(Announcer) For a conversation abou the political violence crisis.

Please welcome Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum, George Packer and Adam Serwer here to lead the conversation is Atlantic Editor-In-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

[Upbeat instrumental music and applause] (Jeffrey Goldberg) Good morning.

Thank you for joining us for another fun filled day.

Discussion of political violence.

Let's start off, start off light a little opera about political violence.

I have three of my finest colleagues, smartest colleague you're all familiar with their their writing.

You've seen them speak.

It's very exciting to put this, put this group together.

Obviously, we just put this, idea together in the last few days, responding to events.

But, Anne Applebaum, obviously one of the great scholars of the Soviet Union, of Russia, of political extremism, George Packer who has written so much about American democrac and American democratic decay.

Is that fair?

(George Packer I think that's the right word.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Okay.

I really listen everybody up this morning, and Adam Serwer, who also writes about democratic decay and, in particular, Adam's done great work on independen judiciary and other, other issue related to, to the way our country is organized, the way the country is supposed to be organized.

I want to start with a very simple question and open ended answers.

I want to ask each of you to define the problem we have at the moment.

And the sort of, colloquial way would ask this, well start with Anne, is how bad is it right now compared to where we, wha we've seen in other countries, what we've seen in American history and where you think it could go?

(Anne Applebaum) So, of course, there have been other moments in American history that were more violent.

The Civil War was more violent, actually, the Revolution was more violent And the run up to the Revolution and the Civil War was more violent and Reconstruction was more violent.

And, I don't know, the 60s numerically must have been also far more violent.

I think there is an aspec of the current situation, though that's a little bit different, and it's one of the reasons why almost all of us feel affected by it.

And that's that for the first time, we live in a world in which people who, we have a media system, a social media system that encourages the most outrageous, the most extreme statements and then rewards them financially.

So the, the, the instinct of, of most people, which is to be moderate, to be calm, to, to create consensus and of course, that's what our political system is supposed to do, to create consensus to, to bring in the extremes; is being defeated by, this very, very loud noise.

and we can all hear the noise and periodically people are affected by the noise in one way or the other.

But the, the fact that we have the system that it, that it pays you and encourages you to have extremism, I think that's or to use extreme language I think that's what's different.

And I think that's what's making people feel afraid.

So it's not just politicians or, you know, prominent figures or celebrities who feel afraid by, by what they see on the media or what they see on, on their phones.

It's also ordinary people who think, well, if all this is happening out there, you know, am I allowed to say what I think it might work?

Or am I in danger if I go to this event?

And I feel that the all encompassing nature of it, that it's there with us all the time.

This this is what's different.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) George.

(George Packer) Yeah, I think that's right.

It is sort of unreality to a lot of this.

There's so much performance online.

But performances lead to physical performances.

I mean, there's a kind of impulse when, when you hear the words, when you see the images over and over again, there are going to be a few individuals who are going to take it to the, to the real world.

And yet it remains there's something there is something about our politics today that is so performative that it's hard to know how deep the problem runs.

Is the country on the verge of a civil war?

I don't think so.

Our most American, do most Americans want a state of perpetual violence?

I don't think so.

But you begin to imagine it might be true if your life is lived online, if you're a hyper-engaged politico on the left or th right for whom that is reality.

I mean, there's three things that are interrelated that are all leading to, a worse and worse atmosphere.

One is social media, which I think is just a hellscape and I avoided it from the start more because I thought I would become addicted to it and that I felt superior to it.

But now I feel superior to it.

And fully, fully I told you so, vindicated.

The second is this profound polarization that, again, is hard to judge, hard to calculate or weigh because so much of it is driven by the financial incentives of, of the platforms.

And yet it is entirely our politics today.

Cracker Barrel changes its logo and it becomes a huge political incident.

Everything gets fed into the machine of polarization.

If you're for it, I'm against it.

And the third is authoritarianism.

