Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: An election is meant to produce a fact. Who do
Speaker 2: the citizens of this country want to lead them? And
Speaker 2: the production of facts is sort of our meat and potatoes.
Speaker 2: Here at the last archive, we made our second season
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one. We'd started working on it in
Speaker 2: late twenty twenty. I don't remember how Jill was planning
Speaker 2: on ending it back then, but I do know that
Speaker 2: on January sixth, twenty twenty one, whatever that plan was
Speaker 2: went out the window. On that day, rioders stormed the
Speaker 2: United States Capitol Building in an attempt to stop the
Speaker 2: certification of the twenty twenty election. They were denying a fact.
Speaker 2: This was an insurrection. The FBI saw it as an
Speaker 2: act of terrorism. Multiple deaths have been linked to that day,
Speaker 2: some in the chaos of it, some by suicide after.
Speaker 2: Since then, hundreds have been convicted of crimes, including the
Speaker 2: crime of seditious conspiracy. The aftermath of that day is
Speaker 2: still playing out, most recently in the Supreme Court. It
Speaker 2: has a deep influence on the twenty twenty four election,
Speaker 2: raising questions about whether Trump can even legally run for president.
Speaker 2: But today I want to revisit the inciting incident and
Speaker 2: play you. The finale of our second season, an episode
Speaker 2: called Epiphany, which is all about January sixth of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one and the moment that an election which had
Speaker 2: produced a single fact, the fact of Joe Biden's presidency,
Speaker 2: instead split the country into two irreconcilable realities. Here's the episode.
Speaker 1: There's a place in our world where the known things go.
Speaker 1: A quarter of the mind lined with shelves cluttered with proof.
Speaker 1: I'm hiding in here. Who's out there? What do they want?
Speaker 1: They sounds so angry. I'm pretty sure they can get in.
Speaker 1: I don't see how I can get out. I think
Speaker 1: I might be trapped. Welcome to the Last Archive, the
Speaker 1: show about how we know what we know and why
Speaker 1: it sometimes seems lately as if we don't know anything
Speaker 1: at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season, I've been trying
Speaker 1: to trace the history of doubt over the course of
Speaker 1: the last century, building that history block by block, a
Speaker 1: tower of doubt. Not too long ago, it all came
Speaker 1: crashing down. It was the beginning of the year twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one. Every archive of knowledge seemed to be under attack.
Speaker 1: Embattled universities, courthouses, press rooms, even Congress but I found
Speaker 1: it the last archives escape patch. Come through with me.
Speaker 1: We'll have to go through a war and of underground tunnels,
Speaker 1: but we'll get there. We're heading to a place called
Speaker 1: Iron Mountain. Something I love about history, all the surprises,
Speaker 1: the twists and turns. So I'm starting with a story
Speaker 1: that has so many turns. In the nineteen thirties, a
Speaker 1: German immigrant named Hermann Noust purchased an abandoned iron ore
Speaker 1: mine in New York State near the Hudson River. Inside
Speaker 1: its caves and old mining tunnels, Noust grew mushrooms. The
Speaker 1: place was perfect for it. The mushrooms mushroomed. Nousk began
Speaker 1: supplying the city with mushrooms, and he made a fortune.
Speaker 1: People called him the mushroom King. At his house he
Speaker 1: had the only mushroom shaped swimming pool in the world.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty one, Noust adapted his caves and mines
Speaker 1: and tunnels for a new business. He founded the Iron
Speaker 1: Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation. Because at the time Americans were
Speaker 1: crazy for bomb shelters. School children were ducking and covering
Speaker 1: to prepare for a nuclear attack. Herman Noust outed them all.
Speaker 1: An atomic bomb expert called Nousts Vault, the safest place
Speaker 1: in the world.
Speaker 3: A thirty ton door equipped with a time lock will
Speaker 3: guard one of the main passages in which four hundred
Speaker 3: vaults are located. During the initial phase of the enterprise,
Speaker 3: already foreign banks have applied for storage space behind the
Speaker 3: massive door. Museums also are expected to seek protection for
Speaker 3: their priceless art treasures. In the atmosphere of international tension,
Speaker 3: bank files and records began to find their way into
Speaker 3: the sanctuary.
Speaker 1: You could put your most valuable documents there, wills, photograph,
Speaker 1: UF's legal papers. The company grew and grew a Cold
Speaker 1: War knowledge vault, a last archive along the Hudson. These days,
Speaker 1: Iron Mountain is still in business. It's a global records
Speaker 1: management company, the world's biggest, with a four billion dollar
Speaker 1: annual revenue and facilities in more than fifty countries. You
Speaker 1: might have seen their trucks with a blue triangular logo.
Speaker 1: I see those trucks all the time, rumbling up and
Speaker 1: down the road. Iron Mountain stores everything, including the records
Speaker 1: of nearly every fortune one thousand company. They've also got
Speaker 1: Frank Sinatra's original recordings and Charles Dickens's last will and
Speaker 1: testament back in the scariest years of the Cold War,
Speaker 1: though Iron Mountain Atomic Storage offered something more than storage.
Speaker 1: It offered secrecy.
Speaker 3: Iron Mountain under a blanket of iron ore alternate underground
Speaker 3: headquarters for corporations that.
