{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Honest Take","title":"A Failure of Imagination: Why the West Keeps Betting its Enemies will Come Around| With Cliff May","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3885,"description":"A sixth-grade teacher in an American public school gets flown to Doha. First class, five-star hotel. Nobody asks her for anything — they just send her home with some curriculum, some textbooks and a few maps.\nCliff May founded the Foundation for Defense of Democracies one week before 9/11. He'd spent a decade at the New York Times before that, so he knows how a story gets built. In this conversation he traces one lie from Soviet disinformation desks to \"Israel pushed us into Iraq\" to \"Israel is dragging us into Iran\" to whatever version is in your feed tonight — and argues it isn't a rumor problem, it's a purchase. An influence operation doesn't need you to say nice things about Qatar. It only needs you talking about somebody else.\nA week before the towers came down, two people walked into Cliff May's office to tell him the country was asleep.\nJeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN, and Jack Kemp, the former congressman and Housing and Urban Development secretary, had a thesis and nobody to test it. America, they said, was taking a holiday from history — the Wall was down, the Soviet Union was gone, and the country had decided it no longer had enemies. Then they read him a list: Beirut in 1983. New York in 1993. Saudi Arabia in 1996. Two embassies in Africa in 1998. The USS Cole in 2000.\n\"Is anybody looking at these and trying to connect the dots?\"\nHe took the assignment. Nine days later he had an answer he hadn't gone looking for, and the rest of his career — he quit the New York Times and built the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.\nThis conversation is about what he's watched since. Not only the conspiracy theories that trail every American war — the Jews were warned about 9/11, Israel pushed America into Iraq, Israel is dragging America toward Iran — but the habit underneath them: a West that keeps betting its adversaries will eventually come around. Iran in 1979 and China after the WTO already ran that experiment and already returned the...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/MWvudMeeQbLLprkXao5bQURkY3G_5oMcfe3JeW4xoBg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Nzg1/NjYxZjIyMzBiODU5/OTczZmQzNjUzMmZi/YWIwNC5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}