparable Red
Scare, there's no one who has the power anymore to shut it down.


You could prove the charges wrong to any sort of empirical
standard you wanted. You could get accurate information out there
all you wanted, but you just can't stop anything anymore. There's
no way to stop half the media universe from just churning it
forever if they want to. So, I think we're going to see if we get
Republican control of government again and Trump in office again,
we're going to see something like that. And there will be no
trusted institutions left that can step in and say, enough's
enough.


There's no Walter Cronkite anymore who can step in and say,
Vietnam's gone on long enough and crystallize the change in
public opinion. There's no trusted institutions or people that
are trusted across borders or across barriers anymore. So,
something like the Red Scare today, I just think there'd be zero
check on it. There would just be no way to ever stop it. It could
go on forever.


Matt Sheffield


It would be probably the Antifa Scare, arguably.


Anna Tarkov


It never stopped, in a sense. Couldn't you say —


David Roberts


Well, they never gave it up, right? They never dropped anything.
They never dropped anything. But there was a time they could be
held to the periphery somewhat, or at least banished back to the
periphery somewhat. There was still a mainstream.


Anna Tarkov


I think, unfortunately. I'm sorry, I've not introduced myself to
anyone, but I'm Anna Tarkov. I'm an associate editor at Flux. Hi,
David. Thank you for joining us. By the way, I'm sorry I wasn't
here earlier. They can't put that genie back in the bottle, as
you say. We have to think forward about ways that we can mitigate
these types of things. And we've had people that have written
things for our side, and we've hosted other types of spaces like
this where we are trying to wrestle with this problem, as are, of
course, many other of our colleagues and other people who are
concerned about these types of things.


And yeah, I don't sadly, no easy answers, but I know that we
often have talked about that maybe there could be some broad
teaching of critical thinking somehow that a lot of people do
come back to that type of thing.


David Roberts


I think that's so wrong. I don't know if you want to have this
out here, but I just think that's the wrong direction to look.
You're never going to create a society filled with rational
people who assess with all these good cognitive habits. It's very
difficult to do that, even for yourself, even to be that way for
yourself. When you make a conscious effort, conscious constantly,
it's never going to be. You can't look to the individual, I
guess, is what I would say. This is a social phenomenon to me.
All the questions about truth are downstream of questions about
trust.


This is all about social trust. The great mass of people have
never been scientific thinkers or rational or gone around
gathering evidence and weighing the evidence before they draw
their conclusions. Most people, most of the time, then and now,
just believe what the people and institutions they trust. We need
trustworthy institutions.


Anna Tarkov


I do agree with you. I think that we need actually, I would say a
multifaceted approach, ideally. And I think that where I agree
with you 100% in a way. I also come back to thinking that we're
not going to get back to a Walter Cronkite reality, right, ever.
So people have to of course, we're not going to turn everybody
into a critical thinker and everybody into a brilliant parser of
information or even the majority of people. That is impossible. I
100% agree with you. I think that what we can do, though, is in
the people that are concerned about these matters as the minority
though they may be, that if you can have people learn and
exercise these skills, they can have influence on other people
who are not brilliant critical thinkers or are able to.


I don't know if that can scale, but on a personal level, I've
seen this work in terms of personal relationships, I'm a person
who is, I'd like to believe, a good critical thinker, et cetera,
and I can affect people in my life and people I come in contact
with. And if we can have a again, it's a multifaceted approach
that we have to take. One of the problems, of course, is the vast
ecosystem of media and other types of actors who are committed to
disinformation for various ends. That is a whole other area that
—


David Roberts


If you look at the research on like if you look at the research
on conspiracy theorists, like Q types, cult members, what you
find over and over again from this research, from the
disinformation research is it's super hard once someone has been
sort of led down this path to get them back. Like, it's high
touch, super emotionally intensive. It's a real one on one thing,
and really the best you can do is cut off the supply. It's always
a supply issue. There's a lot of poison that once it's out there,
is just going to do a lot of damage no matter how much you're
trying to inoculate people against it.


There's got to be some supply — there's got to be some control
over supply.


Anna Tarkov


Yeah, a 100% a 100% —


David Roberts


This is a complicated question: Who do we trust to be that? And
it's like the right-wing media spent decades very deliberately
attempting like, I remember Rush Limbaugh saying this back in the
early 2000s. He's like, academia, journalism, politics, and I
forget what the fourth one was. These are the four pillars of
deception, which basically means all the institutions are taken
over by liberals and you can only trust us. And they've been
saying that over and over for 40 or 50 years now. So the question
is what institution gets to play the gatekeeper role anymore.
Like, we don't trust mainstream media.


We don't trust science anymore. We're going to trust, like, we're
trying to get Facebook to do know, we're trying to browbeat
Facebook and Twitter into doing it, but do we really want them to
be the hand on the supply side? You know what I mean? So there's
just no way around the problem of trust. You have to have social
trust if you want to have a shared reality that you're all
inhabiting.


Matt Sheffield


No, you're right. One of the big issues is religion in regards to
fundamentalism. We've talked about several instances of
right-wing propaganda operations, such as lying about smoking or
lying about the Iraq War, the first one, George W. Bush's Iraq
War, and climate change. But I think if you go back even further,
you could say that trying to cast doubt on belief in human
evolution, that creationism is the original alternative fact. And
so because of that, you've got this idea that a lot of people who
are Christian fundamentalists in America, they feel like that
they know deep down that — they believe the Bible is literally
100% true.


But they know that that's not provable. And they know that, in
fact, there are a lot of things that disprove their ideas. And so
it puts them in 100% tension with everyone else.


David Roberts


Yes, and also who is convincing within that world. If you have
two guys telling you that Jesus spoke to them and told them to
start a church and you should join it, which one are you going to
believe? You're going to believe the one who's most charismatic.
That's what the sort of coin of the realm is in fundamentalism,
is charisma, because, like you say, there are no empirical and
there's no outside empirical standards you can use. So it all
comes down to charisma. And you see this now basically on
right-wing media and in right-wing what's left, I guess, of
right-wing intellectual circles is it's just performance.


It's just who's a good performer? That's what Ben Shapiro is. He
performs argument, you know what I mean? Or performs
investigation more than he actually does it. It's all who's most
charismatic. I was thinking about that when I was listening to
this podcast about Mars Hill. The Mars Hill Church super
charismatic guy started it and ended up, you know, being an
abusive dick. And I was thinking, that's like, who do you think
are the charismatic people who talk loud and a lot and draw a lot
of attention to like, those are scam artists. That's why there's
so many scam artists on the right constantly.


Matt Sheffield


Well, and that's why I do think that progressive Christians
actually are going to be integral to overcoming some of this
disinformation, because progressive Christianity in the beginning
of the 20th century and some even in the 19th century at the end,
figured out that, well, the Bible doesn't appear to be literally
true. It appears that there are multiple gods that were in the
Hebrew Bible that were squished together and created a single one
and that God had a wife and that these gods were members of a
pantheon. So that's something — then they basically said, well,
okay, that means it's not literally true, but that doesn't mean
we have to not believe in God anymore.


It just means that this is a book that was created by flawed
humans and we can still get things that we agree with out of it.
And there's nothing wrong with believing in some of the ideas and
rejecting ones that we don't like. And so that's a much healthier
epistemology, and it's one that Judaism had come by a lot earlier
than Christianity had. And so that's going to be a big part of
helping people overcome some of their intellectual nihilism.


