with-CHRIS-HAY-01
Silverman>
Carolina, a state he won. He is there tonight to introduce General Mattis
who we believe will be the nominee for Secretary of Defense; President
Obama addressing soldiers at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, delivered
his final national security speech, and without referencing Trump by name,
repudiated his successor`s policies, from immigration to civil rights to
military strategy. Just this past week congress on the verge of taking an
actual real step to protect American workers adding a buy American
provision to a water infrastructure bill that required the use of American
made iron and steel, but then Paul Ryan stepped in and stripped that
measure out of the bill. A Republican member of the electoral college just
announced he will not case his vote for Donald Trump. There`s an effort to
get more electors others follow suit. Buzzfeed News partnered with Ipsos
Public affairs and conducted a poll, the first large scale survey into the
fake news phenomenon.>
Policies; Electoral College; Media; Internet; Donald Trump; Barack Obama;
Defense; Military; Air Force One; Security; Health & Medicine; Veterans;
Healthcare>
And we figure the best way to communicate with Trump, with the president- elect was to tweet him. We did it. A bunch of us did it. We got no answer and he didn`t lift a finger. And this -- as I said -- this is really his first test to show whose side he`s on and he failed.
And I wished he hadn`t because this is a pretty big deal for a whole lot of steelworkers in my state, in Ohio and other places.
HAYES: You know, it strikes me today watching this, the tweet he sent at Boeing about, you know, accusing them of sort of cost overruns on this Air Force One contract. The details of that are a little complicated. They are -- it is expensive. It`s unclear how justified it is.
But it struck me that here`s someone who can use Twitter to kind of play the role of tough on corporate America. And as long as that`s where all the attention is, whatever Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell are doing in those two chambers to give away the store to corporate America, is not going to rise to the same level of notice.
BROWN: Well, the president has proven himself pretty darned good, the president-elect, at using Twitter to distract people from the really big issues that are happening. He can do a tweet saying that 3 million Americans are felons because they were doing -- not doing -- they were voting illegally at the same time as all the Trump University settlement was announced. I think that was the same time.
He`s very good at getting people to pay attention to the relatively little things he`s doing when we see these interest groups sell out American workers and Trump doesn`t seem to really care when it comes to getting his congressional colleagues and his congressional party members on board to fight for American workers.
This is, again, the first test, the first example. I hope that he cleans his act up and pays more attention to this and puts heat on McConnell and Ryan to do the right thing.
We`ve got this case where the mine workers in Ohio -- around the country, more than 12,000 mine workers because of one guy, Mitch McConnell -- we`re trying to get Trump involved. He won`t get involved. And a whole bunch of thousands of workers, retirees and widows are unfortunately going to face Christmas with their health care cut off.
HAYES: All right, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Thank you very much, appreciate it.
BROWN: Thanks very much, Chris.
HAYES: All right, joining me now Robert Reich, former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, author of Saving Capitalism for the Many Not the Few, and Sarah Isker Flores, Republican strategist, former deputy campaign manager for Carly Fiorina during her run for president.
And Sarah, I`m fascinated by the tangle of ideological lines that have suddenly been created. There was a line Mike Pence said about the free market. He said, well, the free market has been sorting it out for years now and America is losing. And there`s a poll out today asking people if they agree with that. And, you know, a majority of Republicans agree, the free market has been sorting it out and America has been losing, and a minority of Democrats agree with that.
Is it now Republican and conservative doctrine that the free market has been sorting it out and America is losing because of the free market?
SARAH ISKER FLORES, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Well, I think that that`s simplifying a larger point which you did talk about earlier which was the tax system that we have now and that desperately needs reform, naemely the corporate tax rate right now which is the highest in the world...
HAYES: Right, but that`s not why the outsourcing`s happening, right?
FLORES: No, it absolutely is.
HAYES: No, I mean, it just isn`t. The taxation may be part of the outsourcing, but the trend over 20 or 30 years of moving manufacturing to places where there`s cheaper labor is part of a global trend of global trade, right?
FLORES: Right, and it`s hard to compete with that labor when the taxes here are so high. They are intertwined, of course.
HAYES: But it`s not just the taxes that are driving it, right, it`s the cheaper labor, it`s the entrance, for instance, of China into the WTO, not changes in the corporate tax rate that led those jobs to go to China.
My question is global trade. Let`s say you cut the corporate rate and those jobs still left the country, right.
FLORES: I don`t think they will, but OK.
