TRUE Digital Chaos (Hour 2)

Transcript

TRUE Digital Chaos (Hour 2)

John & Gordy · Wed Sep 17, 2025

Kathryn Lake

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and

And whether today highs in the mid to upper 80s going to be another hot one right now 60 degrees.

Yeah.

And a little while we'll be talking with Mike McCabe in about a half hour.

All right.

Substack blogger and author.

Let's cruise through some of the stuff here.

Elon Musk enjoys anti-immigration leader Tommy Robinson of Great Britain.

He read a he led rather a anti-immigration rally the other day and interviewed.

Ilan via telephone.

And this is how that conversation went.

I'd like to play this for you.

This is cut 114, 114.

Okay.

This is Ilan responding to Tommy Robinson, a anti-immigrant leader in Great Britain.

Listen, listen.

Elon,

none of this could have happened without you giving the British public access to the truth and giving us free speech and fighting for our free speech.

So on behalf of Great Britain and the British public, we're incredibly grateful, Elon.

You may notice this t-shirt that I'm wearing as great British author, George Orwell.

What would Orwell think?

I think that's generally a good way to look at these things.

No.

He would want freedom of speech.

He would want the people to know what's real.

He'd want the people to fight against government oppression and fight for the truth and fight for the future of Britain.

Really?

What I see happening is

a destruction of Britain, initially a slow erosion, but a rapidly increasing erosion of Britain with massive uncontrolled migration, a failure by the government to protect innocent people, including children, who are getting gang-raped.

It's unreal that government has failed in its duty to protect its citizens, which is a fundamental duty of government.

This

has got

to stop.

It needs to be massive governor foam.

So

there

you go.

People need to be in charge.

Not some bureaucracy that doesn't care.

You mean like you when you were here destroying our government, you were unelected.

What's that again?

That's Elon.

Oh yeah.

Okay.

Bringing up the kids, of course.

You always bring up the kids.

Oh, God, they're so horrible.

This is what they think about.

I don't know why they're always thinking about raping children.

What is the preoccupation?

Don't get it.

Obviously, you know, it riles families up.

Yeah, it's just

stirring it up again.

But there's one problem with telling the truth all the time on X. It's not necessarily always true.

And here's one of the examples.

I can't believe he actually says, you know, the truth is right there on X. Well, Elon wiped out Grock's entire memory, knowledge base, regarding Charlie Kirk.

The fact that he was shot.

That was wiped out.

Yesterday, or the day before, Grock confirmed shooter Tyler Robinson was a griper.

Now a griper is a group that follows Nick Fuentes, who is a white nationalist.

So I wouldn't exactly say Tyler Robinson is a liberal, okay, and then go after the liberal network and destroy it.

So anyway, that was in Grock.

Grock confirmed that the shooter was Tyler Robinson, okay?

So the next day, he was... Grock was changed.

He... Grock was changed by Ilan.

And Grock claimed the shooting didn't even occur and says Charlie is still alive.

What?

That is Ilan erasing the truth and getting caught at it in the most obvious way possible.

Wow.

So X is whatever Elon wants it to be, all right, and take it from there.

He's in control.

Yeah, he is definitely in control.

So anyway, now who's in control of like Charlie Kirk's show, his podcast, JD Vance, he filled in for one day, and this is what happened, in a great duel.

audio clip here, somebody put this together.

He put first JD Vance lying about Kirk and a comment he made, okay?

But then he played the actual clip of Charlie Kirk saying what he didn't say, or at least JD Vance said he didn't say.

So listen to this first clip here that JD Vance says is a complete lie.

Listen to this.

The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote,

Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.

But if you go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to, you realize he never said anything like that.

He never uttered those words.

If we would have said

that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Katanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called the brrrrrr racist.

But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us.

They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action.

Yeah, we know.

You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.

You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

There you go.

I guess he did say it.

Yeah.

But if you just go to that link, the clips right there, you know, it proves he didn't say it.

Wow.

Let's go to the phones.

