"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2021
The latest right wing outrage:
Fox News found its latest thing to be outraged about on Monday, devoting multiple segments to complaining that Disneyland’s Snow White ride is the latest victim of liberal “cancel culture” and the “woke” mob because a single newspaper article offered mild criticism about the inclusion of a new kissing scene.
With the California theme park reopening for the first time in more than a year last week, Disneyland unveiled an updated ride based on the 1937 children’s classic, replacing Snow White’s Scary Adventures with Snow White’s Enchanted Wish. The revamped ride includes major upgrades including laser projections and new animation, as well as offering up a more cohesive storyline in line with the movie.
In what was largely a positive review of the new attraction, the San Francisco Chronicle’s digital publication SFGate published a travel piece on Friday claiming it was problematic for the ride to include a “true love’s kiss,” which features the Prince breaking Snow White’s sleeping spell by kissing her. “Haven’t we already agreed that consent in early Disney movies is a major issue? That teaching kids that kissing, when it hasn’t been established if both parties are willing to engage, is not OK,” the article’s reporters asked.
Of course, it didn’t take long for Fox to gin up an outrage cycle off of one paragraph of a digital travel write-up. Beginning with an article on Fox Business’ digital site, which said the new ride was “prompting backlash” while citing only the SFGate piece, the network mentioned the “canceling” of Snow White nine times on Fox News and five additional times on the Fox Business Network through mid-Monday morning.
On Fox & Friends, for instance, the hosts devoted several segments to the issue and even made it a focal point of their interview with Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), who came armed with his usual assortment of colorful colloquialisms.
“So now they’re trying to cancel Snow White. Your thoughts?” Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked the Republican lawmaker.
“You know, sometimes I think we are so screwed,” Kennedy exclaimed. “I don’t know where these jackaloons come up with this stuff. I don’t mean to be mean. I’ll try to be nice if they try to be sane and I shouldn’t discourage it, I guess, because so many of my Democratic friends believe in it, but it’s just such utter nonsense.”
The senator went on to grumble that the single article’s supposed cancelation of a classic Disney film is “about as popular with the American people as head lice” and that liberals are “so out of touch with the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, I don’t know why they spend their time on this political correctness.”ADVERTISING
The obsessive coverage continued on the network’s so-called “hard news” programming. Welcoming on Fox News contributor and The Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway, anchor Dana Perino claimed the “woke movement” is now taking aim at Disneyland and that Snow White had been “canceled.”
“I think it shows how woke-ism destroys everything fun in our society,” Hemingway responded. “But it’s a real issue because of how prevalent these woke culture warriors are in affecting everything that we read and experience.”
The pair would then debate at length the merits of the SFGate article’s argument regarding consent, with Perino grumbling that the “left thinks they can go in and rewrite the ending to other people’s work” while Hemingway complained that liberals would force the Disney ride to go on forever.
“It would involve people coming to the end and having the prince ask for consent over and over and over again to someone who would just lay there and they would have to sit there until the park closed and that’s not an enjoyable ride,” the conservative pundit declared.
Throughout the first few months of 2021, Fox News and right-wing media have bounced from one culture war outrage to the next, obsessing over Mr. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss, The Muppets, Lil Nas X, the AP style guide, and a soap company no longer using the word “normal,” among countless other examples.
I don’t know why they’re so obsessed with children’s stuff but it’s creepy.
People tend to think of “activists” as left-wingers who march in the streets against wars or organize rallies for civil rights and social justice. And there is a great tradition in America and around the world for such liberal activism. But it’s not just the left that has an activist tradition. The right has one too — and it’s often extremely effective.
In the post-WWII years, the right in the U.S. was focused on anti-communism and far-right groups like the John Birch Society attracted middle-class men and women to join clubs and meet to discuss how to fight the onslaught from inside their suburban cul de sacs. In the New Republic some years back, historian Rick Perlstein recounted a hilarious quote from a Dallas housewife in Time Magazine in 1961 saying, “I just don’t have time for anything. I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.” From the Goldwater campaign in 1964 on, right-wing activists focused much of their energy on getting Republicans elected to office, from school boards to the presidency, and were quite successful at it.
