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ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.

Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.

[JUDGE SHOPPING?] NOPE SCOTUS

Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”

Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.

On the same call, Shackelford attacked Justice Elena Kagan as “treasonous” and “disloyal” after she endorsed an enforcement mechanism for the court’s newly adopted ethics code in a recent public appearance. He said that such an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.” (This past weekend, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she too was open to an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court.)

After the call, First Liberty sent a recording of the 45-minute conversation to some of its supporters. ProPublica and Documented obtained that recording.

Ginni Thomas did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

First Liberty Institute did not directly respond to ProPublica and Documented’s questions about the recording. Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel at First Liberty Institute, said in a statement: “First Liberty is extremely alarmed at the Leftist attacks on our democracy and judicial independence and is fighting to bring attention to this dangerous threat. It’s shameful that the political Left seems perfectly fine destroying democracy to achieve the court decisions they favor instead of working through democratic and constitutional means.”

The July 31 call led by Shackelford came shortly after President Joe Biden had announced support for a slate of far-reaching Supreme Court changes. Biden endorsed term limits for justices, a constitutional amendment reversing the court’s recent presidential immunity decision and a binding ethics code for the court’s nine members. Kagan’s comments came before Biden’s. She did not mention any of the structural proposals Biden endorsed.

On the donor call, Shackelford voiced strong opposition to various court reform proposals, including the ones floated by Biden, as well as expanding the size of the court. All of these proposals, Shackelford said, were part of “a dangerous attempt to really destroy the court, the Supreme Court.” This effort was led by “people in the progressive, extreme left” who were “upset by just a few cases,” he said.

This is not the first time that a spouse of a Supreme Court justice injected themselves into controversial political matters. Ginni Thomas sent dozens of messages after the 2020 election that echoed then-President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. In messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Thomas said “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History” and urged Trump to not concede the election. In emails to Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers, she pleaded with them to fight back against supposed fraud and send a “clean slate of Electors.” She later wrote, “The nation’s eyes are on you now. … Please consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.” (Thomas said in 2022 she regretted sending the inflammatory messages to Meadows.)

Martha-Ann Alito, the wife of Justice Samuel Alito, faced scrutiny for flying an upside-down American flag at the family’s Virginia home — a symbol used by the Stop the Steal movement that claimed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. The flag flew outside the Alito home as the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear a case related to the 2020 election. (Samuel Alito told The New York Times he had no role in flying the flag. He said his wife did it in response to “a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”)

The push to change how the court functions grew after a series of ProPublica stories showed that wealthy Republican donors have showered Thomas and Alito with free gifts and travel that they failed to disclose. Following ProPublica’s reporting, Thomas amended past disclosure reports, and the Supreme Court adopted the ethics code, its first ever.

Thomas and Alito have said they weren’t required to disclose free flights or hospitality from friends.

First Liberty has been at the forefront of a decades-long and successful effort to expand the First Amendment rights of religious groups, even as those interests can collide with other constitutional principles like maintaining the separation of church and state or providing equal protection for protected classes.

In the last several years, First Liberty has notched big victories. In June 2022, the Supreme Court’s six conservatives ruled in favor of several Maine families represented by First Liberty and the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning legal advocacy group, when it struck down the state’s ban on using public funding to pay for religious schooling.

Days later, the six conservatives ruled again in favor of a First Liberty plaintiff — in this case, a former football coach at a Washington state public high school who had been fired for praying on the field after games. The conservative majority said the coach had been wrongly removed from his job, a decision hailed by religious groups and criticized by some experts who said it would now be more difficult for public schools to keep education separate from religion.

First Liberty has also represented a bakery in Oregon whose owners refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, citing their religious beliefs; religious groups that opposed the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; and nearly three dozen Navy SEALs and military members who refused to be vaccinated for the virus on the basis of their faith. In all the cases, First Liberty’s plaintiffs won partial or full victories in lower courts or at the Supreme Court.

Shackelford, who is First Liberty’s president and CEO, has led the group for nearly three decades. His influence extends into the broader conservative movement. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a former First Liberty attorney, once called Shackelford a mentor. Shackelford has served as vice president of the Council for National Policy, an umbrella group that brings together conservative leaders and deep-pocketed donors.