David Roberts


These are kinds of people who want this certainty and want this
lack of ambiguity. That's what they're after. How do you convince
them to be more cognitively flexible when the reason they came to
fundamentalist Christian theology in the first place is that it's
easy, very simple, easy answers and a hierarchy that puts them on
the top. That's what they want?


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, well, no, that's true. The certitude is very comforting for
people who want that. Ultimately, there's probably always going
to be people who have that psychological need for certitude. But
overall, though, for people who don't have that need, there has
to be a better awareness of standing up for uncertainty, for
standing up for pluralism, and understanding that these are
things that they don't exist by themselves, that people had to
fight for them and that you have to fight for them. These are not
things that exist because, again, the story of humanity over and
over in societies, over and over, is that the rule of the strong
oppressing those who cannot resist them, that's the human story
over and over.


And so having pluralism, having markets of some kind, these are
all creations, artificial creations of governance and of
democracy. And so you can have your beefs with it, but ultimately
the other systems just don't work as well. But you have to fight
for what you have.


David Roberts


Although I would say, and this harkens back to something I said
earlier about Inhofe sniffing out the implications of climate
change before other people, I sort of think it's a little bit
similar with empiricism, and it's a little bit similar with
capitalism. If you really let capitalism run, it is utterly
destructive to local cultures. It famously sort of standardizes
everything. Wipes out and workers move, and it breaks up these
communities. This is something I think you're seeing, like Rubio
and Hawley get a little sort of hint at these days. Like
unrestrained capitalism is totally toxic to any parochial
culture.


And it's true also of empiricism. Like, if you follow that
string, any parochial belief or superstition you have is going to
eventually go down. I can understand why some people are just
like, "No, I'm not going to take step one. I'm not going to take
step one down that road because I see where it goes."


Matt Sheffield


There is perhaps some positive, though, in terms of focusing on
educational initiatives that if you look at younger Republicans
in office at the national level, obviously a lot of them are pro
QAnon and whatnot, but there actually are some of them, like Matt
Gaetz even, who actually believe that climate change is real,
believe it or not. And their ideas of how to respond to that
don't necessarily make sense, but they are different and this is
something that more conventional older Republicans regard them
with suspicion because of that. I don't know if you've seen Gaetz
talk about climate change at all, have you?


David Roberts


Yes, I've been keenly following this sort of nascent Republican
attempt to claim to have an answer to climate change. But from
what I can tell, Gaetz's thinking and the thinking of that whole
caucus is almost purely 100% political i.e. it's not good for
Republicans anymore for the division to be Democrats want to do
something about this and Republicans don't. That has come to be
viewed unfavorably. So they need to pull yet another scam on the
mainstream media. They need to offer up something that looks like
another side so that they can change the story from Dems want to
do something Republicans don't to Dems and Republicans disagree
on exactly what should be done about climate change. Which is the
kind of story that they can ride forever, like they can delay
climate action forever under cover of that story. Pure denialism
has come to be kind of a PR disaster. But the two side story, as
they're well aware, you can get away with that infinitely.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, well, is that progress, though, do you think?


David Roberts


I almost think I go back and forth on this, but I almost would
have told you 10 or 15 years ago, I mean, I was saying this a
long time ago, that denialism is stupid. They caught the
denialism tiger by the tail and suffered for it. They should have
pivoted to b******t faux solutions a long time ago because that
would have served to — they only became the bad guy in this
debate because of the denialism. If they could have just smoothed
it out with both sides nonsense from a much earlier point, they
could have gotten away with delaying substantial action forever
without as much political flak.


I think this was always the smart pivot on their part. They
should have done it a long time ago. I don't know if it's
progress because once again, what media that people read or see
on cable news is going to tell the American people these
solutions that they are putting forward are horseshit — they will
not do anything and they will not solve the problem, this is not
a good faith policy proposal. Who will say that that's the truth?
But who will say that such that any of the sort of casually
interested Americans will ever hear that?


Matt Sheffield


That's the sort of thing that we need people to say on these
cable news shows and whatnot where they routinely create these
false equivalences or set up these panels. And a lot of times the
guests may not even know very much about the topic that they're
being asked to talk about. And so I've seen many times where you
have some far-right activist who's got a complete set of answers
just that they don't make sense logically or with the facts, but
they at least are short enough to be able to fit into the sound
bites. And these debate segments, they're not accomplishing
anything and in fact, I'd say they're harmful.


David Roberts


It gets back to the performance. As I was saying earlier, who
wins those is who's the most sort of charismatic shouter. And so
to get back to incentives, that whole ecosystem, the incentives
in that genre are for bullshitters.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, well, and then I guess the other sort of unfortunate
dynamic is that if you look at the — and I stopped watching them
a long time ago — but the political Sunday morning shows where
they've got this fetish for, this obsession with trying to find
the reasonable Republican. They're continually putting Chris
Christie on the air, or they've been trying to turn Asa
Hutchinson from Arkansas lately, but they don't know how to talk
to them. And so while they might be not a raving anti-vax
lunatic, they're perfectly willing to enable the raving anti-vax
lunatics. And these people like Chuck Todd and these other hosts,
they have no idea how to speak to them.


They seem to think that their only mechanism is seemingly trying
to attack people for hypocrisy and that's it. Or trying to get
just asking the same dumb question, well, was the election
stolen? What do you gain by asking that question every time? If
you know what they're going to say, then don't invite them on the
program because you are not going to persuade them of anything.


David Roberts


The only thing that should be asked is what would it — like, this
wasn't enough, this wasn't enough, this wasn't enough. What would
be enough for Trump and his base to do? Is there something they
could do that you would decry or denounce? Just in theory, let's
try to set a bar beforehand this time, right. Let's set a few
markers in the sand beforehand this time, so that when all these
collaborators travel past them, at least they're on record saying
they wouldn't.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. Instead of asking about 2020, you should ask them, is
overriding the votes of a state wrong? Having a state legislator
override the vote of the voters wrong? That's what they need to
be asking.


David Roberts


Yes. Or if you're a member of the House of Representatives, would
you vote to take the decision out of the hands of a state and
just give the electors to Trump, which of course the House of
Representatives absolutely can lawfully do and we have every
reason to expect will do in 2024.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. And then at the same time, while they could do better in
terms of how they speak to far-right people and their enablers,
the press hasn't really communicated the urgency of the upcoming
2022 and 2024 election. And that was a huge thing with this whole
critical race theory panic. Is that just like the Climategate
emails or just like the Hillary Clinton emails that — they're
designed to sort of make everyone else throw their hands up and
just be disgusted or confused and then also rev up the raving
lunacy base. And so if you look at polling of Democratic voters
and independents or moderates, they're very disengaged right now
and that's by design on the part of the radical right.


David Roberts


I keep reading about the Republicans looking for more Youngkins
right, just sort of like how to be —


Anna Tarkov


Respectable Trump


David Roberts


yes, how to be a Trump in the sheets but then sort of a moderate
in the streets. But the problem is that takes like and I
guarantee you here's a prediction, the next Youngkin, whoever it
is, part of how they will attempt to signal their moderation to
the middle, to the media, will be to say reasonable sounding
things about climate. That will be one of the sort of flags that
they can wave at the middle while winking at the base. The next
Youngkin will be, quote unquote, good on climate. That's my
prediction.


