Transcript of the original podcast, produced by This American Life
Ira Glass
It’s This American Life. I’m Ira Glass. Today’s program, “Anything Can Be Anything.” In this very conspiracy-minded moment in our country, where even the President of the United States is spreading conspiracy theories, like, all the time, we have stories of people who see the dots and can’t help but connect the dots and then have to figure out what to do with their conclusions. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two– The Red Menace Hits the Crimson Tide.
So now, we turn to a guy who is upset about the conspiracies to tamper with the US elections in 2016, the stuff the Russians did. He was outraged about that. But he had a strange way of dealing with it. He decided, I’m going to try that myself in a big political race in 2017 and one of the reddest states in the country, Alabama. Ben Calhoun tells us what happened.
Ben Calhoun
I met up with Matt Osborne outside his parents’ house in a place called Florence, Alabama. It’s this beautiful little city in the northern part of the state.
Matt Osborne
Now, this street that my folks live on–
Ben Calhoun
It was on this street, Matt told me, 2017, he steps out of his parents’ house. He looked one way, looked the other. Whoa.
Matt Osborne
Every house up the street to the corner had a Doug Jones sign.
Ben Calhoun
At the time, remember, Doug Jones was a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Alabama. Matt was seeing Jones lawn signs up and down his parents’ street, where usually, Matt says, people have signs for Republicans.
Matt Osborne
Folks who would ordinarily have been attracted to voting for a conservative, who were willing to vote for Doug Jones, are enthusiastic about voting for Doug Jones. And that told me it was possible for him to win.
Ben Calhoun
Were you– were you expecting that at all?
Matt Osborne
I was floored by it, to be quite frank. I had never seen anything like that for a Democrat, not since I was a kid, not since George Wallace’s last run for governor.
Ben Calhoun
If you’re a Democrat, you know you’re in trouble when the last big success story you can remember is the man who said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But so back to all these Jones lawn signs. Matt was excited, because Matt was a bitter and disaffected Democrat in one of the reddest parts of one of the reddest states.
2016 sent a lot of Democrats over the edge, of course. And Matt was among them. Matt obviously knew Trump would win Alabama. But he’d gotten pretty obsessed with the dirty tricks he saw online during that election.
In the 2000s, he’d started writing about shady political tactics he’d spotted on the internet. He wrote about that for sites like Huff Post and Crooks and Liars. Matt actually has an investigator’s background– five years in radio intelligence with the army, after that, a few years as a private eye.
Matt was onto some stuff kind of early. Like, he was talking about Twitter bots as early as 2010, writing about Cambridge Analytica two years before most of us had heard of it. So Matt was paying close attention in the 2016 election when he started seeing what he thought were shifty tactics being deployed to help Donald Trump– accounts that look fake on Twitter and Facebook, doing things like stoking divisions between Sanders Democrats and Clinton Democrats.
Ben Calhoun
And like, how did you see that?
Matt Osborne
You know, if you get into a rabid debate with somebody who’s just, you know, Bernie, Bernie, I’ll never vote for Hillary, you know, start looking at their profile. And you say, that– that doesn’t look right.
Ben Calhoun
This Twitter handle doesn’t look right, because it’s got 12 random numbers in it. So it seems like a computer-generated account. Or this person looks weird, because they’ve tweeted 1,000 times, but they haven’t put up a profile picture. That was a lot of it. Who is this weird profile? Who are the administrators of this suspicious Facebook page?
Matt Osborne
Who are the admins of this mysterious page that’s got all this anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda? Click on the Admin. So I’m looking at a profile now that is striking me right away as fake. All right, it’s got 25 friends, who appear to be real people. And none of them are related to each other.
Ben Calhoun
When you were having that experience, what was the feeling that you had? Like, outrage, anger? Was it irritation? Was it worry?
Matt Osborne
Deep foreboding. Deep foreboding, deep foreboding. And the closer we got to the election, the more I felt like something was wrong.
Ben Calhoun
We’ve all heard about what was wrong now. It’s confirmed– the Russian meddling and propaganda, phony accounts designed to sow divisions among Americans and demoralize voters. Matt had had it. For him, from what I can tell, 2016 was like a tipping point of bitterness.
Matt’s bitterness had been piling up for years. Like, he remembers kids in grade school talking about how they were for the Confederacy, which Matt could not understand.
Matt Osborne
And I’ll never forget the kid next to me who was talking the most about it. When I saw him again, when I got out of the Army in 1999, and I came home, I ran into him at Walmart. And in the first 60 seconds of our conversation, he was telling me how much he hated immigrants. So I guess maybe part of my problem is that my values have always contradicted the place where I was.
