Katerina Barton: What do you do when you hear people in your life repeat misinformation about the election?

Speaker 2: I would ask for evidence of where they got that. Like yesterday, my hairdresser was like, "My husband says that Trump is way ahead," so then I went and looked it up in official poll results.

Speaker 3: I signed up to Neighbor to Neighbor, this program where you engage with your neighbors and provide them information in case they want to help others.

Speaker 4: If a friend or a neighbor says to me they think that it was stolen, or they think there was fraud, I say I don't agree and see what the response is. If it's combative, I will exit the conversation. They've already decided this information is real, they're not going to be persuaded or presented with facts, isn't going to change their mind.

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Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show. As we make this episode live here on Sunday evening, Election Day is a little more than 24 hours away. Voting begins Tuesday morning. Many millions of people have already voted, of course, and I really truly hope that you dear listeners, either have or will vote. Having said that, this week we're going to talk about what happens after the voting ends because as hopefully everyone understands by now, it's very likely going to take at least some days before we know the outcome.

Those days are certainly going to be filled with an enormous amount of misinformation, conspiracy-mongering, and just bold-faced lies. We're already hearing it. I'm joined by somebody who warns that all of the lying and all of the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has promoted throughout this campaign and before, they have a purpose beyond rhetoric. They are instrumental.

Anne Applebaum says Trump's rhetoric sets the stage for what comes next, no matter who wins, and that every authoritarian regime she has studied begins in this way. Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and co-host of the podcast Autocracy in America. Anne, welcome to our show.

Anne Applebaum: Thanks for having me.

Kai Wright: Anne, at the start of your podcast, you point out that both you and your co-host, Peter Pomerantsev, have lived through another country's slide into autocracy. You emphasize that it doesn't happen with a big bang. It's slow and almost imperceptible at first. Let's start with that overarching point. How do you mean it happens imperceptibly?

Anne Applebaum: Nowadays, most democracies don't fail because of a coup d'etat. There are no tanks on the streets, there are no lieutenant colonels shooting up the presidential palace. Instead, what happens is a legitimate, democratically elected leader slowly begins to dismantle the institutions of the state. There are different versions of this. Sometimes it's an assault on the judiciary, sometimes it's about taking over state institutions.

For example, in our country, maybe the Department of Justice, maybe the FCC, taking institutions that are supposed to belong to the nation, are supposed to be responsible, supposed to protect the Constitution, and instead using them as the tools of the leader or of the ruling party, depending on the system. Sometimes these changes don't feel like very much at the beginning. I was living in Poland in 2015 and 2016 when we had an autocratic populist government win an election and then try to change the judiciary.

It's a long story, but effectively what they did was change the composition of their equivalent of the Supreme Court. It's as if an American president fired all nine justices and said, we're having new ones, and attempted to do that. There were protests and people were upset but most people, it didn't really affect their daily lives. There wasn't the mass objection that you would think there would have been because most people went on with their lives and so on. It was really only some years later when the effect of that change began to affect other things.

Actually, in Poland, it affected an abortion law. Only much later did people notice. That first episode of our podcast, we talk about how the ruling party had also prepared people in advance in a way for this change by launching a series of conspiracy theories that anyway made people doubt the state. Is everything that we know about our country true? Is the system really working the way we think it's working? Then when there was this dramatic change, some people said, "Well, maybe we had to have a dramatic change because there had been the previous government tried to kill the president." I won't go into the details of the conspiracy.

Kai Wright: "I've been hearing all of these things, and so maybe that's why this--"

Anne Applebaum: "I've been hearing all these things Maybe it's true that the justices are corrupt, maybe it's true that something is dramatically wrong. Maybe it's okay to make this dramatic change because our system is so bad." There was a long preparation for it. In advance of those changes, the political party that won that election in 2015 had begun to change the language that it used.

Kai Wright: You opened the podcast by taking us back to the birther conspiracy, which of course is the idea that Donald Trump pushed back in 2008 that Barack Obama wasn't a US citizen. Again, you and your co-host talk about why this particular conspiracy theory was distinct from others you had seen in US History and reminiscent of what you'd seen studying authoritarian regimes. What about that particular conspiracy theory was notable in that way?

