← Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
AI is Activating Antisemites Left and Right - with Niall Ferguson
00:47:21
Loading summary
Transcript38 lines
- [00:02]
Dan Sonor
Over the past couple of years, CallMeBack has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected, a place for clarity, context, and honest conversations at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what ARC Media is all about, building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it. To help support our rapidly expanding operations, we created Inside Call Me Back our Members Only feed. If Call Me Back has been meaningful to you and you want to be part of what we're building, I hope you'll join us. You can subscribe@arc media.org or through the link in the show Notes and to our insiders. Thank you.
- [00:51]
Neil Ferguson
You are listening to an art Media podcast. All my efforts to help people understand why the Holocaust happened, so that we wouldn't make the mistakes again of the 1930s and 1940s as a species, appear to have come to nothing. To me. There's no longer a polarization problem. We have a horseshoe problem now, which is that the far right and the far left are converging on the political spectrum, which is bending into a horseshoe. They're converging on a number of key issues, of which antisemitism turns out to be the most, as it were, viral. The thing that gets the most engagement on social media is anti Israel, anti Zionism, anti anti Jews. And that seems to be working both for the far left and the far right.
- [01:48]
Dan Sonor
It's 1:30pm on Monday, July 20, in New York City. It's 8:30pm on Monday, July 20 in Israel as Israelis monitor the war with Iran as it escalates. Five months ago, historian Neil Ferguson joined us on this podcast to talk about the return of antisemitism, primarily on the American right. He described, for example, Tucker Carlson's role in reviving what he called all that lunacy, but predicted that with luck, the people pushing it would sink back into irrelevance. That has not happened. Now. Neil and AI researcher John Clark Levin have published a new essay in the Free Press with an arresting title, the Death of History. Its central argument is that the methods historians once used to defeat lies about the past no longer work. For example, in 2000, historians Christopher Browning and Richard Evans could enter a courtroom in the uk, meticulously dismantle David Irving's distortions of the Holocaust and outright Holocaust denial, and help historian Deborah Lipstadt win her libel case. The lie made factual claims. Those claims could be investigated, exposed and disproven. Today, Holocaust denial can arrive as an 8 second video, an AI generated deep fake, a teenager silently signaling an anti Semitic conspiracy or a clip of Hitler speaking English in his own voice. Algorithms distribute that content to the people most likely to engage with it, while bots create the impression that everyone else agrees. By the time a historian reaches for the archive, the viewer has moved on to the next video, and the numbers they cite are alarming, which we'll get into today. We're going to work through three questions. First, what exactly broke between the David Irving trial and the TikTok era? Was it the format, the audience, or our basic assumption that facts can defeat spectacle? Second, how much of this apparent movement is genuine belief, and how much is an illusion of consensus manufactured by bots, troll farms, and recommendation algorithms? And third, if digital identification is dangerous, biometric authentication remains flawed and moral persuasion is only a hope, is there actually a remedy? Neil Ferguson is a Free Press columnist. He's the Milbank Family senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a senior faculty fellow at Harvard's Belfer center, and the author of 16 books, a couple of which we'll talk about today, which are very relevant. He also runs Greenmantle, which is an advisory firm. John Clark Levin is an AI researcher whose work has examined the risks, governance and geopolitical consequences of advanced artificial intelligence. John Clark co authored the piece in the Free Press with Neil that we will be discussing today together. They end their essay with four what fools we were. Well, if the fair fight over historical truth is over, what does the fight become now? Neil Ferguson will join me right after this quick message.
- [04:54]
Daniil Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi
Hi, I'm Daniil Hartman, president of the Sholem Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. And I'm Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Sholem Hartman Institute. What's more important? To be feared by your enemies or morally true to yourself? Should Israel strive to be a nation among nations, or should it accept the fact that it is now a fortress apart? What do Israelis and Diaspora Jews owe each other? If you're Jewish or a friend, an ally, these questions have been gnawing at you these past few years. For some of you, like for us, these questions have been keeping you up at night. And for some, they've been simmering in the background, waiting for answers. But dilemmas don't always have clear answers. What they do deserve are honest and respectful debates. And as it happens, Yossia and I love to challenge each other to get to the bottom of things. We look at current events through a lens that speaks to us most deeply, a Jewish lens. So if today's Jewish dilemmas are on your mind, tune in to our conversation on For Heaven's Sake, a partnership between ARC Media and the Sholem Hartman Institute. You can find For Heaven's Sake on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you there.
