Dave Troy: Russia & the Religious Right

Dave Troy:

If you’re trying to inject truth into the Trump network, they will effectively try to discredit the messenger, and it will radicalize them further. Meanwhile the other network gets radicalized too. So we end up with the hardening of these two social networks to the point where they’re living in two different epistemological realities.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

My guest today is Dave Troy, an investigative journalist whose work has covered everything from the debunking of UFO conspiracy theories to the rise of Christian nationalism. A through line in his reporting is the growing threat that our democracy now, faces on many fronts.

Dave, welcome to Burn the Boats.

Dave Troy:

Yeah, glad to be here, Ken.

Ken Harbaugh:

I want to get specific about those threats in a minute, but I am curious as to how investigative journalism has changed now, that we seem to live in a post-truth era where facts are so much less persuasive than tribalism. You see this at every Trump rally.

And it makes me wonder, if your job is uncovering the truth, but that truth is increasingly less relevant, how do you adapt?

Dave Troy:

Yeah. So, probably a little bit about my background is in order here because I did not sort of set out to be an investigative journalist. I landed in this arena because there was stuff that needed to be done that not many other people were actually doing.

So, my background is really as a technologist, and as an entrepreneur. And I've been doing a lot of analytical work kind of in the realm of the intelligence universe for the last 10 years or so, looking at networks of people and how they relate to each other and doing a lot of work in history. I also, did a lot of work in history and school.

Really what's required right now, is this kind of multidisciplinary approach of using technical analytic skills, with historical skills, with journalistic skills.

And so, I kind of, over the last few years went from being more of an analyst to being more of a journalist because frankly, in order to get the kind of information that you need in order to synthesize these stories properly, you have to have what amounts to journalistic credentials.

I mean, I was starting increasingly to get my work published more and more. I've been a writer since I was a teenager, but in the last few years, it's been more sort of news oriented.

So, by having that credential of being okay, I'm a journalist, I'm actually writing stories that are getting published in outlets and being able to call up public information officers and request information and to do Freedom of Information Act requests, and that kind of thing, has really been crucial for my work. And so, that was kind of just a necessary thing.

So, what's interesting right now, is that there just aren't a lot of people that have both the mandate, the time, and the skillsets to do this kind of work. And there are a few, but it's kind of a rare breed.

So, anyway, that's kind of what I bring to the table is this capability. And because this isn't necessarily like my day job, I don't have somebody breathing over me telling me what I have to do.

I basically follow my nose to where I think the most interesting and most compelling stories are so that we can actually unearth what's going on here. And so, that's kind of what I've been up to.

So, that's effectively what has had to be done over the last few years. And I think others are starting to kind of move into that space, but it's kind of a challenging environment to work in.

Ken Harbaugh:

You did a TED Talk in which you talked about the importance of tracing the historical providence of disinformation packets. Understanding where they come from helps us understand their virality and their traction in certain spaces with certain networks.

I understand that's important from an academic perspective, but how is it important in the combating of disinfo where the reaction has to be so quick, it often can't be nuanced? How does understanding the provenance of particular bits of disinformation help us fight it?

Dave Troy:

Well, I think it's key to get into the mindset of the people that are promoting this stuff and to understand what their actual motives are.

So, for example a lot of people sort of assume that Donald Trump is all about money and that everything he does is motivated by grift.

And yeah, I mean, there's an aspect of that, but a lot of times grift, the sort of entrepreneurial disinformation operations actually are motivated by some deeper sort of philosophical division. They don't believe in fiat currency or they believe that there should be a theocracy or what have you.

These things motivate them, and then they use entrepreneurial tactics to make these efforts of theirs self-sustaining. So, ultimately, if you don't get the motivation right, then you don't understand what they're actually trying to do.

And it's very easy also just to dismiss it as being silly. When you look at something like QAnon, there's a whole lot of crazy sounding stuff in there.

But when you actually dissect out what the messages are, where they came from, what the motivations are behind them, you start to realize that it's kind of actually part of a broader information warfare landscape that's designed to promote certain kinds of behaviors in the target population.

So, if you don't understand that, if you just dismiss it out of hand as being crazy, then you just leave a lot of information on the table that you could be using to actually diffuse and counter these threats. But instead, you're too busy laughing about it.

And of course, that's exactly what the adversary would like you to do, is to ignore the threats so that they can keep posing the threat.

Ken Harbaugh:

You mentioned fiat currency. There is a weird alignment between Russian revanchist, Putin and his coterie, and right-wing extremists here in the US. Can you explain that shared thinking?

