America This Week, December 1st, 2023 “Before the Congress”

And I think it might be my favorite in-person sport pro sport.

And so we had shake shack burgers in a little bunker behind our seats, and, you know, we were living like kings. This is what I come to Vegas for, and the puck hits the plexiglass in front of you and your heart stops. It was a great game.

So I'm just having a great time, man, riding it out, you know? The Late Empire thrills and chills.

When I lived in Moscow, I used to go to the Red Army hockey games all the time and they had. The American rinks are actually smaller, so there's more violence, but the stadium in Russia has fewer seats. So you're like, right on top of the action, and yeah, hockey up close is amazing, right?

And the athletes are kind of incredible. I mean, the NB.A. is great too, but the problem is it's so expensive you're always far away, it seems like.

I like that.

So I'm in Washington right now, I'm at a hotel right outside of Union Station.

And I just testified in Congress, but it almost feels like I didn't.

It was surreal being in the middle of it. There were some humorous moments, including a very strange exchange with Dan Goldman of New York.

Who was beginning to become one of my favorite villains in politics?

But I don't know, Walter, what did you think? I just got out of it? So you tell me, I'm a little bit afraid of what it looked like on television.

And they had a witness there whose qualifications to be there were unclear to me because I started just a little late. Maybe you can introduce who she was.

She was, if I'm not mistaken, she was the homeland security and counterterrorism advisor to Pence. So she was in the Trump White House. She's a critic of Donald Trump and was basically there to say that Donald Trump sucks, and she did that well, although there were some very strange moments. At one point, there was a little colloquy with one of the Republican members who accused her of basically was saying, You call this a conspiracy theory.

And I want to know if you're aware that there's been a court case, the Missouri v. Biden court case that's ruled that. This, in fact, is not a conspiracy theory, that it's going to the Supreme Court. And she said, I never said that. And as she was saying that Michael and I were looking at the text we were reading from her prepared statement.

She said I never said it was a conspiracy theory, and the line that she actually said was. Instead of continuing to spread conspiracy theories about government censorship, this committee should instead focus on the very real and dangerous threat posed by the leading Republican candidate. It was an interesting hearing.

I'm actually surprised the Republican members and we talked to a bunch of them afterwards. They're pretty gung ho for this issue and not politically, they're gung ho to investigate it. So I'm not used to that.

I mean, I guess there were a few people I've encountered on the financial services side who were a little bit like that. But they're really into this topic and not just as a partisan thing, I don't think.

So that was really interesting.

Unfortunately, I think we were kind of hoping that the new releases that came out this week would be able to kind of kick the can forward a little bit. And it wasn't exactly like that. But what did you see, Walter, that jumped out at you?

And they're not just trying to silence people, they're trying to hurt them, they're trying to mock them, they're trying to overwhelm them in certain ways. And they're using all kinds of techniques which they are quite aware of were developed in order to interfere with foreign countries political processes.

And they speak quite openly about the fact that they probably shouldn't be doing this here, but they're going to do it anyway. And it's an amazing insight. It is definitely a fly-on-the-wall moment for the censorship industrial complex, which looks a little less like a forbidding complex. Than a bunch of friends, colleagues, compatriots, and various political orthodoxies having their way using all these military-style tools against the American people.

First of all, how many acronyms are we going to have to learn for this goddamn story, right?

The use of acronyms is, I think, devised and calculated to fog over and obscure any subject. Because, first of all, they all start with C for some reason in this, when it has to do with this issue, and you know, CISA now, CIDL, etc.

You know, when I was young, I had trouble with Russian novels because of the long names. And I have kind of similar cognitive problem with stories that have to do with censorship. Now, because I have to go through this acronymic camouflage.

But the reality of the situation, as revealed in these latest packets, is, I think, one that people could really relate to if they read it in a novel. Because you can actually sort of see the people in their rooms, sitting at their computers, laughing, you can hear them laughing.

And they make fun of the people that they are censoring.

They entertain moral qualms and then laugh them off in the most supercilious ways.

And it sort of scares you because our old style picture of a police state, of a surveillance state was one of kind of gray apparatchiks. Sitting in rooms with headphones on. And these people are, like, probably looking at their TikTok with one hand while they censor you with the other. I mean, they don't seem formidable in the ways that we're used to, bureaucrats seeming.

He doesn't come across as an idiot in these documents or in these video trainings, but some of these people are. It's like, mind-blowing. I mean, there's this character, Deb Lavoie, who just openly says things like.

Basically, we're using many of the same techniques as the bad guys.

And you know, if you're on this team, it means you're a good guy.

