Rick Wilson, Barbara McQuade & Carlos Lozada

very beginning. And now they're desperately trying to retcon this thing and like put it in reverse, like, well, we didn't really know who this guy was. He was an intern, a coffee boy. We barely knew him.

is chaos. What do you get on Fox for? Do you get on Fox for saying why, yes, I was in the sub committee today and we worked on electric vehicle mandate standards or whatever. No, you get coverage on Fox by saying today I fought back against the pedocuck army of sorow Shills, and I burned it all down. And of course burning it all down is all they care about. So you got Mike Johnson clinging to power

and political life by a thread. And look, no one in that organization, no one in the House, cares whether they keep the government open or closed. They want it to be chaotic. They want the problems of a shutdown, They want the chaos of a shutdown. And they all do it because they want to please Donald Trump and they want to get on Fox News. These are the only things that matter, and so that's what that's what we'll get more of.

they did it. They woke up the next morning and said, wait, what a quarter of our female voter population the Republican Party is either actually like Roe v. Wade, pro choice or libertarian, state of the hell out of my business. Pro choice what's happening here. They were shocked that this suddenly bit them on the ass politically in twenty twenty two, and it bit them hard, and it's still hurting them

right now. If you think that Dobbs blew a hole in the Republican Party's coalition, particularly with women who were more educated and affluent IVF, if Dobbs was a bomb, IVF is a nuclear war, you were going to see Republican women, Democratic women, independent women lose their damn minds over this for absolutely good reasons, because you know what if an embryo is a baby, if they're going to

play this game. You know, Nicky Haley had a child by IVF, and Mike Pence and his wife and mother had a child by IVF, and I know people and you know people who've had children by IVF and it was a great blessing for them.

measles anymore. That's what science is for. I mean, this is, like, you know, as much as this is about the end of ree Vwaight, it's also about a Republican party that hates science. I mean, you watch these Trump rallies and they're advertising ivermectin next to Trump. I mean, I mean, this is not just the end of women's reproductive freedom. This is the end of like legitimate science based freedom.

And the thing that I'm so struck by is when you talk about the architect of overturning Rev. Wade, the guy who created SBA in Texas, which functionally overturned ROW a year before, a guy called Jonathan Mitchell has told The New York Times last week he said, we're.

and creating families. This entire movement, they are so running into a gigantic cultural and social buzzsaw that they have not calculated yet how deeply they're going to break their coalition. You know what, if y'all want to go off and go to Alabama, Stan and have twelve kids, more power to you, God blessed, do your best.

power to you great, go forth and conquer. But the brutal reality is we now have people who are overt theocrats seeking to impose a specifically narrow type of Evangelical Christianity on every single American. And we've both talked to Tim Alberta about his book about how politicized the MAGA religious movement has become, and how far it is from faith, and how much it is about a social and cultural rejection of modernity, and whether that's science or whether that's

birth control, or whether that's medicine. They don't want to live in this century. They don't want to live in the last century. They want to live in the nineteenth century or before. And it's all because they believe at the fundamental underpinning of all this, when you get right down to it, is they're worried that the brown people are having more babies than they are. That's what's really

underneath all of this, right, is racism. The white replacement theory informs so much of what's happening here.

dumbest member of the United States Senate. And this is, by the way, the competition is stiff. Do we think he may not know what IBF is.

of children who are yet born. I know people, you know, people who who have struggled to have children, who desperately want to have kids. And now what they're saying is, we're so afraid that there's some overlay with our anti abortion crusade with IVF, that we're going to ban IVF. It's a fascinating and really dark place.

narrow slice of the social conservatives happy. It may end up being the thing that legitimately kills the Republican Party in this country.

about Russian disinformation. It's a bit of a distraction when people talk about it, as you know, what did he conclude with regard to Donald Trump. There's a fascinating discussion in there about Russian disinformation, about the use of social media to sew division, to influence voters in a really sophisticated propaganda campaign. And since twenty sixteen, I have seen those same tactics now being used by political operatives in

the United States. And if you listen to the way Donald Trump speaks and talking about you know, January sixth insurrectionists as hostages, or saying we need to preserve presidential immunity, as if that is a thing. He is using some of those same tactics that we saw in twenty sixteen by Russia, and frankly, once I started digging into it and studying the same tactics, we saw a boy Hitler

and Mussolini and other authoritarians throughout history. And so my goal in writing the book is really to just share with the public in a readable and accessible way the things that I've learned in my research, the danger of disinformation and how it is being used against us to manipulate It's.