Dave Troy:

Yeah, I mean, this is sort of a thread that runs through history. And if you go back to the protocols of the elders of Zion from 1903, which was a forged Russian disinformation document that was published, that suggested that there was a big Jewish banking conspiracy to control the world and to bring about wars and all of this kind of stuff, all of what we're seeing now, is a repackaging of protocols of the elders of Zion.

So, if you consider that the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was a kind of a communist revolt that was bringing about the Leninist power clique, there was a whole nother reactionary network that didn't like that.

There was the white Russians and various religious folks and monarchs and whatnot that felt as though the Russian revolution was itself a kind of a Jewish conspiracy.

So, what we're seeing now, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, is a kind of return of this, I would say royalist revanchist kind of mindset that Putin has latched onto as being kind of his driving force.

So, the US right, has basically been sucked into this royalist network as well, and was also, pretty aligned with this network all through the 1930s and into the ‘50s and everything else.

I mean, the US right, which was really largely led by the National Association of Manufacturers, which spawn like the John Birch Society and that sort of thing. All of that was a reaction to communism.

So, what we're seeing now, is kind of the rise of these anti-communist networks in the US as well as the white Russian royalist Romanov networks in Russia, which Putin and Dugin are effectively Romanovs in terms of their worldview.

And what they want to see is a return of not … people get it wrong, and they say that Putin wants to restore the USSR. No, he doesn't want to restore the USSR, he wants to restore the Russian empire from 1890s. He's thinking more like Catherine the Great.

So, it's very much a return to this kind of royalist hierarchical worldview. And that of course includes fiat currency because they think the fiat currency is this like debased currency that's being controlled by the Jewish bankers as where something like the gold standard or Bitcoin.

Which is a hard currency that is hierarchical in nature and that you can accumulate and you can show clearly who the winners are because eugenics and hierarchy and all this is very important to them. That's kind of where you get these worldview splits.

Ken Harbaugh:

What is the Moscow third Rome prophecy?

Dave Troy:

Yeah. So, sort of complicated, and I have to load all this back up in my head, but there was a young girl in Portugal in the early 20th century who saw a vision, and she basically predicted like World War I, World War II, and then there was a Third Secret of Fatima. The location, I think it was Fatima, and I think the girl had a different name.

But anyway, there were these prophecies about the future. And one of these prophecies that tied into this was the idea that there would be three seats of the Catholic church. So, first you had Constantinople, and then you have Rome, and then you have Moscow, was the idea.

The ultimate idea being that the Catholic and the Orthodox churches would merge, and so the entire Orthodox world, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian would merge with the Roman Catholic Church, but the third seat of this combined outfit would be in Moscow.

And so, Putin actually built a big cathedral dedicated to the idea of the third Rome in Moscow not that long ago, I think in the last 15 years or so, maybe even the last 10 years. And it's also, dedicated to the Russian military.

So, effectively what you have is this idea, this destiny thought that Putin has sort of brought into being along with Dugin and others, that effectively the entire church would land in Moscow and be seated there.

And so, they're sort of trying to bring about that prophecy with this Ukraine war to some extent, although I think in practice, what they're finding is that it's not very easy to unify these churches.

For the Ukrainians, there's a split within the Ukrainian church where like half of it, or some portion of it was controlled by the kind of Russian Orthodox Church and the FSB, and then there's another branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that wasn't tied to that.

And then the Greeks basically opted out. They were like, “Dude, we don't want anything to do with any of this.”

So, it's more complicated than I think Putin and Dugin would hope. But that's what their thought process was entering into this.

Ken Harbaugh:

The Russian Orthodox Church is a political machine more than a spiritual conduit these days. It's entirely in the grip of the Putins forces in Russia. In fact, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church endorsed the invasion of Ukraine, is part of the kleptocratic class in Russia.

Can you unpack that a little bit so that when we talk about the Russian Orthodox Church, we're not really talking about a spiritual entity?

Dave Troy:

Yeah. It's basically been an intelligence network connected with the KGB for decades and decades. And I'm considering myself a student of Russian history. I don't speak Russian, I don't read Russian. So, I've been having to do all this through English lenses, and I think that's a limitation.

But at the same time, I just keep trying to learn more and maybe know more than your average bear.

So, what I understand is that the Russian Orthodox Church has acted as a conduit of the KGB for a long time. And if you think about it, all churches were really the original intelligence networks.