Dick is on the line.

608-879-8255.

Good morning, Dick.

What do you

got?

Good morning.

Um, I'm just wondering, it's kind of tied to this.

With this proclamation we got from Bondi, our attorney general, does that mean we won't be hearing from Trump and, uh, you know, most all of his staff, Miller, Bannon.

Yeah, the hate speech.

Oh,

yeah.

Does that mean we're not going to hear a word from these people anymore?

I hope so.

You're reading

my mind.

I do too.

You're reading my mind.

I have that clip all ready to go.

Why don't we go to cut 115 and listen to what Pam Bondi said on a talk show being interviewed.

Listen.

Here we

go.

There's free speech and then there's hate speech.

And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie in our society.

Do you see

More law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people So we show them that some action is better than no action.

We will absolutely Target you go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech anything and that's across the aisle.

Yeah, okay

Well when it comes to Trump

Basically, all you get is hate speech or word salad dribble.

Is that what we're going to get instead of the hate speech?

Well, I'm glad to see them all go to the FEMA camps, personally.

They're going to have to go because they're just filled with it.

Well, we just heard Steven Miller.

Now, all of that was a rant.

That was definitely hate speech right there.

All right.

Dick, thanks for

Kathryn Lake

your call.

Yeah, thank you.

Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Hey, got

bad news for everybody about TikTok.

You know, there

Kathryn Lake

was

a deadline on TikTok too.

Yeah, what happened?

TikTok too.

All right.

Anyway, there was a deadline.

Oh, guess what happened?

The deadline came and went?

No.

Well, this is what happened.

Okay.

Okay.

He managed to get TikTok

Purchased by or part owners of its Oracle Silver Lake Anderson

are going to control TikTok in the U.S., says the Wall Street Journal.

This is kind of a disjointed thing.

The message wasn't exactly clear.

But what happened here is that, and these are the responses to this, okay?

I just want to, this will clarify what has happened here.

So TikTok will become another Trump-aligned social media outlet, okay?

Because...

Oracle, Silver Lake, Anderson are all very good friends and billionaire friends of Trump.

Okay.

And, and so therefore they have a tie-in.

It'll be part of the administration.

Here's another response.

And the Biden administration establishment dims fell right into their trap.

Congrats out of touch establishment Dems.

You've played yourself again and in the process further weakened democracy.

They could have done this.

They could have taken up tick tock.

Here's another one selling tick tock us domestic operations to the right wing Ellison family in Oracle who will combine CBS Paramount Time Warner CNN and tick tock to create one of the most effective right wing propaganda machines ever constructed.

So

Kathryn Lake

now

it that

fine-tunes what the original message was.

So there weren't a lot of stories written about this, but TikTok has been basically taken over by the right wing.

All right.

Unbelievable.

So we'll

see what

happens there.

We'll

see if

it has the same effect that Elon has on Grok.

And everyone around my age uses TikTok all day, every day.

So that's terrible news.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's terrible news.

It might be censored in some way, shape, or form.

At least we don't know yet.

But, you know, TikTok is vast.

You can get, you could doom scroll forever on TikTok and come up with the worst recipes ever.

Mankind has ever seen.

Okay.

Oh boy.

Okay.

Inflation is back.

I'm trying to get through a lot of these stories because they were.

We're running, you know, there are too many stories.

Okay.

Conservative pollster Frank Luntz reported on social media, grocery inflation is back.

It's the highest monthly increase since August of 2022.

Virtually all major grocery categories are now more expensive than they were a year ago.

Are people complaining about that?

We should be.

Luntz provided a link to the source Axios, article titled, Grocery Inflations Highest Since 2022 as Trump.

Tariffs pile up the article sites data, including a 5.6% change in consumer price indexes for meats, poultry, fish, and, oh, eggs.

Eggs may be going back up.

You never know.

Great.

I was the bird flu that did that.

Okay.

So those prices continue to climb, you

know, just a steady climb.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Isn't that wild?

All right.

How about this?