The right-wing grassroots has always organized itself around the idea that they are under siege and unless they pull together to defend themselves, everything they value will be destroyed. Whether it was fighting communism, secularism, terrorism, civil rights or whatever social justice movement that was supposedly threatening their way of life, the right has always been convinced that they are in imminent danger. And when they find themselves at odds with their own fellow Americans, as they so often do, this sense of victimization and martyrdom is what fuels the culture war at the heart of their complaints. As Perlstein wrote in that 2006 piece:
Conservative culture itself is radically diverse, infinitely resourceful in uniting opposites: highbrow and lowbrow; sacred and profane; sublime and, of course, ridiculous. It is the core cultural dynamic–the constant staging and re-staging of acts of “courage” in the face of liberal “marginalization”–that manages to unite all the opposites. It keeps conservatives from one another’s throats–and keeps them more or less always pulling in the same political direction.
Donald Trump, however, has upended that longstanding dynamic — and the party establishment has no idea what to do about it.
Igor Bobick of the Huffington Post recently reported that Republican officials are anxiously awaiting a resurgence of the Tea Party, which they have been expecting to reconstitute in the face of Joe Biden’s ambitious agenda. It was, after all, a smashing success back in 2009 and 2010 in opposing President Barack Obama’s health care plan. You’d certainly assume that they’d be getting the band back together. But so far, it isn’t happening. And there’s a reason for it: people like what they are seeing.
Bobic quotes deficit hawk Republican Sen. Mike Braun saying, “even my counties back in Indiana are happy, which is a very conservative area. They’re asking, ‘How can I spend $15 million in a rural county?'” Braun ruefully admits that Biden’s agenda is a smart political move and he’s right. Biden and the Democrats are betting that people are hungry for some positive government action and they are determined to deliver it.
But there’s more to it than that.
The Tea Party was a grassroots movement but it was also heavily subsidized by some of the wealthiest activists in the country. The Koch brothers’ operation and other wealthy interests spent quite a bit of money to make the Tea Party a reality because their libertarian ideology really was on the line. But when you think about it, it was a bizarre set of issues for grassroots activists who usually organize themselves around a sense of victimization. And it didn’t really fit their usual modus operandi. The “threat” was a total abstraction. How were they “victims” of other people getting health care?
Sure, the right has always opposed government programs if it would benefit those they believe don’t deserve them (and I think you know who those people might be). But the outrage against Obamacare was really all about Obama. They had to sublimate their racist backlash into something and that was on the menu but the war the Tea Party was really fighting was against the election of America’s first Black president.
Yet some Republicans in Congress are still operating under the illusion that their voters really did care about deficits and will be moved to protest despite the fact that they still adore Donald Trump, a man who didn’t care about any of that. In fact, right-wing grassroots activists are already engaged in a battle that is far more energizing and interesting to them than any of that egghead economic stuff ever was: Donald Trump’s Big Lie.
According to a new CNN poll, 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. And they are taking action. We all know about the flurry of restrictive voting laws that are quickly being enacted all over the country and the preposterous “audit” taking place down in Arizona by a bunch of Trump fanatics and conspiracy theorists is probably just the beginning. The explosion of GOP grassroots activity in the states isn’t just about Joe Biden or the events happening in Washington. They are also working night and day to punish Republicans who dared to disagree with Trump’s version of events and ensure that Trump will be able to win the next election.
The Washington Post took a look at some of the grassroots action taking place around the country. They interviewed one Michigan organizer who is trying to censure and remove a Republican Party executive who accepted the results of the election. She said, “I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified.” That sort of cultish delusion is forcing official rebukes and purges of Trump apostates all across the country.
And then this happened to Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Ut., over the weekend:
The motion to censure the former GOP presidential nominee failed 711-798, which I’m sure softened the humiliating blow. But it’s bubbling up to Washington as well. The House GOP caucus thought they had successfully managed the “Liz Cheney problem” but it’s coming back. Axios reported that there may be another vote to remove her and from the behavior of the leadership, it seems as though the worm has turned, no doubt because these Representatives are getting an earful from their activist base. The party is now eating its own.