Because A, you have kind of a network of churches, you have a hierarchy through which you can pass information, and you have local branches everywhere. So, you've got the ability to communicate and monitor a vast terrain using a fairly lightweight network.

So, the second thing is you've got people coming in and like telling the church your secrets. So, it's a good way to like figure out who's doing what in the local communities and funnel that back up to the top if it's important. So, they became very just closely aligned over the decades.

There's also, an outfit called the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia, which is basically all of the Russian Orthodox Church that exists outside of the domestic Russia situation. So, here in the United States, there's branches of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia.

And I should probably also, mention a similarly aligned outfit called Friends of Lubavitch, which was a Jewish organization. There's a cult that got … and I call it a cult because it's really a Jewish organization that is dedicated to the teachings of one man.

It was Rebbe Lubavitch, and this organization ended up being Chabad. So, in the United States, Chabad is basically the current incarnation of Friends of Lubavitch, and it's also, very closely aligned with Putin for the most part.

I imagine that you may hear from people that are like, “Oh, I know a guy in Chabad and he's not aligned with Putin.” But by and large Chabad is aligned with Putin's networks.

So, you have this kind of additional supplemental network effect stuff that Putin is drawing from both on the Orthodox Christian side as well as on the Jewish side. And then there's a variety of other cults too that they use.

And that's kind of the thing that people need to understand is that Russia has managed to exert its control by way of activating different factions around the world. So, those factions include, say aspects of the Christian right, the Russian Orthodox Church, there's these various cults.

There's a cult called I Am, there's another cult called Allatra. I could probably brainstorm and come up with a bunch of others.

But point being that you don't sort of try to gain control of the world just by like putting up a flag with an idea and hoping that people follow along. You basically need to divvy up the world into factions that you can then put hooks into and then pull them in your direction.

Or ideally, convince them to row in the direction that you want to row so that there's less work that you have to do. I mean, the idea that you would have a bunch of right-wing Christians in the United States rooting for effectively the Russian state in 1980, what seemed anathema.

But right now, that's what's going on. And it's because that right wing Christian faction became aligned with Putin's worldview, and now, they're pulling in effectively the same direction, which is why we can't get funding to Ukraine. So, it's complicated, but it's basically just controlling factions.

Ken Harbaugh:

What are the most important elements of that worldview? Where does that alignment come from? And I have to believe culture is at the center of it. This argument about decadence and morals. Because I can't imagine foreign policy, the way we used to understand it is really at the core of the Christian rights alignment with Russia. What is that alliance about?

Dave Troy:

So, I think it's important for us to kind of recognize that Putin is a bit of a nihilist in many ways. He's very much about outcomes, like how do I achieve the outcomes that I want?

So, to some extent, if he needed to start espousing a belief in, I don't know, left-handed monkeys and pencils, he would do that. But instead he's doing this because this is what works.

If you want to take strategic control of the United States, you need to have control of the Christian right. There's just no doubt about that. If they're against you, then you're going to have a problem toppling elections and gaining majorities and doing the stuff you want to do.

So, to some extent, he's saying what needs to be said in order to get the Christian right to be aligned with him.

That said, yes, it's basically starting in the ‘90s in particular, although I've traced this back into the ‘50s. If you look at like Billy Graham and his trips to Russia in like 1956 and ‘55, all of the people that surrounded Billy Graham at that time, who was traveling to Russia in the ‘50s, ended up being connected with the family.

Which is the right wing group that Jeff Sharlet documented, and the national prayer breakfast and all that. So, they were planting the seeds for co-opting the Christian right way back in the ‘50s.

So, the traditionalism, the anti-gay stuff, there's a whole bunch of these sort of polar opposite things that they've kind of latched onto that they think people in on the US right will be responsive to. So, that includes traditionalism, gay marriage, abortion, all of that.

And in a lot of ways, what you've seen in Russia is that they've actually copied stuff like laws from the US about abortion and implemented them in the Duma in Russia. So, there's a lot of kind of back and forth trying to achieve that alignment.

And of course, I mean, the thing people need to realize too about Russia is that the entire political landscape is just engineered. Like there's no actual real dissent in elections, there's no opposition candidates, really.

People like Navalny are a little bit sort of anomalies and the information space, like people sort of project a western worldview onto Russia and say, “Well, why don't they just revolt? Why don't they just replace Putin?”

