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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Who needs underground radicals when you have an actual congressman? Paul Gosar of Alabama tweeting this in the middle of the January 6th rally, just before the mob stormed the Capitol. Congressman Paul Gosar of Alabama, tweeted, "Biden should concede. I want his concession on my desk tomorrow morning. Don't make me come over there." That was at 12:05, last Wednesday.

As the New York Times notes today in its article on Gosar and others, "Once the siege began, Congressman Gosar tweeted, 'Let's not get carried away here. Who? Me? I didn't do anything. I didn't set you up for this. Blame someone else.' " "Who needs outside agitators and stealthy insurrectionists when you have an actual congressman?" Mo Brooks of Alabama this time riling up the crowd in D.C. last Wednesday like this.

Congressman Mo Brooks: "Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass."

[cheering]

Brian: A few seconds later, he said this.

Congressman Mo Brooks: "Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?"

[cheering]

"Louder, will you fight for America?"

[cheering]

Brian: Congressman Mo Brooks calling on the crowd to yell louder about being willing to fight. He called them at the beginning American patriots. Speaking of Patriots, for all you New York Jets fans who have spent the last 20 years hating Bill Belichick for leaving the Jets and coaching the New England Patriots to nine Super bowls instead, yesterday Belichick announced he would decline President Trump's offer of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Belichick released a written statement supporting "our nation's values" and stating that having worked with his players to combat social injustice, "continuing those efforts while remaining true to the people, team, and country that I love outweigh the benefits of any individual award." Many more New Yorkers may suddenly not root against Belichick so hard. Also, from the sports section, the PGA, maybe you will have heard, the PGA Tour has pulled the big tournament from Trump's Bedminster, New Jersey Golf Club.

Of course, from the social media world, Twitter has now banned Trump permanently. Amazon, Google, and Apple, and others have taken down the extremist friendly site, Parler. Donald Trump Jr. Not banned on Twitter tweeted that removing Parler is a "purge of conservative ideas and thought leaders." Google saw their action, not as about conservative ideas at all, but about explicit threats to public safety. For example, Parler allowing a post reportedly to remain that said, "How do we take back our country?" About 20 or so coordinated hits.

There was that and a list of others that people are citing. Parler is suing saying they're not friendly to extremists, it's about conservative thought. Now, comes a warning from the FBI that armed demonstrations could be in the works for all 50 state capitals, especially next Sunday for some reason, January 17th. With me now, New Yorker Magazine staff writer, Andrew Marantz who specializes in the intersection between political extremism and social media.

He is author of the book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. He has a New Yorker article now called How Social Media Made the Trump Insurrection a Reality. Hi, Andrew. Thanks for joining us again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Andrew Marantz: Hi, Brian. I'm glad. Thanks for having me.

Brian: Let me start with one group you describe in your article called the Red-State Secession. Since most of our listeners have never been on that site, I'll mention one of the quotes from it that you cite, "Patriots-- There's that word again, patriots. It says, "Patriots are not afraid to die." Can you give us the context for that?

Andrew: The context is that those words were emblazoned on a picture of a bunch of guys in paramilitary gear and armor and rifles apparently in some kind of State Capitol building. None of this was particularly [chuckles] subtle. It's pretty clear what Red-State Secession means. Generally, on these sites, whether it's Red-State Secession or there's another site called mymilitia.com, which has been described as the tinder for the extremist militia set.

On any of these sites, if you dig far enough, you'll probably see somewhere in the terms of service, a disclaimer that says, "We're a peaceful site. We don't condone armed violence." Then every other piece of information on the site would lead you to the opposite conclusion. None of this was subtle. It was very clear. All the clips you've played at the top of the show of people talking about taking names and kicking ass and all this stuff, you did not have to be an online forensic sleuth or a constitutional scholar to figure out what was being incited by all this. None of these was a mystery.

