Chitra Ragavan

Techtopia with Chitra Ragavan

Ep. 9 — How Technology and the Digital Media Revolution are Transforming the Global Media Landscape / Marcus Brauchli, Journalist, Co-founder, North Base Media.

https://media.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/ins.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/Techtopia_9_RD1.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS Technology is shaking up the news media — as content creators of every ilk and genre have taken advantage of the digital revolution, commoditizing content and forever blurring the lines between e-commerce and content, news and entertainment, information and disinformation. One media executive who saw the digital revolution coming long before others did, is journalist, media investor and advisor, Marcus Brauchli. He is co-founder of North Base Media, an investment firm specializing in media and technology in global growth markets. Before co-founding North Base Media, Brauchli was executive editor of The Washington Post, shepherding the newspaper’s digital revolution, and helping the Post win seven Pulitzer prizes. Before joining the Post, Brauchli was managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Brauchli believes that the gravest threat to journalism, society and democracy, is the rise of misinformation and disinformation, which he describes as the “accidental by-product” of the technology revolution. Brauchli believes the “moral advocation” on the part of big companies in Silicon Valley to fight online disinformation is partly fueled by their “misguided, naive and ill thought out philosophies of libertarianism that don’t actually reflect what’s good for the society.” But Brauchli says there are growing pressures from all fronts now to start holding these companies accountable and that this likely will happen country by country. Brauchli adds that in the U.S, there are tools to regulate Facebook and Google as economic monopolies. However, the First Amendment precludes the path to disciplining these companies as “information monopolies,” raising questions about how our society can pressure these companies to do the right thing. Read the Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: Technology has transformed the global media landscape, especially, the news media, as content creators of every ilk and genre have taken advantage of the digital revolution, commoditizing content, and forever blurring the lines between e-commerce and content, news and entertainment, information and disinformation. Chitra Ragavan: Hello everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan, and this is Techtopia. One media executive who saw the digital revolution coming long before others did, is journalist, media investor, and advisor Marcus Brauchli. He’s here to talk with us today about the future of digital media and news. Brauchli is co-founder of North Base Media, an investment firm specializing in media and technology in global growth markets. He has served as an advisor to media groups, including Graham Holdings, Univision, and HT Media. Chitra Ragavan: Before co-founding North Base Media, Brauchli was executive editor of the Washington Post, overseeing the Post’s print and digital news operations, shepherding the newspapers digital revolution, and helping the Post win seven Pulitzer prizes. Before joining the Post, Brauchli was managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. His more than two decade tenure at the journal included 15 years as a foreign correspondent, mainly in Asia, and eight years as a senior editor in New York. Marcus, welcome to Techtopia. Marcus Brauchli: Thank you so much, Chitra. Great to be here. Chitra Ragavan: We were both reporters at major news outlets when the digital revolution began and the end of what you aptly described the other day, when we were chatting, as the end of the Voice of God period, when journalists were highly trained, experienced, reputable, for the most part, respected quite a bit, and the main content creators in media and news media. And then you saw the digital tsunami hit and it changed all of our lives. And you were on the forefront of bringing the Washington Post into the digital age. It must’ve been a huge challenge to pull it off. What was it like? Marcus Brauchli: Well, the truth is, the transformation that began with digital technologies, which really led to what you were describing, the end of the Voice of God, the end of the gatekeeper era. It actually began, probably, 10 or 15 years before I came to the Washington Post in 2008. The internet began to erode at the edges. The ability of the big centralized sort of monopoly, oligopoly media players, the ability of them to set the agenda for all other news coverage, because it opened up the door to other people creating content and distributing content via social media channels via start-up media companies, in the early days, via blogs. Allowing people to sort of connect with audiences in a way that previously hadn’t been possible. And it took a long time for the big established media companies to recognize this tsunami of change that was bearing down on them. Marcus Brauchli: For a long time, it simmered and percolated along. And the big focus was on whether the digital revolution was going to erode, as it did, the classified ad business was going to take away, as it did, the display advertising business. And it wasn’t so much on how content itself would have the ability of anybody to create content and share content and create groups to share content, how that would erode the credibility and the authority of traditional media houses. Marcus Brauchli: And that really, it came slowly. The Washington Post, where I was the executive editor from 2008 until the end of 2012, the Washington Post, actually, was very early into digital media. They were one of the first organizations to put their newspaper online. The Washington Post Company, at that time, owned both the Washington Post and Newsweek, and the then owner of the Washington Post Don Graham, who was the chairman of the Washington Post Company, made a very astute decision early on to put all the digital media operations, of not only the Washington Post, but Newsweek into a separate building in, frankly, a separate state. Marcus Brauchli: It was actually in Virginia, a different legal jurisdiction from the Washington Post or Newsweek. Because he was concerned, at the beginning, that all of these digital media companies would be suffocated by the rhythms and obsessions of print journalists, who weren’t

