They know it’s wrong and they don’t care
Early in my tenure here, I wrote about the right wing trafficking in lies as standard procedure. Back in the day, there were the pass-it-on emails I received filled with lies, distortions, and smears. It was the kind of propaganda fathers warned kids against in the early 1960s when it was the “commies” threatening to undermine the U.S. from within. Decades later, it was (TPM) “hundreds of thousands of mailers with false information about voter registration sent by Americans for Prosperity” in 2014.
There was a pattern of misinformation. Larry Haake, the general registrar in Chesterfield County, Virginia, told an area paper, “Most of their information is wrong. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.”
“It Was All a Lie,” Stuart Stevens wrote about his former political party. Republicans had become the people of the lie. And it wasn’t recently.
Marcy Wheeler drives home that point in a column for The New Republic:
There was some surprise on Sunday when vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance argued that the “American media totally ignored” the plight of Springfield and Vance’s own claims about immigration “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.” He seemed to suggest that it was OK to use a false story if it made people pay attention. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” he thundered to Dana Bash, “then that’s what I’m gonna do.”
Even before Donald Trump screeched about cats and dogs on the debate stage last week, Vance took to X to encourage his followers to keep spreading debunked claims about Haitians eating cats: “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.” Such racist claims were worthwhile, Vance asserted, because it was “confirmed” that “a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here,” a reference to the accidental death of an 11-year-old boy in a car accident with a legally admitted but unlicensed Haitian immigrant driver last year.
In other words: It was worthwhile to spread cat memes, Vance argued, because it brought attention to other claims that are also false (claims that the boy’s father has begged people to stop making).
Vance’s proud adoption of spreading false memes may have shocked people. But if you’ve been watching these people as closely as I have over the years, you know it’s not new. The ploy of using false memes to direct mainstream media attention has a storied tradition. For years, right-wing internet influencers—self-described trolls—have deliberately aimed to use “shitposting” to get the mainstream media to cover their favorite topics.
Marcy goes on to describe (as only she could) the trolling culture of far-right chat rooms on 4Chan and Reddit where trolls work up false memes, some humorous, to seed right-wing propaganda into the mainstream in a way that news organizations find they have to cover.
Vance, Trump’s blogger turned senator running mate, may not have grown out of the far-right chat rooms to which Trump’s son got added, but his ethic is the same: to use seemingly harmless memes normalizing false claims to force the mainstream media to adopt a far-right frame for an event, as has happened in Springfield. Imagine what we’re in store for over the next 50 days.
“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care” still applies. Truth is irrelevant. Who gets hurt is irrelevant. Achieving the goal is the only thing that matters, as the Third Reich’s chief propagandist knew: “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent; its task is to lead to success.” Success in this context is returning Donald Trump to the White House where he and his Project 2025 allies can reduce the republic to a Potemkin democracy and carry out a nationwide campaign of intimidation and deportation against nonwhite immigrants.
I’m reminded of one of the opening scenes in Lawrence of Arabia. It’s meant to foreshadow that Lawrence has a taste for pain. He playfully puts out a match with his fingers. Another soldier who tries it shouts, “It damn hurts.” Certainly, Lawrence responds.
“Well, what’s the trick, then?” the singed corporal asks.
“The trick,” says Lawrence, “is not minding that it hurts.”
Trump and our extremist neighbors don’t mind if the country gets hurt either. No trick.