but if they don't know what their budget's going to look like until literally the day before it's about to take affect, it's -- take it back, -- take affect effect, it's real hard for them to do planning and a lot of times what they do is suspend contracts and then they have to start that contract back up again, even though they know that ultimately something's going to get worked out. they can't do long-term planning. and it costs even more money. to do the same thing, so it does lead to a less efficient government, to not have a functioning appropriations process. it's why we want passionately for this to move forward. again, i'd like to see the president leading this charge. he should be the one leading this charge to say, let's come together and move appropriations bills. last year when we were passing bills out of the house, to do this, months in advance of the deadline, the president was sitting on the sideline. he never once said, harry reid, who was his senate leader, on the democratic side when harry's blocking every bill, he never once said, harry reid, take the bill up and y'all debate your differences. that's what congress is supposed to do. he sat on the sidelines and almost encouraged it. so you had this dysfunction get even worse. so i agree. it hasn't happened in a long time. it should happen every year. when we passed a balanced budget last year that we got an

agreement with the senate on, it was the first time since 2002 that congress had come to that kind of agreement. it shouldn't take 13 years for congress to agree on how to balance a federal budget. beenioner: obama has not president since 1977, so maybe there is a time of introspection for congress to kind of look at what their role is. mr. scalise: right. our role should be to do that job and ultimately it takes two sides to do it. when the senate refuses to take up even one bill, when we pass six bills over to them and they made it very clear, we're not taking up any of them, that's irresponsible. somebody should have called out the people that were voting not even to take up a bill. the senate's supposed to be the most deliberative body in the history of the world. that's the way it was created. they turned the 60-vote requirement into a way to be the least deliberative body in the world. that's an abuse of their responsibilities. be nice to see the president chime in on this. but hopefully both of our presidential candidates, republican and democrat, will have an opinion on this. i'd like to see both our

republican nominee and the democrat nominee have a plan on how to actually get this process working again. what is their approach? i'd love to hear it. questioner: [inaudible] mr. scalise: sure. my approach would be, look what we've done. we passed a budget. we passed appropriation bills. we need to keep doing. -- been need to keep doing that. we need to cap actually moving the process forward properly. it does take both the house and senate to make that function. questioner: hi. kathleen shane with the american college of cardiology. thank you very much for taking care of s.g.r. we are now in the midst of a major health care transformation for physicians and hospitals and patients. and interoperability of electronic health records is key. it's currently a mess. we have many different systems out there. we have data blocking. we have all kinds of things going on. what can you do and what can congress do to basically enable us to get to a system where our records can be effectively shared?

i know everybody in this room has had a problem with getting their records from one place to another. mr. scalise: this is something that's still evolving. it's been -- you know, you talk to private hospitals. they spend millions and millions of dollars to develop systems so that medical records can be shared with the doctor, from the doctor's office to the hospital, and ideally between hospitals. truly interoperable. one of the things that we've been pushing is to get -- let's start with these federal agencies. the, for goodness sake. there's so many problems within the v.a. but shouldn't they have a functioning interoperable system? so that they can share their medical records of veterans with maybe the hospital at that the veteran goes to in normal times, maybe sometimes the veteran goes to the v.a. to get treatment, and then he goes to his local hospital. shouldn't that information be interoperable? the v.a. has not done an adequate job of making their

records interoperable. i think it starts with the government agencies being the leaders in at least doing what a lot of people in the private sector are already doing. and at the end of the day, you know, you're going to have to see a better ability for hospitals that have their own systems of medical records to be able to share them electronically with other hospitals and physicians. questioner: thank you for being with us this morning. and on a friday. too. it's great to see a member of congress here on a friday. mr. scalise: great to be here. questioner: i'm mark peril with the homeland security and defense business council. there are contentious political conservative progressive issues that differentiate but in the issues of homeland security, homeland defense, it should rise above politics. it should. so the broader question is, not going to either what mr. mccaul is doing or mr. goodlatte or certain of these issues, but to your role, are you under the mandate that the hastert rule

still exists, that on every issue you need a majority of republicans or how often are you discussing, as i saw when i was on the hill many years ago, too many years ago, discussing with mr. hoyer the whipping of the united states congress to get a majority on certain issues that may not be bright line conservative-progressive, particularly in the area of homeland security, that we see it being pushed to the extremes of politics? how often do you in general talk to your counterpart on the democratic side in order to get 218, 219, regardless of where those numbers come from? mr. scalise: steny and i talk on occasion because, you know, normally i'm meeting with house republicans so that we can coalesce around the things that we're moving forward. clearly we do talk on those issues where it takes bipartisan