Speaker 1: Ad ran in nineteen sixty two, the year of the
Speaker 1: Cuban Missile crisis. If you own a company and wanted
Speaker 1: to hold a top secret meeting, why not hold it
Speaker 1: in hidden conference rooms deep underground, Doctor evilstyle. Or you
Speaker 1: might want to hold your meetings down there if you
Speaker 1: were to say a super secret government agency. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, a few years after Iron Mountain advertised its
Speaker 1: secret layer meeting service, a little book appeared in bookstores.
Speaker 1: It was called Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility
Speaker 1: and Desirability of Peace. The book described itself as the
Speaker 1: record of a fifteen man special study group that had
Speaker 1: gathered at Iron Mountain in those top secret underground meeting rooms.
Speaker 1: And here was the book's bombshell. It was never supposed
Speaker 1: to be published, but someone had leaked it. A member
Speaker 1: of the secret group identified only as a professor of
Speaker 1: social science from a large Middlewestern university. The report itself
Speaker 1: was totally wonky wonky, but shocking.
Speaker 4: The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for stable government.
Speaker 4: It supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority.
Speaker 1: The Special Study Group had been convened, it was said,
Speaker 1: in response to a peace scare. Members of the group
Speaker 1: talked about how devastating it would be if the United
Speaker 1: States were ever for any length of time at peace,
Speaker 1: as if the only thing that kept the American people
Speaker 1: from shaking off the chains of their submission was war.
Speaker 4: Endless war, it has ensured the subordination of the citizen
Speaker 4: to the state. No modern political ruling group has successfully
Speaker 4: controlled its constituency after failing to sustain the continuing credibility
Speaker 4: of an external threat of war.
Speaker 1: Report from Iron Mountain concluded that the US needed to
Speaker 1: keep those wars coming, but if, given the growing anti
Speaker 1: war movement, a dreaded peace did descend upon the land,
Speaker 1: there were still ways for the US government to find
Speaker 1: substitutes for functions of war. This is so crazy, I'm
Speaker 1: going to explain it again. According to this report, the
Speaker 1: US government was trying desperately to keep the nation at war,
Speaker 1: but if their worst fears were realized and peace came,
Speaker 1: they had other options other ways to stifle discontent.
Speaker 4: A comprehensive social welfare program, a giant, open end space
Speaker 4: research program aimed at unreachable targets, an established and recognized
Speaker 4: extra terrestrial menace, massive global environmental pollution, fictitious alternate enemies.
Speaker 1: Fully moonshot Batman. This leaked report was hot, hot, hot.
Speaker 1: It became a best seller on the New York Times list,
Speaker 1: was translated into fifteen languages. Esquire published an excerpt. Of course.
Speaker 1: People tried to find that Midwestern social science professor who
Speaker 1: leaked it, and they wanted to know which government department
Speaker 1: had commissioned it. A reporter from the New York Times
Speaker 1: called around to the White House and the State Department,
Speaker 1: and then noted, no advanced reviewer has flatly labeled the
Speaker 1: book fiction. People who read it were incensed, but report
Speaker 1: from Iron Mountain proved very difficult to verify, even though
Speaker 1: some people thought the whole thing was just a hoax.
Speaker 1: If it's authentic, it's an enormous, roaring scandal, one scholar
Speaker 1: told The New York Times. If it's caricature, it's a
Speaker 1: brilliant job. Eventually most people forgot about it, but then
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, another government report was leaked to
Speaker 1: the press.
Speaker 5: This weekend, portions of a highly classified Pentagon document came
Speaker 5: the light for all the world to see and brought
Speaker 5: cries of outrage from Washington. The New York Times began
Speaker 5: publishing parts of a voluminous report that the Pentagon had
Speaker 5: drawn up on the causes and conduct of American involvement
Speaker 5: in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: The Pentagon Papers revealed decades of lying by the federal
Speaker 1: government to the public about what had really been going
Speaker 1: on in the war in Vietnam.
Speaker 5: Senator George McGovern, a leading critic of the war, called
Speaker 5: the report and we quote, a story of almost incredible deception.
Speaker 1: This is where this history gets twisty, Tourney. The publication
Speaker 1: of the Pentagon Papers brought the authors of the Report
Speaker 1: from Iron Mountain out into the open, because unlike the
Speaker 1: Pentagon Papers, which were entirely real, the Report from Iron
Speaker 1: Mountain was in fact entirely made up. So just to
Speaker 1: be extra extra clear here, there never was any special
Speaker 1: study group, had never met at Iron Mountain, and this recording.
Speaker 4: No modern political ruling group has successfully controlled its constituency.
Speaker 4: After failing to sustain the continuing credit.
Speaker 1: That's one of our actors reading a document that is
Speaker 1: in fact a fake. In nineteen seventy two, in the
Speaker 1: New York Times Book Review, a writer named Leonard Lewin
Speaker 1: revealed that the report from Iron Mountain had been a hoax,
Speaker 1: intended as a satire. He'd involved some pretty high level people.
Speaker 1: Even the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith was in on it,
Speaker 1: But Lewin confessed, I wrote the report, all of it.
Speaker 1: The charade is over. The idea had come from Victor Navaski,
Speaker 1: a leftist writer who later became Editor of the Nation.
Speaker 1: It was all a lark, an angry one. As Navaski
Speaker 1: told NPR's Fresh Air in nineteen ninety six, the.
