Jill Lepore

- In search of the truth about truth.

This week on "Firing Line."

Before QAnon.

- Q is a movement!

- [Margaret] Election denialism.

- [Protestors] Stop the steal!

- [Margaret] And COVID-19 conspiracy theories, Harvard history Professor Jill Lepore set out on a journey to understand how truth was understood in the past.

- You know, the idea that the 1969 moon landing was a hoax, there was a radio broadcaster who really thought the government was involved in all kinds of cover ups.

- [Margaret] And when it came under assault.

- This kind of frantic anxiety about truth really dates, in the modern era, to the very beginning of, really, social media.

- [Margaret] Lepore is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, a podcast host, and author of over a dozen books.

- A full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon.

- [Margaret] So what can the past tell us about our current moment?

How will AI play into our future understanding of the truth?

Plus, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that Harvard's affirmative action policies must end?

- I think one of the reasons that I study the past and the relationship between the past and the present is I often find solace in historical record.

- [Margaret] What does professor and author Jill Lepore say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, the Asness Family Foundation, and by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation.

Damon Button.

- Jill Lepore, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thanks.

- You've recently published an audio book titled, "Who Killed Truth?

A History of Evidence."

Now, this is a topic that you're not new to.

You've taught it at Harvard, and you've been examining truth in various forms, including on a podcast for years.

Was there something 10 years ago that made you think, "Oh, we're gonna really start needing to look at truth?"

- It's actually just very much, it feels very much of the moment right now, but I think that has often been the case over the course of all of human history that- - Yeah.

- When was the Stephen Colbert truthiness moment?

That was 2005, right?

- Yeah.

- Just to give you- - Yeah.

- Some history.

That's almost 20 years ago now that...

I think young people feel like, "Oh, we're just living in this newly post-truth moment."

But this kind of frantic anxiety about truth really dates, in the modern era, to the very beginning of, really, social media, which is what, 2004?

- Yeah.

- When there's a kind of explosion of information and just a new type of uncertainty.

- You weave together various moments in history to tell a story of how society's understanding of facts and evidence has evolved.

For example, you look at a conspiracy theory surrounding the 1969 moon landing.

What is the single most important thing you've learned from looking at truth through a historical lens?

- I think one of the reasons that I study the past and the relationship between the past and the present is I often find solace in historical record.

That is to say, I often, like everyone else gets really wrapped up in the sense of the current crisis and the acuteness of this moment.

And so for me, working on the podcast was a way to share the kind of solace seeking that I do, which is was it ever a little bit like this before?

Of course it was different in the past, but even just like the sort of go-to conspiracy theory, you know, the idea that the 1969 moon landing was a hoax.

You know, Stanley Kubrick filmed it and the whole thing was broadcast just to confuse America.

Maybe there's something to be gained by pulling back from, "Oh, in 1969, there was a radio broadcaster who really thought the government was involved in all kinds of cover ups, and it had to do with Vietnam, and the anguish of seeing footage of Vietnam on your TV in the living room, or whatever else might make sense for understanding that 1969 moment.

- Well, you spend time dealing with the advent of radio and how advances in communication technology since the early 20th century have made it increasingly difficult to tell what's true and what's not.

Compare radio's impact on the truth to the internet and social media.

- So the technology of radio emerges in the 19-teens.

It becomes commercialized in the 1920s, and it reaches Americans in a almost national way quite quickly because of Herbert Hoover's programs around ensuring that this new broadcast medium can actually reach rural America.

Remember, broadcasting is a term that comes from agriculture.

You broadcast seeds.

But Hoover makes a big commitment to radio as essentially a public utility that needs to be licensed by the government.

So that's important because it's a distinction from the internet.

- Yeah.

- So the way the radio is set up and the Federal Radio Act of 1927, and it becomes the Federal Communications Act of 1934 is about public licensing, and there has to be a kind of public interest that broadcasters are obligated to.

It has a big effect on how radio works in the early 20th century.

And so it's the first truly networked form of communication.

It's also astonishingly intimate.

So what you then are told through this new technology, this, you know, tabletop device you might have in your kitchen, it's hard not to believe it.

Here's this voice in my kitchen.

Do I trust this voice?

But it turned out that early radio researchers, the whole field of radio psychology that emerged discovered that people really did trust those voices.