Well, they're getting information in such a controlled way that they don't see the world the way that we see it, because even as our informational landscape has become poisoned and terribly sort of difficult to navigate, theirs is worse. Theirs is just very monolithic and there just isn't a lot of dissent there.

And that's on purpose. They don't just don't want to have a big dissenting faction. So, at any rate, these factors have sort of conspired to make it possible for them to take strategic control of the US.

And I should point out that it isn't just on the right. I mean, they have been doing a lot with the right since 1995 or so. And again, I say it goes back to the ‘50s.

But there's also, a significant faction on the left that they spent decades cultivating. So, like if you look at the anti-war movement, the peace movement, all of that kind of stuff was run effectively by the KGB.

And of course, there's a lot of authentic participation of that sort of thing in the US, but if you look at sort of how those organizations came to be, where they got their funding, where they got their talking points, a lot of it traces back to the KGB.

So, the ‘60s, to a large extent was a product of KGB influence in the US on the left. And then we have now, in the ‘90s to today, a lot of KGB influence on the right.

And what I keep seeing and trying to call people's attention to is this convergence of left and right that is actually sort of acting as a snowplow to take out the center.

And the more that those networks converge, the harder time we're going to have kind of unwinding this and getting back to a place where we have what we consider to be a sort of fair and balanced democracy.

Ken Harbaugh:

It seems to me that the relationship between Putin and the Christian right in this country is entirely asymmetric. The affinity for extremist Christian nationalists in this country for Putinism seems sincere.

Dave Troy:

Yeah, yeah.

Ken Harbaugh:

But Putin seems a hundred percent cynical in his treatment of the Christian right in this country. It's not a real relationship. One side is in the throttle of Putin. And Putin must be laughing in his dacha every time he sees a pastor in this country celebrate the moral values of Putin's Russia.

Dave Troy:

Yeah. I mean, it is very, very cynical and there's a bunch of people that are pulling in the same direction of Putin in addition to the sort of Christian right.

You've got people like David Sacks, and Elon Musk, and Jeffrey Sachs. And there's a long list of people that have been shilling for Putin for whatever reasons. Everybody sort of assumes it's compromat or money or whatever.

But honestly, I think it really boils down to just having a contrarian worldview and believing that some of what Putin is saying is right, and they would rather go down this road of authoritarianism than continue on the road of dealing with the hard work of pluralistic democracy.

Because when you face it, like democracy is a pain. It goes slow, there's a lot of mess, everybody's annoyed all the time. It's like if you could just have a nice autocracy, you could just make some rules and do some things and just move faster.

And I think that a lot of the drive towards accelerationism is really expressing a frustration with democracy and all of its hoopla that goes with it.

And I think one of the darker things that we see kind of coming out of this is that democracy itself is pretty easy to engineer and to control.

So, if you look at just even like any given election, because you have this first pass to post, election system where the majority vote getter wins, it's relatively easy to engineer a contest where you've got say, three, four candidates.

And if the one that you don't want to win, you throw in a couple of spoilers and it pulls off 4 or 5%, then that guy won't win and the strongman will.

And so, that's kind of what you see happening with like RFK Jr., and Jill Stein, and Cornell West, all of whom are basically part of the same organ. People pretend that they are sort of like representing different points of view.

But if you think about them, actually what they're doing is drawing from slightly different factions, which again is this idea of gaining factional control.

So, RFK Jr. is very popular with boomers of a certain age. You've got Cornell West who they've put in the mix to appeal to black people. You've got Jill Stein, who's also popular with boomers, but also, environmentally oriented type folks. So, it's pure engineering is all it is.

And if you come at the US Democratic system with a cynical frame of mind, with just strategic control being your only goal, then it's not very difficult to engineer the outcomes that you want. And that's, I think exactly what is happening right now.

Ken Harbaugh:

We haven't really talked about Trump yet, and his affinity for Putin seems personality driven. It's not as much about the policy positions or even worldview. It seems more visceral than that. He's just drawn to the strong man persona, the autocratic sensibility. Am I right in perceiving that?

Dave Troy:

I think that's a big part of it, for sure. And I'll send you a link to a thread that I just did a couple days ago, and I'm starting to get a little bit bigger picture on this, and will be writing more about it. But yes, the personality thing is a big affinity point, I think for Trump.

There's also, a lot of evidence that Trump has been pulled into the KGB milieu as far back as like the early to mid-‘70s. And in 1987, he did an interview with a magazine writer named Ron Rosenbaum that talked about his ideas for how to engineer a nuclear free world.

