Title: Trump's Fact Eradication Program. Plus, How Jubilee is Transforming Political Debate

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President Trump: Why should anybody trust numbers?

Brooke Gladstone: Said the President right after he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for accurately reporting the job numbers. A new low in the war on facts. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. A rare coalition of private money and state power is trying to sue the watchdog Media Matters out of existence.

Angelo Carusone: Tucker Carlson described what he viewed as the three biggest threats, and it was The Washington Post, the German government, and Media Matters. I said, "Oh my gosh."

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, the YouTube channel Jubilee says it wants to bridge political divides, but its debate format looks more like a firing squad.

Mehdi Hasan: If Jubilee had come to me and said, "You'll be debating one guy who says he's a fascist and another guy who tells you to get out of the country," I'd have said, "I'll pass, thanks. I'm washing my hair."

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. [MUSIC] From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Ever since I got into this business, there have been times that have served as sharp reminders that the mission is to speak truth to power, but the current moment suggests that perhaps the more crucial mission, especially since power is no longer listening, is to speak truth to each other. Not merely to inform, but to reassure you who listen that, no, you are not going crazy.

By truth, I don't mean the higher ones, the moral ones; I mean just plain facts. That's why we decided to take a few minutes to contextualize the President's most ambitious and, by far, his most successful project: fact eradication. Let's start here. On August 1st, he fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

News clip: Hours after a stunning government report that the job market is considerably worse than previously thought.

News clip: President Trump posting on Truth Social that the jobs report was rigged to "make a great Republican success look less stellar."

President Trump: Why should anybody trust numbers? I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election. You know what I did? I fired her.

Brooke Gladstone: Erika McEntarfer, a labor economist with 20 years of public service under her belt. She headed the team of statisticians responsible for revising the recent employment numbers sharply downward. Philip Bump noted in his column that such noteworthy revisions often align with great economic upheaval, like the Great Recession in 2008, 2009, and the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021. What was happening this past April?

News clip: President Donald Trump's slate of sweeping tariffs is set to go into effect later this week.

News clip: Stocks plunging Friday amid the tariff uncertainty and fears of looming trade wars.

Brooke Gladstone: When President Trump doesn't get the beautiful numbers he seeks, he offers alternatives, even if they defy the immutable laws of mathematics.

President Trump: We've cut drug prices by 1,200%, 1,300%, 1400%, 1500%. I don't mean 50%; I mean 1,400%, 1,500%.

Brooke Gladstone: In June, he claimed to have cut the price of eggs by 400%, but a quantity cannot decrease by more than 100% of itself. Even I know that. I don't have an uncle who taught at MIT. As for matters of war and peace.

President Trump: A lot of very beautiful wars have been settled.

Brooke Gladstone: Odd word choice there.

President Trump: India, Pakistan, nuclear. Look at Cambodia. Just recently, it was going to be a war. I settled that up. I settled it up with trade.

Brooke Gladstone: The Nobel Prize, so near and yet so far, because it's rigged.

President Trump: Settled that one. Kosovo, you know about that. With Serbia, I think I settled, averaging about a war a month.

Brooke Gladstone: While the US played a role in some negotiations and ceasefires, it didn't do it alone. Ongoing tensions and violence in those places suggest that such agreements do not amount to a durable peace. He counts on us not to follow news of faraway places. As for wars, we can't help following the ones he was going to settle on Day 1 because the other guy was too stupid. Well.

President Trump: Of course, it was sarcastic.

President Trump: But you've now been in office for five months and five days. Why have you not been able to end the Ukraine war?

President Trump: Because it's more difficult than people would have any idea.

Brooke Gladstone: You think? Meanwhile, the President's war on facts, which cannot be negotiated, is waged with addition and subtraction. A report from the President's Make America Healthy Again Commission included citations to non-existent studies regarding such topics as children's asthma medication and mental illness. Now, that's addition, but these days, the chief weapon is subtraction.

News clip: The White House is taking another step to make it harder to find big, legally mandated scientific reports on climate change.

News clip: Several CDC pages have disappeared. Key resources for healthcare providers are gone.

Amy O'Hara: I am in Nashville, Tennessee, at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association. Sadly, without a lot of the government statisticians that are usually here.

Brooke Gladstone: For the White House, it seems that public enemy number one is data.

Amy O'Hara: The guardrails are gone.

Brooke Gladstone: Amy O'Hara is a research professor at Georgetown Massive Data Institute and the President of the Association of Public Data Users. She used to work at the US Census Bureau.

Amy O'Hara: These institutions that have systems in place to provide reliable data about our workforce, about labor in the United States. There was a leader at the helm of that organization that was just following the rules, using data inputs, using existing protocols, providing information as they always did, and because the numbers were apparently politically inconvenient, that person was told that they cooked the books and they could no longer serve in that role.

Brooke Gladstone: O'Hara says that the White House has also shuttered advisory committees.

Amy O'Hara: Which were the channel people used to understand updates in methodology, or new products coming out, or the discontinuation of other products, that has been shut down. All of those advisory committees, including an important one called FESAC, about Federal Economic Statistics, is one of the ones that were shut down. They produce numbers that people now scratch their head and say, "What is the accuracy of that number? Can I rely on that number?"

Brooke Gladstone: Ah, but that's a key component to the President's fact-eradication project. Convince Americans not to trust numbers or anything else.

President Trump: Why should anybody trust numbers?

Andreas Georgiou: We have to fight an uphill battle against all these accusations, which we're trying to undermine our credibility.

