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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host, Rich Helppie. We've got a very fascinating guest today, Chris Bray. Chris comes to us from Substack. I'm going to recommend his writing. It's called "Tell Me How This Ends." The [essays] are quick hitters with a lot of profound thoughts in them. Today we're going to be talking about what the media environment looks like, probably talk about some politics, and, of course, the election. This follows many of our other guests who've talked about the evolving media model and can we get back to media doing its job. With that, Chris, welcome to The Common Bridge. It's a privilege to have you with us today.
Chris Bray
Thanks for having me.
Richard Helppie
Chris, our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. What were your early days like? Where did you grow up? What was your career arc like, and what brought you to this point?
Chris Bray
Grew up in suburban Los Angeles, which used to be remarkably pleasant, and no longer is. My career arc has been many broken arcs in many different places. Many years ago I worked for small community newspapers and thought that's what I wanted to do. I worked in journalism for a long time and went from local staff writer jobs to doing a bunch of freelancing all over the place; found that more and more difficult over the years. As you know, I felt this sort of sense of narrative control setting in, as I think most people did over the last 20 years. I spent some time in the Army. I was officially an infantry sergeant at the end, but I never did anything the least bit interesting in the army. Spent a year in Kuwait staring at the dirt during the Iraq War, 2005-2006, which I had literally no involvement in at all, except to sit there and look at it. I got a PhD in history at UCLA. I wrote a book about war and society, a book about the way the court martial system and military courts have handled social conflict and conflicts over identity in the United States. Nobody read that book, but I thought it was good. And lately, coming back from a period when I felt like I couldn't write and couldn't get into the conversation, couldn't have my voice heard, I saw people writing on Substack. I saw people like Glenn Greenwald writing on Substack and winning an audience, and I thought, I'll try. I spent about a year in the wilderness on Substack getting six or eight likes on a post. But then gradually, gradually took off, gradually found it becoming successful. I'm really, really pleased with what Substack has become and the diversity of voices, the freedom to speak. And I love my comment threads. I love my commenters. They say smarter things than I do. I love the openness of our discussion. One of the things I love about Substack, people say horrible things in the comment threads, they say horrible things about me sometimes. I've been [called] disgusting idiot many times, and I very, very carefully avoid moderating those comment threads. People say what they want to say. I've argued for years that offensive or stupid comments, or poor discussions or things that are inappropriate to say, are useful because they tell us what people are thinking. They tell us what conversation is going on. So finding a platform where people can speak, after many years, for me, of seeing platforms where it was harder and harder to speak, I'm feeling really grateful for these days just for the conversation.
Richard Helppie
I share your sentiments. Prior to Substack becoming Substack, we were on many podcast platforms - Twitter, before it became X, and elsewhere - and we could see how we were getting channeled down. I brought a number of guests on - ML Elrick, Kevin Allen, Matt Taibbi, Thomas Frank and others - that were all sounding the alarm about the narrative driven things passing for news at a time when the public was still expecting honest, clean reporting. My sense of it today - it's not scientific at all - is that people are coming around to understanding, yes, we're getting garbage, we're getting propaganda, not unlike what totalitarian states feed people. They read it, but they know it's not true. This past weekend, we had a great example. I don't know if you've seen any of the video on Martha Raddatz talking with vice presidential candidate JD Vance about the Venezuelan gangs in Aurora, Colorado; it was jaw dropping. Where, apparently, there was an acceptable level of Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings, [that] was the takeaway.
