michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, is it Facebook’s job to monitor political advertising?

michelle goldberg

As long as Facebook is as powerful as it is, there should be some sort of accountability for spreading disinformation and propaganda.

david leonhardt

Then, in the spirit of Halloween, we talk about rising interest in the occult.

tara isabella burton

What we’re seeing is a kind of mix-and-match approach to spirituality, where people who are turned off by organized religions are in many ways cobbling together their own.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

There’s this interesting dialogue between these two Hoffa-connected works of art right now.

david leonhardt

There’s growing concern over Facebook’s approach to political ads not only among lawmakers and the general public, but inside the company too. In an open letter this week, employees asked Facebook to rethink its decision not to fact check ads by candidates. This all comes after Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress last week, which included an intense exchange with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

archived recording (alexandria ocasio-cortez) Could I run ads targeting Republicans in primaries saying that they voted for the Green New Deal? archived recording (mark zuckerberg) Sorry, can you repeat that? archived recording (alexandria ocasio-cortez) Would I be able to run advertisements on Facebook targeting Republicans in primaries, saying that they voted for the Green New Deal? I mean, if you’re not fact checking political advertisements, I’m just trying to understand the bounds here. What’s fair game? archived recording (mark zuckerberg) Congresswoman, I don’t know the answer to that off the top of my head, I think probably. archived recording (alexandria ocasio-cortez) So you don’t know if I’ll be able to do that. archived recording (mark zuckerberg) I think probably. archived recording (alexandria ocasio-cortez) Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact checking on political advertisements? archived recording (mark zuckerberg) Well, Congresswoman, I think lying is bad. And I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad.

david leonhardt

As we get closer to the 2020 election, should Facebook be stricter when it comes to fact-checking political ads? Or is this all a matter of, as Zuckerberg says, “free speech.” Michelle, what do you think?

michelle goldberg

To me, the question is not should Facebook be stricter? It’s should Facebook be burned to the ground? And I think we have to look globally, right? Because it’s not just here. Facebook globally has been at least an instigator or has sort of poured gasoline on the fire of ethnic violence, genocide, pogroms all over the world. And when it comes to American politics, the side that sees truth as an end in itself, and the side that views empirical reality is at a total disadvantage. And one of Mark Zuckerberg’s justifications is that the general public has an interest in seeing if politicians lie. But the general public doesn’t see the ads that are microtargeted to different constituents, right? And so the general public is often not even aware of a lot of what either the Trump campaign, or dark money groups connected to the Trump campaign, or trolls, or foreign actors are serving out there to various populations. And Democrats could target ads say in South Carolina at hardcore Trump voters saying, thank you, Lindsey Graham, for standing up to Trump. But until they’re kind of willing to get down in the mud, they’re just going to keep getting rolled.

david leonhardt

I mean, I guess the way I think about this is that Facebook is a company. And what it cares about is making money. And so it’s up to the rest of us to figure out whether their making money has problematic aspects for a society. And I think it clearly does, when you look at how Facebook has dealt with people’s data, when you look at Facebook’s really slow response to misleading or outright false, as you’re pointing out, Michelle, ads. And so I still don’t know what I think about breaking up Facebook. It clearly seems anti-competitive to me in some ways. But I’m definitely on board with the idea of stricter regulation given the huge role that it plays in our political discourse. Ross, I’m guessing you’re less comfortable with that.