HAYES: The Republican Party, what do you guys think about global trade? Do you believe in comparative advantage? Do you think that capital should flow to where labor is cheapest or do you think the president should make these countries buck up and stay where they are?
FLORES: I think it`s a fairly simple concept that will be complicated in its very simple implementations, which is we need to do what`s in America`s interests. That`s true for our foreign policy, it`s true for our trade policy and it`s true for our domestic policy. I think that`s what the Republican Party stands for.
HAYES: That is fascinating. That is fascinating. This is fascinating.
Because I want to be clear here, right? Robert, this is a new ideological core for a party that has been extremely favorable to trade deals. It`s been a bipartisan consensus, let`s be clear -- whether it`s NAFTA, whether it`s CAFTA, whether it`s Peru, whether it`s Korea, whether it`s Jordan, whether it`s Cambodia, all of those deals which I`ve covered.
This is new all of a sudden that the guiding light should be America`s interests.
ROBERT REICH, FMR. LABOR SECRETARY: Well, Chris, it`s -- if you define America`s interests as corporate interests, as American corporations` profitability, that is old Republican doctrine. There`s nothing new here at all. The only thing that is slightly new is this Donald Trump gloss that is put over it, this kind of populist worker oriented gloss.
If you look beneath that gloss, what you find is the same old Republican doctrine and that is tax breaks for corporations, every effort to make corporations more profitable will somehow trickle down to the benefit of the rest of America. That`s trickledown economics. We`ve been here before, seen it before. It is just dressed up differently right now.
HAYES: Sara, let me ask you this, the auto bailout. When the auto bailout happened, you had Republicans saying this was essentially Stalinism come to the U.S. I mean, Sean Hannity had a line similar to that, I think he called it communism or the return of the USSR.
You had folks saying, you know, we don`t pick winners and losers, that`s not the way American capitalism works.
If Bernie Sanders were president-elect and he did to Carrier what Donald Trump did, you cannot look me in the face and say the Republicans would be like, yeah, this is totally cool.
FLORES: I think the auto bailout is significantly different from this in a lot of ways that we probably don`t want to get into about managed bankruptcies, and a $90 billion loan.
HAYES: So, go to the second part. If Bernie Sanders did the exact same thing, you`re telling me that Paul Ryan and every Republican would say we are so psyched about this deal.
FLORES: So psyched.
I think that politically governing is about priorities And what Donald Trump did was show the American people...
HAYES: That`s not an answer to the question. Bernie Sanders, President- elect Bernie Sanders does the exact same thing, you tell me honestly that you, other conservatives, Paul Ryan Republicans would say, this is awesome, way to go Bernie Sanders.
FLOREDS: I think it depends what solutions it was pointing to in the presidency. He is still president-elect. He does not have the power o the White House. With Bernie Sanders I think it would have a zillion other plans that Bernie sanders had once he was president to have the government play this huge role.
I think what Donald Trump is signaling is that jobs are going to be his priority. And American jobs are going to be his priority, and therefore as president-elect he`s going to make this deal because he`s a negotiator and as president he`s going to look at the tax code and figure out ways to incentivize these companies to stay here.
HAYES: Believe me, there is going to be a huge corporate tax cut, which corporations will be very happy with, that is clearly on the agenda.
Robert, same question for you, when liberals look at the Carrier job and they say, oh, he -- $7 million of corporate welfare, he`s only saving 700 jobs, aren`t they just doing the same thing that if the shoe were on the other foot they would be applauding?
REICH: Well, actually, Chris, it`s interesting, because what we see here in all of these instances is Republicans using the free market when the free market actually generates higher corporate profits. And when the free market doesn`t, well, then we don`t like the free market. We like corporate welfare.
And again this is not particularly new. What`s new here is a very interesting dynamic between Donald Trump playing a kind of straight man to a Republican congress that`s actually doing the work of giving the corporations and also Wall Street exactly what they want. Donald Trump kind of distracting attention from the typical old Republican playbook. And I think that if the media does its job, and I hope the media will do its job over the next six months, four years, whatever it needs to actually look underneath the orchestration that Donald Trump is using and see what day by day the Republicans are doing, and even what Donald Trump is doing, because Donald Trump is talking out of one side of his face in terms of oh, we`re going to protect American jobs, but actually it`s a handful of jobs.
What`s really happening here, and what we really need to focus on, is a gigantic corporate tax cut. It`s repatriated earnings from abroad, which is going to help United Technologies, the parent company of Carrier. That`s the big story.