In a sense, this is completely shocking and seemed like it came out of the blue, if you woke up one day and saw a mob streaming into the Capitol. If you've been paying any amount of attention, not an extreme amount of attention, but just any amount of attention, this was not a surprise. It was still shocking and horrifying, but it was not a surprise.

Brian: On Red-State Secession, for example, as you report, they solicited the home addresses of 'our enemies' including select judges and members of congress suggesting that some of them might need to be 'eliminated.' Is that threat of violence even legal?

Andrew: It's unclear. The United States has some of the strongest speech protections in the world. There's a very, very high bar for what kind of speech is protected. That said, you cannot threaten specific people in a way that seems like a clear and imminent threat of violence. It's not clear that that kind of speech is protected. It's also not clear that what President Trump said is protected speech. I haven't seen a lot of people talking about this.

The Supreme Court standard is set in a case called Brandenburg v. Ohio about a Klansman who was threatening violence. The very, very high standard that the Supreme Court set in that case, was that "You can have reprehensible views, you can even have violent views, but you can't tell a group of people to go do violence in a specific manner to a specific place or person." That seems pretty close to what President Trump did.

He stood about a mile away from the Capitol and said, "Let's go over there and take back our country." [chuckles] The stuff, it all seems like hypothetical textbook stuff until the reality is standing pretty close to the line of what the constitution allows. The constitution allows a whole lot.

Brian: I guess we'll see this in the coming days assuming there really is an impeachment hearing and vote tomorrow with Trump defenders saying, "He didn't say, 'Go storm the Capitol physically,' he said, "Let's go there with--"

Andrew: He said, "You'll never take back our country with weakness, you have to use strength." It's hard to be much clearer than that. He named Mike Pence by name. Now look, I'm not saying that among Donald Trump's many crimes that the crime of threatening speech should be elevated to the top of that list and that he should be jailed for that. That's not my claim, but is that impeachable speech? I think so.

Brian: Now, Red-State Secession to get back to that example, had a presence on Facebook and was gathering thousands of followers, but then Facebook did ban it, which you write was both appropriate and inadequate. Why inadequate?

Andrew: Well, I go on to make the analogy that it's like, "Wiping down one room of a hospital while you have a pandemic raging around you." You get rid of this one group, that's one place where those 8,000 people can no longer plan their acts of sedition. At that point, it's too late, those people have been radicalized. They've spent years and in many cases going down various pathways, whether it's on YouTube or Facebook or more fringe parts of the Internet or in their daily lives, frankly. Now that they're radicalized, it's much harder to get them out of it.

Yes, you've taken away one obvious place for them to congregate, but there are still many other Facebook groups. There are still many other parts of Parler and Gab and Twitter and Reddit. Again, the permeability between the online and offline worlds I think cannot be underestimated. We're still operating as if there were a thing called online and a thing called offline. We know in our daily lives that isn't really true. We shop online. We have all our meetings online now. We go to school online. It's just increasingly obvious that there isn't a thing called the Internet and a thing called the world.

We've allowed these companies like Facebook to pretend that, "Oh, there's this bright line between what happens on our platform and what happens in the world." That's never been true. They've always been clear that it's not true because when it comes to purchasing behavior or things that they want to sell to advertisers, they're very clear that they can manipulate people's behavior and people's emotions. Suddenly, when it comes to things like politics, "Oh, we have nothing to do with that. Our hands are clean." That's not true. That's why it's inadequate.

You can't just shut down one group or 100 groups and then say, "Okay, we're Facebook, we've done our job." No, you brought us this far, you broke our discourse this much; you have to do more than just backtrack a couple of steps.

Brian: Which would be what?

Andrew: Well, I think it would be rebuilding the algorithms from the ground up. I think it's sometimes useful in this case to come back to the first principles. This is why in my book, I write about the entire national conversation, not just the decisions of one company or the terms of service of one website. The reason I think it's useful to talk about the national conversation is that I think we have an informational crisis, that's every bit as complex as the national infrastructure crisis, or even the climate crisis.