He also works closely with Ziklag, the secretive network of ultrawealthy conservative Christians that aims to “take dominion” over every major sphere of influence in American culture. According to internal Ziklag newsletters obtained by ProPublica and Documented, Shackelford has participated in Supreme Court prep sessions and appeared on strategy conference calls organized by the group.

On the July 31 donor call, Shackelford kept the focus squarely on the mounting calls to reform the Supreme Court. In addition to Biden’s proposals, several groups, including prominent liberal legal outfits, have proposed other changes including term limits and stronger ethics guidelines. And earlier in July, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law said it had received a $30 million gift from the private-equity investor Jim Kohlberg to create a new project that will “seek reform of the Supreme Court.”

Shackelford described all of this — Kagan’s speech, Biden’s announcement, the $30 million donation — as if it was a coordinated effort. “They’re doing everything in their power,” he told the donors. “They’re hitting from every direction.” The “extreme left,” he explained, was “upset by just a few cases, but that’s all they need to say, ‘We’re ready to totally’ — they would call ‘reform’ or ‘restructure’ the court — but almost everything they propose would actually destroy the court.”

He aimed his fiercest criticism on the donor call at Kagan. “That is incredible, somewhat treasonous, what Kagan did,” Shackelford said. “The chief justice rules the court. They’re trying to keep the other branches’ hands off of them. And then you’ve got Kagan from the inside really being somewhat disloyal and somewhat treasonous in what she’s doing.”

Shackelford accused ProPublica of being part of a campaign to “delegitimize or get rid of the court.” He said that the ethics lapses unearthed by ProPublica’s reporting were “false” and “baseless,” even though they helped spark the creation of a new ethics code and led to Thomas filing new financial disclosure forms, in effect admitting that he had failed to disclose certain gifts.

ProPublica stands behind all of the stories in its “Friends of the Court” series. Donors do not have access to stories ahead of their publication, and they have no say over coverage decisions.

Turning to what his donors could do to help, Shackelford said that prayer was at the top of the list. “This is a spiritual battle,” he said. “Because the evil that will occur if we lose the rule of law is beyond, I think, what any of us can even think through.”

But First Liberty needed more than prayer — it also needed money. “We need resources to be able to do a bunch of the things that will make a difference between now and the next six months. And that turned out to be key last time,” he said, referring to a similar instance in 2021 and 2022.

Near the start of the Biden presidency, he said, First Liberty raised $3 million to run a campaign that sought to block efforts to add more justices to the high court and to reform or eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Getting rid of the filibuster then would’ve removed the 60-vote procedural hurdle that currently exists for most types of legislation.

According to Shackelford, First Liberty conducted polling, ran advertisements, worked with social media influencers and urged Congress to oppose these changes. In particular, Shackelford said, his group focused its activities on convincing Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to oppose filibuster reform.

In the end, both senators did just that. “We stopped this from happening,” Shackelford said. (Spokespeople for Manchin and Sinema did not respond to requests for comment.)

But now, he went on, First Liberty needed more money if it wanted to mount a similar campaign to stop Supreme Court reform. He mentioned the Brennan Center’s recent $30 million gift and then asked, “Where’s our, you know, $10 million guy or gal?”

And to anyone who wondered about the odds that Supreme Court reform would actually happen, Shackelford responded: “I don't know. I mean, 25%? 30%? Whatever it is, it’s amazing how big that is when you consider that our country will be over and the rule of law will be over.”

Before the call ended, Shackelford wanted his “very top supporters” to know that they had the support in this fight from key figures in high places. He said that a First Liberty staffer based in Washington, D.C., had recently been in a meeting with Ginni Thomas. Afterward, Thomas sent the email that praised First Liberty for joining the fight against Supreme Court reform.

“‘Great to meet through the meetings today,’” Thomas wrote, according to Shackelford, who read the email aloud to the donors. “‘I cannot adequately express enough appreciation for you guys pulling into reacting to the Biden effort on the Supreme Court,” she said, adding, “Many were so depressed at the lack of response by R’s and conservatives” to recent court-reform proposals. The rest of Thomas’ email, Shackelford said, was the all-caps gratitude.

Do you have any information about the Supreme Court and efforts to block court reform that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

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As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tries to downplay his connection to the far-right policy agenda known as Project 2025, ProPublica and Documented have just published dozens of training videos by the group that show how the conservative movement is gearing up for the next Republican administration. It’s an effort led by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank and other groups to remake the federal government, including by replacing civil servants with thousands of partisan political appointees who would help carry out the extreme policies envisioned by Project 2025. Many of the people who crafted the policy blueprint are former top Trump officials. The training videos include discussions about undoing climate policy, combatting diversity efforts, denying freedom of information requests and more.

