Speaker 1: Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the known
Speaker 1: things go, a corridor of the mind, lined with shelves,
Speaker 1: cluttered with proof. I'm hiding in here. Who's out there?
Speaker 1: What do they what do they want? It sounds so angry.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure they can get in. I don't see
Speaker 1: how I can get out. I think I might be trapped.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we
Speaker 1: know what we know and why it sometimes seems lately
Speaker 1: as if we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapoor.
Speaker 1: This season, I've been trying to trace the history of
Speaker 1: doubt over the course of the last century, building that
Speaker 1: history block by block, a tower of doubt. Not too
Speaker 1: long ago, it all came crashing down. It was the
Speaker 1: beginning of the year twenty twenty one. Every archive of
Speaker 1: knowledge seemed to be under attack, embattled universities, courthouses, press rooms,
Speaker 1: even Congress. But I found it the last Archives. Escape hatch.
Speaker 1: Come through with me. We'll have to go through a
Speaker 1: war and of underground tunnels. We'll get there. We're heading
Speaker 1: to a place called Iron Mountain. Something I love about history,
Speaker 1: all the surprises, the twists and turns. So I'm starting
Speaker 1: with a story that has so many turns. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, a German immigrant named Hermann Naust purchased an
Speaker 1: abandoned iron ore mine in New York State near the
Speaker 1: Hudson River. Inside its caves and old mining tunnels, Naust
Speaker 1: grew mushrooms. The voice was perfect for it. The mushrooms
Speaker 1: Mushroomednust began supplying the city with mushrooms, and he made
Speaker 1: a fortune. People called him the mushroom King. At his
Speaker 1: house he had the only mushroom shaped swimming pool in
Speaker 1: the world. In nineteen fifty one, Neust adapted his caves
Speaker 1: and mines and tunnels for a new business. He founded
Speaker 1: the Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation. Because at the time
Speaker 1: Americans were crazy for bomb shelters. School children were ducking
Speaker 1: and covering to prepare for a nuclear attack. Herman Naust
Speaker 1: outed them all. An atomic bomb expert called Neust's vault
Speaker 1: the safest place in the world. A thirty ton door
Speaker 1: equipped with a time lock will guard one of the
Speaker 1: main passages in which four one hundred vaults are located.
Speaker 1: During the initial phase of the enterprise, already foreign banks
Speaker 1: have applied for storage space behind the massive door. Museums
Speaker 1: also are expected to seek protection for their placeless art treasures.
Speaker 1: In the atmosphere of international tension, banked files and records
Speaker 1: begin to find their way into the sanctuary. You could
Speaker 1: put your most valuable documents there, wills, photographs, legal papers.
Speaker 1: The company grew and grew a Cold War knowledge vault,
Speaker 1: a last archive along the Hudson. These days, Iron Mountain
Speaker 1: is still in business. It's a global records management company,
Speaker 1: the world's biggest, with a four billion dollar annual revenue
Speaker 1: and facilities in more than fifty countries. You might have
Speaker 1: seen their trucks with a blue triangular logo. I see
Speaker 1: those trucks all the time, rumbling up and down the road.
Speaker 1: Iron Mountain stores everything, including the records of nearly every
Speaker 1: fortune one thousand company. They've also got Frank Sinatra's original
Speaker 1: recordings and Charles Dickens's last will and testament. Back in
Speaker 1: the scariest years of the Cold War, though Iron Mountain
Speaker 1: Atomic Storage offered something more than storage. It offered secrecy.