votes to get things passed on the trade promotion authority, for example, probably the most complicated bill that i worked on as the majority whip. free trade's always been a conservative ideal. it's always taken a coalition of republicans and democrats, mostly republicans, but also democrats, to put that together. and that case, the majority whip was -- the minority whip was against the bill, so we were working with other democrats. but ultimately built a coalition. on national security, i think frankly you've seen strong bipartisan majorities to address the problems that we've been facing. if you look at isis alone, we've been calling on the president to come up with a plan. in fact, the president signed into law a requirement that he lay out a detailed plan to combat terrorism around the world. he's failed to meet that deadline. he puts out this plan this week on closing guantanamo bay and sending those terrorists into the united states, which by the way, people of both parties do not want adamantly. strong, strong bipartisan

opposition to bringing gitmo detainees into the united states, so the president, instead of meeting the deadline to lay out a plan to combat isis, has been spending his time trying to figure out how to bring terrorists into the united states against the will of people in both parties. so i'd like to see the president work with us on those areas of strong bipartisan support. again, look, the iran deal. there was strong bipartisan support against the iran deal. you want to talk about a national security issue? that's going to be a threat to the united states for generations to come. and republicans and democrats came together to oppose that plan. unfortunately the president went a very different direction. when we have come together on a lot of national security issues, unfortunately on many of those we found the president on the wrong side. but there is strong, strong republican and democrat support in congress to do what it takes to keep our country safe. and that's been very bipartisan for a long time, including in this congress.

billy: on that, is there still a hastert rule in the house? the most recent speaker ignored it a couple of times and maybe that was to his detriment. has speaker ryan said anything about his view of the hastert rule? mr. scalise: our objective is to always have bills that 218 republicans would support at a minimum. currently we have 246 republicans. there's a special election that's coming up shortly. to fill the vacant seat in ohio. if you look at where we've been as a conference on most of the complicated issues that we've worked through, we've been able to get not just a majority of house republicans but in fact over 218 house republicans to come to an agreement. but clearly not on every issue. and so -- >> that can be -- mr. scalise: ideally you'd like that to happen on every issue. we don't live in a perfect world but we strive to get to that point. billy: there was never really an actual rule. mr. scalise: not a formal hastert rule. you'd like to be able to have 21

8 or more republicans come together on every complicated issue. clearly that's not been the case. i'm sure it won't be the case all the time. but most of the time it will. questioner: good morning and thanks for your remarks. peter with the four-a's. you mentioned briefly tax inversions earlier. where do you see corporate tax reform falling? is that going to be tackled this year or next year? do you see it being a comprehensive approach or do you peel off a specific challenge like inversions? mr. scalise: i know chairman kevin brady just came in as chairman of the ways and means committee when paul ryan became speaker and he had a lot on his plate from day one. but he's had a passion to bring tax reform out of the ways and means committee, to actually pass a bill that not just addresses the serious problem of our uncompetitive corporate tax rate, but also the personal rate.

because if you're at 35% and you want to bring the overall rates down to at least 25%, 20%, somewhere in there, you don't want to have a case where the corporate rate is lower than the personal rate, because there are a lot of people that have companies that are pass-throughs that they're filing on their personal returns, so you want to make sure that both the corporate and personal rates are much lower than they are today. so that our country can be competitive again, so we stop forcing companies to move out of the united states just to be able to stay in business. so that if a company is making $100 billion in foreign countries and they want to bring that money back into the united states to create more jobs here, they're not punished by the united states and the i.r.s. if they want to do that. which they are right now. it's psychotic policy. it needs to be reversed. kevin brady wants to bring a bill out of the ways and means committee that finally tackles this in a comprehensive way. billy this year? : mr. scalise: this year.

questioner: good morning. thank you for your remarks. i am melanie from the blinded veterans association. and there is a wide variety of legislation in the house right now on a number of issues related to interests of veterans and their families. i would like to know if you have any thoughts about what the priorities might be for the congress to actually pass -- i know there were some bills just passed recently and there's talk of an omnibus bill later before the end of the session. do you have any thoughts about what might be the priority issues for the congress to act on before the end of the session? mr. scalise: if you look, we've identified very serious problems within the v.a.