Now, we were talking about Tyler Robinson.

being part of, you know, the white nationalist movement, basically.

But, you know, he was all over the place.

He's a gamer.

He used that as kind of a decoy, set it out there.

But he's, he also, allegedly, Tyler Robinson is seen in a picture squatting low in a black tracksuit with three white stripes down the sleeves and the pants and a flat cap pulled over his eyes.

Tyler Robinson is actually performing a so-called slouch called Slav squat Slav Slavic Slav squat meme it comes from the Pepe Frog cartoon.

Do you know Pepe?

Yeah, Pepe.

Yeah, Pepe.

Yes.

Oh, yeah, they use that in the white nationalist movement not all the time.

It's a comic strip and it's the same

picture as the squatting frog, Pepe.

Okay.

So he was just mimicking what Pepe was doing and

Kathryn Lake

then

again it's a white nationalist movement.

So he is again not a liberal and he's not part of the liberal network that now the administration is going out and

destroy.

Yeah.

And I hope we're not part of that network.

No, we could be.

Look at us and say, oh, well, they're part of it too.

Okay.

It's all in what they say, what they believe.

We're in charge.

That's it.

Okay, we will continue in a moment.

19 minutes past the hour.

When we come back, we'll check the weather with Brittany Merlot.

Next on John and Gordy in the morning, WMDX.

Kathryn Lake

You're listening to Civic Media.

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started.

I really want to go there.

Lots of happy people.

And a guy in underwear.

State Street.

That great street.

That everyone can relate street.

WMDX, John and Gordie in the morning on State Street a block away from the capital in the capital city Madison, Wisconsin and a good morning to everybody out there.

It's a beautiful.

Sunny day.

Yes, it is.

And we can find out more about what's happening weather wise with our WMDX meteorologist, Brittany Merlo.

Brittney Merlot

Good morning,

Brittany.

Yes.

How are

Brittney Merlot

you?

Good morning, guys.

How are you?

I'm

good.

Good.

Okay.

How are things?

Wassa.

Brittney Merlot

Um, sunny.

We're sunny.

We're good.

We're warm.

So no complaints here, finally.

What's on your, uh, what's on your

t-shirt there?

Brittney Merlot

Lie on the wild side an airplane and aerobatic.

Oh,

yes.

There we go.

Love

Brittney Merlot

it.

Love it.

Brittney Merlot

Oh, yes.

Thank you You're

still taking lessons flying lessons, right?

Brittney Merlot

Oh ever so slowly.

Yes Ever so slowly, but it is a blast up in the air.

I'm telling you being able to feel that turbulence feel that wind that I'm forecasting all the time.

Yes.

Brittney Merlot

It's a good

thing Well

getting close to it today's not gonna be windy though

Right?

Brittney Merlot

It's pretty calm.

Not at all.

Yeah.

Brittney Merlot

Yeah.

Super calm today.

Still pretty calm tomorrow too.

Still feeling like summer mid 80s.

Dunny, no complaints.

We could see a small shower storm though by tomorrow evening and then of course we've got that low pressure system headed our way this weekend so more rain and maybe some thunder Friday night is possible.

Do slip a little bit in temperatures Friday down to the upper 70s and we hold the upper 70s for the weekend but yeah it's going to be a little bit of a wetter one with that system rolling through Saturday and Sunday.

That could linger into Monday too before we dry out next week.

Alright.

Is it gonna feel more like fall next week?

Are we back to normal temperatures?

Brittney Merlot

Yeah, not as bad as we were, you know, earlier, how we kind of really dipped down.

We'll just kind of be average here, sitting in those mid to upper 70s.

Okay.

All

right.

That sounds like good grilling weather again.

I think so.

Brittney Merlot

It

does.

Yeah.

Okay.

Very good.

Thank

you, Brittany.

Yeah, Brittany.

You

Brittney Merlot

too.

Have a good day, guys.

All right.

You take care.

See you later.

Okay.

We've got, let's go to the phones, 608-879-8255.