“The first time that Trump … got elected, his operation was very unprepared. They did not have a bench of people ready. There was chaos, there was confusion, and that set back that administration for perhaps months, maybe even a year or two,” says ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll. “If he is elected again, that will not be the case.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. It’s “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

We look now at the far-right policy plan to overhaul the federal government, known as Project 2025. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is trying to downplay his connection to the plan. And last week, Kevin Roberts, head of the influential right-wing Heritage Foundation, postponed the release of his Project 2025 book until after the November election. The book’s foreword is written by Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance.

Trump’s campaign insists it has no connection to the right-wing blueprint for immigration, almost a thousand pages long — a blueprint for immigration, reproductive rights, climate policy and more. But many of the key figures working for Project 2025 are former top Trump administration officials, some of them featured in newly released videos that were created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy.

In a major new development, the independent news outlets ProPublica and Documented have now published dozens of these videos, some of which we’ll feature today. In this clip, Trump’s former deputy chief of staff at USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bethany Kozma, discusses climate change.

BETHANY KOZMAN: Climate change, allegedly, is everywhere. And if the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere. And according to our intelligence community, the number one threat facing our country today is — drum roll — climate change — not Russia, not China, not AI, climate change. This shows how the federal government is all in on this issue. And climate change activists wield a lot of power. This is an issue to pay attention to, as it has infiltrated every part of the federal government.

Now, when I think of climate change, I immediately think of population control, don’t you? I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the “impact” on the environment. Perhaps not everyone will make that connection, but after spending time in the international space trying to protect life, I can tell you that this is part of their ultimate goal: to control people.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s conservative activist and former Trump official Bethany Kozma in a newly released Project 2025 training video.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Andy Kroll, investigative reporter for ProPublica, whose new exposé is headlined “Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.” ProPublica has posted the full 23 videos, totaling more than 14 hours of content, on its website.

Andy, welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain how you got the videos and their significance as we go through some of them.

ANDY KROLL: Yeah, the videos come from the Presidential Administration Academy, which is one of the main pillars of Project 2025. We’ve heard a lot about, you’ve talked about on this show, the extreme policy proposals that Project 2025 put out in its 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” document. What’s gotten less attention but is no less important to Project 2025’s long-term goal here is to train thousands of future political appointees, so that if a conservative president, which, of course, now means if Donald Trump — a conservative candidate wins in November and we have a Republican president, that there will be a bench of thousands of vetted and trained appointees who can go into the government and fill openings in that government, so that, as Project 2025 itself says on its website, that conservative administration can be ready from, quote-unquote, “day one.”

Now, these videos were provided to us by a source who had access to them. I won’t get into the sourcing on it, but with any kind of situation like this, the key things for us at ProPublica are: Are these videos real? Are they authentic? And are they newsworthy? Obviously the substance is newsworthy. In our reporting process, we talked to people who are in the videos. We verified them, authenticated them and fact-checked them ourself. And now we’ve published on them and, as you helpfully pointed out, also published all of these 23 videos, totaling more than 14 hours, on our website. Anyone watching today can go and watch them now.

AMY GOODMAN: Andy, if you can just give us some background again on Project 2025? Because, of course, President Trump has disavowed this, but, meanwhile, the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, a former top adviser in Trump’s administration, has been forced to step down, and, of course, that book which is headed by the head of Heritage Foundation, which is behind this blueprint, is now — they are putting off the publication of this, with the foreword by none other than Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance.

ANDY KROLL: The Trump campaign has clearly come to the realization that Project 2025 and the policies that it lays out are extremely unpopular. And it’s not really surprising to understand why. Just a few of those policies are, for instance, closing the entire Department of Education; further restricting abortion rights in this country, especially mifepristone, also known as the abortion pill; slashing Medicaid; and then, of course, reclassifying tens of thousands of career government employees so that they can be more easily fired and then replaced by more loyal, vetted political appointees chosen by the next conservative president, which, again, in this case would potentially be Donald Trump. So there’s a reason the Trump campaign is distancing itself from those unpopular policies: It is hurting their campaign.