Ep. 9 — How Technology and the Digital Media Revolution are Transforming the Global Media Landscape / Marcus Brauchli, Journalist, Co-founder, North Base Media. Read More »

Ep. 8 — How Polaris is fighting QAnon in its use of human trafficking disinformation campaigns / Anjana Rajan, Chief Technology Officer, Polaris.

https://media.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/ins.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/Techtopia_8_RD2.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS When tech entrepreneur Anjana Rajan joined Polaris as its Chief Technology Officer last year, she thought she was setting aside her prior focus on domestic terrorism to help Polaris with its core mission of fighting human trafficking. But then Rajan learned the far-right conspiracy group QAnon had been making outlandish human trafficking allegations against Polaris resulting in massive Denial of Service or DDoS attacks by QAnon followers who were even making death threats against the non-profit. Suddenly, Rajan found that her world had come full circle. Over the past year, she’s had to bring all of her national security and technology skills to bear to expand Polaris’s mission to investigate this nexus of human trafficking and domestic terrorism. Anjana Rajan’s work and that of her Polaris team resulted in a recent report called  — Countering QAnon: Understanding the Role of Human Trafficking in the Disinformation-Extremist Nexus. Rajan shares the key findings from that report and what it means for U.S. domestic security. This is another fascinating episode in our yearlong exploration of conspiracy theories, radicalization, and domestic terrorism in the wake of the January 6th attacks on the U.S. Capitol by armed, violent supporters of former President Donald Trump. Read the Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: When tech entrepreneur Anjana Rajan, whose expertise is applying cryptography to human rights and national security issues, joined Polaris as a chief technology officer, she thought she was setting aside her focus on domestic terrorism to help Polaris with its core mission of fighting human trafficking. But then Rajan learned that the far-right conspiracy group, QAnon, had been making outlandish human trafficking allegations against Polaris, resulting in massive internet denial of service or DDoS attacks by QAnon followers, who are even making death threats against the nonprofit. Chitra Ragavan: Hello, everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan, and this is Techtopia. Many of you, of course, are familiar with QAnon from the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol and on democracy by supporters of former President Donald Trump, triggering a massive domestic terrorism investigation by U.S. authorities. Suddenly, Rajan found that her world had come full circle. Over the past year, she’s had to bring all of her national security and technology skills to bear to expand Polaris’ mission to investigate this nexus of human trafficking and domestic terrorism. Chitra Ragavan: Rajan’s work and that of her Polaris team resulted in a recent report called Countering QAnon: Understanding the Role of Human Trafficking in the Disinformation-Extremist Nexus. Joining me now to talk about the report and what her investigation uncovered is Anjana Rajan, who I’m happy to report is also my former colleague at Palantir. Anjana, welcome to Techtopia. Anjana Rajan: Thanks so much for having me, Chitra. Chitra Ragavan: We spoke almost exactly a year ago when you were moving cross country from California to join Polaris as the CTO, just as the COVID shutdown was starting. You were coming to Polaris with a mission to combat human trafficking. Just to give a brief definition for people of what human trafficking is, how do you define human trafficking and Polaris’ mission as you knew it when you first came onboard? Anjana Rajan: Sure. Yeah, it’s hard to believe it’s been a full year. But Polaris’ mission is to end sex and labor trafficking and to restore freedom to survivors. Our approach is to be survivor-centered, racial justice-focused, and technology-enabled. The way we simply describe human trafficking is it’s the illicit business of exploiting vulnerable people for profit. It’s $150 billion industry with 25 million victims worldwide, and that number is only going to grow unless something changes. Chitra Ragavan: You’ve had quite a whirlwind year in which clearly everything has changed, including your perception of what you would be doing at Polaris. How did you find out about the QAnon DDoS attacks on Polaris and tell us what the group was alleging? Anjana Rajan: When I joined Polaris, I didn’t think that my work on domestic terrorism would be even remotely relevant, and it turns out I was very wrong about that. When I joined the organization, I had learned that in August of 2018, we were the target of a coordinated disinformation campaign that accused Polaris of being part of a fictitious child sex trafficking ring supposedly run by The Clinton Foundation. This outlandish conspiracy we discovered was driven by none other than QAnon. Anjana Rajan: That summer, QAnon followers doxed our senior staff and our board. They sent our hotline advocates death threats, and they led a cyber attack on our hotline, which made it impossible for victims and survivors to get the help they needed. As you can imagine, it was a really harrowing and traumatizing experience for the organization. When I heard about this after I joined, I was actually very terrified, because it’s one thing to think about domestic terrorism in a very theoretical sense, it’s a whole other thing when the threat is knocking on your door. Anjana Rajan: I was worried that the attack on Polaris was actually a leading indicator of something much bigger. Because while QAnon was not yet part of our mainstream discourse in the way that it is now, the patterns of QAnon followed a very similar disinformation playbook that we’ve seen used by other adversarial actors. It’s the same way ISIS used propaganda to recruit women into their fold. It’s the same way Saudi Arabia launched a disinformation campaign to discredit their enemies. Anjana Rajan: It’s the same way the Russian internet research agency has subverted the 2016 U.S. election. The way that I saw it, the COVID pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the upcoming presidential election, it was all seeming to create this perfect storm of tension. It was clear to me that we were just barreling towards an inflection point that would seem come to head on November 3rd. Chitra Ragavan: In a