Anne Applebaum: What birtherism suggested was that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president, that he was a fake president or he shouldn't be president. Of course, if that's true, if it was true that Barack Obama was illegitimate, that means that a whole lot of institutions and people were collaborating and cooperating to perpetuate this illegitimacy, the FBI and the CIA and Congress and lawyers and the legal system and the electoral system. Somehow we'd elected somebody who had no right to be president. That meant that there was something deeply wrong with the political system. It wasn't just-

Kai Wright: It wasn't just an attack on Barack Obama, it was about something broader.

Anne Applebaum: No, it wasn't about Obama at all. It was about the whole system, the political system, the electoral system, even the Republican Party, which had allowed him to be president. There was something fundamentally wrong with all of them. So many people believed it, something like 30% of the population, and the fact that the public person who was most prominently identified with this theory, which, namely Donald Trump, had this improbable political career afterwards, I think are not coincidental. For many people, he was the first person to point out that our system had failed, that we had an illegitimate president. That was the beginning of his political career.

Kai Wright: At the time, you were like, "This will never work in the United States." Why not?

Anne Applebaum: I overestimated how much Americans have faith in their political system, how much they understand it, how much they understand how the electoral system works. The birtherism was especially stupid because there was a newspaper account of Obama's birth in Hawaii from the day he was born and so on. You really had to stretch a long way in order to believe any of this and yet people did. It was really at that moment that I realized that people's faith in the system and their faith in the media, in their sources of information, was a lot weaker than I had assumed it was.

Kai Wright: There's this turn of phrase that you guys used that really stuck with me, when truth becomes a subset of power, that's when we're in trouble. I'd ask you to just spell out what you mean by that turn of phrase. Really spell it out, truth is a subset of power.

Anne Applebaum: A political leader who can alter the truth, who can change the way reality looks, who makes reality something that he controls has profoundly undemocratic power. Remember that lies and conspiracy theories don't necessarily always need to even persuade everybody. It's not so much that everybody has to believe them. What they do is they demonstrate the power of the person telling the lie.

I actually thought of this recently, that Elon Musk has been making up stories and conspiracy theories recently, which is not something he used to do. I think he's doing that as a way of showing, "Now I have political power, now I can shape reality."

Kai Wright: Like a flex.

Anne Applebaum: Like a flex. "I can do this." People then are scared. People say, "Oh, this is a person who's so powerful that he can lie in a way that even though the lie is obvious, people still feel they have to pay attention to him and believe him." In a way, even the absurdity of the lie and the madness of the lie or the craziness of the lie actually gives a lot of power to the person telling it. If you can do that and get away with it, then you have some kind of power.

Once reality is shaped for political reasons, and it's not understood through a give and take of different organizations and institutions and so on, the way it has been since the Enlightenment or has become over the last several decades, once it becomes something that can be shaped by a single person, then you're already outside of the world of democratic possibilities, because you're already in a world where the word of one person has more power than the law, it has more power than the press, it has more power than other people who are tasked with telling truth in our societies.

Kai Wright: At what point did you look up and say, "Oh, yes, this can happen in the United States."?

Anne Applebaum: Fairly quickly, actually. This is when I realized birtherism, how big it was, and how many people believed it. In the year of 2016, I came to believe-- By the end of the year, I was pretty sure Trump would win the election, partly because of that. I saw that people believe this. They believed what he was saying, even though he was the first politician we've ever had to do this thing of continuous lies. We've had lots of politicians who've lied about various things, but the nonstop, the endless, repetitive, constant lying, which is something, again, I'd seen in other countries.

This I saw was changing the way people perceive politics because if everything is a lie, then you can't believe anything and then you're prepared for a much more radical solution, a much more radical outcome.