Yeah, but that's who these people are, right. They're convinced that their expertise in what they do gives them the ability to do this kind of work, even though they don't have any issue-specific knowledge. I mean, there's one of the videos where that same Deb Lavoie character, who's a former marketing executive, she worked for, I think, a software company, and she was involved with something called the reality Team.

And she basically says, I don't know a lot, but I do know about narratives.

And you know, I just don't like to see my idealistic marketing world used for the bad guys or used for ill or something like that.

Admitting that you don't know a whole lot and then just taking on the endeavor of censoring the entire social media landscape.

How does your brain not have a little reaction at that? I don't know, I don't really understand it.

Because, as I say, it's like censorship. 90210, some kind of TV show about kids who somehow get a machine by which they can manipulate the American discourse and use it. Hey, check it out. I just nuked so and so.

And the people who come to grab him, they're not, like, you know, sentries decked out in like these royal costumes. They're third rate actors with pot bellies, you know?

And Kafka portrays it as arriving in the guise of, like these three third rate actors who couldn't even disguise who they were, right. So, you know, as Joseph K is being dragged away, he's like, What theater do you work at, you know, but that's kind of like, what this is?

You're trained to think in terms of, Oh, these people must be a combination of, you know, Jack Reacher and I don't know what other C.I.A. characters are there. I mean, there's Penn Ghislian of The Old Man.

And as I said before, the insight into their dialogue is very screenplay worthy. But you know, it would star Alicia Silverstone or something.

And I think America has to somehow struggle with the fact that a lot of what's going on now is institutionalized stupidity. And with very powerful tech tools at its disposal. And that seems to be the story here. They borrowed these military information weapons and they put them in the hands of, you know, people who shouldn't be running a hair salon.

And I think one of the reasons why they're so stupefied that we're concerned about it is because they take it so unseriously when they do it. In other words, to them, it's probably baffling that we see this as an Orwellian development, when, in fact, from their point of view, it's just party on garth. I mean, what us you're talking about, us?

We're just pushing buttons and having a ball.

But back to the hearings for a second. So I think you guys were hoping to bring these revelations into the halls of Congress. And that was what I was expecting as a viewer, and it didn't happen the way things were set up. First of all, there was, you know, Democrats holding a separate hearing with their own witness.

And she, I've got to say, you know, there's a term cry, bully gone around. She tried to personalize everything. And, you know, she talked about being doxed and fears that she had for her family, and she talked about a relative being in a mass shooting. And she brought to bear all these kind of melodramatic soap opera elements to her testimony. That had nothing to do with the issues at hand.

And she seemed at times on the edge of tears, but in a very controlled actorly way. And then it would switch back to the topic at hand, and you couldn't believe it was happening in the same room, these two tracks.

That's what I saw.

We probably could have done a better job of coordinating it too. Because, you know, I think we were a little bit of different minds about what the meaning of these documents, of these new documents is.

So for him, his idea is that this group, the CTIA, is basically like the prototype or the beta version of what later became the Election Integrity Partnership and the Verality Project. And that's probably true to some extent, although we can't actually prove that. We see that the two organizations have. They use some similar language, there are some personnel that's similar.

But, you know, I thought that the uniqueness of these documents was that, you know, it went beyond the defensive, it went beyond even censorship. And it laid out that not only are these people interested in taking down things that are maybe true, maybe not even alleged disinformation. I mean, you can see in their discussions that they're just aiming for hashtags like We won't stay home, right?

So just someone who doesn't like the lockdowns, that's not disinformation, that's just a political opinion. But they had a whole threat matrix for that.

And they were going to, they were asking if we do we have enough to take that person down. If not, can we get all troll in their bums? And that's where the I thought the significance of these documents was that they showed a willingness to get into, you know, offensive operations domestically.

And, you know, it suggested a whole new, like realm of mischief that they're probably getting up into.

And, you know, it would have been really interesting to explore that and to see what the Democrats reaction to that was, but we didn't really focus on that. But I think a lot of the members on the Republican side just still wanted to talk about some other stuff and make some points about. Like, you know how this is used against conservatives and that sort of thing.

People tried in this hearing to say, would you be happy if Donald Trump was using these techniques against his enemies? And no one bid on that? They didn't want to acknowledge that it's happening in the first place. And they seem so confident that Donald Trump doesn't have access to the tools that would allow him to do this. Or something that it revealed to me that this is basically a partisan political operation that somehow installed itself inside the bureaucracy, the academy, and so on. And which can't be candidly acknowledged because it's truly the tool of one side.

That's the impression I get.

It's just about whoever's not in power.

But, you know, I tried to emphasize that there's sort of a class difference, right? Like the people who do this work, you know, they're all, you know, none of them are going to be like poor inner city folks, or, you know, single moms doing waitressing jobs, that kind of thing.