And in that interview with Rosenbaum, he basically said that his uncle, John Trump, who was a scientist at MIT, proposed to him an idea for disarming the world.

And effectively what it was, was to strike a deal with Russia to take control of the world's nuclear weapons, basically at gunpoint, to threaten the world with nuclear annihilation if they don't hand over their nukes.

And this would thus achieve not only peace in the Middle East, but peace globally. And it would place the US and Russia in a kind of a joint custodial relationship to oversee the world by virtue of nuclear threat and if necessary to create some kind of a global alliance that would control the nuclear weapons.

So, that idea actually, if you trace it back, and this is why tracing is so important, goes back to the late 1940s and the KGB influence then.

In 1948, Henry Wallace ran for president, effectively on an anti-nuke platform. And he was very much up in various KGB networks. He was heavily influenced by a cult leader named Nicholas Roerich, who was tied in with Russian intelligence.

And it's hard for us now, in 2024, to wrap our heads around just how freaked out people were in 1945 with the deployment and development of the nuclear bomb.

There were a lot of scientists who felt that the deployment of the bomb was immoral. That there were all these innocent civilians in Japan that were killed because of what they saw as Truman's sort of petulance and I guess just rationist in deploying this without proper consideration.

And so, there became a network of scientists in the United States that effectively thought that they knew better than the president.

That the president, and that the democratically elected leadership was dumb, for lack of a better word. And that the world needed these scientists to stand up and to speak out and to take control even if necessary. And that taking control could involve things like espionage.

So, this is where you get into the espionage that was happening during the ‘40s with the nuclear program Manhattan Project.

So, people like Klaus Fuchs, and the Rosenbergs, and Oppenheimer. And now, Oppenheimer's involvement is disputed, but there's no question that he was very, very close to some of these communist networks.

His brother was like a confirmed CPUSA member. They certainly went after him, whether how far he may have gone is still subject to debate there. Of course, the recent movie touches on that material. And I could go on and on about that.

But the point being that the people that were involved in the creation of the bomb thought that they had a moral duty to do something.

So, particularly like Einstein, who was actually not involved in the bomb, but he informed the physics of it quite a bit. And the reason he wasn't involved is because the US government thought he was a security risk.

And so, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hungarian born Jews who were involved in the development of the bomb, they basically went on to kind of have a career being custodians of the idea of the bomb.

So, Leo Szilard sparked much of the new left and Teller became aligned with like the Council for National Policy and a lot of the right wing networks.

And what we're dealing with now, effectively is the remains of those two networks kind of duking it out over the control of the future of nuclear weaponry. And Putin, of course, KGB latched onto this like crazy.

So, KGB pretty much aligned themselves with Szilard, but then through the religious right, the network that Teller was connected to who he developed the hydrogen bomb. So, his idea was sort of peace through strength and the right wing networks became very aligned sort of naturally as they always were with the religious right.

And so, now again, we're dealing with this confluence of kind of the Szilard and Teller networks.

And Putin is just latching onto this and knows that that's how you gain strategic control of the US is to go back to the headwaters of power, which is nuclear weaponry and the wings on both the left and the right that spawned by that power and manipulate those factions. That's what we're dealing with. That's where we are.

Ken Harbaugh:

Doesn't that seem like fantastical thinking now, though, given how many countries have nuclear weapons and would not give them up even at the point of a gun?

I mean, I'm just doing a back of the envelope list. I'm up to nine, and you have very, very few examples. South Africa is the only one that comes to mind of a country that willingly decided to give up its nuclear program. I guess you could add Ukraine to that, and we see how that went.

Dave Troy:

Yeah, they ultimately, got kind of bamboozled into doing that.

Ken Harbaugh:

That’s right. I mean, they had a security guarantee from Russia, and in some ways from the United States that if they relinquished their arsenal, they wouldn't be invaded. I'm simplifying it, but it does kind of undermine the idea that non-proliferation is in the interests of the smaller countries.

Dave Troy:

Well, yeah, and again, don't mistake logic for what Putin thinks he's doing. I mean, again, there's a lot of, I would call magical thinking kind of involved in the Putin mindset.

I mean, I think it's also, very important for Westerners not to project their idea of like what they think would make sense to Putin on Putin, because ultimately he's got his own worldview.

I mean, I think there's a lot of ink spilled over trying to decipher Putin's mindset. And I think we should all have some humility and not being able to fully grok what he's up to.

But that being said, I do think that there are some key underlying threads that do inform the Russian worldview. And one of them is obviously Russian nationalism.

