February 29, 2024 • 46 mins
Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our own archive to help put our present politics into historical context.
This episode, Epiphany, first ran in 2021, as the finale to Season 2, which was all about lies, fakes, frauds, and hoaxes. In this episode, Jill Lepore takes listeners down the winding path from the little-known Iron Mountain hoax of the late 1960s to the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
An election is meant to produce a fact. Who do
the citizens of this country want to lead them? And
the production of facts is sort of our meat and potatoes.
Here at the last archive, we made our second season
in twenty twenty one. We'd started working on it in
late twenty twenty. I don't remember how Jill was planning
on ending it back then, but I do know that
(00:43):
on January sixth, twenty twenty one, whatever that plan was
went out the window. On that day, rioders stormed the
United States Capitol Building in an attempt to stop the
certification of the twenty twenty election. They were denying a fact.
This was an insurrection. The FBI saw it as an
act of terrorism. Multiple deaths have been linked to that day,
(01:04):
some in the chaos of it, some by suicide after.
Since then, hundreds have been convicted of crimes, including the
crime of seditious conspiracy. The aftermath of that day is
still playing out, most recently in the Supreme Court. It
has a deep influence on the twenty twenty four election,
raising questions about whether Trump can even legally run for president.
(01:27):
But today I want to revisit the inciting incident and
play you. The finale of our second season, an episode
called Epiphany, which is all about January sixth of twenty
twenty one and the moment that an election which had
produced a single fact, the fact of Joe Biden's presidency,
instead split the country into two irreconcilable realities. Here's the episode.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
There's a place in our world where the known things go.
A quarter of the mind lined with shelves cluttered with proof.
I'm hiding in here. Who's out there? What do they want?
(02:18):
They sounds so angry. I'm pretty sure they can get in.
I don't see how I can get out. I think
I might be trapped. Welcome to the Last Archive, the
show about how we know what we know and why
it sometimes seems lately as if we don't know anything
(02:41):
at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season, I've been trying
to trace the history of doubt over the course of
the last century, building that history block by block, a
tower of doubt. Not too long ago, it all came
crashing down. It was the beginning of the year twenty
(03:02):
twenty one. Every archive of knowledge seemed to be under attack.
Embattled universities, courthouses, press rooms, even Congress but I found
it the last archives escape patch. Come through with me.
(03:22):
We'll have to go through a war and of underground tunnels,
but we'll get there. We're heading to a place called
Iron Mountain. Something I love about history, all the surprises,
the twists and turns. So I'm starting with a story
(03:43):
that has so many turns. In the nineteen thirties, a
German immigrant named Hermann Noust purchased an abandoned iron ore
mine in New York State near the Hudson River. Inside
its caves and old mining tunnels, Noust grew mushrooms. The
place was perfect for it. The mushrooms mushroomed. Nousk began
(04:05):
supplying the city with mushrooms, and he made a fortune.
People called him the mushroom King. At his house he
had the only mushroom shaped swimming pool in the world.
In nineteen fifty one, Noust adapted his caves and mines
and tunnels for a new business. He founded the Iron
Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation. Because at the time Americans were
(04:27):
crazy for bomb shelters. School children were ducking and covering
to prepare for a nuclear attack. Herman Noust outed them all.
An atomic bomb expert called Nousts Vault, the safest place
in the world.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
A thirty ton door equipped with a time lock will
guard one of the main passages in which four hundred
vaults are located. During the initial phase of the enterprise,
already foreign banks have applied for storage space behind the
massive door. Museums also are expected to seek protection for
their priceless art treasures. In the atmosphere of international tension,
bank files and records began to find their way into
(05:05):
the sanctuary.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
You could put your most valuable documents there, wills, photograph,
UF's legal papers. The company grew and grew a Cold
War knowledge vault, a last archive along the Hudson. These days,
Iron Mountain is still in business. It's a global records
management company, the world's biggest, with a four billion dollar
annual revenue and facilities in more than fifty countries. You
(05:28):
might have seen their trucks with a blue triangular logo.
I see those trucks all the time, rumbling up and
down the road. Iron Mountain stores everything, including the records
of nearly every fortune one thousand company. They've also got
Frank Sinatra's original recordings and Charles Dickens's last will and
testament back in the scariest years of the Cold War,
(05:50):
though Iron Mountain Atomic Storage offered something more than storage.
It offered secrecy.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Iron Mountain under a blanket of iron ore alternate underground
headquarters for corporations that.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Ad ran in nineteen sixty two, the year of the
Cuban Missile crisis. If you own a company and wanted
to hold a top secret meeting, why not hold it
in hidden conference rooms deep underground, Doctor evilstyle. Or you
might want to hold your meetings down there if you
were to say a super secret government agency. In nineteen
(06:25):
sixty seven, a few years after Iron Mountain advertised its
secret layer meeting service, a little book appeared in bookstores.
It was called Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility
and Desirability of Peace. The book described itself as the
record of a fifteen man special study group that had
gathered at Iron Mountain in those top secret underground meeting rooms.
(06:49):
And here was the book's bombshell. It was never supposed
to be published, but someone had leaked it. A member
of the secret group identified only as a professor of
social science from a large Middlewestern university. The report itself
was totally wonky wonky, but shocking.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for stable government.
It supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
The Special Study Group had been convened, it was said,
in response to a peace scare. Members of the group
talked about how devastating it would be if the United
States were ever for any length of time at peace,
as if the only thing that kept the American people
from shaking off the chains of their submission was war.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
Endless war, it has ensured the subordination of the citizen
to the state. No modern political ruling group has successfully
controlled its constituency after failing to sustain the continuing credibility
of an external threat of war.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Report from Iron Mountain concluded that the US needed to
keep those wars coming, but if, given the growing anti
war movement, a dreaded peace did descend upon the land,
there were still ways for the US government to find
substitutes for functions of war. This is so crazy, I'm
going to explain it again. According to this report, the
(08:17):
US government was trying desperately to keep the nation at war,
but if their worst fears were realized and peace came,
they had other options other ways to stifle discontent.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
A comprehensive social welfare program, a giant, open end space
research program aimed at unreachable targets, an established and recognized
extra terrestrial menace, massive global environmental pollution, fictitious alternate enemies.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Fully moonshot Batman. This leaked report was hot, hot, hot.
It became a best seller on the New York Times list,
was translated into fifteen languages. Esquire published an excerpt. Of course.
People tried to find that Midwestern social science professor who
leaked it, and they wanted to know which government department
had commissioned it. A reporter from the New York Times
(09:10):
called around to the White House and the State Department,
and then noted, no advanced reviewer has flatly labeled the
book fiction. People who read it were incensed, but report
from Iron Mountain proved very difficult to verify, even though
some people thought the whole thing was just a hoax.
If it's authentic, it's an enormous, roaring scandal, one scholar
told The New York Times. If it's caricature, it's a
(09:33):
brilliant job. Eventually most people forgot about it, but then
in nineteen seventy one, another government report was leaked to
the press.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
This weekend, portions of a highly classified Pentagon document came
the light for all the world to see and brought
cries of outrage from Washington. The New York Times began
publishing parts of a voluminous report that the Pentagon had
drawn up on the causes and conduct of American involvement
in Vietnam.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
The Pentagon Papers revealed decades of lying by the federal
government to the public about what had really been going
on in the war in Vietnam.
Speaker 5 (10:10):
Senator George McGovern, a leading critic of the war, called
the report and we quote, a story of almost incredible deception.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
This is where this history gets twisty, Tourney. The publication
of the Pentagon Papers brought the authors of the Report
from Iron Mountain out into the open, because unlike the
Pentagon Papers, which were entirely real, the Report from Iron
Mountain was in fact entirely made up. So just to
be extra extra clear here, there never was any special
(10:42):
study group, had never met at Iron Mountain, and this recording.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
No modern political ruling group has successfully controlled its constituency.
After failing to sustain the continuing credit.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
That's one of our actors reading a document that is
in fact a fake. In nineteen seventy two, in the
New York Times Book Review, a writer named Leonard Lewin
revealed that the report from Iron Mountain had been a hoax,
intended as a satire. He'd involved some pretty high level people.
Even the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith was in on it,
(11:16):
But Lewin confessed, I wrote the report, all of it.
The charade is over. The idea had come from Victor Navaski,
a leftist writer who later became Editor of the Nation.
It was all a lark, an angry one. As Navaski
told NPR's Fresh Air in nineteen ninety six, the.