ross douthat

I mean, I’m pretty hostile to the internet, as you guys well know. And so I have a basic sympathy for the view that the sort of consolidated Silicon Valley companies are a problem for American society in all kinds of ways. And I’m totally open to anti-trust arguments and arguments about weakening their power. I think there’s a tension, may be a tension, between what seem like the two thrusts of liberal critique of Facebook, right? One is that it’s too big and powerful. And everyone is on this one social media site. And it’s eating up competitors effectively. It’s eating out newspaper revenue or revenue that should go to journalism. Therefore, the answer is make it less powerful, break it up. It’s not completely in tension, but it’s a little bit in tension with the parallel argument, which is that Facebook has all this power. And therefore, it has this obligation to basically serve as a kind of custodian of democracy, that we want people working for Mark Zuckerberg performing fact checks on political ads. We want people working for Mark Zuckerberg determining which publications are acceptable and which publications aren’t. Basically, we want Zuckerberg to stop using his immense power for what liberals deem evil and start using it for good. And if the first argument is true, if Facebook is this dangerously powerful corporation driven by profit motives and so on, I don’t see why the second argument would ever work. Why would you want Mark Zuckerberg in charge of fact checking political ads?

michelle goldberg

Obviously, you don’t. But I don’t see any kind of contradiction. There’s no contradiction to my mind between saying Facebook should be less powerful. As long as Facebook is as powerful as it is, there should be some sort of accountability for spreading disinformation and propaganda. But I often think that maybe one way to solve this is just to get rid of the provision the Communications Decency Act that basically treats platforms different than publishers. Libel law and that kind of stuff exists. But it doesn’t apply to social media platforms. And if it did — I know a lot of people on my side hate this idea and think it would be very bad for free speech on the internet — but given the scale of the crisis, it seems like one thing worth investigating.

ross douthat

Well, I mean, but this is the idea basically, that Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, has put forward to general horror from libertarians and also, a certain amount of horror, as you say, Michelle, from liberals who don’t like Josh Hawley. And I mean, part of the odd dynamic of this moment is that as much distrust as liberals have for Facebook, there is immense conservative distrust rooted in the same basic reality, which is that these companies have this immense power. There is this sort of right-left agreement that’s then rejected by a lot of people that in fact, these platforms should be treated like publishers, basically, rather than like places where people just post content. I think there are all kinds of problems with that idea. But it has the virtue of being sort of big and simple in a way that the demands for rigorous Facebook fact checking of specific political ads just seem to me to be somewhat hopeless, right? The idea that you’re going to successfully run a fact checking operation out of Silicon Valley, it seems hard for me to imagine any of this working out well, even with the best intentions. In fact, there have been cases where, like in Ohio, where there was sort of an attempt to set up a election truth squad that would fact check political advertising. And a judge struck it down as violating the First Amendment. I mean, I think this stuff on TV, there isn’t some sort of central effective regulator of the kind that maybe is being imagined here that the government could supply for Facebook.

david leonhardt

I think that’s right. I think it would have to be different for Facebook and social media than it’s been for television. It’s not that we would want the way that political advertising on the web is regulated to simply copy TV. It’s that we would want it to acquire some of the same caution and notion of government oversight that television has had from the beginning and the internet lacks. I just don’t trust Facebook or any company to do that with any interest other than its own profits in mind. Right? That’s why they exist. And its executives have been really clear about that. I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of the government regulating this. I just don’t see any alternative to substantially more government regulation of Facebook than we have.

ross douthat

David, could you elaborate on what the government regulation is?

david leonhardt

I mean, it’s a version of what we’ve had with TV for a long time, right? So you basically would need an agency whose job it is to deal with false claims. And I agree with you. You would need a fairly high bar. But I guess to turn the question back on you, Ross, what’s your preferred solution?

ross douthat

I mean, I don’t have a sort of problem in the abstract with some kind of regulation of false claims published on social media. I think though part of what’s happening here is that there is just sort of this— there’s a lot of dispute in a highly polarized environment about what constitutes truth and what constitutes falsehood. And Facebook has become a social media platform that is maybe not dominated, but has a largely older audience. And they share a lot of conservative content. And I feel like that much more than these sort of specific cases of outrageously false advertising is what liberals really don’t like about Facebook. I think the evidence that high intensity internet use is what’s driving conservative populism in America is mostly wrong and that like the idea that Russian bots are tilting the election with dank means is mostly wrong. And some of this is an argument about, what is the significance of this vast world of memes and parodies? And that’s another case study, right? Like where do you draw the line with things like parodies, like the video that appeared to show Nancy Pelosi slurring her words? Like does that vanish?