We are living under a regime, and its reaction to the ugly reaction in a few quarters to the Charlie Kirk killing shows that's the impulse of an authoritarian regime to be utterly unable to hear criticism and even mockery that it doesn't like.

So those three things together, social media as kind of the the motor of it all, polarization as the political expression of it and reality of it in Washington and elsewhere.

And then what's come from the to down in the last eight months, all of those, to me, are dangerous ingredients that I don't know how to begin to undo.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Adam.

(Adam Serwer) I think we have to have a realistic recollection of how violent American politics used to be.

I mean, in 1893, in Paris, Texas, they burned a black man at the stake, a bunch of you know, and when he was dying, they recorded his screams and sold them commercially on Gramophone.

So, you know we've come a long way from there in the sense that I think the consensus against political violence is actually pretty strong.

And that's one reason why you see all these conservative influencers on social media trying as hard as they can to say, we're a war, we're in an asymmetric war, because the average rank and file Republican is actually not supportive of political violence.

And I think you could see a Democratic leadership who all condemned the assassination of Charlie Kirk, that they don't support political violence either.

The problem, I think, is you know, not just social media, but the fact i we have a government of posters.

And so their incentives socially are to say the most extreme thing possible in order to get that reaction from their audience.

And it's not just people who are just personalities, right wing personalities in the media, but actually our government.

People act like this.

If you look at someone like Ted Cruz or you or Donald Trump, I mean, they're people who are trying to get a particular reactio from their audience by talking about the other side in extreme a manner as possible.

So it's not, you know, it's not just social media.

It's not just, you know, it's not just the government.

It's a combination of all of these things.

And I think what we have to hope is that consensus against political violence which was a very hard won, holds in a situation where essentially the federal the people who run the federa government are trying to turn up the temperature as high as possible.

And I don't think that you've ever seen before.

I mean, even, you know during the height of lynching, Democratic presidents wouldn't say, you know, lynching, that's a great thing.

But now you have people saying, you know, Democrats are terrorists.

We're going to go after them.

We're going to suppress our political opposition.

And the reality of it is, is that the Trump administration, Trumpism is functionally, at its core, a program of political violence against undesirables.

I mean, that's what mass deportation is.

That's what it means when you send a guy to a prison, torture prison overseas because he's Hispanic and he has a tattoo.

That's what that means when you throw people in jail because they wrote pro-Palestinian op-eds.

That's what it means when you say the police are allowed to abuse, certain populations with impunity.

So I think, you know, there's political violence, but some but in some sense, you know, Trumpism is the translation of political violence into state violence against people who, you know, their constituencies have been convinced to be terrified of it in order to justify it.

(Jeffrey Goldberg I want to ask, all of you, this, this question as well.

I'll start with you, Adam.

And at the risk of being overly reductionist, the the debate now or maybe a kind of sterile or arid debate is, is left wing violence more dangerous or more prevalent than right wing violence, or are we dealing with something else entirely, which is a kind of nihilistic social media, self radicalization, violence that's kind of, you know, it's like a shitposting violence more than anything else.

But, Adam, talk about that.

This is what this is what people on the left want to talk about.

And peopl on the right want to talk about.

It's the other side that's doing the violence.

How do you understan this, this, this problem, this?

(Adam Serwer) Well, again, in some sense, it's good that we're arguing about who's violent because that means that consensus against political violence still remains.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Right.

(Adam Serwer) You know, by the data, the truth is that, you know, historically in the United States, right wing political violence is far more prevalent.

In other countries it's different but here that's the reality.

But I think it's almost, you know, you know, beyond reinforcing that consensus against political violence, it becomes nonproductiv when you're using it to justify political violence against the other side.

It's one thing when you're saying you should vote for me because the other guy's kind of a jerk.

But it's another thing when you're saying the other side are terrorists, and that's why we're going to use the force of the government to censor and suppress them.

That actually, I think i very dangerous because it risks, justifying political violence in people, in people's minds.

I think there's two things that can lea to further political violence.