where the v.a. is not meeting their mission to take care of our veterans who went and fought in other countries, got injured and came back home and a promise was made to them that they would be taking care -- caken -- taken care of by the v.a. and the v.a. has failed in that mission. i've been very angry about what's happened. you've seen us pass legislation last year, for example. where you had these secret waiting lists. the v.a. denied they existed. we actually exposed that through our house oversight functions. we passed legislation to allow the president to hold people accountable and fire people responsible for it. the president hasn't done that at an adequate level. i'd first call on the president to exercise his abilities under the law to go and fire the people who did such a disservice to our veterans by not providing the proper care. we also passed legislation to open up the v.a. system so that if a veteran is being denied care, is waiting too long to get the care that they deserve, that they be able to go to a private hospital in their community. that law's on the books right

now and from everything we've been hearing by veterans back home, the v.a. is not doing an adequate job of letting veterans know about that. it's almost like they don't want veterans to know that there's real competition, if they're doing a horrible job. and the v.a.'s been failing in their mission at number of facilities across the country. it's not isolated, it's been widespread. we've identified problems, we've passed some specific legislation to allow our veterans to have more opportunities and i'm still really frustrated that it seems like the v.a. is trying to hide those facts from our veterans because they still want to keep them forced into a v.a. system that currently is not working as best as it should be. by the way, we've increased funding to the v.a. over the last few years. so they've had more money and they've failed to meet their mission. and it's a serious problem that congress is going to continue to stay on until they get this right. billy: we only have -- we have to do a little rapid fire here now. do these two right there. quick question before that.

are we going to see a benghazi committee report any time soon? or closer to the election? mr. scalise: i'm not sure what the end result of the committee is. i think one of the things that's been so good about what chairman gowdy has done is that he's made it clear that they're just going to go and continue to get the facts. unfortunately they've had a hard time getting all the facts. all the parties involved at department of state should work harder to get all the information that's been requested. but they continue to uncover more things and they're going to keep doing their work until they get all of the facts out there for the public to see. about what happened in that tragic incident in benghazi where we lost four americans. billy: i'm sorry. questioner: good morning. amy with the american chemistry council. the toxic substances control act hasn't been reformed since it was first passed in 1976. and the senate passed a bill unanimously in december and the house passed a bill last june, 398-1, so it's hopefully going

to be a success story. but i'm wondering if you can comment on any timing or efforts of house leadership right now to try to resolve those two bills and get something to the president's desk? mr. scalise: it is really important we get that bill done. we've been working very hard on the bill that we passed out of the house and we've been in negotiations with the senate for some time to ultimately see if they can resolve the differences. it's a big priority. we want to see it get done. and i think chairman shimkus on the house side has been doing a very able job at leading that effort, working with his senate counterparts, to ultimately get an agreement that we can get signed into law. questioner: great, thank you. questioner: hi. darin wyatt, national industries for the blind. i have to ask an election question. this batch of presidential hopefuls in my lifetime is

definitely the worst and that's 30 years. my dad said -- he's 63, he said in his lifetime it's the worst he's ever seen. so you have bernie sanders who -- i think he means well, but the handshaking across lines from democrat to republican, it wouldn't happen, the relationship building wouldn't happen. just in terms of his policies. hillary clinton, a lot of people don't really trust her. ted cruz in my opinion is just way too creepy. and marco rubio is cookie cutter and it appears that he just got his backbone 12 hours ago. donald trump, who is going to be the republican nominee, he's going to do that, he has come up with two policy ideas in the nine months that he's been around. he's going to build a big beautiful wall with a door in the middle. and he's going to bomb isis oil fields and then have his buddies from exxon come over and build them back up as soon as

possible. that's what he's going to do. so as a conservative, and this is coming from a guy that still doesn't know who he's going to vote for, and it's kind of frightening at this point. as a conservative, how can you possibly defend trump? when you introduce him at your events? when he is going to be the republican nominee? this is a guy that is a fire-branding fear mongerer. and he's frightening. and the fact that the united states of america is at the point where he's literally going to be the republican nominee is, at least for my generation, so scary. so i'm just wondering. mr. scalise: i wouldn't agree with all the assessments you made. obviously it's a lot more complicated than what was laid out. but if you look at the race, any race for president, after months of a grueling primary process on either side, whoever's in there and on the democrat side, it's just two people right now and on the republican side