referring to insurrectionists as hostages. We see a last Stephanic, the congressman from New York, repeating that phrase, or Marjorie

Taylor Grain and Georgia repeating that phrase. And so one of the things that I learned that Adolf Hitler knew and wrote about in Mind comes and that Joseph Gerbels his propagandist talked about is that you must use simple messages understandable to the masses, and then repeat, repeat, repeat them over and over again, so that people hear them from so many different sources they begin to think, well, it must be true because I hear it all the

time from so many different people. I see it from my friends, I see it on television, I see it on social media. That's one. Just repeat the simple message. So a stolen election in twenty twenty stop this deal. Everybody hears it and they begin to believe it. The other fundamental aspect of disinformation is that a big lie is ironically more believable than a little lie. Hit We're talked about this in nine Cobs. That's because all of us have experienced little lies. Most of us tell little

lies because it's a kid thing to do. My husband might say to me, no, that dressed does a make you look fat, deer? He is being kind all of us. You know your hair looks just fine, I might say to my daughter. We're all accustomed to that. But what Hitler said is no one would have the audacity to tell a big lie. And because we think that, we think it would be so immoral to tell a big lie that most of us just can't even imagine telling

a big lie, you know. Of course, for him it was that, you know, Jews were the source of all problems in our world, and we need a solution to them. But what we're hearing today, of course, is this idea of a stolen election. And I think people think, I mean, it must be true because it would be so easy to disprove if it weren't stolen. But in fact it's not, because it's fifty individual state elections. And so if you throw that out there and say it enough, you could

undermine people's confidence in the election. And that's a big part of it, you know. I've just occard in recent days Donald Trump telling people that voting by mail is unreliable, because he's already laying the groundwork so that when we see people in his own party choose to vote in person and people in the other party choose to vote by mail, and we see this red mirage, just as we saw in twenty twenty, where in the early returns he's winning, and then later as a mail in ballots

are tonad he loses. He can say they flip the votes. It was fraud, you see. And so this idea of simple repeatable eyes about a big audacious fact is right out of being with you know, sometimes referred to as the authoritarian playbook.

right now. I have this theory that part of how we are here is that Congress refused to regulate social media at all, and had they been just a little bit more careful, had so, for example, in two thousand and five or two thousand and six, when all this started, if they had said, you know, if you're going to link to a story, you have to pet you know, like made it so that these social media sites have to have editors or fact checkers, so that there was some sense in which, you know, if you just put

up something that said, like the election was stolen, that there would be some kind of pushback from the platform. That doesn't happen, right, So I'm wondering, like, obviously this is tangential, but I'm wondering if you think regulation could have.

to you when we start talking about social media. Elon Musk, any regulation is censorship, and of course that is not the case. There is far less restriction on social media than there is on televis and radio, where there are

regulations that require disclosure of who paid for ads. For example, on social media, there is no requirement to disclose who pays for ads, So Russians could be paying for ads, or large corporations could be paying for ads, or one really rich guy could be paying for ads, and instead they use a name like the Red, White, and Blue

Grandmothers of America. No requirement to disclose. You know, when you watch an ad on television or hear one on the radio, they'll say, I'm candidate so and so, and I approve of this ad because they have to disclose. That's not true on social media. So I think there's a lot we can do to regulate social media that would comply with the First Amendment and fall short of censorship.

So one of the things we've learned about social media from the congressional testimony of that whistleblower named Francis Hougans was that it wasn't so much about the content but about the algorithms that so manipulative. So Facebook, for one, was using algorithms that was designed to push content that would outrage us. The more outrageous the content, the more

it would get. They introduce the dislike and hate emoji, and the more that was attached to an article, the more likely that would show up in a prominent place in our feeds. And the reason was that kept you on the platform, it kept you looking at advertisements, and it made them money. Instead, we could require them to disclose their algorithms, maybe we don't prohibit them, or we could tell them you can't use certain algorithms that manipulate

your users in this way. So there are a lot of things we can do, from requiring disclosure of the payment of ads to requiring some transparency around algorithms that would be very helpful. I think that could avoid arguments about content. Now, I'd go even further than that and say that when there is controversial content, they should push us toward other sources that even if they're not saying this is false, if it's about an election, maybe it gives us the website to our state secretary of state