One is disenfranchisement because disenfranchisement disenfranchised population in the United States are often the targets of political violence, because there's very little political consequence, to targeting them.

And the other is if people feel like they cannot fully participate in the political process.

And if, you know, a government decides to make that a reality by cutting them out of it, I think things can get very bad, very fast.

And I hope that does not happen.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) George.

(George Packer) Well, I would add, the other condition for political violence is when you think the other side wants to destroy you, that what you everythin you care about, all your values, your country, the country that you have cherished and want to live in, want your children to live in, is about to be destroyed.

That thinking, which is there in the language of both the left and the right all the time, is a just a boiling pot for violence.

On the other hand, I want to make sure... (Jeffrey Goldberg it turns your violent impulse into defensive in your own mind.

(George Packer) Yeah, you're defending.

You're afraid.

You're not pissed off at somebody.

You're afraid that they'r coming after you and everything you care about.

And you have to defend yourself and your, your family.

And, but let's remember that with all the ugliness online and in our political discourse today, and it is so ugly, just look at a debate from 1980 or from 2012 and think about how our discourse has degenerated since then, it's pretty shocking Nonetheless, to go from that to getting a gun an planning a killing and carrying it out is an enormous leap and I want to draw a bright line between them.

Even though we all know that a context and atmosphere of violence can lead to violence, there still has to be a sense that we in some ways we have to tolerate.

We don't want it, but we're not going to equate it with firing a gun.

And that's what lead to crushing freedom of speech.

When people equate words with violence, which is done all the time.

But it's dangerous because the you're going to lose your rights (Jeffrey Goldberg You talked about social media, this, this nihilistic violence, which I, I almost think of as apolitical violence.

It's people taking memes, people taking inside jokes from Reddit, 4chan or telegram, and and they are, for whatever reason, dissatisfied with their world, their lives and they, they, they're making this new amalgamation of politics that doesn't adhere to ideological streams.

How do you how do you fight that in our education system, in families?

(George Packer) We know who the shooters are in almost all of these cases.

Do we know what really motivated, motivated them?

Do we do they have an ideology?

What what have been their words?

We we really don't have enough information in almost every case to be able to say, these are the ideas that led to this killing.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Right, or The ideas, the even the point.

(George Packer) Yeah.

The point.

(Anne Applebaum) I mean, this is wha I was going to say is that the, I don't know that we understan enough about what it means to, and I don't even know what it means for myself, to look all day at a series of constantly changing images and to then be, you know, then to have an algorithm selecting the images for you that that become progressively more and more extreme.

You know that if you look at a picture of, you know, if you if you sympathize with animal rights activists, you know, and you keep you stay on that and you continue to do so, you will eventually be shown animal rights terrorists.

I mean, there's a that's that's been proven that people have done experiment with that over and over again.

And I just don't think we know what the effect of that is on people's brains.

And that combined with a, you know, here and here's where you could make a comparison with of America to other countries, you know when you have people who have, you know, when you have a world where politics is all culture wars, so it's all about identity and it's about, the nature o what kind of country do we have?

This is when you have irresolvable conflicts.

You know, if I mean, the example that we were using just when we were speaking before was Northern Ireland you know, there were, it seemed, you know, for a long time it was just irreconcilable either either that piece of territory was Irish or it was British, and you couldn't find a halfway, or there were people who felt there couldn't be a half way.

And that meant tha the only solutions were violent.

And the only way they were able ever to overcome that was by changing the conversation and having the conversation be about, instead of existential culture, identity issues, to have the conversation be about where should we build the bridge?

Or should the youth Education Center be in this part of town or in that part of the town?

And they tried to get people to focus on real life issues of, I don't know, infrastructure or health care or education as a way, which didn't mean that they still didn't hate each other and they stil didn't want to kill each other.

But at least when they were arguing that they weren't arguing over something existential.

And so we have got to a place in America where so many of our conversations are existential conversation about identity and who we are.

And that's the that's the piece.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Whos responsible for shifting that dialo in that apocalyptic direction?

