We’re in the fourth quarter of what promises to be the most contentious general election in recent history. There are, both locally and nationally, no vigorous policy debates. Some voters can see through the propaganda. Others voters will cast ballots based on what the pundits have called vibes. Both groups will vote hoping the results will lead to their preferred scenario.
There are supposedly another set of voters who remain undecided. These humans have been elevated to princeling status by those in the media who see elections as a horse race. A minor-minority of humans are either lying (as an attention-seeking device) or not planning on voting at all.
The attention paid to a tiny little gray band on bar graphs based on polling keeps the nation at large from hearing the details of what’s at stake. It also saves “serious” reporters from the task of dealing with the firehose of falsehoods currently in progress.
Fluffy-eating Haitians in Springfield were just a warm up for what's coming around election day. Photos of empty shelves once displaying toilet paper had more impact than most people realize, stoking a behind-the-scenes rebellion from Capitol Hill Democrats demanding invocation of the Taft-Hartley act to end the east coast dock workers strike.
Now we’re seeing a propaganda effort so full of always-outrageous allegations over the disaster relief in the Southeast run by the federal government that even Republican elected officials feel obligated to publicly refute.
All the fact checking in the world won’t stop this onslaught of truthlessness.
In fact, the onslaught against fact checking is on. Sen. JD Vance said something out loud during the Vice Presidential debate, complaining to the point of having his mic turned off over a moderator correcting a particularly egregious lie.
Here’s a headline on a recent New York Post column by Douglas Murray, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute: “‘Fact check’ has become just another word for censorship.”
There’s also a righteous amount of indignation over fact checking accompanied by buckets full of “what-aboutism” occurring in the Fox News universe.
This is going to be a tough sell, but –trust me on this one– the Trumpanistas will be repeating it 24/7.
Here’s Robin Abcarain at the Los Angeles Times:
As it happens, most Americans think debate moderators should fact-check. According to a June survey by Boston University’s College of Communication (my graduate school alma mater), more than two of every three Americans surveyed said “moderators should point out factual inaccuracies” in candidates’ statements during debates.
The survey did find a partisan discrepancy: While 81% of Democrats supported fact-checking in real time, 67% of Republicans did.
Gee, why do you suppose that is?
Get ready for the worst imaginable “news” threaded to real life events in coming weeks. As I write this, tropical storm / soon-to-be-hurricane Milton is headed toward the west coast of Florida. There’s a good chance the man who ordered the words “climate change” removed from state documents and textbooks will throw hinky allegations at the disaster relief efforts following the storm.
Jordan Zakarin at Progress Report:
The conspiracy theories are deranged in an almost boring way. They’re largely the kinds of paranoid fantasies typically advanced by liars and crackpots, conveniently attached to an unthinkable tragedy that makes anything feel possible. It’s one thing for lunatic nobodies around the country to be spouting them online; to have the GOP nominee for president saying them on TV and on the stump with almost zero pushback or recourse is unfathomable.
While the Trump campaign continues to hold rallies, it’s become hard to ignore his verbal and memory slip ups in recent weeks. Now that the Dear Leader has declared his opponent mentally unfit for office, it’s high time to understand that “every Republican accusation is a confession.”
It turns out that the president who played politics with disaster aid is the guy making the accusations.
The New York Times took a look at the former president’s speech patterns, noting that he’s become decidedly more absolutist and negative in his speeches. They quoted Ramin Setoodeh, author of a new book on Mr. Trump’s days hosting “The Apprentice.”
For instance, Mr. Trump could not remember the day in 2015 that NBC called to cut ties with him after he made derogatory remarks about Mexican immigrants. “He was very clear in terms of his memory of the shows,” Mr. Setoodeh said, even though his versions were often exaggerated or fabricated. “But when we went to more recent years, things got foggier.”
So foggy, in fact, that he forgot Mr. Setoodeh himself. After interviewing Mr. Trump in May 2021, Mr. Setoodeh returned in August. “When I said, ‘Do you remember sitting down with me?’ he said, ‘No, that was a long time ago,’” Mr. Setoodeh said. “It was like we started from square one. He started telling me the exact same stories. He didn’t remember what we had talked about. He didn’t remember me.”
The tidal waves of lies serve two purposes. The obvious one is to discourage people from participating in the electoral process via accusations about corrupt government. The other is to inject what Caroline Orr Bueno calls “unmitigated data voids” into public perception as she dug into a viral story about a FEMA official being beaten by residents in North Carolina.
Nearly 24 hours after the initial tweet alleging that a FEMA director had been physically assaulted by residents of a town near Asheville, NC, I could only find one published attempt to fact-check the unfounded claim, and it was published in an Indian newspaper that couldn’t verify nor debunk the claim. Of course, not every baseless claim on social media needs to be fact-checked — in some cases, doing so just gives more exposure to the misleading or false information while also adding unnecessary clutter to an already chaotic information environment — but the calculation changes when we’re dealing with violence-related viral social media posts in the midst of recovery efforts for a major natural disaster. At the time of this writing, the phrase “FEMA director beaten” was the 10th most searched item on Google — a metric that is indicative of widespread interest (and even more than that, confusion) about what actually happened or, more likely, what didn’t actually happen. .
This discrepancy — between the demand for information on a topic or event, and the supply of credible, relevant, and surfaceable information — creates what is known as a data deficit, which is a specific type of data void that often emerges during breaking news events and crisis or disaster situations. Data voids and data deficits — part of a larger threat that my colleague and I refer to as Informational Dark Spaces — are problematic for a number of reasons, including the fact that they are prime targets for exploitation by bad actors looking to spread disinformation by jumping on highly specific or obscure keywords and phrases, spreading them on social media, and then flooding websites with false and misleading information containing those keywords.
Uncertainty provides a nurturing environment for fear, the secret sauce of authoritarians everywhere. Make sure you’re not unknowingly spreading that fear by repeating it without first injecting a truth. Remember the truth sandwich and serve it up regularly.
Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer gave the best solution (for now) to the problem of untruthfulness:
We’ve been assured over the years that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But the Republican embrace of their right to lie is tearing apart the American Experiment, often with lethal results. Think about the thousands who died needlessly from COVID-19 misinformation, the people who lost their lives as a result of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection inspired by Trump’s election lies, or the growing death toll from climate disasters as millions, led by Trump and Vance, deny the science. We are suffering a national heart attack from listening to Trump instead of the Mayo Clinic.
And things could get a lot worse. A major hurricane is bearing down on vulnerable Tampa Bay even as the toxic lies from the last killer storm — seeking to blame immigrants for the suffering instead of Big Oil’s corporate greed — still echo. The whoppers you’re hearing in 2024 about refugees are setting the stage for a cruel deportation archipelago of detention camps in 2025.
The law is not going to save us from this fate. Only we, as citizens, can save ourselves. In following the letter of the law, a conservative movement based around disinformation is committing the moral crime of the century. If America as we know it is going to survive, they must be punished in the only place they can be, at the ballot box.