When you have something as big as that, let's take the climate crisis, you don't just say, "Oh, well, we need one bill, and that'll solve the climate crisis. We all need to recycle more, and that'll solve it." We need to rebuild the entire way we've constructed our society and our economy, if we want to reverse this massive, existentially threatening trend. I think it's similar in the information landscape. It's just that we're less practiced at seeing the dangers that way. I think they're just as real.

Brian: Listeners who has a question or comment for Andrew Marantz, from the New Yorker who specializes in the intersection between political extremism and social media. We're looking back to last Wednesday, and we're certainly looking forward to the coming days. As you just heard, to the coming era, of rethinking our relationship with social media, in the light of the extremist cultures that have taken root on it. He is the author of the book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

He has a New Yorker article now called How Social Media Made the Trump Insurrection a Reality. 646-435-7280, if you have anything to contribute to the conversation or if you just want to ask Andrew a question. 646-435-7280 or you can tweet @brianlehrer. In the short term, Andrew, are there other things like Red-State Secession still on Facebook today, as we look at the FBI warning that there could be armed demonstrations at all 50 state capitals in the next few days?

Andrew: Yes, I think that the reason that you saw Facebook and Twitter, taking action against Trump and his loyalists in a way that you've never seen them do before is that they are pretty clearly worried about imminent future violence. What you saw is in the wake of this insurrection, you had Mark Zuckerberg saying, "We're going to suspend Trump's account because he is a threat to the safety and viability of our democracy," or however he phrased it. Now, my argument was, "I don't see why that was true on January 7, but it wasn't true a week ago, or a year ago, or four years ago."

Trump has been openly violating the rules of all these platforms for years ever since and before he started running for president. The reason they're taking action now, I think is that the mood in the room has shifted. Trump also is losing his grip on power, which means he can't do as much to retaliate against these companies using the levers of the federal government. Also, they don't want more blood on their hands. They have enough blood on their hands as it is. They don't want to wait for more violence to happen, not only in DC, potentially, but also, there are potential violent protests that apparently are being planned at all 50 state capitals in the coming weeks.

I think if you're one of these companies, like many members of the Trump administration, you suddenly see people discovering their conscience and scrambling for the exits. I think it's too little too late for some of the reasons we discussed that the national conversation has already been ripped into pieces, and a lot of people have already been radicalized. Again, because they're not changing their algorithms so that they're no longer promoting incitement, incentivizing incitement, and encouraging the excitement of the basest impulses and emotions.

They're not fixing it at that level, but they are interested enough in their self-preservation to say, "If Trump is going to encourage further riots, we don't want it to happen on our specific platform."

Brian: Ray in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Andrew Marantz. Hi Ray?

Ray: Hey, how you doing? You're speaking to a former bootboy from New York City. By bootboy, I mean a skinhead. My crew in Boston was [unintelligible 00:15:25] which stood for Trump on that [unintelligible 00:15:28] effing face. Mr. Lehrer, you had an interview with one Chris from a white supremacist group called White American Youth, I think you should be speaking to him. Even though he's not in it anymore nor myself, we know exactly what's going on. When Mr. Trump came to the forum as president; it represented the last stance of national socialism, not just nationally, but internationally. This is going to be [unintelligible 00:16:05] last--

Brian: When you say national socialism, you're referring to Nazism?

Ray: Sir, you speak the Queen's English quite well. Exactly so. The term you need to be utilizing in your days to come will be white martyr. A white martyr will be the American caucus or the equivalent of a Muslim with a bomber vest walking into civilian in a domicile and blowing themselves up. Well, not necessarily just a bomb, but AR-15 with 556.223 calibration round. All right, sir?

Brian: Ray, in your estimation, if everything you're saying is true, how can this be prevented?

Ray: How can it end? How can we solve it? You're asking me?

Brian: Oh, I am.

