Chris Christie runs for president, PGA and LIV merge: 5 Things podcast

USA TODAY National Correspondent for extremism and emerging issues Will Carless looks at the annual report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has designated Moms for Liberty as an extremist group. Plus, the Human Rights Campaign issues a state of emergency over anti-LGBTQ laws, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is running for president, USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer looks into worries from security experts about Twitter's vulnerability for the 2024 election, and the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Tour are merging.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below.This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Wednesday, the 7th of June 2023. Today, a look at the Southern Poverty Law Center's new designation for a number of so-called parents rights groups. Plus a state of emergency over anti-LGBTQ bills around the country, and security experts are worried about Twitter ahead of the 2024 election.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the Moms for Liberty and some other so-called parents rights groups as extremists in its annual report out this week. I spoke with USA TODAY National Correspondent for Extremism and Emerging Issues Will Carless to learn more. Will, welcome back to 5 Things.

Will Carless:

Thanks for having me on.

Taylor Wilson:

Will, can you tell our listeners who the Moms for Liberty are and why the SPLC made this decision?

Will Carless:

So, Moms for Liberty is an extremely conservative group that started during the coronavirus pandemic. It basically grew out of the mask mandates and the controversy over masks and vaccines in schools. It was founded by three conservative women in Florida and it has since pretty much spread across the country. They claim to have 40 chapters across the country and to represent about 100,000 people. I think it's fair to say it's quite a phenomenon in the kind of conservative political ecosystem as a grassroots group focused on what they call parents rights in schools.

Taylor Wilson:

And Will, just stepping back for a second for those who maybe don't know, can you put in context for us what the Southern Poverty Law Center's role is in tracking extremism, and even about some of the criticisms that the SPLC faces?

Will Carless:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, SPLC has gone through some changes in the last couple of years. Essentially the main kind of controversy or sort of criticism of the group is that they are too quick to label certain groups, particularly conservative groups, as extremist groups. Basically, once you land on the SPLC's designated list of groups, that becomes a kind of a defacto definition. But to answer your first question, the SPLC is basically a research institution, it was founded back in the '60s. It's well-known as the foremost research institution doing work into extremism and hate groups. They have all sorts of researchers, some of them will study technology, some of them study specifically white supremacist groups, and generally speaking, have a very good reputation for research, but also are very much criticized as a very, very partisan group by people who are more sort of right of center.

Taylor Wilson:

And also in its annual report, the SPLC gave kind of a checkup on the overall militia movement in the United States. What did they find here, Will?

Will Carless:

So, as far as militia groups are concerned, or so-called militia groups, groups that like to think of themselves as militia groups, basically the SPLC found that in the month or in the years since the January 6th insurrection, those groups have really kind of, not been decimated, but certainly the wind has been taken out of their cells significantly. You've seen the number of those groups drop, you've seen their activities drop, basically they've sort of melted back into the background. But the report does stress, just because they're not as visible or as active does not mean that the sort of anti-government militia type sentiment has gone away. And I do think it's important to stress, I mean, we've kind of focused on the Moms for Liberty aspect of this report, but this is a really comprehensive 50 page report on hate and extremism. For people like me who cover this stuff and follow this stuff, it's very in depth of just a very good record of kind of what was going on last year.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. So just one other angle of that report I want to get to here, Will, is this aspect of the so-called alt-tech spaces online, thinking places like 4chan. What did they say about these parts of the internet?

Will Carless:

The context for this is around about 2018, particularly social media companies - Twitter, Google, Facebook - they basically started to really get serious about kicking people that they considered to be extremists or who were spreading disinformation off their platforms. In response, you saw a whole bunch of sort of niche websites spring up to start to cater to those groups, to basically say, "Hey, if you're not allowed on Twitter, come over to us. In terms of social media. If you're kicked off YouTube, come over to us and stream your videos." And what this study showed is that those groups, far from being just small niche players, are actually consistently getting large numbers of people going to them and are consistently in the sort of top 10% of domains that are accessed by users. So the overall conclusion is these alternative tech sites aren't quite as alternative as you might think that they are, they're actually pretty popular.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Will Carless covers extremism and emerging issues for USA TODAY. Thanks, Will.

Will Carless:

Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

The Human Rights Campaign issued a state of emergency yesterday over anti-LGBTQ laws passed around the country. The country's largest gay rights organization said its emergency declaration. The first in its more than 40 year history comes after 75 anti-LGBTQ bills have been signed into law in various states this year. That more than doubles last year's number, which was previously the worst year on record. Conservative lawmakers have focused their efforts on enacting laws banning drag queen performances, gender-affirming care, LGBTQ inclusive education and more. Meanwhile, in a narrow ruling yesterday, a Florida judge blocked enforcement of the state's ban on transgender affirming care, calling the rule and exercise and politics not good medicine. The move will allow parents who challenge the state to access medical care for their transgender children as the ban's constitutionality is debated in court. And last week, a federal judge said, "Tennessee's first-in-the-nation law designed to put limits on drag shows is unconstitutional."