Charles has been waiting here for a while.

Good morning, Charles.

Hey, good morning, guys.

I had a question.

I don't know if I may have missed this, but have they said anything about this young man's social media footprint

yet?

You're talking

about the shooter?

Well, no, they really haven't.

No.

They're just going by pictures and some of the things.

But of course, he's not saying anything.

They're making it more difficult.

And this space and time where we don't know too much, it creates a lot of speculation on the right wing in order to divide the country some more and then, of course, create these groups, these supposed liberal groups out there, organizing to destroy the country.

No, that's a good

question

though Charles.

We know I

figured we would have heard something by by now Unless it doesn't sit there near to

yeah, it was yeah

left wing

That's right, right.

Yeah, they're in charge of the information flow.

That's for sure Charles.

Thank you.

How do you go

ahead?

How do we how do we get to this?

Oh, I don't know

I'm sitting and I'm just thinking I'm like

You hear nothing more.

You guys talked about the grocery prices.

So if that's what most people voted for, you hear no complaining about the grocery prices and Palestine.

What's going on over there in Gaza?

You hear nothing about these anymore.

So I'm like, how did, how did we allow ourselves as Americans to get to where we are now?

I mean, these, they're, they're just trying to just take control over.

everything

yeah And and of course distract us, you know with blowing up a little boats Off the coast of Venezuela.

Yeah, you know, it's just We don't know what they're doing exactly just blowing boats up.

We were supposed to take their word for it And I don't think too many people are believing anything the administration is saying at this point so

Yeah, I agree with you Charles.

There's not much going on that we can depend on at this point anymore, including the vaccine issues.

You know, now they've approved the updated COVID vaccine,

Kathryn Lake

but only

for certain groups.

Yeah.

And in other words, that just increases the price for everybody else who wants their children or themselves to get that vaccine and protect themselves.

Yeah.

Haven't heard much about the Epstein files the last few days.

No.

No.

Well, that's in the back burner.

Charles, thank you for your call.

Yeah.

We appreciate it.

All right.

Let's see.

Hey, we want to remind you that the Wisconsin Book Festival is happening in Madison October 23rd to the 26th that brings together authors and readers of all ages and interests.

Don't miss out on New York Times bestsellers Jane Hamilton or Mary Roach alongside dozens of others as they gather for readings and conversations around their writing this fall.

You can find out more by going to our website, wmdxradio.com.

Well, I'll tell you why.

We've got time for just this little cut here.

This is Trump on a lawsuit he's got against NBC and ABC Cut 118.

It's ridiculous as usual.

So let's listen.

OK.

President Trump, who's won a pair of lawsuits against the three broadcast networks, is now escalating his battle against two of them.

ABC and NBC fake news, two of the worst and most biased networks in history.

give me 97% bad stories.

If that's the case, they are simply an arm of the Democrat Party and should, according to many, have their licenses revoked by the FCC.

I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our democracy.

Thank you.

That was a tweet basically from

social media.

So anyway, that that's an amazing thing to go after these major networks.

And you know, the head of the FCC is definitely in the camp, the Trump camp.

So he's, you never know, this could actually happen.

Yeah.

It's 29 past the hour.

We've got the Midwest Food and Farm report.

And when we return, Mike McCabe will join us, substack blogger and author.

Stay with us.

It's John Peterson, Gordy Young, coming right back.

you

Yeah, it's John and Gordy in the morning.

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We'd love to hear from you and take your calls.

We have CJ on the line before we get to Mike.

Okay, let's just go up there and talk to CJ.

Good morning CJ.

What do you got for us today?

Good morning gentlemen.

You know, it is a sad situation where we're at.

Don't know there's a survey that has come out.

Have you gentlemen heard of this

which one?

From the national I'm gonna try to pronounce it here The National Condigent Research Institute

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Well, what what's the

survey?

What was the survey about?

Well, they asked both

think it was quite a number of people that identify as right or left and You know about political violence.

Yeah.

