War Game: Film Screening & Conversation

0:00:00.1 Zoe Clark: Hi, everyone. Good evening. I am Zoe Clark. So let's see, the film Rolling Stone called the scariest documentary you'll see all year. And we're gonna process what we all just were able to go through together. I felt really honored to be able to be in this room with everyone this evening. I'm joined by three just fabulous people. And I wanna introduce the Brain Trust on stage this evening to center us and guide us as we process what we just saw. Professor Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the Ford School of Public Policy here at the university. Hello, professor. Good to see you.

0:00:37.1 Javed Ali: Zoe, thank you for having me. And please do not call me professor.

0:00:41.1 ZC: Nope.

0:00:41.7 JA: Even the students in my class, I don't let them call me professor.

0:00:43.4 ZC: No way. I'm a student at heart.

0:00:46.3 JA: So Javed is fine.

0:00:46.3 ZC: Professor Cliff Lampe, a professor in the School of Information here at the University of Michigan. Hi, professor.

0:00:53.2 Cliff Lampe: And I'm absolutely professor.

0:00:54.4 ZC: I yes. [laughter]

0:00:55.7 ZC: Cliff and I go way back. And governor, or should I say president, Steve Bullock, former Democratic governor of Montana, two terms, 2013 to 2021. We're so honored to have you here this evening too.

0:01:08.2 Steve Bullock: Thanks.

0:01:09.4 ZC: Yeah, absolutely. Governor, again, we have to start with you. You lived through what we only just spent 93 minutes. You were there for six hours. Can you center us what it's like to watch that two years later now, but what it was like to be in that room?

0:01:30.0 SB: Yeah, it's crazy in some respects. Because first, the two years ago, we did this on January 6, 2023. We gathered in DC. And if you think about that time, many of us have forgotten about that time. But look, the Democrats had won the midterms. He'd won every election. It seemed like Ron DeSantis was ascendant. On the one hand, there wasn't this thought that former President Trump could run again or would be in the position that he currently is, what, 28 days out. As far as what it was like in that room, what was pretty amazing is that I think by the time that the cameras started, nobody even thought about the fact that the cameras were there, right?

0:02:19.5 SB: And in some respects, some said, well, it kind of came to a cute little ending. It all worked out kumbaya. You had six hours that they compressed into an hour and a half. But it was definitely a stressful, the fog of war, competing information that you were hearing, trying to sift through that. Certainly strong personalities, individuals that had played a lot of these roles in real life and had real conviction about it, and sort of sorting through that in a way. And going in, we were given like six pages. And it was just real cursory stuff. So there was no sort of like here. And it wasn't even centered on the Insurrection Act, necessarily. So it was quite a ride. I had a few glasses of wine after it, for sure.

0:03:14.0 ZC: Javed, I'm so curious to know. You yourself have not been in that particular room that we just watched, but you have been certainly in rooms similar and adjacent, holding positions in the Department of Homeland Security, in the FBI. Can you put into context what you saw? And then I certainly wanna hear from you too, and we'll get to this, but this idea of institutions and the precipice that we sit on what fundamentally feels like some shaky ground.

0:03:42.1 JA: Well, again, thank you for having me and just a brilliant job with the movie itself. Very riveting and steep. Amazing performance to play the president. And Zoe, as you mentioned, I have been in those moments in my government career. FBI, DOD, DHS, the Intelligence Committee. I also served in the Trump White House for a year. My hair went gray before that, so that's not the cause. But again, to be in those moments when our country is in crisis and there are threats, either directed against the country, either foreign or domestic, that's what it's like. And I can say that from having been in that world for 16 years, from 2002 to 2018.

0:04:26.6 JA: So it did a masterful, that's probably the best movie I've seen that portrays what that tension is like in those moments. And sometimes they're longer than six hours, right? I've been there till 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. So it can really put a tax on you just in a single day. So just brilliant job on that level. And in terms of the institutions, this is what the decision-making process is like, either in the White House, and this was a simulated meeting in the National Security Council. And again, I was in the Trump White House and the National Security Council. So I know what, that's like. But it also plays out in different departments and agencies that are trying to support the decision-making of their principals who are there. And again, I saw that perspective as well in all the different hats I play, or the hats I wore when I was in government.