Speaker 1: Iron Mountain, under a blanket of iron ore alternate underground
Speaker 1: headquarters for corporations that ad ran in nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: the year of the Cuban missile crisis. If you own
Speaker 1: a company and wanted to hold a top secret meeting,
Speaker 1: why not hold it in hidden conference room's deep underground
Speaker 1: Doctor Evil style. Or you might want to hold your
Speaker 1: meetings down there if you were to say a super
Speaker 1: secret government agency. In nineteen sixty seven, a few years
Speaker 1: after Iron Mountain advertised its secret Layer meeting service, a
Speaker 1: little book appeared in bookstores. It was called Report from
Speaker 1: Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. The
Speaker 1: book described itself as the record of a fifteen man
Speaker 1: special study group that had gathered at Iron Mountain in
Speaker 1: those top secret underground meeting rooms. And here was the
Speaker 1: book's bombshell. It was never supposed to be published, but
Speaker 1: someone had leaked it. A member of the secret group
Speaker 1: identified only as a professor of social science from a
Speaker 1: large middlewestern university. The report itself was totally wonky wonky
Speaker 1: but shocking. The permanent possibility of war is the foundation
Speaker 1: for stable government. It supplies the basis for general acceptance
Speaker 1: of political authority. The special study group had been convened,
Speaker 1: it was said, in response to a peace scare. Members
Speaker 1: of the group talked about how devastating it would be
Speaker 1: if the United States were ever for any length of
Speaker 1: time at peace. As if the only thing that kept
Speaker 1: the American people from shaking off the chains of their
Speaker 1: submission was war. Endless war, it has ensured the subordination
Speaker 1: of the citizen to the state. No modern political ruling
Speaker 1: group has successfully controlled its constituency. After failing to sustain
Speaker 1: the continuing credibility of an external threat of war, report
Speaker 1: from Iron Mountain concluded that the US needed to keep
Speaker 1: those wars coming. But if, given the growing anti war movement,
Speaker 1: a dreaded peace did descend upon the land, there were
Speaker 1: still ways for the US government to find substitutes for
Speaker 1: functions of war. This is so crazy, I'm going to
Speaker 1: explain it again. According to this report, the US government
Speaker 1: was trying desperately to keep the nation at war, but
Speaker 1: if their worst fears were realized and peace came, they
Speaker 1: had other options other ways to stifle discontent. A comprehensive
Speaker 1: social welfare program, a giant open end space research program
Speaker 1: aimed at unreachable targets and established and recognized extra terrestrial menace,
Speaker 1: massive global environmental pollution, fictitious alternate enemies, bully moonshot Batman.
Speaker 1: This leaked report was hot, hot hot. It became a
Speaker 1: best seller on the New York Times list was translated
Speaker 1: into fifteen languages. Esquire published an excerpt. Of course. People
Speaker 1: tried to find that Midwestern social science professor who leaked it,
Speaker 1: and they wanted to know which government department had commissioned it.
Speaker 1: A reporter from The New York Times called around to
Speaker 1: the White House under the State Department and then noted,
Speaker 1: no advanced reviewer has flatly labeled the book fiction. People
Speaker 1: who read it were incensed, but report from Iron Mountain
Speaker 1: proved very difficult to verify, even though some people thought
Speaker 1: the whole thing was just a hoax. If it's authentic,
Speaker 1: it's an enormous, roaring scandal, one scholar told The New
Speaker 1: York Times. If it's caricature, it's a brilliant job. Eventually,
Speaker 1: most people forgot about it, but then in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: another government report was leaked to the press. This weekend,
Speaker 1: portions of a classified Pentagon document came the light for
Speaker 1: all the world to see, brought cries of outrage from Washington.
Speaker 1: The New York Times began publishing parts of a voluminous
Speaker 1: report that the Pentagon had drawn up on the causes
Speaker 1: and conduct of American involvement in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers
Speaker 1: revealed decades of lying by the federal government to the
Speaker 1: public about what had really been going on in the
Speaker 1: war in Vietnam. Senator George McGovern, a leading critic of
Speaker 1: the war, called the report and we quote, a story
Speaker 1: of almost incredible deception. This is where this history gets twisty, Tourney.
Speaker 1: The publication of the Pentagon Papers brought the authors of
Speaker 1: the Report from Iron Mountain out into the open, because,
Speaker 1: unlike the Pentagon Papers, which were entirely real, the Report
Speaker 1: from Iron Mountain was in fact entirely made up. So
Speaker 1: just to be extra extra clear here, there never was
Speaker 1: any special study group, had never met at Iron Mountain,
Speaker 1: and this recording, no modern political ruling group has successfully
Speaker 1: controlled its constituency 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
Speaker 1: hoax intended as a satire. It involved some pretty high
Speaker 1: level people. Even the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith was
Speaker 1: in on it. But Lewin confessed I wrote the report,
Speaker 1: all of it. The charade is over. The idea had
Speaker 1: come from Victor Navasky, a leftist writer who later became
Speaker 1: Editor of the Nation, who was all a lark, an
Speaker 1: angry one. As Navasky told NPRS Fresh Air in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six, the idea for a report from Iron Mountain
Speaker 1: came to me one day when I saw a little
Speaker 1: headline in the newspaper saying that the stock market had
Speaker 1: fallen abruptly because of a peace scare. And we got
Speaker 1: an idea to do a book about the quashing of
Speaker 1: a report which was commissioned by the White House to
Speaker 1: plan the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy.