However, as you pointed out and as we report in our story, the number of connections between Trump’s political operation in his administration from '17 to ’21 and Project 2025 are many. As we write in the story, of the 36 different speakers in these videos, 29 of them have a connection to Mr. Trump. They worked in his administration across the government — the White House, National Security Council, a number of departments, including Justice, Interior, Health and Human Services, Office of Management and Budget, Presidential Personnel Office, across the board. There are people who ran his 2016-'17 transition team, that led him into the first presidency, and, lastly, I would point out, the Trump reelection campaign spokeswoman, who sent us a comment reiterating, in their view, that there’s no connection between 2025 and the Trump campaign. She herself, Karoline Leavitt, actually appears in the videos that we posted on our site. So, it’s really impossible to say that there is some bright line here between Trump’s political campaign, his team, and this Project 2025 effort.

AMY GOODMAN: Andy Kroll, I want to play a series of clips that you have just released. This is another Project 2025 training video featuring Katie Sullivan, who was acting assistant attorney general at Department of Justice under Trump. In this clip, Sullivan says the next conservative administration will need to eradicate all equity plans.

KATIE SULLIVAN: I think you can expect that equity and all of the equity executive orders under Biden will be repealed early in the next administration. This is going to require a very detailed plan to execute the eradication of the dictates in the equity orders. For instance, there’s a gender adviser position created by one of these executive orders. That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another Project 2025 training video, featuring Dan Huff, former legal adviser in the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, laying out how political appointees should be ready to enforce dramatic changes and face blowback when they do.

DAN HUFF: If the next Republican president does not execute a dramatic course correction, there may never be another chance. So, if you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it will damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially, look, I get it. That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But, please, do us all a favor and sit this one out.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another Project 2025 training video, titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide.” It features Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration.

MAX PRIMORAC: Now, in terms of a tip, survival tip, do not let career bureaucrats hinder you from advancing the president’s agenda. Keep in mind, you’re coming into a place, Washington, D.C., that does not share your conservative values. They’re even hostile to it, because you’re here to do something that’s not in their interest. They’re not going to be your friend, or they’re not going to help you succeed.

What are you doing? You’re here to cut government. You’re here to cut spending. You’re here to cut regulations. You’re here to stop the waste, fraud and abuse that’s going on. But a lot of careers have been made from that. A lot of money has been made from that. Fiefdoms have been built around it. So you’re going to get a lot of opposition here. It’s an entire industry of opposition, from lobbyists, professional associations, contractor groups and, disappointingly, faith-based organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, I want to turn to a Project 2025 training video featuring Alexei Woltornist, a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. In this video, he encourages future appointees to avoid mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, instead take their message to conservative media.

ALEXEI WOLTORNIST: The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times. They’re not reading The Washington Post. Actually, to the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Andy Kroll, investigative reporter for ProPublica, if you can respond? This is just an excerpt of the videos that you have released, “Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.”

ANDY KROLL: Yeah, I would pull out a couple of key points for your audience, Amy. I would say first that there is a level of extreme rhetoric in these videos, even down to the choice of words in these different clips. We hear the word “eradicate” a lot, and then we hear “eradicate” in the context of removing the word “climate change” from any federal government document that a future appointee sees. Obviously, that would not move the country in the right direction in terms of combating this existential threat that we face with climate change. You hear “eradicate” in terms of getting rid of policies that are responding to gender inequality, racial inequality. I mean, those executive actions that Katie Sullivan in the second clip discussed, those are things responding to the abuses surfaced by the #MeToo movement or the abuses surfaced, the injustices surfaced in 2020 during the racial uprisings then, as well, getting rid of all of those.

And then you have, with this last clip, the former DHS press secretary, you have someone basically saying, “When you get into government, just talk to conservative media. Shut out everybody else. I mean mainstream media, but just about everyone else, as well. Only talk to the people who you agree with, who like you.” That the audiences served by those conservative outlets are the only ones that matter, that’s not what a presidential administration, Democratic or Republican, is supposed to do. You’re supposed to serve the whole country. But clearly, that is not the advice that they’re getting in these clips.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting that they advise the right-wing administration not to leave a paper trail, yet they have left quite a video trail. As we wrap up, Andy, the most important takeaways at this point?