Anna Tarkov


Yeah. And I think that it's important to note that not only does
it not fill me with hope that people like Matt Gaetz believe the
climate change is real, and I think the reason for that is very
important to remember that they're quite organized, worldwide,
extreme right fascist movement. And we are going to have, and
already are having climate refugees from the Global South. And I
think that believing — I read this article once where it was like
what happens when the right starts to believe in climate change?
And a lot of the things are quite bad.


David Roberts


It's going to be super ugly and that's coming soon too. I don't
think that's very far away. I mean, if you think about it, if you
try to put yourself in the mind of a reactionary and you find out
that there's this global problem, the way to solve it is either
to sort of cooperate with people across the world in a sort of
global governance where you make present day sacrifices for
future generations. Which doesn't sound like them. Or you could
just build walls, pull up your borders, hoard the remaining oil
and natural gas under the ground and try to basically lifeboat
it.


And that will be the conservative response to climate change.
It'll be what they call ecofascism, it'll be border restrictions
and it will be marginalized communities being forced to again pay
the price for it.


Anna Tarkov


Exactly. There's a book what is it called, Tropic of Chaos? I
have not read it yet. Yeah, it was recommended to me by a
journalist friend who said that this is already — we're seeing
this type of thing across the world already, where there are all
these opportunists who are taking advantage of already, these,
again, disadvantaged and mostly communities of color all across
the world. And it's only going to get worse, as you say. And
already again, we are seeing that already in the US. It's not an
accident that we've already had this type of rhetoric about walls
and locking countries down to immigration and that sort of thing.


David Roberts


Look at how COVID played out too. It's a perfect — Look if you
are just assessing COVID logically, empirically, you immediately
come to the need for communal activity, right? You have to act
together, you have to make sacrifices for one another like you
have to act with solidarity. That's the only way to solve it. But
is that how people reacted? Like, was that people's natural
instinctive reaction? Basically, when people get stressed out and
uncertain and anxious, they don't get more progressive. That
doesn't make them into cosmopolitans. The more stressed and
anxious and uncertain and frightened people get, the more small c
conservative they get and the more open they are to those kinds
of arguments. That's what I fear.


Anna Tarkov


It has gone both ways, I would say. Of course, I'd say definitely
much more on the side of the people who are, as you were talking
about. But there was a moment I don't know if we're past it. I
really hope we're not past it. But in the spaces I'm in and I
know a lot of organizers and a lot of people who are really on
the front lines of working for various types of social change,
including climate change. And I think that we have seen the other
side of the coin, so to speak, where people have pulled together
in a lot of places.


There have been all these flourishing at one point of mutual aid
efforts and all these types of things and that sort of thing.
Unfortunately, it's an open question whether it's going to
persist or not. As we've been saying, there's a lot of people who
are very apathetic right now, especially people who are more
moderate or less politically engaged, whatever you want to call
it. I want to just again bring in something you were saying
before too, about how unfortunately the march of capitalism that
must ever continue is a big hindrance to all of this. Because
people who are, I have a friend who calls it "s**t life
syndrome," is her term for people who — because in our society,
it is so hard for many people that — it is so hard for them just
to make it to put food on the table, to put a roof over their
heads, to pay for things that you don't have time to participate
fully in democracy and you have no inclination to do so when you
are trying to figure out how you're going to pay your rent or
etc.


David Roberts


Right, and if politics does nothing for you, you're much more
likely to. When someone comes along and says, "Hey, f**k all
these people, I'm going to blow it up," you're like, "Yeah,
whatever."


Anna Tarkov


Yeah, that sounds good. And I don't do anything for me because
why would I? They've never done anything for me and they've not
helped me.


Matt Sheffield


Michael Moore in 2016, he predicted that Donald Trump was going
to win on the idea that a lot of people just feel like they have
no control over their lives and they just want to blow the system
up.


David Roberts


Well, that's one of the many frustrating self-reinforcing cycles
that it's so easy for conservatives to launch. Right? Like they
can make you feel anxious and then you become more conservative
and then they pass crappy policy that makes you even more
anxious. It seems like everything they start ends up working to
their favor and it's so difficult to start the opposite kind of —
it's so difficult to start a self-reinforcing positive cycle
where people build on something together and it's reaffirmed and
they benefit from it and so they have more trust and so they
build more together.


It's very hard to get that kind of thing going, especially when
you have basically half the media and one half of your entire
society trying its best to make everyone feel shitty and anxious.


Anna Tarkov


Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's a lot of at least I'd
see some possible promise or a good idea in the sense that there
are people that talk about for example, everyone has like a
different lens that they view a lot of these issues from where
people, of course, will look at multiple viewpoints. But a lot of
time people have one that they focus in on more than others,
depending on the person, the commentator, the journalist,
whoever. And I do think that there's a lot of validity to the
types of people that say that one of the ways to get out of a lot
of these problems is that we need to have a culture of
accountability for people in positions of power which we have not
had for I don't know how long.


David Roberts


That is the central characteristic of American public life from
the time I have been old enough to be aware of it is: Shitty
people doing shitty things and facing zero accountability. I
mean, over and over and over and over and over again. I can't
imagine, like, people born after me, younger people, have never
literally never seen anything but that in American public life of
just like the shittier you are, the more you benefit, the more
you get ahead. And that's just incredibly toxic for trust, like I
said, for social trust.


Anna Tarkov


Yeah. And the troublesome thing is that not only some people
respond to that with, of course, apathy, as we've said. They look
around and they say, "Well, nobody faces consequences. There's
nothing I can do. Certainly my vote doesn't count as much as
someone who can hire wealthy lobbyists, etc. Why bother?" Which I
can understand how people can get to that point very easily. And
then the other thing is that there are people who then they
valorize and want to emulate these types of people because
getting rich, etc.


David Roberts


F**k. Yeah. Well, and what else is whiteness but the promise to
middle and lower class people that they can get a little taste of
that, a little taste of what it's like to be on top and to not be
accountable and to be able to do whatever you want and no one can
stop you. Whiteness is just like you can have this version of it.
Yes, exactly.


Anna Tarkov


That's right. And that's why people hold on to that. Above —
people are always so mystified why these people are voting
against their economic self-interest. Well, it's not that hard to
figure out, really.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. And then also they have other interests as well. So if you
feel like you can never exist in the market, you just resolve
that well, yeah, I'll just always be whatever my current job is.
Then you can seek different incentives. So maintaining white
supremacy or Christian supremacy, those can become things that
are valuable to you and will provide a psychic fulfillment.


David Roberts


The thing about the reactionary mind is based in hierarchy.
Everything's about hierarchy. Every relationship is one of
dominance and submission. So in every relationship, you're either
on top or on the bottom. So all whiteness is, and to a certain
extent maleness too, right, is a guarantee that no matter how low
you are in society or in the economy, you're still above black
people, you're still above your wife and kids, you still are the
king of a little kingdom of your own. And that's in your
interests. I mean, they're not wrong about that being in their
interest.


Matt Sheffield


It's true. But just going back to the climate topic here for a
bit. So, I think one of the developments there have been a number
of recent developments in terms of bringing the costs of
renewable energy, particularly solar, down, and China has really
doubled down on a lot of manufacture of that and trying to deploy
it. Do you think that those developments might move towards some
more positive outcomes for the environment?


