Start With a Lie

Peter picture this a harsh winter has finally come to an end exhausted and ragged America's Revolutionary army soldiers are huddled in tents it's Valley Forge it's 1778 and on a makeshift stage a group of George Washington's officers are putting on a play It's called KO a tragedy so they put on togers in the middle of a war history does not record what costumes they wore nor why exactly they were putting on a play at that particular moment uh we do know it was one of Washington's favorite place it was very popular in colonial America uh it tells the story of the end of the Roman Republic a democracy in its time which was destroyed by a dictator Julius Caesar so basically Washington and the founders you know their their vision of the end of democracy was to be a dictator taking the capital by storm and grabbing power every generation has a vision of how democracy dies and this was theirs I mean today when I'm in America I hear a lot of like references to the Nazis are coming the fascists are coming you and I have both lived in countries that became more autocratic over time meaning that the leader or the ruling party usurped more and more power eliminating checks and balances and we both know that this doesn't necessarily look like Stormtroopers marching in the streets and it happen sort of slowly almost imperceptibly like mold eating away at a building and it's these little things that actually show you that you're going in the wrong direction Things become even more dangerous when people are sick of the political conversation and just want it to end and they want someone to come along and end it I'm Anne Apple bam a staff writer at the Atlantic I'm Peter panv a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at John's Hopkins University this is autocracy in America in this podcast we are not talking about some distant dystopian totalitarian state this is not a show about America's future it's about the present there are authoritarian tactics already at work in America eating away at the guardrails that prevent a leader from usurping power and we're going to show you where look at what we have already widening apathy politicized investigations the Embrace of the strongman cult and in this episode psychological corruption Peter when did you start to see things in the United States shift shift away from a democratic culture look it's a slightly personal issue for me my parents were Soviet dissidents in Soviet Ukraine where I was born they were arrested by the KGB we were exiled in the late 1970s I was still a baby at the time and after the fall of the US I I went and lived in Russia and Moscow from 2001 to 2010 that was the first 10 years of the Putin era and in that time I saw Russia degrade from a really rotten democracy to a really aggressive dictatorship and I actually remember one moment quite clearly this must have been still during the Obama era I was visiting the US on holiday or for a work trip or something and I suddenly found myself among groups of people who subscribed to this idea of birtherism that Obama had not been born in America exactly and if he wasn't born in America then he's not qualified to be president but it was the way they were talking about it I mean the evidence was not important to them I mean you could provide loads of evidence that Obama had been born in America that wasn't the point the way they were using this conspiracy was a kind of a kind of a real warning sign this wasn't like I don't know the Kenedy assassination where people try to find the truth out here people I met who signed up to the birth conspiracy didn't care about evidence they said things I heard in Russia when it was Fading Into dictatorship they would say I know the truth is unknowable there are no such things as real facts or even or even evidence but what did matter was how you signaled your political affiliation by making a conspiratorial statement yep and this is exactly how a conspiracy theory a big lie functions in an autocratic political system it helps the leader the autoc R establish who's loyal who's on our side and who's not you know if you promise to believe in the madeup story then you can work for the government or the party or whatever and if you don't you're out and so this then and not Merit or hard work determines who gets promoted and who runs things to show that you belonged to the Putin system you had to repeat absurd lies that people Putin was arresting were guilty of totally absurd charges you had to agree that Nazis were taking over Ukraine you know that could be socially very awkward at first and people could get quite aggressive especially when they were drunk and and after a while it just became dangerous because if you disagreed with these absurd statements with these conspiracy theories then you were essentially An Enemy of the State and and that would become incredibly dangerous when I first saw birtherism unfold in the US my first reaction was no way is this happening here Americans can't fall for this kind of garbage what sorry why did you think Americans were immune just out of Interest wrongly I imagined our political system is too big and our democracy is too well anchored and people don't believe in conspiracy theories and obviously I was wrong you know once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power it basically means that you can't have democratic debate anymore Eastern Europeans are familiar with the idea of ruling by conspiracy but in contemporary America this is new and it's so new in fact that I'm not sure Americans realize the significance of it in May of 2021 Donald Trump accused me of deleting files from the 2020 election and that was it's just hard to describe but it's a little bit like the eye of saaron with that when when it's turned on you you feel it and people start contacting you and you get a lot of ugliness directed your way Steven richer is an election official in Maricopa County Arizona and this disorienting accusation began at first as something completely impossible for him to imagine that the president knew his name and was releasing statements directed at his office tonight a bitter Feud erupting among Arizona Republicans over an election audit of the state's most populist County Trump released a statement yesterday