Chris Bray
The thing Martha Raddatz did...I wrote about that because there were so many things about that conversation that, in just a few minutes, clarified where we are in such deep ways. In addition to Martha Raddatz saying it is not true that Venezuelan gangs took over took over apartment complexes in Aurora because they only took over a handful of apartment complexes in Aurora, right? You know, you don't have cancer, you just have a little bit of cancer. In addition to that absolutely bizarre framing, she kept doing this thing that I see happening more and more often. David Muir from ABC News, during the debate, Trump said that famous line, “they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.” As a descendant of old New Yorkers, I love listening to him talk that way; “they're eating the pets of the people who live there.” David Muir said, we called the city manager in Springfield, Ohio, and he says that that is not true. And Martha Raddatz kept doing the same. They were talking about hurricane Helene and talking about the hurricane recovery and JD Vance said, well, I have a bunch of friends in North Carolina. I know people who've gone to North Carolina to help with the recovery. I'm talking to people who are on the ground in North Carolina, and they say, from their first hand, direct experience, that the recovery is troubled, that people aren't getting the help that they need, that there are still people cut off. And she said, "excuse me, excuse me, Senator, that is not correct. We have spoken with FEMA officials, and they say that that is not true. Moving on." I see this happening over and over and over again, the news media - what's supposed to be the fourth estate, what's supposed to be the institution that keeps other institutions honest, that is a critic of power, that as journalists like to say they do “speaks truth to power” - what they, more and more, do is they see themselves, to an extraordinary degree, as the voices of power. They say, excuse me, we have spoken to the government and they say what you have just said is not correct, so you must stop saying that. What an extraordinary thing, what an extraordinary thing how much we have journalists who feel like their job is to speak for power, to speak for government and tell you what you're not allowed to say because the government has said that that is not correct. And people like Matt Taibbi talk about this all the time, and I think, very successfully, but it is a cultural cancer. It is a cultural sickness that is destroying us. I want to talk briefly about something you said earlier about this rise of dishonesty in media. I say this to people all the time; be careful about thinking there was a golden age when the media was full of truth, because there's always been...we have to remember - I'm old enough. I suspect you're old enough - the newsstand, where you walked in and there were thousands of titles, thousands of titles, and they had the special news rack with mimeographed Trotskyite and Bircher newsletters and then a dozen titles of center left to far liberal - The American Prospect and the New Republic and the Nation and Mother Jones - and on the right, Reason, being libertarian and the American Conservative being paleocon. There have always been, in America, a great diversity of voices. There has always been in America an argument about ideology and ideological priors that acts like a discussion about fact. We've always had that great diversity of voices and that great argument. I think print culture is not significantly different than internet culture and social media, it just took a different form. What's different about now is this emergence of Martha Raddatz saying, excuse me, sir, that is not what the government says, stop talking. What's different is this extraordinary emergence of narrative control, and John Kerry sitting in Davos saying, oh, this first amendment, it's a huge problem because it keeps us from hammering the wrong voices.
Richard Helppie
I find John Kerry particularly interesting and particularly troubling on a couple of fronts. So first of all, in this myth that there was ever a golden age of straight up journalism, Walter Cronkite, who people said that's the guy we need to hear, who said this is the way it was, as he was leaving his career, he was writing an editorial and his theme was that elections are troublesome for idealists like John Kerry, who have to pretend there's something different in order to get elected, because they're going to do great things but people are just not smart enough. John Kerry really came onto the public scene when he came back from Vietnam and said, what were we doing over there? Basically saying, look, our government lied to us, our government was wrong. And if memory serves me correctly, his famous line was, who do you want to be, the last man to die for someone's mistake? (Chris Bray: Yes.) Now here we are, 50 plus years into the future, and he says, no, no, the government is the source of truth. How does he reconcile that?
Chris Bray
Didn't John Kerry throw his medals over the White House fence?
Richard Helppie
Well, it's a question whether he threw his or someone else's. I don't remember how that actually resolved, but apparently there were medals being thrown that he hadn't been awarded and that maybe he still kept his. Indeed, there is footage of him testifying in front of a Senate committee, I believe, about Vietnam, highly critical of the government and the military, and today saying, no, we have to use the government and probably the military to quash dissent. On this Martha Raddatz story, Rolling Stone's spin is the Republicans are complaining that the fact checking is nitpicking, and leaving out entirely the fact that Vance said to her, are you hearing yourself? And by the way, we have, in Oakland County, Michigan, just outside Detroit, organized gangs of South American criminals that have found ways to jam home security systems, targeting high net worth houses and robbing them. So this is not an isolated thing that happened in one city. But who's reporting on that?
