Ex-US attorney Barbara McQuade's new book sounds urgent alarm about disinformation

There are moments that will stop you in your tracks. For Barbara McQuade, it happened when she visited Normandy a few years ago to see the beaches where so many Allied soldiers lost their lives in the 1944 D-Day invasion crucial to defeating Hitler and winning World War II.

At the Normandy American Cemetery, she looked out on another sea, this one of white crosses and Stars of David that stretch on and on and on. They mark the final resting place of more than 9,000 U.S. service members, many about the same age as her son, who was studying abroad and accompanying her on the trip.

McQuade chose to dedicate her new book “to all of the brave American heroes who have given their lives to defend democracy from fascism.” She writes how going to Normandy left her in awe of such courage and sacrifice: “We owe them and other American patriots our vigilance, so that their sacrifices will not have been in vain.”

During an interview at her University of Michigan Law School office about “Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America” ($35, Seven Stories Press), she stresses the same thing. “They were willing to sacrifice their lives for a greater good,” she says .”We aren’t even willing to tell the truth to protect democracy.”

McQuade (who’s Barb to friends and cable news fans) is a calm, assured voice of reason in the current polarized, often ugly political environment. The former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and current U-M law professor is nationally known for her roles as an MSNBC and NBC News legal analyst and a member of the “#SistersInLaw” podcast.

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Her new book is an effort to spark a national conversation, civil in tone, that just might help in the fight to preserve America’s system of government. Its goal is not to browbeat those who may be inadvertently spreading disinformation but to explain how lies and falsehoods are threatening the nation’s most valued principles. And it’s not only foreign enemies who are the problem. To borrow a horror-film cliche, the call (or danger to democracy) is coming from inside the house.

“Attack from Within” takes a well-researched, carefully considered look at how disinformation has gained such a foothold domestically. In clear, easy-to-understand terms, McQuade traces how disinformation has been deployed by dictators in the past to seize and retain power. In detail, she explains its many tactics for influencing people — tactics that include demonizing others, manipulating nostalgia, keeping critics quiet and encouraging civil unrest.

McQuade also explores how technology is amplifying such strategies and why the virtues of the United States, things like free speech and a free press, make us a vulnerable target for lies. Then she goes further by offering possible ways to stop the war against truth. The book proposes steps like creating a code of ethics for social media platforms, regulating algorithms, banning anonymous users and bots, boosting civics education, strengthening local journalism and motivating citizens to avoid the unintentional sharing of news that’s wrong and potentially harmful.

Unlike so many volumes written since 2016, this is not a tell-all about Donald Trump’s presidency or a mea culpa from a staffer from his administration. Truth is nonpartisan for McQuade and non-negotiable.

“We have become so aligned with our tribes that we have been willing to sacrifice truth. … Whether you’re on the right or the left, that kind of tribe-over-truth (behavior) is unpatriotic,” she says. “To love America is to love truth. Liz Cheney said we can’t have democracy without truth. We need to stop deliberately saying things that are false. We need to say when the emperor has no clothes. And we need to work to compromise across the aisle. That is the only way to advance the interests of society and human progress.”

It started with Watergate

Growing up in Detroit and Sterling Heights (her mother and father met while working for General Motors), McQuade, 59, was a child of Watergate. She calls it “really my first memory of being aware of the news and what was going on in the world,” describing how she saw the headlines every day and knew that President Richard Nixon had done something wrong.

“I remember the first time I asked my mother what Watergate was and she told me it was an office building," she says. "And then I was really thrown, right?”

The crimes and cover-ups that would lead to Nixon’s resignation from the presidency in disgrace left a big impression on McQuade. “I was young enough to believe the president was the greatest person in the country,” she says. “And the idea that he had betrayed the American people was shocking and upsetting to me.”

In the years that followed, she read about Watergate, learned more about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s role in exposing corruption through their Washington Post stories and wrote papers for school relating to it.

Her early awareness of Watergate is part of what accounts for her life’s work in justice. She describes the impact as “just this idea of being deeply offended at abuse of power and wanting to be a watchdog for society, and helping to hold people who abuse their power accountable, and helping to expose that.” She still considers betraying the public’s trust “about the greatest sin there is.”

As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, McQuade worked for the student newspaper, the Michigan Daily, as a sports writer and sports editor. Still a rabid sports fan, she says she watched ballgames with her dad as a little girl and dreamed of joining one of her favorite teams. “If I wasn’t going to be president of the United States — this is, like, (as) a 6-year-old — I was going to be shortstop for the Detroit Tigers because that would be the greatest job in the world,” she says with a smile.

She soon realized that a lot of opportunities weren’t open to women. “It struck me at one point as really hard that I was told anyone can be anything in America, but not girls, and that was deeply offensive to me. So I think it motivated me most of my life to choose jobs and activities that countered those stereotypes,” she says.

After college, McQuade spent a year working at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in New York, starting on the copy desk and moving to sports. When she came back to U-M for law school, it was with the idea that she would return to journalism and use her legal expertise there. “But it turns out I really loved the law,” she says.