ANDY KROLL: Yeah, the most important takeaways, I think, for people watching are, the first time that Trump ran and then, surprisingly to many, got elected, his operation was very unprepared. They did not have a bench of people ready. There was chaos. There was confusion. And that set back that administration for perhaps months, maybe even a year or two into the Trump first administration. If he is elected again, that will not be the case. These videos have a lot of extreme content in them, a lot of eyebrow-raising advice, for instance, like don’t leave a paper trail, which you just referenced, but really what they are trying to do is prepare these thousands or tens of thousands of people to get in government and enact a pretty conservative, a right-wing agenda and be prepared and trained to do it from the moment that administration starts. That is different from before. And the voting public needs to understand that when they think about these two candidates, when they think about what that Trump agenda would be if he gets elected in November and takes office in January.

AMY GOODMAN: Andy Kroll, we want to thank you so much for being with us, investigative reporter for ProPublica, his new exposé titled “Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.” ProPublica has posted the full 23 videos, totaling more than 14 hours of content, on its website. We will link to it.

https://www.alternet.org/disarm-weapons-of-mass-disinformation/

Andy Kroll: Weapons of Mass Disinformation

Only the other day, the Internet got even darker or perhaps I mean dizzier. And I’m sure you know just what I’m thinking about. Elon Musk, not long ago the richest, and now the second-richest plutocrat on this planet — if only they lived on Pluto — and Mr. Free Speech (unless he doesn’t like it!) got into an imbroglio with various reporters on Twitter.

Of course, in a world where a set of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of our former president as a superhero, astronaut, and Top Gun-style pilot (“amazing ART of my Life & Career”) sold out in a day for $4.5 million, nothing is too strange. And hey, what can possibly go wrong when purchasing those fabulous non-funges (??) for $99 puts you in a lottery to win a dinner at Mar-a-Lago? Travel expenses on you, of course! (Maybe it’s time for me to figure out how to make some NFTs of my life & career, thrilling superhero shots of an old man in a cluttered room sitting in front of a computer screen.)

Anyway, I’m sure you noticed how Elon Musk advanced his free-speech platform by suspending the accounts of technology journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, The Intercept, and other places for violating “Twitter rules” by “doxxing” him — that is, treating him in a way he didn’t like. At least in part, it had to do with a website run, as the Timeswrote, by “a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast who had used Twitter to post updates about the location of Mr. Musk’s private plane using publicly available information.” All of this led to — you guessed it! — controversy and ever more publicity for that billionaire, including criticism from the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, which he probably loved. (He reinstated most but not all of the accounts only a day later.)

It seems all too appropriate to me to leave the last word on this incident not to some reporter, but to the New Yorker‘s brilliant satirist Andy Borowitz who began his piece on the subject this way:

Shortly after Twitter suspended accounts that were tracking billionaires’ private planes, including Elon Musk’s, a new poll shows that most people who seek Musk’s precise location are doing so to avoid him. The poll, from the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, reveals that a visceral fear of encountering Elon Musk is what drives eighty-nine per cent of those who follow his movements.

Now, as the end of this strange year approaches, I’d like to turn you over to Andy Kroll, whose new book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, offers a dazzling and dizzying journey into the darkest, most conspiratorial corners of the Internet. Let him leave Elon Musk in the dust (or do I mean “dox”?) of our world and take you to a planet where darkness truly does reign supreme. Tom

Lessons Learned in the Internet’s Darkest Corners:A Plea for Real Connection in a “Connected” Era

We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second’s thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front of us at the grocery store. We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living? Lately, though, such passing encounters tend to leave me with a sense of suspicion, a wariness tinged with grim curiosity. I think to myself: Is he or she one of them?

By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. Not me, though. Over the past five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.

Call it an occupational hazard. Only recently, I published my first book, *A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy*, an investigative political thriller that opens with the 2016 street murder of a 27-year-old who had worked for the Democratic National Committee. In the absence of a culprit, Seth Rich’s killing got swept into the fast-flowing conspiratorial currents of that year’s presidential race, a contest that pitted an unabashed conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump, against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had been the subject of decades’ worth of elaborately sinister claims (with no basis in reality). For my book, I set out to understand how a senseless crime that took the life of a beloved but hardly famous mid-level political staffer became a national and then international news story, a viral phenomenon of ever more twisted conspiracy theories that reached millions and all too soon became a piece of modern folklore.