And then that becomes, by the 1930s, a huge problem, 'cause that's, you know, how fascism works in Europe.

That's how Hitler, you know, convinces people to believe what he wants them to believe.

The radio can be used as a device of persuasion, and that's what mass advertising is, right?

- Talk about the tension between how technology can enhance and hurt our understanding of truth.

- I think, you know, it's important to remember, you know, a book is a technology, the alphabet is a technology, right?

So each technology of communication, so the printing press, the weekly newspaper, then the daily newspaper, then the telegraph, then the telephone, then radio, then television, then cable television, then the internet, then social media has extended and democratized an existing body of knowledge, but it also, by democratizing knowledge, allows people to put back into that system their knowledge.

And there's just a period of disequilibrium with each of those technologies in which you see first a kind of diffusion and democratization, and then that leads, essentially, to political instability, which is then tamped down in one way or another through a new form of regulation or kind of different political settlement around knowledge around these technologies.

And with the case of social media, for instance, we've never kind of... We're still in that disequilibrium that started in 2004.

There's really never been a constitutional settlement that rearranges how we think about that technology.

I mean, you don't need to bring a historian in to observe that the pace of technological change has quickened.

So it's much harder to adjust to technological change, make this sort of necessary social and political adjustments to it when it just keeps happening and accelerating.

- Yeah, and to that point, you know, 2024 presidential election is heating up and we've already seen deep fake videos of President Biden circulating online, campaigns and the country are gonna have to deal with how artificial intelligence, another new technology, will assault the truth.

What do you think is the next major assault on truth?

- So I actually, in spite of the fact that my audio book is called, "Who Killed Truth," that's really tongue in cheek.

Like I don't think...

There's not like a group of people who are trying to attack truth or kill truth, right?

And I think the kind of hyperpolarized partisan discourse around that is not super helpful, to be honest.

Like there's not a political party that's trying to kill truth.

I think there's a lot of really socially responsible technological development.

I think that Congress has completely failed to execute its obligation to the American public by truly investigating and devising possible legislative solutions to some of these problems.

But I also think a lot of it is just human frailty.

And so are we waiting for a new assault on truth?

Not quite exactly.

Is there reason to be deeply concerned about deep fakes and AI?

Absolutely.

- You know, one of the things you say at the end of the book, right, is that truth isn't gone, it's not been killed, it's not been eliminated.

It's still there.

Sometimes it's lurking in the corners of your hometown library, but there's been a collapse of trust.

How do we tackle the collapse of trust, as you put it?

- I don't think that historians are likely to have good solutions for epistemic problems.

- I stumped you.

I stumped Jill Lepore.

- No, no, no, no, no!

- [Margaret] I'm just kidding.

- You know, I'm always stumped.

- Well, let me ask you a different question, because you, in answering and tackling this question about truth, you just said that you don't think one party is trying to steal the truth or kill the truth versus another party.

But there is a candidate of a major party who used to be a president of the United States of America who is propagating a lie about the 2020 election, and who does consistently not tell the truth, both in federal courts and to the American people.

So it seems it sort of falls on deaf ears that there isn't a political element of this.

- Oh, I'm not saying there isn't a political element of it.

And, you know, Trump is a pathological liar, and that was obvious well before he ran for president.

The question there is why people believe him.

And the political question is why do people who know he's lying continue to defend him as if he's telling the truth like that?

And that's a different question.

That's a question about politics and- - Yeah.

- And the answer is horrible, right?

Like these are, you know, Republican office holders who are willing to continue to defend Donald Trump's lying for the sake of their own political careers.

I think that's quite different than people whose trust in the federal government is so non-existent that they would prefer to believe Donald Trump than any other source of information.

I still don't think that for all the books that have been written about Trumpism, I don't really think that's a question people have gotten to the bottom of.

I will say that I continue to feel baffled and bewildered by it.

- You have expressed discomfort with the idea of prosecuting former President Trump, even if his alleged actions justify the charges.

And one concern that you have is that this establishes a precedent for future administrations to target their predecessors.

And indeed, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Joe Biden if he is elected again.

In your view, is it more dangerous to prosecute Trump or to not prosecute Trump?

- I am happy I am not a person who makes that kind of decision.

Prosecuting Trump, the culture of that endless prosecutions, that's the politics that Trump wants.