David Roberts


Yes, yes. I think what we're going to see is China responding
somewhat rationally to economic incentives, which just mean
everybody looks at sort of like, what's China's latest
proclamation? And we judge them by that. But if you look over the
last ten or 15 or 20, 30 years, their level of ambition on clean
energy and on climate just keeps going up and up and up. It's
never as fast as people want, but it's only moving in one
direction. And that's because all the prices for clean energy are
moving in one direction. And it's suddenly known whoever gets
there first in terms of the materials and the manufacturing of
these components of a clean energy future is going to
economically benefit. China is racing — this whole thing in the
conservative circles are like, "China's not doing anything. Why
should we?"


It's so dumb. China is investing trillions of dollars to try to
capture these markets. These markets and solar panels and wind
turbines and everything. Like, China's going as fast as it thinks
it can, literally. And while still maintaining social stability,
it's racing.


Matt Sheffield


And to understand that this is infrastructure, manufacturing,
supply chain. Like, again, that's their supposed obsession with
that now. But the reality is if you actually care about supply
chain issues, then you need to be militating for massive
investments in green energy.


Yes, which is what Democrats are trying to f*****g do with the
Build Back Better bill as we speak, there are literally
provisions in that bill specifically designed to stand up
domestic supply chains for EVs and turbines and solar panels. And
it's going to dump billions of dollars in there. And then someday
those facilities are going to benefit red states, and there are
going to be red governors taking credit for them. You'll see that
in a few years.


Yeah. Well, ultimately it's possible that some right-wing
billionaire might find the light might finally go off in his
head, "Oh, I can make a ton of money off of green energy." And in
fact, there was somebody, Boone Pickens, who had invested lots
and lots of money in wind and natural gas, but then he died. And
nobody kind of stepped into that space after he was deceased.


David Roberts


Or if you're a right-winger, you can take some comfort in the
fact that it seems to be in America, if you become a billionaire,
you become a right-winger sort of automatically, which is what
happened to Elon Musk, you know, who came in talking about saving
humanity from climate change and now has become a f*****g deficit
scold. So don't worry. Right-wingers like money brings people in
your direction.


Anna Tarkov


I mean, I strongly believe that someone can't be a billionaire
without being some sort of an a*****e. But structurally, in order
to amass billions of dollars, I don't think that it's possible to
do that while being a completely ethical and moral person. It's
just not —


The real chicken and egg question. They seem to both, like — they
get grosser the richer they get and the richer they get, the more
it makes them gross. Who knows where it starts.


Matt Sheffield


All right, well, this has been a great discussion. We're going to
open it up in just a little bit here to audience questions. If
anybody has a question, feel free to use the raise your hand
option as we get toward the end here. So I'm just going to go
back and I'll put a link in the show notes to the piece that and
I mentioned it earlier on Twitter, but I'll mention it again
after we're done here. So David wrote a piece in 2017 about
Donald Trump and tribal epistemology and just kind of closing the
loop a little bit on some of what you were saying that in this
essay.


I'm curious what you think of it now that you were talking about
the problem of disinformation to some degree at the time, you
were talking about has to be solved on the demand side. But you
did say, and I'll quote from you because I'm sure you don't have
it memorized, you said, "If it is solved, it will not be, in my
view, on the demand side," you said, "but rather to do it to
change the incentives of disinformation." What do you mean by
changing the incentives to produce disinformation? What does that
mean?


David Roberts


Well, just to put in the most basic possible terms, you should
feel like it is a risk to lie about something in public. You
should feel like if you are exposed as lying in public, whether
you're in the media, whether you're a politician or whatever, you
will receive disapprobation for that social disapprobation. Your
reputation will be hurt, it will affect your subsequent life
opportunities. It feels really dumb and simple to say that, but
we've somehow constructed a system now where there is zero
downside for lying. There's literally nothing that happens to
you. Your lie might not get believed, it might not work, but you
don't ever suffer for it.


This is what Trump demonstrated. Just make up one thing after
another. Some of them will hit, some of them won't, but why not
just keep trying? You can do some of that with economic
incentives. You can do some of that, I think, with government
regulation. But ultimately that kind of has to be like a social
thing. Like you need to just restore respect for truth as a
social norm, as a shared social baseline.


Matt Sheffield


How do you do that, though?


David Roberts


F**k if I know, I was worried you might ask.


Matt Sheffield


I will quote from the last headline, sub headline in your piece.
Your headline was "The answer is: ha ha, just kidding."


David Roberts


Right? Because I don't know the answer. I mean, if you read my
sort of gloomy outlook, I try to think about is there historical
precedent for a culture, a society or culture that has become
this cleaved in two with one side against another inhabiting
different realities, wanting different having different visions
of the good and of a good society and just having different
beliefs about what is real and what isn't. Like what exists and
what doesn't healing itself in some way other than collapse and
violence.


Anna Tarkov


That's a very a good question.


David Roberts


Never mind, like, an unlikely answer. I don't even have a
candidate answer at all. I don't even know what it would look
like. I don't know how you would go about doing that. It looks
very gloomy to me, especially in light of social media, et
cetera, et cetera, because if you had your hand on, like I said
before, if you had your hand on the supply, if you had some
effect over what could get into the public square, then at least
you'd have a place to focus your efforts. But nobody's got their
hand on that anymore.


Everything's flooding in. There's no way to keep anything out.


Anna Tarkov


Yeah, again, like I said before, I think it has to be a
multifaceted approach, right? There's no, like, silver bullet,
sadly. If we knew what it was, someone would have done it by now.
But what I mean by a multifaceted approach, it's like you're
saying, I think there are a lot of different factors, a lot of
different things that can be done and that haven't yet been done
or tried, or at least not — for example, I mean, there are groups
that advocate for tougher regulation by the FCC, for example, in
terms of somebody not being able to buy up 500 radio stations and
TV stations and etc., and broadcast the same message on all of
them, that's like a pretty big thing that could potentially be
done.


That was, again, it requires the will. It requires somebody to
take the lead on actually doing something like that. As far as on
the individual population level, where, as you said, I'm somewhat
pessimistic in the sense that I don't think we're going to solve
it either. We can teach people critical thinking, we can do this,
we can do that, we can try to have people that are trusted, that
check facts, etc., but I don't think we're going to ever get back
to a point where we once were. But I think that on the political
side of things that then what has to happen is that there has to
be a recognition of the fact that there are these — as you said,
there are people who live in these alternate realities.


And maybe the only thing we can realistically do is to keep
people who are not living in the real reality out of power as
much as humanly possible.


David Roberts


Well, you're getting at the biggest central challenge here, which
is in practice, anything that attempted to restore accuracy or
that tried to enforce accuracy would in practice, mostly be aimed
at conservatives. In practice would mostly be shutting down
conservative voices or blocking conservatives from being on
Twitter or whatever. Because it's conservatives that are doing
most of the lying and it's no coincidence. So it's like the fear
of being partisan, the fear of seeming like you're on one side or
the other, has paralyzed every institution that could do anything
about it to the point of uselessness. And I don't know the way
out of that.


You just saw them run the whole scam on Facebook again, just like
they did on mainstream media, like browbeating Facebook, claiming
to be discriminated against, demanding to be represented on any
sort of council or panel or whatever, and they've absolutely run
the scam on Facebook and now are allowed to say whatever they
want on Facebook. And Facebook has put hardcore right-wing
propagandists on their sort of truth committee or whatever it
was. What institution can escape that bind?


