Angelo Carusone and Molly Jong-Fast discuss how American discourse is “pickled in misinformation and right-wing rage”
Published
Angelo Carusone Fast Politics excerpt, 11/7/24
Citation From the November 7, 2024, edition of IHeart's Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast
MOLLY JONG-FAST (HOST) Let's talk about growing power from the fringes. So does that look like McCarthyism?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. But you know what's so different about — and that's one of the reasons why you mentioned McCarthyism as opposed to, say, the John Birch Society. Right? Because McCarthy actually was able to get some power. Right?
And whereas the John Birch Society, they hey. Yeah. They were influential, but they didn't —. Here's the difference, and it gets it, and there's a modern analog to it. The difference is that America has always had fringes, just like any society. We've had a little bit more fringes. In part, that's what makes us a little spicy. Our fringes are kind of a feature in a way, but what we haven't had is the fringes being connected. Right? And so you can't build power unless you connect otherwise disconnected audiences.
That's where McCarthyism comes in. Obviously, McCarthy was a demagogue, so the tool was demagoguery. But what it did was it connected otherwise disconnected audiences, and he used a platform that he had to do that. And what we have now, the modern analog, and, like, to your point about McCarthyism, in a way, it's McCarthyism on steroids because McCarthy still needed to rely on traditional means. And one of the things that we have now is that you have extremely powerful algorithms that connect otherwise disconnected audiences.
If you like one piece of QAnon content or two pieces QAnon content, even if you don't intentionally know it's QAnon or not, the algorithms will feed you more and more and more of that and move you down a rabbit hole and move you and intensify or capture you. They will convert you and they will connect you to new people. And so that is partly what we're dealing with now is that we are dealing with a McCarthyism that does not need to dilute itself to speak to mass audiences. And believe it, the McCarthy thing strangely enough was diluted. It needed to be diluted in order to reach broader and broader audiences. What happens when you don't need to dilute to have the same reach and saturation because the tools that we're using, the tech platforms, are automatically distributing that content to those individuals. And I just wanna make one point on that because I think it helps tie into the outcomes here.
The major platforms had put in place many safeguards since the last election about about about what was recommended, about who they were recommending content to, about not accelerating extremism. And in the last year, most of those safeguards have all been systematically eliminated or reduced as a result of pressure from right-wing influencers. They worked the refs at these platforms. So they knew what they were doing because they knew that in order to scale and execute organizing power on the fringes, you needed the runway and the tools that these tech platforms provided. So I would say it looks like McCarthyism, but strangely enough, a more raw and nondiluted version of McCarthyism.
And I don't think we should joke about the demon thing. When I said that before, it's a joke, but think about it. There's the increase of Christian nationalists, the rise of this evangelical strain, of this intense religious strain, this idea that there are demons among us doing bad things — that is going to be something that they start to name. They're going to start identifying — I'm not even joking. When I talk about Qanon and, like, you know, back in 2018, people, donors, supporters, they really thought I was losing my mind.
And I talk about demons now, not because like, it's a focus point of mine, but I look where they get their information. And it's like they're gonna start screaming that person's a demon. That person's being motivated by demons. And that is a tactic of the same thing that McCarthy is. They will have — they will they will build up new boogeymen, new labels that they can then apply to individuals in order to harass them, persecute them, and all of that is designed to sort of make examples out of people fast so that more and more people duck and cover.
JONG-FAST: Yeah. Let's just keep going with this for a minute. What do we think that we do next? I was on a show this morning. It was on the late-night MSNBC, and we're talking about, like, what went wrong.
CARUSONE: Yeah.
JONG-FAST: Which is what we're gonna be talking about for the next five hundred — until the midterms. And one of the things that, you know, there was a lot of, like, this and that, and this went wrong, this went wrong. But, like, one of the things that I think is that it seems to me like there is a real information problem. Right? Like, we — there are parts of this country that don't have news. The news they're getting is red sludge. Remember how, you know, the thing that Elon shared after Paul Pelosi has been you know what I mean? So what — what's the solve there?
CARUSONE: I would say there are three sort of immediate things, and they — and part of it's you know, a lot of this all starts too with the with the recognition early on that I was describing about how they're organizing and building power. And because that — sort of then is you're working toward countering that.
I think there's sort of three things that are important in terms of the next step here. One is everyone I think a lot of people talk about messaging and say, oh, we need better messaging. I look at it a slightly different way. You know, there's three ways that you can talk to somebody. You can talk to their head, their heart, or their gut. That's it. It doesn't matter what the message is. It's either to their head, their heart, or their gut.