- [06:07]
Dan Sonor
Neil Ferguson, welcome back to the podcast.
- [06:10]
Neil Ferguson
Good to be with you, Dan.
- [06:12]
Dan Sonor
So, Neil, as a historian, you've trained to look backward. John Clark, your co author on this piece, is an AI researcher. He's trained to look forward. Can you just. First, let's just start by telling me what brought the two of you together to deal with this particular crisis of the present.
- [06:28]
Neil Ferguson
Well, John Clark and I met 15 years ago at Harvard when I was a professor there and he was an undergraduate. I think he was one of the first people to say to me, you need to think about artificial intelligence, because something big is coming. And we've remained in touch ever since, mostly as he's tried to help me understand the artificial intelligence revolution. But we've also corresponded about the issue of antisemitism and we've co authored before. He was the one who suggested we revisit the issue of antisemitism on the basis that something was changing structurally in the public sphere. That was quite new. And the more I thought about what he was discovering online, because he did much of the heavy lifting of watching some very toxic content that is out there, the more I realized something very shocking and, particularly for me, depressing. I realized I'd failed. I realized my entire life's work had been a failure. Because I have spent just my entire life since my mid-20s, trying to answer some fundamental questions about modern history. And the hardest question, which is at the center not just of modern European history, but of modern world history, is why did the Holocaust happen? How did it come about? Why was antisemitism, which had been an ideological phenomenon for a long time before the 1930s, why did that ideology begin become the basis for an industrialized genocide? I've written a great deal about this. I've written a great deal of Jewish history, as well as German history, Central European history. I've not only written books, you mentioned that I've written 16. Many have been concerned with this subject. I've done a lot of television. I've given lectures. I've done journalism. Most academics think I'm a kind of tart because I'm prepared to take my knowledge, my research, and disseminate it to a wider public. I never understood why people in the academy look down on that. But I'm a believer in the democracy of knowledge. So I've done Everything in my power I've written for tabloid newspapers, and it's not worked, it's failed. Because all my efforts to help people understand why the Holocaust happened, so that we wouldn't make the mistakes again of the 1930s and 1940s as a species, appear to have come to nothing. Because odious podcasters, broadcasters, shitposters can negate the Holocaust, trivialize the Holocaust, make fun of the Holocaust and reach millions of people. And as far as one can tell from the polling data, they are succeeding in fundamentally reinstating antisemitism as a legitimate ideological position, not only on the right, but on the left of American politics and politics around the world. So I'm here to admit failure, defeat, and at least try and figure out what nicks, because clearly what I've been doing for the last 40 years hasn't worked.
- [09:26]
Dan Sonor
Okay, Neil, can you give us a primer on how previous periods of antisemitism were dealt with? Let's focus. Post World War II, it's not the first time we've encountered corners of the world where there's real antisemitism, and yet it didn't feel like it was spiraling out of control like it is now.
- [09:44]
Neil Ferguson
I think in the period after World War II, there was a pretty successful effort in most countries, including West Germany, to try to address the calamity, the German catastrophe, and say, never again. And political leaders would give speeches along these lines at pretty high frequency. However, there was clearly always a persistent subculture of antisemitism in various places in the political landscape. The old unreconstructed right that had been antisemitic since, oh, certainly the later 19th century. The pro Soviet left, which took Stalin's lead in the later part of Stalin's life when he became overtly anti Semitic, and that blended with Soviet anti Zionism, hostility to Israel, these things were there. But to give you a concrete example, Bill Buckley, William F. Buckley, who was in many ways one of the leaders of American conservatism and a towering figure when I was a young scholar. Buckley's life's work was really to take the anti Semites on the American right and marginalize them and drive them out of the respectable conservative or respectable Republican tent so that American conservatism wouldn't have that baggage. And he did the same with the John Birches. He did the same with the people who were unelectable in his mind. And one can think of Buckley's contribution as being a kind of purging of American conservatism of those Toxic elements, segregationism being the other. All those sentiments, antisemitism, segregationism, and so forth. His own father had certainly adhered to. That's clear from the recent Tanenhaus biography.