HAYES: Sara, you know, I think there`s something interesting that`s happened that we`ve seen is that Donald Trump won that primary I think largely because he jettisoned an entire conservative rhetoric about free market. He didn`t really talk about free markets very much. He, in fact, didn`t really use the word freedom very much.
I remember a really fascinating analysis of his language. He was not really into the word freedom. Ted Cruz loves that word. He kept hammering it. He hammered it during his convention speech. It`s what sort of Reagan Republicans, it`s the word they -- he basically said like I`m going to save your jobs. I`m going to open up the mines and there was not really an articulation of, you know, we have to let the market do its work. It`s basically it was a kind of like almost statist at times agenda of, yeah, I`m going to get in there and pull the levers however they need to be.
Is that now the view of the Republican Party en masse?
FLORES: I think I disagree with your premise, but I think a more interesting thing to look at is actually the distinction between the rhetoric in the general election between Donald Tsaying that he was going to fight for American jobs and Hillary Clinton running an identity politics campaign that ended up failing pretty dramatically in this Midwest corridor that we`re talking about.
And to go back to something you said earlier, you`re talking about union jobs and not including the non-union jobs for no particular reason. I don`t know why someone`s non-union job somehow doesn`t count anymore if they get to keep that.
HAYES: But answer the question. Answer the question, right?
So the question is, is this -- I mean, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump had an ideological dispute in the primary. It was very clear. I listened to those two speeches in Cleveland. I was sitting there. They don`t believe the same thing. Both men said that, OK?
Donald Trump won that argument, and my question is is that the controlling ideology now, the ideology that says we don`t let the market decide, we don`t believe in the invisible hand, we believe in the strong hands of Donald Trump to reach in and move things around so that outcomes the market produces are favorable to the American worker?
FLORES: So I don`t think that`s what Donald Trump stands for. And so I don`t think that`s also why he won. I think that if we want to go back to the primary and why he won, I think that your argument is probably difficult to bear out data wise that he won because of an ideological difference versus all these campaign that frankly political differences that you and I both know and can point to.
HAYES: Although, you know exactly why Hillary Clinton lost the Midwest.
FLORES: Because people voted for Barack Obama twice chose to vote for Donald Trump?
HAYES: It turns out when there`s 80,000 votes across four states there`s lots of reasons why someone might have won or lost.
Robert Reich, and Sara Isker Flores, thanks for your time tonight.
REICH: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: A Republican member of the electoral college just announced he will not case his vote for Donald Trump. There`s an effort to get more electors others follow suit.
Texas elector Christopher Suprin made his case today in a New York Times op-ed today. Pretty interesting document.
"The election of the next president is not yet a done deal. Electors of conscious can still do the right thing for the good of the country. I believe electors should unify behind a Republican alternative, an honorable and qualified man or woman such as Governor John Kasich of Ohio."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRISTOPHER SUPRIN, TEXAS ELECTOR: Objectively, I can look at the emoluments clause and say, look, Mr. Trump, you were making sales calls when you conduct your foreign policy, that is expressly forbidden in the constitution. That is a danger to our republic and the electoral college is here to do exactly what I think I`m doing, which is standing up and saying no.
HAYES: As it stands, when the 538 members of the electoral college -- of course that named after the website 538 -- cast their votes on December 39 (sic), Suprin is the only Republican who says he will not cast his vote for Trump.
But there`s a movement led by Democratic electors to try and convince others to follow suit, to do what Suprin is doing.
They refer to themselves as Hamilton Electors, a nod to Alexander Hamilton`s vision for the college as a kind of check on populist demogoguery.
Their primary goal is persuade at least 37 Republicans to not vote for Trump and have electors coalesce around an alternative, in their view, more moderate Republicans such as Governor John Kasich instead.
But today, Kasich released a statement saying, in part, I am not a candidate for president. Ask that electors not vote for me when they gather later this month.
And one of the men who has promised to give legal representation to anyone that breaks their pledge joins me now. He`s Lawrence Lessig, creators of the Electors Trust Project who also ran as a Democratic presidential candidate.
There are laws in these states, I think 30 states, 29 states, if I`m not mistaken, to bind electors for exactly this reason. No one gets in there and does mischief. You vote for someone you think you`re going to get that person.
There are some now talking about breaking that. And you are say they should do that. Aren`t you telling them to break the law?
LAWRENCE LESSIG, FOUNDER, THE ELECTORS TRUST: Well, there`s a law called the constitution that came first, and it`s the constitution that creates these things called electors. They are federal offices. And these state laws that purport to restrict what these federal electors can do are just not constitutional. The Supreme Court has addressed this in a case called Ray versus Blair. The court made it very clear, states could not legally compel electors to vote one way or the other.