it keeps going down, but it's still a number of people, whether it's three or seven that are viable. but they spend all their time beating up on each other. all you see are the worst parts of each person because that's the job of the other candidates is to identify, unfortunately, why they wouldn't be so good. eventually in these debates especially it's more focused on boating up each other -- beating up each other. so you see the flaws more than you see the positive traits. what i would go back to is 1980. i do think the similarities between 1980 and today are the closest you can find in generations between two presidential races. you had a lot of malaise in the country, you had an economy that was sluggish, you had major foreign policy challenges around the world. and you had an incumbent democrat president and you had a very contested republican primary. just look at some of the things that george h.w. bush said about ronald reagan.

they weren't calling each other good guys. but at the end of the day, you ended up with a nominee in ronald reagan who picked george h.w. bush to be his running mate. and when reagan ran, he ran on a very positive, it inspiring vision and brought large numbers of people out and one with an overwhelm magazine jort and did really great things to get the economy moving again, get the country back on track. i think the same thing can happen again. i can't tell you who the nominee will be. we might know more after tuesday night but we can't assume that one person runs the table tuesday night. i think you'll continue to see a competitive race. don't expect each of them to point out how nice the other guy. however much long tier goes, weeks or months, they're going to continue to say how bad the over guy is but -- the other guy is but at the end of the day, they'll come together. at that point, who's going to do the best job of going to the american people and laying out their bold vision for how to inspire people and get the

country moving again? people are hungry for those ideas. the candidate that can do that is going to be the one who can win. both of them need to do. it i would encourage our republican nominee, whoever that's going to be, to be a reagan-esque inspiring figure. go and excite people again about what's great about this country. the american dream's real. people still want it but they don't think it exists anymore. how are you going to best rebuild that american dream so that people can actually just work hard, play by the rules, you can actually be part of the middle class and even more if you want in your life. that still exists but it's fading away and we can get it back. i want to see the candidate who can best inspire people to then be our next president. i still think that's achievable. billy ok, i somehow let us go over time. i enjoyed it. and very much appreciate talking to you. i enjoyed all the questions. there were some great questions out there. let call a close here. [applause]

[captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016]

>> the tax filing deadline is nearly a month and a half away and on this weekend's news makers i.r.s. commissioner john koskinen talks about i.r.s. operations and its budget request for 2017. he discusses efforts by those on the campaign trail to revise testimony. sis watch the interview sunday at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> how can we best get people to pay attention to wasteful spending so we can define things that are interesting, a little different, easy to understand.

the government is so large. an organization has to cut through a lot of noise and other things going on, you know, members of congress talking about all the wonderful things they're doing and try to get people to be more involved and make it a little more personal so that they on them d the impact and their families and children and gran children. >> sunday night the president of citizens against government waste talks about his organization's efforts to bring attention to wasteful federal spending. citizens against government waste also publishes the p.i.g. book which compiles the list of unauthorized government programs. >> we worked with a bipartisan coalition of members of congress which then was called the congressional pork busters coalition and they came up with us of a definition of what was then called pork barrel spending and really still is eventually became the term earmarks and we went through all the appropriations bills and started the p.i.g. book. i believe the first year was about $3 billion and it went up

to $29 billion in 2006 and every year that we can find earmarks in the appropriations bills we release the congressional p.i.g. book sometime around april or may. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's "q & a." here on c-span we'll take a look next at what is contributing to antimuslim sentiment in the u.s. that's followed by presidential candidates hillary clinton and bernie sanders campaigning in south carolina ahead of the state's democratic primary. later republican candidate donald trump speaks to an udience in virginia. the duke university professor christopher bale is author of the book "terrified" and recently spoke to students at duke university about some of the factors that were contributing to growing antimuslim sentiment in the u.s. his is just under an hour.

>> thank you for joining us. this is an extraordinary honor d privilege for us to have chris bale joining us on a interest is of such to so many of us. professor bail studies how nonprofit organizations and other political actors create cultural change by analyzing large groups of texts from newspapers, television, public opinion surveys, and social media sites such as facebook and twitter. his research has been published by princeton university press including this wonderful book, american sociological rae view, sociological theory, theory and society, sociological methods and research. he is a well published scholar.

his work has been recognized by awards from the american sociological association, the association for research on nonprofit organizations and voluntary action. society for the scientific study of religion, and the society for study of social problems. -- his research has been covered bay major media outlets such as nbc news, national public radio, and washington post and as of today c-span. professor bail earned his ph.d from harvard university in 2011 and his first mono graph which is projected on the screen is "terrified, the study of how antimuslim fringe organizations became main stream" and it was published by princeton in 2014. please join me in warmly elcoming professor chris bail.