Brooke Gladstone: Andreas Georgiou is a visiting lecturer and scholar in statistics at Amherst College. In 2010, he became head of the first independent statistical agency in Greece, ELSTAT, which then issued a report showing Greece's huge deficit was even worse than previously reported. In fact, the deficit as a percent of the GDP, which is roughly defined as the value of all goods and services a country produces during a specific time, had reached completely unsustainable levels.

Andreas Georgiou: It reached 15.4% of GDP.

Brooke Gladstone: Members of the EU are required never to exceed 3%.

Andreas Georgiou: The debt increased by 11.7% of GDP, which meant that the debt-to-GDP ratio for Greece reached 126.8% of GDP. This, of course, meant that the fiscal picture was even worse than anticipated.

Brooke Gladstone: This at a time when Greece was already in a major debt crisis. This landed very hard on the people of Greece. The unemployment rate passed 25% in the following years. Since the deficit was so out of control, Greece had to adopt tough austerity measures. Rising politicians in Greece, seeking a scapegoat--

Andreas Georgiou: Rallied around the idea that the statistical office had put Greece in the eye of the hurricane. The Prosecutor for Economic Crimes began a preliminary criminal investigation against me on the basis of statements that were made by various people, including politicians. The theory was that Greece was somehow subject to some conspiracy, and that had played a role in that.

Brooke Gladstone: He spent the next 14 years battling criminal and civil investigations. He was sentenced to jail. He never served time because he was able to get his cases overturned, but at one point, he took a case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, where Greece was convicted for not providing him a fair trial. This allowed Georgiou to reopen his case in Greece. He has another hearing on it in the Greek Supreme Court next month. His goal, full exoneration.

Andreas Georgiou: That is very important, not just for me personally, but for Greek statisticians and statisticians everywhere that want to follow the rules. It has been, of course, a difficult time for me and for my family. My father suffered quite a bit. It might have contributed to my father's passing. The family had run entirely out of money to pay the lawyers. Eventually, there was crowdfunding.

People helped us a lot. Also, a very good legal firm in Greece offered to take over the cases at no cost. It would have cost me millions of dollars to be here. It has definitely caused a lot of problems for me, too, especially until very recently, as a single father of a little girl, but I can tell you that it was the good fight. I'm glad that I did it.

Brooke Gladstone: The good fight is still very much a fight all around the world. Like in Brazil.

Andreas Georgiou: Bolsonaro, the President there, fired the head of INPE, the agency that controls the satellites of Brazil, and it produces the statistical data on deforestation, among other things. It produced figures that showed that deforestation increased significantly in 2019, when Bolsonaro was in office, and Bolsonaro didn't like that and fired the chief of the institution.

Then we had the case where Erdogan, in Turkey, he fired the head of the Turkish Institute for Statistics, the agency that produced inflation figures. He felt that the inflation figures were overstated. You have this string of interventions and interferences. These are harmful to official statistics and to this important information that is the basis on which society carries out not only its economic affairs and its social affairs, but also its democracy. They are extremely essential for democracy and for accountability of the politicians.

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Brooke Gladstone: The Washington Post reported Wednesday about a leaked draft report that shows the administration is planning to eliminate or downplay accounts of prisoner abuse, corruption, LGBTQ+ discrimination, of course, and other alleged abuses. The White House says the reports will be shortened for "readability." Right, but even when defending facts, one has to concede that data can be cold.

It's well understood that the bigger the number of afflicted people, the less sympathy they engender. It's a paradox Stalin understood when he famously said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic," but despite all that, the truth is numbers, stats, facts, to coin a phrase, are people, too.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up, why are Elon Musk's X, the FTC, and multiple State Attorneys General trying to destroy a media watchdog group?

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Media Matters for America is an avowedly liberal watchdog group that follows and fact-checks right-wing outlets like Fox News Channel, Newsmax, Steve Bannon's War Room, and The Tucker Carlson Show, places where the lies and misdirection that inform American policy and American life pick up steam. It was inevitable that when death came knocking for the organization, it would be someone like Elon Musk holding the scythe by way of a lawsuit or a barrage of them.

Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for a reported $44 billion, renamed it X, and promised to ease up on its content, moderation. "Free speech, let everybody's freak flag or Confederate flag fly," but when Media Matters published a series of investigations in November '23 that showed that ads on X were appearing next to anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi content, this, by the way, after Musk claimed that he had new tools in place to assuage advertisers' fears that their content would show up next to such extremist posts, Media Matters showed that these tools weren't working. Companies like Sony, Apple, IBM, and Warner Brothers pulled their ads from X, costing Musk an estimated $75 million.

Angelo Carusone: Cause and effect is a little unclear because that was the same week that Musk embraced the white genocide conspiracy theory. That's what the fight about discovery is now is what was really motivating a lot of these advertisers' decisions.

Brooke Gladstone: Angelo Carusone is the President of Media Matters, which was initially sued by X in 2023, first in Texas, then in Ireland, and Singapore. Then, following X, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey both opened investigations into the nonprofit. Media Matters sued everyone back, including X, saying that the social media platform's own terms and conditions required X's legal actions to be launched exclusively in California. The judge agreed, halting the Ireland case. Both the Investigations by state AGs were also shot down in court.

Angelo Carusone: A lot of times, people compare this to Hulk Hogan's litigation against Gawker, that was financed by some billionaires, that ultimately bankrupted the company. I understand why that's a comparison, but this is so different because that was just a civil lawsuit. There wasn't a combination of private power and state power to target Gawker. That's what's happening here.

