In Episode 7 of Series 7 of The Rights Track, Todd is joined by Tom Nichols, Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and Contributing Writer at The Atlantic. Tom specialises in international security affairs including U.S. - Russia relations, nuclear strategy, and NATO issues. His recent book – Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy is an account of the spread of illiberal and anti-democratic sentiment throughout our culture. Transcript Todd Landman 00:00 Welcome to The Rights Track podcast, which gets the hard facts about the human rights challenges facing us today. In series seven, we're discussing human rights in a digital world. I'm Todd Landman, in this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Tom Nichols. Tom is Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College and contributing writer at The Atlantic. He specialises in international security affairs, including US Russia relations, nuclear strategy, and NATO issues. He recently authored a book - Our Own Worst Enemy; The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy. It's an engaging account of the spread of illiberal and anti-democratic sentiment throughout our culture. So today, we're asking him who's responsible for this, and what we should do about it. So Tom, it's fantastic to have you on this episode of The Rights Track. So welcome. Tom Nichols 00:51 Thank you. Thanks for having me. Todd Landman 00:53 So I have a rather unusual question to enter into this conversation with you and it involves Indian food, because in your book, you talk about the idea that you're not a big fan of Indian food. But tell me a little bit of the story. What happened when you just expressed this view that you know what, I don't like Indian food? Tom Nichols 01:10 Well, I didn't just express that I didn't like Indian food, I added this kind of snarky comment, because it was on Twitter, of course, and someone had said, post your worst food takes here. And of course, people said things like, well, I hate mayonnaise, and doughnuts are bad, and so on. But I said, Indian food is terrible, and we pretend that it isn't. And, of course, I meant my colleagues who would always drag me to Indian restaurants, and then spend the afternoon sweating and gulping water and you know, sweat running in their eyes. And I would always turn to them and say, so you can't possibly be enjoying this. Because I don't happen to like very spicy food. And this Firestorm broke out. I mean, within two days, you know, I was this, you know, genocidal racist maniac. You know, I was in all the Indian papers. I was in The Washington Post - Russian television mentioned me. I mean, it was insane. All because I'm a middle aged New Englander, who just doesn't happen to like Indian food and is very snarky about it. The coda to this whole story is that finally the former US attorney in New York, Preet Bharara, when the pandemic finally lifted, he took me out and said I challenge you to come to dinner with me. And he took me to an Indian restaurant. And I said, I would sit there and I would just eat Indian food, while people were making donations that we're gonna be used for a COVID ward in India. And this challenge ended up raising about $135,000 for COVID relief in India. Todd Landman 02:42 That is fantastic. Now, I'm going to pick this apart a little bit, because what's interesting is what looked like an incidental and as you admit a bit of a snarky comment about your food preferences, what you really communicated there is the rapidity and the spread of information, geographically, how it gets picked up, it's a bit unusual how one tweet can be picked up and really run and other tweets just sort of die on the vine, as it were. So this captures this idea that you have in the book around the viral nature of information, regardless of its veracity, how it can spread around the world, and how the originator of that information might be vilified by an anonymous group of people out there. And then how stories get picked up. So is that your sort of summary of what happened there that it was just this kind of, you know, ridiculously rapid thing about it actually, just a personal preference? Tom Nichols 03:33 Yeah, absolutely. And there's two things to note about it. One is that the nature of hyper connectivity, where, you know, I mean, when I started my career, 35 years ago, in the late 1980s, a viewer mentioned in a newspaper, you know, people clipped that and sent it to you in an envelope and the thing that we used to call the US mail with a stamp on it, and they'd say, wow, you know, I saw that you were mentioned in a newspaper. Now, you can be mentioned in every newspaper in the world in 24 hours, you know, on the one hand, I suppose there's a good side to that, which is that we all have the opportunity to be more informed. But the second part of it that makes that so worrisome, is that the internet rewards ...
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