Speaker 6: Idea for reports Maron Mountain came to me one day
Speaker 6: when I saw a little headline in the newspaper saying
Speaker 6: that the stock market had fallen abruptly because of a
Speaker 6: peace scare. And we got an idea to do a
Speaker 6: book about the quashing of a report which was commissioned
Speaker 6: by the White House to plan the transition from a
Speaker 6: wartime to a peacetime economy. And we would do a
Speaker 6: kind of hoax book about what happened when the Commission
Speaker 6: concluded that the economy would collapse. Peace really broke out.
Speaker 1: The Report from Iron Mountain hoax brought the storage company
Speaker 1: Iron Mountain, the real Place a lot of grief, And
Speaker 1: it wasn't fair because, let me be clear, the storage
Speaker 1: company had nothing to do with this hoax. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the Hoax report had acquired a huge following among conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 1: They read it as incriminating evidence. They put it on
Speaker 1: their bookshelves, and when the authors revealed themselves to be pranksters,
Speaker 1: it didn't change anything. A lot of conspiracy minded fans
Speaker 1: of the book simply refused to believe this new turn
Speaker 1: of events. They just couldn't take that book out of
Speaker 1: the mental box that said government report written in secret
Speaker 1: underground bunker and put it in the box that said hoax.
Speaker 1: They were still talking about it decades later, like in
Speaker 1: this nineteen ninety three video cassette Blueprint for Tyranny.
Speaker 7: Welcome to the Report from Iron Mountain.
Speaker 3: This report.
Speaker 7: Is some thing you would never believe unless you read it.
Speaker 7: Peace in reality equals world socialism, as we will find
Speaker 7: out as we journey through this report.
Speaker 1: If anything, conspiracy theorists cherished the fake book. More as
Speaker 1: the years passed, they read it avidly, passed it around,
Speaker 1: kept it close to their vests, used it even as
Speaker 1: a manual, a manifesto for opposition to the federal government.
Speaker 1: And then in nineteen ninety five in Oklahoma City, some
Speaker 1: of those right wing conspiracy theorists staged in insurrection.
Speaker 8: The explosion that went off around nine am, and we
Speaker 8: could feel the explosion in the news.
Speaker 6: Room of Channel nine A.
Speaker 2: Now Holy Cow, about a third of the building has
Speaker 2: been blown away.
Speaker 1: On April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, a truck packed with
Speaker 1: nearly five thousand pounds of explosives detonated outside the nine
Speaker 1: story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing one hundred sixty
Speaker 1: eight people, including nineteen very little children at a day
Speaker 1: care center. The explosion injured hundreds more.
Speaker 9: And we can also give you a bit of a
Speaker 9: hint now as to where the government appears to be
Speaker 9: focusing its investigation on some of the what are called
Speaker 9: right wing white supremacist groups in various parts of the country.
Speaker 1: Eventually, two men were charged with eleven federal crimes. They
Speaker 1: were the sort of guys who believed that the report
Speaker 1: from Iron Mountain was real.
Speaker 10: The indictment charges that Timothy McVay and Terry Nichols, former
Speaker 10: Army buddies with a grudge against the government, planned the bombing,
Speaker 10: selected the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as their target,
Speaker 10: bought and stole materials for the bomb, and built it.
Speaker 1: After the Oklahoma City bombing, Americans suddenly started paying attention
Speaker 1: to right wing insurrectionists. Who were these people? Where did
Speaker 1: they get their ideas? Those ideas made They came from books.
Speaker 1: I don't know if Timothy McVeigh read the report from
Speaker 1: Iron Mountain or watched those video cassettes about it, but
Speaker 1: he did have a book that's usually right next to
Speaker 1: it on every right wing extremist's bookshelf.
Speaker 10: Inside mcveigh's Yellow Mercury Sedan, investigators discovered a sealed envelope.
Speaker 11: Containing evidence that would prove crucial to analyzing mcveag's motivations.
Speaker 5: Highlighted passages from the anti government novel That Turner Diaries.
Speaker 1: The Turner Diaries is a nineteen seventy eight novel by
Speaker 1: an avowed American neo Nazi. It includes a detailed account
Speaker 1: of somebody building an explosive device, putting it into a
Speaker 1: truck and driving it up to a federal building. McVeigh
Speaker 1: seemed to have treated the Turner Diaries as an instruction manual.
Speaker 1: In a similar way, a lot of his fellow extremists
Speaker 1: considered Report from Iron Mountain as some kind of decoder ring.
Speaker 1: When Magazine reported it has become required reading for militias,
Speaker 1: Nazi sympathizers, and other righting types who deny that it's
Speaker 1: a hoax and cited as evidence of plans for a
Speaker 1: new world order. The instigator of the hoax, Victor Navaski,
Speaker 1: was horrified, as he explained on Fresh Air, he had
Speaker 1: found out that Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist group, had
Speaker 1: reprinted the report and was to them a kind of bible.
Speaker 6: They were so persuaded that the report was the real
Speaker 6: thing that they didn't bother to get copyright permission to
Speaker 6: reprint it, and had reprinted it as if it were
Speaker 6: a government document and we're selling it.
Speaker 1: Navaski's original partner in crime, Leonard Lewin, sued Liberty Lobby
Speaker 1: and reached a settlement. In the end, they had to
Speaker 1: surrender to him their copies of Report from Iron Mountain.
Speaker 1: Lewin stashed them in his basement but it was too
Speaker 1: late to stop this left wing hoax turned right wing conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Navaski wrote in the Nation about its acceptance by super
Speaker 1: patriots and conspiracy theorists of the far right. He said
Speaker 1: that they're taking it seriously was the scariest proposition of all.