Yeah, whether it's justified or okay and The statistics or the the percentages would be graphically different on each side and

I'd like you to read some of the, it's quite a, you know, it's a research center that has a lot of accreditation, but for example, 59% of lefties believe, supposedly in the survey, of it's okay to destroy Tesla dealerships.

They find it acceptable, or partially acceptable.

Um, you know, uh, what's the other, um, there's multiple 56% of self identifying liberals that killing president Trump can be partially justified.

56% you guys.

Isn't that scary?

Well, that is scary.

What about the right side?

Have they, uh, any opinions about destroying anything or killing anybody?

It's a It is a lot lower.

I think it's in the single digits.

Yeah, or Regardless, yeah, you know, it just scares the hell out of me.

It's not justified.

It shouldn't be 1% on either side, right?

Yeah,

yeah All right, well, we're gonna get we we're gonna get to our guest Mike McCabe, but I appreciate

your point on that, and we'll certainly look that survey up.

All right?

All right.

Well, CJ, thanks for that call.

Mike McCabe has joined us and listening to our conversation.

So what is your feeling about this, the idea that there's a civil war in this country and we're going to be fighting each other and killing each other off?

What the, what the heck is going on in

this country?

Good morning, Mike.

How's it going?

Well,

good morning,

guys.

Well, you're the deposit.

We're looking

for a positive spin on this.

Help us.

Well,

you know, there's no, there's no spin in that question.

You know, I don't know what civil war might look like nowadays because there's no Mason-Dixon line to be drawn.

It's

not

north against

South, right.

I don't know if it's, you know, gonna be cities against small towns or, I mean, you know, there would be civil wars waged in every state in the union because there's the political divide exists in every state in the union.

So I don't know exactly what would meet the definition of civil war or how we would reach that threshold.

But there's no question that

The right sees the left as dangerous and sees all of the political violence coming from the left.

The left sees the right as equally dangerous and sees all of the political violence coming from the right.

And I think if you look at it objectively, there have been repeated...

Democratic victims of political violence and there have been repeated Republican victims of political violence.

And so political violence in truth has known no party boundary.

But yet the way the two sides see political violence is completely different.

One side sees the left as being the big threat, the other side sees the right as being the big threat.

But that goes way beyond political violence.

Everything about every public policy dispute in our country, every disagreement we have on public policy, one side sees the other side as being the force that's trying to destroy everything and the other side sees it in exactly the opposite way.

So I guess in a way that's civil war.

That might be the modern definition of civil war.

But that kind of thinking and that kind of talk gets us precisely nowhere.

It doesn't get us an inch closer to figuring out how to live together peacefully and constructively and actually move our country ahead rather than dragging it down this pit of despair.

And then everybody seems to hate the media.

No matter which side they're on, we can point to the right wing media and the left.

But the thing is,

it's all on the internet.

But

the thing is, for all the carping that's been done for decades now about the mainstream media, the traditional media, man, now we're getting a full dose of what it feels like when you don't get information from

trusted and trained journalists.

What we're getting now is nothing but gossip and speculation that is thrown out there on social media.

the real journalists have to then respond to all those reports, and they're basically reporting on all the gossip and speculation.

They're trying to find the truth, but they're sorting through nothing but gossip and speculation.

That's what our information system has devolved to, where it's just people throwing out stuff.

Some of it is deliberate lies.

But some of it is just rampant speculation.

It's the kind of stuff that happens at accident scenes and things where people will all of a sudden say, you know, I thought I saw this and I thought I saw that.

But now it all gets reported.

breathtaking speed, it all goes out there and people consume it, that is a recipe for propaganda.

Propagandists thrive in an environment where there is no truth, there are no facts, there is no reason to judgment about what information should be shared and what shouldn't.

If anything, this moment should reinforce for us that that evil demonized mainstream media

actually played a very important role in our society.

And we are losing, we're losing an information system, a reliable information system, which any society needs, and certainly a democratically governed society desperately needs.

And we're losing it.

And we're losing it fast.

See how much we've already lost.