Ep. 8 — How Polaris is fighting QAnon in its use of human trafficking disinformation campaigns / Anjana Rajan, Chief Technology Officer, Polaris. Read More »

Ep. 7 — How a patient with a rare tumor is taking personalized medicine to a new level through a unique non-profit biomedical research initiative / Vanessa Slavich, Head of Community, Celo & Peter Kane, Founder & Executive Director, Research to the People.

https://media.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/ins.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/Techtopia_7_RD2.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS For nine years, Vanessa Slavich took a traditional, reactive, “whack-a-mole” approach to manage her battle against a rare and aggressive tumor, working with highly specialized doctors operating in various treatment silos. Frustrated with the outcomes, this year, Slavich is taking a new more proactive and strategic approach. She’s using her career in technology startups as a model for turbo-charging her research and treatment options in a unique way — which she describes in a recent post in Substack, called “The Startup Body: managing my health #Likea Boss.” And Slavich is “designing her health” in collaboration with Peter Kane, Founder and Executive Director at Research to the People, a non-profit biomedical research initiative based in San Francisco. Research to the People helps patients co-lead and direct new research and treatment options for their conditions. The group is creating a bold new model for patient-centric treatment and giving voice to patients who are grappling with rare and complex diseases. Slavich and Kane talk about their collaboration and how it represents a model for the future of precision, personalized medicine. Read the Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: For nine years, Vanessa Slavich took a traditional reactive, whack-a-mole approach to manage her battle against a rare and aggressive tumor, working with highly specialized doctors in various treatment silos. Frustrated with the outcomes, this year, Slavich is taking a new, more proactive, and strategic approach. She’s using her career in technology startups as a model for turbocharging her research and treatment options in a unique way, which she describes in a recent post in Substack called The Startup Body: Managing My Healthcare Like a Boss. Chitra Ragavan: Hello, everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan, and this is Techtopia. Chitra Ragavan: Vanessa Slavich is taking a strategic approach to combat her rare tumor in collaboration with Pete Kane. He’s Founder and Executive Director at Research to the People, a nonprofit biomedical research initiative based in San Francisco. Research to the People helps patients co-lead and direct new research and treatment options for their conditions. The group is creating a bold new model for patient-centric treatment and giving voice to patients who are grappling with rare and complex diseases. Chitra Ragavan: Slavich and Kane are both here today to talk about their collaboration and how it represents a milestone for the future of personalized medicine. Vanessa and Pete, welcome to Techtopia. Vanessa Slavich: Thank you for having us. Pete Kane: Thank you. Chitra Ragavan: Vanessa, tell us when and how you first found out about your tumor and what kind of tumor it is. Vanessa Slavich: I