Speaker 1: It has since gotten even scarier. Since the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the Report from Iron Mountain has passed from generation to
Speaker 1: generation like some kind of scripture. On the sixth of
Speaker 1: January twenty twenty one, the day insurrectionists attacked the US capital,
Speaker 1: some creep on four Chan posted in the cavalierly ugly
Speaker 1: language in this hideous corner of the Internet, read the
Speaker 1: Report from Iron Mountain, you brainless retard. These days you'll
Speaker 1: still find Report from Iron Mountain on far right white
Speaker 1: supremacist reading lists with no mention that it was a
Speaker 1: left wing hoax. And now it has a new reading
Speaker 1: list companion, the writings of Q, the anonymous alleged insider
Speaker 1: who drops clues about all the evil goings on inside
Speaker 1: the government. Just recently I called up Victor Navaski. He's
Speaker 1: nearly ninety. It was really good of him to talk
Speaker 1: to me. We both sound like we're under Iron Mountain, though,
Speaker 1: because the phone is pretty bad.
Speaker 12: It's a fantasy to believe that it's true. And I
Speaker 12: think Q andon is guilty of its own fantasy.
Speaker 13: Do you think if anyone presented himself to the world
Speaker 13: tomorrow and said I am Q and I can prove
Speaker 13: that I am Q, and I was just joking the
Speaker 13: whole time, and it got out of hand none of
Speaker 13: this is true. Would there be any way I'm doing
Speaker 13: what had been done?
Speaker 12: I don't think so myself. I think that's where we
Speaker 12: are as a culture.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, the Q and On report goes something like this.
Speaker 1: An insider decides to spill the beans about a secret
Speaker 1: government run conspiracy, something to do with Satan and pedophiles.
Speaker 1: He leakes some clues in a report and then report
Speaker 1: after report, and the people who read those reports, those
Speaker 1: postings by this anonymous que become passionately attached to the
Speaker 1: idea of a conspiracy, and within the logic of that conspiracy,
Speaker 1: they are being denied access to knowledge, some secret body
Speaker 1: of knowledge hidden away that only the people in power
Speaker 1: have access to, and that the followers of Q have
Speaker 1: to hunt down and piece together clue by clue, Q
Speaker 1: by Q Q isn't true. Also, I don't buy either
Speaker 1: of the two big headlines about Q and On that
Speaker 1: it's new or that it's uniquely powerful. That's what I've
Speaker 1: been trying to argue by going over the story of
Speaker 1: the report from Iron Mountain. This stuff isn't new, it's
Speaker 1: not all powerful, and it has never ever been a secret.
Speaker 4: This election will be the most rigged election in history.
Speaker 1: That is a lie, an old fashioned lie, but it's
Speaker 1: also a complex lie, the sort of lie that brings
Speaker 1: together every kind of doubt whose rise I've been chronicling
Speaker 1: all seasons long as little boats of doubt rowboats canoes.
Speaker 1: They become a fleet of flotilla in Armada.
Speaker 14: They're sending millions of ballots all over the country.
Speaker 15: There's fraud. They found them in creeks. They found some
Speaker 15: with the name Trump.
Speaker 16: Just happened to have the name Trump just the other
Speaker 16: day in a waste paper basket.
Speaker 3: This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen.
Speaker 1: It was awful to watch this unfold in the months
Speaker 1: leading up to the twenty twenty election, and in the
Speaker 1: months afterward, to watch it spread on the Internet and
Speaker 1: hear it from the mouth of the US President. He
Speaker 1: said it again and again and again. If enough people
Speaker 1: in public and in positions of authority lie about something
Speaker 1: for long enough, people will believe it. Watching it all,
Speaker 1: I felt as if my brain was on rewind. Specifically,
Speaker 1: my head kept rewinding back to a brilliant book published
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four called A Social History of Truth
Speaker 1: by Stephen Shapin, Emeritus Professor of the History of Science
Speaker 1: at Harvard. Shapin was writing about gentleman philosophers in the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century in England. But I find his book so
Speaker 1: wholly applies to the President that I ask him to
Speaker 1: read my favorite lines.
Speaker 17: Knowledge is a collective good. In securing our knowledge, we
Speaker 17: rely upon others, and we cannot dispense with that reliance.
Speaker 17: That means that the relations in which we have and
Speaker 17: hold our knowledge have a moral character. And the word
Speaker 17: I use to indicate that moral relation is trust.
Speaker 1: He argues that you can't actually know anything alone, You
Speaker 1: can only know things with other people. He doesn't think
Speaker 1: the United States or the world is experiencing a crisis
Speaker 1: of truth. He thinks it would be better called a
Speaker 1: crisis of social knowledge. For example, and in particular around
Speaker 1: climate change.
Speaker 17: I know something about the loss of biodiversity, species, about
Speaker 17: melting icebergs, about sea level rise. Now someone puts pressure
Speaker 17: in me and say, how do I know these things?
Speaker 17: I don't think any of us know these things directly.
Speaker 17: So the knowledge that I need to know these things
Speaker 17: is to know who to believe, who has credibility, who
Speaker 17: is author to who to trust?
Speaker 1: To know anything, then you have to know who to trust.
Speaker 1: If you doubt everything, it's because you trust no one.