(Anne Applebaum) I mean, there, there there are many many different kinds of people you can blame.

(Anne Applebaum) Sorry?

(George and Anne, together) Newt Gingrich.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Newt Gingrich, yeah.

Wait, wait, you wrote about Newt Gingrich in “The Unwinding”.

(George Packer) I picked him out as the key political figure because I had all these different sectors of our society.

He was the key political figure who turned our politics into total war into nonstop, permanent warfare.

Which back the it does seem a little innocent because it was about... (Jeffery Goldberg) I am fascinated by Gingrich.

Were you able to identify what was the germ of genius?

I use the term and value neutral way, but what was the what was the what was the what was the insight that he had about Americans, about human nature, about technology.

But how did it, how did it all?

(George Packer) Well, first of all, he C-Span had just put cameras into Congress when he got to Congress in, I think, the late 70s, he saw that as a great opportunity to speak directly to the public, not to have to go through the press.

He saw that politics was not about ideas and policies.

It was about emotions, and if you could reach people's emotions.

And this is not original to him.

There's a long, sad history of this.

In the 20th century, if you could reach people's emotions, you had them and it and their unreason would take over.

And so he had these tapes that he made and that Republican candidates for Congress would listen to back when there were cassette tapes in their cars as they drove around their district campaigning.

And the tapes had all the words that they should start using in their campaign remarks in order to get people crazy and to call the opponen a traitor and an enemy and evil.

Those words appeared in those tapes, and that language stuck because it worked, because it got people riled up.

(Anne Applebaum) And that's a very, very old tactic.

I mean, this is the Carl Schmitt idea that what politics is really about is about creating enemies and building a sense of and, you know, of, of division, and then you just wan to make sure that the division is designed in such a way that you're in the majority and the enemy, whoever it is, is in the minority.

So it's that idea goes back a long way.

(George Packer) It does.

(Anne Applebaum) This is the Nazi philosopher, to be clear.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) To be clear.

(Adam Serwer) I think it's important to remember, you know, democracy is a system for resolving conflicts nonviolently, including the most heated conflicts we can imagine.

I think the problem is, you know, and I think, you know, your story about Gingrich sort of gets at it, which is that right now we have a system of social incentives that encourages the people who are currently in power to turn up the temperature as much as possible.

So in the aftermath of th Charlie Kirk killing you, didn't you saw these?

You know, you saw Barack Obama, you start shooting, you saw these Democratic politicians saying, hey, you know, political violence is wrong, etc., etc.

and then Donald Trump gets on TV and says, you know, basicall we're going to crush the left.

And until the incentives change, the social incentives change for, you know, Republican elites to stop turning up the temperature in that way.

You know, I just think it's not the temperatur is going to keep going higher.

They're going to keep turning that knob on the stove.

And I'm not sure how you fix that.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) I want to get to fixes if there aren't fixes.

But stay on this.

I'm very curious about the way in which people on the right have an adopted, maybe you can deal with this because you're a scholar of communism, have adopted some of the...) (Anne Applebaum) Ironically.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) yeah, totalizing, totalizing ideas that came from, you know, from Alinsky to the further left.

It seems as if this, thi the idea of, like, freezing and, and and kind of excoriating, building this enemy.

I mean, I guess there's this is this is maybe, maybe I'm asking for a commentary on the horseshoe theory that the far left and the far right, especially when it comes to political violence and totalizing extremism, are actually quite related, in, in their systems approach, if not in the actual content of the ideology.

(Anne Applebaum) Well, they had they had one thing in common, which is that they understood the or they, they, they theorized that th what really mattered was control over the culture, you know and this is what you hear this now from the American.

Right, all the time.

This is what project 2025 is about, is that it's not enough to have political power.

It's not enough to win an election.

What you need to do is to is to capture the culture.

And they've had a theory for the long time that the left has captured the culture was, in fact, a lot of the culture is neutral or it's created in independent ways.

You know, that's a longer that's a longer argument.