Speaker 6 (11:35):
Idea for reports Maron Mountain came to me one day
when I saw a little headline in the newspaper saying
that the stock market had fallen abruptly because of a
peace scare. And we got an idea to do a
book about the quashing of a report which was commissioned
(11:55):
by the White House to plan the transition from a
wartime to a peacetime economy. And we would do a
kind of hoax book about what happened when the Commission
concluded that the economy would collapse. Peace really broke out.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
The Report from Iron Mountain hoax brought the storage company
Iron Mountain, the real Place a lot of grief, And
it wasn't fair because, let me be clear, the storage
company had nothing to do with this hoax. But meanwhile,
the Hoax report had acquired a huge following among conspiracy theorists.
(12:31):
They read it as incriminating evidence. They put it on
their bookshelves, and when the authors revealed themselves to be pranksters,
it didn't change anything. A lot of conspiracy minded fans
of the book simply refused to believe this new turn
of events. They just couldn't take that book out of
the mental box that said government report written in secret
underground bunker and put it in the box that said hoax.
(12:54):
They were still talking about it decades later, like in
this nineteen ninety three video cassette Blueprint for Tyranny.
Speaker 7 (13:01):
Welcome to the Report from Iron Mountain.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
This report.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
Is some thing you would never believe unless you read it.
Peace in reality equals world socialism, as we will find
out as we journey through this report.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
If anything, conspiracy theorists cherished the fake book. More as
the years passed, they read it avidly, passed it around,
kept it close to their vests, used it even as
a manual, a manifesto for opposition to the federal government.
And then in nineteen ninety five in Oklahoma City, some
of those right wing conspiracy theorists staged in insurrection.
Speaker 8 (13:44):
The explosion that went off around nine am, and we
could feel the explosion in the news.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
Room of Channel nine A.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Now Holy Cow, about a third of the building has
been blown away.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
On April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, a truck packed with
nearly five thousand pounds of explosives detonated outside the nine
story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing one hundred sixty
eight people, including nineteen very little children at a day
care center. The explosion injured hundreds more.
Speaker 9 (14:18):
And we can also give you a bit of a
hint now as to where the government appears to be
focusing its investigation on some of the what are called
right wing white supremacist groups in various parts of the country.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Eventually, two men were charged with eleven federal crimes. They
were the sort of guys who believed that the report
from Iron Mountain was real.
Speaker 10 (14:42):
The indictment charges that Timothy McVay and Terry Nichols, former
Army buddies with a grudge against the government, planned the bombing,
selected the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as their target,
bought and stole materials for the bomb, and built it.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
After the Oklahoma City bombing, Americans suddenly started paying attention
to right wing insurrectionists. Who were these people? Where did
they get their ideas? Those ideas made They came from books.
I don't know if Timothy McVeigh read the report from
Iron Mountain or watched those video cassettes about it, but
he did have a book that's usually right next to
it on every right wing extremist's bookshelf.
Speaker 10 (15:23):
Inside mcveigh's Yellow Mercury Sedan, investigators discovered a sealed envelope.
Speaker 11 (15:27):
Containing evidence that would prove crucial to analyzing mcveag's motivations.
Speaker 5 (15:32):
Highlighted passages from the anti government novel That Turner Diaries.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
The Turner Diaries is a nineteen seventy eight novel by
an avowed American neo Nazi. It includes a detailed account
of somebody building an explosive device, putting it into a
truck and driving it up to a federal building. McVeigh
seemed to have treated the Turner Diaries as an instruction manual.
(15:57):
In a similar way, a lot of his fellow extremists
considered Report from Iron Mountain as some kind of decoder ring.
When Magazine reported it has become required reading for militias,
Nazi sympathizers, and other righting types who deny that it's
a hoax and cited as evidence of plans for a
new world order. The instigator of the hoax, Victor Navaski,
(16:18):
was horrified, as he explained on Fresh Air, he had
found out that Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist group, had
reprinted the report and was to them a kind of bible.
Speaker 6 (16:30):
They were so persuaded that the report was the real
thing that they didn't bother to get copyright permission to
reprint it, and had reprinted it as if it were
a government document and we're selling it.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Navaski's original partner in crime, Leonard Lewin, sued Liberty Lobby
and reached a settlement. In the end, they had to
surrender to him their copies of Report from Iron Mountain.
Lewin stashed them in his basement but it was too
late to stop this left wing hoax turned right wing conspiracy.
Navaski wrote in the Nation about its acceptance by super
(17:03):
patriots and conspiracy theorists of the far right. He said
that they're taking it seriously was the scariest proposition of all.
It has since gotten even scarier. Since the nineteen nineties,
the Report from Iron Mountain has passed from generation to
generation like some kind of scripture. On the sixth of
January twenty twenty one, the day insurrectionists attacked the US capital,
(17:27):
some creep on four Chan posted in the cavalierly ugly
language in this hideous corner of the Internet, read the
Report from Iron Mountain, you brainless retard. These days you'll
still find Report from Iron Mountain on far right white
supremacist reading lists with no mention that it was a
left wing hoax. And now it has a new reading
(17:49):
list companion, the writings of Q, the anonymous alleged insider
who drops clues about all the evil goings on inside
the government. Just recently I called up Victor Navaski. He's
nearly ninety. It was really good of him to talk
to me. We both sound like we're under Iron Mountain, though,
because the phone is pretty bad.
Speaker 12 (18:10):
It's a fantasy to believe that it's true. And I
think Q andon is guilty of its own fantasy.
Speaker 13 (18:18):
Do you think if anyone presented himself to the world
tomorrow and said I am Q and I can prove
that I am Q, and I was just joking the
whole time, and it got out of hand none of
this is true. Would there be any way I'm doing
what had been done?
Speaker 12 (18:35):
I don't think so myself. I think that's where we
are as a culture.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
And unfortunately, the Q and On report goes something like this.
An insider decides to spill the beans about a secret
government run conspiracy, something to do with Satan and pedophiles.
He leakes some clues in a report and then report
after report, and the people who read those reports, those
(19:03):
postings by this anonymous que become passionately attached to the
idea of a conspiracy, and within the logic of that conspiracy,
they are being denied access to knowledge, some secret body
of knowledge hidden away that only the people in power
have access to, and that the followers of Q have
to hunt down and piece together clue by clue, Q
(19:26):
by Q Q isn't true. Also, I don't buy either
of the two big headlines about Q and On that
it's new or that it's uniquely powerful. That's what I've
been trying to argue by going over the story of
(19:47):
the report from Iron Mountain. This stuff isn't new, it's
not all powerful, and it has never ever been a secret.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
This election will be the most rigged election in history.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
That is a lie, an old fashioned lie, but it's
also a complex lie, the sort of lie that brings
together every kind of doubt whose rise I've been chronicling
all seasons long as little boats of doubt rowboats canoes.
They become a fleet of flotilla in Armada.
Speaker 14 (20:16):
They're sending millions of ballots all over the country.
Speaker 15 (20:19):
There's fraud. They found them in creeks. They found some
with the name Trump.
Speaker 16 (20:23):
Just happened to have the name Trump just the other
day in a waste paper basket.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
It was awful to watch this unfold in the months
leading up to the twenty twenty election, and in the
months afterward, to watch it spread on the Internet and
hear it from the mouth of the US President. He
said it again and again and again. If enough people
in public and in positions of authority lie about something
(20:51):
for long enough, people will believe it. Watching it all,
I felt as if my brain was on rewind. Specifically,
my head kept rewinding back to a brilliant book published
in nineteen ninety four called A Social History of Truth
by Stephen Shapin, Emeritus Professor of the History of Science
at Harvard. Shapin was writing about gentleman philosophers in the
(21:13):
seventeenth century in England. But I find his book so
wholly applies to the President that I ask him to
read my favorite lines.
Speaker 17 (21:22):
Knowledge is a collective good. In securing our knowledge, we
rely upon others, and we cannot dispense with that reliance.
That means that the relations in which we have and
hold our knowledge have a moral character. And the word
I use to indicate that moral relation is trust.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
He argues that you can't actually know anything alone, You
can only know things with other people. He doesn't think
the United States or the world is experiencing a crisis
of truth. He thinks it would be better called a
crisis of social knowledge. For example, and in particular around
climate change.
Speaker 17 (22:02):
I know something about the loss of biodiversity, species, about
melting icebergs, about sea level rise. Now someone puts pressure
in me and say, how do I know these things?
I don't think any of us know these things directly.
So the knowledge that I need to know these things
is to know who to believe, who has credibility, who
(22:24):
is author to who to trust?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
To know anything, then you have to know who to trust.
If you doubt everything, it's because you trust no one.