Ray: It can't be solved. It cannot be solved. Man, you saw Mr. Elon Musk, they're building rockets to go to Mars and Jupiter. In 1000 years, we can be having the same conversation, Mr. Lehrer. It's a human condition. We come from primates. Monkeys are the most racist animals on planet Earth. Look it up. We can't help ourselves. It's going to [inaudible 00:17:28] this country.

Brian: Ray, thank you very much. Without giving too much credence to calling Trump a Nazi, there are many things we could call him. When somebody says that, you got to call it out. We'll say, "Well, not necessarily Nazi." Andrew, as you follow social media is the thing that he's predicting in terms of "white martyrs" as they will label themselves. Blowing themselves up or blowing facilities up or taking AR-15s to them in the coming days, something that you're seeing any indications of online?

Andrew: Look, I don't rule anything out. I spent a lot of time not only tracking these groups online but also being present with them and embedding with them and listening to how they talk. They certainly talk about things like "white jihad." They certainly talk about things like protecting their civilization by any means necessary. They bring up books like The Turner Diaries. I don't think any of that is out of the realm of possibility. I will say also, to the second point, the caller made about human nature. How we're primates and we're just consigned to this fate. I think it's important to push back against that. I'm by no means optimistic.

I'm probably one of the least optimistic people. I know about the state of our country, but I don't think it's right to create this deterministic fallacy that well, people are just tribalistic. We're stuck in this endless loop of hatred and fear. I think those elements obviously exist and certainly have always existed in this country at least since 1619. That doesn't mean that that's the only force at play here. I think what that does when we take that deterministic view is it lets all of us off the hook.

It means we don't have to work to make the country better. It means that social media companies don't have to work to make their platforms better because they can just say, "Well, this is human nature. People like to fracture and divide. What would you have us do about it?" It means that the Republican members of Congress who are fostering this behavior can just lean back on these tropes about human nature. I think we need to dispense with these notions about whether people are essentially good or bad, and just do the work of making the conditions in people's lives better so that they're not driven to these acts of desperation.

Brian: About social media, I've seen that even after Twitter vanished Trump, the #HangMikePence was still proliferating. How big a whack-a-mole project is it for these platforms with millions or billions of users to root out incitement to violence?

Andrew: Well, that's a really good example because I looked at that hashtag and a lot of the tweets, I think a vast majority of the tweets were condemning the fact that people were trying to hang Mike Pence. It was people tweeting, "Can you believe that these traitors came to the Capitol to hang Mike Pence. Now, this is a good example of how social media content enforcement is always a little bit more complicated than people think. I did a whole article about Facebook's content moderation and how deeply, deeply flawed it is.

I believe that Facebook is not only not doing a good job, but not even really trying to do a good job for various financial incentives and other reasons, ideological as well. I do think it's more complicated than people think it is. You can't just say, "Okay, let's kick off everybody who says the phrase, 'Hang Pence.' " I'm saying the phrase, "Hanging Mike Pence, right now." I wouldn't want to be kicked off Twitter if I tweeted about that idea. These things are complicated.

I think the fact that they're complicated doesn't mean though that we can just take a laissez-faire approach across the board and say, "Again, what would you have us do? We'll just let people be people. We'll let the marketplace of ideas sort it out." I think the fact that it's complicated means that you have to step up your game if you're one of these companies.

You have to say, "Okay, we decided about 15 years ago that we were going to disrupt and innovate and change everything about how human communication works. Now we've done it. The world is more unstable. A lot of former liberal democracies are trending toward authoritarianism. Maybe we should redouble our efforts to reverse that and actually clean up the mess we've made instead of just continuing to move fast and break things."

Brian: We'll continue in a minute. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Andrew Marantz, New Yorker staff writer who specializes in the intersection between political extremism and social media. He's author of the book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. He has a New Yorker article up now called How Social Media Made the Trump Insurrection a Reality. Can you talk about Parler in particular and the degree to which it had become a gathering place for people with violent intent?

