Angelo Carusone tells MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin the right-wing playbook for LA wildfires and other crises
Carusone: “You take this massive right-wing media megaphone, an echo chamber, and you just start to pump lies into it, and it's about to get a whole lot louder and more effective because of the changes that Mark Zuckerberg has made at Facebook.”
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From the January 11, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Ayman
AYMAN MOHYELDIN (HOST): And so to that point, I was going to say, let me, Angelo, get your thoughts on this because, you know, you've got Fox, not just Fox hosts Jesse Watters, you've got other Republican leaders directing the blame, spreading conspiracy theories. There's one going around that they've been promoting that officials use public funds to house undocumented migrants instead of building water storage infrastructure.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, I mean, and I think that — And Molly [Jong-Fast] sort of referenced it before a little bit about the ecosystem. And that's what's really concerning about these moments in particular, is that it's beyond just, you know, sort of these day-to-day fights of flooding the zone with lies. One of the things that's happening in these moments of crises, and they've been doing this more and more. And as Dean [Obeidallah] noted, he's about to come into power now, which means he can operationalize that, those lies into something more, more and more power for himself.
What they do in these moments when people are really emotional and their, you know, their lives are turned upside down, people want answers. And you take this sort of high valence emotions that people feel. You take this massive right-wing media megaphone, an echo chamber, and you just start to pump lies into it, and it's about to get a whole lot louder and more effective because of the changes that Mark Zuckerberg has made at Facebook. And in those moments, you're basically handing out a bunch of red pills to people that are just looking for an answer. They're looking for someone to be mad about, something to blame, something that's not a decades-long, complicated climate change discussion. They just want to know who messed up, is this a question of competence, and how can we get accountability and change it?
And in a few weeks, Trump is going to not just be able to sit on the sidelines and snipe. He's going to be able to say, “They messed up, they made mistakes. And here's this extraordinary thing that I want to do. Here's Richard Grenell, the new viceroy of California. He will fix all of your problems.” Right? And that's the kind of stuff that he's going to be able to operationalize. So these lies have more consequences than just sort of messing up the conversation, distorting people's ability to prevent crises and making crises worse. It actually is a way for him to continue to build and organize power on the backs of this massive disinformation engine.