Kai Wright: I'm Kai Wright. I'm talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic and co-host of their podcast, Autocracy in America. We can take your calls if you have a question for Anne or want to react to what she's saying. 844-745-TALK. That's 844-745-8255. You can call or text us. I'm also interested in hearing from people who have lived in places under autocratic rule. Have you been feeling a connection to what's happening in the US now? Coming up, why Anne argues that Donald Trump's extreme rhetoric isn't only about challenging the results if he loses, it also sets the stage for what comes if he wins. That's just ahead.

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Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright, and I am talking with historian Anne Applebaum. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic and co-host of their limited series podcast, Autocracy in America. We can take your calls and texts if you have a question for Anne or want to react to what she's saying. To pick up on what we were talking about before the break around just the flexing of telling the lies, I guess. In your podcast, you and your co-host, you're talking about Russia and how the Putin era slowly set in.

Your co-host says that people are always asking him, "Do Russians believe all the lies Putin tells?" You immediately say, "That's exactly the wrong question to ask in an autocracy." Why is that the wrong question?

Anne Applebaum: Because the purpose of the lies isn't to make people believe them. The purpose of the lies, as I've said, partly it's to convince people that the leader has power, but the other important purpose is to get people to stay out of politics. If you hear a repetitive strain of lies, it means that you have no idea what's really happening. Your reaction is, "Better stay out of politics altogether, better stay home. I won't know what's going on. I have no ability to change anything. These people are in a world that I can't understand. I don't know what's true and what's not true.

"I see no better world. I can't have any ideals or any dreams because they'll undercut them with this stream of invective, and so I'd better just keep to myself." Part of the purpose of authoritarian propaganda, especially in its modern version, the Soviet version was a little different, but in its modern version, it's very often the purpose is to keep people out of politics, to get them to stay home, get them to not have views, not participate.

Whether they have views or not is unimportant, or do they believe it or not believe it, it doesn't matter, because they don't have any voice anyway, and they can't participate in public life anyway. There is no public sphere that they can be part of, or they can join in or they can listen.

Kai Wright: Which connects to this overarching feeling that everything's already rotten in the first place, but it's also about that it's a sorting exercise for loyalists versus dissidents. You used the silly controversy over the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration in 2017 to illustrate the point of how that part of it works. Can you break that example down for us now?

Anne Applebaum: Yes, sure. Another function of these kinds of extreme lies or conspiracy theories, and they're different versions of it, is to sort out who's really loyal. If you're really loyal and if you'll remember, Trump at that time had a press spokesman who was, you will repeat the lie. If you remember right at the beginning of Trump's presidency, he lied about how many people were at his inauguration. If you remember his inauguration, it was not a very nice day. The mall was half empty by comparison when Obama was inaugurated, the mall was full.

Trump wanted to prove otherwise. He wanted to claim that a lot of people had been to his inauguration. This is an obsession he has to this day about events. He has to say that many people were there even when they weren't, and so on. It doesn't matter why he does it psychologically, but the way it worked politically was if he said that, the people who went along with him who said, "You're right, it was the biggest inauguration ever," those were then the people that he could trust. People who will repeat his lies.

This, of course, is now expanded onto a gigantic level with the lie about the 2020 election. Those are the people who are on his side. T0 this day, people like Lindsey Graham who know better, people like Marco Rubio who know better, JD Vance who knows better, all of them bend over backwards not to contradict Trump's claim that he won in 2020 because if they did, he would immediately spot them as disloyal. The lie, the conspiracy theory, is also a testing mechanism.

Kai Wright: In this sense, the more absurd, the better. The more absurd and frivolous, the-- So many of us were shocked that that was the first debate of the Trump presidency, was the size of his crowd at the inauguration, and took it as a sign of pettiness. What I'm hearing in the way you about it is that's beside the point. The silliness and the pettiness of it is the point.

Anne Applebaum: It's a petty lie, it's stupid, but it's a useful mechanism if you're Trump, to find out who's on your side. Also the injection of absurdity and ludicrousness into politics. There's a reason why Central European literature is full of absurdist novels, Kafka, Milan Kundera, because also a part of dictatorships, not only in that part of the world, but they're best at writing about it, I think, has been creating these absurd situations and then watching as people play them out.