Chris Bray
There are robbery crews in very wealthy neighborhoods in Los Angeles, there is a growing disorder that people are feeling in their homes. And if the government says that's not true, you're not supposed to notice that...we have - in Los Angeles, and in California in general - we have this long running discussion about homelessness, where the things you see with your own eyes are not true. When Gavin Newsom was the the mayor of San Francisco, he presented - something like 15 years ago - his ten year plan to end homelessness in California. And 15 years later, we have a significantly larger homeless population, but we have the constant, constant, constant narrative about, we have to reject extremism, we have to reject disinformation and recognize that we're solving these problems. Who are you going to believe? Your own lying eyes or the government problem.
Richard Helppie
There's a popular left wing legal analyst on MSNBC - she's been on my show before, I actually knew her prior - that wrote a book about disinformation. It's hilarious, because this same person - I don't want to give her any publicity - wrote a column in Time Magazine way after all the facts were out, that Christopher Steele of the Steele dossier fame, had been hired by Republicans and Democrats. Not true. She knew that it was the DNC and the Clinton campaign who hired Perkins Coy who hired Fusion GPS, and then Reynolds hired Steele, and Steele got his information from one source, and it fed back up the chain, and that's where the money went. But we don't hear about that anymore. I think it's funny that you have a person like that - teaching law school, by the way - telling people that disinformation is coming from elsewhere. On The Common Bridge we try to understand both sides. We are looking for a guest to come in and defend what some might call censorship on the social media platforms. And to date, we've not been able to find anybody willing to step up and say we think that the fake reporting about Donald Trump and prostitutes' urination is a thing that was good. We don't find anybody yet willing to come in and say that tamping down the story about the damaging information on Hunter Biden's laptop, that was a good idea to suppress that; can't get anybody to defend those stories as of yet. Chris, as a person deeply involved with this, two questions, because it may have the same answer. One is, where can people go for good journalism today, and what can we do to change the business model of this vast, established media ecosystem?
Chris Bray
Before I answer those questions, I want to just give one more example of what you were talking about from this weekend, which is that Kamala Harris - for whatever reason - this weekend decided that a winning campaign would be to say that Donald Trump is going crazy and falling apart, and he's an old man and he's senile and he doesn't even make sense anymore. She gave the speech where she said, and is that why his campaign is hiding him away and doesn't want him to appear in public at all? When the crowd roared “d'oooh!” you know, what a brilliant thing to say that they're hiding Donald Trump. He did multiple campaign rallies this weekend. He's done significantly more interviews than she has. He's done much longer interviews than she has. But she says this thing that's absolute nonsense, that's a completely made up line that has no base in reality. And the news media, which is obsessed with disinformation and Trump's lies, carried the speech and repeated it, and we have people like Joe Scarborough retweeting her speech and saying, what a great point they're hiding Donald Trump away. We see it over and over again. I think the news media would be respected if they attacked Donald Trump and call him a liar and called him names, but went after everybody. If they had some capacity for not just mindlessly repeating whatever nonsense is coming out of the Democratic party today, if they were a disinterested attack dog, I think people might not despise them.
Richard Helppie
Let me make one comment about that, because I did watch the Sunday talk shows yesterday. This is October 14, we'll be publishing this at some point in the future. I thought, by the way, that Harris releasing her medical records was a master stroke because that is a thing they ought to be attacking on. They should be asking Donald Trump, how old are you going to be on your next birthday? I think that they should call that into question. I think it's a great...if I was playing on that campaign, I think we'd go after it. Mike Johnson responded that, look, here's what the guy's schedule's like. He's out there all the time and the retort was - and I cannot make this up - we don't know what Trump's cholesterol levels are. Because America's sitting in front of their television and going online today and they want to know what Donald Trump's cholesterol level is.
Chris Bray
I'm not voting until I have cholesterol levels, it's the most important issue facing America. It's a desperate searching about for something to use against Trump that will work and when you see them doing that, you see that they're being partisan advocates for one side. They're not reporting truth without fear favor. They're serving the Democratic Party and it's really depressing to see them do it, for them not to notice what they're doing to themselves.
Richard Helppie
If someone was going to caption this interview, already this far into it, it's going to be captioned as an attack on the media, when we're really saying, no, we're begging you to do your job. People want you to be better. We're not attacking you. We're just pointing it out. Now, the 60 Minute interview...I don't mind if they edit it out for clarity, or say hey, you want to say that again or whatever, but making up an answer and inserting it is over the top. Just do your job.