I find this framework really helpful. No one is killed truth. Instead,
we have this crisis of trust. But how did people
stop knowing who to trust? One answer to that question
involves the unintended consequences of new technologies of communication. We've
(22:52):
been hearing about those all season. How radio, for example,
amplified all kinds of extremism, but broadcasts only reached so far.
Then came the Internet, starting with bulletin boards and chat
rooms in the nineteen nineties, but we still think of
it the way we thought about radio in the nineteen thirties.
The phrase echo chamber comes up a lot an acoustic metaphor.
Speaker 17 (23:15):
So there's a million voices are screaming out there, but
any any body or any any group of like mind
that people are listening to some and not to others.
So there's another kind of question about what for us
is audible and what for them is audible.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Right, But then that metaphor of audibility and voice voice
also meaning vote, you know, has implications for democracy, which
is to say we will hear all the voices, and
that we will we will automate a system wherein we
hear everyone who's enfranchised. But then now we're in a
crisis of democracy around people not feeling heard, right, I mean,
(23:58):
if we just think about the siege of the Capitol
and if you listen to interviews with those people, we're
here to have our voices heard.
Speaker 17 (24:04):
A democratic project, everyone has a voice. I mean, well
we've heard them now.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Still, the argument that technology allows fakers and haters to
find each other more easily, Stephen Shapin thinks that's just
too glib. It's one of the reasons I loved talking
with him. He got me thinking harder about another argument
to explain what has happened to Americans and trust over
the past century. That argument is political. It involves what
one set of political actors have done to institutions over
(24:34):
time in order to shift the balance of power in
their favor.
Speaker 17 (24:39):
Do you mean to say the Supreme Court decision is
not void?
Speaker 18 (24:42):
No, a Supreme Court decision is not necessarily the law
of the land. The Constitution still is.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
That's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater making a Conservative argument that
the Supreme Court had overstepped in its decision to abolish
segregation in Brown versus Board of Education in nineteen fifty four.
Conservatives at the time were very much out of power.
Goldwater was an upstart, but his wing wanted to take
over the GOP, and then they wanted to take over
(25:11):
the country. And so, beginning in the nineteen fifties, Conservatives
engaged in a sustained assault on trust and institutions that
produce and diffuse knowledge. Three institutions, especially the courts, the press,
and the university. These institutions, they said, were all dominated
by liberals, first, the courts and the supposed liberal bias
(25:36):
of the judiciary. Whatever you do, Goldwater said, don't trust
the courts.
Speaker 18 (25:41):
They interpreted by that action that it was wrong to
have segregation. Now, they didn't spell out what was to
be done.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Other Conservatives went after institutions of higher learning. William F.
Buckley led the assault against the academy, beginning with this
nineteen fifty one book God and Man at Yale.
Speaker 18 (26:02):
How would all be governed by the first two thousand
people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two
thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Buckley said, whatever you do, don't trust the professors. The
third front in this warren institutions of knowledge was an
attack on the press. This began with a Nixon administration,
and most famously with a speech given by his vice president,
Spiro Agnew in nineteen sixty nine. Whatever you do, Agnew said,
(26:30):
don't trust the press.
Speaker 19 (26:32):
These men can create national issues overnight. They can elevate
men from obscurity to national prominence within a week. They
can reward some politicians with national exposure and ignore others.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
The courts, the universities, the press. Conservatives believed that to
defeat liberalism they needed to conquer these institutions of knowledge
to story trust in them. The left has contributed a
whole lot to this epistemological unraveling, too, but conservatives have
been playing a long game. This, ever, took years and years,
(27:07):
and eventually they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, they took
over the courts, or at least the federal judiciary.
Speaker 20 (27:14):
I'm honored and humbled to appear before you today as
a nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
They built their own press, your mask is making me uncomfortable,
and they undermined the university, especially scientific inquiry. So here
we are, decades later, on the other side of this
slow rolling revolution, a world where there is very little
left of what used to be called common knowledge. This
brings us to the twenty twenty presidential election.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
Those mail and ballots could have been written the day
before by the Democratic Party hacks that will roll over
the convention Center.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Sure are lots of people in positions of power and
authority said the election of Joe Biden was free and fair,
the most secure election in American history. The Court said
that every reputable news outlet said that political scientists, election observers, scholars,
they all said that, But could you trust them. For
(28:13):
a lot of Americans, the answer remained, no, not anymore
and maybe never again.
Speaker 7 (28:37):
If we can be covered rarely by the media, and
the media is the biggest problem we have, and we haven't.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
The sixth of January twenty twenty one. It was the
Christian holiday of Epiphany, marking the day the Three Kings
visited Jesus and the Manger, and Epiphany is a moment
when all is revealed. In Washington, thousands of people gathered
for a rally to save America, cheering President Trump and
(29:09):
damn the press. Meanwhile, down the street inside the Capitol,
a joint session of Congress was meeting to certify the
results of the presidential election, an election that would send
Trump packing in two weeks time.
Speaker 18 (29:22):
And after this, we're gonna walk down and I'll be
there with you, and we're gonna walk down to the Capitol.
Speaker 16 (29:31):
And we're gonna cheer on.
Speaker 15 (29:32):
They have never seen us here.
Speaker 8 (29:34):
We spent off with Trump saying it's been four more
years awad.
Speaker 20 (29:45):
Already.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
They marched to the Capitol, waving Trump flags and Confederate
battle flags, wearing Maga hats and superhero costumes and camouflage
and bulletproof veests. You probably saw all this. The crowd
started pulling down the barricades, flimsy fences, climbed the stairs,
scaled the scaffolding. They beat up Capital police, smashed windows,
(30:24):
crashed through doors. They broke into the capital. For people
who study right wing extremism and have read their neo
Nazi novel the Turner Diaries, everything that happened that day
was eerily familiar, because that book describes an attack on
(30:45):
the capitol this way. The real value of all our
attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the
immediate casualties. More important, though, is what we taught the
politicians and the bureaucrats. They learned this afternoon that not
one of them is beyond our reach. The decades long
(31:12):
conservative attack on institutions of knowledge, the press, the courts, universities,
it had come down to this day when these people
did not believe in the outcome of an election, or
believed it and wanted to overturn it. For weeks, Trump
supporters had been trying and failing to challenge the results
in counties where lots of black people voted. They were
(31:34):
especially matt about Georgia, where in runoff elections a Jewish
man and a black man had just won seats in
the US Senate.
Speaker 12 (31:43):
Well, fucking writers.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Cried about on a fucking half, Well, the fucking writers.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
It was a riot, a white race riot, and yet
horrible as it was the insurrection on the sixth of January.
Epiphany looked like it might be another kind of epiphany,
a day when people could finally see clearly revelation at
last that all the lying wasn't harmless. There seemed at
first to be real consequences. The President was banned from Twitter. Later,
(32:20):
the House impeached him for a second time.
Speaker 15 (32:22):
President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States
and its institutions of government. He threatened the integrity of
the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power,
and imperiled a coequal branch of government. He thereby betrayed
his trust as president to the manifest injury of the
(32:44):
people of the United States.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
The charges went to the Senate for a trial. Last year,
the first season of The Last Archive, I started out
with a trial, Remember Lucina Broadwell strangled in Barry, Vermont.
I started this show there because I wanted to explain
a bit of crucial history. Most of our ideas about
(33:06):
how to decide what's true and what's not true come
from the thirteenth century, with the rise of trial by jury.
Two sides take turns presenting evidence, and a jury decides
the verdict the truth.
Speaker 21 (33:19):
Here ye, here ye here ye.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Impeachment too, is a relic from the Middle Ages.
Speaker 21 (33:26):
All persons are commanded to keep silence on pain of imprisonment.
While the Senate of the United States is sitting for
the trial of the article of impeachment exhibited by the
House of Representatives against Donald John Trump, former President of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
England's parliament invented impeachment in the fourteenth century. In seventeen
eighty seven, the framers of the American Constitution, meeting in Philadelphia,
decided to add an impeachment clause because impeachment and conviction
was the only way to stop a president from declaring
himself ruler for life like a king. Jamie Raskin, congressman
(34:04):
from Maryland, led the prosecution for the House in a
trial where members of the Senate sat acting like a jury.
Speaker 8 (34:12):
You will not be hearing extended lectures for me because
our case is based.
Speaker 15 (34:18):
On cold, hard facts.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Trump's lawyers argued that Trump hadn't incited an insurrection at all.
Speaker 8 (34:27):
And if we buy this radical argument the president Trump's
lawyers advance, we risk allowing January sixth to become our future.