Ben Calhoun
So imagine Matt after he left the Army with an injury. He’s on partial disability, in chronic pain, searching for direction, spending a lot of time reading the internet and writing about Democratic politics. He’s like a blue dot in a red ocean.
Matt describes the last 10 years of his life as him being “radicalized.” That was his word. And that is where Matt’s head was when Alabama’s 2017 Senate election suddenly burst into the center ring of American politics.
Reporter 1
We begin tonight with the Alabama Senate race, where–
Ben Calhoun
Quick refresher. You’ll probably remember this. This was a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, who’d left to be attorney general. On one side, the Democrat, Doug Jones, an uncle-ish looking former prosecutor, and his opponent, Republican Roy Moore, a Bible-quoting former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
The race was not supposed to be competitive, until it was. Remember, nine women came forward to accuse Roy Moore of a combination of sexual misconduct and molestation for things he allegedly did when they were young, some underage, as young as 14. Moore denied those allegations. But there was lots of reporting, including accounts of how Moore was allegedly such a creep, he got banned from the local mall.
It wasn’t enough to knock Moore out of contention, though. Alabama is just so red that people were saying things like this on conservative talk radio in Birmingham.
Reporter 2
What we’re getting is, Alabamians would vote for a pedophile over a liberal Democrat.
Man
In this circumstance, yes.
Reporter 2
OK. You’re just saying it flat out, then.
Man
Yep, absolutely.
Ben Calhoun
It got uglier and uglier. As the allegations against Moore piled up, Breitbart dispatched two reporters with the mission of discrediting the women making the allegations. It turned into a morass of character attacks and aspersions, including fake news stories targeting Moore’s accusers.
And a disaffected, angry Matt Osborne, still stewing over 2016, wanted in super badly, which is how Matt went from despising the sleazy online tactics of 2016, utterly opposing them, to using them for his side. And the moment that tipped him from one side to the other– it happened on the phone. September– this was two months before the election– Matt was talking to a DC political operative he knows. The plan was just, let’s brainstorm a bunch of ideas, anything to help Doug Jones.
Matt Osborne
We are talking on the phone. And it’s sort of a blue sky discussion.
Ben Calhoun
So the two of them start throwing stuff out, from regular ideas to pretty far-out ideas, the kind that start with, what if?
Matt Osborne
What if, on election day, you had events in neighboring states that might draw some people from Alabama? Like, you could advertise heavily in Alabama to draw potential Roy Moore voters out of the state on election day.
Ben Calhoun
So those are the kind of ideas that are getting kicked around.
Matt Osborne
Right. These are just crazy ideas getting kicked around.
Ben Calhoun
And then, suddenly, Matt says, he’s throwing out an idea that he hadn’t even considered before the moment it was coming out of his mouth. He tells the person on the phone, Alabama Republicans, like both national parties, they’re split, right? Internally divided.
You’ve got a more centrist wing. And you’ve got a more radical wing. So what if, Matt hypothesized, what if we could pose as Republicans online with fake identities, and we could do things to aggravate that divide, make Alabama Republicans feel icky about each other, and try to suppress Republican votes?
In other words, Matt proposed a conspiracy– the kind of conspiracy Russians are accused of running in 2016, right? Put out misinformation and disinformation under phony identities to stoke divisions among your opponents. You’ve probably heard of these referred to as false flag operations.
Matt Osborne
And that’s the one that people want to know about. Like, why don’t you write that up and share it with me? So I wrote a little paper.
Ben Calhoun
Matt then transformed his rough idea into a detailed plan. He drafted a memo, one this operative could take to Democratic donors to see if anyone might fund it. Matt’s idea to divide Alabama Republicans was to divide the religious right Republicans from the more moderate Republicans.
Roy Moore had always been closely tied to the extra-religious, conservative wing of his party. In fact, his political operation depended heavily on Alabama’s extensive network of Baptist pastors.
Matt Osborne
That pastor network is the backbone of his get-out-the-vote machine. On Wednesday nights, Sundays, that’s when the Roy Moore pastors push their flock to go vote for Roy Moore. That’s how it works down here.
Ben Calhoun
Baptists, as Matt wrote, are the largest denomination in the state, over 40% of the population. But–
Matt Osborne
Although Baptists are the largest single denomination in Alabama, they are by no means a majority, all right? So what they are is a very vocal minority.
Ben Calhoun
And, Matt wrote in his memo, the wedge issue to split the Baptists from the more moderate Republicans– prohibition. I know. You’re like, prohibition? Against alcohol? Didn’t we settle that like 100 years ago?
