292 - Jason Stanley: Breaking Down Trump’s Propaganda

33:42So she's extremely familiar with Trump as mob boss. So I think the tactics he uses, like Arendt points out that just like the mob, fascism involves replacing competent people with loyal people. So that's what we're seeing, where loyalty is the only test for participation and positions in the regime. So Trump is a very natural mob boss, which makes Trump a very natural fascist leader. I think Trump is perfectly aware that he's targeting democracy. He has said, I believe, that if I'm not mistaken, he said that he doesn't care if people call him a tyrant and he could be a dictator if he wanted to be.

34:35And, you know, he says that stuff all the time. He engages in very clear dictatorial behavior, and he's perfectly aware of all this. He admires dictators, that sort of thing. And then you mentioned that How Propaganda Works came out in 2015, and the landscape has shifted immensely, not just in terms of have we gone from a liberal democracy to an authoritarian regime. But AI, I think, has fundamentally changed the way that we communicate and absorb information and how information is produced, especially with AI agents and bots. And another thing you're really interested in is the epistemic conditions of democracy.

35:27And I'm wondering how your thoughts on propaganda and political communication have changed to reflect developments in AI. And maybe before you answer, I should also mention that I think just before this episode comes out, one will come out with where I interviewed Darren Asimoglu, the Nobel Prize winning economist from MIT. And we talked a lot about AI and how it's affected and undermined liberal democracy. Yeah. So people on social media are performing for bots, right? I mean, there's huge numbers of bots and you can engage those bots with, you know, outrage campaigns. And so, you know, I see well-known people posting on social media, you know, performing for bots, trying to draw like, you know, so, you know, hundreds of thousands of bots to comment threads.

36:33And then that gets real people worked up. So you have this mixture of bots and real people. But the boxed bots are, you know, there to, to support outrage. And so basically you have a kind of, uh, constant outrage. And I remember, so how propaganda works came out in 2015 and, uh, its thesis is that propaganda, it's in thesis in political philosophy is that propaganda should be, the central issue in democratic political philosophy, how propagandas affect liberal democracy, propaganda's potential to undermine liberal democracy should be the central question in democratic political philosophy. And I think of it as Plato's problem, because it's what Plato discusses in Book Eight of the Republic.

37:32Well, not liberal democracy, not talking about liberalism, But democracy has as its central value freedom and freedom allows anyone to run for office. And that means the worst people will run for office and they'll lie and engage in demagoguery. They'll create an internal enemy and an external enemy and promise to be to be the nation's protect, the city state's protector against the internal enemy, the people's protector. And so what we're seeing is that. And so, you know, that book was written before social media and gave propaganda, put propaganda on steroids. But it's the same basic problem.

38:16Right. I mean, John Stuart Mill in On Liberty in the in the end of the famous second chapter, people overlook this constantly. But when he says free speech will lead to more knowledge, he said, of course, this is all relative to norms of discourse. I forget the exact language he uses, but where people have respect where essentially we're all Victorian gentlemen, where we wouldn't abuse our power by ridiculing those lower in power. We wouldn't engage in that kind of, you know, ridiculing behavior and discourse. And what's essential to understand is like when you're in conversation with someone, embodied conversation, the norms of discourse are entirely different than when you're online.

39:08And this is obvious to someone like me who's been, you know, has gone through a decade of more than a decade of online attacks. You know, when I meet people who attack me online in person, they're often very nice to me. So so the structure that John Stuart Mill says must be in place for free speech to to function democratically and epistemologically in the way that he hopes and on liberty or he argues that those background conditions of mutual respect and not using ridicule. They don't hold online. So the whole argument for free speech that Mill gives doesn't work in the online space. People behave entirely differently.

40:02So embodied communication, I've come to think is essential for democracy. You know, for some reason online, people lose the capacity to to for empathy and mutual respect. And and as Mel said, you know, that's the precondition for for free speech to to be to lead to more truths, to lead to more knowledge. So so so really so I've come to view embodied communication, you know, communication in person is really central to democracy. So so that's one thing. Now, when I was when I had published how propaganda works, I mean, as I said, I was ridiculed for working on the topic and I was ridiculed by political philosophers.