Speaker 1: And we would do a kind of hoax book about
Speaker 1: what happened when the commission concluded that the economy would
Speaker 1: collapse if peace really broke out. The Report from Iron
Speaker 1: Mountain hoax brought the storage company Iron Mountain, the real place,
Speaker 1: a lot of grief, and it wasn't fair because, let
Speaker 1: me be clear, the storage company had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with this hoax. But meanwhile the Hoax Report had acquired
Speaker 1: a huge following among conspiracy theorists. They read it as
Speaker 1: incriminating evidence. They put it on their bookshelves, and when
Speaker 1: the authors revealed themselves to be pranksters, it didn't change anything.
Speaker 1: A lot of conspiracy minded fans of the book simply
Speaker 1: refused to believe this new turn of events. They just
Speaker 1: couldn't take that book out of the mental box that
Speaker 1: said government report written in secret underground bunker and put
Speaker 1: it in the box that said hooks. They were still
Speaker 1: talking about it decades later, like in this nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: three video cassette Blueprint for Tyranny. Welcome to the Report
Speaker 1: from Iron Mountain. This report is something you would never
Speaker 1: believe unless you read it. Peace in reality equals world socialism,
Speaker 1: as we will find out as we journey through this report.
Speaker 1: If anything, conspiracy theorists cherish 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 and Oklahoma City, some
Speaker 1: of those right wing conspiracy theorists staged and insurrection. The
Speaker 1: exploded off around nine am, and we can feel the
Speaker 1: explosion mimmy newsroom of our channel nine ELW Holy Cow.
Speaker 1: About a third of the building has 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 Pmor Federal Building, killing one hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: eight people, including nineteen very little children at a daycare center.
Speaker 1: The explosion injured hundreds more. And we can also give
Speaker 1: you a bit of a hint now as to where
Speaker 1: the government appears to be focusing its investigation on some
Speaker 1: of the what are called right wing white supremacist groups
Speaker 1: in various parts of the country. Eventually, two men were
Speaker 1: charged with eleven federal crimes. They were the sort of
Speaker 1: guys who believed that the report from Iron Mountain was real.
Speaker 1: The indictment charges that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, former
Speaker 1: Army buddies with a grudge against the government, planned the bombing,
Speaker 1: selected the Mura Federal Building in Oklahoma City as their target,
Speaker 1: bought and stole materials for the bomb and build 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 mainly 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. Inside mcveagh's Yellow
Speaker 1: Mercury Sedan, investigators discovered a sealed envelope containing evidence that
Speaker 1: would prove crucial to analyzing mcvay's motivations, highlighted passages from
Speaker 1: the anti government novel The Turner Diaries. The Turner Diaries
Speaker 1: is a nineteen seventy eight novel by an avowed American
Speaker 1: neo Nazi. It includes a detailed account of somebody building
Speaker 1: an explosive device, putting it into a truck, and driving
Speaker 1: it up to a federal building. McVeigh seemed to have
Speaker 1: treated The Turner Diaries as an instruction manual in a
Speaker 1: similar way, a lot of his fellow extremists considered Report
Speaker 1: from Iron Mountain as some kind of decoder ring. When
Speaker 1: Magazine reported it has become required reading for militias, Nazi sympathizers,
Speaker 1: and other right wing types who deny that it's a
Speaker 1: hoax and cited as evidence of plans for a new
Speaker 1: world order. The instigator of the hoax, Victor Navasky, was horrified,
Speaker 1: as he explained on Fresh Air, he had found out
Speaker 1: that Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist group, had reprinted the
Speaker 1: report and was to them a kind of bible. They
Speaker 1: were so persuaded that the report was the real thing
Speaker 1: that they didn't bother to get copyright permission to reprint it,
Speaker 1: and had reprinted it as if it were a government
Speaker 1: document and we're selling it. Navasky's original partner in crime,
Speaker 1: Leonard Lewin, sued Liberty Lobby and reached a settlement. In
Speaker 1: the end, they had to surrender to him their copies
Speaker 1: of report from Iron Mountain, who unstashed them in his basement.