We're only three quarters of a year into this four year term.

which is shocking.

And I'd like to see-

But we've all got to take responsibility for pulling back from the brink.

I heard you talking about the accused shooter in the Charlie Kirk murder.

We don't know.

The simple truth is we don't know what his ideology was.

He might have been a liberal.

He might have been a right winger.

He could be fascist.

We don't know.

All we know is that he spent an awful lot of time in the recesses, the deepest recesses of the dark web.

He speaks the language

of

the gamers.

And they use that language to throw people off trails.

They use that language to confuse people.

They use that language to game people and to mock authorities who are trying to figure out what the heck they think and who they are and why they're doing what they're doing.

We don't know what this guy's background really is.

We don't know what his thinking really is.

And that's the truth.

And

any responsible journalist would say, we don't have enough facts yet to draw any conclusions.

But the speculation still runs rampant.

And it's irresponsible.

I still think you can kind of draw a conclusion a little bit because the Greipers, the ones who followed Nick Fuentes, they have

kind of been trolling Charlie Kirk.

See,

that's what they

have

been

trolling.

That's what all the gamers and the people on the dark web do, is they

troll people.

They thought Charlie Kirk was too inclusive.

And so they trolled him for it.

And because of the picture that I saw the picture, it's a picture.

I

saw the picture too.

And

it's exactly like the Pepe the Frog picture.

Exactly.

I've seen all the pictures, John, and I've heard all the speculation, but there isn't an ounce of verifiable fact.

behind any of it.

It's, you see one image, you speculate about it.

You hear something that somebody says, you gossip about it.

But we don't know for sure what was going on inside the young man's head.

I'm only going by the pictures that I've seen and that is proof enough for me to at least speculate with some confirmation that he is

part of that griper movement.

But you can also look at certain elements of his background.

If you're on the right, you can look at that, you can see it, you can read certain online comments, and you can come to the conclusion that he's a left-wing fanatic.

And so the truth is, maybe he's a left-wing fanatic, maybe he's a right-wing fanatic.

We don't know.

But you know to me the article I just wrote for substack this week I I try to raise a question that I think is a question that nobody's talking about in the midst of all these mass shootings and

Kathryn Lake

all this

in all this violence What what fascinates me not only is this country will not come to terms at all with with the How heavily armed this nation has become but the other thing that fascinates me is that in the

With the advent of new technological innovations, our country didn't respond to the digital age remotely like it responded when there were past technological advancements.

We didn't respond the way we responded to electricity.

We didn't respond the way we responded to the telephone.

We didn't respond to the way we responded to the creation of radio and then television.

In each of those instances, our society chose to either make those things public utilities, electricity and telephones were made public utilities.

Or for public good.

Or we required radio and television to operate in the public interest.

We made them public goods.

We required that they be used for the benefit of society.

And with the advent of the digital age, we didn't do that.

We allowed this to just become a wild west.

We allowed profiteers to make billions.

off the use of these technologies that they did not invent.

And then we allow people to use them in the most irresponsible ways imaginable.

And we are paying a huge price for us not responding in the way we responded to past technological advancements.

There's no reason why we couldn't have made the internet a public utility.

Why we couldn't have required digital devices to be used in the public

interest.

We chose not to.

That's a huge oversight by our society.

We will continue our conversation with Mike McCabe in just a moment.

It's John and Gordy on WMDX.

Kathryn Lake

You're listening to Civic Media.

Find the latest news, information and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.

John and Courtney in the morning Mike McCabe our guest this morning from sub-stack and author and we've been chit-chatting about some of the things the movements that are going on in this country and I would like to ask CJ to text us a link

to that survey so we could take a look at it because Mark brings up a good point in his text to us.

He says, I really have questions about this survey.

Sort of supports the Trump agenda.

It could be push questions on that.

Here's one from Matt in Middleton.

He says about the media.

I was in a house fire in college off Dory Street downtown.

The news interviewed us after the incident and the only bit of information they got right by the time it was broadcast was my name.