Speaker 1: I find this framework really helpful. No one is killed truth. Instead,
Speaker 1: we have this crisis of trust. But how did people
Speaker 1: stop knowing who to trust? One answer to that question
Speaker 1: involves the unintended consequences of new technologies of communication. We've
Speaker 1: been hearing about those all season. How radio, for example,
Speaker 1: amplified all kinds of extremism, but broadcasts only reached so far.
Speaker 1: Then came the Internet, starting with bulletin boards and chat
Speaker 1: rooms in the nineteen nineties, but we still think of
Speaker 1: it the way we thought about radio in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: The phrase echo chamber comes up a lot an acoustic metaphor.
Speaker 17: So there's a million voices are screaming out there, but
Speaker 17: any any body or any any group of like mind
Speaker 17: that people are listening to some and not to others.
Speaker 17: So there's another kind of question about what for us
Speaker 17: is audible and what for them is audible.
Speaker 1: Right, But then that metaphor of audibility and voice voice
Speaker 1: also meaning vote, you know, has implications for democracy, which
Speaker 1: is to say we will hear all the voices, and
Speaker 1: that we will we will automate a system wherein we
Speaker 1: hear everyone who's enfranchised. But then now we're in a
Speaker 1: crisis of democracy around people not feeling heard, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: if we just think about the siege of the Capitol
Speaker 1: and if you listen to interviews with those people, we're
Speaker 1: here to have our voices heard.
Speaker 17: A democratic project, everyone has a voice. I mean, well
Speaker 17: we've heard them now.
Speaker 1: Still, the argument that technology allows fakers and haters to
Speaker 1: find each other more easily, Stephen Shapin thinks that's just
Speaker 1: too glib. It's one of the reasons I loved talking
Speaker 1: with him. He got me thinking harder about another argument
Speaker 1: to explain what has happened to Americans and trust over
Speaker 1: the past century. That argument is political. It involves what
Speaker 1: one set of political actors have done to institutions over
Speaker 1: time in order to shift the balance of power in
Speaker 1: their favor.
Speaker 17: Do you mean to say the Supreme Court decision is
Speaker 17: not void?
Speaker 18: No, a Supreme Court decision is not necessarily the law
Speaker 18: of the land. The Constitution still is.
Speaker 1: That's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater making a Conservative argument that
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court had overstepped in its decision to abolish
Speaker 1: segregation in Brown versus Board of Education in nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: Conservatives at the time were very much out of power.
Speaker 1: Goldwater was an upstart, but his wing wanted to take
Speaker 1: over the GOP, and then they wanted to take over
Speaker 1: the country. And so, beginning in the nineteen fifties, Conservatives
Speaker 1: engaged in a sustained assault on trust and institutions that
Speaker 1: produce and diffuse knowledge. Three institutions, especially the courts, the press,
Speaker 1: and the university. These institutions, they said, were all dominated
Speaker 1: by liberals, first, the courts and the supposed liberal bias
Speaker 1: of the judiciary. Whatever you do, Goldwater said, don't trust
Speaker 1: the courts.
Speaker 18: They interpreted by that action that it was wrong to
Speaker 18: have segregation. Now, they didn't spell out what was to
Speaker 18: be done.
Speaker 1: Other Conservatives went after institutions of higher learning. William F.
Speaker 1: Buckley led the assault against the academy, beginning with this
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty one book God and Man at Yale.
Speaker 18: How would all be governed by the first two thousand
Speaker 18: people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two
Speaker 18: thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University?
Speaker 1: Buckley said, whatever you do, don't trust the professors. The
Speaker 1: third front in this warren institutions of knowledge was an
Speaker 1: attack on the press. This began with a Nixon administration,
Speaker 1: and most famously with a speech given by his vice president,
Speaker 1: Spiro Agnew in nineteen sixty nine. Whatever you do, Agnew said,
Speaker 1: don't trust the press.
Speaker 19: These men can create national issues overnight. They can elevate
Speaker 19: men from obscurity to national prominence within a week. They
Speaker 19: can reward some politicians with national exposure and ignore others.
Speaker 1: The courts, the universities, the press. Conservatives believed that to
Speaker 1: defeat liberalism they needed to conquer these institutions of knowledge
Speaker 1: to story trust in them. The left has contributed a
Speaker 1: whole lot to this epistemological unraveling, too, but conservatives have
Speaker 1: been playing a long game. This, ever, took years and years,
Speaker 1: and eventually they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, they took
Speaker 1: over the courts, or at least the federal judiciary.
Speaker 20: I'm honored and humbled to appear before you today as
Speaker 20: a nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: They built their own press, your mask is making me uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: and they undermined the university, especially scientific inquiry. So here
Speaker 1: we are, decades later, on the other side of this
Speaker 1: slow rolling revolution, a world where there is very little
Speaker 1: left of what used to be called common knowledge. This
Speaker 1: brings us to the twenty twenty presidential election.
Speaker 4: Those mail and ballots could have been written the day
Speaker 4: before by the Democratic Party hacks that will roll over
Speaker 4: the convention Center.
Speaker 1: Sure are lots of people in positions of power and
Speaker 1: authority said the election of Joe Biden was free and fair,
Speaker 1: the most secure election in American history. The Court said
Speaker 1: that every reputable news outlet said that political scientists, election observers, scholars,
Speaker 1: they all said that, But could you trust them. For
Speaker 1: a lot of Americans, the answer remained, no, not anymore
Speaker 1: and maybe never again.