That's the politics he ran for.

That's the political system he described when he ran on a campaign to lock up Hillary Clinton.

I mean, I think, you know, people will say was it the right thing for Ford to pardon Nixon?

I, even as a kid, remember that moment.

- Yeah.

- And I remember the relief in my household.

We were a Republican household, and it wasn't...

I don't think my family was pro Nixon.

They were somewhat indifferent to Nixon, but they were pro political stability, and it seemed the best path of political stability.

So in that moment, which was the most dangerous thing for the country?

Not pardoning him.

Historically, what was the right thing to do?

He shouldn't have pardoned him.

If Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, we might be in a different place today.

So I don't think indulging known criminality in an ex-president can possibly be defended.

- Help me understand that throughline.

How do you see the throughline from Nixon to Trump?

- There was something quite extraordinary about Nixon's malfeasance, about the cover up, about sending guys out to do his illegal bidding, making lists of his political enemies and then acting on that.

And the way in which the pardon...

It's not that Nixon was never held accountable.

He resigned.

But the pardon was really meaningful.

And so I guess, you know, if I'd been an adult at that time, I would've wanted Ford to pardon him because I would've wanted the political stability.

I would have wanted the country to move on.

What's easier to see from our vantage is what the cost of that pardon was.

What it meant to say you will not ultimately be held criminally accountable.

- You're the director of a project called Amend, which has cataloged every one of the thousands of proposals to amend the United States Constitution in the nation's history.

The founders intended the Constitution to be difficult to amend, but maybe not this difficult.

There are those who could make a strong argument that the Constitution has become unamendable.

What say you?

- I do think the Constitution is effectively unamendable, and politicians and activists and ordinary citizens act as if it is unamendable, and in a way that makes it unamendable.

It's one of those things we kind of believe it into being.

It hasn't been meaningfully amended since 1971.

And what really, in a sense, broke Article 5, which is the provision of the Constitution by which the Constitution is amended, was the Equal Rights Amendment.

It passed Congress in 1972, went to the states, and was ultimately derailed.

State constitutions are amended all the time, but compared to other national constitutions, the United States Constitution, it is the least amended constitution and the most difficult to amend.

And it's a problem for American political life and public life because constitutional amendments, it is hard, but the process itself is really useful for an electorate, for a polity to discuss.

Like are there changes in our fundamental law that we should be arguing over right now?

Should we be having, you know, town meetings, city meetings, statewide deliberations about these things?

That process is no longer in place, and it's part of a kind of civic decay.

- Well, you mentioned the Equal Rights Amendment, and you spend a considerable amount of ink on Phyllis Schlafly in your book, "These Truths."

You call her a political genius and credit her with more or less single-handedly defeating the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment.

Listen to Phyllis Schlafly with William F. Buckley Jr. on the original "Firing Line" in 1973.

- The proposed constitutional amendment, passed overwhelmingly by the Senate and the House, holds that, quote, "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex."

That doesn't sound particularly subversive.

- Well, it's the very innocuous wording of the amendment that is the reason why many people didn't realize in the beginning what unfortunate consequences it would have.

We find as we look into the matter that ERA won't give women anything which they haven't already got or have a way of getting.

But, on the other hand, it will take away from women some of the most important rights and benefits and exemptions we now have.

- Why do you think that Phyllis Schlafly, who you've called a hugely important driving force in the 20th century politics, is not better understood for her influence by mainstream historical accounts?

- Yeah, I mean, I think Schlafly's just fascinating.

She really has been ignored by historians for two reasons.

One, academic historians who tend to be liberal just have really been bad at offering a history of the rise of the modern conservative movement.

This just tremendously important political insurgency, you know, since the 1950s, of which, you know, Buckley's "Firing Line" was an important element.

And then conservative historians just haven't really paid attention to Schlafly because she was a woman.

They really wanted to think the movement was really led by Buckley and, you know, various other figures, especially political commentator types.

And she was an organizer.

Just really, she was like a battlefield general marshaling her troops.

She was incredibly effective at what she did.

And I think people misperceive that because of her self-presentation, right?

She's got the blonde bouffant and the pink.

Even in this shot you showed in the pink dress, and she would always talk about her children, and she was Mrs. Schlafly, and there's a whole vibe that she put out there that was really important to her movement.