Speaker 15 (34:39):
And what will that mean for America. I'll show you.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Raskin played that video. Trumps lawyers played some of their
own video, but nearly everyone in the Senate had already
decided how they'd vote, and there was little suspense.
Speaker 20 (34:58):
These are fifty seven. The day's are forty three, two
thirds of the senator's president not having guilty. The state
judge is that the respond to Donald John Trump, former
President of the United States, is not guilty as charged
in the article of impeachment.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
The vote fell short of the supermajority required to convict,
even though there is no more clear cut case for impeachment,
no more indisputable evidence than an armed insurrection incited by
the executive branch to stop the legislative branch from certifying
an election. In the aftermath of the insurrection and the impeachment,
a buzzphrase emerged, the big lie. Republicans kept insisting that
(35:42):
the election had been stolen. Democrats took to calling this
the big lie, but Republicans said the big lie was
the idea that Joe Biden was the lawful president. A
lot of progressives talked about another kind of big lie,
the lie that white people matter more than black people.
That move harkened back to something James Baldwin had said
in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 14 (36:04):
The curriculum my color is what you use to avoid
facing the fact of our common history, the facts of
American life.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
In twenty twenty, Princeton historian Eddie Glaud Junior updated Baldwin's argument.
Speaker 16 (36:19):
America is so wilfully ignorant, right, And it's willfully ignorant
because it wants to protect its innocence. As Baldwin says,
it doesn't want to admit that it is not the
shining city on the hill. The trouble is deeper than
we wish to think, because the trouble is in us.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
The trouble is in us and the lies we tell.
He just can't pull these two lies apart. The lie
about the election is the lie about white supremacy. People
who say the election was stolen are generally arguing that
black voters stole the election, So really there's just the
one lie. But then I guess, predictably, the very expression
(37:03):
the big lie became meaningless, the way that earlier fake
news became meaningless, just another to disagree with someone. When
Georgia passed a law that challenged requirements for voting, and
liberals called it a voter suppression law. Conservatives said that
was a big lie. Here's how crazy this is. Some
people said that some other people lied, that they committed
(37:25):
voter fraud. Then some other people said this was a lie,
there was no fraud. And then the first group of
people said those people were lying about the lying. And
they all said all these lies with a big lie.
Here in this emergency bunker and iron mountain, I feel
buried beneath the weight of it all. I think a
lot of people feel that way. End of January, I
(37:48):
watched the newly and actually elected Joe Biden deliverer's inaugural address.
He'd started drafting his remarks in late twenty twenty, but
reportedly it's quite common for Biden to revise his speeches.
Up until the last moment after the insurrection, he'd had
some more revising to do.
Speaker 15 (38:08):
There is truth.
Speaker 11 (38:09):
Our lies lies told for power and for profit. And
each of us has a duty and a responsibility as citizens,
as Americans, and especially as leaders, leaders who have pledged
to honor our constitution, to protect our nation, to defend
the truth and defeat the lies.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Defeat the lies. I like that very much when I
heard it, so did Stephen Shapen, the historian of science,
and then it really worried both of us.
Speaker 17 (38:42):
Yes, it was beautiful. I entirely agree because I know
what he meant. But it's as much as pounding the
table or shouting as a way of addressing the nature
of the problem. There is truth and there is lies. Yeah,
who could disagree with that?
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Pounding on the table is not enough. Saying I tell
the truth, you tell lies is not enough, and it
doesn't work. This season of the Last Archive has been
a long hundred years, from the Scope's Trial to Ripley's
Believe It or Not, from the War of the Worlds
(39:19):
to Axis Sally in Tokyo, Rose Maury Bernstein, the mid centuries, Fengali,
the Moon Hoax, Soviet propaganda, and Rest in Peace Rush Limbaugh.
A problem of historical thinking is that when you look back,
everything seems to lead to now, but of course now
keeps changing, but the past remains the same. I've been
(39:42):
looking for a history of mischief, the peddling of doubt,
people who profited politically financially for making other people confused.
What I've argued is that there really is a genealogy. Here.
These people learn from one another's tricks, so it's been
worth laying them all out. Here's how this trick works.
(40:03):
Don't be fooled again. Report from Iron Mountain. It's one
of the sorriest of these tricks.
Speaker 4 (40:09):
Impossibility war is the foundation for stable government. It supplies
the basis for general acceptance of political authority.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
He was created as a prank, a joke. I look
what a mess it helped make. I don't want to
leave it just hanging near there. A hoax. So I
have one more story to tell. Remember Herman Noust, the
mushroom King with his mushroom shaped swimming pool. When I
(40:41):
was thinking about Iron Mountain and came across his name,
it sounded so familiar to me, Herman Noust, Herman Nous.
After a while I remembered I'd once met his granddaughter.
Here's how that happened. A bunch of years ago, I
got obsessed with a guy named Joe Gould, who, starting
more than a century ago, claimed to be writing the
(41:03):
longest book in the history of the world. He would
do this by making his own last archive, writing down
every word that anyone ever said to him. His book
was supposed to be called The Oral History of Our Time.
Apart from literary merit, it will have future value as
a storehouse of information, he would say. Later people said
(41:24):
this book never existed, that Gould had just talked about it,
had never written a word of it. Gould, it turned out,
was insane. He was in fact a psychopath. But long
after Gould's death, when I heard about The Oral History
of Our Time, I went looking for the manuscript. I
went digging, tunneling through archives, and weirdly, believe it or not,
(41:45):
I found it, or at least I found a part
of it in a notebook deep in the archives of
the New York Public Library. Gould had destroyed most of
the manuscript, but it had mainly been about one person,
a black artist named Augustus Savage. And she's the real story,
the true report from Iron Mountain. Augusta Savage had been
(42:08):
a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in the nineteen twenties
and nineteen thirties. She'd started her own studio. She'd been
commissioned to create a work about black Americans for the
nineteen thirty nine World's Fair. She'd been featured in Life magazine,
but then she met Joe Gould. He began to stalk
her everywhere she went. There's some evidence that he raped her.
In the nineteen forties, she disappeared. She went into hiding.
(42:31):
I found that she'd moved to upstate New York, where
she had lived at first in a tiny, run down
house without plumbing or electricity. She turned a chicken coop
into a studio. Then she got a job at Iron
Mounted Storage company. Augusta Savage is dead now and her
house is being turned into a museum run by Herman
Noust's granddaughter. Augusta Savage worked at Iron Mountain, but also
(42:56):
every week Herman Nelson's son brought her clay, He bought
her a car, He had a kitchen installed in her house.
Had electricity run out there. She'd come to the family's estate,
the one with the mushrooms shaped swimming pool, to recite poetry.
But meanwhile she destroyed much of her own art. She
went in the city mainly just to collect her old
work and destroy it. She apparently sent a man to
(43:19):
retrieve a bust that she'd made of W. B. D
Boys and then reportedly smashed it. The story of Augustus Savage,
that's my report from Iron Mountain. I wrote a book
about all that. It's called Joe Gould's Teeth. A lot
of the Last Archive is like Joe Gould's teeth. A
(43:41):
lot of history is like Joe Gould's teeth. Tragic and
maddening stories about loss and destruction, not leading to some
glorious or terrible present, just sad. When I went out
to that chicken coop that had become Augustus Savage's studio,
the ground was still covered with smashed bits of her sculpture.
(44:03):
Her voice, like her art, is lost. But I'm tired
of hidden and smashed history. I'm tired of bunkers, tunnels
and vaults, underground layers and ridiculous conspiracy. It's time to
dig out, time to climb up, time to get out,
(44:27):
time to figure it out. You can study history for
its own sake, curl around in attics to seek the truth,
rifle through the pages of old books, bury yourself in
every last archive. But you can also study history to
learn how to solve problems. Pry open the door of
the vault and creep out. Bring the knowledge of the
(44:49):
place where the known things go, and carry it outside.
Escape the corridor of the mind for the Messy, angry,
half wrecked, beautiful World. The Last Archive is written and
(45:18):
hosted by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane
mckibbon and ben Natta Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton,
and our executive producer is Mia Obel. Martin Gonzalez is
our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by
Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphinette. Our research
assistants are Kamanie Pantheer and Lily Richmond are full Proof
(45:41):
players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorn, Matthias Bossi, Dan Epstein,
Ethan Hruschenfeld, Becca A. Lewis, Andrew Perella, Robert mccotta, and
Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin
Industries Head Pushkin Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnarz,
Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostack, Maggie Taylor,
(46:02):
Maya Kainig and Daniella La Khan. Special thanks to Carla
and Noustelaiah and Simon Leak, and thanks to Shola Lynch
at the Schomberg Center. If you like the show, please
remember to rate, share, and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. I'm Jill Labour.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
An election is meant to produce a fact. Who do
the citizens of this country want to lead them? And
the production of facts is sort of our meat and potatoes.