saying quote the entire database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been deled Leed this is illegal and the Arizona State Senate who is leading the forensic otic is up in arms at first it felt somewhat impossible for Richard to take this kind of accusation seriously he knew it wasn't true he could see all the files on the county computers every day he went to work they hadn't disappeared at all in response Republican recorder Steven Richard sent out a tweet saying quote wow this is unhinged I'm literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen right now now we can't indulge these insane lies any longer and then these claims started to take hold with other big players in the Trump Circle Christina Bob from one americ News Network was here the stop the steel candidates throughout the country would come into Arizona and almost pay pilgrimage pay homage to to that production and were the attacks on you were they what were they accusing you of doing everything from rigging tabulation equipment to falsifying evidence to deleting electronic files to you know turning my back on my people to not not maintaining proper chain of custody I just the the the breadth is really breathtaking and it's uh some of it is quite imaginative and never in a million years would I have thought that somebody would have accuse me of shredding ballots from the 2020 election feeding them to chickens and then burning the chickens to cover the evidence it's something right out of the sort of absurdest stories that you hear about politics in Eastern Europe where where where the regime is using absolutely nonsensical charges against you and their very absurdity shows that you're kind of powerless to fight back cuz how do you fight back against somebody accusing you of feeding chickens with election ballots right this was the kind of archetypic absurdest thing that happened in communist Poland or communist Czechoslovakia you know you would be accused of something ludicrous or ridiculous and there would be no way to defend yourself but the whole system would somehow take it incredibly seriously you can't actually fight back against absurdity it's actually very well let me put it differently it starts off funny and then it becomes really creepy I kind of always thought just like you did with birtherism and with conspiracy theories that in the US false accusations would be quickly knocked down by by the Press but just by the system that is at the end of the day grounded in some sort of rationality or at the very least I kind of thought that somebody like Steven richer who well let's put it very basically as a white election official not a particularly vulnerable member of society that they would be able to defend themselves pretty easily against blatant lies but that is not what was happening at all no in Maricopa County which is completely ordinary part of America we see not just accusations of fraud but ridiculous accusations of Fraud and they were being taken seriously I remember vividly one of the meetings I went to in front of a group of about about 50 Grassroots activists in the Republican party and the first question they asked was were the tabulation machines in 2020 connected to the internet and we had just had three professional elections Technologies companies come in and test that very thing among other things so I knew categorically as sure as I possibly could that the answer to that was no but you could look into their faces and see that that was not going to go down well and I said it and then it turned into just u a lot of shouting a lot of obscenities um and then ultimately following me out to my car it got personal and it got much worse from there a man from Missouri made a phone call telling me in no uncertain terms what he thought of me and what he was going to do because I had said that President Trump's comments were unhinged regarding his allegations that I had deleted the the files and do you think that the people who criticized you or attacked you do you think they believe belied Trump um or were they you know had they departed already from any idea of reality or was it something they said for political reasons the politicians say it for political reasons I think the people online and a lot of the people from the Republican Grassroots of Arizona who email me really believe it and it conforms to what they want to believe about the world which which is I think a real victimization right now and an explanation of how they lost in 20120 that isn't simply more arizonans voted for Joe Biden because I don't think they want to embrace that possibility and it's incompatible with the world that they see around them when they go to Trump events and see Trump flags and their neighbors voted for trump it appears to be official Arizona's attorney general has opened an investigation into the 2020 presidential election former American was somebody that I was on friendly terms with and we had he had told me that he knew it was all nonsense but we moved more and more apart as he continued to indulge it and then in the late months of 2021 he launched a criminal investigation into the 2020 election over 6 months so an how did we actually get here there's a statement from then president Trump then there's pilgrimages from National figures to Maricopa County exactly this is where rumors and talk transformed yet again not just into dramatic pilgrimages and pressure campaigns but now into an actual criminal investigation by the Arizona attorney general he committed 10,000 man hours to investigating it it is especially scary to think that somebody who who is willing to indulge these delusional beliefs could have been the chief prosecutor for the State of Arizona and I I just can't help feeling there's a bigger story here it's not about just what happened in Arizona it's about how did something so unhinged something so absurd become so normalized in the Republican party there are a lot of people including a lot of Republicans who are trying to understand that that's after the break this podcast is produced by the Atlantic and made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute an academic and public forum at John's Hopkins University dedicated to strengthening Global democracy learn more at www.s SNF aora jhu.edu Peter