michelle goldberg

That wasn’t a parody. That was misinformation.

ross douthat

You’re going to have a situation where you have a government agency deciding that you can’t take a video of a politician and slow it down to make them look like they’re senile? There’s no law that’s being violated there. That’s sort of a part of American political argument.

michelle goldberg

Is it a part of American political argument to be able to kind of microtarget disinformation to credulous old people? I mean, is that part of the assumptions of how American politics have worked before the last few years?

ross douthat

I mean, actually, it sort of is the history of American politics of the 19th century.

michelle goldberg

Can I say one other thing? This seems relatively simple. You can have a regulation that just requires a level of transparency. So that every political ad that is run on Facebook is archived somewhere and that there’s some transparency about who is being microtargeted to and where the money is coming from. We have that kind of transparency when it comes to TV ads. I cannot imagine this idea that we’re going to sacrifice liberal democracy on the altar of a refusal to do anything about propaganda on Facebook, because we don’t trust the government to do it correctly.

ross douthat

I mean, I think the idea that the government doesn’t do a good job of deciding what is and isn’t propaganda sort of is like part of where the First Amendment comes from.

michelle goldberg

No, because there is no reason. What is the justification for people being allowed to do things on Facebook with paid political advertising on Facebook that they cannot do on television or newspaper advertisements?

ross douthat

I agree. I don’t think there is a strong justification for treating television and Facebook radically differently.

david leonhardt

Let’s spend a minute on Libra, which to me, is connected to a lot of these questions about Facebook’s role. So this is this cryptocurrency that Facebook wants to launch essentially, to let people on its platform pay for different things. And a lot of people have raised concerns, including Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Fed. He said it raises serious concerns regarding privacy, money laundering, consumer protection, financial stability. And Ross, the reason I’m sort of fascinated by this is it’s actually to me a microcosm of the problem here, which is Facebook realized it’s good for its business to maybe launch a currency. They wrapped it up in a lot of highfalutin language about how it’s good for humanity. But actually, there’s a good chance that it’s quite bad for humanity to have a private company running its own currency. And so I see this as an example where regulators are right to try to stamp this out. And it involves hard calls and all that. I just wish they would do more of that in other areas.

ross douthat

I mean, I would think of it more in sort of macro political terms that Facebook is a global company that therefore is, because of its reach and influence, is effectively a pseudo-state entity, especially in parts of the world with weak state power. And part of the case for Libra, the sort of humanitarian case in part is that this is a currency that would be really good in emerging markets and places with weak state formation. Sub-Saharan Africa, especially, it would create in a landscape where you can get hyperinflation when a government collapses or does something wild, then you’d have this currency sort of available to sustain the economy. I think that the United States government has a strong national interest in that not happening. Because it would be in effect a sort of political economic rival to the United States. This would be Facebook sort of increasing its global political power in a way that existing governments, like the US, should be extremely wary of.

michelle goldberg

And also, I mean, the United States however imperfectly is still sort of a democracy. Whereas Facebook is a totally unaccountable entity with a totalitarian level of surveillance data about a huge number of people on earth. So if you kind of give Facebook state-level powers, it basically makes democracy itself much less meaningful everywhere that it still exists.

david leonhardt

Yeah, Ross, I think that’s a fair description of the tradeoffs, I guess. I’m enough of a nationalist to say that I care about what’s good for the United States more than I care about what’s good for Facebook.

ross douthat

Yeah, well, and to Michelle’s point, I mean, it’s true. But it’s also true that American power in the places in the world where Libra would become influential is not a Democratic form of power. The power that the dollar has in Congo as a currency is not an expression of the popular will of the Congolese people. So in that sense, it would be different. But if it’s a competitor currency globally, I think the Democratic aspect is a little different.