Andrew: Yes, I would say Parler and Gab are the two companies right now that are fighting for the mantle of the far-right equivalent to Twitter. You often see this when a company like Twitter gains enough prominence. You see what I have called a bizarro version of that platform. When Reddit starts enforcing rules against egregious content, you have competitors to Reddit. When Twitter started enforcing its rules, you had competitors like Parler and Gab. Those were places where it was much more of an echo chamber. They're much smaller than a place like Twitter, but they're much more extreme.

That's essentially the trade-off is that if you go on Twitter and say on January 6th, "I'm going to bring explosives and handcuffs and try to assassinate the vice-president," you would get kicked off of Twitter. You probably wouldn't get kicked off of Parler because they don't take a proactive approach to content moderation. In fact, they take a very, very laissez-faire approach, almost extremely so. There have been interviews with the CEO saying, "Well, I don't even know what's on my platform. I don't think it's my job to know."They have this jury system where a jury of five of your peers can decide.

If five of your peers are radicalized white terrorists, then your incitement of violence posts will stay up. That's a coherent view that "We're a private company and we should be allowed to let everything stay up." Because of section 230 and a number of other reasons, it's a view that they can get away with. I certainly don't think it's good for the world to simply let people plan whatever acts of violence they want to and just wash your hands of it.

Brian: Let me throw a couple of arguments at you that I've heard against this serial de-platforming of extremists who aren't committing actual illegal acts of threatening violence with their speech platform. I should say Parler has been de-platform by Google, Apple, and Amazon. How much does this make the risk of violent extremism go away, as opposed to just go further into its own bubbles and onto its own servers and other ways of using the web to recruit and communicate that are further underground?

Andrew: Yes, I think you're right. This is the trade-off. You never make this stuff fully go away. Look, there are obviously reasons to protect the freedom of the Internet. I don't want us to gloss over this. Freedom of speech is monumentally important. I don't want to live in a world where the United States government is shutting down every website that it doesn't like. Seizing the servers of blogs because they don't like the speech on those blogs.

It's very important to keep that slippery slope in mind. I think that as long as we're invoking that slippery slope, though, it's important to invoke the opposite slippery slope that if you just have people openly planning insurrection on mymilitia.com that you don't have any checks on that speech. To your point about whether these things fester and keep going on, if you put them in their own little echo chambers, I think that is a worry. I have seen a lot of research that suggests that de-platforming works.

For the simple reason that there are only so many people who are already pre-committed to hardcore violent or radical ideas. It's not the case that 75 million Americans are predisposed to like the idea of erecting a gallows outside the Capitol. That just is not the case. It is true that there are a lot of people who are angry at the Democrats or angry about the state of the country and could be drawn along a pathway to radicalization. A lot of the people that I spent time with over the years I was reporting, my book would talk about the "libertarian to alt-right pipeline."

The reason they talk about a pipeline is that they know that very few Americans are currently radicalized, but a lot of Americans are opens radicalization, for various reasons that are personal and structural. When you get these voices off of these huge mainstream platforms, you're cutting off their supply of fresh impressionable minds. When Alex Jones gets de-platformed from every major platform, his revenue goes down, his reach goes down. It may seem inconceivable, but I think the same thing is about to happen to Donald Trump.

Not to say that Donald Trump is going to go away, but his reach gets cut off. This is why he cares so much about his Twitter account. Yes, you do have the problem of echo chambers and putting people into their own little nooks and crannies, but there are a lot of researchers who think that the trade-off is worth it.

Brian: Dan, in Troy, you're on WNYC with Andrew Marantz. Hi Dan.

Dan: Hi. Yes, thanks for taking my call. I've heard a lot about mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook and a wider variety of others that have cut off Donald Trump. I haven't heard a lot about YouTube. From what I understand, YouTube is an important radicalization engine because they try to keep you watching more and more videos. I'm wondering if the guests could speak to that a little bit.