Adam kinzinger is a former Republican Congressman in Washington where a lot of examples are set that then trickle down to State and local politics kininger was in office from 2011 to 20123 and he saw the changes in the party as they were happening and he played along with them a little bit himself at least for a while before changing his mind completely yeah so you know I was raised during the time of Reagan when I started to pay attention to politics and you know always just really believed in the role of America I mean I I grew up hearing that America is this Force for good well you know I was alive during the Soviet Union I saw at a young age the Berlin Wall fall I saw the Iron Curtain torn down and and I gave credit for that to the Republican party you know the party that was unabashedly pro-america Peter kininger was very idealistic like many people who join Congress but then he discovered that the reality of politics wasn't always so Noble and that to be part of the party sometimes you go on TV to say things that rally the base yeah well look this is uh this is obviously a reason why I think we need real border security not a threat but that Isis has grown to where it even eclipses Al-Qaeda Congress may be unpopular look we all get that we understand it that doesn't mean Congress doesn't exist that doesn't mean you convenient get to throw out the Constitution kensinger's ability to speak for the party on TV and elsewhere got more complicated because right after Donald Trump's inauguration immediately Trump started saying absurd things about how he'd had the largest crowds in history no one had ever seen so many people on the National Mall yeah just shortly after that you know dismissing what we see in pictures the pictures showed that that it wasn't a very big crowd out there so so you know he was sort of saying that to be part of his group part of this new political ingroup that rules the country you've got to repeat these absurd statements and that will show that you're one of us exactly in this case it was ridiculous I mean who cares how many people were at the inauguration but he insisted that his press spokesman get the National Park Service to lie about how many people there were because only through forcing people to lie forcing institutions to lie could he prove their loyalty and this is another classic piece of authoritarian Behavior authoritarianism doesn't start with something huge it's like taking or giving a tiny little bribe five bucks or something it doesn't sound like a big thing but that's it you're hooked and then it's just like cotton candy it reels you in it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger right so all the while Adam kininger was increasingly forced into kind of mental gymnastics he did for a while continue to go on TV speaking for the GOP on issues that he cared about but without fully aligning himself with the commander-in-chief I agree with what the president's saying about Iran I think him pulling out of the nuclear deal was huge Iran has by the way about 40,000 troops in Syria obviously I I think there's some things I wish he wouldn't put on Twitter but when it comes to some of these issues like with North Korea I think there's benefit the president wouldn't do is show any kind of division with his intelligence Chiefs I think it's not beneficial for us it's not beneficial for our our presence on the world stage if you disagree with intelligence you can really hear kininger trying to find a way to be loyal to his party and yet keep his integrity and criticize the leader and he continued to try and find that balance but he found less and less camaraderie among members of his party especially as the investigation into president Trump's ties with Russia began this was during the Russia investigation this person who was I all I remember is they were a s rational person just said yeah but I think the Democrats are making this up to go after him I remember specifically thinking you know that that's not true but then I started to understand like you can convince yourself of anything if you have to rationalize your behavior you can convince yourself of anything so if you know that you have to defend Donald Trump despite his to Russia or his sympathy to Russia if you know that and you know that's hard for you to do but you can convince yourself that the Democrats are making this up you can start out double speaking and saying one thing to one group and another thing to another but eventually even the leaders even those pushing out the false narratives eventually they get corrupted too and they believe they're own garbage and that's a very dangerous moment it's a dangerous moment moment and also sort of the infection of mental corruption spreading I saw the same thing happen in Russia as it tipped into being a full-blown autocracy it was around 2014 I remember the moment very clearly Russia had just invaded Ukraine and people that I knew who worked in state media and the bureaucracy who'd always been like so cynical sort of smirking when they repeated the government's lines signaling that they knew that all the propaganda was a stupid game that they were just playing along suddenly when the war started they had this completely blank look and this total seriousness as they repeated the government lies that the revolution in Ukraine which was this incredible Act of heroism by the Ukrainian people was I don't know all a CIA plot I kept on looking for their old smug the little glint in in the eye but suddenly they were just delivering it like zombies something had changed they knew now that they had to inhabit these lies fully if they were going to survive in a new paradigm and this vulnerability to mental corruption is very human uh it's just like what happened in 2015 when the plane crash conspiracy theory in Poland started to take hold this is the plane crash conspiracy that that the former government had actually been what brought down by by the president's plane crashed carrying a lot of military and political leaders and plane crash was an accident it was extensively investigated the black boxes were found there had been a pilot error but then the late president's brother who was also the leader of what was then the political opposition in the parliament began