Chris Bray
Right, we need a news media that works. We need a news media that's aggressive. I will vote for Donald Trump. There are fair questions to ask about him, there are fair criticisms. As a Trump voter, I say, if you want to criticize him and you find the evidence, please go for it, and I'll listen to you. No one in America is above criticism. Get it right, bring evidence, and I'll listen. I hesitate to say here's who you should go read who is telling the truth, like there's someone you should go read who never gets it wrong. What I would say is, every single day I read - and this is driving me slightly crazy, I will probably take a break after the election - but every single day, I read widely across the Left and Right. I go look at Daily Cos and I read The Huffington Post and I read the New Republic and I read The Daily Beast, which is just so horrible, and I read Right wing news aggregators. I read Revolver, Citizen Free Press and Rantingly. I read widely - Left, Right and Center - across the ideological spectrum. And I try to test what I'm seeing. I try to test what I'm reading, and I try to go look at the thing itself. This is the most fundamental advice I give people. The Arizona State Legislature passed a law allowing people...saying that - trying to think of exactly how to characterize this - passed a law defining as lawful self-defense, the use of deadly force on your own property in the face of someone who enters your property and makes you feel that you're threatened or that someone else on your property is threatened, that their life is threatened, their safety is threatened. They did that because of the series of people - particularly in the very southern end of the state near the border - who were finding large groups of migrants crossing through their property. A rancher in southern Arizona shot and killed a migrant and was prosecuted, and they were trying to create the legal conditions in which - particularly as large number of illegal migrants crossed the border and went through people's property - people could lawfully defend themselves if they felt threatened. They were trying to clarify the limits of self-defense in Arizona, and there were a series of news headlines in Arizona that said, "Arizona Legislature Legalizes Murder of Migrants," "Arizona Legislature Legalizes Murder of Brown People." I said to people, this law is one page long, the legislation they passed is one page long. You can find it in 30 seconds on the website of the Arizona state legislature, and you can read it. When you see headlines that say Arizona legalizes murder of brown people, you can go read the law they passed and you can decide for yourself. I say all the time, don't take someone's interpretation as the final word, I say to people on my website, don't trust me. Don't believe me, go check this, go look at the law. Go look at the characterization of a government report, the characterization of a disaster. Look at the thing itself to the greatest extent possible. If you're reading a news story characterizing an exchange between a congressman and a witness in a legislative hearing, you can probably go find the unedited video, the direct video of that exchange in a minute on YouTube. Committee hearings are all recorded and broadcast and streamed and archived. Read widely. Notice framing. If you read something like The Huffington Post, every single headline about Trump is; “Trump Melts Down,” “JD Vance Spins Out of Control in Answer.” Go look at the answer. Go look at what Trump said when The Huffington Post tells you that Trump has melted down again. Go look at the thing itself to the greatest extent possible. And the one miracle of the internet is disintermediation, the cutting out of the middleman. The one miracle of the internet is that you can go find the law yourself, sitting in your living room, in less than a minute. You can go find the discussion sitting in your living room yourself in less than a minute. Don't just rely on the news and what people tell you, go look at the thing itself. How do we change the business model? I think the business model is being changed. I think the Los Angeles Times has had a long series of layoffs. The Washington Post has had a long series of layoffs. CNN has had a long series of layoffs. CNN started a streaming service and said, we're going to charge for this and like a month later, or six weeks later, it collapsed, because no one in a country of 330 million people will pay for CNN. Imagine paying money for CNN. I think the business model is collapsing, and I think people who lie for a living and propagandize for a living are seeing the consequences of making those choices. I think the correction is coming, but it may be a while in coming. The changes in what I still call Twitter, the changes in Twitter are very important. People lie on Twitter, people say dumb things on Twitter, people spread misinformation on Twitter. If you read carefully and you read critically, you can identify it. There's a person on Twitter now saying that he has devastating information about Tim Walz and the way he behaved with a young child who was a student of his, and he's been saying, for a week, I'm about to reveal all the information. When you see someone saying, I have devastating information on someone and someday I'll tell you...[chuckle]
Richard Helppie
And I'm the only person that got it, I alone crack this case. I have it, yet I'm going to sit on it. I've seen those. It's like, okay, next. We've seen a number of those.