Brooke Gladstone: How have you done in court on these challenges other than that very important decision in California?

Angelo Carusone: The decision in California was one success. The other thing I would note is that our lawsuit against both state AGs was successful.

Brooke Gladstone: Paxton and Bailey, Texas and Missouri, those are no longer on the table.

Angelo Carusone: That's correct. They were shut down. We received an injunction against them, and Andrew Bailey asked to settle with us so that he didn't have to go through a discovery. That was closed. Paxton appealed the decision that we received in the district court level to the Circuit Court, the DC Circuit Court. The DC Circuit Court upheld the lower court's decision in our favor.

The other thing is the substance of these rulings. Judges, whenever they look at this, often describe it as a campaign of government harassment, which is how the DC courts had described it. Whenever they touch on the merits, the underlying facts, they always describe them as either meritless or baseless. What's so incredible about all of this is that we barely had a moment to enjoy the relief of not being under state scrutiny, because just as we were putting to bed the civil investigative demands from the states, this FTC one was now blossoming.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about the Federal Trade Commission case. What are the grounds?

Angelo Carusone: I don't know.

Brooke Gladstone: What do they say, then?

Angelo Carusone: We're a nonprofit. We don't engage in commercial activity. The FTC doesn't even have any real authority over us. We're not in trade. We're not in commerce.

Brooke Gladstone: What information did they want?

Angelo Carusone: They want to know information about funding sources in some cases. They want to know who's worked here for the past six years. They want to have insight into the editing process and how the reporting and journalism gets done. They want all kinds of communications that we've had with third parties. It seems to be one about retaliation.

The other part that I think reinforces that is that Andrew Ferguson, who's the chairman, has talked about these concerns around what they call advertiser boycotts. There was a recent merger between two very large media buyers. In their approval of that merger, the FTC, they said, "Look, we'll approve this deal, but only under the following condition. You're no longer allowed to remove ads based off of politics or ideology," meaning--

Brooke Gladstone: Really?

Angelo Carusone: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: This is news to me.

Angelo Carusone: It's such an incredible tell or reveal there.

Brooke Gladstone: If this is a purely free-market capitalist society, they should be able to put their money wherever they want.

Angelo Carusone: They're not just trying to change politics. Now, Project 2025 showed us that, and Steve Bannon, I think, describes it so effectively is that politics is downstream from culture. For them, so much of the work is being done to reshape and transform our culture. This is very similar to what we're seeing with colleges, right?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, very similar.

Angelo Carusone: It's like, "Well, you have to pay all these funds for the damage that you did with your DEI policies." Because of the work that we do, which is reporting and research, and illustrating these trends in the media landscape, there are many people on the right that really, truly despise us. It's worth keeping in mind that so much of the Trump administration is pulled from the right-wing media fever swamps. Three of Andrew Ferguson's senior people that he brought on board to the FTC have all attacked Media Matters vigorously in the past, describing us as a cancer and all sorts of other things, saying we should be in jail and prison.

Brooke Gladstone: The FTC says that you're engaging in collusion and that this needs to be investigated, that you're trying to disrupt the marketplace under consumer protection laws.

Angelo Carusone: That was what they would argue. It's very similar to what the state AGs were claiming was that we were interfering with commerce in their respective states, and that's why we needed to be investigated. It is a strong testament. The advertising industry is not small. It's a multi-billion-dollar. This idea that somehow we're the wizard behind the curtain is part of the right-wing narrative.

Tucker Carlson once described what he viewed as the three biggest threats and it was The Washington Post, the German government, and Media Matters. [laughter] I said, "Oh my gosh." I remember when Rush Limbaugh, at one point, and again, this is somebody that had 20 million listeners, he was lamenting that we were "in the midst of mob rule, run the trolls at Media Matters." In their minds, we are just so overwhelming.

Brooke Gladstone: So hydra-headed. How are you going to be able to pay your legal bills? You've observed that in any other environment, you would stop doing what you do, focus on beating back the legal assault, and then pick up on the work after the lawsuits were settled, but now you're being expected to do both at the same time.

Angelo Carusone: I think that's a fair expectation. Our biggest study that we've ever produced in 21 years in terms of its reach actually came out this year, while we were under this litigation. We did a massive thing with The New York Times shortly before the 2024 election that looked at YouTube election misinformation for six months. It was this huge thing that they published in coordination with our research. That was in the midst of this litigation. Our supporters have mostly stayed with us, but we haven't received support from the major foundations and new people that care about civic spaces. That's really what this fight's about.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. Because they're afraid, because they don't know about it, why?

Angelo Carusone: I think it's a combination of a few things. One, I think, is legitimate fear. Musk himself has threatened retaliation against individuals, or at least that's the perception that exists in many, say, "Oh, I don't want to touch that. My gosh." The other part is the Trump administration; all of these big players are folding. It gets where you say, "How could you possibly win this fight? CBS had to cave. If ABC had to cave, what chance does Media Matters have?"

Brooke Gladstone: You say that to get to the finish line, you need $5 or $6 million. You also say that if this were happening in 2017, you'd have it. You'd be resistance heroes.

Angelo Carusone: If this was 2017 and the Trump administration was attacking us like this, we would be resistance heroes. Because back then, it was considered a badge of honor. It was a demonstration that you were standing up, and the fear, it was present, but it wasn't front and center. Now, I think within the first few months, the Trump administration has successfully illustrated to many that they're serious, that they will punish you.