Brian: Thank you, Dan. Andrew.

Andrew: Yes, that's a really good point. YouTube is hugely important in this. My friend, Kevin Roose at The New York Times has done great work on this, as have a lot of other journalists at The Times and elsewhere. YouTube is an extremely important funnel for radicalization, if not potentially the most important. It's just the mechanics of it are different. To take Donald Trump as an example, he uses Twitter to transcribe his id.

He just takes to Twitter and uses it to immediately share his thoughts. YouTube is a little bit different. There are some people who are used to the act of blogging to transcribe their thoughts live on video to the world, but most people are not like that. Most people are sharing videos that were made by someone else. They're putting together things in a more calculated way. It's just the mechanics are different. I think the caller is totally right that YouTube needs to be reckoned with as a huge part of the radicalization problem.

Specifically there algorithm, we talk generally about algorithms and how we need to get the algorithms under control. What is meant by that is pretty specific. These algorithms are designed to incentivize certain things and optimize certain things. The YouTube algorithm in the past was optimizing, it seems, for watch time. They wanted to keep you hooked on the platform. Whether it was humans or machine learning, whatever combination thereof figured out that the way to keep people hooked to the platform was to give them more and more extreme content.

Whether that was more extreme political content, more extreme baking content, more extreme distance running content, whatever it was. They've now tweaked that a little bit, but they haven't completely flipped the incentive structure on its head to force-feed you civics education or whatever the opposite of extremist content is. That's all just to say that the caller is absolutely right, all of these companies have their own internal incentive structures, most of which are totally opaque to us because they are black boxes. They're private companies that don't report their algorithmic makeup in any publicly transparent way. They're continuing to manipulate us.

They might make these high profile decisions or bans, but the basic incentive structure still works the same way. I think, to return to the climate analogy that we were talking about before, you might institute a national recycling mandate, but you still have ExxonMobil directly incentivized to pull fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them. The system itself is still a problem even if there's high profile changes made along the way.

Brian: Lindsay on Long Island, you're on WNYC with Andrew Marantz from The New Yorker. Hi, Lindsay.

Lindsay: Hi, how are you?

Brian: Good.

Lindsay: There was recently an article where Joe Toscano, one of the experts featured on the social dilemma, discuss how banning Trump is essentially the downfall of big social media companies. They created I guess, a loophole in Section 230 by essentially taking on accountability. Is that something you can see happening?

Brian: Andrew, do you want to summarize the section 230 debate for everybody else?

Andrew: Section 230 is actually a more complicated thing than I think we often let on. My colleague, Anna Wiener has done a lot of good writing on this at The New Yorker. It's a section that creates a shield for legal immunity for companies that-- basically it creates a way for these companies not to be held liable for everything that everybody posts on their platform. The original purpose was to say, "Okay, I'm setting up a message board like eBay. I don't want to be held legally liable every time somebody wants to sell something illegal on eBay."

Then this has been extrapolated and extended to all kinds of speech. It hasn't really been updated as the Internet has become ever more powerful and has disrupted and taken over more and more parts of our economy and our lives. I don't like to be the guy who always says, "It's more complicated, but let's be more nuanced." I think some things are pretty clear, especially as we try to defend the last dying embers of whatever's left of our democracy. I think certain things can be very black and white. I do think that when it comes to claims about government regulation, and saying, "Well, if we just repealed section 230, this would all be okay."

Not to say that that's what the caller was saying, but I do hear people saying that. I just don't think that stands up to scrutiny. I don't think any act of government regulation is going to fix this. I think it's going to be a much deeper and broader process than that if it does get fixed.

Brian: It's a technical thing, I don't know. Should we see it as a technical thing or should we see it as a profound thing? If section 230 protects the platforms like Twitter and Facebook from lawsuits based on their content because they're not publishers, they're just platforms. "If Red-State Secession publishes an incitement to violence on Facebook, then sue Red-State Secession. It's not Facebook's responsibility." That's what section 230 states. Trump wants section 230 repealed because he claims that these platforms have a liberal bias or a biased against him.