michelle goldberg

The idea of having Mark Zuckerberg in charge of a global currency again, with all of his surveillance powers, is just so unbelievably dystopian that I cannot believe that there is anyone out there who thinks that this is an even tolerable idea.

david leonhardt

O.K., we’ll wrap it up there. And I will be sitting out our next segment to make room for a guest. More on that after the break.

ross douthat

American Christianity is apparently in sharp decline. A new Pew Research study shows that the number of American Christians dropped 12 percentage points in just the last decade. And more than 40% of millennials rarely or never attend religious services. Are millennials actually secularizing? Or are they just interested in different forms of spirituality? As Christianity ebbs, there seems to be a surge of interest in occultism, basically, a catch-all term for everything from witchcraft, to divination, to crystals and astrology. Michelle and I have both written about this phenomenon in the past. And for the week of All Hallows Eve, we’re joined by Tara Isabella Burton, who’s written an entire book on the subject. It’s called “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.” And it comes out next year. Tara, welcome to “The Argument.”

tara isabella burton

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

ross douthat

Let’s start out big picture. What is going on with the rise of occultism?

tara isabella burton

So I’d say that the rise of contemporary occultism is inexorably intertwined with the development of a kind of much more eclectic spiritual culture overall. So while it is true that traditional organized religion is in decline, I think an important statistic to remember is that 72 percent of the so-called religiously unaffiliated say they believe in some sort of higher power, be that the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible, be that a nebulous big something. And so I think what we’re seeing is a kind of mix and match approach to spirituality, where people who are alienated by or turned off by organized religions are in many ways cobbling together their own. And practices associated traditionally with occultism and folk magic, be they sage cleansing, be it spellcraft, or even the lighting of a candle with a bit of intention, nothing sort of as formal as a full-scale black mass, all of these things are attractive as part of a kind of D.I.Y. religious culture that we see more broadly in America and particularly among American millennials.

michelle goldberg

Tara, a few years ago, I wrote a book about how yoga came to the West. And a lot of that story was set in the world of theosophy, both in Russia and Weimar Berlin, and then later on in southern India. And I guess that was also sort of eclectic, right? You know, people were taking parts from different kinds of European wisdom traditions, and Buddhism, and Hinduism, and stuff they made up themselves. And I guess I’m wondering, do you see what’s happening now as being in that vein? Or is it a significantly different phenomenon?

tara isabella burton

So I very much do see it in that vein with one important caveat, which is that we have the internet now. And I think that the rise both of the accessibility of information and sometimes misinformation on the internet, as well as a broader cultural sense that we are curators of our own lives. I interviewed someone once about secular death rituals and creating funerals, who joked to me, we curate our own Facebook page. Why shouldn’t we curate our own funeral? And I think that that’s very true in terms of culturally how we think about the bricolage aspect of faith. And I think we’re seeing in the rise of modern occultism a renaissance of religions of the self, of religions that each individual person can create.

michelle goldberg

It’s so interesting to me that you emphasize agency. Because when I think of this phenomenon, I always think of it in terms of a reaction to helplessness and disempowerment. That people turn to magic in times of social crisis when they feel like existing ideologies or existing religions aren’t serving them. This piece I wrote a couple years ago was about this kind of hipster Brooklyn occult store called Catland. They were doing these hexes of Donald Trump. It was much earlier in the administration. One of the owners of Catland was talking about people don’t have health insurance. They don’t have other kinds of security. So of course, they’re more interested in spells or alternative forms of healing.

tara isabella burton

So I wonder if we might frame it a different way, which is to say it’s not exactly about agency and empowerment or disempowerment as much as it is about faith in institutions versus a lack of trust in institutions. The owner of Catland who writes about hexes and they say in one of their zines, how could anyone fault me for cursing my rapist? That magic is for them the only way of achieving a form of justice. At the same time, I think you have people who similarly see in religious institutions, as in judicial institutions, legal institutions, political institutions, a kind of failure to provide meaning, purpose, stability, such that the occult magic intuition all forms of religious and spiritual practice become all that could be relied on.