I often imagine a scenario in which George Soros and Barack Obama were going after a right-wing media figure like Charlie Kirk, that they were both putting all these resources into trying to destroy and announced it, that their plan was to destroy Kirk. It would be the biggest story ever. Every potential right-wing donor would be out there saying, "No, no, no," not even because they necessarily want to defend Charlie Kirk or stick it to Obama and Soros, but because they would say, "We cannot let that tactic become acceptable."

I think that's my big warning for everyone is that if you don't take this tactic and show that it doesn't work, they'll just keep using it over and over and over again. Every time they use it, it will become sharper. One of the incredible things that came out of the Paxton investigation or the lawsuits around that is there was this argument in court that his team was making that essentially amounted to the fact that if anybody in Texas reads a news article that has any effect on anything related to Texas, that they have the authority to go out there and investigate all the reporting leading up to it, the journalists, their notes, their research.

Brooke Gladstone: That was the case they made?

Angelo Carusone: That was one of the arguments that they were making at the time, is it all centered around this nexus of consumer protection.

Brooke Gladstone: What did the judge say?

Angelo Carusone: The judge obviously didn't accept it because they lost, but I think it shows the point of fighting because, even then, when we sued the AGs first, we had very similar questions. "Is this worth the money? Shouldn't you just try to negotiate? Shouldn't you wait until they fight you in their state courts?" The answer to that is no, because it's ceding the ground to this encroachment and attack on basic, not just freedoms, but basic civic rights. I know resources are constrained across the board, but for me, this is not a resource problem.

Brooke Gladstone: Unexpectedly, though, some figures and groups on the right have offered Media Matters some grudging respect and even, in a few cases, support.

Angelo Carusone: This is the one thing that has been pleasantly surprising. We've had conservative right-leaning organizations that have filed briefs on our behalf, basically saying, "Hey, you should support Media Matters here on this issue because it is a free speech issue."

Brooke Gladstone: You're talking about groups like?

Angelo Carusone: There are some organizations that have been funded by the Koch Network. Another group is FIRE, which is a free speech organization that, in the past, I would have described it as a conservative organization. Outside of the amicus brief, which is, I think, a very formal thing, even people like Steve Bannon, who've been acknowledging our sophistication and contributions and maybe even appreciating our toughness a little bit, that's the stuff that it's like, "Well, at least they're being consistent."

We've seen so many figures; they just capitulate to Trumpism, right? When you're in this type of work, so much of the work becomes the fight itself. You lose sight that you're not just stuck in trench warfare indefinitely, that actually some of the people you're engaging with are honest brokers, too, even if you disagree. As terrible as all this has been, and it has been almost entirely terrible, some of those bright spots have been reminders that even when it feels like so much of our culture is being transformed in the most destructive ways, there are actually strange bedfellows that align around the basics of what our country is supposed to be.

Brooke Gladstone: You think you can survive?

Angelo Carusone: Yes, the short term is that, look, money is the hard part, and there may be some more curve balls, and it may get worse. We are in a posture now of finding a way to balance these complicated legal attacks, this multi-front battle, and our mission. I don't want to sacrifice any more of our mission. I do believe in persistence. I could go back to a laundry list of things that always seemed impossible when we first started them, and then in six months became more real and more possible. Then, in a year after that, it happened. I think my own experience has said, "Yes, you know what, we're on firm ground, and you can keep hitting us, but I think we have a path ahead."

Brooke Gladstone: Angelo, thank you very much.

Angelo Carusone: Thank you so much.

Brooke Gladstone: Angelo Carusone is the President of Media Matters for America.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the biggest debate show that's not a debate.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. [MUSIC] This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. The latest episode of South Park just so happens to perfectly set up a piece that we've been working on.

Charlie Kirk: Hello, and welcome to the Third Annual Charlie Kirk Award for Young Master Debaters. More and more young people today are learning to fight for America through master debation.

Co-Host: Not only were you featured in this episode, Charlie, your name was in bright lights as the Charlie Kirk Award. It was basically an entire homage to the genre that you've popularized.

Micah Loewinger: The real-life Charlie Kirk, a far-right podcaster known for arguing with liberal college students, was showered with praise from his co-hosts.

Co-Host: You've transformed the entire dialogue that exists in America, between young men and crazy, woke, psychotic young people.

Micah Loewinger: Because even scathing satire from South Park is attention. In 2025, attention is everything.

Co-Host: It's taken over TikTok. It's taken over all social media.

Micah Loewinger: It's true that political debates, and not just among right-wing outrage merchants, have become one of the major ways that people engage with the news. There was the nearly five-hour Israel-Palestine Debate on Lex Fridman's podcast last year.

Mouin Rabbani: Was Palestine the only spot of land on Earth?

Benny Morris: Yes, basically that was the problem. The Jews couldn't immigrate anywhere else. [crosstalk]

Mouin Rabbani: What about the United States?

Micah Loewinger: And there's Piers Morgan's YouTube channel, Uncensored, which routinely devolves into shouting matches between pundits.

Alan Dershowitz: He just called me a pervert. He will be sued now for defamation, [crosstalk] and we will be able to resolve this in a court of law. I guarantee you that he will be sued for calling me a pervert.

Mohammed Hijab: In my understanding, you are a pervert.

Micah Loewinger: Some of these debates are clearly designed for sensationalism and partisan polemics. Some are more educational. Some even try to crown a winner, like the Munk Debate, a semiannual Canadian event that recently hosted Ezra Klein and Kellyanne Conway.