0:05:14.4 JA: And then kind of the third piece on institutions, and this is the thread of the movie, is that are there potential extremists within the military? And if so, how big is that pool of people? And potentially, what can they do? And the answer to that question, unfortunately, is yes. And the answer to that question is yes, stretching back for probably 150 years, if not longer. This is a recurring theme in our country's history. Now again, it's never become an existential threat the way it was portrayed here. But time and time again, when certainly we look at domestic extremism here in the United States, depending on the decade or the moment or different sort of dynamics happening in the country, there will unfortunately be people with either an active duty background or a former military background who are involved in some of these plots and threats. And again, that has been a consistent theme for since basically the Civil War. And it'll probably be a consistent theme for another 150 years going forward.

0:06:19.3 ZC: The difference there, of course, and I'm gonna turn to Cliff Lampe's School of Information, and is that social media.

0:06:25.6 CL: Right.

0:06:26.6 ZC: Wasn't playing what really was this almost character unto itself in the film. It had it's own life, it felt like. And I'm so curious, from your perspective, watching this. I kept seeing you and looking over at your face as you were watching this, because this is the work you study, and this is what you do. What did that mean to you?

0:06:47.0 CL: It's was interesting. I thought some of the things in the documentary were very realistic. So for instance, how easy it is to fake information. We think AI is going to be a big part of this. You don't need AI to fake information, right? It's just so easy to take an image from somewhere else and plop it in and add a new caption. We call these cheap fakes sometimes, as opposed to deep fakes. Like you don't actually need really sophisticated technology to generate a ton of great misinformation. I think the thing that was maybe a little inaccurate is I think they took it pretty easy on you guys, actually, with the misinformation. I think if you could set up botnets, you would have a network of people, not just real people, but robots, who would set up information.

0:07:30.7 CL: One of the actors I think said it best, which is the idea here is to flood the zone, right? When you're flooding the zone, just sending out so much information, you're trying to do two things. One is to create confusion, so people don't know what's real, what's not real, and we saw you guys react to that a little bit. Is this a real post or not? The other is to get people to give up on the idea of truth altogether, right? And that's the longer-term strategy of disinformation. We call it manufactured nihilism. If nothing is true, then I can make up truth based off my ideology, right? There's no fact, there's no common ground, and that is the goal of disinformation. It's not to trick you that something is not true or not, it's to get you to give up that there is a truth.

0:08:14.6 ZC: And Javed, I wanna hear your thoughts about that again when we talk about sort of institutions, but Governor, I'm gonna hand the microphone to you because I'm so curious about what was going on in your brain as you were leading and trying to take on this misinformation. I heard you talking to Cliff about this. How did you determine what you needed to sit on and not?

0:08:36.9 SB: Yeah, and two things. And first, if I could also, to Javed's poinway I was Attorney General for a governor. And in Montana, you're in charge of all law enforcement functions. In 2009, I had the Oath Keepers recruiting our state troopers. So this is something that isn't new.

0:08:55.6 ZC: 2009.

0:08:56.3 SB: 2009.

0:08:57.7 ZC: Yeah.

0:08:57.8 SB: And one of the, I guess, hardest parts of the movie for me was when they said, this now gives veterans a bad name. And that was Yvette saying that. When you think 6.3% of Americans are veterans. And yeah, 20% of those convicted on January 6. But there are gonna be those radicals. And we can't turn around and then paint for the whole brush with law enforcement, our military, our veterans, because of those that are radicalized. Directly to your point, the question of like, what were we thinking, the misinformation and disinformation.

0:09:33.7 SB: In some respects, the game was constrained. Presumably, you would have known better exactly how many individuals were out, be it in Arizona or in front of the US Capitol. But I think one of the, as the role players looked at it, once we saw the movie, and we've gotten together a couple of times, we said one of the places that we really did fall short was actually having that active presence and counteracting that. I used to say as governor to my staff, don't pay attention to what's on Facebook and Twitter. And I've only been out for three or four years. We have to pay even that much more attention to it.