40:55who are like, you've never written a work in political philosophy, and now you're saying some early, mid-20th century notion propaganda is relevant for political philosophy? Don't be ridiculous. Political philosophy is all about just redistribution. So after I published it, suddenly propaganda became a big issue in the wake of the 2016 elections. And I was invited to a number of early propaganda conferences as someone who had written a book on propaganda. And so two things about that. One is that I saw how the Russian attack on the 2016 election worked. They directed essentially tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of fake accounts to create outrage.

41:48So I saw one presentation where people said people showed how the Hillary Clinton super predator remark was directed against Metro Detroit, you know, so to get people to to tamp down the boat, essentially. So I think we can see that happening again. So outrage against, you know, So, you know, outrage on social media by bots and other actors intentionally aimed at suppressing the anti-Trump vote. Wow. So that took the form in the 2016 elections of, for example, representing Hillary Clinton as a racist for her super predator remark. Whether or not, you know, you want to think that that showed she was a racist, you know, that kind of vocabulary has been directed by politicians black and white against to to justify mass incarceration.

42:49It was certainly employed by by our country's enemy to to to get people to stay home and not vote for Hillary Clinton. I think we're seeing that run up again. I think we're seeing that method of attacking, you know, getting people to be suspicious of pro-Palestinian voices, to be suspicious of of democratic voices. I think you see it through the Hassan Piker attack on Abdel El Saeed. You see a sort of method of trying to delegitimize candidates who take a certain critical stance on Israel's actions towards Palestinians. So I'm seeing that happen on social media. I'm seeing, you know, you know, the left fighting amongst itself as a method to tamp down the vote for Democratic candidates.

43:52So the the use of Islamophobia, things like this. So I think there are legitimate critiques to make of people, but as you get closer to election time, I think you do see this pattern of social media being used in the way, in the characteristic way that it was used in the 2016 election to depress the vote for the Democratic side. The other thing I wanted to mention about those early propaganda conferences until I was disinvited by the time people are by late 2017, 2018, I was already disinvited for those conferences. So I was like invited to a high level State Department conference on propaganda in 2017 at the Hoover Institute.

44:43I was at a conference with like CIA, you know, in that year. But what I gradually saw is the very people who had mocked me for working on this topic starting to become, you know, leading people in the study of propaganda. And these were not humanists. I started to see humanists being expelled from propaganda conferences. And I started to see a technocratic approach take over to the study of propaganda. And I think that's very dangerous. I think we need humanists to understand propaganda tropes. And the idea that, you know, cognitive psychologists with no background in history can somehow, you know, gain access with the uses of social psychology and cognitive psychology without any understanding of classic propaganda tropes from history.

45:38I think that's going to obscure our understanding of the reality rather than illuminate it. And I think that just sort of helps the enemies of democracy by transforming propaganda studies into a technocratic discipline, which is what has happened. And as a result, you know, people who go to disinformation conferences have never heard of the protocols of the elders of Zion. And so don't know and don't understand the propaganda tropes that are directed towards us. They haven't read Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, and they represent themselves as experts on a topic where really they're not experts on because they don't know history.

46:26To understand the propaganda tropes that are most powerful, you really need to know history. Now, there are some social psychologists who are attuned to that sort of thing. Jennifer Richeson is an example, my former colleague who who's attuned to grave replacement theory as a propaganda trope. Ibram Kendi just published an excellent book, Chain of Ideas on grave replacement theory. You know, but you need that in the study of propaganda. So those, I guess, are my full thoughts. yes, social media has exasperated what I and how propaganda works argued should be the central problem of democratic political philosophy, which is how do we prevent people from falling for propaganda?

47:16Now, the standard response to that, which is the response that I took and how propaganda works, is make people feel more economically secure. That's Rousseau's response. Right. Rousseau's response is, you know, we have to reduce inequality so that people are not tempted by a more proper or to take Fred Neuhauser's view, the wrong kind of a more proper resentment towards one fellow citizen. So Rousseau's idea is if you reduce social and economic inequality, people will feel less resentful. And so they're not going to fall in for the kind of scapegoating that that we see being used by these politician fascists who represent oligarchs.

48:07So but I think that in the age of social media, you know, this problem for democracy is really now amped up on steroids.

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49:18I have a number of things I want to ask about that you just mentioned. But first, you used to be super prominent on social media, especially what was once called Twitter. Did you leave because of the bots or why was it that you you left some time ago? I left the instant Musk bought Twitter. And I wrote about it in Project Syndicate. And I said, Musk is going to use Twitter to remove its democratic potential and destroy it as a source of information. So I think, you know, not to toot my own horn, but I think I was like, I immediately wrote that piece that this was going to be the destruction of a democratic platform.