Kellyanne Conway: The Golden Age of America is upon us. I see the small businesses that feel they can survive and thrive with less regulation, with lower taxes, with more energy independence.

Ezra Klein: No, I don't think we're in a golden age. I almost don't think it needs to be argued this heavily. Are we even in a decent age?

Micah Loewinger: These spectacles, of course, are hardly new. For precedent, you could point to the televised Gore Vidal, William Buckley debates of 1968, which were ostensibly rarefied policy discussions that still went off the rails.

William F. Buckley Jr.: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, [crosstalk] or I'll sock you in the goddamn face.

Micah Loewinger: Or early panel shows like CNN's Crossfire, which in 1982 famously hosted the KKK's National Leader.

Tom Braden: Wait a minute, Mr. Wizard. You believe in the final solution, which is Black repatriation to Africa?

Bill Wilkinson: I'm not going to be cut off.

Tom Braden: I'm not going to be shut off either. You're running around on a bedsheet. I don't have the bedsheet.

Micah Loewinger: At least in terms of scale, pure metrics, nothing to date has transfixed viewers quite like Jubilee, a YouTube debate channel that The Atlantic compared to The Jerry Springer Show with Gen Z appeal.

Speaker 1: You have no idea what you're talking about.

Speaker 2: They don't all have to--

Speaker 1: You think 300,000 minors are lost in America? Are you crazy?

Speaker 2: I'm saying that--

[laughter]

Taylor Lorenz: Millions, tens of millions of people watch Jubilee. They've got billions of collective views at this point. Jubilee is a YouTube behemoth.

Micah Loewinger: Taylor Lorenz is a tech journalist who writes the User Mag newsletter. She's been following the meteoric rise of Jubilee. Whether you love it, hate it, or you've never heard about it before, Jubilee has become an undeniably important forum for changing hearts and minds. Its founder, Jason Y. Lee, came up with the idea for the company after the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Taylor Lorenz: Jason was surprised by what happened with the election and also just trying to make sense of what was happening with the country.

Jason Y. Lee: I saw huge polarization on both sides. It was very jarring for me.

Micah Loewinger: Jason, speaking with Taylor Lorenz on her podcast Power User.

Jason Y. Lee: I felt like there was just this huge white space in the center for young people, which was about empathy, about dialogue, about nuance, which, unfortunately, at that time, and unfortunately now, it felt like we weren't seeing. I had this crazy idea at the time, where "Could we create a media company that is not about featuring just the left side or just the right side, but featuring true human voices and finding some kind of middle ground there?" I decided to raise a small round of capital and launch Jubilee Media.

Micah Loewinger: He ended up raising $650,000, telling investors that he thought filming tough conversations could be hugely lucrative, and he was right.

Jason Y. Lee: One of our first big shows that we created was a show called Middle Ground. What it would do is it would bring together two "opposing sides," but rather than just squaring off for a Fox or CNN-style debate or kind of everyone yelling at each other, we said, "Is there a way for us to find middle grounds between conservatives and liberals, or between Christians and atheists, or even between flat-Earthers and round-Earthers?"

Flat-Earther: I'm what you call a Globe denier. This is a brilliant opportunity to speak. We've been suppressed, censored by mainstream media. Alternative media is just a thing of beauty for me.

Micah Loewinger: This is one of three flat-Earthers who debated three scientists in what's become the most popular episode of Middle Ground, with 31 million views.

Round-Earther: My point is that these experiments clearly show that the Earth is a globe, and you don't need to go outside the globe to see it's global.

Flat-Earther: It's a conclusion. It's a theoretical--

Round-Earther: You told me you want the evidence.

Ben Smith: The critique of you guys, which you've seen, is like, "Are you kidding me? You're putting a flat-Earther out there, as though this is a reasonable point of view?

Micah Loewinger: Semafor's Ben Smith interviewing Jason Lee on the Mixed Signals podcast.

Jason Y. Lee: I think that the flat-Earther one is the one that we had to discuss quite a bit about, like, "Hey, where are the bounds by which we wouldn't go?" One of the principles we talk about a lot at Jubilee is what is this idea of what we call radical empathy. For example, there was a woman who was really incredible. She lost her husband, and when her husband went on his deathbed, he became like a full-on flat-Earther.

Speaker 3: My husband actually brought home this movie, talking about how the moon landing was fake.

Jason Y. Lee: Once he had passed, I think that she feels like this is part of her way to connect with him, right? Again, does that make me believe that the Earth is flat? Absolutely not, but do I understand or have some sort of empathy towards that experience? I'm like, "Yes, I do."

Taylor Lorenz: I think Jason is naive. I think that it is a monster that Jason does not realize he's created. I think he is deluding himself into thinking that it's a lot less harmful than it is.

Micah Loewinger: Taylor Lorenz.

Taylor Lorenz: I think it's more of like "YouTuber brain."

Micah Loewinger: What is "YouTuber brain"?

Taylor Lorenz: YouTube rewards rage bait. Mostly, the entire Internet rewards rage bait. That's what algorithms reward. If you can create these viral clips of people saying extremely shocking things, you will succeed. If you're making millions and millions of dollars, it's really hard to change course and say, "Actually, I want to make less money."

Micah Loewinger: Jason Lee did not respond to our request for an interview. If he had, I would have asked him about the channel's most successful format, the one that's generated quite a bit of controversy in recent weeks. A show called Surrounded.

Taylor Lorenz: Which is this round robin debate-style video where it's 1 person in the middle and then a group of 20 people that disagree with them around them.