Speaker 1: But it was too late to stop this left wing
Speaker 1: hoax turned right wing conspiracy. Navasky wrote in the Nation
Speaker 1: about its acceptance by superpatriots and conspiracy theorists of the
Speaker 1: far right. He said that they're taking it seriously was
Speaker 1: the scariest proposition of all. It has since gotten even scarier.
Speaker 1: Since the nineteen nineties, the Report from Iron Mountain has
Speaker 1: passed from generation to generation like some kind of scripture.
Speaker 1: On the sixth of January twenty twenty one, the day
Speaker 1: insurrectionists attacked the US capital, some creep on four Chan
Speaker 1: posted in the cavalierly ugly language in this hideous corner
Speaker 1: of the Internet, read the Report from Iron Mountain, you
Speaker 1: brainless retard. These days you'll still find Report from Iron
Speaker 1: Mountain on far right white supremacist reading lists with no
Speaker 1: mention that it was a left wing hoax. And now
Speaker 1: it has a new reading list companion, the writings of
Speaker 1: Q the anonymous alleged insider who drops clues about all
Speaker 1: the evil goings on inside the government. Just recently I
Speaker 1: called up Victor Navasky. He's nearly ninety. It was really
Speaker 1: good of him to talk to me. We both found
Speaker 1: like we're under Iron Mountain. Though, because the phone line
Speaker 1: is pretty bad. It's a fantasy to believe that it's true.
Speaker 1: And I think qan On is guilty of its own fantasies.
Speaker 1: Do you think if someone presented himself to the world
Speaker 1: tomorrow and said, I am que and I can prove
Speaker 1: that I am QUE and I was just joking the
Speaker 1: whole time, and it got out of hand. None of
Speaker 1: this is true. Would there be any way I'm doing
Speaker 1: what had been done? I don't think so myself. I
Speaker 1: think that's where we are as a culture. And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the Q and On report goes something like this. An
Speaker 1: insider decides to spill the beans about a secret government
Speaker 1: run conspiracy, something to do with Satan and pedophiles. He
Speaker 1: leaks some clues in a report, and then report after report,
Speaker 1: and the people who read those reports, those postings by
Speaker 1: this anonymous QUE become passionately attached to the idea of
Speaker 1: a conspiracy, and within the logic of that conspiracy, they're
Speaker 1: being denied access to knowledge, some secret body of knowledge
Speaker 1: hidden away that only the people in power have access to,
Speaker 1: and that the followers of Q have to hunt down
Speaker 1: and piece together clue by clue, Q by Q. Q
Speaker 1: isn't true. Also, I don't buy either of the two
Speaker 1: big headlines about Q and On that it's new or
Speaker 1: that it's uniquely powerful. That's what I've been trying to
Speaker 1: argue by going over the story of the report from
Speaker 1: Iron Mountain. This stuff isn't new, it's not all powerful,
Speaker 1: and it has never ever been a secret. This election
Speaker 1: will be the most rigged election in history. That is
Speaker 1: a lie, an old fashioned lie, but it's also a
Speaker 1: complex lie. The sort of lie that brings together every
Speaker 1: kind of doubt whose rise I've been chronicling all season long,
Speaker 1: has little boats of doubt, rowboats, canoes. They become a
Speaker 1: fleet of flotilla in Armada. They're sending millions of ballots
Speaker 1: all over the country. There's fraud. They found him in creeks.
Speaker 1: They found some with the name Trump. Just happened to
Speaker 1: have the name Trump just the other day in a
Speaker 1: waste paper basket. This is going to be a fraud
Speaker 1: like you've never seen. It was awful to watch this
Speaker 1: unfold in the months leading up to the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: election and in the months afterward, to watch it spread
Speaker 1: on the internet and hear it from the mouth of
Speaker 1: the US President. He said it again and again and again.
Speaker 1: If enough people in public and in positions of authority
Speaker 1: lie about something for long enough, people will believe it.
Speaker 1: Watching it all, I felt as if my brain was unrewind. 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 Chapin, Emeritus Professor of the History of Science
Speaker 1: at Harvard. Chapin 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 asked him to
Speaker 1: read my favorite lines. Knowledge is a collective good. In
Speaker 1: securing our knowledge, we rely upon others, and we cannot
Speaker 1: dispense without reliance. That means that the relations in which
Speaker 1: we have and hold our knowledge have a moral character.