And if you look at the bulk of Republican and conservative and right-wing message you know, messaging, what they're saying, it's almost all to people's gut. Sometimes it'll be to their to their heart, never to their head. If you look at Democratic messaging, it's almost always to people's heads, sometimes their heart, never to their gut. And why that matters is that we live in — we have this information asymmetry, but obviously people say, well, not that many people watch the news or read papers. Sure. But they still live in an information world because they — you get it through word-of-mouth.
You get — you don't get the individual facts or the threads, but you get the narrative. We all live in a narrative or narratives. And when that narrative when the right wing has narrative dominance, and as you noted, that narrative dominance is really just a reflection of right-wing sludge, you're just pickled in misinformation and right-wing rage all the time. Even if you don't consume a drop of it, you're still pickled in it because your friends are, because indirectly you're getting it, it's on the television, you see the chyron when you're picking up your bagel in the morning. You form a narrative. That's what happens. And so I think we need to, 1, think about how it is that we communicate, and communicators need to recognize that we need to rethink about that.
The second, there were two more structural pieces. One is that there's no shortage of creators on our side, but the one thing that the right-wing does, and they've done this for decades and they do it better, is they invest in people.
There's no reason why our content creators should not be getting — have to have other jobs. You know? Some of our best people are you know, it's not their primary position. They're not full-time, you know, you know, video creators or podcasters. It's something they do on the side incidentally, and we've never really made robust investments in them, whereas they have, and they have a pipeline for that.
JONG-FAST: Which they have. Yeah.
CARUSONE: You know, there are people on Instagram that got grants from Charlie Kirk years ago that will make their way to or have already made their way to Daily Wire podcasts after a few years. Right? And that's how it works. And so you get the benefits immediately of you balance out the scales because you have your own people out there pushing information, and it's it's authentic. You're not trying to come in and control it, but then you're also building revolving capital in businesses that are designed to build and shape narratives. So unless that challenge is confronted, you know, and liberals are so burned by what they — by Air America. It's like, well, we tried to combat right-wing radio in the ninety you know, in the late nineties and early two thousands and it failed. So let's give up forever. You know? And that's a mistake.
And then the last thing I'll say is — so one is we need to do grapple with that, and that's not no. We'll spend one point five billion dollars on ads that we know don't work, but we won't spend a hundred million dollars to incubate and seed a new generation of creators and talkers and storytellers. That's ridiculous. That's stupid.
And that's a mistake. And then the third thing I'd say is that the tech platforms are going to kill us. They are. And we need to deal with that. And the Democrats you know, Republicans worked the refs in newsrooms, and then they took the same strategy.
JONG-FAST: And it worked.
CARUSONE: And it worked. And it worked. And they did it again here. You know, every time you know, YouTube or another major platform rolled back another election policy as a result of right-wing pressure, there was no Democratic counter-response.
There was no talk of them cheating or yelling and screaming. I wasn't surprised by what happened with Jeff Bezos or what we saw in Silicon Valley as the spring rolled by because those seeds were sown months ago. They were scared from Republican pressure that they were getting. And that needs to be something that Democrats really grapple with. And it's not only because that will help, again, balance out the scales, but it's also that they'll maybe get some insights into that the political landscape is realigning. They need to be more responsive to what is happening, and that political landscape is actually a reflection of what the larger information landscape is.
You know? Obviously, I'm at Media Matters, whenever I talk to them about the media, people say, well, not that many people watch CNN or read The New York Times. Like, sure. But they get a podcast secondarily. They sit online. They get push alerts on their phones. All these things add up.
JONG-FAST: Right, it's downstream.
CARUSONE: Yes. And that's it. And Republicans understand, and Trump in particular, you know, I think we need to internalize the lesson. He's a media creature, and he was able to do a lot because he is a media creature.
And, you know, part of what allowed people to say, oh, he doesn't really mean it is a thing called kayfabe, which exists in WWE. It's a wrestling thing. It's a character. And people sort of— all the stuff that people that really has turned him off to people, they say, oh, but he's just a character. No one thinks the Undertaker really murders their villain in the, you know, their opponent in the ring and brings them underground. It's a joke. And I think a lot of times, what Trump was able to do was not only manipulate the media to have narrative dominance and to coordinate, you know, take advantage of this massive right-wing megaphone that they've had, but also rely on the benefit of the doubt and the sort of the way that consumers engage with those characters and in particular him. And we need to recognize that that is a thing that we're gonna have to grapple with as well because he won't be the last. That's the scary thing.
Tucker will be a rising political force, and we need to accept that as a thing that is true. We will have to accept that, look out the trail, and look who performed in terms of engagement. Very few people cut across right the right-wing landscape in the way that Trump does, and Tucker is one of those few figures. Obviously, Musk as well. That's it.
That's the next step. And it doesn't solve everything, but I don't think circular firing squad or trying to figure out some of the micro things that would have been different are gonna be helpful because what took place here is macro, and we need to think about it at a bigger level.