Chris Bray
And the most important political story of the year, some person happened to randomly contact me and say, I have all the information about this, you know, browngoat2277@Twitter, that's the person the whistleblower reached out to. Yes, but there's good content on Twitter, there's good content on Substack if you look for the way people present evidence. Look for the way people present evidence; if someone tells you, I have information that proves that Tim Walz did this horrible thing, do they show you the information?
Richard Helppie
What that group of people is doing, they're playing into this environment that's been created. That would say, okay, let's be blunt about this - CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, New York Times, LA Times, etc. - if they had that story, what would they do with it? So someone saying, hey, you know what, we can just make one up because people understand. But you know something Chris, Fox really pioneered this. They took a decidedly different view and they did it to run up audience. They picked their audience. They fed the audience what the audience wanted. They fed it all the time. They're still up to that. I was told people never watch Fox after 7pm. I don't even know where you start now, where you drop it off. Remember we had Hannity and Colmes, you had right and left wing. I always thought that Alan Colmes, he was the Washington Generals of the Cable News Network - for those of you that are old enough to remember that - but Fox is the one that started it, MSNBC picked up on it. Then you look at the New York Times, they look like they're covering a story, but they leave out critical elements, and the people that only get their news from that, they believe the New York Times. I mean, this is not like a left wing/right wing thing. This is a broken media in the middle.
Chris Bray
Yes, it is a broken media. It's not a left wing/right wing thing. But I would say, among the many things I would say, I would say that I don't think Left and Right are working for us that well right now. (Richard Helppie: Indeed.) I don't think those terms describe what we've usually taken them to mean. I mean the Left now is Liz Cheney campaigning with Kamala Harris so what is the Left? Dick Cheney saying Donald Trump is the most dangerous man in our history? I don't know that we have a Left and Right right now. I think we have something like a court party and a country party, to use old terms that historians have used to describe the party centered around power and the royal court and the political center, and the party centered around the periphery and the provincials, the people who are not part of the insider political circle. I don't know that we have a Left and Right right now. I think we have an inside and outside. I think the inside takes a bunch of power that we have regarded as being in opposition to other forms of power, and has married them all together; something like the Affordable Care Act, in which we used government power to say that you have to buy a private corporate product, or Operation Warp Speed that used government money to fund private corporate research and development on a product that the government then mandated, that the government used public funds to buy, and in buying it created a private corporate profit. There are all of these relationships in society that we use to say this is what left is and this is what right is, the private sector versus the public sector, corporate power versus state power. And I think those boundaries are collapsing. I think all of those things are muddling together. I think in that context, it becomes very difficult to talk about Left and Right. I think we have an insider party and an outsider party.
Richard Helppie
I would concur with that, in that when we bring people on that are inside the beltway, their perspective of what they think is important...from where I sit in the Great Lakes area, what I hear that people think is important [is different]. One of the things you're going to see coming again in this election, in several weeks, they're saying we have the endorsement of the UAW. It's like, no, you don't have the UAW, you have the UAW leadership, you don't have the rank and file. You're seeing the reactions to that right now. When you talk about Operation Warp Speed, you have people that were far left, anti-corporate, anti-government people all of a sudden celebrating; everybody needs to get this injection from Pfizer. I covered that story extensively. I have a fairly deep background in healthcare, mostly through the IT and business side. The vaccines seemed to be our best option but if you listen about what you're not hearing today, you're not hearing any definitive study that said they worked, where you would want to be trumpeting that from the mountaintops [if they did]. All the data I've looked at suggests that this could have just been a virus that went through its normal course of what every virus does; it gets less lethal and more quickly spread because it wants to live, and eventually it just becomes pervasive, which is where we're at right now.