The dictator says something absurd, and then he watches as people line up behind him. It's true, the crowd at the mall was pretty unserious but then look at the progress over time. Then by 2021, we had the big lie of the election having been stolen, and then it was deadly serious. Then it was a real assault on the American electoral system, and there were a lot of people willing to go along with it. Many at the time, but also many more afterwards and many more now. The initial tests worked, and they began to sort out who was loyal from who was not, and now Trump mostly has around him only people who are proven to be loyal. The test of their loyalty is that they'll lie for him.

Kai Wright: Given that dynamic when we're talking about responding to this kind of thing, you're talking about the powerful people around him, but then also his supporters who believe and choose to believe these lies. Countering them, the main way to counter it has been this, we're going to fact-check our way back to truth. That doesn't feel like it's a useful reaction to what you're describing in your-- Does that work? Has that worked in other places? I just wonder how you react to the idea of us fact-checking our way out of this.

Anne Applebaum: Fact-checking is important and someone should do it. There have been a couple of places in the world where fact-checking groups and organizations have created a lot of trust and people believe them and they have a role to play. I don't want to denigrate it altogether, but unfortunately, in the United States, fact-checkers themselves are now the subject of conspiracy theories. Their organizations, whether they're newspapers or whether they're other independent organizations, are now attacked by the far right and by the people around Trump as a way of undermining them as well.

Unfortunately, if you don't trust the fact checker, then why would you believe them? Fact-checking itself has now somehow fallen into the same hole as all the other institutions, leaving us really only with the possibility of creating alternate narratives. We need to be thinking a little bit differently about how to reach people and how to speak about reality in a way that moves people differently.

Kai Wright: A listener texts with the question, "If Trump wasn't in the race, would JD Vance be lying in the same fashion?" Which I would take, if I can broaden the question, to be, are these dynamics, in your opinion, a function of Donald Trump's particular strategies around this creating an alternate reality to support his own pursuit of power, or do you see something deeper in US Politics at the moment?

Anne Applebaum: I would say two separate things. One is that Trump is special, he is unusual and others who have tried to replace him weren't able to do it, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, and there's maybe reason for that. It's also true that he has set an example. Whoever is the President of the United States creates examples. People learn from him, people follow him, they learn to imitate him. He's taught people in the party how to do this.

I do think, in addition to that, there's a deeper problem. This can affect Democrats as well and actually everybody in and out of politics, which is that we now live in a world in which we all get and process our information through telephones or through other forms of very fast-moving media. We see a huge amount of information every day. Sorting through it has become harder. The creation of priorities, what's important, what's not important can get lost. The ease with which you can create reality has really changed the feeling that we once have of having a shared political conversation.

Trump has caused some of this, but he's also a symptom. The fact is that people don't trust what they read so much anymore and they don't trust what they see on television. There are a lot of reasons for that that predate Trump and have much more to do with the nature of news and information right now.

Kai Wright: Don't trust a ton of institutions that has at least some part to do with the failure of those institutions. Some-

Anne Applebaum: Some cases they failed, in some cases, they haven't failed. They're perceived to have failed because that's ho how they're described, and if you're in one particular echo chamber or another, that's how you see it.

Kai Wright: We're talking now about the way all of these conspiracy theories and alternate realities affect democracy. Something that has troubled me about the public conversation this election is that while there has been a lot of appropriate alarm about the threat to democracy itself, I haven't heard the same kind of alarm about the rhetoric that Donald Trump uses around mass deportations. The really inhumane thought about what is going to happen or what of the stated policy he has for how to deal with immigration.

Those ideas seem to have become normal. These are the kinds of ideas that were outrageous to people in 2016, and now we don't hear the same kind of outrage. I gather from what you've written that that's something you want us to consider, that there's a link between the rhetoric and what is going to happen should Donald Trump just win. Can you spell out the link you want us to hear between the campaign rhetoric and what happens should Donald Trump win with this policy of mass deportation?