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, although, I mean, to be fair to the other social network,
Facebook from the very beginning was proto-fascist with Peter
Thiel on the board.


David Roberts


Yeah, I don't think they had very far to travel.


Anna Tarkov


Exactly.


Matt Sheffield


Well, I mean, no, you're right, a lot of this it has to be a
combination effort. And this is something because the
disinformation economy is very distributed. It can't be attacked
in a head-on fashion and successfully. And I would say so before
I started Flux, I worked at the Hill doing polling for them. And
one of the things that we always polled on was Donald Trump's
approval rating. And it was very different from other presidents
in that he had this strong floor of support that seemed very
consistent, but to a large degree, that floor of support —


we asked people, do you strongly approve somewhat disapprove or
strongly disapprove of Trump? And there definitely were a
substantial number of people who strongly approved of Trump, but
there also were for a long time, people who only somewhat
approved of him. And those people figuring out what makes them do
what they do and what motivates them may be the key to overcoming
a lot of the social impasses that we have. And that's why I
mentioned progressive Christianity.


Anna Tarkov


Well, on the one hand, yes. And on the other hand, isn't it
partially a pandering to those people that has caused the media
to take this approach where we have to prove that we're not
partisan?


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. Understanding and — understanding them, but not pandering
to them. Yes, good point there.


David Roberts


To again and again, if you look at the sort of academic research
on public opinion, and what you find over and over again is that
people basically take their cues from elites, they basically take
their cues from people they trust that are in leadership
positions in what they consider their tribe. And that's sort of
one of the most basic features of public opinion. It's one of the
most basic features of human thinking. Which leads me again and
again to the conclusion that there's just no way to solve this
from outside the conservative movement. It's got to reform itself
from within somehow, because it's completely sealed everyone else
out.


Like, what else can anybody do? No one else is trusted inside it.
And when will that happen? And what reason would they have to
reform? They're winning. It's working. They change what they're
doing.


Matt Sheffield


That's a great point. But ultimately they are damaging the things
that they suppose that they're trying to protect. So, like, for
instance, if you look at belief in Christianity in the United
States, it's gone down as right-wing Christianity came to the
fore on the Republican Party. Belief in the Bible has gone down.
And even like Orthodox Judaism is losing members now compared to
Reform or Conservative or actually Conservatives lost as well.
Reform is the only type of Judaism that's growing in. And that's
also true with regard to Christianity is that there are a lot of
people out there, these fundamentalist right-wing Christianity
sects, they're losing members as well.


So like Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons or Southern Baptists,
they're all losing members in western countries. I think that
understanding — that's why I said understanding what motivates me
and then trying to have the people who are concerned, rather than
leaving and becoming Democrats, just try to stay and fight for
reason within their own party. And that's a hard ask, I
understand.


David Roberts


It is. I mean, if you look at the dynamics of fundamentalist
movements or fascist movements, they all have a kind of arc,
right? They all start with a broad appeal, usually as a backlash
against some regime or elite or some bloated, whatever, and then
it's just the mentality. They have to get more and more extreme,
build clearer and clearer walls around them, and they shrink,
right? I mean, this is what happens. They shrink and get more
extreme and shrink and get more extreme and then end up imploding
and bringing some substantial chunk of society down with them.


That's sort of the arc I think you would expect this to have is
more and more people get shut out, you know, like you see, like
Liz Cheney, what happened to Liz Cheney. Like more and more
people will get sort of declared apostates and booted until the
thing shrinks down, until it can't really but that will be an
ugly, ugly, ugly process. And maybe you could reverse it. Maybe
Republicans of goodwill could throw themselves on the tracks and
try to stop that process from happening. But I don't have a lot
of hope.


Anna Tarkov


I often come back to the fact that while you can't necessarily
get people to think critically, I think that it's more achievable
to get people to work — deep canvassing, have you heard of that?
Where you go and you talk to people not about a specific issue or
a specific candidate or a specific policy, but you try to reframe
their thinking about various things. For example, I know of, and
this has been empirically studied and it seems to work. So it's
something that unfortunately, I don't think is employed as often
because a political campaign isn't going to; they're going to go
and talk about their candidate.


A political party typically is not going to engage in that sort
of thing either because they want their candidates to win, et
cetera, or to promote their policies or whatever the case may be,
or their brand. This is what Democrats stand for. This is what
Republicans stand for. And so I think things like that show a lot
of promise. It's just a matter of them being employed more.


David Roberts


Well, and think about it when you leave that house. I believe
that this is what I mean by sort of high touch intensive
interaction or intervention. I believe if you can get in the
house with people and talk with them over time and establish a
human connection, you can invoke different frames. You can get
them to think about things in a different way.


Anna Tarkov


Exactly.


David Roberts


But then you leave the house and you're gone. And Fox is still
there, and Fox is there all the time, 24 hours a day, day and
night, leading them back the other direction. So we can't go deep
canvas everybody. We've got to get a voice of reason inside the
house.


Anna Tarkov


You have to work all the different sides.


David Roberts


Yes.


Anna Tarkov


Matt, do we want to do questions? Let's do it.


Matt Sheffield


All right. We're going to open it up to the audience here real
quick.


Anna Tarkov


If you haven't used spaces before, you have to request.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, okay. And actually, it looks like we have a request here. I
mentioned this at the beginning, but if you weren't there at the
beginning, this is a recorded Twitter space. So if you don't want
your voice to be recorded, then you may not want to ask your
question. But I did want to disclose that to everybody. Henry
Elsewhere real quick. I have added you as a speaker. Go ahead.


Henry Elsewhere


Hey, how's it going? I'm curious, have you seen I believe it was
in China, this kind of like, might actually be the carbon capture
technology we're looking for. I just want to know if you'd seen
it and if you had any thoughts on it. I heard there's a bunch of
VCs that are super stoked on it because they're like "Oh, we only
need like a 25 x 25 miles area with these carbon capture plants
set up and they basically turn it into fertilizer." I don't know
if you're familiar with this or not, but kind of interesting if
it works.


David Roberts


Yeah, I can say a few things. I don't know what specific
technology you're talking about, but this is a super active area
of research and there are a bunch of different interesting
directions people are pursuing. There's mineralization, which
might be what you're talking about, where you absorb the carbon
into minerals, which basically render it stable and then just
throw them down on the ocean floor or bury them or mix them in
with fertilizer because they're a good fertilizer. There's a
bunch of different carbon capture machines. All I would say is
that carbon capture is going to be a marginal contributor.


Even if you take the sort of International Energy Agency as
gospel, it predicts a lot of carbon capture, but still, carbon
capture is going to be dwarfed by solar and wind and batteries
and all the normal stuff. So I feel like the tech community and
the VC community have gotten themselves sort of geeked up in kind
of a Star Trek way about this because they love the idea of
advanced super technology that no one's invented yet and can
magically solve things. But the fact is, we have the stuff we
mostly need and it's mostly political and social resistance
that's stopping it. And it would be nice if some of those tech
and VC people got in the arena and advocated for policies that
got the first 80% of reductions done before we start worrying
about these technologies, we need to do the last 20%. That's what
I would say generally about carbon capture.


Matt Sheffield


Okay. All right, thanks for that. All right, Nelson looks like he
got his Internet connection resolved. So go ahead, Nelson.