0:10:22.5 SB: And how crazy is it that, sort of like as you had said, Javid, in addition to the table, there were four different tables also around where people were having the meetings. But how crazy is it that it took four hours into a six-hour exercise before we were finally saying, let's be talking to social media companies and get them down? I guess that's one of the problems with having people around the tables that are in their 50s and 60s, not 30-year-olds saying we should be doing, or 20-year-olds that we could be doing a lot more on that.

0:10:54.0 CL: I was gonna say you needed support, Gen Z, right?

[laughter]

0:10:58.8 JA: But also, again, sort of having lived through these real-world crises in my own career, like you just lose perspective sometimes because your mind gets so hyper-focused on the issue or the threat or the task that's in front of you that you sort of forget about all these other sort of considerations. And then that's why it took four hours to realize, oh, by the way, maybe we need to talk to the social media companies. Another thing I'm pulling on from my own memory is that, again, in the sort of issues that I was dealing with in that timeframe from 2002 to 2018, I don't recall ever having to deal with a real-world crisis and deal with the social media aspect of it, or the misinformation.

0:11:36.3 JA: We had a hard enough time just trying to figure out what the heck did truth look like from our intelligence perspective? And you're always in a fog of war on that. And I was a professional intelligence officer, so that was something the policy makers would always beat us up on. It was like, why can't you give me the perfect truth in the moment? And I used to say, and trust me, I got yelled at by everybody, sir or ma'am, it doesn't exist. This 100% filled-in jigsaw puzzle picture that you want in the moment just doesn't exist. We will do our best to fill in the picture at the 75% level with the best intelligence we have in the moment, but you're never gonna know what truth is in a crisis. You probably don't even know what reality is until days or weeks later. But again, you have to make decisions in that fog of war.

0:12:26.2 ZC: Yeah.

0:12:26.7 CL: If I could do a quick follow-up. I think we see that in real time now with Hurricane Celeste and Hurricane Milton, right? FEMA has come out with explicit statements. Southern governors have come out with explicit statements saying that support efforts are being hindered by the amount of misinformation and disinformation being shared on social media. It used to be that natural disasters were one of those things that could come across partisan lines and where we would feel that external threat. That's not happening this time around.

0:12:55.9 ZC: So, Governor, I'm so curious, then, where leadership plays a role in that and how you see sifting through misinformation as you see trying to build back up institutions. What can you do, how can you focus your energy into some solutions as we look forward, particularly in what can feel like really dark times?

0:13:21.8 SB: Yeah, and part of it, if the directors were here, they'd say this is a provocation for discussion, right? This movie, that's what it's supposed to be about. When someone said, this is such a scary movie. No, to me, what's scary is 171 members of Congress from 37 states deny the results of the 2020 election still. What's scary is, to me, that 25% of Americans in polling earlier this year said that the FBI instigated January 6th. So we all on the one hand, have that obligation to say that we can be deeply disappointed with elections. We can think that the wrong person won, but that doesn't mean you undermine the norms of what this country, 'cause it's not just the Constitution, it's the norms that we've all actually bought into that has actually supported the Constitution in our country for 250 years.

0:14:12.4 SB: I think some of the things that, like going through this exercise, and I knew Senator Heitkamp, I knew Senator Jones a little bit. I didn't know necessarily everybody in there. I was so heartened by the four stars and the generals who I didn't know because I truly thought that they would turn around and say, let's use everything we have, right? But they had a deep enough appreciation with the role that the military's played throughout our history to say that once you go there, you may not be able to go back. And I hope that part of what it is, too, is that to say who we have in those rooms matter. What was cool about that is it really was about half Democrats, half Republicans.

0:15:07.3 SB: Like you knew Elizabeth, the blonde-haired woman, she was at the end, she was number three in the Trump Homeland Security. She'd run George Bush's faith-based initiatives. There were a whole lot of Republicans in that room too, but folks that were all together collectively saying that we need to put country above ideology. And I think that's something that, that's an obligation for all of us.