Speaker 7: If we can be covered rarely by the media, and
Speaker 7: the media is the biggest problem we have, and we haven't.
Speaker 1: The sixth of January twenty twenty one. It was the
Speaker 1: Christian holiday of Epiphany, marking the day the Three Kings
Speaker 1: visited Jesus and the Manger, and Epiphany is a moment
Speaker 1: when all is revealed. In Washington, thousands of people gathered
Speaker 1: for a rally to save America, cheering President Trump and
Speaker 1: damn the press. Meanwhile, down the street inside the Capitol,
Speaker 1: a joint session of Congress was meeting to certify the
Speaker 1: results of the presidential election, an election that would send
Speaker 1: Trump packing in two weeks time.
Speaker 18: And after this, we're gonna walk down and I'll be
Speaker 18: there with you, and we're gonna walk down to the Capitol.
Speaker 16: And we're gonna cheer on.
Speaker 15: They have never seen us here.
Speaker 8: We spent off with Trump saying it's been four more
Speaker 8: years awad.
Speaker 20: Already.
Speaker 1: They marched to the Capitol, waving Trump flags and Confederate
Speaker 1: battle flags, wearing Maga hats and superhero costumes and camouflage
Speaker 1: and bulletproof veests. You probably saw all this. The crowd
Speaker 1: started pulling down the barricades, flimsy fences, climbed the stairs,
Speaker 1: scaled the scaffolding. They beat up Capital police, smashed windows,
Speaker 1: crashed through doors. They broke into the capital. For people
Speaker 1: who study right wing extremism and have read their neo
Speaker 1: Nazi novel the Turner Diaries, everything that happened that day
Speaker 1: was eerily familiar, because that book describes an attack on
Speaker 1: the capitol this way. The real value of all our
Speaker 1: attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the
Speaker 1: immediate casualties. More important, though, is what we taught the
Speaker 1: politicians and the bureaucrats. They learned this afternoon that not
Speaker 1: one of them is beyond our reach. The decades long
Speaker 1: conservative attack on institutions of knowledge, the press, the courts, universities,
Speaker 1: it had come down to this day when these people
Speaker 1: did not believe in the outcome of an election, or
Speaker 1: believed it and wanted to overturn it. For weeks, Trump
Speaker 1: supporters had been trying and failing to challenge the results
Speaker 1: in counties where lots of black people voted. They were
Speaker 1: especially matt about Georgia, where in runoff elections a Jewish
Speaker 1: man and a black man had just won seats in
Speaker 1: the US Senate.
Speaker 12: Well, fucking writers.
Speaker 3: Cried about on a fucking half, Well, the fucking writers.
Speaker 1: It was a riot, a white race riot, and yet
Speaker 1: horrible as it was the insurrection on the sixth of January.
Speaker 1: Epiphany looked like it might be another kind of epiphany,
Speaker 1: a day when people could finally see clearly revelation at
Speaker 1: last that all the lying wasn't harmless. There seemed at
Speaker 1: first to be real consequences. The President was banned from Twitter. Later,
Speaker 1: the House impeached him for a second time.
Speaker 15: President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States
Speaker 15: and its institutions of government. He threatened the integrity of
Speaker 15: the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power,
Speaker 15: and imperiled a coequal branch of government. He thereby betrayed
Speaker 15: his trust as president to the manifest injury of the
Speaker 15: people of the United States.
Speaker 1: The charges went to the Senate for a trial. Last year,
Speaker 1: the first season of The Last Archive, I started out
Speaker 1: with a trial, Remember Lucina Broadwell strangled in Barry, Vermont.
Speaker 1: I started this show there because I wanted to explain
Speaker 1: a bit of crucial history. Most of our ideas about
Speaker 1: how to decide what's true and what's not true come
Speaker 1: from the thirteenth century, with the rise of trial by jury.
Speaker 1: Two sides take turns presenting evidence, and a jury decides
Speaker 1: the verdict the truth.
Speaker 21: Here ye, here ye here ye.
Speaker 1: Impeachment too, is a relic from the Middle Ages.
Speaker 21: All persons are commanded to keep silence on pain of imprisonment.
Speaker 21: While the Senate of the United States is sitting for
Speaker 21: the trial of the article of impeachment exhibited by the
Speaker 21: House of Representatives against Donald John Trump, former President of
Speaker 21: the United States.
Speaker 1: England's parliament invented impeachment in the fourteenth century. In seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty seven, the framers of the American Constitution, meeting in Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: decided to add an impeachment clause because impeachment and conviction
Speaker 1: was the only way to stop a president from declaring
Speaker 1: himself ruler for life like a king. Jamie Raskin, congressman
Speaker 1: from Maryland, led the prosecution for the House in a
Speaker 1: trial where members of the Senate sat acting like a jury.
Speaker 8: You will not be hearing extended lectures for me because
Speaker 8: our case is based.
Speaker 15: On cold, hard facts.
Speaker 1: Trump's lawyers argued that Trump hadn't incited an insurrection at all.
Speaker 8: And if we buy this radical argument the president Trump's
Speaker 8: lawyers advance, we risk allowing January sixth to become our future.
Speaker 15: And what will that mean for America. I'll show you.
Speaker 1: Raskin played that video. Trumps lawyers played some of their
Speaker 1: own video, but nearly everyone in the Senate had already
Speaker 1: decided how they'd vote, and there was little suspense.
