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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

How to Cover the Big Lies, and Understand Those Who Fall for Them
The media's still struggling to depict the dangers and the roots of
the right's mass delusions

I write a great deal about political lying, together with the failure of
the members of the mainstream media to deal effectively with its current
epidemic proportions. This is in part because I've written two books
and a dissertation on the topic. (This one

is still sort of new.) But to be honest, the fact of the now
near-pathological lying emanating from today's Republican Party is
only a part of the problem facing the future of our country. Even more
worrisome is the character of their content.

The Times offered up a mini tour of Republican crazyland in a piece
focusing on Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar
,
who became famous when six of his siblings

banded together to warn the rest of the country never to vote for him.
The Times notes that Gosar "falsely suggested

in 2017 that the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville was planned
by liberals and funded by George Soros. More recently, he has questioned
whether federal law enforcement officials

planted agents in far-right groups that stormed the Capitol."

Deeper in, things grow in size and scope. The lunatic league's leader,
per usual, is Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Donald Trump
picked recently as his warm-up act for one of his Nuremberg-style hate
fests. Greene, the piece reports, has "endorsed executing Democratic
lawmakers
,
including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was also an adherent of QAnon, the
pro-Trump conspiracy movement
that holds that a
corrupt cabal of Democrats, global elites and career government
employees who run a Satan-worshiping child sex-trafficking ring will
soon be rounded up and punished for their misdeeds, and that Mr. Trump
will be restored to the presidency." If that's not nutty enough for
you, there's the fact that she has repeatedly compared COVID
vaccinations to the Holocaust: "We can look back in a time in history
where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely
treated like second-class citizens-so much so that they were put in
trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly
the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about." Even after
admitting that she may have gone a little far in the above, and even
after a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Greene returned to the very
same analogy by characterizing the officials in the Biden
administration's push to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated
against the coronavirus as "medical brown shirts
."

I am almost always tempted to fill up this space with similar lunacy,
both in sympathy with the journalists who have to figure out how to
cover it, but also to illustrate just how much more serious is the
threat these people portend for our republic than our media has so far
been willing or able to portray. Take a look, if you have not already,
at the Times' incredible 40-minute video

about the events of January 6 if you imagine that next time, we can
expect an opposition that respects a peaceful presidential election,
democratically arrived at, and accepted by the likes of Trump and his
increasingly violent-minded foot soldiers.

For all the ink that has been spilled on the grievances of Trump
supporters-no coffee shop in central Pennsylvania was safe from a
horde of skinny-notebook-wielding reporters for much of 2017-most of
us remain confused as to what drives Trump supporters to embrace so
obviously fraudulent a figure, spouting not only lies but barely
coherent nonsense syllables and yet earning football-style cheers from
enthusiastic crowds. Given the logical incoherence and barely concealed
dishonesty that characterizes literally every one of the conspiracy
theories that make up Trumpist ideology, it can be difficult to get a
handle on any underlying consistency that provides the foundation for
any or all of it. New York's Eric Levitz

makes a decent attempt to get to the bottom of a part of it with a focus
on the snake oil sold every night by Tucker Carlson. For a deeper look,
however, I'd turn to Thomas Edsall's investigation of what he nicely
terms Trump's "cult of animosity
."

Edsall quotes a number of scholars to support his thesis that what he
calls the "'schadenfreude' electorate"-that is, "voters with
the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans" and
"voters who take pleasure in making the opposition
suffer"-"continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the
aftermath of the Trump presidency." He quotes a series of scholars
who, based on research undertaken during the past four years, find
* animus towards marginalized, Democratic-linked groups was a good
predictor of future support for Trump, regardless of party;

* a wellspring of animus against marginalized groups in the United
States that can be harnessed and activated for political gain; and

* the "Trump voter profile" [reveals an attraction to] relatively
explicit appeal to xenophobia, racial prejudice, authoritarianism,
sexism, conspiracy thinking.