To do so, I traced the arc of those Rich conspiracy theories back to their origins. In practical terms, that meant hundreds of late nights spent huddled over my desk, eyes fixed on my computer screen, clicking and scrolling my way through a seemingly endless trail of tweets, memes, posts, and videos. The Internet is, in some ways, like an ancient city, its latest incarnation resting atop the ruins of so many civilizations past. I came to think of myself then as an online archeologist digging my way through the digital eons, sifting through archived websites and seeking out long-vanished posts in search of clues and answers.

Or maybe I was a waste handler, holding my nose as I picked through piles (or do I mean miles?) of toxic detritus that littered old versions of social media sites you’d know like Twitter and Reddit, and others you probably don’t, like 4chan, 8kun, and Telegram. It was there that I encountered so many of them, those faceless users, the ones I might have passed on the street, who, with the promise of anonymity, had felt unburdened to voice their unfiltered, often deeply disturbing selves. It was all id, all the time.

Who were these people? I couldn’t help but wonder whether they actually believed the stuff they wrote. Or was it all about the thrill of saying it? In an unnervingly boundless online world, were they testing the boundaries of the acceptable by one-upping each other with brazen displays of racism, misogyny, or antisemitism (just to start down the list)?

Firing up my laptop and venturing into those noxious places was like entering an inside-out world impervious to logic and critical thinking. They had their own language — losers were “cucks,” loyal foot soldiers “pedes,” and Hillary Clinton was Hillary “Klanton” — and they operated with their own sets of elaborate but twisted rules and hierarchies. After a few hours of studying such “conversations,” a form of vertigo would set in, a spinning sensation that made me get up from my desk and clear my head with a walk or a conversation with a real human being.

Now that the book is published, I don’t spend much time in those disturbing online worlds. Still, every once in a while, I can’t help checking in — old habits die hard — despite the horrors I saw there while gathering material for my book. What nags at me even now — in fact, it haunts me in some way — is the knowledge that there were real people behind those toxic accounts. The same people you might sit next to on a bus without having the slightest suspicion of just how disturbed they were and what a disturbing world they were helping create or elaborate. That knowledge still weighs on me.

Weapons of Mass Disinformation

A confession: on a few of those late nights spent in the online ruins, I caught myself starting to nod along with some of the wild-eyed nonsense I was reading. Maybe I found a particular Reddit thread surprisingly convincing. Maybe the post in question had sprinkled a few verifiable facts amid the nonsense to make me think, Huh? Maybe my sixth cup of coffee and lack of sleep had so weakened my mental safeguards that madness itself began to seem at least faintly reasonable. When I felt such heretical thoughts seep into my stream of consciousness, I took it as a sure sign that I should log off and go to bed.

Thinking back on those moments, I admit that the first feeling I have is pure and utter embarrassment. I’m an investigative reporter. I make a living dealing in facts, data, and vetted information. Heck, my first job in journalism was as a full-time, trained fact-checker. I should be impervious to the demented siren song of conspiracy theories, right?

The correct answer is indeed: right. And yet…

I realize now that, on those disturbing long nights at the computer, I was more than an avid journalistic explorer of online content. I had immersed myself — and immersion is what the Internet does best. It’s the gateway point to a seemingly infinite number of rabbit holes. Who hasn’t clicked on a Wikipedia entry about, say, the making of the atomic bomb only to check the time, realize that two hours had slipped by, and you’re now watching a YouTube video about the greatest comebacks in baseball history with no memory of how you got here in the first place?

That frictionless glide from one post to the next, video after video, tweet upon tweet, plays tricks on the mind. Spend enough time in that realm and even the most absurd theories and narratives start to acquire the patina of logic, the ring of reason. How else to explain the sheer number of QAnon adherents — one in five Americans, according to an analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute — who believe that a secret cabal of pedophile elites, including Tom Hanks and Oprah, run the world, or that the Earth is indeed flat, or that the moon landing more than half a century ago was faked, no matter what news broadcaster Walter Cronkite might have said at the time?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that conspiracy theories weren’t a fixture of American life before the Internet came along. Quite the opposite: for as long as we humans have existed, we’ve dreamt up elaborate theories and fables to explain the inexplicable or, increasingly in our time, the otherwise all too explicable that we refuse to believe. Some of the founders of this country were unashamedconspiracy mongers. What those delirious late nights at the computer led me to believe, however, is that tools for spreading such fantastical theories have never been more powerful than they are today and they’ve entered our politics in an unnerving fashion (as anyone paying attention to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol knows).