found out about it in 2011. I had just started working at Square. It was a early startup back then, and I was actually at my friend’s graduation, and the chair was hitting my back in a very particular way. And I remember shifting back and forth and being like, “Man, this chair sucks.” And then my friend looked at my back, and she’s like, “Oh, you have a little bump.” Vanessa Slavich: And I ended up getting a biopsy, and they found out it was what’s called a desmoid tumor. It’s also called aggressive fibromatosis, and it’s a rare tumor. You’re more likely to get struck by lightning than have this tumor. There’s about 900 cases per year in the United States. And it basically is part of my connective tissue so it’s everywhere in my body, but it’s considered locally aggressive in that it likely won’t show up in my foot or my brain. It’ll probably always be somewhere near my back. But in the last 10 years, we haven’t found a really effective treatment option. Chitra Ragavan: What was that like to know that you had a tumor that was rarer than being struck by lightning. That must’ve been quite a shock. Vanessa Slavich: I think the optimist in me is like, “Wow, I’m so special and unique. I’m really one of a kind.” And then actually at one point, so part of the reason I’m working with Pete now is we’ve done quite a bit of genetic testing in this time period, and we’ve never found the traditional molecular markers of a desmoid tumor. Vanessa Slavich: So I’ve had one doctor tell me, “It looks like a desmoid and smells like a desmoid, but we can’t actually prove it’s a desmoid.” Vanessa Slavich: And I even got a biopsy a month ago, and they tested it again. It came up with the same conclusion and so there’s a possibility that my tumor is also a rare one in the world of desmoids, and so I could be one of a kind which, intellectually, is really fascinating and working with Pete… I told him this week, the innovation side of this I love, and it’s like, “Wow, this is so interesting.” And then I’m like, “But it really sucks.” So I’m really curious about it, but it’s also really pretty overwhelming. Chitra Ragavan: I guess the startup, techie geek in you really appreciates it, but at an emotional level, it packs a punch, doesn’t it? Vanessa Slavich: For sure. Chitra Ragavan: Now, you’ve given the tumor a nickname. Tell us how that came about and why you call it what you do. Vanessa Slavich: So my tumor is called Ursula which is funny because my fiancé used to date someone named Ursula, so that’s a complex name, but I actually named her a long time ago when I found out that the way desmoid tumors kind of react is that they don’t invade in that it wouldn’t show up in my blood as I was kind of explaining, but they push, and they have tentacles. So there’s no… the idea of clear margins is kind of nebulous, partly because it’s part of the connective tissue. And so it’s kind of this evil thing that’s very hard to die or very hard to kill,

Ep. 7 — How a patient with a rare tumor is taking personalized medicine to a new level through a unique non-profit biomedical research initiative / Vanessa Slavich, Head of Community, Celo & Peter Kane, Founder & Executive Director, Research to the People. Read More »

Ep. 6 — How the COVID-19 vaccines will change our approach to future pandemics / Dr. Robert Pearl, Author, Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients.