But hang on, because Alabama actually has a long history of restrictive alcohol laws. Like, of the 30 counties that make up the northern half of Alabama, 19 counties are dry. Roy Moore’s Baptist allies have been all, heck yeah, keep it that way. Get behind me, Satan, to which mainstream Republicans have responded, um, no. Matt says, suburban and business-wing-type Republicans have often favored looser alcohol laws.
Matt Osborne
The business wing of the Republican Party in Alabama was never enthusiastic about Roy Moore in the first place, all right? If you can get the sort of business-wing Republicans, if you can get the suburban Republican who votes Republican, but he likes to drink his beer on Saturdays while he’s watching the football game– if you can get him to identify Roy Moore with prohibition and moralistic screed-type activity, then they will be less likely to vote for him.
What we want is for people to say, gosh, Roy Moore is nuts. Roy Moore’s followers are nuts, you know? These people who are in my party– you know, I share a party with them, but they’re nuts.
Ben Calhoun
There’s one more thing to just feel a little less excited about.
Matt Osborne
Exactly.
Ben Calhoun
And exactly what the Russians purportedly did to Democrats in 2016– stoke their internal divisions to make them feel less motivated. Matt’s version of that was to create fake groups on social media. One would be named The Southern Caller. The other, Dry Alabama. They’d act like prohibitionist cultural conservatives, enthusiastic about Roy Moore, and hope that they could bum out mainstream Republicans.
Matt Osborne
You can mirror the activity of 2016 in this sense. All the Russian activity, you can mirror it if you get Republicans arguing with each other. The more they argue with each other, and the more Republicans see other Republicans arguing with each other, the less likely they are to vote.
Ben Calhoun
When you pitched the idea of Dry Alabama, was there any part of you that had any apprehensions about sort of deploying that kind of strategy?
Matt Osborne
You know, by that time, I had already made up my mind. Like, I’m ready to pull out all the stops. I had made up my mind already that I was willing to create content under a false flag, if you will. I was willing to trick Republicans into not voting. That was fine with me.
Ben Calhoun
Matt says, when he sent off his memo, he wasn’t sure if people would want to fund his plan. He was, after all, in the party that had been waving around Michelle Obama’s slogan– when they go low, we go high– and using that to attack Republicans. And for a while, Matt heard nothing– for weeks– so long that he figured no one wanted to fund his dirty tricks.
Matt Osborne
I was sitting in my living room. What was I watching? I don’t remember. I was watching TV. And my phone rang. And I’m told, hey, we got money.
Ben Calhoun
It was the Democratic operative in DC. “We got money” meant some donors had decided to fund Matt’s proposal. Matt’s reaction?
Matt Osborne
Bam.
Ben Calhoun
No kidding. This is for real?
Matt Osborne
Oh, wow. This is real. This is– this is happening. OK, cool.
Ben Calhoun
The donors put up $100,000. Part of that would pay for a team of people to create these fake conservative groups. The rest of the money, most of it, would pay for ads on Facebook to shove what they made into the social media feeds of Alabama Republicans.
At this point, there were only 17 days left before the election. So they had to go fast. Work started immediately– bogus email addresses, fake logos. The team doing this, I should say– sort of fascinatingly tiny– just two people in DC and then Matt in Alabama.
One of the people in DC, Matt says, was sort of doing oversight, not even super involved. The other person in DC created tweets and memes. Matt did the Facebook posts and the videos.
The whole group was so small. It kind of makes you realize, you don’t need a building full of people to do this kind of thing. It can be a conspiracy of just two or three.
Matt, as an Alabama native, was kind of the person who the group turned to make the con seem authentic. Hey, Matt, how would people say this in Alabama? How would they say that?
Matt Osborne
Hey, Matt, how do you spell “barbecue” in Alabama? What– we want to come across as authentic. I said, BBQ, or spell it out, barbecue with a C, right? Alabamian instead of Alabaman, that sort of thing.
Ben Calhoun
There were some things that were deemed too much, even by dirty tactic standards. Matt pointed out that something that would inevitably get a ton of engagement would be an AR-15 giveaway. The funder, it turned out, was not OK with a gun giveaway, real or fake. But even if they weren’t going to give away an AR-15, there was a lot of room for imagination. Like, Matt recruited a woman he knew.
Matt Osborne
I will just– for our purposes today, I will call her Sharon.
Ben Calhoun
Matt hired Sharon to do a voiceover on a video that he made for Dry Alabama.
Matt Osborne
She’s wonderful. She’s as Alabama as they come. She has the perfect accent, right? The kind of middle Alabama, kind of rapid-clip accent with all the right vowel inflections.