But but if you want it, if you need to capture the culture then you need and you need to, change the institutions.

And so in their case, they need to change the civil service and they need to change, they need to ban PBS, you know, and they need to change... (Jeffrey Goldberg) You can literally seize the the Kennedy Center.

(Anne Applebaum) And they need to seize the Kennedy Center, and seize the Smithsonian and sue the New York Times, and take down the, you know, media broadcast media.

And that's all I mean, it's it's not it's not I don't think it' all a carefully worked out plan, but it's certainly the the instinct from the beginning has been that, that those are the institutions that we need to take over.

And in our political system, for as long as it's existed, those institutions were never I mean, sometimes they've bee political one way or the other, but they were meant to be somehow independent.

And so they have an idea that all the independent institutions and by the way, this could also move to the courts and as I said, civil service, need to be politicized.

And one of the things we forget about liberal democracy is liberal democracy is actually if it's going to work and it's going to last, it's dependent on the existence of nonpolitical institutions.

So there has to be, you know, it has to be the case that when you win an election, you don't get to control everything, because if you control everything, then there won't be another free election in four years time.

So there have to be independent courts.

There has to be independent media.

There has to be independent culture.

Business clas has to be somehow independent.

You know, we've had a meritocratic, independent civil service at least in theory, since the late 19th century.

And it's meant to wor for Democrats and Republicans.

And once you destroy those things, then you begin to make democracy more difficult.

(Jeffrey Goldberg CDC is picking it's Ebola expert based on how they vote.

(Anne Applebaum) That's right.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Were cooked.

this was this is what the Bolsheviks were.

So the Bolsheviks also said, you get to be promoted, you get to be president of the university or a head of the construction company.

If you're a really believing Marxist.

(George Packer) I do think, though, tha historically here and in Europe, the left has had the cultural power and the right has had the political power much mor often than the other way around.

And it was certainly true in the last ten years.

I mean, now I'm trying to think of it a little bit through the point of view of project 2025.

There was a progressive movement in the last decade that did take over a lot of institutions, and that was quite censorious and repressive in many ways.

And cancel culture was real.

I mean, I was involve in the writing of the Harper's letter, which was a totally anodyne plea for a more open atmosphere for speech.

And it just got killed.

It was as if we had called for genocide.

The the left went after i as if it was the worst document that ever existed.

Some of those same people, of course, are now calling for free speech because the shoe is on the other foot.

So the left had had the cultural influence that the right thought was destroying the country.

I don't think it was destroying country.

The right though it was destroying the country.

The right is now using political power, government, the top of government, the presidency, (Anne Applebaum) actual government repression.

(George Packer) Yes.

Which the left never did.

And that is a more powerful form (Jeffrey Goldberg) and the FCC is... radically shifted.

The head of the FCC ha radically shifted his position.

(George Packer Well, in 2019, he tweeted, how how dare the FCC tell an broadcaster what they can say?

And he has deleted that tweet in the last few days.

Yeah.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Adam, I want both George an Adam to talk about Charlie Kirk.

For a bit.

You spent a lot of time watching Charlie Kirk.

Adam, you live and repor in in Texas, and I'm wondering if you could frame for us a little bit of the role Charlie Kirk played in creation of political ecosystem outside of, the East Coast, the so-called elite enclaves.

(Adam Serwer) Yeah.

I mean, you know, obviously, first, I want to preface what I'm going to say by saying that political violence and particularly in particular Charlie Kirk's murder was unjustifiable and wrong.

But Kirk was a conduit from for far right ideas to the Republican mainstream.

And I'll just give an example, you know, him saying that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake.

You know, I, I'm simply not going to agree, that, I'm not allowed to criticize a man who thinks that my tax dollars should pay to have police remove my family from a whites only restaurant.

You know, I'm just not goin to accept that I'm supposed to, not be critical of that.

And I think you know what you saw from Kirk and again, it in n way justifies his assassination, was that he took a lot of these ideas, the idea that we should return to the immigration laws of the 1920s, the, you know, that that we should persecute trans people, that women should submit to their husbands.