>> thank you for that very generous introduction and to the franklin center and islamic study center for hosting me. i'd like to begin my talk today by looking at some recent media headlines. probably most of you heard donald trump comment last month in which he claimed to have observed muslims in new jersey celebrating after the september 11 attack. despite widespread disbelief of this statement he doubled down and later called for a ban on all muslims entering the united states. his competitors were not too far off so ted cruz several days later made pointed comments that implied that most

or even all muslims tacitly condone terrorism. marco rubio tried to out trump trump and claimed that we should not only be shutting down certain houses of worship ut any place where muslims congregate. and ben carson actually before trump nabbed one of the biggest fundraising calls in a single hour in the history of the republican party for his disparaging comments about islam. and, you know, i don't think we'll see an end to this any time soon. so my research question that i set out and that i'll answer for you today is simply how did this antimuslim sentiment become so main stream? how can a leading candidate for the presidency, the republican party, disparage one of the country's largest religious groups given that our country

has foundational principles surrounding religious liberty and freedom? and you may think there are a few easy ainss -- answers to this question. muslims or people who call themselves muslims are implicated in some very terrifying recent events most recently the san bernadino attacks. when we look at the numbers as my colleague charlie kersman has done we see quite clearly we should be much more afraid of a variety of other threats to our well being than terrorism. with the threat terrorism there is no clear cut evidence it is increasing on an exponential scale. maybe it's isis, this terrifying new organization that has proven that it can take over large slots of territory, has committed horrific acts of terror against u.s. citizens, and european citizens, that's proven its capacity to do massive harm in

places like paris, and yet i'm going to show you today that this story really begins years before isis was even around. maybe this is just 911 you might ask. aybe a story about a kind of effect. most americans pre 9/11 could barely knew about muslims. the survey data suggests less than one in three americans had ever met a muslim which is somewhat shocking and i think probably more reasonable to say they didn't knowingly meet a muslim because muslims have been in the united states since the beginning of our history as many of you probably know. but nevertheless, an event of the scale of 9/11 surely would provoke some type of back lash. interestingly what we see is actually an uptick in positive sentiment toward muslims and specifically muslim americans after the 9/11 attacks.

we don't see a steady growth, kind of wave like growth of antimuslim sentiment from 9/11 on. in fact, if we go back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, prominent republicans such as george w. bush were, in fact, outwardly going out of their way to say islam is a religion of peace, were criticizing various evangelical leaders who had said a variety of disparaging things about muslims, and this image here is bush meeting with numerous leaders of muslim american organizations among them the current leader on the council of american islamic relations, an organization which now faces pervasive allegations it tacitly condones terrorism. i'll say more about that in a little bit. so if it is not fear of terrorism, not isis, if it's not 9/11, what is it?

i'm going to argue today that a small network of antimuslim organizations in the wake of the september 11 attacks captivated the media and, specifically, through emotional appeals. and though these organizations were once peripheral actors within the broader family of organizations trying to shape public discourse about islam, they've now raised more than $242 million to mount one of the most significant campaigns to shift american public opinion against islam. i'll show you how they've exerted considerable influence upon our counterterrorism policy, the recent wave of so-called antishaharya laws, and, you know, perhaps most disturbingly how they've even been hired to train our ounterterrorism officials. all of this occurs in the broader context of the

so-called battle for hearts and minds we currently find ourselves in against groups like isis and, surely as i'll show you at the end of my talk these fringe ideas about the antimuslim ideas are avid travelers. they get picked up by international media where i think they may do their most significant harm by tarnishing the reputation of the united states which was once a paragon for religious freedom and making it seem as though the u.s. is in fact antimuslim, thereby validating the claim of groups like isis that the u.s. is fundamentally at war with islam. so this is the subject of my book that was mentioned, "terrified, how antimuslim fringe organizations became main stream." now, historically social scientists, i'm a cultural sociologist, we looked at small cases of organizations that exerted profound change on public discourse.