Put simply, we don’t stand a chance against the social media companies. Fueled by highly sophisticated algorithms that maximize “engagement” at all costs by feeding users ever more inflammatory content, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of them don’t simply entertain, inform, or “connect” us. As New York Timesreporter Max Fisher writes in his book *The Chaos Machine*, “This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”

Spending so much time burrowing into such websites, I came away with a deep sense of just how addictive they are. More than that, they rewire your mind in real-time. I felt it myself. I fear that there’s no path out of our strange, increasingly conspiratorial moment, filled with viral lies and rampant disinformation, without rewriting the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives.

The Lost Art of Saying Hello

Still, I’m under no illusion that Tweets and memes can adequately explain the schisms in American life and this country’s descent into a more embittered, polarized, us-versus-them cultural moment. Nor can Donald Trump, who is as much a product of the strange Internet world of conspiracies as a cause of it. They are, in fact, the ever-more-virulent symptoms of a country in which it’s not enough to disagree with your opponents. You also have to demonize them as subhuman, criminal, and alien, while, in the process, doing genuine harm to yourself.

In what still passes for the real world, how else to explain the prominence of conspiracy theories like QAnon or the current far-right trend of accusing someone, especially anyone who disagrees with you, of being a “groomer”? Or how do you account for the existence of a seemingly inextinguishable belief now lurking in our world that one of the country’s prominent political families, the Clintons, are also prolific serial killers who have slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds of people? Or the explosion of those baseless claims I spent all that time exploring about the murdered Seth Rich, claims that would haunt his family for years, denying them even the space to grieve for their own son?

No amount of late-night online sleuthing was going to provide an answer to the larger social ills afflicting this country. Indeed, the more time I spent online, the greater the chasm appeared — so vast, in fact, that I began to wonder whether it could ever be bridged. Nor is this a malady that can be dealt with by politicians or governments, important as they are. It runs even deeper than that.

When I think about the root causes of such societal drift, I return to a phrase I read in a 2021 study that described a “national friendship decline.” According to that survey, “Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.” The data wasn’t all grim. More than four in ten respondents said that they had made a new friend during the pandemic. Still, the lockdowns and self-isolation of these Covid years had exacerbated what the survey’s authors called a “loneliness epidemic.”

When I think about those endless Twitter rants and Reddit screeds I encountered, I envision lonely people hunched over their computers in empty apartments, posting and scrolling madly (sometimes in the most literal sense) deep into the night. Loneliness and social isolation, of course, can’t explain away all the mad conspiratorial rants you find on the Internet, nor are they the sole cause of the brittle, increasingly dangerous state of American politics. But it’s so much easier to resent and rage against a perceived enemy if you’ve never met them or anyone like them, so much easier to cast the other side as the out-group or the villain if you’ve never shared a meal or a coffee or a phone call with them.

I mention that “loneliness epidemic” only to underscore my belief that healing the schism in our culture and politics will require something more difficult and yet simpler than major policy reforms or electing a new generation of officials. Don’t get me wrong: both of those are needed, on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Today’s politics too often resemble a race to the bottom, as politicians rush to outflank their rivals and whip up their constituencies (often using social media to do it). All the while, powerful interest groups, their lobbyists, and a growing billionaire class shape (or sink) the kinds of wholesale changes needed to reboot our political system.

Yet our problems run deeper than that — and the solutions can’t be found in Washington, D.C.

One answer is finding ways to knit back together an unbearably frayed nation. Neighborhood groups, book clubs, sports leagues, civic associations, labor unions, religious groups, whatever it is, the surest way out of this stubborn conflict must come through the simplest of gestures — human connection. The lost art of saying hello.

Tech executives love to talk about the value of “connection” and their goals of “connecting” the world. Almost two decades into the social media era, we should know better than to believe thoseempty paeans used as cover for the relentless pursuit of profits.Now more than ever, it’s time to step away from those weapons of mass disinformation.

I don’t care much for New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, I would say: let’s make 2023 the year of logging off. Get to know your neighbors and colleagues. For my part, I’ll work on not thinking of those everyday strangers, or even those tiny avatars on the Internet, as them. Instead of fearing them, I’ll think I say hello.