For Ronald Reagan it was the ball turret gunner and the welfare queen, stories he told repeatedly. Reagan claimed the former tale of WWII heroism was true. It came from a movie. The latter tale he used to stereotype Black people. Linda Taylor was real and of mixed race. And a lifelong con artist. Decades later, the country would hire one as president.
Post-Reagan and before Facebook, chain emails would spread across conservative networks through multiple forwards. Eager All-American propagandists trafficked in lies, distortions, and smears easily debunked on Google in the time it takes to attach your email list and hit Send.
A couple of tweets this morning remind us how central phony stories and imaginary threats have become to sustaining right wingers’ self-image as scions of virtue manning the barricades against threats to everything America holds holy.
Roy Edroso points out a tweet by podcaster Michael Hobbes. Fake stories on the right are enough of a thing to deserve the term trope.
For Donald Trump, stories involving crying men and someone adressing him as “sir” were sure to be made up. Daniel Dale spent four years keeping track of them.
Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election — “straight up-is-down reversal of verifiable reality” — proved deadly this year. But “the nation’s truth problem goes far beyond a Trump problem,” Dale says in a CNN video. “It is a long-term problem for the United States that millions of citizens have fallen deep down a conspiracy rabbit hole.”
What began as Reagan’s misremembered anecdotes now fuels talk of civil war and breakup of the republic.
The habits of self-deceit formed over decades now supply the justifying narrative behind the right initiating violence against domestic “communist” foes just as the George W. Bush administration used lies about Iraq to justify its preemptive war.
Manufacture a violent “commie” strawman and you can justify terminating his command with extreme prejudice. In the name of freedom, naturally.