so we track down an organization that, you know, shapes the way we talk about say nuclear energy or any kind of big, social problem we all deal with. and there are a variety of problems with that approach. we wind up studying groups and wouldn't learn about groups that failed and we'd wind up with a distorted picture that uses circular reasoning to try to understand how groups exert influence on public discourse. but when i was trained, i was learning alongside other social scientists about the new wave of computational social science methods or so-called big data. these are the increasingly large amounts of data that are available due to the rise of social media, the internet, the mass digitization of archival and historical records and so on and so forth. so in my book i leveraged these new computational methods to try to ask, to answer this question. who gets to speak on behalf of islam before the american

public and why? and to do this, i collected a massive sample of press releases produced by any organizations trying to shape public discourse about islam. so these include not only antimuslim fringe organizations but also groups like the council on american islamic relations, or various other muslim public affairs council and so on, other kind of advocacy groups, religious organizations, think tanks, and so on and so forth, all nonstate and nonprofit groups trying to shape public discourse about islam. i then collected all mentions of these organizations in a large number of, large group of media documents including newspapers such as the "new york times," "usa today," the "washington times," designed intentionally to measure the kind of political spectrum of the media from left to right, as well as tv -- fox news, cnn, and cbs news. and the innovation of my work

is to use a plagiarism detection device to check the extent to which each press release influences this larger public discourse about islam. what is neat about the new ail gow rowland-smithisms is we can identify not only verbatim quotes, here we have a press release that sighs bias and hate is unamerican, this also identifies near matches or paraphrased quotes of the press releases. and they enable kind of quantitative measure of the amount of the influence of each organization upon public discourse about islam. i also conducted in depth interviews with the leaders of each, all of these organizations or, sorry, sub sample of these organizations. both those that succeeded in influencing public discourse about islam as well as those who had little or no influence on shaping public discourse about islam.

and so let me tell you the story that begins my book actually begins with a history of muslim american organizations in the united states and the broader struggle to shape the public opinion about islam before the 9/11 attacks. but today i'm going to focus mostly on the post 9/11 period because i think it has the most implications for the current type of main streaming of fringe ideas about islam that we're seeing among conservative leaders. it's difficult to forget this image. it is seered into many of our heads, our subconscious. yet what most of us may forget is that there was an outpouring of sympathy for muslims after he 9/11 attacks. so there have been yearly surveys of american public opinion of islam which i'll soon show you which show as i mentioned earlier an increase in positive sentiment toward muslims after the 9/11 attacks.

this on top of dozens and dozens and dozens of statements from all manner of civil society groups arguing that muslims are in fact a peaceful people who are being victimized by a minority among them who are hijacking the religion for olitical ends. and this is an example of how the plagiarism detection analysis can show us this. i need to take a few minutes to walk you through this graph. first of all, each of these circles describes an organization -- think tank or religious group, advocacy group, and so on. and the size of each circle describes how much media influence they had. how many times newspapers or television channels regurgitated their message and their press releases. you can see some organizations like the council on american islamic relations have a lot of influence. but most organizations have no

influence. these tiny little dots here. now, the position of these circles describes the similarity of their messages. so with a group of research assistants i coded the type of language that each organization uses to describe muslims. these could be things like, you know, muslims as victims narrative, orris lamb is an inherently dangerous and violent religion narrative. what we see is that most groups as i just mentioned were using a main stream narrative that was simply that main stream muslims organizations or muslim americans are a peaceful group who are being victimized by a group of political radicals who have hijacked their religion for political ends. and yet as we look at who got the most media attention, it's groups like the middle east forum or the center for security policy.

to relatively obscure organizations at the time in the wake of 9/11 who are receiving the lion's share of media coverage. now, these groups were advancing a so-called stealth jihad narrative which will be another theme i'll talk about, and their narrative was essentially that muslims and muslim americans in particular are a column secretly plotting to undermine the u.s. constitution, implement sharia law, and they hide between a thin veil of political correctness in so doing. this is an example of the type of work that -- the type of messages that came out. on the left is daniel pipes from the middle east forum. famously launched a campus watch campaign. his idea was that u.s. universities had been infiltrated by terrorist sympathizers for radical islam and that a concerted campaign

was needed to out these folks and to prevent u.s., the future generation of u.s. leaders from being duped into the idea that muslims are actually a peaceful group when in fact he was arguing they are kind of a trojan horse. like wise on the right here you'll see frank gaffney from the center for security policy, one of the people who later became instrumental in the so-called antisharia movement and the various attempts to create laws that would prevent the use of sharia law in the united states. and he famously accused the white house of being infiltrated by extremists, among them grover norquist who had a very weak ties to a hedge fund that funds many of the largest muslim american organizations in the country. and so why didn't main stream muslim organizations get in the media?