- [11:35]
Dan Sonor
I just want to stay on that for a second, Neil, because it's important. That Tannenhouse just came up, I think maybe a year, a little over a year ago, on this very long biography of Buckley's life. And the part I found most shocking, which I did not know, is the degree to which William F. Buckley grew up in a very anti Semitic home. Yeah, his father was encouraging Buckley's older siblings to literally go protest and torment the local Jewish synagogue in their neighborhood. I mean, this was the water which Buckley swam in. And he came out to do what you just described, which is to say, I'm gonna put up some guardrails in the conservative movement and drive out the anti Semitism.
- [12:09]
Neil Ferguson
And the triumph really comes with the Reagan administration and a version of American conservatism that has really been purged of all these toxic elements. And I think if you'd sort of asked me then, I was starting out my career in the mid-1980s as a graduate student, you know, are you worried that antisemitism could make a comeback in the United States? I probably would have said no. I think that's really unlikely. I could imagine it elsewhere, but probably not the United States or the United Kingdom, for that matter, where a parallel process had produced Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. Margaret Thatcher's government was full of very talented Jewish ministers, the most talented Nigel Lawson. So it all kind of seemed like a problem that would be elsewhere, that it might be a problem in post Soviet Russia. That was obvious to me more or less, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. I remember being in the streets of Moscow and seeing people selling audio cassettes of SS songs. And I remember saying to my Russian friend, what the hell is going on here? The Nazis killed more Russians than almost any other group, including the Jews. And he said, you have to understand the appeal of forbidden fruit. So I remember thinking then, ah, I see what's gonna happen. Fascism, antisemitism as part of fascism, might make a comeback in the post Communist countries, where all of that was officially regarded as taboo because it's, as my friend said, forbidden fruit. But for the US and the UK in the 1980s and the 1990s, I wasn't really worried.
- [13:41]
Dan Sonor
Okay, so now take us to the present. If you were to describe the scale of the problem which you and John Clark get into in the Free Press piece, tell us, like what are we looking at?
- [13:52]
Neil Ferguson
Well, I think the first thing that one has to do to understand what's going on is just look at the sheer volume of toxic content there is online. Most of the people watching this will have heard of Nick Fuentes, might have heard of Daryl Cooper, the phony pseudo historian promoted by Tucker Carlson, but I'm doubtful that they'll be familiar with some of the even lower life people online who are peddling antisemitic content. There is just a huge network of people who appear on what we used to call social media, but what we should really call algorithmic media with names like Delano or Lost, who posts short clips or memes which are clearly, immediately, recognizably antisemitic. There's a vast volume of this stuff and it has been proliferating in ways that I think most people aren't aware of. John Clark Levin, who co authored the piece with me, has a great example of the way on TikTok, if you show interest in right leaning content with amazing speed these days, he ran this experiment government TikTok's algorithm will serve you up videos of Hitler. And I think you mentioned it earlier, Dan, you can now, thanks to artificial intelligence, have Hitler in English not dubbed in some crude way, but with Hitler ish vocals, just English, not German. So this is part of what we are talking about here. It's a new form for an old content. Now, you could take the view that this is just the kind of AI slop that you can get in just about any field. But then you look at the polling for the TikTok generation. So 18% of 18 to 22 year old voters now say the Jewish community has had a negative impact on the United States. That's nearly a fifth compared with 6% of Americans aged 45 or older. Another poll asked people aged 18 to 34 whether they agreed with at least one of a series of anti Semitic statements. For example, Jews in the United States have too much power. Now, among extremely conservative voters, 64% agreed with at least one of these antisemitic statements. And so what we see is the young who are especially susceptible, and it's the people on the right who are more susceptible than people who describe themselves as liberal. And what we've seen in recent times, partly as a result of the Iran war, has been a kind of mainstreaming of these attitudes because the argument that the war was being fought by the Trump administration because the Prime Minister of Israel conned Trump into doing it, that's gone viral in lots of different ways. And so we can see the Nick Fuentes style, the so called Groiper style, is now becoming quite well established in at least some sections of the Republican Party. So I think that the evidence is no longer ignorable that something very, very bad is happening and it's affecting people who are relatively young and it's more affecting people on the right than the left. But I want to just make clear that it's happening on the left too, because obviously one variable that's novel in our something that we didn't see in the 1980s and 1990s when we were thinking about this is that Islamists have become a much bigger part of the body politic on both sides of the Atlantic, partly because of immigration, but also because in the academy there's been a mainstreaming of anti Zionism, anti Israelism. And this often, as we've seen since October 7, 2023, this shades over into anti Semitism on the radical left quite quickly. So to me, there's no longer a pol polarization problem. Remember how we used to talk about polarization all the time? We have a horseshoe problem now, which is that the far right and the far left are converging on the political spectrum, which is bending into a horseshoe. They're converging on a number of key issues, of which antisemitism turns out to be the most, as it were, viral. The thing that gets the most engagement on social media is anti Israel, anti Zionism, anti Jews. And that seems to be working both for the far left and the far right.