Speaker 1: And the word I used to indicate that moral relation
Speaker 1: is trust. He argues that you can't actually you know
Speaker 1: anything alone. You can only know things with other people.
Speaker 1: He doesn't think the United States or the world is
Speaker 1: experiencing a crisis of truth. He thinks it would be
Speaker 1: better called a crisis of social knowledge. For example, and
Speaker 1: in particular around climate change. I know something about the
Speaker 1: loss of biodiversity and species, about melting icebergs, about sea
Speaker 1: level rise. Okay, now someone puts pressure on me and say,
Speaker 1: how do I know these things? I don't think any
Speaker 1: of us know these things directly. So the knowledge that
Speaker 1: I need to know these things is to know who
Speaker 1: to believe, who has credibility, who has authority 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 has killed truth.
Speaker 1: Instead we have this crisis of trust. But how did
Speaker 1: people stop knowing who to trust? One answer to that
Speaker 1: question involves the unintended consequences of new technologies of communication.
Speaker 1: We've 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 bolton 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 1: So there's a million voices they're screaming out there, but
Speaker 1: any any body or any group of like mind that
Speaker 1: people are listening to some and not to others. So
Speaker 1: there's another kind of question about what for us is
Speaker 1: audible and what for them is audible? Right, But then
Speaker 1: that metaphor of audibility and voice voice also meaning vote
Speaker 1: you know has the implications for democracy, which is to
Speaker 1: say we will hear all the voices, and that we
Speaker 1: will we will automate a system wherein we hear everyone
Speaker 1: who's enfranchised. But then now we're in a crisis of
Speaker 1: democracy around people not feeling heard. Right. I mean, if
Speaker 1: we just think about the siege of the capital and
Speaker 1: if you listen to interviews with those people, we're here
Speaker 1: to have our voices heard. A democratic project. Everyone has
Speaker 1: a voice, Well, we've heard them now. Still, the argument
Speaker 1: that technology allows fakers and haters to find each other
Speaker 1: more easily, Stephen Shapin thinks that's just too glib. It's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons I love talking with him. He
Speaker 1: got me thinking harder about another argument to explain what
Speaker 1: has happened to Americans and trust over the past century.
Speaker 1: That argument is political. It involves what one set of
Speaker 1: political actors have done to institutions over time in order
Speaker 1: to shift the balance of power in their favor. Do
Speaker 1: you mean to say the Supreme Court decision is null
Speaker 1: and void? No, it Supreme Court decision is not necessarily
Speaker 1: the law all the land. The Constitution still is. That's
Speaker 1: Republican Senator Barry Goldwater making a conservative argument that the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court had overstepped in its decision to abolish segregation
Speaker 1: 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. They interpreted by that action that it was
Speaker 1: wrong to have segregation. Now, they didn't spell out what
Speaker 1: was to be done. Other Conservatives went after institutions of
Speaker 1: higher learning. William F. Buckley led the assault against the Academy,
Speaker 1: beginning with this nineteen fifty one book, God and Man
Speaker 1: at Yale. I would well have be governed by the
Speaker 1: first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory and
Speaker 1: by the two thousand people on the faculty of all
Speaker 1: the university. Buckley said, whatever you do, don't trust the professors.