Nelson


Yeah, sorry about that. We were talking earlier about one way for
people to become more interested in the truth or more interested
in the left and its policies is for the truth to help them. For
the left and its policies to help them, right. And it seems to me
that there's a lot of things like the Green New Deal, et cetera,
that have the potential to directly aid people in their lives.
But I think a problem is taking credit for it, right. If it is
not reported on as actually helping the people's lives, or if the
effects are downplayed or accredited to Republicans, for
instance, then it seems to me that you will not get the desired
effect of people becoming invested in the truth or progressive
policies.


So I guess I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how to,
supposing that we do succeed in improving people's lives, getting
credit for that and using that to move progressive policies
forward further, right? It seems like, can we get more
progressive media? Can we yank the current media, give more
credit where it's due? What do we do?


David Roberts


Yeah, that's a fantastic question, which I could go on about at
length, but I'll try to be concise. First, I would just say,
didn't the poll just come out not very long ago that a
substantial number of people who got the childcare tax credit
checks think they came from Trump? Something like 30 ish 40 ish
percent of people in the country? So you're right that there is
no this sort of naive version of this notion that Dems have that
like, oh, if we change material circumstances in a positive way,
it will redound to our political benefit.


That is naive because as you are sort of indicating here, even
people's experience of their direct own lives and circumstances
is mediated in some sense. Like they don't bring meaning to these
things inherently. They find out from the voices and media around
them what these things mean, what's the context for them, like
who's responsible for them, all these kind of questions. So
there's nothing unmediated. You can't just change material
circumstances and expect that to do the political work for you. I
think Obama found that out, he lowered most people's taxes, and
yet to this day, most people believe he raised their taxes.


So, I would say two things. One is, when you think about
interventions that can improve people's material circumstances,
think not only in economic terms like Obama did, but also in
social terms. What is a change in their circumstances that's so
big and obvious that they can't miss it? You know what? And Trump
grasped this in his little lizard brain, which is why he held up
the checks until he could sign them. Do you guys remember that?
He didn't send out relief checks until he could sign, but he got
that. So, you need to do things, one that are big and dumb and
clear and unambiguous enough that they're easy — if you do talk
about them, you can cut through the fog a little bit and just
make it clear.


And things, I think, like EV tax credits. If we're going to give
people $3,500 back on the purchase of an EV, that $3,500 check
should come with, like, Joe Biden's smiling face on it saying,
"Thanks to the Build Back Better Act, here is your $3,500." That
kind of thing. Like, Dems need to think more crudely almost about
public policy and quit this technocratic fiddling with tax
write-offs and tax deductions and capped tested tax benefits, all
this s**t. No one knows. No one ever finds out about any of that
stuff, even if it does help. So, do some big, dumb things is step
number one.


And then step number two is just talking about it a lot. And that
involves two things. One, some message discipline on the left.
Which, how do you do that? I don't know. Two, it involves what is
the information infrastructure that gets those messages to the
ears and eyes of voters? And that is the biggest question in my
mind facing the left today, is that they don't have one of those,
right? You have a right-wing media dedicated 24 hours a day, all
year long to making them look like s**t no matter what they do.
And then you have a mainstream media who, as we were discussing
earlier, views its role as, quote, unquote, adversarial, hold
people accountable, which in their translation means just writing
negative stories over and over and over again.


So when you have a Democrat in office, the entire media landscape
is dedicated to writing negative stories about them and making
them look bad. And that's why that explains so much of what we
see around us now. So, what is the left's machine to push back
against that? Is it a cable channel? Is it a radio station?
Should we send hip-looking young people out on TikTok to do — I'm
half joking, but I saw a handsome young man on TikTok the other
day with an incredibly articulate little presentation about
zoning, about upzoning and its climate benefits. I was like,
s**t, yes. If they're out there watching TikTok. Let's send some
people onto TikTok. I don't care where it is. But Dems have got
to stop relying on the mainstream media to carry their messages
to voters. It just doesn't work. It's a game of telephone, but
that never reaches the voters. So, I wish I had a better answer
on the latter half of that question because it is everything.
That's everything. How to build that machine, but I don't really
know.


Matt Sheffield


Well, I think no, that's a great point, David. And that's
actually one of the things that we're trying to do with Flux is
to A, get people on the political left aware that this needs to
happen and then B, build it up to whatever degree that we can.
And the reality is that it shouldn't be one thing.


David Roberts


Right.


Matt Sheffield


Progressive philanthropy has this obsession with, well, we need
to have only just one thing. That's just this massive thing. And
the reality is that's not what you're up against and that's not
what you should do.


David Roberts


Guerrilla warfare that's out on the streets, right? Corner to
corner in all the places.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. You need to be helping people, help you get the word out.
Progressive philanthropy, there's a lot of problems with it.


David Roberts


If I had to trace the problem to one factor above all, it's our
shitty billionaires. Right-wing billionaires are legendarily
patient with their capital and generous and will just like — if
you want to get on that gravy train, you can and live on it for
the rest of your life just doing nothing but being a hack, going
out on TV and saying the message over and over and over and over
or writing it over and over and over again. And the left's
billionaires are terrible. Terrible. They do these one-off
campaigns. They do these deliverables.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah. Or they make for-profit investments in media. I mean, if
you look at so many left-of-center media outlets in the United
States, they're for-profit, and that makes no sense at all. If
you actually believe in your ideas, you can't put pressure on
them to be commercially viable. That's just —


David Roberts


And this is a good way of framing this that I ask people a lot of
times. So the public has this mistaken belief that the federal
budget is like your kitchen table budget. Right. This is
long-standing —


Anna Tarkov


Huge problem.


David Roberts


Yes, it's a huge problem, and it's been a problem forever because
it really makes the public fundamentally misunderstand what the
federal government does, like, what the federal government is
for. It's a very terrible misunderstanding that hurts progressive
policy. But anytime you bring that up and I've brought it up to
numerous Democratic politicians and sort of like pollsters and
advisors and whatever, and they all say the same thing, which is,
"Oh, well, that's very old and deeply rooted and we're in the
middle of a campaign and we don't have time to re-educate people
about the basics like that. We just have to work around their
misunderstanding. We have to do the best we can do in light of
their misunderstanding" and that's true on a bunch of different
issues. And so then I come to the question whose job is it to
change the public's view about that like that and many other
things but just choose that? Whose f*****g job is that? Is it
think tanks? Is it some kind of media? Is it some kind of paid
PR? I don't know what it is but, like —


Matt Sheffield


It's certainly not going to happen by itself.


David Roberts


Yeah, it's not going to happen by itself. And the right has
numerous organs devoted full time to convincing people that
government sucks and it can't do anything right. Who does the
left have devoted to convincing people that government can work
and that it's responsible for most of the good things we have in
our life in America and etc., etc. Who's out there educating them
on basic true facts about the world and no one can give me an
answer.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, that's a know we try to explore a lot at Flux. So for
people who are not following us on Twitter, I invite you to do
that. And flux.community is our website address as well. And
yeah, right now we don't have anybody raising their we actually
do we have a profile name here so go ahead and you can take your
turn unmute yourself.