Republicans counting on the Tea Party zombie to rise again had better come up with a Plan B. The activists the GOP in Washington wants to organize against Joe Biden’s program are already booked. They’re busy fighting other Republicans three nights a week.
Update: Good luck Liz
If she wants to be president she’s better hope this fever breaks soon. I see no sign of it.
Republicans for years dominated the absentee-ballot battle space. Then came COVID-19 and the rush to expand voting options to facilitate conducting a general election during a pandemic. Donald Trump lost reelection. Republicans lost control of the U.S. Senate.
Republicans contracted a case of the sads. Their voters want now to contract the ways Americans can cast ballots.
It is legend among Florida Republicans how in 1988 it was late-arriving Republican absentee ballots that turned a narrow U.S. Senate loss for Republican Connie Mack into a 34,518-vote victory, writes Amy Gardner (Washington Post):
Virtually every narrow Republican victor of the past generation — and there have been many, including two of the state’s current top officeholders, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott — owes their victory, at least in part, to mail voting.
Can’t have that anymore now that Democrats have started voting by mail in large numbers. But as Republicans introduce measures to curtail voting by mail, some of their elected officials worry it may hurt their reelection chances.
“Donald Trump attempted to ruin a perfectly safe and trusted method of voting,” said one longtime Republican consultant in the state who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment.
“The main law that we pass when we pass election bills in Florida is the law of unintended consequences,” he said. Now, he added, the GOP must live with the result.
I may have to frame that quote.
Florida voters are demanding Republicans do something to restrict voting by mail.
This year’s bill restricts the use of drop boxes, adds hurdles to voting by mail and prohibits actions that could influence those standing in line to vote, which voting rights advocates said will probably discourage nonpartisan groups from offering food or water to voters as they wait under the hot Florida sun.
Together, the provisions compound hurdles for voters, critics said, because the curtailment of mail voting will probably lead to longer lines on Election Day and during early in-person voting, particularly in urban communities that already tend to face long wait times to vote.
Senate Bill 90 requires voters to reapply for mail ballots every two-year election cycle, rather than every two cycles — or four years — as current law allows. The legislation prohibits mobile drop boxes, and it requires local election supervisors to staff all drop boxes and to allow ballots to be dropped in them only during early-voting hours. Supervisors who leave a drop box accessible outside those hours are subject to a civil penalty of $25,000.
Dear Leader created the demand. Elected Republican must furnish the supply of vote-by-mail-quashing bills or face the wrath both of Trump and his faithful. This after decades of Florida Republicans making voting by mail easier, as Gardner details, and by making in-person voting — preferred by Black voters — harder.
“It was comical to watch Trump light on fire 20 years of Republican work and tens of millions of Republican investment — literally lighting a match to it,” Schale said. “Every time he sent a tweet out, I’d get a text from a Republican operative here in Florida with an eye-roll emoji.”
Gardner has much more here.
It was clear from the outset that if Trump lost he would try to light a match to the entire country, Republican Party and all.
Disingenuousness is one defining feature of Republican Party politics. One among many. Including such diverse elements as Othering, the patented Hissy Fit, racism, undermining popular sovereignty, and now flat-out lying. One would say Donald Trump raised lying to an art form except there was no artfulness to it. His party of supplicants nonetheless followed their Dear Leader.
The Right’s creation of wedge issues to further exacerbate the country’s political and cultural divide is now so commonplace that one could teach a course in how its false narratives combine the various features above to keep political tensions in the country at low-boil.
Theoretical foundations of GOP cancel culture
Paul Rosenburg took on “cancel culture” last week at Salon, sketching out the people and elements of American life Republicans work at canceling while promoting weeks-long narratives about imagined cancelings on the Left.
You know who is really canceled? Rosenburg begins. “George Floyd is canceled. Breonna Taylor is canceled. Ma’Khia Bryant is canceled. Andrew Brown Jr. is canceled. They are the true victims in America’s longest-running culture war. Anyone who tells you different is just gaslighting. You want ‘cancel culture’? America is plagued with cancel culture.”
