A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

How Republicans Argue: They Lie

Which the media generally doesn't bother to point out (or contrast
what they say with the truth) after quoting them

**If I have a single cause in life**-aside from my insistence on the
proper use of "was" and "were," together with that of "less" and
"fewer"-it's my apparently quixotic quest to demand contextual
information be included in news media accounts of political (and other)
events. I wrote about this last week

as it related to

**The New York Times**' (admirable) commitment to long-form
investigations. Today, I'm inspired by a rather obscure story, also
reported by the

**Times**about a fight going on in the Department of Homeland Security.

But first, some meta-media context: As David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf)
pointed out in a tweet, when people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg
speak of "free speech," what they mean is "speech" in the control of the
wealthiest people in the world.

[link removed]

The second piece of meta-context to always keep in mind when reading
about U.S. politics is how deeply the contemporary right wing is
embedded with the enemies of democracy, including its murderous
dictators. It's not just that CPAC is having its convention in Victor
Orban's Hungary
.
Nor is it just that Fox News is a more effective propaganda tool for
Vladimir Putin

than RT ever was. It's also that the Republicans keep nominating
candidates who are either personally, financially, or via their staffs
playing for Putin's team as well. It wasn't just Trump and the
people with whom he peopled the government
.
It was, as Steve Schmidt revealed this week, also John McCain
,
something that was originally reported by **The Nation**
back
during the 2008 campaign but lied about by the campaign and ignored by
the McCain-besotted mainstream media. That article noted, and Schmidt
has now confirmed, that "despite McCain's tough talk, behind the
scenes his top advisers have cultivated deep ties with Russia's
oligarchy-indeed, they have promoted the Kremlin's geopolitical and
economic interests, as well as some of its most unsavory business
figures, through greedy cynicism and geopolitical stupor." (If one wants
to be really cruel or learn something important about the psychology of
the Washington press corps, go back and read the loving coverage offered
to McCain in real time. I wrote about that here
, again,
back in 2008, and here
,
two years later. I've got more, but that's enough for now.)

The third and among the most important meta-media-related factors never
to forget in contemporary political reporting is the mass addiction of
contemporary conservatives to the practice of "bald-faced lying." (I'm
using the term in its philosophical senses
.)
This compulsion is evident even among many who profess distaste for
Trump's brand of dishonesty. Look, for instance, at this

Peggy Noonan column in

**The Wall Street Journal**. In support of her nutty contention that a
leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion-which is not even against the
law-is somehow the equivalent of a murderous insurrection designed to
overthrow the government of the United States, Noonan argues, "Other
high court decisions that liberalized the social order-desegregation
of schools, elimination of prayer in the schools, interracial marriage,
gay marriage-were followed by public acceptance, even when the rulings
were very unpopular." I suppose it is conceivable that Noonan-a
regular not only in the

**Journal** but also on NBC News's

**Meet the Press**-is so ignorant of history that she is unaware that
the case she picks first-desegregation of schools-was met with what
was proudly called "massive resistance
"
in the South up to and including one district in Virginia shutting down
its entire public school system

rather than comply with the Supreme Court's ruling.

[link removed]

Now, Noonan may just be nuts. There is certainly evidence to support
this view
.
But she has editors and copy editors and other people-researchers, I
imagine-who help her produce her columns. Most likely, all of these
people have gone to college and are at least minimally familiar with the
history of the United States in the second half of the 20th century. So
the only explanation for her ridiculous contention is that Peggy feels
she has a license to lie. And it doesn't even matter if her readers
know she is lying. That's the beauty of the bald-faced lie. The truth
doesn't matter. What matters are the politics and in this case, it's
a neat combination of racism and anti-feminism tied together by
know-nothingism: a pretty good, albeit partial, description of the
contemporary Republican Party. (I've no space to get into personal
corruption
,
for example.)

Ditto the stuff about editors, etc., for this ridiculous Ross Douthat
(whom I usually defend) column
.
As for this comically foolish Andrew Sullivan intervention
,
well, if you're surprised by it, then bless you, you've been lucky
enough to have not been paying attention in the very first place.