Here at the last archive, we made our second season
in twenty twenty one. We'd started working on it in
late twenty twenty. I don't remember how Jill was planning
on ending it back then, but I do know that
(00:43):
on January sixth, twenty twenty one, whatever that plan was
went out the window. On that day, rioders stormed the
United States Capitol Building in an attempt to stop the
certification of the twenty twenty election. They were denying a fact.
This was an insurrection. The FBI saw it as an
act of terrorism. Multiple deaths have been linked to that day,
(01:04):
some in the chaos of it, some by suicide after.
Since then, hundreds have been convicted of crimes, including the
crime of seditious conspiracy. The aftermath of that day is
still playing out, most recently in the Supreme Court. It
has a deep influence on the twenty twenty four election,
raising questions about whether Trump can even legally run for president.
(01:27):
But today I want to revisit the inciting incident and
play you. The finale of our second season, an episode
called Epiphany, which is all about January sixth of twenty
twenty one and the moment that an election which had
produced a single fact, the fact of Joe Biden's presidency,
instead split the country into two irreconcilable realities. Here's the episode.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
There's a place in our world where the known things go.
A quarter of the mind lined with shelves cluttered with proof.
I'm hiding in here. Who's out there? What do they want?
(02:18):
They sounds so angry. I'm pretty sure they can get in.
I don't see how I can get out. I think
I might be trapped. Welcome to the Last Archive, the
show about how we know what we know and why
it sometimes seems lately as if we don't know anything
(02:41):
at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season, I've been trying
to trace the history of doubt over the course of
the last century, building that history block by block, a
tower of doubt. Not too long ago, it all came
crashing down. It was the beginning of the year twenty
(03:02):
twenty one. Every archive of knowledge seemed to be under attack.
Embattled universities, courthouses, press rooms, even Congress but I found
it the last archives escape patch. Come through with me.
(03:22):
We'll have to go through a war and of underground tunnels,
but we'll get there. We're heading to a place called
Iron Mountain. Something I love about history, all the surprises,
the twists and turns. So I'm starting with a story
(03:43):
that has so many turns. In the nineteen thirties, a
German immigrant named Hermann Noust purchased an abandoned iron ore
mine in New York State near the Hudson River. Inside
its caves and old mining tunnels, Noust grew mushrooms. The
place was perfect for it. The mushrooms mushroomed. Nousk began
(04:05):
supplying the city with mushrooms, and he made a fortune.
People called him the mushroom King. At his house he
had the only mushroom shaped swimming pool in the world.
In nineteen fifty one, Noust adapted his caves and mines
and tunnels for a new business. He founded the Iron
Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation. Because at the time Americans were
(04:27):
crazy for bomb shelters. School children were ducking and covering
to prepare for a nuclear attack. Herman Noust outed them all.
An atomic bomb expert called Nousts Vault, the safest place
in the world.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
A thirty ton door equipped with a time lock will
guard one of the main passages in which four hundred
vaults are located. During the initial phase of the enterprise,
already foreign banks have applied for storage space behind the
massive door. Museums also are expected to seek protection for
their priceless art treasures. In the atmosphere of international tension,
bank files and records began to find their way into
(05:05):
the sanctuary.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
You could put your most valuable documents there, wills, photograph,
UF's legal papers. The company grew and grew a Cold
War knowledge vault, a last archive along the Hudson. These days,
Iron Mountain is still in business. It's a global records
management company, the world's biggest, with a four billion dollar
annual revenue and facilities in more than fifty countries. You
(05:28):
might have seen their trucks with a blue triangular logo.
I see those trucks all the time, rumbling up and
down the road. Iron Mountain stores everything, including the records
of nearly every fortune one thousand company. They've also got
Frank Sinatra's original recordings and Charles Dickens's last will and
testament back in the scariest years of the Cold War,
(05:50):
though Iron Mountain Atomic Storage offered something more than storage.
It offered secrecy.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Iron Mountain under a blanket of iron ore alternate underground
headquarters for corporations that.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Ad ran in nineteen sixty two, the year of the
Cuban Missile crisis. If you own a company and wanted
to hold a top secret meeting, why not hold it
in hidden conference rooms deep underground, Doctor evilstyle. Or you
might want to hold your meetings down there if you
were to say a super secret government agency. In nineteen
(06:25):
sixty seven, a few years after Iron Mountain advertised its
secret layer meeting service, a little book appeared in bookstores.
It was called Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility
and Desirability of Peace. The book described itself as the
record of a fifteen man special study group that had
gathered at Iron Mountain in those top secret underground meeting rooms.
(06:49):
And here was the book's bombshell. It was never supposed
to be published, but someone had leaked it. A member
of the secret group identified only as a professor of
social science from a large Middlewestern university. The report itself
was totally wonky wonky, but shocking.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for stable government.
It supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
The Special Study Group had been convened, it was said,
in response to a peace scare. Members of the group
talked about how devastating it would be if the United
States were ever for any length of time at peace,
as if the only thing that kept the American people
from shaking off the chains of their submission was war.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
Endless war, it has ensured the subordination of the citizen
to the state. No modern political ruling group has successfully
controlled its constituency after failing to sustain the continuing credibility
of an external threat of war.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Report from Iron Mountain concluded that the US needed to
keep those wars coming, but if, given the growing anti
war movement, a dreaded peace did descend upon the land,
there were still ways for the US government to find
substitutes for functions of war. This is so crazy, I'm
going to explain it again. According to this report, the
(08:17):
US government was trying desperately to keep the nation at war,
but if their worst fears were realized and peace came,
they had other options other ways to stifle discontent.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
A comprehensive social welfare program, a giant, open end space
research program aimed at unreachable targets, an established and recognized
extra terrestrial menace, massive global environmental pollution, fictitious alternate enemies.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Fully moonshot Batman. This leaked report was hot, hot, hot.
It became a best seller on the New York Times list,
was translated into fifteen languages. Esquire published an excerpt. Of course.
People tried to find that Midwestern social science professor who
leaked it, and they wanted to know which government department
had commissioned it. A reporter from the New York Times
(09:10):
called around to the White House and the State Department,
and then noted, no advanced reviewer has flatly labeled the
book fiction. People who read it were incensed, but report
from Iron Mountain proved very difficult to verify, even though
some people thought the whole thing was just a hoax.
If it's authentic, it's an enormous, roaring scandal, one scholar
told The New York Times. If it's caricature, it's a
(09:33):
brilliant job. Eventually most people forgot about it, but then
in nineteen seventy one, another government report was leaked to
the press.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
This weekend, portions of a highly classified Pentagon document came
the light for all the world to see and brought
cries of outrage from Washington. The New York Times began
publishing parts of a voluminous report that the Pentagon had
drawn up on the causes and conduct of American involvement
in Vietnam.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
The Pentagon Papers revealed decades of lying by the federal
government to the public about what had really been going
on in the war in Vietnam.
Speaker 5 (10:10):
Senator George McGovern, a leading critic of the war, called
the report and we quote, a story of almost incredible deception.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
This is where this history gets twisty, Tourney. The publication
of the Pentagon Papers brought the authors of the Report
from Iron Mountain out into the open, because unlike the
Pentagon Papers, which were entirely real, the Report from Iron
Mountain was in fact entirely made up. So just to
be extra extra clear here, there never was any special
(10:42):
study group, had never met at Iron Mountain, and this recording.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
No modern political ruling group has successfully controlled its constituency.
After failing to sustain the continuing credit.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
That's one of our actors reading a document that is
in fact a fake. In nineteen seventy two, in the
New York Times Book Review, a writer named Leonard Lewin
revealed that the report from Iron Mountain had been a hoax,
intended as a satire. He'd involved some pretty high level people.
Even the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith was in on it,
(11:16):
But Lewin confessed, I wrote the report, all of it.
The charade is over. The idea had come from Victor Navaski,
a leftist writer who later became Editor of the Nation.
It was all a lark, an angry one. As Navaski
told NPR's Fresh Air in nineteen ninety six, the.