50:17He was going to amp up the conspiracy theories and amp up the parts, the aspects that destroy the epistemic space required for democratic deliberation. and had nothing to do. And so it was undermining propaganda. He was taking over Twitter, supposedly in the name of free speech. But if we think of free speech as the ideal that John Stuart Mill defended, John Stuart Mill is very clear that this only works with an atmosphere of mutual respect and a refusal to engage in belittling behavior to those less powerful. Uh, so obviously, uh, that's what happened that Musk was using the, his takeover of Twitter to attack the epistemic foundations of democracy.

51:12So, you know, I mean, now most people have left, most people, you know, democratically inclined people have less left Twitter or a lot of them. So, but I did instantly as soon as Musk bought it. Uh, I maybe should have joined blue sky, but I'm glad I'm not connected to social media anymore, for better or for worse. I rely on, I can't check Twitter, I don't, or whatever it's called, X now. I don't track social media, I must confess. And so I read about social media and I get my information derivatively about the general trends, But, you know, dipping. So and also the things that I've said so far in this conversation are based on more on my theoretical predictions of what social media must be rather than following social media.

52:15I don't know who's attacking me. I don't know what's said on social media. I don't know who's being pilloried at the moment. You know, I can tell you that in the run up to the 2016 election, Russian Russia employed it to tamp down the vote by, you know, attacking Hillary Clinton as a racist. you know so that's that's that's a method that i know is going to happen before elections suddenly you know they're probably i'm guessing that i i know enough about what's going on in social media to know that the islamophobia is being ramped up and not just against the right but also you know solidarity is being targeted that's what happens in the run-off to elections is solidarity is targeted, but I don't look at social media anymore.

53:06And, uh, you know, um, probably that leaves me ignorant of things that I should be informed of. Uh, but it allows me to have a better sort of an, I do look at Instagram, uh, but most of mostly to follow Jalen Brunson and the Knicks. Well, your current engagement with social media is pretty much indisputably healthier for you so i'm kind of uh i'm jealous of you i am a bit more engaged with it than i would like to be but you you mentioned a couple of times that you've been the subject of online attacks and i think you said earlier for a little over a decade i just wanted to ask what prompted those attacks and what were they like well Well, the first time was Rod Dreher went after me in 2015, I believe, 2016.

54:05I tweeted something. I put something on a private Facebook chat about Richard Swinburne's talk where he said a philosopher who said homosexuality was a disability. And I used some, you know, an unprofessional language to describe not Swinburne, but, you know, people attacking the LGBTQ community within philosophy. And this then became this huge thing. And I think people don't realize back then to be attacked on social media was much harsher than now because it was very unfamiliar to people. So these attacks. So so, you know, I went through many attacks. One time I called Chris Rufo white supremacist or something like that.

54:58You know, another time I, you know, a few times I have a very kind of I'm you don't see it in this interview, but I have a very sort of sarcastic and humorous way of speaking. and that does not come across well on social media. So a number of times in response to people in the midst of a thread, I would say something sarcastic like, I'm not just another, I don't want to be another Ivy League professor. I want my work to be read in 200 years. And so this would be taken out of context. As a philosopher of language, I can tell you, you can't understand speech out of context. So social media targeting, you take people's speech out of context.

55:48And so since it's out of context, you can fill in the background context and then completely misinterpret. You can misinterpret the emotional valence, like where it occurs in a conversation stream. So, you know, you know, a sarcastic remark out of context or like what's meant to be humorous remark out of context will not appear like a humorous remark. So I got tagged like that a few times. But it was mostly, you know, you're not your you know, there was a time where I was really stressed out. I was single parenting and, you know, like someone was like attacking me for a piece I did on Flint. And, you know, I mean, things like this.

56:32So, you know, I got used to it. It's the price of public life, really. It's the price of public life. I don't know what what's said about me on social media and I haven't for years. again much much healthier while we're on this digression away from our theoretical discussion as i think you referred to it a bit earlier and you you've already mentioned the the prescience of your departure from twitter i am curious how you feel about the prescience of your departure from the united states to toronto and how you're reflecting on that sometime later now? Well, I hadn't anticipated the personal cost on removing myself from an institution I loved, Yale, you know, a dozen years of being part of the woodwork at Yale.