Chris Bray
I think what happened during the pandemic is the clearest example of what's happening to us in general. For example, one of the things that we know happens with a failed vaccine, a vaccine that doesn't work correctly and that hasn't been properly tested, is that it can enhance illness. It can enhance, it can make people more susceptible to infection and illness through the mechanism of antibody dependent enhancement, which I don't claim to understand as a scientist. But there are scientists who said that; hey, be careful, a vaccine can fail and can cause antibody dependent enhancement, it can make people sicker. The response wasn't to talk about the science of that, to talk about the history of failed vaccines - like the vaccine for Mareks disease in chickens that made chickens sicker - the response was to say you're against science, you don't believe in science. There was an interview, a panel discussion that Anthony Fauci did - I think, in Davos, if I remember correctly - and the moderator on that panel said to him, Dr Fauci, we have so many people who don't believe in science. What do we do about these unbelievers? To talk about science but say that there are unbelievers, to speak in the language of faith healers and tent show evangelists while you're, in theory, talking about the scientific method, I thought was one of the most telling exchanges we've had in the last decade. There was a rational discussion to be had. There were many rational discussions to be had about does strapping a piece of paper to your face stop a virus from spreading? When you go to restaurants and you wear a mask to walk to your table but take off your mask at the table, what's the science behind that? There were a bunch of rational discussions to be had focusing on evidence that were coded as being an unbeliever.
Richard Helppie
The absolutism is what I find troubling, and I think the pandemic gave us some great examples. It should have started with let's tell you what we know, why we believe we know that at this point in time, in this place, and what we don't know or what's to be revealed. But to say, well, today, we've got it one hundred percent figured out and we're going to shut down anybody that says anything different, which is exactly what they did. In recent days, after the hurricane in western North Carolina, I have some relatives up in that area. One is telling me, hey, we're not getting any response. He's called law enforcement, and they are saying the not-for-profits and the churches are delivering aid, but that's what we're getting. I have others...and I wrote a column called "JD Vance For President," and part of it is, like I said, the response to the hurricane was inept. I got people inside there saying, you can't say that because they, in their location, had water intermittently, they had electricity intermittently, and they had internet intermittently. And I said, okay, great, further up the mountain, there are different reports. In your own area, there are different reports. So they were reporting as an absolute; it's like me looking out my window and going, it never snows here because I don't see any snow out there right now, therefore there is no snow. And the funniest part of this story was a person I like a lot - but is a knee jerk liberal who takes every left wing point and just broadcasts it out like it's the honest truth - said, didn't like that. And I said, well, let me try a rewrite because really the point of the story was not about the FEMA response, it was like a distraction. So I rewrote it. And I said, what do you think of this? Well, since I don't agree with you on very many things politically, I don't think I should comment. I'm like, I'm giving you a chance on my platform to edit my words but no, you won't do it because you just can't bring yourself to understand there are different points of view out there. Even accurate, honest perceptions change over time, over location, over distance. It just happens.
Chris Bray
I was watching people on Twitter - on what I still call Twitter - saying, well, I'm in Asheville, and I see FEMA officials here. It's a lie that FEMA isn't responding appropriately to this hurricane. If they're in Asheville, they must be in every small town in North Carolina.
Richard Helppie
And also the other good reporting would be, here's the role of FEMA. Here's what we're here to do. Here's where we need the National Guard, or in this case, the active military. This is what their job is going to be. Here's what the state agencies are doing, and here's where you can help. This isn't rocket science, it's just communication. But the notion that FEMA is infallible is insane. If you turn the clock back to Katrina, they were interviewing people in the Astrodome, and they were praising George W. Bush because they said we got resources here. And remember, Bush said, you're doing a great job, Brownie, and the news tore him up. Like that's not the story we want to tell. I don't know what the truth was because I wasn't there, and I don't really have any reliable reporting about it.
Chris Bray
So as people criticized FEMA and said, I'm on the ground here and and I'm not getting help, I'm in this small town in North Carolina and no one's showing up to help me, the Secretary of Homeland Security oversees FEMA and the FEMA director - her name is Deanne Criswell - and Alejandro Mayorkas, their first response was to say, this kind of disinformation is unacceptable and this rhetoric is not appropriate and you need to stop talking this way. Their first response was not to say - to people who were in crisis, who lost their homes, who were counting their dead, who were looking for missing family members - was not to say to those people, I hear your concerns. It's hard. It's complicated. There's a big disaster area. We're on the way. Hang in there. Their first response was to say, how dare you criticize us.