Donald Trump, former president known for the phrase “You’re fired,” had a parade of people he wanted canceled. He called them out via his now-canceled Twitter account: NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and a list of corporations from “AT&T, Apple and Macy’s to newspapers like the Dallas Morning News and the Arizona Republic to liberal commentators like Paul Krugman and Touré and even conservatives like Karl Rove, Rich Lowry, Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg.”
The cancel culture narrative provides “a shared cookie-cutter framework to both fuel and give shape to that panic — which is in fact a genuine cultural panic about the white right’s loss of power to impose its worldview, and resulting judgments, on others.”
That the phrase is vague makes it more all-purpose. “‘Cancel culture,’ ‘woke’ and ‘identity politics’ are talismanic for the Right, Rosenburg explains. And meaningless. “For conservatives, that meaninglessness is a feature, not a bug. Those words mean whatever a right-wing accuser needs them to mean in the moment.”
While conservative pundits rail that the Left’s criticism of the Right’s positions are somehow violations of the First Amendment, the Right’s “efforts to cancel democracy at the ballot box (with 361 bills in 47 states as of March 24) and in the streets (81 anti-protest bills in 34 states as of April 21) are deadly serious threats to American democracy” and assaults by the Right against a string of post-Civil War amendments.
College campuses such as the University of Wisconsin are special targets. Campus Reform and its publisher, the conservative Leadership Institute will book controversial speakers knowing their views will generate protests as surely as the sun rises in the east. Republican legislators then use the protests to propose cuts to state university budgets and programs, Georgetown political scientist Donald Moynihan observed in a New York Times op-ed.
“Having created the narrative of the intolerant liberal campus as a problem, conservative politicians could propose a solution,” Moynihan continued. “They could make a case for why their policing of speech on campus was actually protecting free speech. They effectively persuaded many that politicians should be trusted to monitor speech on campus, more than the people who lived on campus and have historically done a pretty good job of protecting speech.”
But none of this matched reality. “Wisconsin has a long history of protest and counter-protest on campus, some of it quite violent. The idea that students had suddenly become aggressive seemed clearly wrong to me,” Moynihan recalled. “These terms I kept hearing just did not fit with my experience with the students I engaged with. The gap between my lived experience on campus and what was being portrayed in the media was large.”
At the same time, “I looked around the world and saw a very disturbing trend: Authoritarian governments in places like Hungary, Turkey and China were policing speech on campus as part of their effort to stifle dissent, using many of the same tools that U.S. state legislatures are adopting,” Moynihan said. “For example, a bill in Florida encourages students to record and monitor their professors to expose their views. What could be more chilling to speech in the classroom? This is the same tool that China uses to control universities: Student informers report any dissent against the party.”
Then there is canceling of voters at the ballot box. One week ago, former NC Republican Party executive director Dallas Woodhouse wrote in the conservative Carolina Journal that with the state gaining a seat in Congress next year “… GOP redistricting leaders will consider approving a new map designed to elect a 10 Republicans and four Democrats beginning in 2022.” And why not gerrymander “with almost surgical precision” for another 10 years? The NC GOP ran out the clock in court for the last 10. Courts finally forced new lines in the last election. Voters sent eight Republicans and five Democrats to Congress after years of a map drawn to yield 10 and three. Trump in 2020 won the state 49.9% to 48.6%, virtually the same balance as in 2016 and Romney in 2012.
Rosenburg offers more examples, including newly proposed crimes intended to cancel street protest and decriminalize, well, hitting protesters with cars, as I mentioned here.
“All this is simply accepted as normal now, but it’s prima facie evidence of a concerted conservative cancel-culture effort to stifle the voices of key Democratic constituencies.” he concludes. “It’s visible in the broad reach of voter suppression efforts, of protest suppression efforts and curriculum suppression efforts as well.”
Naturally, this is all the Left’s fault. Even if the Right goes full-on fascist.
Update: Added a.m. Holland tweet.
