The Long Game

One of the foundational books of my adult life is "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. It helped me see the ways in which the modern world was driven by entertainment more than information, as we transitioned from an word-based society to an image-based society with the advent of television. The modern equivalent to Postman's book, in my opinion, is Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows." Written in the late 2000's, before the smart phone was ubiquitous, Carr interprets the impact of the computer and the internet the same way Postman did television. A new 10th anniversary edition of The Shallows was released this year, with a new afterword, in which Carr argues that he believe his book is more relevant now than it was when it came out. "One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system," Carr writes, is "a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity." Video of the panel in 2015 with myself, Nick, Nicco Mele and Brad Jenkins is here, and my notes on that panel are here. Outro music: "Feel You" by My Morning Jacket Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Next Monday, the CEO's of four of the most dominant and important technology companies in the world will testify to Congress: Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, and Apple's Tim Cook will all appear before the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on anti-trust, commercial and administrative law. My guest today is the congressman who is going to chair and run that hearing, Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island. A Democrat, Cicilline has been in Congress for the last decade, and before that was mayor of Providence for eight years. He was the first openly gay major of a U.S. State capital. For the last year Cicilline has been holding hearings on the issue of regulating big tech, and this hearing Monday will be the last hearing his subcomittee holds before they release a report with recommendations for Congress and for regulatory agencies in the executive branch. Cicilline told me he hopes to have this report out by late August, and when I asked if the regulations they're going to recommend could be implemented next year — if Joe Biden were to win the presidency — he said he would expect them to. "There's no reason to not expect a new administration to take this up in their first year," he said. "I think it's pretty clear we don't have real competition, partly because of the size of these platforms, and partly because of the fact that they have essentially been unregulated." Outro music: "Under Control" by The Internet Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rick Hasen is professor of law and political science at UC-Irvine and author of "Election Meltdown." Rick is two things that make him worth your time. First, he knows more about elections than almost anyone I know of. He updates his "Election Law blog" daily with the latest developments, and he has written two books on elections and election law. The most recent one, "Election Meltdown" came out earlier this year just before COVID-19 hit, and we talk about the main themes of that book. But second, Rick is probably the most fair-minded expert on this topic that I've come across yet. I've done a fair amount of reporting and reading over the past few years on the issues of voting, voting rights, voter suppression, and allegations of fraud. And these are issues that elicit strong reactions from people, and as a result, both Democrats and Republicans get locked into diametrically opposed narratives on these issues. Hasen is very scrupulous and devoted to nuance on this stuff. It's an incredibly hard quality to find. We cover a lot of ground and if you're curious about this topic, there's a ton of information here. Outro: "Garden Song" by Phoebe Bridgers Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tom Ridge is the former governor of Pennsylvania, from 1995 to 2001, and went on to become the first ever head of the Department of Homeland Security, which was created by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. In March, Ridge and a former Democratic Governor, Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, formed a group called Vote Safe, which is pushing to expand access to voting by mail. Every state has different rules for its elections, and Ridge believes that's a better system than a nationalized one, but the point is that you need to know your state's specific rules. Some of the best websites I've seen to do that are vote.org and votingrightslab.org. I'll provide links in the show notes to their key pages. I'll link to some of their key pages below. Ridge did not vote for Trump in 2016 and spoke out publicly against him during the election. But Ridge's appeal to Trump's self-interest is part of the 74-year old Vietnam veteran's effort to promote mail-in voting. "You've got Republican incumbents and challengers who are going to be using [mail-in voting] in order to hopefully either be reelected or gain advantage as a challenger. And so there's a disconnect between the president and I think the balance of the party," Ridge said. Ridge said that many Republican-leaning voters in a state like Arizona -- where 80% of ballots are