Charlie Kirk: Hello, everyone. I am Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, and I am surrounded by 20 woke college kids.

Ben Shapiro: I'm Ben Shapiro, and I'm co-founder of The Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show. Today, I'm surrounded by 25 Kamala Harris supporters.

Taylor Lorenz: The Ben Shapiro episode was the fifth-most-viewed piece of political content on YouTube during the election.

Micah Loewinger: Democrats and nonpartisan experts have also starred in Surrounded videos, though they tend to get fewer views.

Pete Buttigieg: I'm Pete Buttigieg, and today, I'm surrounded by 25 undecided voters.

Dr. Mikhail Varshavski: I'm Dr. Mikhail Varshavski, better known as Doctor Mike across social media. I'm a board-certified family medicine physician who makes content online, improving health literacy. Today, I'm surrounded by 20 vaccine skeptics.

Micah Loewinger: That Doctor Mike video, which has 10 million views, is interesting for a few reasons. The way the format works is that the high-profile person in the middle, in this case, Doctor Mike, starts each round of the debate by stating a prompt.

Dr. Mikhail Varshavski: My next claim is that RFK Jr. is a public health threat.

Micah Loewinger: Then, on the count of 3, the 20 anti-vaxxers can race to a seat in the middle to challenge him, leading to this exchange.

Anti-vaxxer: How is it that he's a villain? How are we a villain if some of these vaccine creators and scientists are the ones saying we should not get them?

Dr. Mikhail Varshavski: Is there anything I could say today that would change your mind [crosstalk]?

Anti-vaxxer: I'm just asking your opinion.

Dr. Mikhail Varshavski: And I'm asking you a question.

Anti-vaxxer: Probably not because I actually read and study.

Dr. Mikhail Varshavski: I would like to give you my knowledge, my experience, and what I've seen in the hospital system, but if you're telling me right now, no matter what I say, you're not going to change your mind, is there any value to that?

Micah Loewinger: That clip pretty much sums up the entire one and a half hour video. Every time Doctor Mike attempts to debunk medical misinformation, his opponents cut him off or ignore him, talking about how they'd done their own research and didn't trust mainstream science. One comment under the video that received 143,000 likes reads, "This didn't feel like a debate; it feels like 20 people venting as if it's therapy." After the video came out, Doctor Mike revealed that it was his idea. He pitched this video to Jubilee.

Dr. Mikhail Varshavski: I was watching Jubilee and saw a 20-versus-1 episode, and I said, "Wow, wouldn't it be a good idea if it was a doctor versus anti-vaxxers?"

John Oliver: The only accurate way to report that one out of four Americans are skeptical of global warming is to say a poll finds that one out of four Americans are wrong about something.

Micah Loewinger: John Oliver, speaking on his HBO show in 2014.

John Oliver: A survey of thousands of scientific papers that took a position on climate change found that 97% endorsed the position that humans are causing global warming. I think I know why people still think this issue is open to debate, because on TV it is.

Micah Loewinger: He then brings out two people for a mock debate: Bill Nye, who believes climate change is real, and a denier who doesn't. The problem here, Oliver says, is that a split-screen TV debate implies that these two positions are equal.

John Oliver: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before we begin, in the interest of mathematical balance, I'm going to bring out two people who agree with you: a climate skeptic and Bill Nye. I'm also going to bring out 96 other scientists. [laughter] It's a little unwieldy, but this is the only way you can actually have a representative discussion.

Micah Loewinger: A mathematically balanced debate about COVID-19 vaccines would look the same way because an estimated 97% of medical scientists say those vaccines are safe, and yet Jubilee flipped it. 20 so-called skeptics were pitted against 1 expert because that's more provocative. There are other ways the channel's producers stack the deck for drama. Take the February episode of Surrounded, titled 1 Conservative vs 25 LGBTQ+ Activists.

Stassia Underwood: I saw that they were casting for a Jubilee video, so I sent in my application, and that's pretty much how it started.

Micah Loewinger: Stassia Underwood is a 26-year-old activist who's received a lot of attention online since appearing in that Jubilee video.

Stassia Underwood: My intention was to hopefully meet some more trans women. I knew that it was a huge opportunity. I knew that it could bring me a lot of exposure, negatively and positively.

Micah Loewinger: Did the producers tell you anything about who you'd be speaking with? Just that they'd be conservative.

Stassia Underwood: I had no clue. I definitely wasn't expecting it to be somebody that was so hateful.

Michael Knowles: My next claim is that transgenderism should be eradicated from public life entirely.

Micah Loewinger: The conservative in the middle turned out to be Daily Wire host Michael Knowles. Stassia sprinted for the chair in the middle.

Michael Knowles: Hello.

Stassia Underwood: Hello.

Micah Loewinger: Which she says was scripted to make it look like she was competing with other people.

Stassia Underwood: My first thought was that it was absurd because transgenderism isn't real. We are transgender people. How are you going to get people to stop being trans?

Michael Knowles: I think we're going to tell boys that they're not girls, that they're boys.

Stassia Underwood: We're going to tell boys that they're not girls, and they're going to listen.

Michael Knowles: Yes, basically, yes.

Micah Loewinger: Really? That's what we've done for most of history.

Stassia Underwood: Pardon. That's amazing because that happened to me, and I can promise you to God that I didn't listen.

Michael Knowles: Yes, well, because we live at a time that is affirming the transgender delusion.