Anne Applebaum: This is something I wrote about in The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago. I actually did a very weird thing for a US Political campaign[, namely, I downloaded a collection of Hitler's speeches, and I started searching them, and I also searched my own. In the years ago, I worked in the Russian archives, in the Soviet archives, and I searched my own notes. I was looking for the word vermin, and I was also looking for the word blood because I know that Hitler had this obsession with blood and poisoning of the blood.

This is because Trump had started talking about his opponents. Sometimes he's talking about immigrants, sometimes he's talking about his political opponents using that language. He talks about them as vermin. He talks about them poisoning the blood of the nation. He uses vermin, parasites, infection, and disease. This is a kind of language, this is a way of talking about people that I have not found so far elsewhere in mainstream US Politics. You cared a little bit during wartime, people denigrating their enemy, but even George Wallace, he made a famous racist speech when he became governor of Alabama. He was later a presidential candidate.

I looked at that speech just to see how he talked, and he didn't use that kind of language. He said segregation now and segregation forever. He didn't talk about his political enemies or about Black Americans or about anybody as vermin. This is a new element in US Politics. We've never had it before. I wrote that who else has done this? Hitler did it, Stalin did it, the East German Stasi loved talking about Berman. You can find that tradition back in the 1930s, and the reason it was used then and the reason it's being used now was to prepare people for more extreme things to happen.

Once your opponents are vermin or immigrants are vermin, and actually, Trump has stopped distinguishing between legal and illegal immigrants. Sometimes he's talking about one, sometimes the other. It's not always clear. That was part of the problem in Springfield, Ohio, as well. Once you start using that kind of language, then these aren't-- Not only these vermin and parasites are not citizens, they're not even human.

What you do to the, if you heard them in camps or you do mass deportation, or you burst into their homes in the middle of the night without a warrant, whatever it is that you do to them is okay, because you've already accepted the idea. It's lodged in your brain that these people aren't human.

Kai Wright: I want to try to squeeze in one call before we will let you go. Let's go to Eliza in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. Eliza, welcome to the show.

Eliza: Thank you. Hi.

Kai Wright: If you can do me the favor of just keeping your question real tight because we're tight on time.

Eliza: Absolutely. Hi, Anne. I appreciate your viewpoints and all of this and the entire show. I am in my 70s. I've been left of center of my life, and I absolutely recognized the co-opting of the phrase question authority, which arose and became even a bumper sticker in the '70s. I just wondered whether you saw that too, whether this whole birtherism and this whole questioning of everything that the government is doing was co-opting.

Kai Wright: Thank you for that, Eliza. I'm going to stop you just so we have time for Anne to answer. What do you think about that, Anne?

Anne Applebaum: It's certainly true that the far right has been interested for a long time in theories of delegitimization that sometimes you can also hear on the far left. The caller is right to hear some echo. I think question authority, talking truth to power, and calling for transparency, all those things are absolutely still true. What we have happening now is people who are not just questioning authority, but seeking to create an alternative authority or an alternative system, even an alternative reality. I think that takes us to a new and different place in US politics. Maybe you can compare it to 1860, but I don't know of another election or another political moment in modern history that is the same.

Kai Wright: The alternate reality piece of it or what is the part that's so different?

Anne Applebaum: The alternate reality and the deep questioning of the system itself. Is there such a thing as a legitimate American election? Can there be? Does the American political system even matter anymore, or should someone simply become president through acclaim, through emotion, and through some kind of mass movement, which is what Trump and some of the people around him sometimes seem to imply.

Kai Wright: For those who didn't catch the 1868, that is the beginning of the Civil War. Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and co-host of their podcast, Autocracy in America. Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Anne, thank you for this time.

Anne Applebaum: Thanks so much.

Kai Wright: Election Day is on the horizon, but this week we are talking about what comes after the voting ends. Coming up, we wade into the dark, murky waters of election conspiracies. What you can expect to hear in the coming days and how to process it, that's just ahead.

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Katerina Barton: Hey, it's Katerina Barton from the show team at Notes for America with Kai Wright. Something happens to me when I listen to this show. No matter the topic or the guest, I can always think of someone I want to tell about what I just heard, and I do. If you're thinking about who in your life would enjoy this episode or another episode you've heard, please share it with them now. The folks in your life trust your good taste, and we would appreciate you spreading the word.