All they can do is morally compel. And so that`s what they`ve done. They said you pledge you were going to vote for one side or the other.
And the question now is whether these electors believe they have a stronger moral obligation to vote in a different way.
HAYES: So here`s the -- so two of these people are in Colorado. The Colorado secretary of state withering statement today basically said instead of honoring the will of the Coloradans who voted for them, these two faithless electors seek to conspire with electors from other states to elect a president who did not receive a single vote in November, being John Kasich. The court should reject this illegal conspiracy. This is not a noble effort to fight some unjust or unconstitutional law. This is an arrogant attempt to elevate their personal desires over the entire will of the people of Colorado.
LESSIG: Yeah, so obviously what happened today in Colorado was a lawsuit was filed to make it clear what I thought the law was already clear about, that these federal electors were free to exercise their judgment.
HAYES: So, you are saying constitutionally they are free. Like the state law can say whatever it wants, the constitution supersedes and the constitution says you can vote for whoever you want.
LESSIG: Right. But the question is what should they do? What`s their moral obligation?
Now, I think it`s hard to say that if you`re an elector and you`re pledged to one candidate but you are going to vote for another one because you like that one better, that`s actually a moral thing to do. I think breaking your pledge. But if you believe, like some of these guys do, that the emoluments clause is being violated by Donald Trump, there`s a constitutional reason why they would not be supporting Donald Trump.
And all we`re trying to do in the Elector`s Trust is give them legal advice. And more importantly, we`re giving them an opportunity confidentially to signal that they might be interested in doing this so that they can learn whether there are enough people who are also willing to do this.
HAYES: So they can come to you and find out this sort of like GoFundMe, right? Like you pledge and only if it gets over the certain actual amount you actually have to pick it.
LESSIG: Well, they`re not going to come to me, but they`re going to get a lawyer who is promising confidentiality. I`ll never know their names. Nobody will know their names until they actually vote.
HAYES: Let me ask you, you and I have known each other a long time. We are friends. I admire you tremendously. I have to say there`s some part of me that says I look at what happened over the last 18 months this country and we have watch all these norms unraveling. There`s norms unraveling before Donald Trump in some ways laid the path to Donald Trump.
And he`s the sort of expert right of blowing up these norms. You can`t do that. Sure, I can. This seems like is one of those things where it`s like you can`t do that, right, like we kind of know what the rules of the game are. You can say what you want about the intent of the constitution.
But this is the way it works. The states decide how they apportion their electors, then that person becomes president.
Don`t you run the risk of sort of further tugging at what`s left of what`s binding us all together in this liberal democracy, which we currently inhabit for who knows how long if you start doing something like this.
LESSIG: Well, you know, the question is how are you going to talk about the norms. Like one norm is the person who gets the most votes becomes president, that happened all but two times. The last time it happened was 2000, the time before that was 1888.
Now these two exceptions to a very strong norm I think should lead people to say, well, which of the norms should we be embracing? And in this context when the electoral college follows the winner take all rules, which are again imposed by the states, that is what`s creating this gap between what the people have said and what the electoral college produces.
And so, one strong norm they could embrace is the idea -- one person, one vote. And what one person, one vote should mean is that I should be voting in a way that`s upholding the democratic norm.
So, you`re right, we haven`t had examples of this in the past, but this is like a circuit breaker and it doesn`t go off.
But when it goes off because there`s a reason for it to go off, I think we have to look at the reasons for it. And I think what we`re seeing among Republican electors at least, is deep concern that they`re making a fundamental mistake.
HAYES: I have to say I was pretty amazed to read that in The Times today. And we`ve already seen one resign. So, it will be interesting to see if others come forward.
Lawrence Lessig, always a pleasure.
LESSIG: Great to see you.
HAYES: All right, up next, the fake news effect. New scientific data shows a massive majority of people from across the political spectrum believed it when they read headlines like Denzel Washington endorses Donald Trump, which, yeah, sure, why not? Alarming new numbers ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: There`s been a lot of talk lately about fake news and how big its reach is but there`s been very little data on the subject. So, Buzzfeed news did something novel. They partnered with Ipsos Public affairs and conducted a poll, the first large scale survey into the fake news phenomenon. We are bringing this exclusive Buzzfeed News survey with Ipsos as the story goes live.