Oh look. The pacifist “isolationist” president who wanted to end all the “forever wars” turns out to have been none of those things. Not that we didn’t know that but still …
The Biden administration has disclosed a set of rules secretly issued by President Donald J. Trump in 2017 for counterterrorism “direct action” operations — like drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional war zones — which the White House has suspended as it weighs whether and how to tighten the guidelines.
While the Biden administration censored some passages, the visible portions show that in the Trump era, commanders in the field were given latitude to make decisions about attacks so long as they fit within broad sets of “operating principles,” including that there should be “near certainty” that civilians “will not be injured or killed in the course of operations.”
At the same time, however, the Trump-era rules were flexible about permitting exceptions to that and other standards, saying that “variations” could be made “where necessary” so long as certain bureaucratic procedures were followed in approving them.
In October, Judge Edgardo Ramos of the Southern District of New York had ordered the government turn over the 11-page document in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by The New York Times and by the American Civil Liberties Union. The Biden administration inherited that case and sought a delay but has now complied, providing a copy to both plaintiffs late on Friday.
The Biden administration suspended the Trump-era rules on its first day in office and imposed an interim policy of requiring White House approval for proposed strikes outside of the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. At the same time, the Biden team began a review of how both Obama- and Trump-era policies had worked — both on paper and in practice — with an eye toward developing its own policy.
The review, officials said, discovered that Trump-era principles to govern strikes in certain countries often made an exception to the requirement of “near certainty” that there would be no civilian casualties. While it kept that rule for women and children, it permitted a lower standard of merely “reasonable certainty” when it came to civilian adult men.
Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on the Trump-era rules.
“We’ll let the previous administration speak to their policies,” she said.
Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff lawyer with the A.C.L.U.’s Center for Democracy, portrayed the Trump-era rules as having “stripped down even the minimal safeguards President Obama established in his rules for lethal strikes outside recognized conflicts” and called on Mr. Biden to end “secretive and unaccountable use of lethal force.”
I guess wanting to secretly kill civilians in foreign countries is fine as long as it’s from a distance.
It’s been a while since Americans felt like their lives might just get better. Maybe it takes hitting bottom after four years of an hideous freakshow and a global pandemic, but it appears that people are starting to believe things are finally looking up:
President Joe Biden completes his first hundred days in office with a country that is more optimistic about the coming year, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.
The last time the country came close to that level of optimism about the coming year was in December 2006, when 61% said they were optimistic about where the country was headed, according to previous ABC News/Washington Post polls. Shortly before the 2016 election catapulted Donald Trump to the Oval Office, only 42% of Americans were optimistic about the future, compared to 52% who were pessimistic.
I’m still shocked that 42% of the country felt optimistic after Orange Julius Caesar eked out his win in 2016. I don’t think I’m over my deep depression about that even now. It was as traumatizing as the pandemic for me.
Anyway:
Only a slim majority (52%) think the federal government should spend to revitalize the economy, even if it raises taxes — including 80% of Democrats and 54% of independents. The question of government spending and taxes largely divides Americans, with 47% saying taxes should stay at the same level, even at the expense of the economy — including 78% of Republicans.
They don’t want to raise taxes? Ok. Let’s just spend the money and put it directly into the hands of the American middle class, working class and the poor. Income inequality is a horrific and growing problem that has to be dealt with if we want a decent society. But if raising taxes adds up to trashing the whole program, it’s better to table it for now and get the economy growing. Politically, taxes are an abstraction — money, jobs, purchasing power, opportunities are not abstract. If the Democrats want to maintain power (which means stopping the neo-fascist right) they have to deliver to voters directly.