Richard Helppie
Take another story. Take the attempted assassination of former President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and there were people out within hours saying it was staged. There were people dead. And then, was he really wounded? Did he use a blood packet? Now you were in the military, so you know what a .223 or a .556 would do on a grazing wound, particularly the .223 - they haven't said what kind of AR it was yet - it's not going to necessarily rip your ear off. I even had one of my very left wing friends saying, well, we don't know if he got hit by a bullet or a bullet fragment, [laughter] like, because they read it on reporting. Gerald Posner is on this now too, he is a great investigative reporter, and I did a show about that that just said, like, how did this 20 year old with a small media footprint, how did he know to go to the one unprotected roof in the place? And the director of the Secret Service said, oh, we didn't put a guy there because it was too steep. Where's the media saying, wait a minute, we're calling bullshit here. That's what I like about Substack, too, I can say that. Chris, let's go through a little bit more. What else should we talk about relative to the media and what could fix it? And then I'd love to get your take on where we're at politically, particularly with the presidential election.
Chris Bray
The single thing that fixes our broken culture - I have the magic solution - the single thing that fixes our broken culture is for all of us to arrive at the conclusion that we're engaged in democratic pluralism, that we disagree about things, that we see things differently and we're working on it. We're having a discussion and we're working on it. For Alejandro Mayorkas, when all he hears is I feel like FEMA is failing us, to say, tell me more about that. I'm sorry you feel that way. We're trying to do our best, but tell me what you need. Tell me why you think I'm failing, and let's discuss it. The single thing that we need is to stop responding to information we don't like, or to fact claims that we don't like that may not be true - but may be true if we talk about them - with repression and hostility; you shouldn't be allowed to say that and that should be removed from social media if you post it on social media. The madness of the years when Facebook and Twitter were getting messages from government agencies saying, here are the messages we want you to take down today; if we can get to a point where we simply understand that people see things differently and we can just work on it, we can sit down and talk to each other and work on it, we will instantly move toward a significant degree of health. There's a piece in The Atlantic right now - I think it was published yesterday, might have been the day before - by a very famous person in the disinformation community named Renée DiResta. She talks at great length about all of this disinformation that's flooding onto X.com because of this monster Elon Musk, and talks at great length about how we need to develop a response to it and figure out a way to crush it and put a stop to it so people aren't being misled by all these lies. Along the way, through all of that discussion, toward the top, in something like the third or fourth paragraph, she says, one of the biggest problems is that a lot of this disinformation eventually turns out to be true, so it's harder to police it [laughter] because the conspiracy theorists see their crazy ideas validated. Well, what you just said is the crazy conspiracy theorists see their truths validated, their mad beliefs validated by the fact that they are merely factually true. So if you stop thinking of everyone disagreeing with you or saying something you don't like as pathology, and start thinking of people saying things you don't like as the other half of the conversation and we can all just talk to each other, this is like normal society. My mother says that when she was a very young child, her father was very liberal, was a union guy in New York City, and she remembers him saying, Adlai Stevenson lost today, that makes me sad. I really like Adlai Stevenson. I thought he would have been a good president, but anyway, Eisenhower is our president now. I'm sure he'll do very well. And then they had dinner. Like something happened that wasn't exactly what we wanted to happen. We'll be fine, if we can just get back to an ordinary sense of democratic pluralism and an ongoing discussion. We're sort of talking ourselves into not being okay. And being okay is, I think, pretty simple, once you accommodate yourself to the the stunning notion that there may be people in the world who don't see the world precisely the way you do every single time, and you don't have to repress them or shut them down or have them thrown off social media.