Micah Loewinger: What was the kind of digital afterlife of the video? How did it affect you specifically?

Stassia Underwood: I knew that it was going to be viral. I didn't know that I was going to go viral. My video is, right now, currently still sitting at like 14 million views on the TikTok page on Jubilee's. My clip was the most viewed of the whole segment. I got so many hate comments, but I was expecting that. That wasn't really what took me by surprise. It was The Daily Wire posting me, making sure that it ended up on certain sides of the Internet, but also, I definitely received more of a following on my social media. I have been invited to do multiple other shows. I was on Piers Morgan Uncensored. There has been some huge things that have come out of this.

Micah Loewinger: Do you feel like all of the hate that you got, was it worth it?

Stassia Underwood: Yes. I think yes, and I think no. I think I could have gone without the death threats.

Micah Loewinger: Would you still have participated in the debate if you'd known about the prompts and the identity of Michael Knowles ahead of time?

Stassia Underwood: I would not have participated. Not with Michael, but I chose to go on Jubilee. I could have walked out. That's something that we all have discussed with each other recently is like, "We probably should have walked out at a certain point when he was saying things like the eradication of trans ideology," but we all sat there, and we all participated. I think it's all dependent on what you're willing to put up with and what you're not.

Micah Loewinger: I spoke with another guest on Surrounded who feels he was misled by Jubilee and is now reflecting on whether participating was worth it.

Mehdi Hasan: I'm Mehdi Hasan. I'm a journalist. I'm the editor of Zeteo, and today I'm surrounded by 20 far-right conservatives.

Micah Loewinger: Mehdi is a natural fit for this kind of thing. Back when he had an MSNBC show, he was known for his tough interviews. He also literally wrote a book about debate called Win Every Argument. I began by asking him which of the previous Jubilee videos made him wanna jump in the ring.

Mehdi Hasan: I watched a lot of the right-wing ones. Most of the Jubilee videos are right-wingers versus woke kids or liberal students, or Harris's supporters. There's only been a couple of "progressives" who have done it. Sam Seder, a good friend of mine at The Majority Report, did it. Sam is the one who told me it's worth doing it, worth going into this lion's den. It's a new audience. It's a younger audience. They need to hear our arguments.

Micah Loewinger: Who approached who? How was it presented? What was the conversation like before you showed up at the studio?

Mehdi Hasan: Jubilee approached me. They pitched it as 25 Trump supporters, MAGA supporters. The name changed over time. It ended up being 25 far-right conservatives. To be fair to them, that should have been a tell to me. Which people self-identify as far-right?

Connor Estelle: I'm for defending the traditional demographics of this country, which is majority white.

Micah Loewinger: This is Connor Estelle, who began his debate with Mehdi Hasan, saying he didn't care if Donald Trump defied the Constitution.

Mehdi Hasan: How would Connor's America look? What would it look like?

Connor Estelle: Well, quite frankly, I think we would deport people who shouldn't be here, whether--

Mehdi Hasan: I didn't ask about deporting. What does the government look like?

Connor Estelle: I would say, quite frankly, it's under a benevolent leader such as Franco.

Mehdi Hasan: Where does he come from?

Connor Estelle: It could be a kind of aristocratic class, could be someone who--

Mehdi Hasan: Who picks the autocrat?

Connor Estelle: Frankly, the people. We could hold a vote on it.

Mehdi Hasan: Isn't that democracy?

Connor Estelle: Well, sure, you can have a vote to get to that scene.

Mehdi Hasan: And then no more votes afterwards?

Connor Estelle: Absolutely. 100%.

Mehdi Hasan: Wow, wow. If that autocrat kills you and your family, you're fine with that?

Connor Estelle: Well, I'm not going to be a part of the group that he kills because that's the whole thing.

Mehdi Hasan: How do you know? How do you know? He starts going on about General Franco, and I'm thinking, "Wow, this is kind of insane stuff. General Franco, who murdered many innocent people, thousands of people, in the White Terror." He starts quoting Carl Schmitt, right? You're quoting a Nazi theoretician. Then I'm thinking, "Whoa, where are we going again?"

Connor Estelle: I frankly don't care being called the Nazi at all.

Mehdi Hasan: I didn't say that. I didn't actually say that. I said, "Are you a fan of the Nazis?"

Connor Estelle: Well, they persecuted the church a little bit. I'm not a fan of that.

Mehdi Hasan: What about the persecution of the Jews?

Connor Estelle: Well, I certainly don't support anyone's human dignity being assaulted. I'm a Catholic.

Mehdi Hasan: You don't condemn Nazi persecution of the Jews?

Connor Estelle: I think that there was a little bit of persecution [crosstalk], which is bad.

Mehdi Hasan: We'd have to rename the show because you're a little bit more than a far-right Republican.

Connor Estelle: Hey, what can I say?

Mehdi Hasan: I think you say, "I'm a fascist."

Connor Estelle: Yes, I am.

[laughter]

Mehdi Hasan: Then I kind of realized that "What am I doing here? I don't debate fascists." I've had a very strong, consistent, anti-fascist platform since the day I became a public figure, a broadcaster. It's easy clickbait, but I try and avoid climate deniers and election deniers, simply because I think journalists should have some attachment to reality. I'll be honest with you.

If Jubilee had come to me and they didn't, but if they'd come to me and said, "You'll be debating one guy who says he's a fascist and another guy who tells you to get out of the country," I'd have said, "I'll pass, thanks. I'm washing my hair."