- [18:36]
Dan Sonor
Now I think back to Pat Buchanan running for president in 1992, where he challenged a sitting president. George H.W. bush didn't beat him, but dealt Bush a real scare, an early blow in the primaries to the point that Buchanan had real traction. And Buchanan himself trafficked again, not as ghoulishly, not as grotesquely as the images you're describing in terms of these videos and whatnot, but in terms of the arguments about Jews and arguments about Jewish influence and even some of his ideas about what actually happened in World War II and how we should think or rethink Hitler, the Nazis, David Duke, you'll recall, leader of the KKK. He's the Republican nominee in 1991 for governor of Louisiana. It was actually the Bush administration that stepped in and helped the Democrat win that race because the administration was so horrified. So we've seen experiments with this stuff in Republican politics over the last number of decades. Do you think all that was missing is that they didn't have access to today's algorithms. And had they, could they have gone farther?
- [19:34]
Neil Ferguson
I think we wouldn't have written this essay had it not been for the confluence of our thinking. If I think about the ideas, part of what we see is that they've metamorphosed into memes, into gestures, into simple slogans. Nobody's reading elaborate treatises on the role of the Jews and the decline of Western civilization as they might have been in the 1920s. But John Clark Levin's contribution is to show the ways in which network platforms, using algorithmic media, reinforced by ever more powerful AI, together these things are allowing the memes to reach millions of people. And it's that change in the structure of the public sphere that is absolutely critical here. In the days of Pat Buchanan or David Duke, it just was very hard to get that kind of messaging across because the networks of television, the newspapers, the mainstream media wouldn't give it space, or if they did, it would be to castigate it. That's all really gone. In a world in which young people overwhelmingly get content online. When they watch television, what they're actually watching is YouTube. When they're getting news, they're getting it from social. That is algorithmic media. In this new world, then the toxic content is promoted. Why is it promoted? And this was an argument I made now more than, well, nearly 10 years ago in the square, in the tower. It's because the network platform's business model, unlike, say, printing, which was the dominant technology of the period after the 16th century, the network platforms monetize through engagement. Eyeballs are connected to screens, and then the ads can be run. The core of the business models of the. What are we calling them now, hyperscalers, Basically, the big tech technology platforms is selling ads, and you can't do that if you can't show the people who are willing to pay you for advertising space that there's user engagement. And the user engagement, and this has been true for 10 years, maybe more, is driven far more by, we call it rage bait, things that get people angry than it is by mainstream sentiments like, you know, motherhood and apple pie are good. The way you get engagement online is to say Hitler was cool. And Nick Fuentes is the great example of this. He's somebody who presents in a slick, entertaining, engaging way, saying outrageous things. We give the example of his interview with Piers Morgan, when Piers Morgan thought, you know, let's think of him as boomer broadcaster, that he was calling Fuentes out and insisting that he was an outrageous Holocaust denier and all that Fuentes did was make fun of him. And clips of him making fun of Piers Morgan then went viral on TikTok. I think the two key things that people don't get, which is I think why we had to write the piece, are number one, the algorithms really do promote the most outrageous content and that is the business model. And they use bots to do it. That is to say, fake people, people simulating personhood, troll farms, creating lots and lots of American sounding accounts that then replicate, repeat, amplify the message. This has been going on for some time. Second thing is that AI is so much more powerful than it was even two years ago, nevermind 10, that it can take these algorithmic features and make them far more powerful than they were. So this is the thing that's new. What you've got is that the power of the large language models combined with the business model of the network platforms to create engines for the dissemination of the most toxic, but also the most engaging ideas that are out there. That's why this is happening. And it's why my sweet attempt to write books and articles and do TV on pbs, all these attempts are simply blown away. I mean, I'll give you another example. Tucker Carlson last year had as a guest on his very popular podcast, a guy named Darrell Cooper, of whom I'd never heard, and Carlson said he was the most influential popular historian in America. Well, of course I'm interested to know this because at times I used to dream of being a popular historian. The guy has never written a book in his life. He appeared on that show and began to use the kind of discredited, mendacious arguments about World War II and about the Holocaust that I thought were dead and buried. Carlson promoted him, hyped him, and it didn't take long for Cooper's views to reach millions of people. That's what we're dealing with.