https://media.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/ins.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/Techtopia_6_RD1.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS The extraordinary scientific and technological innovations around the COVID-19 vaccines have enabled the U.S. government and governments around the world to deploy multiple vaccines against the lethal virus — allowing a gradual reopening of society and return to a new normal. What do we need to do to defeat COVID-19 once and for all and how can technology be used to prevent such devastating pandemics in the future? It’s always a wake-up call to speak with Dr. Robert Pearl, author of a new book out this spring called “Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients.” Dr. Pearl also hosts two popular podcasts, Fixing Healthcare and Coronavirus: The Truth. Read the Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: The extraordinary scientific and technological innovations around the COVID-19 vaccines, have enabled the U.S. Government and governments around the world to deploy multiple vaccines against the lethal virus, allowing a gradual reopening of society and return to a new normal. Hello, everyone I’m Chitra Ragavan and this is Techtopia. What do we need to do to defeat COVID-19 once and for all? And how can technology be used to prevent such devastating pandemics in the future? Here to answer those questions and more is Dr. Robert Pearl. He’s the author of a new book out this Spring called Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients. Dr. Pearl hosts, the popular podcasts, Fixing Healthcare and Coronavirus, The Truth. Dr. Pearl, welcome to Techtopia. Robert Pearl: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Chitra Ragavan: It seems as if we’re finally seeing the light at the end of a very dark tunnel with these multiple vaccines being given emergency authorization, more and more shots given in arms, schools starting to reopen, businesses reopening. What’s your assessment of where we are today compared to even a month ago, here in the U.S. and what are we likely to see in coming days, weeks, and months? Robert Pearl: Great question. Let me go back to one thing that you said earlier. I want listeners to know that all the profits from the book Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients, goes to a charity, Doctors without Borders, so if they purchase the book, they actually are going to be contributing to some global healthcare delivery. Thank you. In terms of the vaccine, this is a massive breakthrough. In “The Coronavirus: The Truth” podcast that Jeremy Corr and I do, I talk about chess games, an opening set of moves that the United States totally failed at. We did insufficient amount to limit the spread, to provide education, to have a national strategy, we could spend hours talking about the failures. But the middle game that we’re in right now, is one of the vaccine and it’s absolutely brilliant, particularly the messenger RNA vaccines. Robert Pearl: I know that a lot of your listeners are in the tech world, CEOs of companies, so to help to provide context, the human body or the viral organism has genetic material, and that material directs the body to create proteins. And between the genetic material in humans inside the nucleus and the actual proteins that are created, there is a code sent out. It’s called messenger. Think about that, the message is trotting out there with the code and RNA for the ribonucleic acid. And although it’s been thought of for a long time, that we could take this RNA, this messenger RNA, and inject it into people, get their bodies to produce the proteins that are responsible for the infection, the proteins that are specific to the virus or the bacteria for that matter, and then get our bodies to create an immune response, it had never been done. Despite two decades of trying to make it work. Robert Pearl: It’s why it was a long shot. And I wrote a piece in August questioning whether we’d be successful. And that was only seven months ago, and today 95% efficacy, tremendous safety, that’s what the vaccines currently are able to do. And the beauty of it is how fast, I knew vaccine can be produced. In the past, it took a minimum of five years, and that was fast for a lot of vaccines. Now we can do it in a matter of about six weeks. And we’ll probably talk a little bit about some of the new mutant strains, which is a great threat to us. We can actually modify the vaccine as needed to be able to respond to the mutants. Because we understand the single change protein in these new viruses and we can design new messenger RNA to create that exact protein going forward. Chitra Ragavan: Yeah. And in fact, Moderna is trying out, it’s doing a trial, looking at some of these variants and Johnson & Johnson, I think has been found to be very effective against some of the variants, so already you’re kind of seeing that the existing vaccines may offer some, if not a lot of protection plus any new vaccines that may come out to deal with the variance, right? Robert Pearl: Absolutely. The current vaccines, there’s three main variances, there’s one in the United Kingdom, one in South Africa and one in Brazil. The one from United Kingdom is the one that right now represents as much as 30% of the disease in the United States, and the vaccines are still effective, although probably slightly less. It’s less clear what’s going to happen with the other two variants, although there should be at least some degree of protection and the opportunity to be able to change the vaccine and as you say, people are looking at that. They’re also looking at giving a third dose to boost the antibody levels that are produced even higher as a possible alternative solution. Again, for listeners, what

Ep. 6 — How the COVID-19 vaccines will change our approach to future pandemics / Dr. Robert Pearl, Author, Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients. Read More »

Ep. 5 — Technology has given women a powerful voice in the alt-right movement / Seyward Darby, Author, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism.