Sharon
So at the next tailgate party, instead of drinking and succumbing to evil temptation, try thing amazing, Bama-style, alcohol-free cocktail. Try this moral take on a sinful beverage, a righteous mint julep. Place mint leaves in an old-fashioned glass. Pour in lemon juice and sugar. And mix with a spoon until the sugar’s completely dissolved.
Ben Calhoun
This video, just to say, does have the genuine lo-fi feel of those try-this-recipe videos that you see online all the time.
Sharon
Fill the cup with ice and pour sparkling water over the top. Garnish with a sprig of mint. And you’ve got some smooth as fine cotton. Pledge your support for a Dry Alabama today. And join our crusade for a Dry Alabama.
Ben Calhoun
At one point, talking about all this, Matt said, some of this feels new. But in his mind, it’s actually not, really. If you remember, Matt did radio intelligence in the Army.
He told me, one tactic they teach you is something called spoofing. You find the enemy’s radio frequency. And then you mimic the voice of the people on it. And you give out bad information.
Then, he read a tweet from Dry Alabama. “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” That’s from First Peter, Matt told me.
Reporter 3
Doug Jones comes from behind. And now, CNN projects, he will be the next Senator– first time in 25 years that a Democrat–
Ben Calhoun
More than 1.3 million people voted in the election. Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore by just 22,000 votes. Altogether, $51 million was spent on the race, which unleashed a hurricane of TV ads, armies of canvassers, meaning it’s just impossible to gauge what effect Matt’s thing had.
Matt’s team considered the project a success, though. On a wrap-up call, he was told, with just $100,000, the team’s content was seen 4.6 million times, their videos watched hundreds of thousands of times. Everybody was happy with those numbers. But people also felt like the whole thing was a success in the sense that they’d pulled off the fakery without getting caught. That was part of what they were testing.
I’m just going to confess here that I’m somebody who’s troubled by the culture of our politics right now. I believe people should feel a societal pressure to win with ideas and inspiration and that playing dirty should be looked down on, because playing dirty, I think, encourages suspicion and cynicism. And that’s bad for everybody.
Maybe because of that, when I went to see Matt, I half thought that because he spent so much time outraged about this kind of deceptive and scuzzy politics, that maybe, after having some time to think it over, he’d end up with some kind of buyer’s remorse. Like, I drank so much. What did I say?
Ben Calhoun
Doesn’t it feel like, especially in– you know, during the presidency of Donald Trump, that the norms are only the norms if most people adhere to them, you know? Like–
Matt Osborne
Well, what is the norm here? The norm here is that Democrats are supposed to go high and get kicked in the knees. That’s the norm. The norm is that Republicans play dirty and win.
Is that the norm that we’re supposed to preserve? Because if that’s the norm that we’re supposed to preserve, let that norm die, I say. Burn it down. Burn it to the ground.
Ben Calhoun
So the core of what I hear you saying is that you don’t think that it’s something that you can combat by example and just say, we’re going to refuse to win that way.
Matt Osborne
Oh, look at me. I have clean hands and clean clothes, and I’m standing above you in a shining light, and I don’t have any power. I can’t actually make any changes. But don’t I look good? And isn’t that the important thing?
[LAUGHS]
Ben Calhoun
It sounds so harsh when you put it that way.
Matt Osborne
[LAUGHS]
Ben Calhoun
I’m not about to referee Matt’s idea that Republicans play dirtier. What I do think is important is whether these tactics will continue to spread. Over the last few months, there’s been excellent reporting about a number of digital strategies tried out by Democrats in this Alabama race in addition to Matt’s.
In one, Democrats created fake Russian bots to make it look like Russians were helping Roy Moore. In another, a company microtargeted voters on social media, sent them messages it claims drove up Democratic turnout by 4% and drove down Republican turnout by over 2%. Senator Doug Jones, I should say, has said he disapproves, knew nothing about this stuff. He’s called for an investigation.
From talking to Democratic fundraisers, I can tell you for sure, there’s plenty of donors who don’t want any part of this kind of thing. But there’s definitely a portion, I hear, who say, yeah, it’s time. They’re ready to throw money at stuff like this.
Matt says, he thinks, when it comes to these kind of dirty tactics, the situation is going to have to get worse before it gets better, because in our gridlocked system, you won’t get regulations against this stuff until both parties are fed up with it, which, that sounds like a real bummer to me. But I have to admit, there’s a logic to that.
For his part, Matt’s not going to stop, at least if someone will pay for him to keep doing things like this. If you want to see the memo that led to his misinformation campaign, you can go read it yourself these days. Matt’s posted it on his LinkedIn profile. He wants to get hired to do more stuff just like this.
Ira Glass
Ben Calhoun is one of the producers of our show.