- [24:29]
Dan Sonor
Okay, so Neil, let's stay on Fuentes for a second. Cause you and John Clark wrote in the piece, and I'm quoting here, Fuentes dances on the cliff edge between definitely serious and definitely kidding. So can you talk a little bit about that? What you mean by that?
- [24:44]
Neil Ferguson
Well, I kind of understand the desire amongst especially young men to poke, to mock, to ridicule the solemnities that are inflicted on them from the minute they enter middle school all the way through to college. And so if you think about what people get at school these days, it's generally a very progressive account of history with a considerable emphasis on the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. And all of this, as I've written elsewhere and we've discussed, is very suffocating and generally bad for free inquiry. If you want to kind of make, make fun of that, rebel against it, then you take the most outrageous positions that would horrify your PO faced schoolteacher or professor the most. I remember feeling the same way about the world when I was a high schooler and when I was an undergraduate. Was part of what made punk rock attractive was that you got to say things that your parents found or your teachers found offensive. But it seems to me when you see someone like Nick Fuentes, what we're doing here is taking that generational revolt and scaling it in ways that were just unthinkable for rebels in the 1970s who wanted to cock a snook. Establishment sentiment, because we didn't have algorithmic media, much less AI. We could buy the Sex Pistol's new single, but it wouldn't get played on the BBC. Fuentes has got a huge market of young, mostly guys who tune in to hear him say outrageous things. And the media landscape is such that he can very quickly build that kind of relationship to an audience by presenting in a funny, semi serious, semi satirical way. I'll give you an example of how the generation war plays out, because I do think this is partly a generation war, where young people want to say things that outrage older people in a very classic, familiar fashion. So Fuentes, in the course of the conversation with Piers Morgan, got onto the subject of another British journalist of Piers Morgan's generation, Danny Finkelstein. Danny, whom I somewhat know, had given testimony that Hitler had tried to starve his mother to death and did starve his grandmother to death. They were Holocaust victims in that generation of his family. Fuentes made fun of this, saying, well, my generation, we're just done with peril clutching. And then he actually ridiculed Finkelstein, mocking him, using his voice. Me mom, me mom, me mom got killed by Hitler. This is, of course, what we were talking about when we said, you're dancing on this kind of precipice. You're being funny about something that's taboo, and people can't get enough of that online. And of course, the algorithms want more of it and they'll take it wherever they can find it. So this is what we're dealing with here. This kind of shock statement, this kind of provocation is not new. It's what younger generations have been doing to older generations pretty much since modernity dawned. But previously, someone like Nick Fuentes wouldn't have had the Possibility of building an audience of millions of people just wouldn't have existed.
- [28:08]
Dan Sonor
But Neil, so much of this is, as you're saying here, is algorithmic content or algorithmically spreading or driven content. That leaves many of us, me included, I feel this way a lot, intuitively skeptical about how much of what is happening online mirrors sentiments, opinions in real life, how real is the engagement? At what point do these algorithmically enhanced fringes move to the mainstream?