claiming that the crash was deliberate maybe it was caused by his political Rivals maybe by the Russians a lot of people dismissed this there was no evidence for it but once there had been a change of power once the president's brother's party was in charge of the government the conspiratorial party then all kinds of people suddenly thought well you know they won they must be right the conspiracy must be true and even if it's not true it's in my interest to repeat it and then they began to repeat the same lies as the people in charge truth that I'm saying that in vered comment becomes whatever the powerful say it is I'm often asked like do Russians believe in all the lies that Putin's propaganda says and it's completely the wrong question completely wrong exactly it's the wrong question cuz you know if you think about belief of something a set of beliefs that you've thought about and you've worked you've worked out and you've decided that represents you you know these are your your thoughts what you stand for I mean that matters in a society where your opinion matters but here it's the other way around you know you say that which marks your belonging in order to sort of feel some sort of psychological Comfort but if tomorrow the line changes well then you'll believe that you look at Nazi Germany and you're like How could an entire population of Germans do what they did and I understand it now because if you're living in an environment where there's so much pressure you can convince yourself of anything now I'm not comparing Republicans to Nazis but I can see now how when that pressure is so intense you can convince yourself of anything simply to survive I have come to believe in my life that people fear more than they fear death they fear not belonging I think there are more people that would step in front of a train to save a child than there are people that would be willing to leave their party and be an outlier for me I I find it somewhat petrifying because basically this means a political system where truth and facts and evidence that they aren't a currency anymore you can't have a democratic debate about anything really what Adam kinzinger is talking about here it's it's a very very anxious moment and I'm not quite sure how you go back from that moment and of course it's also true that once you aren't having a conversation about reality you're not talking about things that have actually happened then you're in a different kind of political conversation then all you have is anger and emotion and people expressing themselves in order to confirm their ident identities or to attack somebody else's identity and then you're not talking about health care or roads or how to build Bridges where the next investment should be or how high taxes are instead you're in a you're in a different kind of politics and I I do think that America crossed into that world there might be something else going on as well because at some level you know people who are inhabiting this anti anti-act anti-truth identity at some level they must always know that they're that's not quite them you know even if they're now performing it very seriously they're still performing it and so you're saying there's a there's a cost there's a psychological cost to having a kind of double life and And when they see someone like like a kinzinger calling them out saying hold on you weren't like this before this is not true then that sort of just causes this sort of visceral anger at them yeah I think it's anger because someone like kinzinger is letting on the side but also he's able to say things in a Freer way and there's a kind of jealousy there as well that's also the moment when he was ostracized and for kininger it finally happened when he made his decision to vote for the impeachment of President Trump congressman Adam kinzinger is one of a growing number of House Republicans to publicly say they will vote to impeach the president he Jo to me I think by the time that impeachment vote came up I was I was blown away that it was only 10 of us I mean you know when I broke with the GOP yeah I guess there's any number of ways people react some were confused did you become a Democrat now are you a Democrat like you only have two options or something like you know the idea of being somebody that actually could think for yourself was was foreign to these folks and so when you make the decision to go against the party to leave the party you first off you realize who your friends are and then you realize you don't have near as many as you thought you did can can you remember any specific people who who dropped you or who were nasty to you oh yeah you know the guy I fought with in Iraq sent me a text that said I'm ashamed to have ever flown with you wow like and that's there was nothing about our friendship or our time in Iraq together that was political we fought the enemy but all of a sudden he's ashamed to have fought in a war with me because what he disagrees with my political stand what kinzinger found when he was speaking freely was not only did his relationships with people around him change but his whole life became much more dangerous we had people you know all in the Name of Christ for some reason and I say this as a Christian it's embarrassing to me for people to say that they want the Lord to strike me and my family down why cuz I told you the truth cu the Bible I looked at the truth was what you're supposed to be telling um people wishing my son who was 6 months old at the time would die I mean these are the kinds of things that you just like you you you realize the rot in people's lives but I was less concerned about those making calls and leaving messages when they're drunk on Fox News than I was about the people that wouldn't bother calling because to them it would be some just battle to go and kill a congressman right and I mean it's it's kind of extraordinary in all the in all the worst possible ways a US Congressman in the United States of America who's afraid that he'll be murdered because he refuse to go along with a set of utter lies about the 2020 election and the assault in the capital and one has to feel for for kininger and and kind of admire him but he was experiencing these threats at a at a really high level and I can't forget about the