Right-wing chain emails stopped arriving regularly a decade ago. The pass-it-on spam once showed up after multiple forwards, sometimes with as many as 75 email addresses attached (blind copy seemed a mystery to conservatives). My collection of over 200 still sits in the “Spam – Right wing” folder where I send it. Early on in this space, I commented:
Now, out of those 200 chain emails, maybe three or four are not outright lies, distortions, and smears. Easily debunked on Google in the time it takes to attach your email list and forward to all your friends. They are lies and, deep down, right wingers know it. Yet they pass them along dutifully, almost gleefully. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
The earliest in the collection date from 2005. They were a clue to where Donald Trump would later take the country. So long as the in-box propaganda smeared people your dad or crazy uncle despised, they did not care if they were spreading lies. (Maybe Russian ones?) If phony stories about liberal “attrocities” made them angry and kept them angry, they would, like any Real American™, dutifully pass them on so their friends would get and stay angry too. Trump took the model live aided by social media and bona fide Russian propaganda.
But the right-wing spam machine has not gone totally silent, the New York Times finds:
A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all.
It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email.
Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.
The Times signed up for the campaign lists of 390 senators and congressman to revisit what Snopes.com prophetically filed years ago under Inboxer Rebellion. Hyperbole in fundraising pitches is standard fare for both major parties, Maggie Astor reports:
But Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.
“The relatively small number of false statements from Democrats were mostly about abortion,” Astor notes. But the Times review reveals “how ubiquitous misinformation has become among Republicans.” But you knew that.
The people behind campaign emails have “realized the more extreme the claim, the better the response,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. “The more that it elicits red-hot anger, the more likely people donate. And it just contributes to the perversion of our democratic process. It contributes to the incivility and indecency of political behavior.”
As I’ve observed for over a decade, this is nothing new. Except the in-box lies were once more anonymous. I suspected for years that some were being created somewhere in Russia. I have even more reason to suspect that now.
Emily Thorson, an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse, notes that given the medium’s targeting, minds are not likely to be changed by the emails, but the misinformation is more likely to be accepted more uncritically by recipients because they come from elected officials. The 2020 election-rigging lie spread that way, not “because of random videos on Facebook but because it was a coherent message echoed by a lot of elites,” Thorson said. “Those are the ones that we need to be most worried about.”
Thorsen gives the GOP base too much credit for having any critical tinking. This stuff has been circulating since before Snopes cranked up in 1994. A couple of generations of Americans have had critical thinking conditioned out of them to the point that Pizzagate and QAnon sprouted in ground carefully made fertile for conspiracy theories.