- [28:35]
Neil Ferguson
Well, I think it's already visible there's been a huge shift in the sentiment of registered Democrats on the question of Israel. It's one of the biggest changes we've seen in American political opinion in our lifetimes. And it's happened very fast. And October 7, 2023 didn't reverse it, it accelerated it. Now here we need to introduce some other variables. You could say, well, this is just a spontaneous consequence of the way the algorithms are set up and the way the ad auction model works and so forth. But who might have an interest in sowing this kind of discord in the United States and elsewhere? It is certainly plausible that foreign governments hostile to the United States have played a part in promoting this kind of content. This was a debate about TikTok that has somewhat faded from the headlines, but given that the parent company is Chinese, you could have certainly made a case that somebody was working the algorithm to promote anti Israel content and pro Palestinian content after October 7th. There was at least some circumstantial evidence to support that, though the company has consistently denied it. We've just read about the role the Cuban government has played for decades in trying to promote ideological division. We know the Soviets did it in their day, but they didn't have algorithmic media. They never really got very far with their psychological operations. But I think it seems pretty clear that Chinese Communist Party psychological operations, Russian troll farms and others are playing a part here. This whole debate got greatly confused in the wake of the 2016 election by the desire of many people on the American left to exaggerate the extent of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. This led, of course, down many rabbit holes. What was never, I think, disproved was that Russians were certainly trying to get toxic content onto Facebook in the United States. And there is absolutely no doubt that many of the bots out there are Russian origin or Russian funded troll farms outside Russia. So I think this is part of what makes the phenomenon we're describing. So concerning the network platforms have created engines that can be instrumentalized by my hostile foreign powers and non government actress hostile to the United States in order to amplify divisive messages. We know this is going on. You know this is going on because you've seen it yourself. X, as we now call Twitter, is absolutely alive with bots. And if you comment on the Russia Ukraine war in a pro Ukrainian way, they'll come to get you. Now, one interesting thing, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this since we wrote the piece, is that no serious effort is being made to identify human origin content online versus AI origin bots content. This is simply nothing that seems to interest the masters of Silicon Valley. Why not? Because the bots are part of the business model. So there isn't a serious effort to distinguish human content from non human content even as the volume of non human content grows exponentially as the AI models become more powerful. What would help a lot would be if online content were credibly differentiated so that one could tell the human content from the bots.
- [32:21]
Dan Sonor
We will be right back with Neil Ferguson. Hi, it's Dan Sonor. Israel is heading into one of its most consequential elections, and this time the whole world is watching closely. Hot takes and daily noise are pretty much guaranteed to populate your media diet. But as with any election, there's a deeper story about identity, religion, democracy, and what kind of country Israelis want to live in. That's why Army ARC Media launched Israel Votes, a special initiative across. Call me Back for heaven's sake. And Ark News Daily. You'll hear from the leading candidates shaping the race, along with analysis and reporting from two of Israel's leading political analysts. ARC Media contributors Nadavael and Amit Segal. Join us for Israel Votes, your front row seat to the election that could define Israel's Future. Go to arkmedia.org votes to watch and listen. See you there. And we're back with Neil Ferguson. We take for granted, whether when leans right or lean's left, that we are living in this classic, you know, the western societies, classically liberal democracies, small L liberal. Is this model of governance and this kind of structure of society even compatible with these technologies unless there's some major change or reversal.
- [33:50]
Neil Ferguson
Towards the end of the square in the tower, I asked what we could do. I even wrote a paper after its publication called what is to Be Done for Hoover? Which looked at ways that we could reduce the ways that network platforms like Facebook could be instrumentalized by bad actors. One was the rewriting of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That's an issue that's fallen by the wayside. But for many years, the legislation created a Catch 22 in which network platforms could enjoy all the benefits of being publishers. They could edit, delete whatever they liked, promote whatever they liked with none of the downsides of being publishers. So harms online that have arisen from network platforms they were not liable for. Now, there's gradually some sign that the courts are changing their view of this, but it's, in my view, 10 years too late. And it was a major mistake of the first Trump administration not to go after a rewriting of section 230. My sense is that we as a free and open society can deal with this problem, but we need to recognize it for what it is, and we're not doing that. The Chinese obviously can harness algorithmic media. They can harness AI to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party by simply insisting that the models are trained to promote Xi Jinping thought, and the algorithms are trained to identify anything that's critical of Xi Jinping thought. So there's no incompatibility between communism, authoritarianism and these kinds of AI enabled platforms. But we have a clear contradiction. A free society which guarantees free speech and says that the federal government can't limit it, can't give free speech to AI enabled bots. We can't give large language models free speech. We can't give chatbots free speech because they're going to be used to undermine the freedom of real human beings. Nobody wants to admit that that's the real tension because the money that is being made by the hyperscalers, the network platforms, whatever you want to call big tech, depends on this blurring. It depends on you believing the outrageous thing you just read came from a human being and that that human being is a housewife in Iowa. If you knew that it's just fake, then you probably would just screen it out and you ought to be able to say to X, hey, X, I don't want to see any non human content, none of it. Just take it out. Can you do that? No. What are we left with? Community notes? Well, we show in the piece that community notes, while an improvement or nothing, generally don't stop anti Semitic content reaching a lot of people.