One aspect of Republican ideology that gets insufficient attention, I
would argue, is its attachment to imaginary victimization of white
males. This is not to say white males do not experience discrimination
in certain circumstances-just as I would not argue that left-wing
"cancel culture" is entirely made up. Both are real. In terms of
both depth and breadth, they are minuscule in comparison to the
discrimination, and its effects, regularly experienced by women, people
of color, and members of the LGBTQ communities. One of the most
ridiculous expressions of this particular form of almost comically
undeserved whining can be found in Eric Kaufmann's recent essay in
National Review
,
in which the author bemoans the fact that most educated young women want
nothing whatsoever to do with male Trump supporters when it comes to sex
and romance. The author blames this on a "predilection among many
young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism, a belief system
that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in
the name of the emotional 'safety' of historically marginalized
race, gender, and sexuality groups. In this left-modernist worldview,
conservatives' resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism
mark them as moral deviants."

But here's the thing, Eric. The problem is that they are "moral
deviants." It is literally impossible to support Trump and the current
Republican Party without being either a) stupid, b) ignorant pretty much
beyond belief, and/or c) morally deviant. Why would any person of any
age want to date, marry, or reproduce with someone who espouses crazy
cultish conspiracy theories laced with racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
Islamophobia, ethnocentrism, and a dedication to anti-democratically
maintained white supremacy based on easily disprovable disinformation?
The piece quotes another writer who insists that "those who
politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as
those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews." Got that?
"Precisely." In other words, Trump supporters were born that way,
just as they are born with superhuman immunity from imaginary pandemics
that were either cooked up on purpose inside a lab or in China or were a
total hoax in the first place made up by Dr. Fauci.

The Democratic primary is over in New York and its counting, everyone
agrees, was a catastrophe. There is no question whatsoever that the
responsibility for this failure belongs to the city's Board of
Elections, which has long been a cesspit of patronage and corruption.
But the city chose a new way of electing people via the eminently
sensible "ranked-choice voting," and therefore we are getting a few
extremely foolish pieces attempting a "whataboutist" turn to blame
RCV. This dishonestly headlined Politico article
,
for instance, admits that "last week's fumble by the city Board of
Elections ... was not specifically related to the ranked-choice
system," even though Politico decided to go with its deliberately
misleading headline and thrust anyway. The piece even includes this
quote: "'So much of the challenges that we've seen over the past
couple of weeks have been linked to ranked-choice voting incorrectly,'
said Sara Eskrich, executive director of Democracy Found, an
organization pushing to incorporate Final Five Voting-an alternative
voting method similar to ranked-choice voting
-into
Wisconsin elections. 'There's a lot of election administration
problems that have happened that are not the fault of the electoral
system itself.'" So why the headline "New York's
'Head-Swirling' Mistake Puts Harsh Spotlight on Ranked-Choice
Voting" when it's so obviously the BOE, not the voting system? Did
Pod People eat
Politico's brain?

In a similar vein, the Times reports "Why New York's Election
Debacle Is Likely to Fuel Conspiracy Theories
."
But again, its author admits that "[t]he disinformation fueled by New
York's mistake may not end up being compelling to Americans who
haven't already bought into the lie that the 2020 election was
stolen." It nevertheless goes on to speculate that "it is very
likely, especially among New Yorkers, to undermine overall trust in
public institutions-and that sort of distrust creates fertile ground
for disinformation to grow." Like so much of the coverage of
"disinformation" and the lack of "overall trust in public
institutions," its authors fail to note that almost all of it comes
from the Republican side of the aisle. Democrats, unlike Politico
reporters and Times headline writers, can tell the difference between a
bad count and a bad voting system.

I'll get back to more music next week. In the meantime, I don't
think anyone needs me to tell them this at this late date, but if you
haven't, please do watch Questlove's "Summer of Soul
"
either on Hulu or in a movie theater. Talk about "Hot Fun in the
Summertime
"
...

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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