I’ll let the Nobel Prize wining economist explain why debt isn’t the issue:
Today’s broadcast, “Who’s afraid of the big bad debt?”, going up shortly. Let me share a couple of slides that may also be relevant to today’s column 1/
First, when people ask how we’ll pay back the debt incurred as we respond to Covid-19, or suggest that debt over 100 percent of GDP would be disastrous, consider the history of the UK in the mid-20th century 2/
Britain emerged from World War II with debt of more than 250 percent of GDP. It didn’t have a debt crisis. And it never paid off that debt, just rolled it over. However, debt as a share of GDP eroded as the economy grew. 3/
CBO currently projects debt by the end of next year of 108 percent of GDP. How hard would that be to deal with? Bear in mind that interest rates have consistently been below the economy’s growth rate, so that with primary (non-interest) balance, the debt ratio would fall 4/
Two scenarios: primary balance, and a primary deficit of 2% of GDP, which is roughly where we were before the 2017 tax cut. In both cases I assume interest rate 1% below growth rate. Deficit scenario would lead to gradually rising debt ratio 5/
But the operative word is “gradually”: even by the year 2050 the US debt ratio would be lower than that in Britain for much of the 20th century. The point is that we shouldn’t panic about debt; we have lots of running room, and won’t need extreme measures to contain it 6/
Originally tweeted by Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) on May 21, 2020.
Still getting anxious mail from people who worry about how America will pay down its debt. Folks, we don’t have to pay it down. Here’s what happened after WWII: 1/
America never repaid its war debt. It just issued new debt as the old debt came due. But because of inflation and growth, debt as a share of GDP declined steadily, so that by the 60s the war debt was negligible in economic terms 2/
Today, we have an economy where dollar GDP can be expected to grow 3-4% a year, while the feds can borrow at ~1%. This means that debt tends to melt away as a share of GDP unless we run really huge deficits 3/
The usual suspects try to shout down this arithmetic by playing Dr. Evil: We have 24 TRILLION DOLLARS in debt. But if you analyze the numbers instead of hyping them, there isn’t any visible problem 4/
Originally tweeted by Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) on January 19, 2021.
If you are interested in learning more about this you can subscribe to Krugman’s podcast, here.
This tweet thread by George Conway points out something that I haven’t heard anyone else say in the aftermath of the Washington Post and NY Times corrections that Giuliani didn’t actually receive a warning from the FBI:
Corrections are nice, but shouldn’t obscure the point that, at a minimum, Giuliani should have known that it was likely he was being used by the Russians. For example, …
Check out what he said to the Daily Beast last year: “The chance that Derkach is a Russian spy is no better than 50/50.”
And Giuliani’s own client, the former guy, *was* in fact told by the FBI that Russian intelligence officers were using President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Joe Biden’s candidacy.
Both knew or should have known what the Russian game was; neither gave a damn. Both allowed themselves to be turned into Putin’s tools.
Originally tweeted by George Conway (@gtconway3d) on May 1, 2021.
And as for the money, well Giuliani wasn’t being paid by Trump but he wasn’t working for free. It turns out that several people were trying to get marie Yovanovich fired, some of whom were corrupt Ukrainians and some of whom were Russian assets. And they all knew that Trump and Giuliani were trying to sabotage Joe Biden’s campaign. So which ones paid Giuliani? No matter who it was, it’s not too hard to surmise that they were paying him on behalf of Trump at least as much as themselves and Trump and Giuliani almost certainly knew it.
He always gets someone else to pick up his tab. Always.
This should be a crime. Preying on vulnerable populations with these idiotic conspiracy theories, many times for profit, is just cruel and inhuman:
Last year, I was working on a coronavirus story for the PBS NewsHour when my father texted me a since-removed YouTube video titled, “How to wipe out the corona virus THT in 10 min.” A chiropractor with a graying beard named John Bergman — with more than half a million YouTube subscribers and an office in Huntington Beach — said that taking vitamin C and drinking hot water would kill the virus and that the pandemic media coverage was “designed to take away your rights.”
Since the pandemic began, Latinos like my dad, a Mexican immigrant, have been hit with a torrent of false claims about COVID-19 on social media, including that the pandemic is a hoax. When I called Papi to urge him to wear a mask, his mind was made up: He said I was brainwashed. He didn’t believe my mother, who is a doctor, about COVID risks, either. I was frightened for his safety and angry at the people preying on Latinos’ learned distrust of authorities.
Latinos, like other communities of color, have long been targets of inhumane medical policies and practices, such as the sterilization of a third of Puerto Rico’s women between the 1930s and 1970s and of thousands of California Latinos. Our hard-earned skepticism can be an asset, but in the pandemic, it has contributed to high infection and death rates in the Latino community.