Speaker 1: The third front in this war on institutions of knowledge
Speaker 1: was an attack on the press. This began with the
Speaker 1: Nixon administration, and most famously with a speech given by
Speaker 1: his vice president, Spiro Agnew in nineteen sixty nine. Whatever
Speaker 1: you do, Agnew said, don't trust the press. These men
Speaker 1: can create national issues overnight. They can elevate men from
Speaker 1: obscurity to national prominence within a week. They can reward
Speaker 1: some politicians with national exposure and ignore others. The courts,
Speaker 1: the universities, the press. Conservatives believed that to defeat liberalism
Speaker 1: they needed to conquer these institutions of knowledge to story
Speaker 1: trust in them. The left has contributed a whole lot
Speaker 1: to this epistemological unraveling, too, but conservatives have been playing
Speaker 1: a long game. This, ever, took years and years, and
Speaker 1: eventually they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They took over
Speaker 1: the courts, or at least the federal judiciary. I'm honored
Speaker 1: and humbled to appear before you today as a nominee
Speaker 1: for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. They built their
Speaker 1: own press. Your mask is making me uncomfortable, and they
Speaker 1: undermined the university, especially scientific inquiry. So here we are,
Speaker 1: decades later, on the other side of this slow rolling revolution,
Speaker 1: a world where there is very little left of what
Speaker 1: used to be called common knowledge. This brings us to
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty presidential election. Those mail and bat could
Speaker 1: have been written the day before by the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: hatch that will roll over the Convention Center. Sure are
Speaker 1: lots of people in positions of power and authority said
Speaker 1: the election of Joe Biden was free and fair, the
Speaker 1: most secure election in American history. The Court said that
Speaker 1: 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. Covered barely by the media, and
Speaker 1: the media is the biggest problem we haven't haven't. The
Speaker 1: sixth of January twenty twenty one, it was the Christian
Speaker 1: holiday of Epiphany, marking the day the three Kings visited
Speaker 1: Jesus in the Manger, and Epiphany is a moment when
Speaker 1: all is revealed. In Washington, thousands of people gathered for
Speaker 1: a rally to save America, cheering President Trump and damning
Speaker 1: the press. Meanwhile, down the street, inside the Capitol, a
Speaker 1: joint session of Congress was meeting to certify the results
Speaker 1: of the presidential election, an election that would send Trump
Speaker 1: packing in two weeks time. And after this, we're gonna
Speaker 1: walk down and I'll be there with you. We're gonna
Speaker 1: walk down to the Capitol and we're gonna cheer on.
Speaker 1: They never seen us. We are We're off the Trump
Speaker 1: four more years. They marched to the Capitol, waving Trump
Speaker 1: flags and Confederate battle flags, wearing maga hats and superhero
Speaker 1: costumes and camouflage and bulletproof vests. You probably saw all this.
Speaker 1: The crowd started pulling down the barricades, flimsy fences, climbed
Speaker 1: the stairs, scaled the scaffolding. They beat up Capitol police,
Speaker 1: smashed windows, crashed through doors. They've broke into the Capitol.
Speaker 1: For people who study right wing extremism and have read
Speaker 1: the neo Nazi novel The Turner Diaries, everything that happened
Speaker 1: that day was eerily familiar because that book describes an
Speaker 1: attack on the capital this way. The real value of
Speaker 1: all our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not
Speaker 1: in the immediate casualties. More important, though, is what we
Speaker 1: taught the politicians and the bureaucrats. They learned this afternoon
Speaker 1: that not one of them is beyond our reach. The
Speaker 1: decades long conservative attack on institutions of knowledge, the press,
Speaker 1: the courts, universities, it had come down to this day
Speaker 1: when these people did not believe in the outcome of
Speaker 1: an election, or believed it and wanted to overturn it.
Speaker 1: For weeks, Trump supporters had been trying and failing to
Speaker 1: challenge the results and counties where lots of black people voted.
Speaker 1: They were especially mad about Georgia, wherein runoff elections a
Speaker 1: Jewish man and a black man had just won seats
Speaker 1: in the US Senate. Drug about on the fucking hair, Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: the fucking w It was a riot, a white race riot,
Speaker 1: and yet horrible as it was. The insurrection on the
Speaker 1: sixth of January, Epiphany looked like it might be another
Speaker 1: kind of epiphany, a day when people could finally see clearly,
Speaker 1: a revelation at last that all the lying wasn't harmless.
Speaker 1: There seemed at first to be real consequences. The President
Speaker 1: was banned from Twitter. Later, the House impeached him for
Speaker 1: a second time. President Trump gravely endangered the security of
Speaker 1: the United States and its institutions of government. He threatened
Speaker 1: the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful
Speaker 1: transition of power, and imperiled coequal branch of government. He
Speaker 1: thereby betrayed his trust as president to the manifest injury
Speaker 1: of the people of the United The charges went to
Speaker 1: the Senate for a trial. Last year, the first season
Speaker 1: of The Last Archive, I started out with a trial,
Speaker 1: remember Lucien a broadwell strangled in Barry, Vermont. I started
Speaker 1: this show there because I wanted to explain a bit
Speaker 1: of crucial history. Most of our ideas about how to
Speaker 1: decide what's true and what's not true come from the
Speaker 1: thirteenth century. But the rise of trial by jury. Two
Speaker 1: sides take turns presenting evidence, and a jury decides the
Speaker 1: verdict the truth har ye har ye har ye. Impeachment
Speaker 1: two is a relic from the Middle Ages. All persons
Speaker 1: are commanded to keep silence on pain of imprisonment. While
Speaker 1: the Senate of the United States is sitting for the
Speaker 1: trial of the article of impeachment exhibited by the House
Speaker 1: of Representatives against Donald John Trump, former President by the
Speaker 1: United States. England's parliament invented impeachment in the forteenth century.