57:33I was in the Faculty Senate. I was like, you know, I had had to spend years. I love teaching. So, you know, I'd spend years building up, you know, credibility among undergraduates. So my courses were, were, were packed and, you know, I had friends across the university. So, you know, I had, I'd always wanted to be a department person. I've always been a department guy. I've always been like, you know, you know, every faculty meeting and, you know, like involved, you know, on committees. And, you know, that's what I like to do. And I wanted to retire in a philosophy department and, you know, have the whole, you know, thing of people talking about me being there.

58:17And I sacrificed that life. I also lived half time in New York City and, you know, was part of the democratic socialist community and have, you know, I just returned from New York. I have many dear friends there. I'm very excited about the politics of New York. You know, that's my home. So it was very, as you're moving as a 56-year-old, I would really, you know, it's a real cost being in exile, you know, or whatever it is, you know, self-imposed exile. It's a real, real cost. The journalist John Dunder said that, you know, first you leave and you think, you know, everywhere is home, and then you realize nowhere is home.

59:02So I don't know, you know, at 56, it's hard to develop new community. So I think on a personal level, it's been very tough. And I'm in a public policy school now. So I'm not in that, you know, am I training philosophy grad students? I suppose I could. I'm quarter time in philosophy. So that's the personal side. I also feel like, you know, I moved here, you know, thinking that I could hit as hard as I wanted on the media against Trumpism, against global fascism. Whereas if I had stayed at Yale, I would always be nervous that I was bringing, you know, fire to Yale, an institution I love. So. I think that's right.

59:51I think when I appear on MS now or I appear on television networks or or here on podcasts, I can hit as hard as I want. I can I can say whatever I want. And I would have done that anyway at Yale. but I would have been more nervous. And I've been bringing speakers to Toronto to, you know, well, when I, when I left, I was at a Mamdani fundraiser and the writer Mohsen Hamid was there. And when we met, he said, people are really criticizing your move to Canada. And people are, I mean, I've lost a quarter of my friends from this. You know, I meet people who used to be friends of mine and they'll say right to my face, I have contempt for you.

1:00:39And so Mohsen Hamid said, you know, people criticize your move to Canada, but it seems wildly premature. Whether or not it's a success will depend on whether or not you stop what has happened in your homeland from crossing the border to your new hawk. I suppose that if Canada becomes the 51st state, you'll be, I mean, that'll be some tough luck. Right. So, so I think that, you know, it's too early to judge my move to Canada. I'm trying to do whatever I can for American democracy. I am at the University of Toronto, the University of Toronto's named chair in American studies. Literally, my job is to write about American democracy.

1:01:31So, you know, I'm writing a lot about that. Obviously, I will always do the kind of technical work and philosophy of language and epistemology that I so enjoy. I teach in the philosophy department as well. But, you know, my incentive structure has changed. At Yale, my job was to mentor graduate students. I'm very proud of the fact that my graduate students teach across university apartments across the world. But that is not my main job right now at the moment. So moving from Yale also was a move to make, as it were, my outside job, which is being a public intellectual, into my main job. At Yale, my main job was to be, you know, teach courses on formal semantics of, you know, philosophy of language and the occasional philosophy of mathematics course.

1:02:31but now my job is to be the person I was in the work that was gradually taking over my life. Though, as I said, I published a book in Formal Semantics and Philosophy of Language in 2023, but now my main job is to be a public intellectual working on U.S. democracy. And so that was also part of the switch. Like I completely changed jobs. And so, and my remit changed. So now my remit is actually doing the stuff that was outside my remit at Yale. My remit at Yale was, you know, when an epistemol, when Keith DeRose was not teaching epistemology that year to teach a seminar in epistemology, you know, like, and, and all the public intellectual stuff I had to do outside the department.

1:03:30So, so that it was also a change for that, but, you know, Adam Tooze, uh, described the move to Canada as like the worst possible decision politically and ethically, you know, uh, my, I'm told that my former colleague who I admire greatly, Greg Grandin flames at me on social media, though I don't read social media, so I have no idea if that's true. So, you know, so I know it was, but I know a lot of people are really angry at me. I mean, I think I really, in my defense, it's just like, I have always thought Trumpism was fascism. And a major criticism of me was, if you think Trumpism is fascism, why aren't you leaving the United States.

