Noah Berger/AP Photo
A Black Lives Matter protester carries an American flag as tear gas fills the air outside the federal courthouse, July 21, 2020, in Portland, Oregon.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has termed as “performative authoritarianism” President Trump’s deployment of the Border Patrol and other federal agencies to Portland (the first, perhaps, of many cities). That’s a damn good description.
Trump is seeking to convince his followers that America’s Democratic-run cities (note: virtually every sizable American city is governed by elected Democrats) are so plagued by crime and protest that he “alone can save” them by deploying bash-’em-in-the-skull federal forces. It stands to reason that he hopes his injection of what Nancy Pelosi has called his “stormtroopers” into the mix will lead to scenes of violence that the media will convey to his sufficiently credulous compatriots. He may well have concluded that the only way he can win is to convince America that a new civil war is sweeping the nation, which requires him to stage a latter-day version of the attack on Fort Sumter, while laying the blame on the inhabitants of the fort themselves.
None of this would be possible if our right-wing media hadn’t long been engaged in continual industrial-strength distortion of the news. It has required outlets like Fox, not to mention Limbaugh, QAnon, and their ilk, to all but create such “threats” as the New Black Panther Party (Remember them? Even if they existed only on right-wing media?), link them to liberal permissiveness, and thereby to whichever Democrats they seek to bring down. Today, that Democrat is Joe Biden, in cahoots, if you believe this garbage, with antifa subversives and every stray Maoist in downstate Indiana.
As far back as the 1990s, I began using the term “Big Lie” to describe right-wing media’s depiction of reality, though some editors discouraged that term since any usage that called up the horrors of Nazism was considered an offensive overstatement. We’ve now passed the point where almost any usage except Big Lie fails to depict the conscious deception to racist and authoritarian ends that is the very purpose of such enterprises as Fox News. Rupert Murdoch may not have endowed a Joseph Goebbels School of Journalism, but he’s effectively re-created it.
