Why bother checking facts when they don’t matter?
The clip below of “Good Liar” Jason Selvig live-debunking a dude at the NRA convention posted Tuesday. Watch how swiftly the interviewee pivots away from his firmly held truth.
Dana Milbank this morning expands on the theme. What a glorious feeling to be released from the bonds of space, time, and reality (Washington Post):
Beginning in the hours after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Tex., right-wing social media churned out every manner of conspiracy theory: The shooter was an illegal immigrant! No, he was transgender! Or maybe the massacre was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the anti-gun left! And the grieving families are paid crisis actors!
Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.) went for the hat trick. Gozar tweeted that the Uvalde gunman was “a transsexual leftist illegal alien.” Hours later, he deleted it.
On Fox Business, Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican and prominent advocate of Ivermectin dewormer as a covid-19 therapy, blamed the shooting on critical race theory. “We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools; now we’re teaching wokeness,” he said. “We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.” Reminded by host Neil Cavuto that school shootings were happening long before CRT became a (Republican-invented) issue, Johnson added the claim that CRT was “going on under the radar for quite some time.”
Then came the ubiquitous Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who, fresh from a GOP primary victory, repeated in a live Facebook broadcast the false narrative that the perpetrator was trans (“wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing”). She also nodded to the conspiracy belief that the shooter couldn’t have afforded the weapons and therefore anti-gun forces must have given him the guns to create a pretext for gun confiscation. “He must have really been saving up,” she said.
Having a rational discussion of serious issues in the age of truthiness is pointless, says Milbank, not because there is no broad consensus on many, but because one side is “hijacked by disinformation.”
Republicans share 200-500 percent more fake news than Democrats, an MIT study finds. Researcher Brian Guay tells Milbank the amount of bullshit floating around the right-wing disinformation ecosystem is part of the problem. Guay believes Republicans share it more because they encounter it more. (“Flood the zone with shit,” yes?)
Milbank concludes:
If you saw “evidence” everywhere you turned, from people you trusted, that the country is being run by socialist pedophiles bent on disarming the populace, extinguishing your race and destroying the United States, you’d probably be outraged, too. At the very least, you might not be in the best frame of mind for a constructive conversation about ending gun violence.
Sean Illing call ours “an age of manufactured nihilism.” He wrote, “The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.” This makes it easier to follow a leader who will tell them what to believe.
Guay and Illing credit the right with too much good faith. They insist on being right even when they are wrong. They insist on having won even when they have lost. They insist on lying in the face of contradictory facts. They insist on spreading untruths that reinforce their sense of self and their sense that enemies are beasts. Fact-checking is for losers. Not for those who are meant by God to rule.
People who live a lie, teach lies, and defend lies, find it very easy to lie.
The right’s propaganda machine has conditioned the conservative base to accept and spread bullshit for decades. It is now generational.
Some of us are old enough to have seen Superman on black-and-white TV defending truth, justice, and the American Way. That was then. The saddest part of pass-it-on propaganda and AFP disinformation is that the people who raised us at the height of the Cold War warned us that commies would use propaganda and disinformation to destroy America from within. Now, many of those same Real Americans™ consider trafficking in propaganda and disinformation good, clean fun for the whole family. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
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