already cast by mail -- will likely want to vote this way. "You really can't expect them necessarily to wait in line three or four hours. Or they may say to themselves, 'Because of my health concerns, I'm not going to the polls. I want to vote absentee,'" Ridge said. "Mr. President, you have all the machinery. Take advantage of it," Ridge said. Here are the pages on each state's rules: https://tracker.votingrightslab.org/states https://www.vote.org/absentee-voting-rules/ https://www.vote.org/voter-id-laws/ ----- Please donate to the DC Dream Center here. The Dream Center is giving out free hot meals and grocery items 7 days a week to those in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. ----- Outro music: "Standing in the Doorway" by Bob Dylan Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-SC, is the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate. When he was elected in 2012, he was only the 7th African-American senator in the nation's history. Scott has been quite vocal on many sides of the George Floyd killing. He's called on Minneapolis to charge all four officers, he's called the killing of Floyd a murder, and he's spoken out publicly about systemic racism in the past and on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He's also been outspoken in his condemnation of violence, even as he has criticized President Trump for his actions during this crisis. Scott said Trump's tweets about "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" and other inflammatory things posted on Twitter by the president were "not constructive" and he has spoken directly to the president about this. Scott has also criticized the president's use of federal officers to attack peaceful protesters so he could stage a photo op at a church across Lafayette Park from the White House. We discuss a number of things about Floyd's killing, including the argument that violence is an appropriate response. ."Many people are asking if violence is a valid means of producing social change. The hard and historical answer is yes," wrote Kellie Carter Jackson, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College, in The Atlantic. "Violence compels a response. Violence disrupts the status quo and the possibility of returning to business as usual. So often the watershed moments of historical record are stamped by violence—it is the engine that propels society along from funerals to fury and from moments to movements." Scott disagrees. "Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis: pick one," Scott said. "I think they would all say that without any question of the country, the arc of the universe, it bent because of the nonviolent resistance. … Whether it was sit-ins at Woolworth counters, Rock Hill, South Carolina. We've seen silent nonviolent protests, Rosa Parks, lead to community transformation when everything else seemed to not work." Scott also said that Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a pioneer of the civil rights movement who was beaten nearly to death in 1965 by Alabama police after crossing Edmund Pettis Bridge at the head of a protest march, warned him about the dangers of violence. "He was so crystal clear that aggression and bitterness are the enemies of your soul. It will rot you out faster than anything else. And for those who believe that violence is a way, it seems very much like a hatred. The person who suffers the most is the person that holds onto it," Scott said. ----- Please donate to the DC Dream Center here. The Dream Center is giving out free hot meals and grocery items 7 days a week to those in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. ----- Outro music: "Have a Little Faith" by Mavis Staples Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Francis Collins is the director of the National Institutes of Health, which is the primary U.S. government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research. It's a giant agency, with 20,000 employees, including 6,000 research scientists, and a $39 billion budget. And this job makes him a crucial figure at this particular moment. He is leading the hunt in America for a vaccine solution to the COVID-19 crisis, leading a consortium of several government agencies and 18 pharmaceutical companies. "I am worried," he says, "that if we get a vaccine for COVID-19 by the end of the year, current polls would say maybe 20 percent of Americans say that they wouldn't take it. And why would they not take it? Just because they don't trust that vaccines are going to be safe, and that all sort of builds upon the stories coming from anti-vaxxers in the past." "This is a terrible tragedy. Hundred thousands of people are dying across the world. We could stop that. And 20 percent of Americans say, 'I wouldn't want that vaccine because it might not be what I think it should be because maybe they're lying to me about whether it's safe.' How did we get there?" But Collins also acknowledged that establishment organizations and leaders need to engage more meaningfully with the concerns of anti-vaccine activists. "There's virtually no human intervention, including drinking water, that is without risk for certain people in certain doses. So let's be clear. When I say vaccines are generally safe, that doesn't mean