Speaker 6 (11:35):
Idea for reports Maron Mountain came to me one day
when I saw a little headline in the newspaper saying
that the stock market had fallen abruptly because of a
peace scare. And we got an idea to do a
book about the quashing of a report which was commissioned
(11:55):
by the White House to plan the transition from a
wartime to a peacetime economy. And we would do a
kind of hoax book about what happened when the Commission
concluded that the economy would collapse. Peace really broke out.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
The Report from Iron Mountain hoax brought the storage company
Iron Mountain, the real Place a lot of grief, And
it wasn't fair because, let me be clear, the storage
company had nothing to do with this hoax. But meanwhile,
the Hoax report had acquired a huge following among conspiracy theorists.
(12:31):
They read it as incriminating evidence. They put it on
their bookshelves, and when the authors revealed themselves to be pranksters,
it didn't change anything. A lot of conspiracy minded fans
of the book simply refused to believe this new turn
of events. They just couldn't take that book out of
the mental box that said government report written in secret
underground bunker and put it in the box that said hoax.
(12:54):
They were still talking about it decades later, like in
this nineteen ninety three video cassette Blueprint for Tyranny.
Speaker 7 (13:01):
Welcome to the Report from Iron Mountain.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
This report.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
Is some thing you would never believe unless you read it.
Peace in reality equals world socialism, as we will find
out as we journey through this report.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
If anything, conspiracy theorists cherished the fake book. More as
the years passed, they read it avidly, passed it around,
kept it close to their vests, used it even as
a manual, a manifesto for opposition to the federal government.
And then in nineteen ninety five in Oklahoma City, some
of those right wing conspiracy theorists staged in insurrection.
Speaker 8 (13:44):
The explosion that went off around nine am, and we
could feel the explosion in the news.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
Room of Channel nine A.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Now Holy Cow, about a third of the building has
been blown away.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
On April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, a truck packed with
nearly five thousand pounds of explosives detonated outside the nine
story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing one hundred sixty
eight people, including nineteen very little children at a day
care center. The explosion injured hundreds more.
Speaker 9 (14:18):
And we can also give you a bit of a
hint now as to where the government appears to be
focusing its investigation on some of the what are called
right wing white supremacist groups in various parts of the country.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Eventually, two men were charged with eleven federal crimes. They
were the sort of guys who believed that the report
from Iron Mountain was real.
Speaker 10 (14:42):
The indictment charges that Timothy McVay and Terry Nichols, former
Army buddies with a grudge against the government, planned the bombing,
selected the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as their target,
bought and stole materials for the bomb, and built it.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
After the Oklahoma City bombing, Americans suddenly started paying attention
to right wing insurrectionists. Who were these people? Where did
they get their ideas? Those ideas made They came from books.
I don't know if Timothy McVeigh read the report from
Iron Mountain or watched those video cassettes about it, but
he did have a book that's usually right next to
it on every right wing extremist's bookshelf.
Speaker 10 (15:23):
Inside mcveigh's Yellow Mercury Sedan, investigators discovered a sealed envelope.
Speaker 11 (15:27):
Containing evidence that would prove crucial to analyzing mcveag's motivations.
Speaker 5 (15:32):
Highlighted passages from the anti government novel That Turner Diaries.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
The Turner Diaries is a nineteen seventy eight novel by
an avowed American neo Nazi. It includes a detailed account
of somebody building an explosive device, putting it into a
truck and driving it up to a federal building. McVeigh
seemed to have treated the Turner Diaries as an instruction manual.
(15:57):
In a similar way, a lot of his fellow extremists
considered Report from Iron Mountain as some kind of decoder ring.
When Magazine reported it has become required reading for militias,
Nazi sympathizers, and other righting types who deny that it's
a hoax and cited as evidence of plans for a
new world order. The instigator of the hoax, Victor Navaski,
(16:18):
was horrified, as he explained on Fresh Air, he had
found out that Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist group, had
reprinted the report and was to them a kind of bible.
Speaker 6 (16:30):
They were so persuaded that the report was the real
thing that they didn't bother to get copyright permission to
reprint it, and had reprinted it as if it were
a government document and we're selling it.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Navaski's original partner in crime, Leonard Lewin, sued Liberty Lobby
and reached a settlement. In the end, they had to
surrender to him their copies of Report from Iron Mountain.
Lewin stashed them in his basement but it was too
late to stop this left wing hoax turned right wing conspiracy.
Navaski wrote in the Nation about its acceptance by super
(17:03):
patriots and conspiracy theorists of the far right. He said
that they're taking it seriously was the scariest proposition of all.
It has since gotten even scarier. Since the nineteen nineties,
the Report from Iron Mountain has passed from generation to
generation like some kind of scripture. On the sixth of
January twenty twenty one, the day insurrectionists attacked the US capital,
(17:27):
some creep on four Chan posted in the cavalierly ugly
language in this hideous corner of the Internet, read the
Report from Iron Mountain, you brainless retard. These days you'll
still find Report from Iron Mountain on far right white
supremacist reading lists with no mention that it was a
left wing hoax. And now it has a new reading
(17:49):
list companion, the writings of Q, the anonymous alleged insider
who drops clues about all the evil goings on inside
the government. Just recently I called up Victor Navaski. He's
nearly ninety. It was really good of him to talk
to me. We both sound like we're under Iron Mountain, though,
because the phone is pretty bad.
Speaker 12 (18:10):
It's a fantasy to believe that it's true. And I
think Q andon is guilty of its own fantasy.
Speaker 13 (18:18):
Do you think if anyone presented himself to the world
tomorrow and said I am Q and I can prove
that I am Q, and I was just joking the
whole time, and it got out of hand none of
this is true. Would there be any way I'm doing
what had been done?
Speaker 12 (18:35):
I don't think so myself. I think that's where we
are as a culture.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
And unfortunately, the Q and On report goes something like this.
An insider decides to spill the beans about a secret
government run conspiracy, something to do with Satan and pedophiles.
He leakes some clues in a report and then report
after report, and the people who read those reports, those
(19:03):
postings by this anonymous que become passionately attached to the
idea of a conspiracy, and within the logic of that conspiracy,
they are being denied access to knowledge, some secret body
of knowledge hidden away that only the people in power
have access to, and that the followers of Q have
to hunt down and piece together clue by clue, Q
(19:26):
by Q Q isn't true. Also, I don't buy either
of the two big headlines about Q and On that
it's new or that it's uniquely powerful. That's what I've
been trying to argue by going over the story of
(19:47):
the report from Iron Mountain. This stuff isn't new, it's
not all powerful, and it has never ever been a secret.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
This election will be the most rigged election in history.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
That is a lie, an old fashioned lie, but it's
also a complex lie, the sort of lie that brings
together every kind of doubt whose rise I've been chronicling
all seasons long as little boats of doubt rowboats canoes.
They become a fleet of flotilla in Armada.
Speaker 14 (20:16):
They're sending millions of ballots all over the country.
Speaker 15 (20:19):
There's fraud. They found them in creeks. They found some
with the name Trump.
Speaker 16 (20:23):
Just happened to have the name Trump just the other
day in a waste paper basket.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
It was awful to watch this unfold in the months
leading up to the twenty twenty election, and in the
months afterward, to watch it spread on the Internet and
hear it from the mouth of the US President. He
said it again and again and again. If enough people
in public and in positions of authority lie about something
(20:51):
for long enough, people will believe it. Watching it all,
I felt as if my brain was on rewind. Specifically,
my head kept rewinding back to a brilliant book published
in nineteen ninety four called A Social History of Truth
by Stephen Shapin, Emeritus Professor of the History of Science
at Harvard. Shapin was writing about gentleman philosophers in the
(21:13):
seventeenth century in England. But I find his book so
wholly applies to the President that I ask him to
read my favorite lines.
Speaker 17 (21:22):
Knowledge is a collective good. In securing our knowledge, we
rely upon others, and we cannot dispense with that reliance.
That means that the relations in which we have and
hold our knowledge have a moral character. And the word
I use to indicate that moral relation is trust.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
He argues that you can't actually know anything alone, You
can only know things with other people. He doesn't think
the United States or the world is experiencing a crisis
of truth. He thinks it would be better called a
crisis of social knowledge. For example, and in particular around
climate change.
Speaker 17 (22:02):
I know something about the loss of biodiversity, species, about
melting icebergs, about sea level rise. Now someone puts pressure
in me and say, how do I know these things?
I don't think any of us know these things directly.
So the knowledge that I need to know these things
is to know who to believe, who has credibility, who
(22:24):
is author to who to trust?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
To know anything, then you have to know who to trust.
If you doubt everything, it's because you trust no one.
I find this framework really helpful. No one is killed truth. Instead,
we have this crisis of trust. But how did people
stop knowing who to trust? One answer to that question
involves the unintended consequences of new technologies of communication. We've
(22:52):
been hearing about those all season. How radio, for example,
amplified all kinds of extremism, but broadcasts only reached so far.