He was a conduit for these ideas to the Republican mainstream, because he presented the in a way that was more palatable than the extremists whose names we all know.

And I'm not going to give them a percentage by naming them.

And I think to a certain extent, part of what the enforced mourning of Charlie Kirk right now that Republicans are trying to implement is to is to make people, is to make people endorse those ideas, even though they might not want to.

And I think that is part of the general, repression of free speech that the Trump administration is involved in, which, you know, comes fro a basic philosophy of the, of, you know, free speec is when we can say what we want and when you can say what we want.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) So can you talk about I mean, you're an expert on Texas politics.

Can you talk about just using that as a representative state of a complicated state, very red state with very, very deep blue pockets, Can you talk about talk about the rise of what maybe you would call thi kind of intolerant conservatism, among the young in in your state?

(Adam Serwer) Well, I mean, you can look you can look at, you know, or the past couple of years.

I mean, Greg Abbott has presented himself as a champion of free speech, and he sort of spent last weekend highlighting students who he felt, should be expelled because they were, you know, critical of Kirk's views or were nasty or rude to people who were mourning Charlie Kirk which obviously I don't endorse.

But free speech is free speech.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Were trying to get ri of people who have been nasty on social media is a recipe for their own... (Adam Serwer) Right (Jeffrey Goldberg) ...distraction.

(Adam Serwer But, I mean, I think, you know the issue here is that we have, we have introduced thi idea that government is supposed to settle these kinds of arguments.

And it's not.

Once you ge government involved in saying, you know, this is acceptable and this is not acceptable.

I mean, you just saw the the head of Texas A& get removed because, you know, a professor, committed thought crime in one of his classes.

And that was recorded by a conservative student.

When you have that sort of situation, you simply cannot have free speech.

Free speech cannot exist in a world where people are afraid o being sanctioned by the state.

And that was already happenin in Texas, despite this posture of being pro-free speech, you know, long before it came to United States government.

(Jeffrey Goldberg So let me just go down the down the row, starting with you, Adam, and talk about the solutions to this problem.

Obviously, the country has gone through periods before.

So we're not experiencing, there novel aspects of this, including the social media aspect, but, but when you're thinking about what would what would change this dynamic and what would change the the culture aroun the acceptability of violence, what do you think that is?

Does it have to do with the people who run social media companies?

(Adam Serwer) There I don't know ho it happens, but there has to be a political cost for engaging in that type of politics.

And so far that cost has not been big enough.

Obviously, Trump lost in 2020.

But the cost of demonizing your fellow citizens and the particular way that they do it in orde to justify persecution of them, there has to be a cost for that.

And until there's a cost fo that and I mean that politically in terms of votes, in terms of the ballot box, unless you know, just in case anybody tries to take that out of context, you know, until there is a political cost for that at the ballot box, politicians are going to continue to engage in that kind of, behavior.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) George.

(George Packer) Well, one solution and I, I only mean this half facetiously, is for some international organization (Anne Applebaum) I was just going to say that.

We need, you know, the U.N.

negotiator.

(George Packer) Like in Bosnia, we need some NGOs, you know, from around the worl to come in and teach Americans from red and blue states to work together, like you put on a street, you put on a musical together and and have to have to make it really good.

Even though they hate each other, there's still they want the musical to be great.

And so they're going to have to learn to work together, because we have lost what Tocqueville called the habit of the heart of self-government.

We don't know how to talk to each other.

We don't know how to work together.

I think Adam is right... (Jeffrey Goldberg) So, is this a prerequisite for this is the rebuilding of affection that Americans feel for each other based on their Americanness... (George Packer) How will that happen?

How will the bonds be reknitted?

Well, one thing we've learned is i will not come from the elites.

The elites have all been cowed.

All those people who sat at that long table in Windsor Castle, at the, on the bounty of Donald Trump and King Charles, the leaders of our business and tech companies, etc., have been have been bought.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) I vote for David Letterman based on yesterday.