Speaker 1: In seventeen eighty seven, the framers of the American Constitution,
Speaker 1: meeting in Philadelphia, decided to add an impeachment clause because
Speaker 1: impeachment and conviction was the only way to stop a
Speaker 1: president from declaring himself ruler for life like a king.
Speaker 1: Jamie Raskin, congressman from Maryland, led the prosecution for the
Speaker 1: House in a trial where members of the Senate sat
Speaker 1: acting like a jury. You will not be hearing extended
Speaker 1: lecturers for me, because our case is based on cold,
Speaker 1: hard facts. Trump's lawyers argued that Trump hadn't incited an
Speaker 1: insurrection at all, and if we buy this radical argument
Speaker 1: that President Trump's lawyers advance, we risk allowing January sixth
Speaker 1: to become our future. And what will that mean for America.
Speaker 1: I'll show you. Raskin played that video. Trump's lawyers played
Speaker 1: some of their own video, But nearly everyone in the
Speaker 1: Senate had already decided how they'd vote, and there was
Speaker 1: little suspense. The yay's are fifty seven, the nays are
Speaker 1: forty three, two thirds of the senators. President not having
Speaker 1: poured guilty. The Senator judges that the responded Donald John Trump,
Speaker 1: former President of United States, is not guilty as charged
Speaker 1: the article of impeachment. The vote fell short of the
Speaker 1: supermajority required to convict, even though there is no more
Speaker 1: clear cut case for impeachment, no more indisputable evidence than
Speaker 1: an armed insurrection, and cited by the executive branch to
Speaker 1: stop the legislative branch from certifying an election. In the
Speaker 1: aftermath of the insurrection and the impeachment, a buzz phrase emerged,
Speaker 1: the big lie. Republicans kept insisting that the election had
Speaker 1: been stolen. Democrats took to calling this the big lie,
Speaker 1: but Republicans said the big lie was the idea that
Speaker 1: Joe Biden was the lawful president. A lot of progressives
Speaker 1: talked about another kind of big lie, the lie that
Speaker 1: white people matter more than black people. That move hearkened
Speaker 1: back to something James Baldwin had said in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: the character of my color is what you use to
Speaker 1: avoid facing the facts of our common history, the facts
Speaker 1: of American life. In twenty twenty, Princeton historian Eddie Gloud Jr.
Speaker 1: Updated Baldwin's argument America is so willfully ignorant, right, And
Speaker 1: it's willfully ignorant because it wants to protect its innocence.
Speaker 1: As Baldwin says, it doesn't want to admit that it
Speaker 1: is not the shining city on the hilling. The trouble
Speaker 1: is deeper than we wish to think. Because the trouble
Speaker 1: isn't us. The trouble isn't 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 way to disagree with someone.
Speaker 1: When Georgia passed a law that challenged requirements for voting,
Speaker 1: and liberals called it a voter suppression law, conservatives said
Speaker 1: that was a big lie. Here's how crazy this is.
Speaker 1: Some people said that some other people lied that they
Speaker 1: committed voter fraud. Then some other people said this was
Speaker 1: a lie, there was no fraud, And then the first
Speaker 1: group of people said those people were lying about the lying,
Speaker 1: and they all said all these lies with a big lie.