Micah Loewinger: There was one YouTube commenter who put it this way, "It's never been easier to understand the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany." That comment got 162,000 upvotes under your video. What do you make of this idea that there's some kind of educational or even journalistic value in platforming this stuff?

Mehdi Hasan: I get it, and it's appealing to some people, but there has to be a red line, right? What are we going to do now? Is Jubilee going to have 1 Jewish person versus 20 Holocaust deniers? Where do we draw the line?

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] I think that literally, a Jubilee producer told a writer at The Atlantic that they had considered that topic.

Mehdi Hasan: Oh, wow. I didn't know that. I was just being sarcastic. I guess this is where we are.

Micah Loewinger: Are you happy with how the video turned out?

Mehdi Hasan: That's a tricky question.

Micah Loewinger: Are you having you did it?

Mehdi Hasan: I don't know the answer to that latter question. I'm reserving judgment on that. I'm going to wait and see. I'm not going to be fake-modest. Clearly, millions of people watched that. Millions More people now follow me in Zeteo. In terms of grabbing attention, that worked. That was one of the reasons I did it. I'm not going to lie to you. Of course, the idea of appealing to a younger audience who probably have never heard of Zeteo or me was appealing. Clearly, that worked. People now have heard of me who have not heard of me. In that sense, it worked. Now people can say that's cynical, that's self-serving, whatever.

Micah Loewinger: After the video came out, Connor, the self-described fascist, did his own little podcast tour.

Host: You are in some serious trouble in your personal life over this, am I right?

Connor Estelle: That is correct.

Host: What happened?

Connor Estelle: Well, unfortunately, I lost my job as a result. No one really is to blame for that. It's just the manner in which you're canceled for voicing any heterosexual Christian moral belief.

Micah Loewinger: He ran with the cancel culture story and raised nearly $40,000 on a crowdfunding site. A huge boon for a guy who, to that point, like some of the other Jubilee participants, had been struggling to break through as an aspiring right-wing influencer. What do you make of the argument that any good that came of your appearance, the millions of teenagers who didn't know who you were but now do, what do you make of the argument that that is all negated by the exposure that these aspiring right-wing influencers got, these people who need to be canceled in order to get famous in their circles? Is the juice worth the squeeze here?

Mehdi Hasan: No, it's a very good question. I don't know the answer to that question. I think it's a very fair criticism, and that's why I reserve judgment on the whole thing to see what the longer-term fallout is than just a week of 10 million views, but more like, "What is the longer-term fallout for some of these influencers?" It's a two-point process. One is, should Jubilee exist? Because it already does, regardless of Mehdi Hasan. If it does exist, should someone like me, who knows how to debate, go on and debate these freaks?

Micah Loewinger: In addition to the views on the actual Jubilee YouTube video, these debates have this long afterlife as video clips. I've often seen each side of the debate more or less declare victory with their own communities. Is there something about just the way that social media is wired, what the algorithms reward, that undermines the very idea that a side can win with a persuasive argument?

Mehdi Hasan: That's a great question. It's something I've struggled with a lot, which is, you can win a debate, as I have, and then see the other side clip something completely out of context to make it look like that was the moment. People don't watch the whole hour and a half. They watch 2 minutes in their feed or 30 seconds in their feed. It is a problem, no doubt about it.

I'm not sure what the solution is. I don't think we should stop debating issues because people could spin it the way they want. One of the reasons I did Jubilee again, and time will tell, is I would argue that most people, most normal people who watch something like that will come away going, "Wow, A, those guys are crazy and extreme. B, Mehdi clearly won that debate. C, we need to worry about our country."

Micah Loewinger: In your book, you respond to this idea of we're living in a post-truth culture, which is a kind of resounding conclusion that many people came to after the 2016 election, but you cite some data to back up the idea that people's minds can still change. After this latest election, after the dark turns we've seen in our politics since you wrote that book, do you still believe the facts can change minds?

Mehdi Hasan: Yes, but not for a lot of Americans. The debate is not whether it could change minds; the debate is, how many minds can it change? I think that audience is a shrinking audience. I have to be honest with you. I think that audience grows smaller by the day, but look, I do believe people's minds can change. Just look at the polling. Trump has just won an election, right?

That's deeply depressing for someone like me. Having said that, he's also the most unpopular president at this point in his presidency in living memory. Why is that? Because people's minds have changed since the election. People have either seen him do bad stuff, or have felt him do bad stuff, or have accepted the argument from those of us in the media or Democrats that he is doing bad stuff.

His numbers have plummeted on the economy, on immigration, on multiple issues. I do think that's an interesting test. What happens in the midterms and the next presidential election? If we have free and fair elections again in this country, it'll be interesting to see how many minds have been changed. It's a dwindling number, for sure, but it's still a number that's worth reaching out for and persuading.

Micah Loewinger: Mehdi, thank you very much.

Mehdi Hasan: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Mehdi Hasan is editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo.

Announcer: And now, watch as Clyde Donovan totally destroys these woke liberal students.

Clyde Donovan: Welcome to the channel, guys. Looks like a lot of whiny babies have a problem with what I say, so prove me wrong.

Betsy: Did you call the girls' soccer team a Marxist indoctrination factory?

Clyde Donovan: That is correct.

Betsy: We actually beat the boys 4 to nothing.

Clyde Donovan: You can whine about American oppression all you want, but you're using an iPhone made by the free market to complain about a system that gave it to you. Girls have it way easy in America, and that's just the truth.

Announcer: Woke student totally pwned.

[MUSIC]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark‑Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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