But really, since the 1950s, women were the foot soldiers of that conservative insurgency.

It was really suburban housewives who were the foot soldiers of that movement.

- In the final days of this final Supreme Court term, the court ruled that Harvard and the University of North Carolina's race-based affirmative action programs, permissible for nearly the last half century, violate the 14th Amendments Equal Protection Clause.

What do you think the consequences will be of this decision, both on your institution, but at schools across the country?

- I think that schools across the country have been bracing for this decision for certainly for the last couple of years with this particular Supreme Court.

Admissions departments have protocols in place by which they will attempt to refashion, within the framework of this Supreme Court decision, new ways to think about the process of selecting students and ways that are consistent with their goals for, you know, at my institution, the president of our university sent out a video message about how committed the university is to bringing together students from all over the country and all over the world who come from different backgrounds and have had different experiences, and it's their clash in the classroom and in the dormitories and in the cafeteria and on the quad that is the intellectual experience of a college education.

I mean, one of the longer term consequences of this ruling coming on the heels of a series of other decisions by this court going back to 2022, so if we kind of mark the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement with Amy Coney Barrett, is public agitation about the court.

And you asked earlier about trust.

The Supreme Court, for a long time in American history, had been one of the more trusted institutions.

I think there's a lot of public alarm about what the jurisprudence of originalism really is and means.

And that, part of that, I think in some of the dissenting opinions in this affirmative action decision have to do with taking the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection regardless of race, that is part of the anguished attempt, but also thrilling attempt to build a truly multiracial democracy after the Civil War.

What it means for originalists to read that language and use it to explain that there can be no longer affirmative action is, I think, baffling to people.

It requires a lot of inquiry.

And I think that in itself is likely to be one of the longer lasting consequences.

Not just because of this ruling, but on the heels of the Dobbs abortion decision, the Bruen gun regulation decision.

- So I think what you're saying is that the lasting consequence of this decision will be continued erosion of confidence in the court.

Is that what you said?

- I think a chief consequence of this affirmative action decision on the part of the court coming on the heels of a series of other decisions that were at variance with public opinion, not that they didn't satisfy a large segment of the American population's political preferences, but were at variance with probably majority public opinion and whose legal logic is a little bit illegible if not largely illegible even to constitutional scholars.

Like, "How did you get to this result again?"

I think that does erode confidence in the court, but it also stirs up more interest in the court.

- You've written about originalism last June.

You said, "There's no method to it, nothing but inconsistency and caprice."

Can you elaborate?

- So originalists dress up their theory of constitutional interpretation as if it's a form of historical investigation.

But how they write about history is completely inconsistent with any conceivable historical method because it proceeds by understanding the past as deducible from a very finite number of documents, and believing that these documents have fixed knowable meanings, knowable public meanings.

So there's a lot of different varieties of originalism, but the main one now is judges are looking for the original public meaning of a phrase, right?

"Well-regulated militia," for instance.

Well, what was the original public meaning of that phrase?

Where they look for that meaning is in a very small set of documents.

So they're gonna look at the text of the Constitution itself, as of course well they should.

They're gonna look at James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention, which are very dubious as a source.

They're gonna look at the notes of the ratifying conventions in the states.

They might look at some newspaper accounts.

They'll look at dictionaries from the time.

They'll look at Samuel Johnson's 1755 "Dictionary of the English Language."

Does that get us to the original public meaning?

We are not living in 1787.

We can't answer the question of what anything meant in 1787 when we're looking at the documents and records left behind by a small, very small group of enfranchised American white men.

And if we actually were to concede, which I would not concede, that how we understand our constitutional rights in the 21st century needs to be discovered in 1787, in the historical record of 1787, from a historical methods point of view you'd need to consult a much greater archive, the archive that tells us about all kinds of people, people who were wholly disenfranchised or very weakly enfranchised.

So are we to have our constitutional meaning dictated by that set of constrained historical sources?

I think if we're left with a jurisprudence of originalism, we need to have a much more capacious historical archive.

- Jill Lepore, thank you for your thoughts and reflections.

I appreciate you joining me here on "Firing Line."

- Thanks a lot, Margaret.

[upbeat music] - [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, the Asness Family Foundation, and by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation.

Damon Button.

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