- [36:41]
Dan Sonor
Okay, immediate electoral implications. Most of the primaries, Republican primaries, have not been decided on the issues you're talking about right now. Now, there's other factors which are. The biggest tool in the toolkit in all these primaries is Donald Trump. He's almost, and this is gonna offend a lot of our listeners, but in a sense, Trump is almost playing the Buckley role Now for the right and for maga, meaning you can't get on the wrong side of Trump if you're running in a Republican primary. And Trump is not on the wrong side of these issues. So he kind of distorts perhaps, or gives us a false sense of where things are going on. The left we've actually seen in Democratic primaries, this being what you're talking about now, these issues being the dividing issue. So are these just isolated pockets where we've seen problems and we shouldn't extrapolate out how significant they really are or electorally, should we be thinking about the implications of what you and John Clark focus on as the new normal?
- [37:35]
Neil Ferguson
Well, I think it's a mistake to see these as vote winning issues in themselves because voters concerns are predominantly with bread and butter affordability issues and they will tend to demote, say, foreign policy in their voting decisions. But that's been true in American politics since time immemorial, with very rare exceptions. I think the background that's important here is what it implies for post Trump Republicanism. Trump is philosemitic the way he's Anglophile. It's just one of his kind of assumptions that the Jews are smart. And he's kind of broadly sympathetic to the point of having absolutely no issue with the Jewish son in law and Jewish friends. He's not an anti Semite, not even in the way Richard Nixon was. And Nixon was far more bigoted in his attitudes than Trump. But what happens after? That's the question in the post Trump, post boomer politics that we're heading towards. Where will the energy be? Now? We can already see the energy on the left is with Zoran Mamdani and the Democratic socialists. And that is a very striking thing because the progressive movement on the Democratic Party's side had in Bernie Sanders a kind of somewhat unpromising candidate. I mean, as a charismatic leader, Bernie falls down on a number of obvious points. Mamdani's got all that that Bernie lacks. And now you see the energy on the progressive side, but with that energy, and you see this in the candidates that Mum Danny has backed in the recent primaries in New York. With that progressive energy comes the antisemitism of the left. And it's absolutely clear it emanates from the campuses and it focuses on anti Zionism. Anti Zionism is one of its key principles. So you can see it happening on the left and on the right. What will happen in the post Trump world? This is a key question for Vice President Vance. We know from things that he says that he far more than his rivals for the Republican nomination, flirts with the alt right. That's happening. And there are other candidates out there already who at the very least flirt with alt right memes. I mean, one obvious example, we mention him in our piece. This is James Fishback, who's running for governor of Florida. And there are things that he has said that seem to me to cross the line. And certainly if Bill Buckley were here today, he would not be endorsing James Fishback. So I think the issue is, in the post boomer world that we're gonna be in in 2028, how much will this stuff be baggage that successful charismatic candidates carry with them to make sure that they have the youth vote locked up? That's the question.
- [40:45]
Dan Sonor
Well, the good news is, if you believe the polls, Fishback will be soundly defeated. But I don't wanna get ahead of it. Byron Donalds, who interestingly obviously rejects all of this craziness, all the outright stuff, and is being backed by Trump.
- [40:58]
Neil Ferguson
But look further ahead. If you just look at youth attitudes on a whole range of issues, the striking divide in American politics is generational. It is between where people in their 20s are versus people in their 60s that is a really striking divide. And it's a divide that's economic because after all, young people see themselves expected to shoulder the burdens of a vast army of retirees in an aging population. But as the retirees fade from the scene politically, we're gonna see a very new political spectrum in America. And I don't think people are ready for the kind of things that young people in their 20s are gonna carry into their politics when they're in their 30s and 40s on both the left and the right.