0:15:33.5 ZC: Yeah. Javed, I think one of the other things I was thinking a lot about during the film was this idea of sort of the US and that this was something that was happening just in the country that we were watching. And one thing you focus on is foreign actors, which didn't even necessarily play a role in this documentary. How do you think about that when you're thinking, again, about our own internal institutions and our own security versus this relationship that we have with a world that there are, as we know, bad actors and have seen in previous elections?

0:16:05.5 JA: And Cliff knows the answer this too, but since 2016, and now to where we are now, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, you just pick the list of countries that are adversaries of the United States. They have tried to influence the way people think about candidates here, or Russia potentially had developed the capability to technically interfere with the elections in 2016, they just never weaponized it. So Russia wrote the playbook on what a country is capable of doing to the United States to influence the outcome of an election. And I don't think we know, unless Cliff has better answers, can you empirically prove that Russia's efforts to just pump so much disinformation into the social media ecosystem and other traditional media to influence the way people thought about candidates, did it actually tip the balance in terms of 2016? Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

0:16:58.5 JA: But the playbook's out there, and now every four years, you will hear from my former colleagues in the intelligence community will say, either before an election or after an election, here's what all those countries have tried to do or tried to do to the election, on whether they were successful or not. And so just, I think a couple weeks ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence also just put out a statement basically saying that those countries are once again, there are indicators those countries once again are gonna try and use different playbooks, and there were indictments issued a few weeks ago too about Iranian intelligence or military officers who are trying to sow disinformation through social media and actually promote or sort of cast out on President Trump as a candidate and perhaps their preferences for Vice President Harris as a candidate. So again, we're just gonna see this continually now in our electoral process and cycles. Every four years, the foreign adversaries of the United States are going to hit us from the outside.

0:18:04.6 ZC: Cliff, I see you nodding and then Governor.

0:18:09.8 CL: Yeah, absolutely. And the social media companies play a little bit of whack-a-mole with these agencies. A good example is the Internet Research Agency out of Russia, which is just a masterful shop filled with internet trolls who are able to create content and send it out at massive scale. And you shut one account down like they did in the video, but then five more pop up to replace it, right? It is an almost impossible evolutionary fight to win against bad actors.

0:18:39.6 SB: Say two things, one on the foreign. Senator Kelly just this past weekend said that hearing from the FBI, the NSC, the DNI, that the estimate was 20 to 30% of all political commentary on social media right now is from either Iran, Russia, or China. So that's out there. And I think what you said about the hurricane in the South, because there's misinformation, right? There's misinformation and every one of us is guilty of it from we hear something, we repeat it. Then there's disinformation, which is literally saying a falsehood that you know it's a falsehood to try to change things.

0:19:25.2 SB: And when you hear, as an example, all that FEMA money, it's not actually going to the South. It's going for those undocumented. That's disinformation trying to ultimately make either the nihilism or disgust or contempt. And I think one of the things, sorting through for all of us, right? Misinformation or disinformation. What's the best filter? It's hopefully also that space between our two ears that we need to be thinking every time now, unfortunately, where's this coming from? Why is it coming to me? And what's it trying to do either to me or to the community? And it's an obligation that we can't just put on social media companies. We can't just put on the government. We can't just put on political candidates. Unfortunately, that obligation rests with all of us.

0:20:21.1 CL: What I would say, you cannot trust social media companies to fix this problem, right? They're in the business of selling ads, not into the business of saving democracy, right? And you cannot trust, or trust is the wrong word, the government's not the right agency to solve this problem either for a variety of reasons. Law specifically works slowly by design, right? And the internet works quickly. And also the free speech protections we have in the United States are important and part of our fabric as well. I always think we should treat this as a public health problem as much as anything else. This isn't a technology problem. It's a public health problem of the grandest sort, really.