Now, Latinos lag behind in vaccination rates, driven in part by Spanish-language disinformation deliberately targeting us on Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and more. The conspiracy forces that tried to depress Latino voter turnout with lies about the election now appear to be using internet platforms to tell Latinos the vaccine contains a microchip, alters DNA or causes stillbirths. The misinformation then spreads through word of mouth.
María Teresa Kumar, the chief executive of Voto Latino, said vaccine disinformation is meant to further erode Latinos’ trust in institutions. “It’s the most morbid form of voter suppression,” she said. Even her Colombian American mother, who works in elder care, feared the vaccine because she heard it wasn’t safe for human use. Kumar had to point out to her that she made sure Kumar got every single vaccine when she was a little girl.
Kumar recently co-founded the Latino Anti-Disinformation Lab, which found that 51% of unvaccinated Latinos don’t plan to or are hesitant to get vaccinated. For Spanish-dominant speakers, it’s 67%. The lab aims to sway the one-quarter of respondents who are on the fence.
“Once somebody has consumed misinformation such that they’ve internalized it and formed an assessment, it’s extraordinarily difficult and resource-intensive to get them to change their mind,” said Angelo Carusone, chief executive of Media Matters and the lab’s co-founder.
Days after Papi texted me, my Mexican abuela, who lives in San Diego and speaks little English, sent me a WhatsApp message with a Spanish-language video claiming the virus was created by Big Pharma for profit. She was reluctant to be vaccinated because, she said, “they’re experimenting on us.”
But my aunt made her an appointment and persuaded her to get a shot, pointing out that doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers were vaccinated. My aunt, who runs a Mexican restaurant, says only two of her 40 employees took advantage of early vaccines for food industry workers. “They were like, ‘If you’re going to make me get it, I’ll quit,’” she said.
Another relative told me she won’t get the vaccine because she’s suspicious of accelerated clinical trials and doesn’t want to be a “guinea pig,” even though scientists did not cut any corners.
Last year, my Puerto Rican aunt emailed me and dozens of others urging us to watch a bogus conspiracy theory video, “Plandemic,” claiming that masks “activate” COVID-19 and that vaccines “kill millions.” YouTube and Facebook removed it but only after it was viewed at least 8 million times.
I wrote to my aunt, fact-checking the video and expressing my frustration with fraudsters preying on her worries. She thanked me and said, “I forgot to check who was creating this. My cousin sent it to me through Facebook.” She said she’s been wary of official information because the government had done a “poor job preventing and controlling the disease.”
Systemic neglect, police brutality and violent immigration enforcement don’t exactly encourage Latinos’ trust. But there are ways for communities to fight back.
Social media campaigns like #VacunateYa are working to dispel myths with facts. #YaBastaFacebook is urging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to “close the Spanish content moderation gap.” (One analysis after the 2020 election found that Facebook put warnings on half of false English-language posts but only on 10% of Spanish-language misinformation.)
PEN America has released English and Spanish guides for media literacy and how to talk to family and friends who share bad information. “You have to bring a level of empathy,” said Nora Benavidez, PEN America’s director of free expression.
We’re all vulnerable to being tricked. But it is particularly deadly when conspiracy theorists are targeting Latino essential workers who have sustained the American economy during the pandemic. We have to look out for one another — and use our familial connectedness and skepticism to fight those trying to use those strengths against us.
This makes me furious on a moral level. It also makes me furious on a political level. The Democrats really need to up their game in the Latino communities and not just for electoral reasons. Many of these folks are the working class of America and if they really want to help them they need to focus on more specific outreach.
I hope that the Biden economic plans are successful and these folks feel the results and are able to regain some trust in government and the Democratic Party. Maybe they will be in a better position to reject these inane conspiracy theories if they can trust political leaders a bit more.
You love to see it:
If there’s one good thing Trump did it was make it impossible for the sanctimonious phonies on the right to clutch their pearls over mild swear words. Sometimes nothing else will do, particularly when talking about them.