If you really want to go above and beyond, please leave us a review. It helps more people, the ones you know and the ones you don't find the show. I'll let you get back to listening now. Thanks.

Kai Wright: This is Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. The podcast Tiffany Dover Is Dead explored a single conspiracy theory and its lasting impact on an Alabama nurse and the wider world. It's hosted by my next guest, NBC News senior reporter, Brandy Zadrozny. She has the wide-ranging beat of the internet, but she's reported up close on conspiracy theories and far-right misinformation campaigns, including covering January 6th. You can find her reporting at nbcnews.com. Brandy, welcome to Notes from America.

Brandy Zadrozny: Hi Kai, thanks for having me.

Kai Wright: There has been tons and tons of conversation, of course, around these, terms misinformation, and disinformation, over the last eight years. Maybe we should just start with a level setting of what the difference between these two things is and why that's relevant.

Brandy Zadrozny: It all has to do with rumors, I think, is an easy way to understand it, false information. Misinformation we saw a lot during COVID which is the sharing of false information that's not done deliberately. A lot of it during COVID was, I hear that the COVID vaccine might make women infertile or it might harm you in some way. That's a lot of the misinformation we've seen around vaccines generally, is this sharing of information to help because better share it than not, can't do any harm kind of thing. It's not for a particular purpose.

Disinformation is shared particularly and specifically for a purpose. Maybe it's for clout, maybe it's for political power, maybe it's for money, but it's false information shared to fool someone so someone else benefits.

Kai Wright: These move in different ways, they have different impact. Is it an important distinction for us to keep in mind as we have this conversation?

Brandy Zadrozny: Yes. Rumors are as old as humans. We tell each other stories, and sometimes we don't know the answers or all of the details of that story, and so we fill in the gaps. Misinformation loves a vacuum. I think it's just very common and human of us to share information that might be false. I think what's really important to look at is the disinformation and the people who are profiting off of the lies.

Kai Wright: As we move into trying to fill some of that information vacuum, let's go back to January 6th, actually, because you were there. You covered that day at the Capitol. You had been covering disinformation from the Trump campaign for a while by that point. What do you remember of that day?

Brandy Zadrozny: Oh, gosh. Let's go to January 5th, because January 5th is when we had been tracking a lot of the disinformation and a lot of the violent rhetoric that it was fueling online. Another reason why I think disinformation is so important is not because I love tracking down every lie that's ever told, but because extremism is really fueled by disinformation, an attempt to otherize someone, to make enemies out of human beings, your neighbors. You have to have that disinformation to fuel hatred and to fuel a violent response.

On January 5th, we filed a story that said people online are talking about storming the Capitol. They're using violent rhetoric, and they're saying, "We're bringing guns, we're bringing weapons, and we're going to storm the Capitol." We published that story on January 5th, and then on January 6th, I was sitting at my computer. I shared an office with my husband at the time, and I had five screens going and just watching this thing happen. We knew it would be bad, and it was just very bad.

Kai Wright: Is there an analog to that today? Is there something that now that you've been covering this campaign that you're hearing and you think, "Oh, here we go."?

Brandy Zadrozny: I hate to say no. I would say, first of all, no. It's not as bad or as specific as it was on January 5th, which is-

Kai Wright: That's one of the most comforting answers I've heard about this election in a long time, Brandy. That's a good start.

Brandy Zadrozny: I agree, and yet I worry. I worry for lots of reasons, but I worry because there are specific strains of disinformation that are so powerful right now. Many of them are aimed at groups like immigrants or undocumented immigrants. Many of the people who are throwing this disinformation around, like Anne just said, don't necessarily make a differentiation between those two groups.