0:21:00.5 ZC: So I'm an optimist by nature. And as we wrap up, because we know it's getting late and we've all just been through a lot, but luckily together, I wanna leave us with some ideas though for moving forward. And I think there's this sense, and I wanna hear from all of you, but Governor, I'm gonna start with you, that you're this elected official, right? And so therefore you have leadership and therefore it's up to you to lead. But I'm curious what you would say to all of us who can be leaders when we leave this evening in our civic society, right? And whether that's voting or by discussing hard topics. Like what is something that is a takeaway for folks who aren't leadership table officials on the ballot that can take away though tonight and do for their community to feel empowered? Because I think that's sometimes what's so difficult right now is feeling and hearing these statistics, but not knowing either what to do or feeling empowered.

0:21:52.6 SB: That's an easy one, thanks.

0:21:54.5 ZC: Oh, yay.

0:21:57.0 SB: No, no in all honesty, right? And I think I said that the patriots are in that. It's all kind of coming out, but the patriots are nobody in office, it's everyone out there. And look, it is a difficult time. Every time I ran for office, I said, this is the most important election of our lifetime. And maybe it was just to raise money, but I truly believed it. And it's the most important election in some ways in our lifetime, but also in the overall sort of this promise of this country, right? And I do think we have the obligations. If we can't always even get along with our family members anymore, how are we gonna get to the point where we kinda have these commonalities? So definitely a number one vote, right? That our vote is our voice, and that voice is stronger than any corporation or special interest. And it's unfortunate that so many folks now say, what's it even worth? Not that I'm counting, but I won my first election by 7531 votes.

0:22:58.7 SB: Every single vote mattered. And others engage in the public sphere in ways that, no, you don't have to run for office, but drop a note to a candidate about an ad that you like and an ad that you dislike. Drop a note about things that disappoint you in your elected officials and provide encouragement when they do. And make it about a community, right? And a community like, I used to truly believe all politics was local. Now it's becoming more and more nationalized. But the community is the people you see when you're dropping off your kids at school. And you don't have to say, I can't believe you, believe this crap and this is what you're gonna do. But sort of like how that Janessa Goldbeck did, she was the vet voice person with her father, asking questions, help me understand this. And you may not necessarily see the whole world the same way, but at least being willing to engage in these conversations when civility and conversations are short in supply is, I think, an important first step.

0:24:11.6 ZC: Cliff Lampe.

0:24:14.0 CL: I really like the governor's point earlier about thinking about our own responsibility in this case, right? What is it, be the change we wanna see? I always tell my students to be humble when we think about information overload, right. All of us do become victims to bad information at one point or the other, whether it's miss or disinformation. I always ask my students to think about Cui bono, right? Who benefits by sharing this information for you? And what is the benefit that they get and what's your benefit from it? The other thing I would say, just as a final word, is don't give in to the nihilism, right? That's their plan. It's still a great country. I still talk to my conservative friends. I'm a liberal, if you didn't guess. And I have great conversations with them and we agree on so much more than we disagree, right? We want our families to be happy and healthy. We love our neighbors. Don't let the nihilism make you think that it's worse than it is.

0:25:07.6 ZC: Clapping for that one, too.

[applause]

0:25:10.7 JA: And just to kind of end on another optimistic note, despite all the threats that are out there, both foreign and domestic, and all the crises that our country has faced, I am also eternally optimistic. And having been a former deep stater and having worked in all these different security institutions. Every day I woke up and I went to work and just inspired by the people, not only the mission that we were doing to try to keep the country safe, but just the people that I worked with. And there are thousands and thousands of those folks, either in DC or other parts of the country, or around the world, who are just doing it for the good of the country and the good of the mission and are not trying to engage in any glory or fame. And that is really inspiring when you're around people like that. And again, I was lucky to serve in that capacity. And I think that's another part of our institutional framework that'll sort of keep us safe, even when it seems like democracy's a little fragile. But I think we'll be okay.

[applause]

0:26:09.1 ZC: So all of those are to-do items. It is the year of democracy at the Ford School. So you can be engaged in that way. With Michigan Radio and NPR, we are constantly looking to make sure that accurate information is in our community. Engage with us that way. And go out and vote and do good in the world, right? After what we just witnessed this evening, we can all do a little bit of good. Javed Ali, Cliff Lampe, and Steve Bullock, thank you so much this evening. Thank you, and thank you to all of you for spending the time tonight.