so we could read more about elections. I think we could do those things. Can we require it under the First Amendment? I don't know, but I think we can permit it. You currently before the Supreme Court, there are a couple of lawsuits pending, one out of Texas, the other out of Florida where they have statutes that have been passed that would prohibit content moderation as censorship, as

violating First Amendment right. So those are a coup pair of cases I am looking for, and media companies have joined against those statutes to say, without content moderation, social media would be a toxic healscape. You think it's bad, now, just way do we stop moderating all the threats and harassment and other things we see there? You know, there is an argument on the right that social media platforms

have a pro left bias in their censoring things. On the right, I think what the social media platforms would say is, well, we do take down things that threaten people, that harass people, that target groups, and so this Supreme Court decision will decide whether that is permissible. I shudder to think what social media will look like if those social media companies lose.

worst possible thing they can do. But you know, they also favor big business, and so the media giants are also a big business, and so I think they will look somewhat favorably there as well.

recall the timing of all of this. Russia steals emails from the Democratic National Committee, and you know that includes Hillary's emails that include the party chair, and they hold on to him for a little while, and then the day the excess Hollywood tape gets released in which Donald Trump is saying some disgusting things that is very likely

to lose him a lot of voters, particularly women. Now is when Wikileiks decides is the time to drop these emails, and so they drop a lot of emails, including some that were actually that were unflattering to people in Democratic Party leadership, and so Russia is controlling the narrative. Instead of talking about access Hollywood, that gets pushed off the front page, and instead we're talking about palace intrigue in

the Democratic Party, so that gets repeated. Of course, the other email scandal is a different one, which was Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. Certainly, Caroless, certainly is something that voters should have been thinking about and been aware of. But this idea that it was ever criminal was far fretch from the start. Ultimately concluded, the FBI concluded no crime, and then Jim call me, I think makes a real serious mistake.

And so back to twenty sixteen, I digress. And then when he reopens the case, you know, they discover a few more emails on I think it was Anthony Wiener's computer, and they realized that he look at some more and he didn't know how long it would take. In fact, it took a few days and they were done before the election, but he felt the need to report to Congress that they had reopened the investigation. I don't understand

why there is a need to do that. Ordinarily, it is the policy of the Department of Justice to neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation. I think at that point, if charges are merited, you file them. But to say we're going to be looking at these emails over the next few days. It just put the matter in the headlines again, stayed there for several days.

had to sway voters to see those headlines. And the other data point I'll mention Molly is that there is I forget the statistic now, but more than any single policy issue, Hillary Clinton's emails dominated the news cycle by a factor of you know, I forget the number, but it's you know, sixty to one or some outrageous ratio, and so that became the narrative on Hillary Clinton instead of anything about you know, her experience or positions between

the two parties, between the two candidates. And so I do think that that issue, both the way the Justice Department and Jim Comy in particular handled Hillary Clinton's email investigation, and the way Rush used WikiLeaks to drop these emails on the public in October close to the election, to push the EXUS Hollywood tape off of the headlines, I think those absolutely had some influence in the outcome of the election.

Russian operatives. There was one called Blacktivist that spent many months gaining followers, saying things that seemed very mainstream if you were you know who, This person purported to be a black activist, lots of things that people would like and share and follow, and they believe this person to be a credible black activist. And then as the election approach, said things like, don't vote for Hillary, stay home, you don't have to vote for Trump, just don't vote for anybody,

vote for Jill Stunt. Hillary doesn't care about the black vote, don't vote for her. And so that was made possible by anonymous accounts, by the ability to call themselves blacktivists, and so I think we should require social media companies to verify all of its users, and not by simply paying a fee, but by genuinely sharing identification documents so that people are who they say they are, because I

think that is a really dangerous way that disinformers can succeed. Now, I'm more worried about attacks from within our own country that I am about foreign interference. I'm worried about political operatives now who have learned from the Russians how this game is played. And so Trump has truth social where he is posting all kinds of things that are trying to persuade voters that things that are not true are true. You know, he's been talking about we need to preserve

our great presidential immunity, as if that's a thing. Yeah, but people receive you see that and think, oh, it's Jack Smith is trying to change the status quo and we can our presidency, when that's not the case at all. There's no such thing.

And I've covered these as as a book critic for The Washington Post and now as an opinion columnist at the New York Times. And when people hear that, this is how I spend my time, like you know, like reading, like Mike Pence's memoir, and you know that sort of thing.