Yeah, I think David Letterman... (George Packer) He's a, he's a sort of decay to lead.

I guess there's something pretty old.

It will happen.

Sorry.

It'll happen.

(Jeffrey Goldberg Youre just saying that because Letterman watches Washington Week.

(George Packer) Let me redeem myself here.

It'll have to come from... (Jeffrey Goldberg) that that's fair.

I mean, I don't know if you know if you saw it.

(George Packer) Let me.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) The spirit of free.. He had a free spirit about him.

(George Packer) He did.

It'll have to come from the revulsion of large numbers of ordinary people who just don't want to live this way, who don't want to keep hearing this, who don't want to keep seeing the violence.

Who are sick of their leaders manipulating them, of the tech barons manipulating them, and who just either with their votes, with their voices say, we will not continue to be a part of this.

(George Packer) That can take very long.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) So this is the question.

And, you know, and we but we all hav a lot of experience in Germany.

And we have a lot of experience in Italy.

You know, one of the things that's interesting when we visit places and talking in those places, like guys, do, you know, like, look, look at us.

Look what we went through.

You don't want to do that.

Like like we can.

They can teach through tragedy.

But the question is, are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way?

(Anne Applebaum) You know, I mean, in in Germany you had to have political collapse, war, chaos and violence before you had this national movement to, to to t do a different kind of politics.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) And even there there's som amnesia about, you know, what?

(Anne Applebaum) It's it's and the amnesia is because people don't really remember it anymore, because it's the stories told to them by their grandparents and it's not real anymore.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Right.

But so so then what if you could if you could focus on one area of this?

(Anne Applebaum) I mean, you know, I keep coming back to the, to the algorithms on social media, and I know this is not we're now at a hopeless moment where nothing will be done.

And obviousl this administration won't do it.

It could happen in Europe, but even to to force them to be transparent, you know, to because because what we have now is a system where we don't know wh we're being shown this picture or that picture or that clip or that clip.

And we don't have control over it.

And so we are not, you know, we're not, you know, when we're online, we are citizens, we are active members of a community.

We're just recipients of doesn't or I mean, even if it's cat videos, you know, it's we're just recipients of whatever the you know, the machine thinks that we want to see and some means of giving people more control over that and making that system transparent.

And this is actually the argument that's happening in Europe right now, is, is there a form of regulation, social media regulation that's not censorship but is but gives people access, allows people to create their own algorithms or influence what it is that they see.

And that's the only kind of technical solution I can come up with.

And I, I don't see that it's feasible (Anne Applebaum) here, right now... (George Packer) Its the regulation of social media as if they are publishers, which they are.

So they're liable for defamation so that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the owners of TikTok are actually face legal consequences for defamation.

(Anne Applebaum) But the more realistic thing, actually, although you were, I know you were half joking, the more realistic thing i a kind of grassroots movement.

I mean, those have happened in America before, and they do change politics.

I mean, we were talking earlier about the grassroots movement to get to make sure that there arent telephones in schools, for example.

People understood it's bad for kids, to have... (Jeffrey Goldberg) that actually working (Anne Applebaum) that's actually happening.

(George Packer) And smoking is bad.

And maybe our politics is unhealthy for you.

(Anne Applebaum) Well, you know, it's no that politics is unhealthy, it's that it's the passive, passive politics in which you are manipulated by propaganda.

Is is bad for you.

And, you know, being an active member of your local, you know, you know, church group or, political movement or PTA is good for you.

I mean, and there's a, you know, and those were things that we did have in American life before and maybe we could have again.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) All right, go out an join the PTA and, no, it's it's.

(George Packer But don't scream at the people you despise.

(Jeffrey Goldberg) Yeah, but but but try to understand that you're just not going to get along with everybody is important.

Thank you all for for doing this.

Adam.

George.

Anne.

Please read them constantly in the Atlantic.

Well, thank you very much for being here.

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