I have also been covering recent mass violence against El Paso. For example, the shooting in El Paso, which killed 23 people, specifically this shooter was engaged and motivated by this great replacement theory. I worry about individual pockets of violence. Experts that I talk to feel the same, that's why I worry, because they tell me that they worry. I don't see anything specific. I can't tell you like I did on January 5th, something bad is going to happen here, but we've created this environment where if something bad happens, we'll probably be able to point to a lot of the rhetoric and say this might be why.

Kai Wright: Listeners, if you have a question for Brandy about the misinformation, maybe something you're hearing or seeing online, 844-745-TALK. As just a matter of conspiracy literacy maybe, what do you think if you had to tell our listeners what to expect to hear starting the day after voting ends, that you'd be concerned about? Let's say, as is expected, it is a very, very close election. We're waiting days for the answers. What sorts of conspiracy theories are you expecting to hear? Is it even predictable in that way?

Brandy Zadrozny: Yes. There are some familiar strains that we'll see, some genres of conspiracy theory, if you will. I think that there will be some sort of suggestion that the media is in on it, has picked a winner in some-- Not all of these are logical, I'll state first, but-- Like we saw a recent example where a local TV station mistakenly was testing out some chyrons and they had this random that Harris wins by 50% and Donald Trump has 49% or something. They had that at the bottom of some race or something.

It went kind of crazy on TikTok people saying, "See, they're in cahoots. They've already determined the winner." That might be something you see. Again, because we've seen it already, you're probably going to see the misinterpretation of a routine part of elections being twisted to suggest something nefarious. For example, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the election workers there were going through ballots as they're supposed to, and they noticed in some of the mail-in ballots that the signatures were the same so that the way these ballots were-- not even ballots, excuse me, the way that these applications, the mail-in application was filled out was all the same.

They spotted it and they stopped it and they took it to the local authorities, and they said, "We're investigating these applications." That is exactly the way that this is supposed to work. This is a shining example of how the system has worked as it should. However, then you have Donald Trump saying today in Pennsylvania that that was somehow an example of how the cheat is already in, they've already rigged it. I think that bending of reality is something that we will probably see more of, especially because in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania they don't allow for pre-processing of ballots.

Florida for example, gets something like 20-something days to start counting their early votes, and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they have to wait until Election Day. It's going to take some time. We're not going to have results by 7:00 PM, but that might not preclude or stop Donald Trump from saying he's victorious at any time he wants, which is what happened in 2020. That's something that we're sort of on the lookout for, this bending of normal procedures to suggest something nefarious and further this idea that it's been rigged.

Kai Wright: How organic is this stuff in your experience? How much of it just bubbles up, and it's just happening versus a thought-out process to plant specific lies and specific conspiracy theories either on the part of the Trump campaign itself or on the part of various actors not associated with either political party, but nonetheless are explicitly trying to start a lie?

Brandy Zadrozny: Why not both? I think that they're-- First of all, let's just take this non-citizen voting myth, this non-citizen voting lie that Democrats have somehow, as Elon Musk calls it, imported voters into swing states, imported undocumented immigrants into swing states and there are somehow progressive groups that are registering illegally these people to vote and that they would somehow risk their immigration status in the US risk deportation, risk a felony because it's illegal to vote in federal elections to vote, and that they would all vote Democratic. That's the conspiracy theory.

In terms of is it coordinated? That single conspiracy theory has been the basis of multimillion-dollar conservative organizations like Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Institute. It is now the basis of dozens of active lawsuits claiming that we can't trust the election officials in however many states because all of these non-citizens are on the roll. Somehow it has become the basis for voter purges in Virginia and multiple other states to purge voters off the rolls, often voters who are ironically actually new citizens because they use bad DMV data.

The people that ropes in as not non-citizens are people who used to be non-citizens and have been naturalized. That kicks them off the rolls. There's a very coordinated effort to use obviously false information to boost the process of claiming the election is rigged in lawsuits or laws or whatever, but then there's also-- In terms of organic disinformation or organic misinformation, I think of that as the posts we see that say, oh, this changed my vote from Harris to Trump or Trump to Harris and that was wrong. You see the videos where their guys are pushing the buttons and it goes to the wrong place.