And Russian nationalism includes a healthy dose of like Russian cosmism and their idea about earth's place in the universe, and what it means to be human, and the future of humanity and all this stuff.

So, like the idea of like Elon Musk wanting to extend the light of consciousness and become a multi-planetary species, that actually aligns perfectly, it comes from Russian cosmism. So, that's partly why there's a worldview alignment between like Musk and Putin.

And with respect to the disarmament question, you've obviously got this sort of notional bricks concept that Putin has been trying to make a thing. And I don't know whether that's going to work out quite the way he thinks.

I mean, the whole bricks idea actually came from a Goldman Sachs analyst in like 2002. So, it's not like they came up with this. It's sort of a word that they latched onto as a way of crystallizing what they hope will happen.

But effectively what they're hoping will happen is that all of these countries that have been sort of at odds with US hegemony will bond together over this sort of bipolar world that Putin is trying to bring into being.

He calls it a multipolar world, but effectively what we're really dealing with is instead of a unipolar world where the US sort of has all the ultimate hegemony, he's thinking that there's like the US versus everybody else.

And so, what I think he's hoping is that the US comes under strategic control of Russia and Putin, and that the rest of this Brix block is also, under their strategic control.

Now, whether or not the US could be altered in some way so that it becomes effectively aligned with Putin's worldview for any period of time, I don't know. I mean, if we collapse the government, everything's on the table. But I think that's what they're sort of hoping.

And yeah, while it sounds improbable because of the Russian worldviews reliance on mysticism, and fate, and destiny, they think that somehow or another magically this is all just going to come to pass if they just kind of manifest it into belief.

His chief of staff, Anton Vaino, he actually wrote a paper, it was called The Capitalization of the Future, and a big part of it is the power of self-fulfilling prophecy. So, if you prophesize something, if you say it long enough, they believe they can manifest it.

Which is really just the power of positive thinking and the secret and all of those kinds of theosophy kind of driven ideologies. But it's officially Russia's policy to try to manifest stuff. So, they're trying to manifest this crazy future, and that's what they're up to.

Ken Harbaugh:

And Trump is certainly a part of that.

Dave Troy:

Oh, yeah. Well, I wanted to mention about Trump. I mean, the key thing you have to remember about Trump is that he's from Queens. And there is no chip on one shoulder bigger than someone's who is from Queens and doesn't feel like that they quite fit in in Manhattan.

And the KGB latched onto that in a big way because the whole thing really is that yes, he's not John Jacob Astor, he's never going to be like some old money Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, he's a grubby little dude from Queens.

And that inferiority complex people think, “Oh, he doesn't have an inferiority complex.” Yes, he does. He wishes that he was those people. He was snubbed by them his entire life, he’s snubbed by them now.

And he feels as though it's his duty to sort of put one over on all of these people that said that, “No, no, no, you're not part of our club.” And so, the KGB just latched onto that and is using it to great advantage.

So, I think in terms of Trump, that's what makes him tick is that he's got this giant chip on his shoulder.

Ken Harbaugh:

It is, funny is not the right word, but given all of the available compromat on this personality, the real vulnerability is his insecurity. It's not money, it's not scandal. I mean, those are all very real flaws in this person's character, but it's his deep-seated insecurity.

We talked to Mary Trump about this. We've talked to Bandy Lee about this. I mean, it's a pathology.

Dave Troy:

Yeah, I think so. And I think that's why he's just so manipulable. And I think again, people get it wrong that people are all about money.

I mean, Musk wants money, that's not what motivates him. I mean, sure, people are motivated for money up to like their first a hundred million dollars or first billion or whatever.

After that, then it's about power. It's about worldview. It's about controlling others. It's about creating the future that you believe is the best future. That's what motivates people. Of course, sex too sometimes. But it's not just about money. That's one part of a much bigger picture.

Ken Harbaugh:

You said recently that Trump not only presents a danger to democracy in the United States, but a danger to democracy everywhere. Can you explain that?

Dave Troy:

Yeah. I think it's sort of self-evident just that the US is what many people would consider to be the reference implementation of democracy. Like this is sort of how it's supposed to be to an extent.

Although I would argue that many countries around the world seem to be doing a better job at democracy than we are at the moment.

I was in Switzerland last week, and a fun fact about Switzerland is that I was in this restaurant, they have a big room, old restaurant from a hundred years ago with murals depicting scenes in the life of George Washington. And I'm like, “Why? Why is this the George Washington room?”