A lot of progressives want section 230 repealed because they say, Zuckerberg and others have allowed hate speech and fake news and everything else, disinformation and incitement to violence to proliferate. He should be held accountable for that.

Andrew: I think that's right. Look, I think one thing that it speaks to that is really important is, how we conceive of what the Internet is. I think the Internet has become so dominant in our society so quickly, that in a way it took over our lives without us really being able to know even what it is in the first place. You see all this grasping at metaphor. Is it a public square? Is it a soapbox? Even the word platform is a metaphor. The word web is a metaphor. The word link is a metaphor. This is all us trying to return to older modes of knowledge and communication to understand what our lives have become.

I think with the section 230 debate, you see that too. Are these things publishers or platforms? Should they be liable? Are they just tubes that are just transmitting information? I think the answer is, we have to what economists would call "internalize some of the externalities." Meaning, again, to return to the climate metaphor. If we don't create any way to disincentivize companies to belch toxic fumes into the air, they will continue to do it. It's easier for them to do so. If we shut down every company that has an emission, maybe that is not the way, we want to do it because that will upset the economy.

I think the key thing here is to see that speech can have negative consequences. I think in any other industry, we see, "Okay, if you're a tobacco company, you are having negative consequences by selling your product. If you're a food company. If you're a slot machine company." We get that there's a trade-off here. You who have the right to start a business, but the government maybe has a right to regulate it. People have a right to boycott it. Society has a right to look down its nose, if you make your money by poisoning people and getting them addicted to toxic chemicals.

Somehow, with the Internet and with speech, we have gone so long, blinding ourselves to the fact that speech can have negative externalities as well. We cherish and value this thing called free speech, this abstraction. Of course we should, but somehow we don't allow ourselves to understand that when you allow speech to continue in this completely, not only unfettered way, but actually algorithmically promulgated way that encourages people to be their worst selves online. Encourages people to go down these attentional death spirals and turn toward their lizard brains all the time. Of course, that's going to have negative consequences.

Whether you deal with that by tweaking the law. Whether you deal with that by creating a public movement to get people off of social media or to use social media differently. Whether you do that by pressuring the CEOs of these companies to act differently. The first step is recognizing that these things can have negative consequences. It doesn't make you anti-free speech to recognize that there are externalities.

Brian: Let me ask you one last thing before you go. As somebody who follows some of these extremist sites. Certainly, anyone paying attention since last Wednesday, will know that much of Black and brown America is experiencing this not as an aberration, but just the latest episode of who we have always been as a country, as at least part of our makeup. While many more white Americans are saying things like, "Not since the war of 1812, have we seen anything like this." Forgetting about all the white race riots that have happened since the end of reconstruction, let's say 150 years ago, to keep people like those who stormed the Capitol in sole control of power.

Your New Yorker colleague Jill Lepore, wrote that one term that could be used to apply to the events at the Capitol is race riot. From what you know of the extremist groups who took part, did they think they could do this with impunity? It was so out in the open. How much privilege did those sedationists think they had?

Andrew: There's a huge amount of privilege there. My other colleague Masha Gessen argued that they had the privilege of being underestimated. I think it's patently obvious that if this had been a mob of non-white people who had a different racial or political valence, they would have been treated very differently. A lot more State violence probably would have been meted out on them. That's hardly even a hypothetical given how the racial protests and uprisings of the summer were handled.

Brian: Clearly.

Andrew: You can see that this is a stark difference. Of course, it's baked into our history. Of course, this is elementary. I said in my piece that for people like Joe Biden and Mike Pence to say, "This is not who we are," is at best naive or disingenuous. At worst, it's a form of whitewashing. Obviously, this is part of who we are. I guess, I would just return to what I was saying to the previous caller that "It's not the entirety of who we are." I don't say that in a tricky optimistic, "Let's forget about the sins of the past and move forward." I think we absolutely need to reckon with the sins of the past, which are also the sins of the present.