McQuade was a law clerk from 1991 to 1993 for U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman, an “amazing friend and mentor” in her words and a Ronald Reagan appointee. She spent time in private practice at Butzel Long in Detroit before spending 12 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit, where she was deputy chief of the national security unit. In 2010, she was appointed by President Barack Obama as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, becoming the first woman to hold that office.

As U.S. Attorney, she oversaw cases that involved, among many things, public corruption, terrorism, corporate fraud, civil rights and health care fraud. Some of the most high-profile ones were the corruption case against former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the prosecution of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for his role in the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit.

After Trump became president, McQuade, like dozens of U.S. attorneys appointed by Obama, was asked to resign. She found a new career path teaching at the University of Michigan Law School. Almost simultaneously, the woman who considers herself a journalist at heart was drawn back to that profession in an unexpected way.

 Says McQuade: “I was on my very first day of new employee orientation in early May of 2017 when I got a call asking if I could appear on MSNBC that evening, really out of the blue.” MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a now-gone show hosted by Chris Matthews, was looking for someone with an understanding of both the Justice Department and national security law to comment on former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ testimony before a Senate panel looking at alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The next day, she got another call from MSNBC, this time from Rachel Maddow’s show, wanting to book her for that night to discuss Trump’s firing that day of James Comey, the FBI director.

McQuade has settled comfortably into her role as a cable news analyst, which is sort of a classroom writ large. In 2021, she and three other legal heavyweights and MSNBC contributors — Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Joyce Vance and Jill Wine-Banks — premiered their podcast, “SistersInLaw,” on current legal issues.

MSNBC contributors, 2 from Detroit, host new podcast that has a big following

Disinformation vs. misinformation

McQuade, who is married and has four grown children, says academic life has given her more time for research and writing, which allowed her to carve out early mornings for work on her book. “Attack from Within” came about after an editor read an essay she wrote for the New York Times on the hazards of election deniers reaching state offices like secretary of state. When the editor inquired whether she wanted to expand on the topic, McQuade, having taught disinformation since 2018 as part of her national security course, suggested a broader survey of its threat to democracy.

The book reflects McQuade’s grounding in journalism and law, which both require presenting facts and attributing them to reliable sources. Using a typical traffic incident as an example, she says: “It’s not enough to say the light was red. You have to say how you know that. The light was red, according to eyewitnesses named so-and-so who were there on the ground at the time.”

McQuade’s devotion to documenting facts is demonstrated by the more than 1,700 footnotes in her book, a subject of debate with her editor. “He kept saying, ‘Do we really need to footnote the fact that Hitler was the chancellor of Germany?’” she says. In all seriousness, she worries that some of the commitment to attribution has disappeared in the disinformation age.

The book takes pains to separate disinformation from misinformation, a distinction that McQuade thinks could open the door to reaching those who mistakenly put their faith in falsehoods. With disinformation, “these are people who are deliberately using lies to deceive others and manipulate people,” she says. Misinformation, in contrast, comes from “those of us who fall prey to disinformation, believe it and then spread it to others.”

To illustrate that it can happen to anyone, she writes about the time in 2020 when she retweeted what seemed to be an ESPN post that Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was refusing to play until his team changed its name to something that didn’t offend Native Americans, but then found out she had been duped by a fake account. Says McQuade: ”I think the group that is simply misinformed is a group of people who want to be informed and could be.”

McQuade also takes a deep dive in the book into the psychology of why we accept lies as truth, covering things like cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and the backfire effect, which makes people hold even firmer to their beliefs when they are challenged. She also outlines how the digital world warps the marketplace of ideas. Now online users have to choose not only which ideas are best, but which are rooted in deception or grounded in honesty.

Still, McQuade remains hopeful about the future. She devotes the final section of the book to ways to restore facts and truth to their proper status and suggests that the battle against disinformation has to be a group effort.

“I don’t think its going to happen by itself. I think it’s going to require people to take action. I think if we allow things to just happen, it’s not going to go well for us. Because there are people who are going to acquire more information, more data, more power, who will be able to dictate the rules. But in a democracy, we have that power to do things and to stem the tide.”

In the conclusion to “Attack from Within,” she writes, “To love America is to love the truth.” The task ahead is to preserve that system, so the love affair can continue for generations to come.

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

Barbara McQuade book events

● McQuade will discuss her book at 6:30 p.m. March 7 with author John U. Bacon at the Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S. Fifth Ave., Ann Arbor. Hosted by Literati Bookstore. Free.

● McQuade will appear with John U. Bacon at 7 p.m. March 11 as part of the National Writers Series at City Opera House, 106 E. Front St., Traverse City. For information, go to cityoperahouse.org.

● McQuade will appear with journalist Stephen Henderson at 6 p.m. March 20 at the Detroit Public Library, 5201 Woodward, Detroit. detroitpubliclibrary.org.

● McQuade will appear with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson at 11 a.m. April 23 at a Detroit Economic Club event at MotorCity Casino Hotel, 2901 Grand River Ave., Detroit. Tickets are $55 for DEC members, $65 for guests of DEC members and $90 for non-members at econclub.org.