Richard Helppie
I wish I could be that eloquent. As we have said on The Common Bridge, this is why I started this program. You're never going to take an ardent Trump person and drag them all the way over to, okay, now you're an ardent Joe Biden/Kamala Harris person. You're never going to take an ardent Biden/Harris person and drag them over to Donald Trump. But can we find places we can agree? We've had a lot of policy discussions on this and it's amazing how close people will get when you come down issue by issue, but the people that we hire to do that, that we elect into office, don't do it. I think you're calling that out. I'm going to encourage people go to substack.com, look up Chris Bray, "Tell Me How This Ends," comment on his writings. Check into The Common Bridge, we'd appreciate that too. But there are so many better writers, better reporters, more qualified people than I am that are trying to do an honest job. Chris, you and I are fellow travelers; I look up the legislation, report on it. My prior job, I actually read all the healthcare legislation. I know it pretty well. The individual mandate was taken out; well, you know, that's a topic for another day about what they got right and what they didn't get right about it. But to your earlier point about people reporting on themselves, all these nationally run systems, Canada, for example, the people that are running the system report what a good job they're doing. The VA was doing that for years and I know how they manipulated the data. I told people, this is what they're doing. By way of example, if you ask for an appointment, you think you have prostate cancer, they go okay, our next appointment is March 30, and you take that because that's the next time you can get to see the doctor. They say there was no wait because you've got the next appointment. Never mind that it's five months from now. That's what they're doing to the data. We need to come down to something that is more data driven, more factual. Let's turn to the election and like, I [think] you...I'm going to guess that you, whether Kamala Harris is elected president or Donald Trump is elected President, [would say] that will be my president. I will hope that they will do a good job. I would offer them my support in any way, and I would also expect that the reporting would be honest and critical of both of them. The issue we have today is that we have people voting against Trump because of the caricature of Trump, and we have people that are voting against the Democrats because of their track record and the way that they got their candidate. But one of them is going to become president. My question is this: your outlook on the election? And then, presuming a Trump victory, what brings Vance into the White House? How does his VP pick play out, because I think it's a foregone conclusion he won't go the four years. And presuming a Harris victory, what becomes of the country at that point?
Chris Bray
Let me start with this. I think whoever wins and whatever happens in this election, we've made presidential elections much too important in our country. I think we have essentially now a four year campaign cycle, like the minute the 2024 election ends candidates for 2028 are going to start showing up in Iowa and New Hampshire and work in the diners in February of 2025. I think we've made...I think the president is one official, in one branch, at one level of government and we've made the president much too important. We've made the presidential campaign much too important. We talk about it too much. I think the things that are not working in our country have to be solved in our school boards and our city councils and our state legislatures and in our culture and in many other levels. When we take all of our disagreements and all of our pathology and we put them in the single basket of Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, we're distorting the question to begin with. I think cultures where the prime minister calls an election and six weeks later they have the thing, they have a much healthier model. I think we simply talk about presidential elections and presidents way too much, and it obscures a bunch of other things we need to talk about. To the extent that we're doing that and we're stuck with it in this election, to me, voting for Kamala Harris represents a kind of cultural declaration that we're on the right track, and what we're doing is working and we should stick with the status quo, and that, to me, is a terrible argument. I view Donald Trump as a flawed person who is a flawed president, who will not be anywhere near as flawed a president as the news media is making him: the wannabe dictator who's going to be a Hitler figure, it's just absurd. The one about...the constant refrain about Donald Trump is going to turn all the women into handmaids, it's all stupid. But for me, the single point or value of this election is a kind of cultural declaration about accepting or rejecting the status quo and saying the country needs to change. So I don't perceive Donald Trump as the savior figure who's going to fix America, but to me, voting for Donald Trump this time is a culturally critical need and something that I can't wait to do.
Richard Helppie
Chris, as we wrap up, anything that we didn't cover that we should have, or any final comments for the listeners, readers and viewers of The Common Bridge?
Chris Bray
I've been watching the presidential election. I've been watching what we talk about, and we have an ongoing war that keeps being escalated and made worse, a war that keeps metastasizing in Ukraine, a war in Israel that's becoming more and more disordered, war between Israel and a growing list of other actors, Hamas, Hezbollah, effectively Iran, effectively Lebanon, and on and on. We have chaos all over the place. And when I see, for example, the vice presidential debate where the moderators were asking questions like, Senator Vance, why don't we have European style paid family leave; the thing you were talking about earlier, that people inside the beltway don't perceive what's important to the country and don't discuss it. I think we need a dramatic re-orientation so that we can begin talking about things that matter, which I think we don't do. I think we we have a sort of endless noise in national media that doesn't reflect what's wrong and doesn't reflect what needs to be addressed. I think a dramatic re-orientation of the compass is long overdue, and I hope we have it.
Richard Helppie
I share your hope, and I often quote Winston Churchill, that Americans will do the right thing after we've tried everything else. So with our guest today, Chris Bray, Chris Bray on substack.com "Tell Me How This Ends," this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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