I don't think we're past this in any way. I think, in fact, we've never really looked it squarely in the face. It's just to say that "To be too blithe about who we are, whether that's brutal or noble or whatever it is, that's not enough. We can start there and we can reckon and wrestle with that, but we have to get past this predetermined view of human history to say, "Oh, well, the arc of history will bend this way or that way." We can't get stuck there. We have to say, "We are this very flawed country. We're a country born in revolution. We're a country based in the original sins of genocide and slavery. How are we going to preserve what we have left of this country?"

We have to be able to hold both of those things in our heads. We are facing massive crises of polarization, of information, collapse, all the rest of it, not to mention the climate and everything else we have to deal with. To throw up our hands now and to say, "Well, we've always been a bad country. What else would you expect?" I think that's a dereliction of duty. I think the point here is to look squarely in the face, everything that we're dealing with and to say, "Okay, how do we move forward?"

Brian: Yes, but one more point on this and to the specific moment. You can compare what happened Wednesday to Charlottesville, where people did this out in the open. In that case, Klansmen who didn't feel the need to wear hoods to protect their identities. In this case, people engaging in an attempted violent takeover of the United States Capitol, just right out there with no masks, knowing cameras are everywhere in 2021. Talk about social media.

From your understanding of the groups, what did the mob think the outcome would be? They didn't have the military weapons, heavy military equipment of an actual coup to seize power by force, how did they think this would end? Does your sleuthing on the sites give you any clue?

Andrew: Well, as you say, a lot of this is out in the open so it doesn't take much sleuthing. I have watched a lot of the live streaming footage of people who are in that crowd. It's incredibly revelatory, in part because, one of the advantages of moving in numbers, like this is not only that you can overwhelm the Capitol police with force, although that's part of it, it's that you can put different subgroups together and they can blend in with each other. In this group, you have a bunch of just frankly, clownish-looking people. You have these guys, like the Q Shaman who dresses up like a fur-covered pagan figure and vapes in the Capitol. All these just absurd silly things.

Those people are used as cover in a way because you see those people first and you say, "Oh, this is silly. Yes, maybe this seems scary, but how could this possibly be taken seriously because these people are obviously so clownish and deranged? They're just trying to get likes on Instagram or whatever." In addition to that, you have people moving with quasi-military precision. You have people who are in full tactical gear and bulletproof vests and carrying flex cuffs and planting bombs. It's both of these things at once. This is how it's always been in America. This is how it's always been everywhere.

There members of the SS and the Gestapo who looked really silly and had silly haircuts and silly mustaches. That doesn't make them less dangerous. Again, I don't think it's that every person there had a specific plan about how they were going to execute this coup. That's obviously not the case. I'm not sure that no one had a plan. I think that interspersed with that group, there were people who were trained and determined to do real violence. There were ex-military people who are now running. There may have been ex-law enforcement people.

You see on these live streams, a lot of these people thought that they were going to go in there and the police were going to somehow join them. You see people on these live streams begging Capitol Police officers, "We're with you. You should join us and help us enforce the constitution." That's deeply delusional, but I think they really believed it. Part of the threat here, not only with this particular mob, but with where we stand in general, is to take all of it in, even though it's contradictory.

Yes, you had people who were silly. Yes, you had people who were scary. They were both there and part of the challenge is to take it all for what it is and say, "We need to be able to deal with both things at once."

Brian: New Yorker Magazine staff writer, Andrew Marantz, who specializes in the intersection between political extremism and social media. He's author of the book Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. He has a New Yorker article now called How Social Media Made the Trump Insurrection a Reality. Always appreciated. Andrew, thank you very much.

Andrew: Thanks for having me.

 

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