"We were pretty normal guys who ended up in an information war": Jay McKenzie and "Did Nothing Wrong"
We sit down with Tennessee's finest, a man who built a successful podcast / newsletter without losing his mind to wave after wave of disinfo.
Jay McKenzie and Griff Sombke are the creators of Did Nothing Wrong, a podcast and a newsletter all about “politics at the intersection of extremists, propaganda and Cold War 2.0”; their goal, “cutting through the noise to help you make sense of a chaotic information space”.
Jay took some time off his busy schedule to tell me how they do this. ALL of this.
Enjoy.
You already shared your personal origin story on the newsletter: sadly it's a common one. To some degree, watching a loved one go down the disinformation rabbit hole has become a sinister rite of passage after 2008. I'd like to know what gave you the extra push necessary to start your own project after helping out journalists and researchers for several years.
In truth, I had a freelance research job going where I was essentially paid a stipend to keep contributing as I’d been doing for years and work on some select projects related to disinfo, extremism and related funding. I wasn’t making a lot, but it was something to keep me going. Then I lost that job rather suddenly. So, I found myself at a bit of a crossroads with the next step. I could look for another similar job in research or media monitoring, or I could start my own thing. The other possibility was to just focus entirely on my kids and being a stay-at-home dad who maybe writes some words occasionally that maybe someday someone reads.
I knew Griff was willing to do this with me. We talked about it on and off over the years. My hesitation was in becoming “just another podcast,” which maybe could be successful but doesn’t really do much. I don’t think we’re doing that with Did Nothing Wrong but making it sustainable financially remains a question. I love what I’m doing and want to keep doing it, but I have to be able to pay the bills. I hope we can get there. We’re trying! We’ll keep trying as long as we can.
I never addressed this, but my own interest in “chaotic information spaces” comes from a (mercifully short) season (early 2020) where I was circling the drain of anti-establishment conspiratorial thinking, because of a terrible media diet on top of residual grief over private matters. It was crushing for about a day, the realization I could be as gullible as anyone else, but moving on from it was surprisingly invigorating. What kind of positive reinforcement can be offered to someone who wants to do better?
There’s a way back for almost anyone, if they’re sincere and want to do better. If you’re a Groyper or a Proud Boy or someone who’s said or done some really extreme things, the way back is a lot harder and some people are probably never going to believe you or be willing to forgive you; but for the average person, I would remember a couple points. The first is that people forget. They move on. They quit thinking about you and caring about you if enough time passes. The internet is a permanent record, but there are also so many permanent records to keep up with and people have the memory of a goldfish. You can beat yourself up for all the awful things you’ve done, or you try to move on and be a positive force in the world.
The other point is that most people will forgive you, if you mean it. Most people want to support good work by good people, and they’ll forgive you if you own your mistakes. Yeah, you might get dunked on, and it won’t feel great. But you can either be on the side with a conscience, or the side without one. I believe people who say “there are more of us than there are of them.” That’s true. Most people aren’t red pilled and QAnon dog whistlers or violent extremists. Most people are just people. However, going down the far-right influencer beat is the easy way to make a living and make a name for yourself. Those of us paying attention understand the difference between grifters and people trying to make the world better. Why? Because making a difference is a lot harder work and (save for a select few) a much less lucrative career path.
Show people you want to do the right thing. You want to help. Keep doing that day in and day out. People will notice. They will appreciate what you’re doing.
I just interviewed literary author Naomi Kanakia and we did speak about the latent incentives for people to join the extremist Voltron. If you say outlandish stuff, and you say it often, you're bound to find an audience. See: the pundit who embraces bigotry, the gamer who rants about "forced diversity", but we know we've had several people on the Left who pushed nonsense talking points. How much of this has been a concern in your work building Did Nothing Wrong? You've been very careful and even-keeled in your reporting…
One of the biggest issues I see from the left is an unawareness of when they’re helping, and when they think they’re helping but really just giving the far-right narratives that help their case. There are two types of unhelpful people. The first is the “post-left” world of Glenn Greenwalds and Jimmy Dores who are perfectly fine with regurgitating right-wing talking points and being a token lefty who Don Jr. can quote tweet as evidence of “this Biden thing is so crazy even the left is criticizing it.” You can’t really do much about this faction of “the left” because the grift is good, and as long as it’s good, they’re going to keep going.
Outside of this circle, there are people who are some form of genuine Democrat or leftist. I think most of these people essentially want the world to be a better place. They want to help people, but they don’t always know how. We may disagree about the specifics. That’s okay. That’s normal. However, because of our very much walled off information silos between the right and the left, these people (the “normies”) don’t necessarily know what narratives are helpful to the other side, so they don’t consider the consequences of what they’re saying necessarily. What we try to do is educate people and in some ways, yes, temper their expectations. The more extreme left-wing stances are going to seized upon by the right and turned into “look at the crazy left” narratives for their audience. Don’t help them do this. Instead, find the center or middle ground position. Those policies may not get you everything you want, but they’re also much more likely to lead to change. Do you want to be a left-wing influencer who pushes ideas that have no hope of becoming law, or do you want to push liberal causes that could one day get mainstream support? Recognize the difference and act based on what you want to see in the world.