that there's not a rare instance where a vaccine does lead to a negative outcome, some sort of side effect or a secondary illness of some sort. What we ask, I think though, scientifically is how do you balance the benefits and the risks? And I think we ask every consumer to do that same calculation," he said. "I'm afraid we have not done a great job in terms of explaining how one makes a thoughtful, rational decision, that you have to really get quantitative about it. If somebody says, 'Well, there's a risk there.' Of course there is. How big is the risk? What does that mean for the individual? And how do you factor that into what's the benefit? Then you could have a reasonable conversation," he said. We also discuss why Christians seem to be so vulnerable to conspiracy theories. -------- Please donate to the DC Dream Center, which has been giving away hundreds of free hot meals every day in one of the most needy parts of Washington DC since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. Donate here. -------- Outro music: "The Times They are a Changing" by Bob Dylan, performed by Francis Collins, Joe Perry and Rudy Tanzi Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Terry Mattingly, founder of GetReligion.org and a nationally syndicated religious columnist, talks about the ways in which conspiracy theories like Qanon are merging with conservative white evangelical subculture. The Atlantic piece on Qanon is here, and Terry's responses are here, here and here. Outro music: "Working On a Dream" by Bruce Springsteen Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tim Miller worked in Republican politics for many years but over the last few years he's become more of a writer. One of his latest pieces at The Bulwark is titled, "Taking #Obamagate Seriously: President Trump's Bonkers Theory Explained." Tim is a veteran political communicator with a good feel for how information flow moves in the modern media environment, and he believes that you can't let half-truths and lies spread unchallenged. He's spent a lot of time trying to unpack and explain some of the more popular conspiracy theories on the right. We talk about the speciousness of President Trump's insinuations that President Obama did something wrong, but also about the apparent mishandling of the FBI's 2017 interview of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Some background reading on Flynn: "The Case Against Michael Flynn Now Looks a Lot Weaker" by Eli Lake "The FBI Set Flynn Up to Preserve the Trump–Russia Probe," by Andrew McCarthy "Why the Flynn Interview Was Predicated," by Barbara McQuade "Flynn Redux: What Those FBI Documents Really Show" by Benjamin Wittes & Quinta Jurecic Outro music: "Flux Capacitor" by Jay Electronica Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marc Elias is leading 32 current lawsuits in 16 states to try to push for more expansive voting rights, and since the coronavirus, his workload has gone way up. We go deep on the debate over vote-by-mail, and ballot collection, aka ballot harvesting. Elias is chair of the Political Law practice at Perkins Coie. He was the top lawyer on Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and has years of experience in election recounts, which led him to focus on voting rights and redistricting over the last few years. "What I realized is that there was a large number at the end of every election of ballots that wind up going uncounted. So I wound up getting involved in voting rights litigation mostly through the prism of how do we look at the pool of people whose ballots get rejected and get wrongly rejected," he said. "At the end of 2016 I realized that though there are a lot of reasons you can point to that Secretary Clinton lost those close elections, some of them had to do with how the rules of elections were held. One thing I always point out to people is, no matter what election rules you use, there are going to be winners and losers … There are going to be some populations that are more advantaged than disadvantaged, so I wanted to spend time for 2020 trying to make the rules fairer for everybody." ----- The DC Dream Center is a wonderful youth facility in southeast DC that is serving 200 free hot meals a day right now to anyone who is in need. They're the only location east of the river in Wards 7 & 8 doing so for all ages. Please consider making a donation to them. You can donate HERE. ----- Outro music: "Ladies" by Fiona Apple Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"When I was young, it was so simple. I thought God was good. I thought God rewarded those who obey the rules. I thought my good news was accessible to everyone if only they had the ears to listen. I thought my country was a place where hard work was rewarded on a level playing field, no matter where you came from …" D.L. Mayfield's penetrating book, "The Myth of the American Dream," examines the obsession with safety, ease, affluence and power among American Christians, and how the American church may have prized things that are in conflict with the imperatives at the core of the faith. Mayfield's first book was "Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith." Outro music: "All in it Together" by Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.