1:04:20And then suddenly I leave the United States and people are like, oh, you're a coward. You know, even though I go back to the United States regularly, I was in Montgomery, Alabama in July doing political work. You know, it's not like I'm not politically involved in the United States. I'm heavily politically involved in the United States. But it's like the main criticism of me is if, you know, that guy doesn't even believe what he's saying because otherwise he'd leave. So the whole idea of thinking this is fascism and I'm going to stay, it seems like a performative contradiction to me. I mean, I really do believe the United States is in the grips of a fascist movement.

1:05:03And if so, they are going to target a lot of people. And maybe, you know, they're not going to, and I don't, you know, I've got two kids. You know, I want to, I, you know, If I'm right about my diagnosis, things really will get bad or much worse. And I don't want to be complicit in that. I don't want to be complicit in America's crimes. And although Canada is very self-hating, Canadians demand to be viewed as just as bad as America. um you know uh i recently was in a uh discussion at the toronto public library and i said canada is not based on slavery like the united states people booed and hissed and were like how did say the question session someone was like how dare you a white man uh minimize canada's uh slavery.

1:06:02It had terrible effects then and, you know, it was, you know, still visible everywhere today. And just to put it in perspective, in two centuries, Canada has had 4 ,000 enslaved people. And at the dawn of the Civil War, the United States had 4 million. So Canada, you know, I feel less complicit in America's crimes here. I still pay some taxes in the United States, But generally, my taxes now go to Canada. And so to me, I'm much less complicit. I don't feel like I'm bringing harm to my institution by hitting hard against Trumpism and hitting hard against the fascist forces in the United States and elsewhere.

1:06:49Um, in fact, you know, uh, people are Canadians across the political spectrum are supportive, uh, of what I do. And if anything, it's the left in Canada who criticized me because they're like, Canada is as bad as the United States, which it clearly isn't. Uh, and so, uh, so, uh, so I think, you know, it's complicated. Um, it's complicated losing a quarter of your friends. It's complicated uprooting yourself and your family. You know, my kids are upset about the move. You know, they were taken away from their friends. I moved with my ex-wife. The whole thing was really complicated. I mean, it was a theoretical abstraction until it became real.

1:07:36The personal costs were large. And I just really have to deliver politically. For it to be worth it, I have to do well at warning my new country about the dangers and the dangers that face them, both from the United States as an enemy and internal fascist forces. And then I have to do more for American democracy here. I have to show that I can do more than I could in the United States if I had remained in the United States. Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off.

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1:09:00Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. yeah well i hear you and it really does sound like you're kind of a damned if you do in a damned if you do damned if you don't situation especially with the sort of challenge to like well if you really believe this then you should leave and then being condemned for leaving it but in any event thank you for these few digressions about your personal life for now though i kind of want to return briefly to what we were saying about, or what you were saying about social media and my question about AI.

1:09:47And in responding to my question, you mentioned that something that is really integral to democracy is freedom. And as part of that, I think implicit in that is freedom of thought. And increasingly, we're getting our information not only from social media, but from our communications with AI. And this will sound a bit unrelated for a moment, but since I am on social media more than you, I'm seeing this trend where people are posting really unflattering pictures of themselves or they're sending them to chat GPT. And then they're asking, like, how do I look or should I post this on social media?

1:10:40And chat GPT will say, you look awesome. Like, definitely post this on social media. It shows you have like this great sense of humor. And we've long known about echo chambers in social media where the algorithm will sort of populate your feed in such a way that you're only seeing views like yours and posts that are meant to inflame you. But I imagine that as people are now communicating more with AI about politics, the AI, which has all of their data, is just feeding them exactly what they want to hear and in a way that sounds very sophisticated and reassuring and competent. And in a way, this undermines democracy by undermining our freedom of thought.

1:11:31I'm wondering if you've thought about that or if there are other ways that you've thought about AI in particular rather than just social media undermining. Absolutely. I mean, there's both negative and positive aspects. I mean, obviously, Musk would not have purchased Twitter if if he didn't view it as a threat. In other words, if he didn't view it as a threat to his power, he purchased Twitter because he recognized that, you know, it allowed powerless people to say things. So he wanted to destroy that epistemic space. So I think I wouldn't be surprised if there's methods of using AI that could be democratically acceptable.

1:12:22Like, as my former colleague Robert Post argued, you know, experts have a role in democracy. We need scientists in a democracy. Scientists are people who can provide a kind of expert judgment for policy. And that's why our taxpayer dollars support them, or one reason. So maybe AI could help along those dimensions. But, you know, right now it can't. I haven't a lot. I know there's work on the democratic potential for AI, but I think the skepticism, the skeptical case so outweighs that. I mean, you want to know my actual view? My actual view of what's going on is the billionaires want to replace humanity.