Now, that used to happen on Twitter when there was Twitter. We'd get a couple of those videos or several of those videos, but they were more organic, and then Twitter would knock them down with it would promote the Secretary of State or the election official in that county that says this isn't as actually what happened. Now what happens is we have this great misinformation infrastructure built by Elon Musk after buying it and changing it to X.

What he has done is instead of looking out for that information as it happens organically and reacting to it with facts, what we have now is a home for that misinformation. There's a place called America Pack. The America Pack has an X profile, and on that X profile, there's a community. Elon himself has asked, "If you see anything funny, post it here." Now we really have a one-stop shop for all of this stuff to go, and then it's amplified by Musk himself who blasts himself out to even people who don't follow him.

That's not the only place. We have infrastructure with other groups like True the Vote and other people have created apps for all of this stuff. There's just become a much tighter and stronger infrastructure with which to not only record misinformation but also to distribute it.

Kai Wright: That's a good answer to a couple of people who have called or texted asking what is the way that it spreads now. It used to be Facebook, how is it happening now? I feel like that's going to answer that question. Let's go to Max in Lakewood, New Jersey, who also has a question. Max, welcome to the show.

Max: Hi, thanks for taking my call.

Kai Wright: Thank you. What's your question, Max?

Max: I'm listening to the conversation and I'm hearing what she's talking about, misinformation, disinformation. I'm getting a lot of information, good information. My question is-- two questions. Number one, if I'm looking for the truth, number one, where can I go? If you go to CNN, MSNBC, et cetera, they're on one side. If you go to Fox News, Max News, et cetera, they're on the other side. Number two, NPR itself seems to be just promoting one side of the conversation and doesn't very little airtime to the other side of the conversation. For example, an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How am I supposed to navigate this? I'm hearing basically only one side.

Kai Wright: Thank you for that, Max. Brandy, you have an answer to that? Where do you go looking for real information in the course of this environment that you're describing?

Brandy Zadrozny: I actually don't think disinformation should be a partisan issue, but I do recognize the fact that it can feel that way because I'm often talking about Donald Trump as the purveyor and originator of this stuff. I'm often talking about right-wing spaces. That's not because I'm particularly a progressive person or because-- Everyone has their opinions, of course, but it's just the fact that disinformation doesn't flow with the same speed or intensity and is not networked in the same way as right-wing spaces.

We don't have a comparable Donald Trump on the left in terms of disinformation and lies. I don't think I'll be able to solve public opinion about the media. I do know that it's at a low, and that is a real bummer for me. I can just say that I just report the faxes, we see them and I think in terms of where you can get that information, should your local paper, radio station outlet still exist, I think that local TV news is a great place to go on election night, is a great place to find information.

Kai Wright: In this last minute, to add to that question, we have several callers asking how do they recognize it when they see it. How do they recognize disinformation when it comes across them?

Brandy Zadrozny: I think that it's not always easy, but there's one surefire tell. If you are seeing something that makes you immediately feel angry or indignant or that this must be cheating or somehow validates what you're already feeling, this isn't just disinformation or misinformation, I think that is a really great place for you to say, "Whoa, do I know that this is true?" I have two post-its above my desk and one says, is this true? The other says, what if I'm wrong? I think that that's great tips in terms of before sharing news too.

Kai Wright: We'll leave it there. Brandy Zadrozny is a senior reporter at NBC News. You can read her reporting at nbcnews.com Brandy, thanks for this time and for those tips.

Brandy Zadrozny: Thanks, Kai.

Kai Wright: Notes from America is a production of WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Suzanne Gaber. Our theme music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Matthew Mirando is at the boards for our live show. Our team also includes Katerina Barton, Regina de Heer, and Siona Petros. Our executive producer is Lindsay Foster Thomas. We are on Instagram @noteswithkai.

We do not share conspiracy theories there, but we do share a lot about the show, like the fact that we were recently honored with a pair of 2024 Signal Awards for podcasts that define culture. That includes a Listener's Choice Award for best live podcast recording, and we have you, dear listener, to thank for that. Thanks. I'm Kai Wright. Thanks for spending this time with us.

 

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