i argue in my book it is because of the emotional blavents message. these were visceral, fearful, angry, condemnations of muslims and muslim americans in particular that really alerted a public that had very little idea again what islam was, who muslims were, the majority of americans had not met a muslim and the majority of americans could not have -- were unable to identify the koran as the holy book of islam or allah as the deity associated with islam. so america's imagination about islam was very fertile. it was a real opportunity to define what was going on. and as is so often the cais with the media the loudest voice gets most of the attention. now, the story might have ended there had, you know, like the proverbial boy who cries wolf, in the absence of another major terror attack we might have seen these type of emotional appeals disappear.

instead we saw something very different. though i showed you that these groups represented a minority of all voices talking about islam, it appeared as if they were a majority. and that because of the media distortion of this family of organizations so the majority of you wasn't getting out the minority view was being misperceived as a majority view. this had a variety of consequences but one of the most important i argue was for muslim american organizations themselves. and so this rise, this surge of antimuslim sentiment in the media i argue in my book created what i call a rip tide, a reaction among main stream muslim organizations that served to further increase the profile of antimuslim organizations. this chart describes what type of messages main stream muslim groups like council on american islamic relations, muslim public affairs council, were making in their messages. now you may not be able to read this. on the top this large line,

this is the number of press releases per day and this is the period from 2001 to 2003. you can see it was very common for organizations to dispatch press releases that condemned anlty muslim sentiment. these were things like hate crimes against muslims. controversies about whether for example a muslim should be allowed to pray at an airport and so on and so forth. and many, many organizations were understandably very itical of these types of issues. this lower line here shows all of these, all of the press releases picked up by the media that condemned antimuslim sentiment. you can see the majority of their voice in the media was condemning antimuslim sentiment. and this tynier line here describes the number of press releases that condemned terrorism. not antimuslim sentiment but terrorism. groups like al qaeda which was then the foremost terrorist

organization. and this tiny sliver, this tiny black sliver here describes the number of press releases by main stream muslim organizations that received any media coverage. nd so if you can imagine for a moment that you are an american with very little information about islam, and you're confronted by a media that showed you a variety of very fearful and compelling messages to suggest that this is in fact a dangerous religion combined with an apparent absence of condemnation on the part of muslim americans themselves, and instead a group of people, muslim americans, who appeared more concerned about dispatching and discarding antimuslim sentiment than they were about condemning terrorism, and so i'll show you in a moment how this kind of helped the antimuslim narrative coalesce. antimuslim organizations were able to accuse main stream

muslim organizations of tacitly condoning terrorism because they never publicly, their message was not getting out that they were unequivocally condemning terrorism by groups like al qaeda and at the same time it lent credence to the idea these groups were actually hiding behind a veil of political correctness. that is that they were more concerned about criticizing antimuslim sentiment than they were about criticizing terrorism, itself. now, at the time muslim american leaders were enmeshed in very vexing debates about whether and how terrorism should be condemned. there was a very real concern that by condemning terrorism you would somehow legit mate the idea that islam has anything to do with terrorism. and so many organizations such as council on american islamic relations spent much more of their time as this graph shows

condemning antimuslim sentiment rather than condemning terrorism. i'll come back to that theme a little later. and so here is the analogy again of the rip tide. the more that main stream muslim american groups condemn antimuslim rhetoric, the further they get pulled out to sea. until we actually see a change of public discourse around islam, that is that attacking fire with fire and that by the way is why so many of the antimuslim -- so many of the condemnations of antimuslim sentiment got media attention, because they were also very emotionally charged. people were extremely angry at people like daniel pipes and that of course feeds the media frenzy. the media sees the back and forth emotions and gramb tates toward that. meanwhile condemnations of terrorism were much more intellectual and dispassionate. they like to invoke geo