Then came the Internet, starting with bulletin boards and chat
rooms in the nineteen nineties, but we still think of
it the way we thought about radio in the nineteen thirties.
The phrase echo chamber comes up a lot an acoustic metaphor.
Speaker 17 (23:15):
So there's a million voices are screaming out there, but
any any body or any any group of like mind
that people are listening to some and not to others.
So there's another kind of question about what for us
is audible and what for them is audible.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Right, But then that metaphor of audibility and voice voice
also meaning vote, you know, has implications for democracy, which
is to say we will hear all the voices, and
that we will we will automate a system wherein we
hear everyone who's enfranchised. But then now we're in a
crisis of democracy around people not feeling heard, right, I mean,
(23:58):
if we just think about the siege of the Capitol
and if you listen to interviews with those people, we're
here to have our voices heard.
Speaker 17 (24:04):
A democratic project, everyone has a voice. I mean, well
we've heard them now.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Still, the argument that technology allows fakers and haters to
find each other more easily, Stephen Shapin thinks that's just
too glib. It's one of the reasons I loved talking
with him. He got me thinking harder about another argument
to explain what has happened to Americans and trust over
the past century. That argument is political. It involves what
one set of political actors have done to institutions over
(24:34):
time in order to shift the balance of power in
their favor.
Speaker 17 (24:39):
Do you mean to say the Supreme Court decision is
not void?
Speaker 18 (24:42):
No, a Supreme Court decision is not necessarily the law
of the land. The Constitution still is.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
That's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater making a Conservative argument that
the Supreme Court had overstepped in its decision to abolish
segregation in Brown versus Board of Education in nineteen fifty four.
Conservatives at the time were very much out of power.
Goldwater was an upstart, but his wing wanted to take
over the GOP, and then they wanted to take over
(25:11):
the country. And so, beginning in the nineteen fifties, Conservatives
engaged in a sustained assault on trust and institutions that
produce and diffuse knowledge. Three institutions, especially the courts, the press,
and the university. These institutions, they said, were all dominated
by liberals, first, the courts and the supposed liberal bias
(25:36):
of the judiciary. Whatever you do, Goldwater said, don't trust
the courts.
Speaker 18 (25:41):
They interpreted by that action that it was wrong to
have segregation. Now, they didn't spell out what was to
be done.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Other Conservatives went after institutions of higher learning. William F.
Buckley led the assault against the academy, beginning with this
nineteen fifty one book God and Man at Yale.
Speaker 18 (26:02):
How would all be governed by the first two thousand
people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two
thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Buckley said, whatever you do, don't trust the professors. The
third front in this warren institutions of knowledge was an
attack on the press. This began with a Nixon administration,
and most famously with a speech given by his vice president,
Spiro Agnew in nineteen sixty nine. Whatever you do, Agnew said,
(26:30):
don't trust the press.
Speaker 19 (26:32):
These men can create national issues overnight. They can elevate
men from obscurity to national prominence within a week. They
can reward some politicians with national exposure and ignore others.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
The courts, the universities, the press. Conservatives believed that to
defeat liberalism they needed to conquer these institutions of knowledge
to story trust in them. The left has contributed a
whole lot to this epistemological unraveling, too, but conservatives have
been playing a long game. This, ever, took years and years,
(27:07):
and eventually they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, they took
over the courts, or at least the federal judiciary.
Speaker 20 (27:14):
I'm honored and humbled to appear before you today as
a nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
They built their own press, your mask is making me uncomfortable,
and they undermined the university, especially scientific inquiry. So here
we are, decades later, on the other side of this
slow rolling revolution, a world where there is very little
left of what used to be called common knowledge. This
brings us to the twenty twenty presidential election.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
Those mail and ballots could have been written the day
before by the Democratic Party hacks that will roll over
the convention Center.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Sure are lots of people in positions of power and
authority said the election of Joe Biden was free and fair,
the most secure election in American history. The Court said
that every reputable news outlet said that political scientists, election observers, scholars,
they all said that, But could you trust them. For
(28:13):
a lot of Americans, the answer remained, no, not anymore
and maybe never again.
Speaker 7 (28:37):
If we can be covered rarely by the media, and
the media is the biggest problem we have, and we haven't.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
The sixth of January twenty twenty one. It was the
Christian holiday of Epiphany, marking the day the Three Kings
visited Jesus and the Manger, and Epiphany is a moment
when all is revealed. In Washington, thousands of people gathered
for a rally to save America, cheering President Trump and
(29:09):
damn the press. Meanwhile, down the street inside the Capitol,
a joint session of Congress was meeting to certify the
results of the presidential election, an election that would send
Trump packing in two weeks time.
Speaker 18 (29:22):
And after this, we're gonna walk down and I'll be
there with you, and we're gonna walk down to the Capitol.
Speaker 16 (29:31):
And we're gonna cheer on.
Speaker 15 (29:32):
They have never seen us here.
Speaker 8 (29:34):
We spent off with Trump saying it's been four more
years awad.
Speaker 20 (29:45):
Already.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
They marched to the Capitol, waving Trump flags and Confederate
battle flags, wearing Maga hats and superhero costumes and camouflage
and bulletproof veests. You probably saw all this. The crowd
started pulling down the barricades, flimsy fences, climbed the stairs,
scaled the scaffolding. They beat up Capital police, smashed windows,
(30:24):
crashed through doors. They broke into the capital. For people
who study right wing extremism and have read their neo
Nazi novel the Turner Diaries, everything that happened that day
was eerily familiar, because that book describes an attack on
(30:45):
the capitol this way. The real value of all our
attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the
immediate casualties. More important, though, is what we taught the
politicians and the bureaucrats. They learned this afternoon that not
one of them is beyond our reach. The decades long
(31:12):
conservative attack on institutions of knowledge, the press, the courts, universities,
it had come down to this day when these people
did not believe in the outcome of an election, or
believed it and wanted to overturn it. For weeks, Trump
supporters had been trying and failing to challenge the results
in counties where lots of black people voted. They were
(31:34):
especially matt about Georgia, where in runoff elections a Jewish
man and a black man had just won seats in
the US Senate.
Speaker 12 (31:43):
Well, fucking writers.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Cried about on a fucking half, Well, the fucking writers.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
It was a riot, a white race riot, and yet
horrible as it was the insurrection on the sixth of January.
Epiphany looked like it might be another kind of epiphany,
a day when people could finally see clearly revelation at
last that all the lying wasn't harmless. There seemed at
first to be real consequences. The President was banned from Twitter. Later,
(32:20):
the House impeached him for a second time.
Speaker 15 (32:22):
President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States
and its institutions of government. He threatened the integrity of
the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power,
and imperiled a coequal branch of government. He thereby betrayed
his trust as president to the manifest injury of the
(32:44):
people of the United States.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
The charges went to the Senate for a trial. Last year,
the first season of The Last Archive, I started out
with a trial, Remember Lucina Broadwell strangled in Barry, Vermont.
I started this show there because I wanted to explain
a bit of crucial history. Most of our ideas about
(33:06):
how to decide what's true and what's not true come
from the thirteenth century, with the rise of trial by jury.
Two sides take turns presenting evidence, and a jury decides
the verdict the truth.
Speaker 21 (33:19):
Here ye, here ye here ye.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Impeachment too, is a relic from the Middle Ages.
Speaker 21 (33:26):
All persons are commanded to keep silence on pain of imprisonment.
While the Senate of the United States is sitting for
the trial of the article of impeachment exhibited by the
House of Representatives against Donald John Trump, former President of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
England's parliament invented impeachment in the fourteenth century. In seventeen
eighty seven, the framers of the American Constitution, meeting in Philadelphia,
decided to add an impeachment clause because impeachment and conviction
was the only way to stop a president from declaring
himself ruler for life like a king. Jamie Raskin, congressman
(34:04):
from Maryland, led the prosecution for the House in a
trial where members of the Senate sat acting like a jury.
Speaker 8 (34:12):
You will not be hearing extended lectures for me because
our case is based.
Speaker 15 (34:18):
On cold, hard facts.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Trump's lawyers argued that Trump hadn't incited an insurrection at all.
Speaker 8 (34:27):
And if we buy this radical argument the president Trump's
lawyers advance, we risk allowing January sixth to become our future.
Speaker 15 (34:39):
And what will that mean for America. I'll show you.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Raskin played that video. Trumps lawyers played some of their
own video, but nearly everyone in the Senate had already
decided how they'd vote, and there was little suspense.