Speaker 20: These are fifty seven. The day's are forty three, two
Speaker 20: thirds of the senator's president not having guilty. The state
Speaker 20: judge is that the respond to Donald John Trump, former
Speaker 20: President of the United States, is not guilty as charged
Speaker 20: in the article of impeachment.
Speaker 1: The vote fell short of the supermajority required to convict,
Speaker 1: even though there is no more clear cut case for impeachment,
Speaker 1: no more indisputable evidence than an armed insurrection incited by
Speaker 1: the executive branch to stop the legislative branch from certifying
Speaker 1: an election. In the aftermath of the insurrection and the impeachment,
Speaker 1: a buzzphrase emerged, the big lie. Republicans kept insisting that
Speaker 1: the election had been stolen. Democrats took to calling this
Speaker 1: the big lie, but Republicans said the big lie was
Speaker 1: the idea that Joe Biden was the lawful president. A
Speaker 1: lot of progressives talked about another kind of big lie,
Speaker 1: the lie that white people matter more than black people.
Speaker 1: That move harkened back to something James Baldwin had said
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 14: The curriculum my color is what you use to avoid
Speaker 14: facing the fact of our common history, the facts of
Speaker 14: American life.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty, Princeton historian Eddie Glaud Junior updated Baldwin's argument.
Speaker 16: America is so wilfully ignorant, right, And it's willfully ignorant
Speaker 16: because it wants to protect its innocence. As Baldwin says,
Speaker 16: it doesn't want to admit that it is not the
Speaker 16: shining city on the hill. The trouble is deeper than
Speaker 16: we wish to think, because the trouble is in us.
Speaker 1: The trouble is in us and the lies we tell.
Speaker 1: He just can't pull these two lies apart. The lie
Speaker 1: about the election is the lie about white supremacy. People
Speaker 1: who say the election was stolen are generally arguing that
Speaker 1: black voters stole the election, So really there's just the
Speaker 1: one lie. But then I guess, predictably, the very expression
Speaker 1: the big lie became meaningless, the way that earlier fake
Speaker 1: news became meaningless, just another to disagree with someone. When
Speaker 1: Georgia passed a law that challenged requirements for voting, and
Speaker 1: liberals called it a voter suppression law. Conservatives said that
Speaker 1: was a big lie. Here's how crazy this is. Some
Speaker 1: people said that some other people lied, that they committed
Speaker 1: voter fraud. Then some other people said this was a lie,
Speaker 1: there was no fraud. And then the first group of
Speaker 1: people said those people were lying about the lying. And
Speaker 1: they all said all these lies with a big lie.
Speaker 1: Here in this emergency bunker and iron mountain, I feel
Speaker 1: buried beneath the weight of it all. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people feel that way. End of January, I
Speaker 1: watched the newly and actually elected Joe Biden deliverer's inaugural address.
Speaker 1: He'd started drafting his remarks in late twenty twenty, but
Speaker 1: reportedly it's quite common for Biden to revise his speeches.
Speaker 1: Up until the last moment after the insurrection, he'd had
Speaker 1: some more revising to do.
Speaker 15: There is truth.
Speaker 11: Our lies lies told for power and for profit. And
Speaker 11: each of us has a duty and a responsibility as citizens,
Speaker 11: as Americans, and especially as leaders, leaders who have pledged
Speaker 11: to honor our constitution, to protect our nation, to defend
Speaker 11: the truth and defeat the lies.
Speaker 1: Defeat the lies. I like that very much when I
Speaker 1: heard it, so did Stephen Shapen, the historian of science,
Speaker 1: and then it really worried both of us.
Speaker 17: Yes, it was beautiful. I entirely agree because I know
Speaker 17: what he meant. But it's as much as pounding the
Speaker 17: table or shouting as a way of addressing the nature
Speaker 17: of the problem. There is truth and there is lies. Yeah,
Speaker 17: who could disagree with that?
Speaker 1: Pounding on the table is not enough. Saying I tell
Speaker 1: the truth, you tell lies is not enough, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't work. This season of the Last Archive has been
Speaker 1: a long hundred years, from the Scope's Trial to Ripley's
Speaker 1: Believe It or Not, from the War of the Worlds
Speaker 1: to Axis Sally in Tokyo, Rose Maury Bernstein, the mid centuries, Fengali,
Speaker 1: the Moon Hoax, Soviet propaganda, and Rest in Peace Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 1: A problem of historical thinking is that when you look back,
Speaker 1: everything seems to lead to now, but of course now
Speaker 1: keeps changing, but the past remains the same. I've been
Speaker 1: looking for a history of mischief, the peddling of doubt,
Speaker 1: people who profited politically financially for making other people confused.
Speaker 1: What I've argued is that there really is a genealogy. Here.
Speaker 1: These people learn from one another's tricks, so it's been
Speaker 1: worth laying them all out. Here's how this trick works.
Speaker 1: Don't be fooled again. Report from Iron Mountain. It's one
Speaker 1: of the sorriest of these tricks.
Speaker 4: Impossibility war is the foundation for stable government. It supplies
Speaker 4: the basis for general acceptance of political authority.