ross douthat

So I mean, a couple of things I’m interested in here. One is that I wrote a book I guess seven years ago now that was sort of trying to be an anatomy of American religion. And it made in a way a version of the argument that you just made, Tara, that we’re a culture of religious individualists. And that instead of the decline of institutional religion leading inexorably to a sort of secular materialism dominating everything, instead it leads to this sort of do it yourself spirituality — these bricolages, as you put it. But what I was writing about in that book was I think much more people sort of still with one foot clearly planted in Christianity and then sort of pulling in some Buddhism over here or some Deepak Chopra style new age stuff over there, some spiritualism over here. And it seems like it’s a more post-Christian landscape. Occultism is, I mean, you can call it pre-Christian, if you prefer. But either way, it’s much more sort of decisively outside a Christian cultural matrix than I think some of the sort of Oprahesque spirituality. Do you think that’s right?

tara isabella burton

Up to a point. Certainly, a lot of these people are specifically identifying themselves with traditions that aren’t simply in addition to Christianity, but also very much anti-Christian. To be a witch is to fight against a patriarchal, tyrannical, sexually-repressive system. That said however, the numbers of Christians versus the religiously unaffiliated who say they believe in things, like astrology and reincarnation, are not so different. A 2018 Pew study, for example, found that 33 percent of all U.S. adults say they believe in reincarnation. And 29 percent say they believe in astrology. Among Christians, those numbers are 29 percent and 26 percent, so not so different.

ross douthat

There’s also the really interesting complexity that there is aspects of occultism that an Orthodox Christian can believe in, in the sense of believing that they could work and be incredibly dangerous. Like nobody believes more in the potential power of Ouija boards, for instance, than Catholic priests who work in the exorcism business. And that I think gets to my other question about all of this, which is how much do people who are practitioners believe in the metaphysical reality of what they’re doing? And I’m curious for Michelle since you’re someone who I think generally doesn’t believe in the metaphysical reality of say, casting spells. But you’ve written about sort of this culture a lot. I’m just curious like —

michelle goldberg

That was actually what I was going to ask. Because my own relationship to this stuff is sort of I’m an extremely secular person. I’ve also been practicing yoga for almost 20 years and like some of this mythology around it, that this kind of arrangement of limbs can end up activating certain chakras or have some sort of broader resonance in your body or your life. There’s things that people practice, like waving sage around your house, or putting crystals on the bookshelf. But I guess my question is, how deep is the actual belief in all of this stuff as opposed to it’s fun, or I like the ritual aspect of it, or it couldn’t hurt?

tara isabella burton

So I think there’s two answers to that question. The first is, of course, it varies. That there are people for whom the feeling of community is itself meaningful in a way that doesn’t have to do with metaphysics. The other thing that I would say — and this is something that I see in a lot of different elements of what I might call contemporary sort of occult-adjacent culture or wellness culture — is this implicit metaphysic of energy. And it’s something you see in SoulCycle, for example. There’s always these little signs saying, your energy will affect the energy of other riders. So please stay focused. In a lot of these different traditions, there is a vague sense that there’s something called energy. And there is some good energy. And there is some bad energy. And whether it’s through the right kind of meditation, or the right kind of Gwyneth Paltrow-approved diet, or the right kind of sage cleansing, you’re able to bring in the good energy, connect with other people’s energy, cast out the bad energy. And I think that is, in my mind at least, quite widespread across these various spiritual, but not religious traditions.

ross douthat

You spend a lot of time reporting this book and spend a lot of time in these different worlds. Is there something particularly strange or supernaturally inflected that happened while you were doing this reporting that stayed with you?