The reason was because the Swiss in 1848 adopted the US Constitution as a blueprint for their own constitutional republic.

And so, it's sort of impossible for us, as Americans just sitting here to fully understand the degree to which America's influence around the world has had an impact on democracies everywhere.

So, to some extent, if American democracy fails or falls apart or discontinues support of key allies, (and I mean, we're seeing this right now, with Israel and Ukraine) it's going to have a big impact on the world and sort of how the world sees democracy as a whole.

So, I think that Trump, if you really listen to him, he actually doesn't exhibit that much support for like a Christian nationalist agenda.

He doesn't care about religion. He is pretending to, to some extent, but what he's actually said is that he wants to basically end the constitution. That he thinks the constitution sucks, and that we want to do something else.

And certainly, everything he does in terms of fact and deed suggests he desire to subvert the Constitution. He doesn't believe in the elections. He doesn't believe in the laws. He thinks that everything should be sort of thrown out in favor of this populist rule that he's seeking.

And of course, the Republicans have basically been fully co-opted by this faction. Now, I mean, I was hoping, and I guess not that optimistic that it would happen, but kind of hoping that Nikki Haley would be able to push back on some of this and be able to kind of crystallize a faction that would eject this disease from the Republican party. But it's just not happening.

So, it's seems like he's got a really tight hold on the US Republican Party, and I think this is going to have impacts around the world.

Certainly, you see reflections in people like Orban, and I have no idea what's going on with Milei in Argentina, but there's this sort of this strong man mold that's taking root, and I think it's very disturbing.

Ken Harbaugh:

What is most alarming to me about the former president's anti constitutionalist impulses is that he has now, surrounded himself with people who are effective, who are ruthless, who are planning.

I've said it before on this show, but this is a great place to repeat it. The difference between a petty bully and a fascist is that a fascist has a plan, and Trump 2.0 has a plan.

And the most terrifying part about it from someone who swore on oath to support and defend the Constitution, is that they're using the Constitution itself to undermine the constitution.

I'm thinking of, for example, the pardon power. If you diminish the significance, the sacredness of that pardon power so much that you're using it to pardon the Sheriff Arpaios of the world or offering blanket pardons to people who shoot protestors or war criminals, as in the case of Eddie Gallagher and others who are offered those kinds of things. It undermines the Constitution itself to the point where it loses its moral force.

Dave Troy:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's one distinction that I think is worth sort of pointing out at this juncture where we are is that there's two branches of subversion that are really happening simultaneously.

One is the institutional subversion where people, as you say, are using the institutions to the letter of the law and doing things like subverting the court and trying to achieve outcomes that they want there.

And doing manipulations within the institutional structure of the Congress, that sort of thing.

I mean, like right now, we have a really bizarre situation if we're honest about it, that in the House, the majority of the House members want to pass aid to Ukraine. The reason why that it isn't passing is because the House speaker won't bring the bill to the floor.

That's a institutional procedural blockade that has been enacted by somebody who's aligned with Putin. And so, that's a really difficult thing for us to get around right now.

Certainly, people are talking about doing the discharge petition and other mechanisms to try to make this happen, but it's very difficult to get around that.

Beyond that, there's a lot of other subversion that's happening at what I would call the societal level sort of population directed active measures where you have people being kind of radicalized and brought into worldviews that might incite them to violence.

And all of that stuff is happening outside of the realm of institutions. So, in broad strokes, I would say that this is sort of a difference between like the Leninist and people working with inside government.

This is a desire not only crash the government from within and to dismantle it. So, you see like the project 2025 being proposed by the Heritage Foundation and sort of the Koch Cato network, that I would call all of them Institutionalists. Yes, they want to radically change the government, but they're basically institutionalists.

The Bannon type networks, and Stone, and Mike Flynn, they're doing effectively like irregular warfare where they're radicalizing the population.

And so, Mike Flynn's gone around with these great awakening and great reset tours and whatever, trying to get people almost imbued with religious fervor for overthrowing the government.

So, again, it's this confluence of approaches when you combine the sort of radical revolutionary type approach with this institutional approach, you're almost guaranteed to get some kind of major outcome from that because it's just meeting from the bottom and the top simultaneously. It's very scary. I mean, it's, I think, quite effective, honestly.

Ken Harbaugh:

Last question, and I think it brings us full circle back to my opening question about truth in an age of post-truth.

It feels like the truth tellers, the investigative journalists are at a massive disadvantage when confronting disinformation, which can be so easily scaled, because you don't need to be careful with your lies. You can crank out a hundred lies.