Diana


Hi. This is actually Diana. Thank you. I just want to say thank
you. Your conversation here has been awesome and I really
appreciate learning so much from you guys. I'm trying to be one
of those people that is having those one-on-ones with people in
my community a little bit. I have an EV and I know it's not
perfect for the environment of course, but it's progress.
However, from my neighbors, I've had comments I really didn't
expect things like, "Hey, it'll take too much for the grid to
handle and we can't have everybody driving an EV."


And comments like the debate about the post-use pollution of the
vehicle and the battery and then they go to I say, "Well it's
better than the pollution." So then they turn around and talk
about the mining process for the battery and it seems like I just
can't win. So I'm just wondering somehow they win the argument. I
don't know where to go with it. And I was wondering if people are
hearing that and it's been the same different people, but it's
always the same exact lines. Are they getting this from somebody
or are they all coming up with that?


David Roberts


The thing, they're all getting it from the same that's why they
all sound the same is because they're all getting it from the
same places. All these same arguments. Like I can mark as someone
who is, let's say, too online, extremely online and involved in
these particular subjects, I can sort of tell when a new talking
point goes out. A talking point like "The grid can't handle all
the EVs at once." That was nowhere, and then all of a sudden it
was everywhere. I don't know the mechanism like what Alec or what
think tank guy dreamed it up or how these things start, but
clearly the word went out and I was getting Twitter randos
yelling at me, using almost identical language one to the next.


So the answer to are they all getting in the same place? Is yes.
And the other thing is, I can tell you from a history of arguing
about climate change in very similar ways, with very similar
people who were getting their information from very similar
outlets, is that there is no winning, there is no end to it.
Because they weren't arguing against climate change, because they
had any genuine spontaneous feelings or thoughts about climate
change. They just knew it was a lib thing. They knew — and you're
supposed to own libs, and people like us, conservatives, don't
believe that b******t.


And so they would try this argument and you shoot it down and
they try that argument and you shoot it down, and then they'd go
back to the first argument and you're like, wait, I shot that
down. And then they drift off to some third argument and
eventually you realize — in my case it took like ten friggin
years — eventually you realize this is not a good faith exchange.
We are not on a journey together to try to find the truth
together. That's not what's happening here. They view their jobs
as pissing me off and wasting my time.


Them changing their mind based on evidence is not in the cards.
It is not a possible outcome here. And so a lot of times you just
have to choose not to engage or disengage. I don't know exactly
if there's a rule to tell the difference between what's good
faith and what's not, but like a lot of these, you're going to
run into a lot of this about electric cars. Now that they're
threatened by electric cars, the coming global growth of electric
vehicles is the number one thing that is going to diminish oil
demand in the near term and is going to f**k the industry all up.


They're officially scared now, so you're seeing these Anti-EV
arguments roll out and the fact is, yes, if every car converted
to EV tomorrow, it would overwhelm the grid. Luckily, that's not
going to happen and it's impossible. What's actually going to
happen is the grids are going to be getting greener and being
bulked up while electrification is happening. They're going to
proceed in parallel and nobody is going to — no grid operator,
like there's no forecast for the sale of EVs that has them rising
so fast that they overwhelm grids in a way that we can't
anticipate and deal with.


So that's just like disingenuous. It's disingenuous. It's just
one of these made up arguments that's made to waste time. And
it's the same with you here. Like, oh, you're just charging off
the grid and the grid is coal. So really you're just emitting
just as much elsewhere. Well, first of all, no, it's not just as
much. Even on a coal intensive grid, an EV is better by pollution
in pollution terms. And as I said, we're greening the grid as we
speak. The US grid is getting cleaner and cleaner and cleaner,
which means if you buy an EV and you're charging off a grid
that's getting cleaner, in environmental terms, your EV is
getting cleaner every day.


Right. Like an internal combustion engine you buy is as dirty as
it is forever. But an EV literally gets cleaner every day as the
grid gets cleaner. So it rises with the grid. There are answers
to these things if you go out and look for them. I'm just
skeptical about whether the kinds of people you're interacting
with are ever going to care if you can shoot down their latest —


Anna Tarkov


Yeah, I want to underscore that for anyone else listening because
this is a common theme that comes up not just in talking about
climate, but every other progressive issue, right. Is where
people believe that they can argue on the facts and give people
statistics and studies and information that they view as
empirically sound or scientific and that this is going to change
their mind. Unfortunately, that's not how human psychology works.
That's not how people's political beliefs are formed or how they
work typically.


David Roberts


There's a great fact I like to share, which is that several
studies and surveys now have found the same thing, which is that
the most hardcore climate deniers, like old school "climate is
not happening deniers" are the ones who know the most about
climate science. They're not dumb, they're not ignorant like
that. I think that's really important to understand. They often
know more about climate science than your sort of average person
off the street who just accepts what the scientists tell them,
you know what I mean? They learn more about it in order to debunk
it.


Right. It's not a matter of ignorance. It's all about ideology
and motivation.


Anna Tarkov


Yeah. And that's why you have to parse whether someone is talking
to you in good faith or not. And it can be hard to do it's easier
in person than online, for sure, I will say.


Matt Sheffield


But it definitely is true. It definitely is true that some people
are sincere in their question asking. As somebody who was a
conservative for most of my life. People, I was able to change my
mind so I can say that. All right, well, so we're going to do —
give people two more chances to speak. So Gene, we tried to bring
you in earlier but I don't know if you were hearing us or not. So
we're going to let you have a chance and then if you're not able
to speak, then we'll move to Kent.


Gene


I actually hit that by mistake. Sorry.


Matt Sheffield


Okay. All right. I'll remove you from the speaker then. Okay.


All right, so Kent, you can go ahead then. This is the last
question here.


Kent


Okay. Yeah, there's a point here that — I live in a rural area.
I'm a blue-collar infrastructure worker, retired. I worked on
dams and all kinds of projects. But anyway, there's a point here
where we need to decide, are we going to save the environment and
the planet, or are we going to change the minds of the people
that are fighting us? And I live here, and you ain't going to
change these people's minds until they realize that there's money
to be made and even the small-time farmers — I just sent a link
to a couple of you about Sherman County, Oregon.


It went for Trump by 52 points, went from the poorest county in
Oregon to one of the richest in less than 20 years by embracing
wind energy. And the turbines are on farmers' land, and there's
one farmer up there that gets $82,500 a year off her wind
generators, which provides her money for next season's seed and
maybe a new tractor that needs to be replaced that kind of thing.
Dead Trumpers. But there's a point where if what we need to do,
like here in Oregon, I can't put solar panels up. I've got five
acres. I can't put up any more solar panels than I use for
electricity.


So I can't actually produce electricity and get a wholesale price
for it of whatever excess I make. And that would at least add to
the grid. And the people that are fighting this really embrace
that kind of thing. And so it's just a point where we got to
decide, how are we going to do this? I mean, there's a big black
cloud out there that we're charging towards, and we're all
preaching to the choir, and that includes me. And so when I go
out and I'm talking to my friends around here, they used to tell
me that the Green New Deal wouldn't let them grow their cows.


They couldn't make hay. They couldn't drive their trucks to go
get their cows. Beef was going to be outlawed. I mean, it was
just insane. So I carry a couple of copies of the Green New Deal
in my pickup, and I've got them all highlighted and marked up
with all the pertinent things. It's only 14 pages. I'm sure
everybody here has read it. And I go through it with them and
say, look, here's what it says. There's a lot of good points in
here. And then I talk to them about Sherman County. They just put
in a large, huge, about a square mile solar farm here.