True story, okay.

And Gary agrees with you, Mike.

I agree with Mike.

We cannot say this was a political shooting.

All we know is what this guy said and what he did.

And we didn't get much from the transcript from a conversation he had with his roommates in revealing that he had done the shooting.

There's a lot of questions, obviously, to still ask and find out about, but I think one side is trying to create a truth around the fact that it is a liberal...

plan or plot or network that is behind all of this and it's devious, if anything.

And you talk about the dark web, you talk about doom scrolling in your latest sub stack article.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, I, you know, I start out the article by saying there's a reason why it's called doom scrolling and not hope scrolling.

Yeah.

Because doom Trump's hope.

and lies are more powerful than truth.

And the algorithm picks up on that.

When

it

comes to how the algorithms respond to information.

And I think it's just important for all of us to be aware that social media is driven by algorithms.

It's not driven by journalistic choices or anything like that.

And the algorithms are designed to first and foremost,

capture audiences to keep them logged in, to keep them scrolling so that they can be delivered to advertisers.

Because the whole purpose of the, you know, these social media sites is to deliver us to advertisers.

They're selling our information, they're selling us to advertisers.

So they need to keep us logged in.

And it so happens that the most efficient way to do that is to be outrageous, to be irresponsible, to be

hateful.

Hate is a more powerful motivator than love online.

Yeah.

No question about it.

And, you know, there's that old saying that, you know, alive is halfway around the world before truth gets its boots on.

And

Kathryn Lake

I

think Mark Twain is the person who said that.

But of course, it rings true at any age.

And that's what the algorithms pick up on, is that what keeps people logged in, what keeps people motivated is when they're on edge, when they're full of anxiety, when they are full of anger, that keeps them scrolling.

And so they just keep feeding us more and more of that kind of information.

And of course, Charlie Kirk knew the algorithms.

That's something that he understood extremely well.

And the current occupant of the White House knows the algorithms.

He understands the forces that rule this digital world.

And they feed that.

And then these, one of the fascinating things is that these shooters, the Minnesota school shooting, Charlie Kirk's murder, all of these things,

have something in common.

They have shooters who were deeply and perpetually engaged by the deepest recesses of the dark

web.

Social media.

Not

only social media, but the darkest forms of social media.

An earlier article, I had made the point.

I had shared the fact that the Minnesota school shooter

had the name of the Madison Christian School shooter.

Yes, yes.

On his gun.

They had been in touch.

They knew each other and they egg each other on and they talk.

I think one of the things that we have to come to terms with is maybe, maybe just maybe Charlie Kirk shooter and maybe a lot of these shooters are completely apolitical.

Maybe they don't have an ideology.

Maybe what they know,

is that doing these mass shootings makes them famous.

Maybe that's their real motivation.

If we want to engage in speculation, that's as valid a speculation as anything.

Maybe they just want fame and they know that...

committing mass murder will make them famous because they're talking with each other about these kinds of crimes and they're communicating with each other and egging each other on in these places that they hang out in.

And that's what we get when we treat the digital world as something that it's okay for it to just be the Wild West.

We should be thinking about

This in the same way that we thought about electricity and the telephone and and radio and television and we're not and we're paying a huge price

I know yeah, we had that discussion sure it was a great idea to do something about it And then they went the opposite way on AI saying no regulations for ten years exactly now Well,

we have to leave it there Mike.

Yeah You have an event this weekend.

Yeah, I'm gonna be up in Stevens Point

A place called Bound to Happen Books, wonderful independent bookstore.

Gonna be up there at one o'clock on Saturday, the Saturday.

Very good.

Thanks for joining us.

We'll see you again next Wednesday.

Tomorrow, Jim Santel will join us, former U.S.

Attorney and also Tim Slecker from Busted Pencils.

And

we'll read some of the texts that you sent us today, tomorrow, and pick up on the topic again.

Yeah, we'll recap that.

Stephanie Miller's next.

We hope you have a great day so

long.

The

Kathryn Lake

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