What's the old Mark Twain quote? A lie can travel twice around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on. It's more than just the speed of lies, it's the volume. I can crank out a hundred invented stories for everyone that requires fact checking.

Dave Troy:

Yeah, exactly. And I think we've mistaken the idea of truth, which of course, is important, but truth is not the only thing that's in play here. It's really more the structure of how our information flows.

So, if you think about it in terms of trust and the relationships between networks of people and who's going to listen to truth. I mean, you can sit there with the truth all day long.

I have this experience where I've got stuff that's true, that's worth hearing, but it's too early because it sounds a little bit bizarre and people don't know the history. And so, it doesn't necessarily travel even into my own networks at first, much less getting across to people that don't trust me or my network or my worldview.

So, what's happened is that a lot of this information warfare beyond infecting people with ideas that are false, it has reshaped the networks of our country.

So, we effectively have two major networks of people that don't trust each other. We sort of have the progressive democratically oriented folks in cities and large population centers, and then we have what I would call a more rural network that is more aligned towards Trump.

And information simply does not pass between those two networks. It doesn't matter whether it's true or false, it just won't pass.

And so, what ends up happening is if you end up trying to inject true information into this more rural network … and I'm speaking generally, but obviously there's Orban, Trump supporters, that kind of thing.

But speaking generally, if you're trying to inject true information into the Trump network, they will effectively try to discredit the messenger. It will radicalize them further so that they not only don't trust that message, but they won't trust future messages from anything resembling that network.

Meanwhile, the other network gets radicalized too because if the other network tries to influence them, then they start rejecting that information. And so, we end up with the hardening of these two social networks to the point where they're living in two separate epistemological realities, two different entirely separate worldviews.

And so, that's the problem that we're facing, is that we are becoming hardened into these worldviews that are diametrically opposed.

And anybody that studies genocides or civil wars or world wars or whatever knows that this is the precursor towards massive kinetic conflict and genocide.

Because effectively when you get to the point where you think that there's a group of people that has a worldview that you just simply reject and you think that they're not only wrong but evil, then it's easy to dehumanize them.

Once you've dehumanize them, it's easy to kill them. And that's what we're up against right now.

And so, in order for us to combat this long term, we have to figure out ways to reknit the fabric of our social network.

And the analogy that I use is that this fabric has been eroded. It's been burned away much like a forest fire, and it would be easy to, after a forest fire, say like, “Well, let's just distribute some truth around, everything will be fine.”

No, this isn't about truth. This is about the connective tissue between people about our shared reality. And you're not going to fix that just by sort of throwing water onto a forest fire. You have to give it time to grow back, and you have to give it the conditions where it can grow back.

So, I would argue that in order for us to fix this long term, we have to engineer programs that bring us long-term social connectivity across this divide.

And I've been thinking about programs like AmeriCorps. If you took something like AmeriCorps and scaled that up massively, where you had maybe 20 million people a year participating in that as like a program for young people, and you just made it very attractive for them to do so, and you ended up purposely mixing people across the rural and urban interface, you might actually solve this.

And a little dirty secret is that when we had World War II and Vietnam and there other conflicts, we ended up doing some of that by default, by mixing people in the military.

And those people, that generation of people from World War II that mixed across those barriers went on to build the post-war 20th century United States. And they built the institutions that we rely on now, NATO, and Bretton Woods and everything else.

So, I think we need to be more retro introspective about kind of how we got here and how we're going to get out of it.

And when you boil all that down, it doesn't have a lot to do with truth. It's more about social structure, and comity (and C-O-M-I-T-Y, not C-O-M-E-D-Y, although that's helpful too). We have to figure out how we're going to have a society that works.

And in America, because we're such a big country, it makes it difficult, so I think smaller countries have a little bit easier time because everybody's sort of more close together and more tightly interfaced.

Here, we have room to have a complete separate epistemological worldview all packed into one country. And we've had this problem before. There was the matter of this 1860 to 1865 event that was sort of ugly.

So, I think we're on the brink of risking doing something like that again if we don't get our act together. And I think it's going to take way more than truth to do that. We really need to figure out what kind of society we want to be.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, let's end on that note. I am a huge proponent of the AmeriCorps suggestion and would love to have another conversation about that with you.

Dave Troy:

Sure, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Ken. This was great.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

For updates and more, follow us on Twitter @Team_Harbaugh. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to rate and review.

Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

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