https://media.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/ins.blubrry.com/techtopiawithchitraragavan/Techtopia_5_RD1.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS A large number of women participated in the rioting at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 by violent supporters of former President, Donald Trump. Some allegedly played a key role in plotting the protests and two of the five people killed in the riots were women. How have women exploited technology to expand their reach and influence in the alt-right movement? And have technology companies done enough to counter and combat their disinformation campaigns and hate messaging by white nationalists? Seyward Darby, author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism has some interesting insights. Read the Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: I was struck by the number of women taking part in the rioting at the US Capitol on January 6, by violent supporters of former President Donald Trump. Who are these women, I wondered? How have they exploited technology to expand their reach and influence in the alt-right movement? And have technology companies done enough to counter and combat their disinformation campaigns and hate messaging. Chitra Ragavan: Hello, everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan, and this is Techtopia. Here to answer those questions and more is Seyward Darby. She is the author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism. Darby is the editor in chief of The Atavist Magazine, a forum for great long-form journalism. Darby previously served as the deputy editor of Foreign Policy, and the online editor and assistant managing editor of The New Republic. As a writer, she has contributed to The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Elle, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. Chitra Ragavan: Seyward, welcome to Techtopia. Seyward Darby: Thank you so much for having me. Chitra Ragavan: What led you to start researching the role of women in white nationalism and to write Sisters in Hate? Seyward Darby: I began this project immediately after the election that preceded this one. So I guess four years prior, so in 2016. Just like January 6th of this year and the aftermath of the election in 2020 has led a lot of people to ask questions about the state of the country and to ask questions certainly about women’s complicity in the far right in this country. I had a similar question after 2016. But in that case, rather than number of women who were suddenly in the news, it was the opposite. There were no women who were ever quoted or mentioned as being part of the so called alt-right movement, which had gotten a good amount of press attention over the course of the election, because of the movement’s affinity for Trump and the way that he projected dog whistles to them. Seyward Darby: So I would read articles about the alt right and find that there were always mentions of how they were angry white men, and it was so misogynistic, and a woman was never quoted, there were no photos of women. There was just a complete absence of women. And that struck me as wrong from the standpoint of how social movements actually function and what is required for social movements to function, particularly social movements that are all about making sure you’re preserving an identity, a way of life, a race in this case. You literally need women for that. And history has shown us that women have been very deeply involved in many oppressive, racist regimes and organizations. Seyward Darby: So, I went looking for the women. They were quite easy to find. They were exactly where you’d expect them to be on YouTube, and Twitter, and Facebook, and all of these different platforms. I then dove into these questions of who are they? Why do they believe what they believe? How did they come to believe what they believe? But also, why are we not talking about them? Why have they been erased from the wider narrative about the far right? And so that was exactly four years ago, basically, that I kicked this into gear. Chitra Ragavan: When you use the phrase “dog whistle,” for those of us who are not familiar with that, what do you mean? Seyward Darby: Dog whistle is essentially coded language, suggestive language. I mean, frankly, you could argue that make America great again, and America first are dog whistles, because embedded… Well, first of all, there are echoes of actual clan slogans from the 1920s. But then on top of that, within that is embedded this idea of America as being very much for white Americans. And so “dog whistles” are things where you’re not… Trump isn’t using the N word, or Trump isn’t saying America for white Americans, but the language is coded such that people who do, believe these more hateful ideas, will hear what they want to hear in that language. That’s a dog whistle, obviously, is something that only a dog can hear. And in this case it’s language that people who know what to be listening for can hear the truth inside it basically. Chitra Ragavan: You were so deep into researching all of this when the January 6th riots took place at the US Capitol, and you see all of these women not just participating, but several of them taking the lead. Others had been involved in planning and two women actually died of the five people. In addition to the Capitol Police Officer, Brian Sicknick, there were two women. Ashli Babbitt, she was an Air Force veteran, a former Air Force veteran. You saw images of her pushing through the window and getting killed by a US Capitol Police Officer. And then you had Rosanne Boyland, who may have been crushed to death by fellow rioters while trying to push through a police line. When you saw this unfolding, what were your thoughts having done all of this research that you had already done? Seyward Darby: It

Ep. 5 — Technology has given women a powerful voice in the alt-right movement / Seyward Darby, Author, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism. Read More »