1:13:19They want us to die. They want us to be like horses in a glue factory. And they want to replace us by AI. And they want to be gods. They want to be, they've created the new species. This is the real great replacement theory. And this is what, I'm writing an op-ed about this now. So what is happening is the billionaires want to destroy humanity. They want to kill all the humans. They want to make them, render them, they want to render all humans superfluous or the vast majority of humans. They want to be the surviving ones who are then the gods because they've created the new species. And they're using great replacement theory in country after country to, ironically, but great replacement theory with immigrants.

1:14:15So they want to say in country after country, they're saying immigrants are displacing you. Immigrants are taking your jobs away. When really the real great replacement is that they is one they are engineering, which is that AI agents are going to replace us. So at the very same time as the billionaires are engineering a great replacement of humanity by AI, they are covering this great replacement by the propaganda campaign, the global propaganda campaign that is immigrants who are replacing the jobs of local populations. So that's what I think is going on. Well, if that theory is correct, it's extremely terrifying because I genuinely believe that the billionaires are on the path to acquiring the power necessary to do this if they don't already have it.

1:15:19It's only a matter of, I mean, clearly they have the political power at this point. It's a matter of, are there enough militarily capable drones that they can enforce their will upon the population? And is AI at such a point that they can control it to do that? Yes, will our children. And I think, you know, the great irony is they're using great replacement theory to cover their own great replacement goals and aims. So, you know, and yeah, once the idea is once people figure out that it's not immigrants who are stealing their jobs, but AI agents, by that time, the billionaires want the security apparatus locked down, that they can simply suppress any rebellion against the billionaire class.

1:16:22Well, I'm so glad I asked this question because that's an extraordinarily fascinating answer. You kind of may have already answered another question that I wanted to ask that came up as soon as you brought up why Elon Musk purchased Twitter. But I'm wondering what you think his ultimate goals are. Is his ultimate goal personally? I mean, one day hopefully I can interview him and ask this question myself. You won't get an honest answer. Yeah, maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe not. I don't know him. I'd have to ask and look him in the eye and ascertain for myself. But what do you think his ultimate goal is?

1:17:15I mean, he has so much money. Why would he be interested in his forays into politics, into purchasing Twitter when he could really just vanish off the face of the earth and enjoy all this money that he has? He wants to be God. He wants to be God. He wants to kill all the humans, you know, and create, help create, be part of the creation of a super species and be God, live, live, be immortal. You know, he just wants to be God. Maybe he doesn't care about killing all the humans. Maybe, you know, but he doesn't care. You know, I mean, he just wants to be live on as God. And, you know, this is this is, I think, the challenge that we face.

1:18:07Naomi Klein and Astrid Taylor's new book, End Times Fascism, lays this out pretty clearly. So, yeah, I mean, these are the greatest the greatest villains humanity's ever faced. yeah it's maybe it's uh the fact that i'm kind of a an inherently empathetic person but it is hard for me to imagine even though i know it is the case that there are people who are evil enough out there who would be very happy to kill all humans i i can totally believe that you're right that somebody like Elon Musk would like to be a god and would like to be immortal and would like to be all powerful. But the idea of wiping out all humanity is just so terrifying and hard for me to really imagine that people like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel do feel that way, even though it is, of course, entirely possible that they do.

1:19:10Well, didn't you see the interview with Ross Daldat when Ross Daldat asked Peter Thiel if humanity should survive. And then Daldat was like, you're taking a long time to answer that question. I totally saw that, but it's just the charitable person in me that doesn't want to go from his pausing, taking a long time to answer to the inference that he must want all humans to be dead. It certainly is a very bad optics and makes me really scratch my chin. But I think he did, you know, what his follow-up answer was did suggest that, you know, I mean, I think he did say that he doesn't want humanity to be extinct, but, you know, to go to the glue factory or whatever he said.

1:20:03But I mean, I think it was indicative of, the discussions that they're having. I don't think they want to actively kill all people. I don't think that at all. I think they just envisage a future where AI takes over and humans are superfluous and they are the creators of AI and they are gods and who cares what happens with humanity. And in the meantime, they're going to blame it all on non-white immigrants. You know, it's interesting that this is the association that comes to my mind right now, but you and I and probably many of our listeners even who aren't in philosophy PhD programs or philosophy professors are familiar with Peter Singer's drowning child argument.