story we started with Maricopa County in Arizona Steven richer in a sense he was he was far more vulnerable there and he and his team were were having the full weight of the Republican law machine come down on them I asked Steven Richard to talk to me about that how did this impact your day-to-day life did your commute to work change did you think differently about trips to the grocery store anything like that we took certain precautions at our homes we built a new security system and security just got baked into the into the elections Administration puzzle so much more such that all of our facilities are are just very secure facilities now I would say the biggest impact it's had is just where I go I don't put myself into some of the places where quite frankly I feel I need to be speaking because they need to be hearing some of this places where it's just it I don't know if it would be smart and it certainly wouldn't be fun meaning places where they're Republicans like the Grassroots groups you know where it's a gathering of 50 plus of people who are you know they're angry they're angry about life they're angry about the world they're certainly angry about the 2020 election and certainly a lot of their anger has been directed towards people like me not all this anger just stays in people's heads you have the attempted murder of Congressman Steve scales in 2017 the plot to kidnap Michigan's Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 a gunman outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 and also in that same year a man broke into Nancy Pelosi's house intending to kidnap her and wound up smashing her husband's head with a hammer instead and then of course this summer a 20-year-old in Pennsylvania tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally the bullet grazed his ear but all these examples involve big names congressmen Supreme Court justices in Arizona we're talking about local government workers this is a county election office and yet Richard and his team in 2021 are being questioned and harassed and threatened and even investigated by the state's attorney general under pressure from the president of the United States and this was really hard on Richard Staff there's a number of people for whom this was a job and they found it on a County website and they like the people that they're working with they like that it's consistent and it rattled quite a few people um some of them would come to me just alarmed am am I going to be arrested and I didn't do anything and this is a really important moment when it's not just about conspiracists believing their own reality they start to force it onto other people people start feeling really awkward and guilty and start internalizing the guilt I mean a bit of your brain starts going well did I I do it what if they're right what if 2 plus 2 really equals five what's going on here it's unsettling and people talk about it years later and don't always recover I mean they you know the the moment when they were afraid of being arrested for some absurd political claim the moment when they were forced to say something or do something they didn't believe these are moments when you suddenly feel a sharp break with what's supposed to be normal and what life is supposed to be like the let's be frank people get accused of murders they haven't committed I mean there's all sorts of horrible things that that happen even in the most you know Advanced democracy so so these things happen What's Happening Here is a political attack on one of the institutions the Electoral commission that is meant to guarantee the facts of our democracy it's a sort of strategic attack on the infrastructure of reason that supports a functioning democracy well the infrastructure of reason is still standing in Maricopa County the Kafkaesque investigation into richer ended and the Attorney General in Arizona is an elected position a Democrat now holds the job for almost a year the state's top prosecutor concealed his own investigators reports that would have showed arizonans that there was no evidence of election fraud in 2020 now that Republican attorney general Mark berovic has left office his Democratic successor Chris Mays released the reports today team 12's Bram Resnik is joining us in studio with more on these bombshell reports Bram yeah keep in mind that [Music] former this slew of prosecutions and personal attacks has a very direct consequence on Democracy it means that ordinary people just don't want to be part of it don't want to work in these in these jobs without Which democracy doesn't actually happen I asked Steven Richard what he's doing these days in order to recruit and rehire at the county clerk's office I tell them you get a front row seat to history I tell them that 10 20 30 years whatever it is from now this will be a chapter in American textbooks and for whatever reason of all the bars and all the towns and all the world Maricopa County figures in prominently to this conversation and our office figures in prominently [Music] autocracy in America is hosted by Peter panv and me an applebomb it's produced by Natalie Brennan and Joselyn Frank edited by Dave Shaw mixed by Rob smak claudian abade is the executive producer of Atlantic audio and Andre Valdez is our managing editor autocracy in America is produced by the Atlantic and made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening Global democracy through powerful Civic engagement and informed inclusive [Music] dialogue I suppose that was a happy ending of a Kind although this summer Richard lost a Republican primary the investigations ended but many arizonans continue to believe that the 2020 election was stolen and what happens if the courts are undermined and are willing to go along with that conspiracy what if the psychological corruption becomes political corruption what if the online mobs shouting about conspiracy theories and the people calling congressmen to threaten their children what if those people get control of a congressional committee a government department or a courthouse it's beginning to happen already that for me was a a real oh wow moment because I thought surely we're not that far gone and then yeah and then I realized uh maybe we are actually that's next time on autocracy in America