Speaker 20 (34:58):
These are fifty seven. The day's are forty three, two
thirds of the senator's president not having guilty. The state
judge is that the respond to Donald John Trump, former
President of the United States, is not guilty as charged
in the article of impeachment.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
The vote fell short of the supermajority required to convict,
even though there is no more clear cut case for impeachment,
no more indisputable evidence than an armed insurrection incited by
the executive branch to stop the legislative branch from certifying
an election. In the aftermath of the insurrection and the impeachment,
a buzzphrase emerged, the big lie. Republicans kept insisting that
(35:42):
the election had been stolen. Democrats took to calling this
the big lie, but Republicans said the big lie was
the idea that Joe Biden was the lawful president. A
lot of progressives talked about another kind of big lie,
the lie that white people matter more than black people.
That move harkened back to something James Baldwin had said
in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 14 (36:04):
The curriculum my color is what you use to avoid
facing the fact of our common history, the facts of
American life.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
In twenty twenty, Princeton historian Eddie Glaud Junior updated Baldwin's argument.
Speaker 16 (36:19):
America is so wilfully ignorant, right, And it's willfully ignorant
because it wants to protect its innocence. As Baldwin says,
it doesn't want to admit that it is not the
shining city on the hill. The trouble is deeper than
we wish to think, because the trouble is in us.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
The trouble is in us and the lies we tell.
He just can't pull these two lies apart. The lie
about the election is the lie about white supremacy. People
who say the election was stolen are generally arguing that
black voters stole the election, So really there's just the
one lie. But then I guess, predictably, the very expression
(37:03):
the big lie became meaningless, the way that earlier fake
news became meaningless, just another to disagree with someone. When
Georgia passed a law that challenged requirements for voting, and
liberals called it a voter suppression law. Conservatives said that
was a big lie. Here's how crazy this is. Some
people said that some other people lied, that they committed
(37:25):
voter fraud. Then some other people said this was a lie,
there was no fraud. And then the first group of
people said those people were lying about the lying. And
they all said all these lies with a big lie.
Here in this emergency bunker and iron mountain, I feel
buried beneath the weight of it all. I think a
lot of people feel that way. End of January, I
(37:48):
watched the newly and actually elected Joe Biden deliverer's inaugural address.
He'd started drafting his remarks in late twenty twenty, but
reportedly it's quite common for Biden to revise his speeches.
Up until the last moment after the insurrection, he'd had
some more revising to do.
Speaker 15 (38:08):
There is truth.
Speaker 11 (38:09):
Our lies lies told for power and for profit. And
each of us has a duty and a responsibility as citizens,
as Americans, and especially as leaders, leaders who have pledged
to honor our constitution, to protect our nation, to defend
the truth and defeat the lies.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Defeat the lies. I like that very much when I
heard it, so did Stephen Shapen, the historian of science,
and then it really worried both of us.
Speaker 17 (38:42):
Yes, it was beautiful. I entirely agree because I know
what he meant. But it's as much as pounding the
table or shouting as a way of addressing the nature
of the problem. There is truth and there is lies. Yeah,
who could disagree with that?
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Pounding on the table is not enough. Saying I tell
the truth, you tell lies is not enough, and it
doesn't work. This season of the Last Archive has been
a long hundred years, from the Scope's Trial to Ripley's
Believe It or Not, from the War of the Worlds
(39:19):
to Axis Sally in Tokyo, Rose Maury Bernstein, the mid centuries, Fengali,
the Moon Hoax, Soviet propaganda, and Rest in Peace Rush Limbaugh.
A problem of historical thinking is that when you look back,
everything seems to lead to now, but of course now
keeps changing, but the past remains the same. I've been
(39:42):
looking for a history of mischief, the peddling of doubt,
people who profited politically financially for making other people confused.
What I've argued is that there really is a genealogy. Here.
These people learn from one another's tricks, so it's been
worth laying them all out. Here's how this trick works.
(40:03):
Don't be fooled again. Report from Iron Mountain. It's one
of the sorriest of these tricks.
Speaker 4 (40:09):
Impossibility war is the foundation for stable government. It supplies
the basis for general acceptance of political authority.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
He was created as a prank, a joke. I look
what a mess it helped make. I don't want to
leave it just hanging near there. A hoax. So I
have one more story to tell. Remember Herman Noust, the
mushroom King with his mushroom shaped swimming pool. When I
(40:41):
was thinking about Iron Mountain and came across his name,
it sounded so familiar to me, Herman Noust, Herman Nous.
After a while I remembered I'd once met his granddaughter.
Here's how that happened. A bunch of years ago, I
got obsessed with a guy named Joe Gould, who, starting
more than a century ago, claimed to be writing the
(41:03):
longest book in the history of the world. He would
do this by making his own last archive, writing down
every word that anyone ever said to him. His book
was supposed to be called The Oral History of Our Time.
Apart from literary merit, it will have future value as
a storehouse of information, he would say. Later people said
(41:24):
this book never existed, that Gould had just talked about it,
had never written a word of it. Gould, it turned out,
was insane. He was in fact a psychopath. But long
after Gould's death, when I heard about The Oral History
of Our Time, I went looking for the manuscript. I
went digging, tunneling through archives, and weirdly, believe it or not,
(41:45):
I found it, or at least I found a part
of it in a notebook deep in the archives of
the New York Public Library. Gould had destroyed most of
the manuscript, but it had mainly been about one person,
a black artist named Augustus Savage. And she's the real story,
the true report from Iron Mountain. Augusta Savage had been
(42:08):
a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in the nineteen twenties
and nineteen thirties. She'd started her own studio. She'd been
commissioned to create a work about black Americans for the
nineteen thirty nine World's Fair. She'd been featured in Life magazine,
but then she met Joe Gould. He began to stalk
her everywhere she went. There's some evidence that he raped her.
In the nineteen forties, she disappeared. She went into hiding.
(42:31):
I found that she'd moved to upstate New York, where
she had lived at first in a tiny, run down
house without plumbing or electricity. She turned a chicken coop
into a studio. Then she got a job at Iron
Mounted Storage company. Augusta Savage is dead now and her
house is being turned into a museum run by Herman
Noust's granddaughter. Augusta Savage worked at Iron Mountain, but also
(42:56):
every week Herman Nelson's son brought her clay, He bought
her a car, He had a kitchen installed in her house.
Had electricity run out there. She'd come to the family's estate,
the one with the mushrooms shaped swimming pool, to recite poetry.
But meanwhile she destroyed much of her own art. She
went in the city mainly just to collect her old
work and destroy it. She apparently sent a man to
(43:19):
retrieve a bust that she'd made of W. B. D
Boys and then reportedly smashed it. The story of Augustus Savage,
that's my report from Iron Mountain. I wrote a book
about all that. It's called Joe Gould's Teeth. A lot
of the Last Archive is like Joe Gould's teeth. A
(43:41):
lot of history is like Joe Gould's teeth. Tragic and
maddening stories about loss and destruction, not leading to some
glorious or terrible present, just sad. When I went out
to that chicken coop that had become Augustus Savage's studio,
the ground was still covered with smashed bits of her sculpture.
(44:03):
Her voice, like her art, is lost. But I'm tired
of hidden and smashed history. I'm tired of bunkers, tunnels
and vaults, underground layers and ridiculous conspiracy. It's time to
dig out, time to climb up, time to get out,
(44:27):
time to figure it out. You can study history for
its own sake, curl around in attics to seek the truth,
rifle through the pages of old books, bury yourself in
every last archive. But you can also study history to
learn how to solve problems. Pry open the door of
the vault and creep out. Bring the knowledge of the
(44:49):
place where the known things go, and carry it outside.
Escape the corridor of the mind for the Messy, angry,
half wrecked, beautiful World. The Last Archive is written and
(45:18):
hosted by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane
mckibbon and ben Natta Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton,
and our executive producer is Mia Obel. Martin Gonzalez is
our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by
Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphinette. Our research
assistants are Kamanie Pantheer and Lily Richmond are full Proof
(45:41):
players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorn, Matthias Bossi, Dan Epstein,
Ethan Hruschenfeld, Becca A. Lewis, Andrew Perella, Robert mccotta, and
Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin
Industries Head Pushkin Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnarz,
Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostack, Maggie Taylor,
(46:02):
Maya Kainig and Daniella La Khan. Special thanks to Carla
and Noustelaiah and Simon Leak, and thanks to Shola Lynch
at the Schomberg Center. If you like the show, please
remember to rate, share, and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. I'm Jill Labour.
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