tara isabella burton

I was at this Halloween party that I go to every year that I quite enjoy at a performance space in Chelsea. It’s inspired by Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” So there’s witches. And people are dancing and covered in blood. And someone is singing Ariana Grande’s “God is a Woman.” And everybody is cheering. And suddenly, looking at it through the eyes of a researcher I thought, gosh, there’s so much going on here. There is something really profound about the fact that this is attractive, that liberal New Yorkers want to unwind and get drunk in such a way that we interact with these ideas. These ideas are sexy. These ideas aren’t scary. And once upon a time, the idea that the witch Hecate would be coming down and cackling from the rafters would be a truly terrifying prospect. And I’m not 100 percent sure whether the fact that we’re so comfortable with it means that we don’t really believe in that witches are real or that we like the idea of witches, because they’re at least something enchanted. So I’m not sure if something supernatural happened to me, so much as I started noticing hints of the supernatural everywhere. I will say I’ve gotten a lot more superstitious too. I did decline to attend a seance very recently, which I’m not sure I would have done a couple of years ago.

ross douthat

Well, on that note of wise prudence about the affairs of the other world, thank you so much, Tara, for joining us, and Happy Halloween.

tara isabella burton

Oh, happy Halloween.

ross douthat

And now it’s time for a recommendation, where we suggest something to help take your mind off the news. David’s back in the studio with us. And it’s your turn this week, David. What do you have?

david leonhardt

So I’m going to recommend a book that I’m reading called “In Hoffa’s Shadow,” which is a pretty remarkable book. It’s written by Jack Goldsmith, who if you’re an intense reader of the news, you may recognize that name. He’s a conservative law professor at Harvard. He served in the George W. Bush administration and was quite critical of it. And he has this unbelievable life story, which is that he was the step-son of Jimmy Hoffa’s right hand man, which is not something that you would expect of a Harvard Law professor. And I’m not going to give away any ending of this story here. But he tells this remarkable story of what it was like to grow up with this dad who was a high union official and had all kinds of dealings with the mob. And what I like about it is not only the personal story, which is amazing. But it’s caused me to rethink a little bit Jimmy Hoffa’s legacy and just how much Jimmy Hoffa actually did for truck drivers, even with all the terrible things he did. And it’s also caused me to rethink a little bit Robert Kennedy’s legacy. Because the book is very critical of the ways that Kennedy basically broke the law to go after Hoffa. So I highly recommend it for about seven different reasons.

michelle goldberg

Well, that’s fascinating. I’ve known who Jack Goldsmith was for a long time. And I think he writes on Lawfare. Is that right?

david leonhardt

That’s right.

michelle goldberg

So he often kind of writes around legal issues around Trump’s various misdeeds. And I had no idea he had that background.

david leonhardt

I didn’t either. I started listening to a radio interview with him. And basically, 15 minutes in, I realized, oh, my goodness, this is so fascinating. I am stopping this interview right now, so I can go read the book without finding out how it ends. And then I’ll come back and listen to the interview later.

ross douthat

Well, and what’s interesting is this book is coming out at the same time that Martin Scorsese has this movie coming out, “The Irishman,” which stars Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino, and others, and is among other things, basically presenting a theory of Hoffa’s murder. And Goldsmith, you can read his piece in The New York Review of Books — I just read it the other day — basically arguing that the movie’s theory of Hoffa is based on a false confession or an implausible confession. There’s this interesting sort of dialogue/argument between these two Hoffa-connected works of art right now.

david leonhardt

No, that’s right. And Goldsmith makes clear early in the book that the central tension is whether his father figure turned on Jimmy Hoffa and was involved in Jimmy Hoffa’s murder. And basically, the movie takes it as a given that he was involved.

ross douthat

All right, so the name of the book again, David?

david leonhardt

“In Hoffa’s Shadow” by Jack Goldsmith.

ross douthat