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Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has officially joined the 2024 presidential race. He filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission yesterday and announced the bid during a town hall in New Hampshire. He's also expected to participate in a CNN town hall event next week taking questions from anchor Anderson Cooper. Christie is trying to set himself apart from others in the GOP field, mainly by going after the party's front-runner former President Donald Trump. Christie said, "He undermined our democracy and the only reason he undermined our democracy was because he was pissed." It's not yet clear which main issues Christie will campaign on heading into 2024. When he ran in 2016, he called for criminal justice reform focused on community policing efforts, a stronger national defense and a secure border.

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Security experts say that Elon Musk's changes to Twitter could leave the social media platform vulnerable ahead of the 2024 election. USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer explains. Welcome back to 5 Things, Josh.

Josh Meyer:

Thanks for having me as always.

Taylor Wilson:

I want to start by just asking what the major changes have been to Twitter's security and operations teams since Elon Musk took over?

Josh Meyer:

Well, that's a good question. I'm not sure anybody would disagree with this, but Musk has essentially gutted much of the operations and security elements of Twitter, partly by design, partly by the way he's been running the organization. In the last couple of weeks, two more senior Twitter officials left, the two people that ran the trust and safety team, one who was appointed to replace the other, both of them have left. Essentially thousands of people that had worked for Twitter, many of them in very key positions, are no longer there. There's more of a skeleton crew than anything else that's left over according to one of the former trust and safety team leaders.

And the problem with that is that you need these teams there to moderate content. There's teams at Twitter that were on the lookout for manipulation by foreign powers like the Russian and Chinese governments, people creating fake bots and campaigns to manipulate the election to create false narratives and then have them go viral, things like that. So there's a lot of concern that without these kind of teams in place, that it's going to be much more vulnerable to the kind of manipulation that we saw in the last election.

Taylor Wilson:

Josh, you mentioned misinformation. What's changed when it comes to policing fake news specifically ahead of this '24 election?

Josh Meyer:

Well, I mean, Elon has said that he is a virulent free speech advocate and that sort of anything goes and we should let people say whatever they want, essentially on Twitter. Musk has restored not only Trump's account, but very virulent, right wing extremist organizations and individuals that have been using Twitter and other social media platforms to really create a polarized society and to exploit differences between people. And in some cases, according to experts, that's helped cause January 6th. Musk has been very hands-off on that, he's created some policies that have made it easier to do that. And there's a lot of concern that there's not going to be any kind of content moderation, especially when it comes to Trump's claims of a rigged election the last time perhaps rigged election this time about January 6th and other real hot button issues.

Taylor Wilson:

And maybe new concerns for the '24 election that we haven't seen in past elections as much are these AI bots. Could platforms like ChatGPT and others be used to manipulate the spread of information on Twitter around an election?

Josh Meyer:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know if you've seen some of these deep fake videos there. There's one of the Pope wearing like a mink jacket, I think, and there's one of Ron DeSantis basically assuming the persona of the guy from the office, Michael Scott, defending himself for wearing a woman's suit. But yeah, these deep fake videos are very believable and they're getting better literally by the day. So I think that AI could be used for nefarious purposes in the election. There's a lot of people that also believe that AI could be used for good purposes, that it could be used to help cull through the algorithms and look through and see if there's any signs of manipulation, especially foreign interference and disinformation campaigns. So it could be a double-edged sword where it's used for good and for evil. We just don't know yet.

Taylor Wilson:

And Josh, you touched on this briefly, but what has Twitter said it's planning to do to alleviate some of these concerns?

Josh Meyer:

That's another good question. I'm not sure they really have said much that they're going to do. Musk has been very close to the vest when it comes to what he plans to do to fix problems at Twitter. I think one of the concerns is that the new Twitter executive, the former NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino, that as she prepares to take over Twitter, that she'll be much more focused just on the advertising revenue and not on the trust and safety issues, and content moderation, and preventing Twitter from being used to create false narratives that could influence the election.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer. Thanks as always.

Josh Meyer:

My pleasure.

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Taylor Wilson:

The PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour are merging. They made the announcement yesterday after a bitter year of tensions fractured the golf world in half. A year ago, LIV began as a breakaway competition taking several of the sports big names with it. PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said yesterday that he's aware some might call him a hypocrite after he previously denounced the Saudi-backed league over its ties to the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

In addition to golf, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund announced this week that it effectively seized controlling stakes in four of the country's largest pro soccer teams. The league has already extended massive sums of money to some of the world's best players, including Cristiano Ronaldo, who's making more than $200 million a year to play there. Activists and academics have pointed to the PIFs investment in soccer and golf as part of a broader campaign of so-called sport washing or using sports to polish a country's otherwise problematic reputation. Saudi Arabia has a record of human rights abuses ranging from politically motivated killings to inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And if you have any comments, you can reach us at [email protected]. I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.