Instead of abolish the police or defund the police, advocate for reforming the police. Instead of ending the 2ndAmendment, call for Biden’s plan which calls for banning assault style weapons and high capacity magazines. Don’t call for open borders. Call for changes or reforms to immigration. Realize that the people standing in your way want you to take the most extreme opposition to them because it essentially means both sides are arguing over policies that are never going to be passed by Congress anyway.
One of the elements I admire most in the Did Nothing Wrong Universe is the Permanent Record section. Certain purveyors of hate thrive on confusing their audience, either claiming “it's just a joke” or denying they ever said what they said, so a calm, precise “permanent record” on people like Jack Posobiec is a great resource to put out there. How hard are those episodes to research and produce, compared to your news round-ups?
It's actually not that hard because most of the information is already stored in my brain somewhere, laying dormant. These horrible people have been a feature of our lives in one or another for the last six years, for better or (really) for worse. So, a ton of work has already gone into this stuff. We’ve read their posts. We’ve listened to their shows and speeches over the years. We’ve saved quite a bit of that material. I’ve shared it with journalists or activists when it made sense to do so, but at least with the first few of these we have planned, a lot of that work that goes into it has already been done. It’s really just putting the pieces together and building that out into a coherent narrative. I imagine as we do more of these, it’s going to require more fresh research and work, but that’s okay. If you want to be an expert in any field, you have to do the work, and reading and listening to hateful, horrible content is what we signed up for. That’s how you figure out how to beat it.
Thinking about the work you guys do, the closest comparison would be a podcast like Conspirituality. A common thread is age: these shows are created and managed by grown-ups, the atmosphere is less joke-y, never mean spirited for the sake of it, but also, to me, the secret ingredient is the immense benefit of having experienced different lives outside the content creation hamster wheel. ... Am I off base here ?
I think that description lines up well with who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish here. There are a lot of podcasts out there. Some are helpful, some aren’t. There’s more than one way to approach this and using humor is a perfectly good way to go about it. I think the QAnon Anonymous guys figured out how to have fun with really dark subject matter and created a show that’s really informative and helpful. It’s doable! But obviously it’s not easy.
I don’t know what makes us approach it the way we do. We were pretty normal guys who ended up in an information war. We made some friends and enemies along the way, sometimes deliberately and other times I couldn’t even tell you why. It all sort of happened to us, and we dealt with it the best way we could. We’ve seen a lot of people come and go on our Twitter feeds over the years. Some people can’t take the stress of living in the trenches day in and day out, and they bail. Somewhere along the way, we decided the most important thing is to survive intact and help others survive it intact. We have this sense that yes, the world is absolutely insane sometimes. You’re not crazy for thinking it’s crazy out there, and there’s not a lot we can do about it! But also, we can do some things. We can help a little. We can educate people. We can work towards a better future. We can make a difference, but you have to stay in the fight with your faculties intact. We take it one day at a time without any of the secret sauce that promises Q or Bob Mueller or whomever is going to swoop down and save us all. They’re not coming. It’s just us.
Reporting on disinformation feels like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes over and over. How do you guys preserve the sanity and the motivation necessary to keep doing this important work?
We got outside and touch grass. I have to keep the world in perspective. We absolutely do live in a 24/7 doomscrolling society trapped in late stage capitalism with so many seemingly unfixable problems, but really, on a personal level, we live pretty comfortable and secure lives compared to other countries in the world. That’s especially true from a historical perspective, and I’m a nerd who reads history books for fun. The enemy army isn’t outside the gates preparing to sack the city, you know? Of course we do face huge problems today. There is so much unnecessary suffering in the world, but there also always has been. That’s the history of humans on planet earth. The internet makes everything seem worse all the time. Knowing that you’re being manipulated by algorithms and ad campaigns and bad actors doesn’t make the worry and concern go away, but it does help me find a more reasonable center of gravity.
The world can get you down if you let it. Tragedy can strike at any moment. Your mind is a fragile thing and there’s always a chance you get sucked into a vortex of crazy at some point, but if you put the phone away, hug the people you care about and get some sunlight from time to time, you might remember that for the most part, we all have it pretty good—even if we have to fight an information war to keep it that way.
Once again, Jay has been generous with his time / Jay and Griff have built a great thing / you should listen to them both / I do.
So, action:
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This is Jay on Twitter, and this is the show on Twitter.
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