Most Americans who see fake news believe it, new survey says. Respondents were shown a random selection of six headlines, three true and three false. 75 percent of the time they thought fake headlines were somewhat or very accurate. By comparison they considered 83 percent of real headlines to be accurate. That`s just the tip of the iceberg on this new data.
Joining me now to flesh out the numbers, co-author of that piece, Craig Silverman, media editor at Buzzfeed news and someone who sort of pioneered the beat on this and wrote one of the greatest stories of the campaign cycle about the town in Macedonia that produces fake news or a lot of fake news.
Craig, what did you learn from this survey?
CRAIG SILVERMAN, BUZZFEED: Well, one of the key things we learned is an answer I think to one of the key questions around fake news in the election was when people encounter it, do they actually believe it? And I was surprised by a 75 percent number of people believing those headlines.
The other thing that really stood out to me is we did split the numbers between people who said they voted for Trump and people who said they voted for Clinton. And surprisingly more than half the people who voted for Clinton also believed a lot of these fake headlines. And that was surprising because a lot of the headlines that were fake were actually pro-Trump or anti-Clinton.
HAYES: Yeah, see that`s what I found fascinating. So, we`re show this one example. Could we show that again, the FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apparent murder/suicide.
If that happened, that would be a very big deal, OK? That was just entirely fake story. In fact, we know the person that wrote it who himself voted for Clinton and said he just made it up.
People believed that when they saw it.
SILVERMAN: They did. And you know, to the point about the Clinton supporters, one of the things that`s been established by research over a long period of time is that people are more likely to believe information that aligns with their beliefs or interests.
So, you might expect Trump supporters to maybe fall for that headline, and fall for that story. But the fact that Clinton supporters also believed it to a surprising degree is something that goes a little bit against that assumption. And I wonder what it says about sort of the perceptions of Clinton for the people who even voted for her.
HAYES: OK, here`s something I thought was really important. Asking this question of what have you seen, right. So, there`s this question of what`s the reach of this. Mark Zuckerberg trying to make this point that it`s 2 percent of the stuff that`s content that`s floating around newsfeed.
So, you guys go out and you say to people, have you seen this fake article, right, and you get high teens to low 20s percent which is in the rage of awareness have you seen a real article, you know, like the, whatever the sort of controls are, meaning that people are seeing fake articles and real articles at roughly the same rate.
SILVERMAN: Yeah, the spread between the kind of exposure to the fake news headlines and exposure to the real ones was probably a bit tighter than I would have expected. I mean, overall people did believe the real ones to be more accurate. People did see the real ones more.
But the fact that the gap is not bigger is a really surprising and disconcerting thing. I mean, fake news is getting out there. People are seeing it. And they are believing it. And those are, I think, some of the key questions people had around this discussion and we`ve given some pretty good data on that.
HAYES: You know, there`s also this perception of accuracy of fake headlines, but I think what`s so key about all this is no one is actually reading these articles. It`s literally just headlines that are flowing through the people`s newsfeeds. And the perceptions there are 70, 80 percent range, nearly as high as perceptions for the accuracy for real headlines, which is in the 80 to 90 percent range.
And what I think is going on here and I`m curious to hear what you think is, there`s a format to a headline that we have just come to associate with someone not making something up. And so I remember when there were these sort of versions of kind of satire sites like Daily Current that were sort of pioneers in this where they would do a headline, it wasn`t satire, but it was also just not true and you would believe it because you thought well, I know that that`s a format that I recognize with something that`s generally factual and now that`s just being entirely abused.
SILVERMAN: 100 percent.
I mean, the people who are running the sites that publish 100 percent fake stuff, they watch what people at real news sites are doing. They pay very close attention to which headlines are trending on Facebook and they move towards that and they invent stories that fit within the realm of things that are going on but have that extra tweak to it and that present as real.
As you said, you know, people are seeing these headlines go by on a Facebook newsfeed where the real ones and the fake ones in some ways present as the same kind of thing. A lot of the context is taken out of it.
And I think that is a factor in people believing them.
HAYES: All right, Craig Silverman who has been doing really great work on all this at Buzzfeed. Thank you. Appreciate it.
SILVERMAN: Thank you.
HAYES: Before we go, programming announcement. You`re going to like this one. This Monday I`m going on the road with Senator Bernie Sanders for a special town hall event in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We`re going to talk frankly and openly with workers, voters and residents there and see if we can`t get a better idea of exactly how Donald Trump managed to turn that state and that county red for the first time, the state for the first time since Ronald Reagan.