- [41:41]
Dan Sonor
Okay, Neil, I want to wrap with this. You and John Clark end the piece with the words what fools we were. Which is quite disheartening if you generally believe that. If the fair fight is over, what do you personally, you, Neil, this award winning best selling author, historian, what do you personally do differently now? Do you stop writing books? Do you start doing something else? Like, are you going to just keep at it or what?
- [42:09]
Neil Ferguson
Well, I keep at it because I do think that there's still a need for serious archivally based scholarship. Maybe we're writing for the future, but as long as the serious rigorous work goes on, then it exists, even if it's only in a library for future use. Second thing I'm doing, which I've now been doing for five years, is building a new university in Austin where we prioritize intellectual freedom and meritocracy. And we feel that if we model how scholarship should work, and that includes making sure our students don't spend all day and every day cheating with ChatGPT, then we may at least create amongst this new generation an elite of people who retain their ability to engage in critical thinking. One thing I've learned from the study of history is that a small, dynamic institution can do a lot. It can be an example for others, but if nothing else, it can produce an elite that hasn't had its mind poisoned. And the third thing that I'm intent on doing is not going on TikTok and not wasting my time in a doomed battle with gripers and democratic socialists. It would be a waste of my energy and in some ways a compromise of my integrity to try to play their game. I mean, ultimately I said what fools we were. I really meant what fools my generation of historians were. You know, Richard Evans and I are not great friends. He's on the left, I'm on the right. But ultimately we're on the same side. I mean, we both devoted our lives to writing books, sometimes big books about aspects of German history. I think we were the fools because we kind of thought at the time of the Irving trial, that's it. We've got a decisive victory there. That's it. On the record. The most influential of the Holocaust deniers, David Irving, who was seen as a serious historian by many people and whose work had slipped imperceptibly but fatally into Holocaust denial. He's discredited. Game over. Thanks for playing anti Semites. Go back to your basements and generate your self published garbage. Nobody's going to read it. So that's the delusion that we kind of thought we'd won and we didn't realize that the rules of that time were going to be swept away by the transformation of the public sphere by the Internet and the advent of, of algorithmic media which people would naively think was social media and the entry into our discourse of a vast army of fake people.
- [44:43]
Dan Sonor
All right, Neil, the best news for our listeners is that you're not going to stop doing what you are doing. Because I think our listeners are not lost in TikTok holes. They're actually reading your books. So I'm glad you're going to keep doing what you're doing.
- [44:55]
Neil Ferguson
God bless you. All the good news about history. Maybe this is an optimistic note to conclude on.
- [45:01]
Dan Sonor
Please, please. We always try to end on a hopeful note. So I'm looking for something. I'm grasping here.
- [45:05]
Neil Ferguson
The bloodthirsty, marauding dictatorial types with their moronic followers don't always win. They don't always win. And the heroic minorities who are persecuted, at worst ridiculed, at best often do win networks of smart people who have courage and integrity, maybe also faith they can win against the dictators and the mobs. So I don't see that we can win if we just form our own mob. A mob will be too small. But if we stick to the pursuit of truth, if we maintain our faith in God, if we uphold the values of a free society, then I think we have at least a shot against the CCP and the other authoritarian powers that want to exploit algorithmic media and AI to bring our free society tumbling down. We have a shot.
- [46:00]
Dan Sonor
All right, Neil, there we go.
- [46:02]
Neil Ferguson
Upbeat note Never surrender. This is the Chilean moment that all podcasts need.
- [46:08]
Dan Sonor
We will link to the piece in the show notes. We'll link to some of these books that you cited and thank God you're doing what you're doing and I look forward to having you back on soon.
- [46:16]
Neil Ferguson
And you keep doing what you're doing. Dan.
- [46:18]
Dan Sonor
Thank you.
- [46:36]
Deborah Pardes
I'm Deborah Pardes, the host of Ark News Daily. What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters, but it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all. That's why we started ArkNews Daily. Every weekday morning, I walk you through the most important news, give you the context you need, and let you know what to look out for next. I don't try to convince you of anything and I don't waste your time. On most days, I'll be in your ears for about 10 minutes or less. Then you can move on with your day, hopefully a little bit smarter than before. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the show notes. I hope to see you tomorrow.