Speaker 1: He was created as a prank, a joke. I look
Speaker 1: what a mess it helped make. I don't want to
Speaker 1: leave it just hanging near there. A hoax. So I
Speaker 1: have one more story to tell. Remember Herman Noust, the
Speaker 1: mushroom King with his mushroom shaped swimming pool. When I
Speaker 1: was thinking about Iron Mountain and came across his name,
Speaker 1: it sounded so familiar to me, Herman Noust, Herman Nous.
Speaker 1: After a while I remembered I'd once met his granddaughter.
Speaker 1: Here's how that happened. A bunch of years ago, I
Speaker 1: got obsessed with a guy named Joe Gould, who, starting
Speaker 1: more than a century ago, claimed to be writing the
Speaker 1: longest book in the history of the world. He would
Speaker 1: do this by making his own last archive, writing down
Speaker 1: every word that anyone ever said to him. His book
Speaker 1: was supposed to be called The Oral History of Our Time.
Speaker 1: Apart from literary merit, it will have future value as
Speaker 1: a storehouse of information, he would say. Later people said
Speaker 1: this book never existed, that Gould had just talked about it,
Speaker 1: had never written a word of it. Gould, it turned out,
Speaker 1: was insane. He was in fact a psychopath. But long
Speaker 1: after Gould's death, when I heard about The Oral History
Speaker 1: of Our Time, I went looking for the manuscript. I
Speaker 1: went digging, tunneling through archives, and weirdly, believe it or not,
Speaker 1: I found it, or at least I found a part
Speaker 1: of it in a notebook deep in the archives of
Speaker 1: the New York Public Library. Gould had destroyed most of
Speaker 1: the manuscript, but it had mainly been about one person,
Speaker 1: a black artist named Augustus Savage. And she's the real story,
Speaker 1: the true report from Iron Mountain. Augusta Savage had been
Speaker 1: a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: and nineteen thirties. She'd started her own studio. She'd been
Speaker 1: commissioned to create a work about black Americans for the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine World's Fair. She'd been featured in Life magazine,
Speaker 1: but then she met Joe Gould. He began to stalk
Speaker 1: her everywhere she went. There's some evidence that he raped her.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen forties, she disappeared. She went into hiding.
Speaker 1: I found that she'd moved to upstate New York, where
Speaker 1: she had lived at first in a tiny, run down
Speaker 1: house without plumbing or electricity. She turned a chicken coop
Speaker 1: into a studio. Then she got a job at Iron
Speaker 1: Mounted Storage company. Augusta Savage is dead now and her
Speaker 1: house is being turned into a museum run by Herman
Speaker 1: Noust's granddaughter. Augusta Savage worked at Iron Mountain, but also
Speaker 1: every week Herman Nelson's son brought her clay, He bought
Speaker 1: her a car, He had a kitchen installed in her house.
Speaker 1: Had electricity run out there. She'd come to the family's estate,
Speaker 1: the one with the mushrooms shaped swimming pool, to recite poetry.
Speaker 1: But meanwhile she destroyed much of her own art. She
Speaker 1: went in the city mainly just to collect her old
Speaker 1: work and destroy it. She apparently sent a man to
Speaker 1: retrieve a bust that she'd made of W. B. D
Speaker 1: Boys and then reportedly smashed it. The story of Augustus Savage,
Speaker 1: that's my report from Iron Mountain. I wrote a book
Speaker 1: about all that. It's called Joe Gould's Teeth. A lot
Speaker 1: of the Last Archive is like Joe Gould's teeth. A
Speaker 1: lot of history is like Joe Gould's teeth. Tragic and
Speaker 1: maddening stories about loss and destruction, not leading to some
Speaker 1: glorious or terrible present, just sad. When I went out
Speaker 1: to that chicken coop that had become Augustus Savage's studio,
Speaker 1: the ground was still covered with smashed bits of her sculpture.
Speaker 1: Her voice, like her art, is lost. But I'm tired
Speaker 1: of hidden and smashed history. I'm tired of bunkers, tunnels
Speaker 1: and vaults, underground layers and ridiculous conspiracy. It's time to
Speaker 1: dig out, time to climb up, time to get out,
Speaker 1: time to figure it out. You can study history for
Speaker 1: its own sake, curl around in attics to seek the truth,
Speaker 1: rifle through the pages of old books, bury yourself in
Speaker 1: every last archive. But you can also study history to
Speaker 1: learn how to solve problems. Pry open the door of
Speaker 1: the vault and creep out. Bring the knowledge of the
Speaker 1: place where the known things go, and carry it outside.
Speaker 1: Escape the corridor of the mind for the Messy, angry,
Speaker 1: half wrecked, beautiful World. The Last Archive is written and
Speaker 1: hosted by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane
Speaker 1: mckibbon and ben Natta Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: and our executive producer is Mia Obel. Martin Gonzalez is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by
Speaker 1: Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphinette. Our research
Speaker 1: assistants are Kamanie Pantheer and Lily Richmond are full Proof
Speaker 1: players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorn, Matthias Bossi, Dan Epstein,
Speaker 1: Ethan Hruschenfeld, Becca A. Lewis, Andrew Perella, Robert mccotta, and
Speaker 1: Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin
Speaker 1: Industries Head Pushkin Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnarz,
Speaker 1: Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostack, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Maya Kainig and Daniella La Khan. Special thanks to Carla
Speaker 1: and Noustelaiah and Simon Leak, and thanks to Shola Lynch
Speaker 1: at the Schomberg Center. If you like the show, please
Speaker 1: remember to rate, share, and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
Speaker 1: listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. I'm Jill Labour.