People say to me, like, Wow, I'm glad you're reading those books and telling us what's in them, but like, I would never read them, like you're reading that so that we don't have And the implication of like you read them so we don't have to is that these books are bad, right, they're self serving, boring, or their propaganda. But I am a real believer in the world Washington Book.

I want to make the case for the Washington Book because what I've found, you know, for all these years of reading and writing about them, is that no matter how carefully these political figures, you know, sanitize their records and their experiences, or present themselves in the most you know, favorable, electable, confirmable light, they always end up revealing themselves right in some way, you know, they they end up telling us

who they really are. And it could be like a little throwaway line here, a recurring phrase, something in the acknowledgments. The acknowledgements are by the way, like an amazing source of information about about these people. But it's in there somewhere, right, And that means that even books that are I grant you all of those things, right, propagandistic and self serving, are still really illuminating about our politicians, but also about

our politics. And so my book, The Washington Book is a collection of my digging into my deep dives into Washington books over the past decade, basically starting from like this Town, you know, by Mark Lebovich, through to you know, the Trump indictments. That's the Washington Book. And I hope that once you get through it you will find that the case for the Washington Book is real and that these really are, you know, if you read it carefully enough, very revelatory texts.

try to understand him. I read those, But I also read this book by Reggie Love, who was the guy who was his personal aid, like you know, the body man that you know, candidates and presidents have. He wrote a book called Power Forward, My Presidential Education. He was a basketball player, so that's how Power Forward, you know, makes it make sense. But there was one little detail in that book that for me, just captures Obama so well.

It's the only thing I remember from this book, or the thing I remember best from this book, I should say, and that is that there was a moment when Reggie Love forgot to bring Obama's briefcase on the plane, and you know, he's like, oh my god, I'm going to get fired. You know, he's freaking out. Obama, you know, was annoyed but gracious, and you know, forgave him for it.

And then Love explains, you know that Obama mentioned one reason he had been so annoyed about the missing bag, and he said he wanted to be seen carrying something off the plane because he said JFK carried his own

backs and like that told me so much. That told me how so carefully Obama thought about his public image and how he was sort of hearkening back to perhaps our most mythologized former president to develop the image and story behind perhaps our second most mythologized who was Barack Obama. And so that's just one little detail in a book that did not make major waves. But if you read them, you find stuff like that. That's why I you know, sort of enjoy digging through these.

really fascinating way. So, for instance, you remember Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony in the January six hearings, right, and she was there the mourning of Donald Trump's speech at the Ellipse, right, and she's describing how he wanted them to take the magatometers away so that even if like his supporters were armed, he still wanted them to come through and be where he was because he wanted the bigger crowd. That was kind of a big dramatic.

if it's unhurt and that means what that means. You know, he thinks they're here to praise me, they're here to support me, they're here to applaud me.

that context. The one thing that makes clearest of all I think is that Trump knew that all the things he was saying about the election were false, right because it you know, there's this wonderful, like two or three page chart in the middle of the January sixth report, where it shows like every time that he had been told by you know, the Attorney General, by a top eight, a D, a J. By one of his own campaign staffers.

You know that that you know, X, Y or Z thing was wrong, that actually we lost this stage, or you know, what you're saying isn't true. And then you know it shows how you know the exact you know, day later he's out, you know, repeating the same the same lie. But what I find I try to look at these all these reports as almost like speaking to each other, as as as chapters of a of a

bigger story rather than his and his des greet individual moments. Right, if you read, say the Muller Report, and then you read the Special Committee report on Trump and Ukraine right on the perfect call, you know that thing led to the first impeachment, and then you read the January six report, you sort of see how they're talking to each other.

future investigators could do. And you see how the Ukraine Report and the January six report, you know, completely picked up on the things that Mueller almost that the Mother Report wished it could have done but wasn't able to do. And so it's impossible for me to read these and isolation from one another, like that's that's the key, you know.

When the January six Commity Report came out, I use that as an opportunity to write like one big piece about all three of these investigations together, because they really are talking to each other.

become the nominee. And so that's why you end up with like the existence of like a Tim palente book, right, exactly like Tim Polenti's book was I Believe Courage to Stand an American story.