I can see it from my front yard. And people at first fought it
and fought it, and now they're going, wow, that's pretty cool.
There are some good things happening out there. It isn't all doom
and gloom. We stopped the Pembina gas pipeline that was supposed
to go through Oregon from Malin all the way to Coos Bay. They've
completely abandoned that project. So that was just the people
here. And you know what? It was all Republicans who stopped it
because it was going to go through their land. It was a NIMBY
thing. I know it seems really hard and it seems like all of these
things are immovable, including us, but there is a way to get
around this, maybe just at least as part of the energy part of
it.


It's kind of like Tom Sawyer when he talked. We've all read that
when he talked to all of his neighborhood friends to paint his
aunt's fence instead of him because it was so much fun.


Matt Sheffield


That's a great point, Kent. Let's give David a chance.


Kent


Sure, not a problem. I just wanted to say there are some things
out there that are happening that aren't just bad.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, no, thanks. Thanks for that.


It's a really great question and a bunch of good points. Here's
one thing I would say. If you can try to project yourself back to
before you heard anything about the Green New Deal and empty your
mind about it and think about what was the spirit of the Green
New Deal as offered by the people who came up with it. And I mean
in the contemporary context, the sort of contemporary left that
came up with it, the whole point and motivation behind it, well,
part of the motivation behind it is we got to address climate
change.


David Roberts


That's one thing. But the other thing is this transition is going
to happen because of economics. And we specifically want to make
sure that we don't discard communities, particular communities or
that particular communities don't get ground up in the wheels
while we're changing as has happened during previous energy
transitions. So specifically we have all this stuff in here for
farmers, like all this stuff in here for agriculture, all this
stuff in here to transition and help coal workers and natural gas
workers that are left behind. One of the whole motivating spirits
of the Green New Deal was a rural, friendly, working-class,
friendly transition.


That was the damn point. And of course, if you could get out to
those rural people and the farmers and the ranchers and get them
away from Fox and talk to them for a while and show them what's
in it, you could talk them around to that. But the fact is, after
the Green New Deal — and I wrote about this study — after the
Green New Deal was introduced by AOC and her cohort, in the
following six months, Fox mentioned the Green New Deal more than
all the other networks combined, like twice as much as the other
three big cable networks combined. Why?


Because they recognized it had potential symbolic potential. Like
they recognized you could make it into a symbol of something
different than previous environmentalism, something more
worker-friendly, more justice-oriented than previous transitions.
They recognized the threat and they went right after it to
destroy it. They very deliberately mounted a campaign to lie to
their listeners about it and tell them it bans beef and bans —
yes, they on purpose killed it. And I come back to the question I
come back to over and over, which I've come back to a bunch on
this call. Whose job is it to mount a similarly comprehensive,
loud, repetitive, ubiquitous campaign on behalf of the Green New
Deal, to support it, to lend it positive, symbolic connotations
and —


Matt Sheffield


On non-ideological grounds?


David Roberts


Yes. So the left isn't unified to do it. We don't have a machine
on Fox or talk radio. So what AOC does is give a press conference
to the friggin mainstream media and then just is dependent on
them to convey it to their listeners, which they don't. So
naturally now public opinion is against the Green New Deal
because one side went after it and one side didn't support it.
And that's true for everything. There's nothing that's
intrinsically going to appeal to farmers or rural people. It's
all got to be somehow delivered to them and conveyed to them.


And the only people they listen to are Fox and right-wing radio
who's lying to them actively about it. So basically, all problems
on the left and all problems in the climate, left too, come back
to this. Like we just don't have any control over the information
atmosphere. And Fox can pollute anything it wants. It can turn
those rural people against anything it wants. Right now, just as
a funny example, Democrats are saying let's bulk up the IRS
enforcement a little bit so that we can make rich people pay the
taxes they owe. You would think that would be the most obvious,
non-controversial, you're like, who could be against that?


Literally, who could be against that? And somehow right-wing
media has got such a lock on their audience that they've figured
out a way to convince these poor people that giving the IRS more
enforcement power is just going to somehow hurt them. Even people
who don't pay tax because they're so poor now believe they're
against IRS reform. Which just goes to show there's nothing so
obviously good that Fox can't pollute it.


Anna Tarkov


Well, David, the IRS is the government. The government's bad.


David Roberts


And why is that? Because they've spent 40 years saying that half
their messages are already baked in. Everyone's already
pre-convinced. I mean, I remember when the cap and trade bill
came out in 2009 and the pro-climate people are like, well you
see, there's these permits and then you trade the permits and
then you can trade them in for an auctioned value. And then the
right comes in with Fox and says "tax". Boom. Debate was over.
Bill was dead because they had already everybody on their side
already knows what a tax is, right? They know exactly how to
fight that.


They know exactly how to think about it. They know exactly what
they're doing with that.


Matt Sheffield


I'm sorry. They also have made the infrastructure. In real estate
the number one rule of real estate, commercial real estate, is
location, location, location. But the number one rule of
persuasion is presence, presence, presence, presence. If you are
there and if you're there, you don't even have to have good
arguments, just the fact that you exist and are there and people
can see that you're there on the cable. Like a ton of people came
to watch Fox News just because they were flipping the TV. They
didn't, you know, actively seek it out. They had never even heard
of.


So, you know, just being out there all the time and that's
something positive that we can think of as well as we come to the
end here. That being out there on the regular, it is persuasive.
If people encounter — some people will never change their minds,
but other people, if they encounter ideas enough in enough
different places from different people, eventually they can rub
off in some fashion. And that's something that happened in a good
way with the fight for same-sex marriage. And generally speaking,
there's been a greater acceptance for LGBT rights and existence.
So good things can still happen even in a system in which the
deck is stacked.


David Roberts


Yeah, I mean, the thing is, the left does have enormous cultural
power. The right is not wrong about that. They're not wrong when
they freak out that the left owns Hollywood, et cetera, et
cetera, et cetera. So if everyone on the left decides at once,
like they seem to about gay marriage, then that will seep through
culture, right? It'll come out through sitcoms, you know what I
mean? Like in movies, it becomes ambient in culture. If the left
really is gripped by something, it can make it ambient in culture
and change minds about it. The question is just like, how do you
do that on purpose?


How do you herd those cats on purpose? And no one knows?


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, well, it begins with enough people having the will to do
it. And that only begins by conversations like this and writings
like everybody here today that getting people to understand that
this has to be done and we have to move toward a more
change-oriented politics. Really, I appreciate you joining us
today, David. And just to recap for everybody, so the
conversation today, this was a recorded Twitter space. So patrons
of David's and patrons of Flux, it will be available to you after
this is over if you weren't able to make it. So I encourage you
to subscribe to David's site or to join Flux on Patreon.


And David, did you have any concluding remarks you wanted to say?


David Roberts


No, other than everyone should subscribe to Volts.


Matt Sheffield


And your website address is impossible to forget. So go ahead.


David Roberts


Is volts.wtf.


Matt Sheffield


Yeah, you can't forget that one. That will be seared into
everyone's mind today, hopefully. All right, David. Well, thanks
for being here, everyone, and we'll see you next Tuesday at 03:00
P.M. Pacific, 06:00 P.M. Eastern Time. So thanks, everyone.


David Roberts


All right. Thank you, bye.


Matt Sheffield


Bye.


David Roberts


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