politics and kind of more intellectual reasoning but lack the tangible emotion that the media gravitates toward. i argue in the book that is one reason they didn't get much media attention. yet again, the condemnations of antimuslim sentiment fed the media fire, increased the profile of antimuslim organizations, and enabled them to achieve even more standing within the mass media. so you can see this is the first graph i showed you which is after the 9/11 environment. here are organizations that produced antimuslim messages and the vast majority of groups who are producing pro or moderately pro muslim messages. and between 2001 and 2003 and 2004 and 2006 you can see that the number of organizations producing antimuslim messages more than doubled. the color of these circles by he way describes the emotional -- a little hard to see on this screen. you can see the emotional power

down here of antimuslim groups was increasing as they grew in size. okay. at this point they still represent a minority of all groups battling or struggling to shape american public discourse about islam. how did they become main stream? how did we get to the point where they could raise $245 million and compel major political figures to express such vehemently antimuslim views? well, here's one more year of data, so here's the plagiarism detection analysis for 2001. 2003. 2004 to 2006. 2007 to 2008. and as you can see on the right side of the graph here, the number of organizations that are expressing an antimuslim narrative increases threefold. these ties, these kind of arcs between these organizations describe organizations that share a board member. so you can see that not only did they grow in size but they

also forged allegiances to powerful organizations outside of the field such as a publican -- other groups who would enable them to solidify their stature within the public sphere and more importantly enable them to make weak ties to financeers, other political connections that would solidify their stature. so this graph describes several of the largest antimuslim organizations in the country at the time and shows that their donations to contributions in u.s. dollars here over this period from 2001 to 2011 again grew exponentially. even at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. and i argue in the book that the increased media profile of these organizations gave them the standing necessary to become visible, to become an organization that could be essentially donated to.

and with this money they began to further consolidate the capacity to find islam in the american public sphere. one of the ways they did this i argue in the book is to invent experts. the very idea of a terrorism expert is a business of an oxy moron. terrorism is by definition arbitrary and indiscriminate. and of course lacking data on terrorism it is extremely difficult. so even among academics there is very little consensus about how and why terrorism happens. but there is an industry, a very well funded industry of people who call themselves terrorism experts. many of whom have very little credentials to call themselves such. many of whom don't even for example speak languages that are spoken in regions that are most afflicted by terrorism. and then there's also a variety -- get e who have the

an additional level of credibility by for example the color of their skin or their accent but are in fact not muslim. so examples of these are folks from lebanon, palestine, who became really high profile media voices during this period and published several best seller books on the "new york times" best seller book list. so the one hand these organizations funded and propelled the so-called terrorism experts into a celebrity, which then, you know, now again picture yourself as the american public. you don't know much about muslims. you've been exposed to this very scary message. muslims, themselves, don't seem to be saying anything. and now people who look and sound like muslims are telling you that muslims are actually terrorists. so you can see how there is a kind of confluence of events that begins to cohere around the antimuslim narrative. not only are they founding --

funding these types of folks to write books and give talks and so on, but they're creating their own infrastructure for public outreach. this is an organization which translates media from the, primarily from the middle east in north africa with the express aim of identifying hate speech in the middle east. this is a scene from the equivalent of "sesame street" in palestine, which the organization translated as i will shoot the jews. this is a woman who is talking to these two young children who have said according to this translation i will shoot the jews. and this went on to air at cnn and one of the administrative assistants at cnn quickly realized it had been mistranslated. it did not read i will shoot the jews. it read the jews are shooting us. this is an example of the type

of manipulation that exists and is possible when you have such power to define the public onversation. also funded major film. spent about $19 million on a film called obsession. radical islams were against the west. this film which has a very scare u sounding piano music at the beginning and very compelling sin pa was distributed -- cinema was distrib you thed -- distributed in every major paper in the runup to the election. it right -- bona fide muslim leader. instead they are anti-muslim groups, who again, lend credence to the idea that the american public is being duped by mainstream muslims.

reached theve position where anti-muslim organizations are no longer part of the french. they are from the part of the mainstream. -- part of the fringe. they have their own media infrastructure. meanwhile, mainstream muslim organizations have little media influence. they are involved in excruciating debates whether and how to respond to these anti-muslim organizations. as a result, they are falling out of public view. this i argue in the book provided an opportunity for anti-muslims organizations to attack the legitimacy of mainstream organizations. you can also say who is mainstream and is not. groups like the council on american islamic relations are widely accused of tacitly condoning or even encouraging terrorism. there is