Speaker 1: Here in this submergency 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 deliver his
Speaker 1: inaugural address. He'd started drafting his remarks in late twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: but 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. There is truth and there
Speaker 1: are lies, lies told for power and for profit, and
Speaker 1: egy of us has a duty and responsibility as citizens,
Speaker 1: as Americans, and especially as leaders, leaders who have pledged
Speaker 1: to honor our constitution and protect our nation, to defend
Speaker 1: the truth and defeat the lies, defeat the lies. I
Speaker 1: like that very much when I heard it, so did
Speaker 1: Stephen Shapen, the historian of science and then had really
Speaker 1: worried both of us. Yes, it was beautiful. I entirely agree,
Speaker 1: because I know what he meant. But it's as much
Speaker 1: as pounding the table or shouting as a way of
Speaker 1: addressing the nature of the problem. There is truth and
Speaker 1: there is lies. Yeah, who could disagree with that. Pounding
Speaker 1: on the table is not enough. Saying I tell the truth,
Speaker 1: you tell lies is not enough, and it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: This season of the Last Archive has been a long
Speaker 1: hundred years, from the Scopes Trial to Ripley's Believe It
Speaker 1: or Not, from the War of the World to Access
Speaker 1: Sally in Tokyo, Rose Maury Bernstein, the mid centuries, Bengali,
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. The permanent possibility war
Speaker 1: is the foundation for stable government. It supplies the basis
Speaker 1: for general acceptance of political authority. It was created as
Speaker 1: a prank, a joke. I like what a mess it
Speaker 1: helped make. I don't want to leave it just hanging
Speaker 1: in the air. There a hoax, So I have one
Speaker 1: more story to tell. Remember him announced the mushroom King
Speaker 1: with his mushroom shaped swimming pool. When I was thinking
Speaker 1: about Iron Mountain and came across his name, it sounded
Speaker 1: so for Millar to me, herman nous Hermannus. After a
Speaker 1: while I remembered I'd once met his granddaughter. Here's how
Speaker 1: that happened. A bunch of years ago, I got obsessed
Speaker 1: with a guy named Joe Gould, who, starting more than
Speaker 1: a century ago, claimed to be writing the longest book
Speaker 1: in the history of the world. He would do this
Speaker 1: by making his own last archive, writing down every word
Speaker 1: that anyone ever said to him. His book was supposed
Speaker 1: to be called the Oral History of our time. Apart
Speaker 1: from literary merit, it will have future value as a
Speaker 1: storehouse of information, he would say. Later, people said this
Speaker 1: 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, or at least I found a part of
Speaker 1: it in a notebook deep in the archives of the
Speaker 1: New York Public Library. Gould had destroyed most of the manuscript,
Speaker 1: but it had mainly been about one person, a black
Speaker 1: artist named Augusta Savage. And she's the real story, the
Speaker 1: true report from Iron Mountain. Augusta Savage had been a
Speaker 1: leader of the Harlem Renaissance in the nineteen twenties and
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. She'd started her own studio. She'd been commissioned
Speaker 1: to create a work about black Americans for the nineteen
Speaker 1: 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'd lived at first in a tiny Rundown house without
Speaker 1: plumbing or electricity. She turned a chicken coop into a studio.
Speaker 1: Then she got a job at Iron Mounted Storage company.
Speaker 1: Agustus Savage is dead now and her house is being
Speaker 1: turned into a museum run by herman Neust's granddaughter. Augustus
Speaker 1: Savage worked at Iron Mountain, but also every week Herman
Speaker 1: Neust's son brought her clay, He bought her a car,
Speaker 1: He had a kitchen installed in her house. Had electricity
Speaker 1: run out there. She'd come to the family's estate, the
Speaker 1: one with a mushrooms shaped swimming pool, to recite poetry,
Speaker 1: but meanwhile she'd 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 beat the boys,
Speaker 1: 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 am
Speaker 1: tired of hidden and smashed history. I'm tired of bunkers,
Speaker 1: tunnels and vaults, underground layers and ridiculous conspiracy. It's time
Speaker 1: to 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 Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane,
Speaker 1: mckibbon and Ben Natt of Hafrey. Our editor is Julia
Speaker 1: Barton and our executive producer is Mia Lobel Martin Gonzalez
Speaker 1: is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines, original music
Speaker 1: by Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Sympinett. Our
Speaker 1: research assistants are Kamani Panthier and Lily Richmond. Our full
Speaker 1: proof players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorne, Mathias Bossi, Dante,
Speaker 1: Ethan Hushenfeld, Becca A Lewis, Andrew Parella, Robert Riccotta, and
Speaker 1: Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Head Pushkin Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnarz,
Speaker 1: Carl Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostak, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig and Daniella Lacan Special thanks to Carl Annusteliah
Speaker 1: and Simon Leek, and thanks to Shola Lynch at the
Speaker 1: Schoenberg Center. If you like the show, please remember to rate,
Speaker 1: share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: I'm jillapoor Th