But back to the demand for lying. The need to lie is understood to be
ingrained in contemporary conservative politics. That's why they are
"ecstatic
"
about Musk's takeover of Twitter and promise to "open it up." You see
that in this

**Times** story

mentioned above about the Department of Homeland Security. Republican
lawmakers are engaging in a collective conniption fit over the
appointment of Nina Jankowicz, the author of

**How to Be a Woman Online**, to lead an advisory board at the DHS on
the threat of disinformation.

"Within hours of the announcement," the paper reports, "Republican
lawmakers began railing against the board as Orwellian, accusing the
Biden administration of creating a 'Ministry of Truth' to police
people's thoughts. Two professors writing an opinion column in The
Wall Street Journal noted

that the abbreviation for the new Disinformation Governance Board was
only 'one letter off from K.G.B.,' the Soviet Union's security
service."

Let us note, as DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas has done, that this
tiny office enjoys "no operational authority or capability and that it
would not spy on Americans." That doesn't matter. What does matter is,
first of all, right-wingers don't like Jankowicz, who, the

**Times** tells us, "has suggested in her book and in public statements
that condescending and misogynistic content online can prelude violence
and other unlawful acts offline-the kinds of threat the board was
created to monitor." She "has called for social media companies and law
enforcement agencies to take stiffer action against online abuse." But
the right-wingers also don't like the idea that the board will monitor
"disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,
or other adversaries such as transnational criminal organizations and
human smuggling organizations." Republicans

**love** disinformation, especially the kind that comes from Russia and
makes its way into Republican presidential campaigns. In fact, they
rarely use any other kind.

I guess I need to give a high five to the

**Times** reporters for including this crucial bit of recent historical
context. "The department joined the F.B.I. in releasing terrorism
bulletins warning that falsehoods about the 2020 election

and the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, could embolden domestic
extremists." Trump would likely not have been elected president without
the 2016 falsehoods, and he and the party he has under his thumb are now
hailing those "domestic extremists" who sought to take over the
government and murder his vice president on January 6 (with AIPAC now
supporting the Republican congressmen who voted to overturn the election
, I
cannot help myself from adding).

Republicans know they cannot win without lying. And they know that most
of the time, the media will "both sides" their lies to the point where
citizens cannot discern what's true and what's not (to the degree
that they are sufficiently engaged with old-fashioned politics even to
care). And so Republicans resist all attempts to address the issue, no
matter how vulnerable it leaves the rest of us to violent extremists,
both from within and without. It's actually amazing to me, as I write
these words, the degree to which conservatives have become virtually
carbon copies of the enemies that so excited them during the Cold War. I
haven't watched this crappy movie
for a long time, but if it
were being made honestly today, it would be called

**I Was a Republican** ... well, the FBI is not allowed to look into
this kind of thing either.
We are really screwed.

**I saw two shows recently** that ought to give hope to those of us who
worry about our ability to keep on keeping on as we find ourselves
getting on. One was an 85th birthday celebration for my fellow Upper
West Sider and onetime CUNY professor Ron Carter
. Credited with having
played on 2,200 albums, 60 of which he was the leader on, Carter had a
lot of friends join him at Carnegie Hall this past Tuesday. (One might
ask, "How long has this been going on?" since his friends have been
honoring him since 1995
.)
Tuesday's show had three iterations, a trio, a quartet, and an octet,
the latter featuring six, count 'em, upright basses. One interesting
thing about this show was learning just how "big in Japan" Carter is.
He's been given the country's highest honor and was feted Tuesday
night by its ambassador. Here's the trio doing an NPR Tiny Desk
Concert .

The previous week, I caught the queen of New York cabaret, Karen Akers,
doing her first solo concert at Birdland, where she did a retrospective
of her career of songs by the likes of Edith Piaf and Stephen Sondheim
for a show she called "Water Under the Bridge." Her voice has deepened
over the decades and so has her connection to her audience, which could
not have responded more enthusiastically. The evening could hardly have
felt more intimate or been more moving. Here she is with "Non, Je Ne
Regrette Rien ."

~ 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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