I have been writing this for so long now that I’m worn out from it. The Republican game has been the same for a very long time now: gin up phony scandals, throw it all at the wall until people think there must be a fire because they’re choking on all the smoke. The confusion, chaos and resultant exhaustion are the point.
But it’s good to see people who are important saying the same thing. If people don’t recognize what they’re up against, it will never change.
This piece by Ann Applebaum in The Atlantic is getting a lot of response. She debunks one particular byzantine scandal being churned up in the right wing mediverse at the moment about which she has some personal knowledge. And offers this analysis:
… In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are also providing the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night’s debate to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works. A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.
As Americans learned during the 2016 presidential campaign, an email dump is an ideal source for this kind of raw material, not least because email communications are so often informal. When people speak or write to one another privately, they make jokes, they test out ideas, they use language they would not use in public. This does not necessarily make them duplicitous: All of us speak differently depending on whether we are talking to our friends, our families, or a large auditorium filled with strangers. In many languages, these different kinds of conversations require distinct forms of grammar.
But just as the misuse of grammar can make someone sound illiterate, a note meant for one person’s eyes can look jarringly out of place when it appears in, say, a newspaper. The change of context alters not just the weight of what was written, but the meaning. This is what happened in 2016 to the emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee by Russian intelligence and released by WikiLeaks. Those messages contained no actual scandals either—only the miasma of scandal. And that was all that mattered. But her emails was an effective phrase precisely because it was so amorphous. It was an allusion to a whole world of unnamed, unknown, and, as it turned out, fictional horrors.
Time and experience have taught many who work in the media to understand all of this better. In 2016, American journalists weren’t yet attuned to the many ways in which masses of irrelevant, hacked material could be used to waste their time. Now they are. That’s why relatively few people, other than Tyrmand (who must have a lot of time on his hands, considering how much of it he has wasted on me), have devoted much effort to the study of Bevan Cooney’s Gmail account or the material supposedly found on the waterlogged laptop. Yet these stories, which have miraculously appeared within a few days of each other, nevertheless have a purpose.
To begin with, these revelations are clearly timed to give the president something to talk about, other than the coronavirus, over the last two weeks of an ugly election campaign. By making wild references to the characters who have emerged in emails and texts, Trump hopes to undermine Joe Biden’s most important electoral asset: the impression, shared by even those who don’t like the former vice president, that he is a fundamentally decent person.
They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute “news.” Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will, over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham’s monologues. The extraordinary and completely unsupported insinuation, made by Wisconsin’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, that child pornography was found on Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop also looks like an unsubtle attempt to persuade the followers of the QAnon cult to fold this story into their dreamworld as well.
As my colleague Franklin Foer has written, the email drops may also be a kind of psy-op, a cruel provocation designed to bully Joe Biden by hitting him in his weakest spot. Having lost a young daughter to a car accident and an adult son, Beau, to brain cancer, the senior Biden is known to be particularly sensitive about Hunter, his only living son. Voters got a glimpse of the pain he feels during the first debate, when Biden responded to Trump’s false declaration that Hunter had been dishonorably discharged from the military: “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” he said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”
In that instance, Biden recovered. Next time, he might not. By bringing up Hunter’s name over and over again, the Trump campaign may hope to make Biden emotional, or make him stumble, just as it hopes to provoke his stutter, or at least a gaffe.
By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history. Their use of this tactic is not remotely subtle. Last summer, Donald Trump Jr. was in Indonesia to promote two Trump-branded properties; Eric Trump has traveled to Uruguay; Donald Trump himself has stayed at his own properties more than 500 times as president, using his presence as a form of advertising. And yet, days after authorities approved plans for a new Trump golf course in Scotland, Eric Trump took to Twitter to declare that “when my father became president we stepped out of all international business.” Only in the fantastical world of Fox can anyone hear that statement and not laugh out loud.
Last but not least, this kind of story also serves to provide employment, or at least activity, for rudderless, aimless, angry people such as Tyrmand. […]
This trajectory is not unusual. Laura Ingraham herself has followed the well-trod path by which acolytes of Reaganism become accessories to ratfucking. So has Tyrmand’s colleague Schweizer. He co-edited a book, published in 1988, called Grinning With the Gipper: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of Ronald Reagan; later, he wrote a book with former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Now he is focused on Cooney, Archer, and the other characters in the Foxworld universe.
None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don’t have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it. As the gap widens further between the reality lived by most of the public and the “reality” presented by people such as Ingraham and Tyrmand on Fox News, they will need to generate even more noise and even more activity if they are to keep their audience’s attention. This fantasyland is now the business model of Fox and Breitbart, and it will be with us for a long time, whatever happens on November 3.
Yes, this is true and it’s been true for avery long time. If I may just share a little bit of something I wrote back in 2007, taking the mainstream media to taks for its complicity. It’s just one of many on the same theme I’ve been flogging for the last two decades. This. Is. Not. New:
These are patented Whitewater-style “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren’t illegal they “look bad.” The underlying theme is hypocrisy because the subjects are portrayed as making a dishonest buck while pretending to represent the average working man. Oh, and they always feature a Democrat. Republicans are not subject to such scrutiny because a craven, opportunistic Republican isn’t “news.” (Neat trick huh?)
No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” right?
Will things change this time? Finally?
Hope springs eternal …