1:20:52And the notion that it just is an empirical fact that most people are far less concerned with the welfare of those that aren't in their direct vicinity. And I can totally imagine that people like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk are just at some very extreme end of the spectrum where they simply do not care at all about the welfare of people who are not close to them. And so while they may not want to actively wipe out humanity, they may just care not the slightest bit whether humanity or humans are able to provide for themselves in this AI future. Absolutely. I don't think they care one bit. And in the meantime, they're covering their tracks by supporting far right parties everywhere who spread great replacement theory and, you know, fear of migrants and fear of Muslims, etc.

1:21:59You know, I would like to get back to fascism and the future of democracy throughout the world. But something you've mentioned a number of times and that's come up is that, yeah, you're working as a public intellectual pretty much now focusing on American democracy, but that's not at all how you started as a very technically astute kind of hardcore philosopher. Before you became known publicly for, I mean, your work on propaganda and authoritarianism, you were best known for philosophy of language and epistemology. Why was it or how was it that you ended up making this transition? Yeah, I guess my very first piece for the New York Times in 2011 was on the birtherism conspiracy theory.

1:23:01It was called Ways of Silencing. And oddly, that was spread by Donald Trump. So in a sense, my career as a public intellectual has exactly overlapped with Donald Trump's public political involvement. And I was writing about it as a philosophy of language topic because it seemed to me, you know, I was thinking about how it undermined the kind of structure of discourse that you find in theories of communication, like theories of communication rely on us trusting each other. so our formal semantic theories our pragmatic theories are ill-designed for trickery you know so so i i came into that you know thinking about the work you know the models that i was working with in philosophy of language.

1:24:01And I guess early on, I started worrying about whether or not in the philosophy of language, we're constructing formal models of things that have no real world you know uh reflections that our formal models have you know gotten to be their own pursuit this was i think an early worry of mine uh i think i became i started out with an interest in logic and logicism because like the uh vienna circle i kind of saw hope for universalistic enlightenment objectivity. But then I started thinking, okay, what are we doing when we're working with these models and looking at epistemic modals, for instance, and looking at these constructions that really don't map on to any real world conversations?

1:25:13There's a debate now. So, you know, I'm really ending up on the other side of my sometimes co-author and good friend, Timothy Williamson, who defends modeling. And I'm not arguing that modeling doesn't have a role. I mean, I'm a formal semanticist, even. You know, I model all the time. But I think in analytic philosophy, things went off the rails and you have whole disciplines that are just simply, you know, playing around with formal models. And it's not clear what the connection to the original motivational thing is. So. So I started worrying, as it were, about the real world and. And in how propaganda works, that was the result of me bringing the formal semantic models that I learned from my teachers like Robert Stalnecker to bear on political communication.

1:26:13But then I realized that's not going to work. You have to go in the other direction. You have to start with the phenomena that you want to explain and go backwards to create the tools and the concepts. So in a sense, I don't feel like I'm doing anything different in my theoretical work. I've always done the technical work, the detailed technical work in tandem with my public intellectual work. I always like, you know, teach the classes on my, you know, the graduate seminars on, you know, the theories I'm developing at the same time at which I'm doing the public intellectual work that that is based on that theoretical work.

1:27:05That's why, you know, I published a 500 page book and a 350 page book on propaganda and philosophy of language during the whole time I was a public intellectual. So I think it's more like, you know, I kept being interested, I think, in the epistemology case, my work in epistemology, my first book and my work on practical interests in epistemology was precisely on how practical, political, moral interests impact the search for knowledge. So that's what that work is about. So when people sometimes ask me, when you ask, how did you move from this highly theoretical domain to this more practical domain?

1:27:59Well, my 2005 book, my first book, which was in a phistemology, was arguing that these domains are not separate. Jason, I'm glad that we've gotten to really run the gamut on propaganda. There are so many more things I'd love to discuss with you another time, like really getting into the fascism debate and talking about what's going on in the rest of the world beyond the United States. And then I'm sure that after these elections wrap up, people will be thinking about what's going to happen in two years. But for now, this has been really, really excellent. I'm glad I finally got to have you on the show.

1:28:39So thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for the work you're doing. It's great to have another philosopher be out there doing this kind of public facing work.

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