You know, these are kind of like a publisher's sweepstakes, you know, hoping that one of them pans out. Pence's book, he was already clearly a public figure. This was sort of looking back on his vice presidency, and it came out, you know, after he had distinguished himself by not being hung on January six and by not refusing to certify vote. In this book, he was kind of it was a bit of a victory lap about you know, what he had done on January sixth, that that was a lot

of it. And so in that sense, is it incredibly revelatory on some of those basic elements. Maybe not. But just like the point I made with you know, JFK

carried his own bags. You know, Like, there's one moment in the Pence book that I find so telling, and that is when he's looking back on January sixth, and he is talking about how he did the right thing, and then he mentions how Trump finally issued that video telling people to leave the cap after taking far too long to sort of make any effort in that regard. He then quotes Pence in his book quotes from Trump's video address, except he makes one omission in the quote.

So here's what he quotes in the book. I know your pain, I know you're hurt dot dot dot, but you have to go home now. We have to have peace. So when I read that, I wondered, like, what was the dot dot dot? Like what did he skip with the ellipses?

Pence is still covering for the boss. He is still omitting Trump's repetition of the election lie, right, And so to me, that captured everything, right, Like I think so much of Pence's vice presidency is captured in those three little DUTs. He would always say, I'm here to serve, right, that's his recraise, I'm here to serve. But who was he there to serve?

you know, it sort of transcends politics as well. Like one of the pieces that I wrote last year that I'm most you know, interested in or kind of happy that I did, was on this question of, you know, whether a US Chinese conflict is likely right, And so I read a bunch of different books, five or six books on that subject, just to try to figure that out for myself, and then you know, wrote about it for The Times. You know that that took a while.

I'm really grateful to have editors who kind of let me take the time to do that kind of thing. But you know, when Liz Chinese book comes out, when all these kind of prominent political books come out, now I get to pick my spots a little bit more, as opposed to when I was a book critic. I kind of had to review everything that came out. That part is enjoyable, but I you know, I fully recognized books as a way to understand politics is just my way.

But there I mean, there are obviously so many different lenses, even if you look at different cultural artifacts. Like James pony Wasac, the TV critic at the Times, wrote a really good book about the Trump era through the lens of television, right, trying to understand Trumps as a product of television. And you know, that's an equally legitimate way to do it. Books just happened to be to be

my way the way I'm comfortable doing that. I'm starting to look at some of these big kind of government in waiting policy books that are coming out on the Trump side, and that's my way of kind of reporting on what a future administration might look like, what a second Trump term might look like. But again like through through the lens of books.

will try to say, we're just trolling. Watch the Libs lose their minds. But what they're doing is try to shove the Overton window further to the right. What they're doing is trying to give themselves a permission structure and give their people a permission structure to say, yeah, now's the time, we're done with this, with this pesky constitutional republic. We want the autocrasy, we want the authoritarianism, and frankly

Trump is reelected, they're going to get it. This is why I tell people that you cannot let these people pretend that they're joking, pretend that they're trolling, because they're not. They're deadly serious about it. This is what they want, this is what they're working for every single day. And the idea that these assholes, that these scumbags, that these vile low travelers in this grotesque movement think they're going

to get away with this is astounding to me. And the fact that people still in mainstream journalism call Steve Bannon and Jack Bisobiak and talk to them and say, hey, what's going on in Trump World? Man how are you, buddy? When they are intention and their direction is incredibly clear. They are people that really deserve and need to be thrown as far out of the political process and mainstream in this country as you can imagine. So that's my moment of fuckery.

drop out? And I realized that some of it is that there has been so much reporting about Biden's age versus Trump's ninety one criminal indictments that these people actually think that Trump is a more suitable candidate. And I'm saying to you mainstream media people, and you know, I don't even think it's the journalist. I don't think it's fair to blame the journalists, because you know, the truth

is a lot of journalists don't write headlines. I know this myself, Like you know, you don't get to sign off on the headlines, especially at big places. So I understand. But if you are an editor right, ask yourself, what am I fucking doing here? For American democracy? You don't have to be for the left or for the right, but you do have to be for democratic norms. Having a pro democracy bias does not make you a partisan. And I think that is really important that these people

ask themselves, like, what am I fucking doing? Why am I framing this in a way that both sides are equal?

reporters for reporting things from whistleblowers. They'll be the first ones shocked as hell when people like Bannon and Miller and Patel and the rest of these people are in charge and running American media into the ground. They'll be the first ones to be like, I'm appalled by this. Well, don't say you were not warrant.