Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) speaks during a press conference on the 21st Century Free Speech Act that she has co-authored, April 28, 2022.
If I have a single cause in life—aside from my insistence on the proper use of “was” and “were,” together with that of “less” and “fewer”—it’s my apparently quixotic quest to demand contextual information be included in news media accounts of political (and other) events. I wrote about this last week as it related to The New York Times’ (admirable) commitment to long-form investigations. Today, I’m inspired by a rather obscure story, also reported by the Times about a fight going on in the Department of Homeland Security.
But first, some meta-media context: As David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) pointed out in a tweet, when people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg speak of “free speech,” what they mean is “speech” in the control of the wealthiest people in the world.
The second piece of meta-context to always keep in mind when reading about U.S. politics is how deeply the contemporary right wing is embedded with the enemies of democracy, including its murderous dictators. It’s not just that CPAC is having its convention in Victor Orban’s Hungary. Nor is it just that Fox News is a more effective propaganda tool for Vladimir Putin than RT ever was. It’s also that the Republicans keep nominating candidates who are either personally, financially, or via their staffs playing for Putin’s team as well. It wasn’t just Trump and the people with whom he peopled the government. It was, as Steve Schmidt revealed this week, also John McCain, something that was originally reported by The Nation back during the 2008 campaign but lied about by the campaign and ignored by the McCain-besotted mainstream media. That article noted, and Schmidt has now confirmed, that “despite McCain’s tough talk, behind the scenes his top advisers have cultivated deep ties with Russia’s oligarchy—indeed, they have promoted the Kremlin’s geopolitical and economic interests, as well as some of its most unsavory business figures, through greedy cynicism and geopolitical stupor.” (If one wants to be really cruel or learn something important about the psychology of the Washington press corps, go back and read the loving coverage offered to McCain in real time. I wrote about that here, again, back in 2008, and here, two years later. I’ve got more, but that’s enough for now.)
The third and among the most important meta-media-related factors never to forget in contemporary political reporting is the mass addiction of contemporary conservatives to the practice of “bald-faced lying.” (I’m using the term in its philosophical senses.) This compulsion is evident even among many who profess distaste for Trump’s brand of dishonesty. Look, for instance, at this Peggy Noonan column in The Wall Street Journal. In support of her nutty contention that a leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion—which is not even against the law—is somehow the equivalent of a murderous insurrection designed to overthrow the government of the United States, Noonan argues, “Other high court decisions that liberalized the social order—desegregation of schools, elimination of prayer in the schools, interracial marriage, gay marriage—were followed by public acceptance, even when the rulings were very unpopular.” I suppose it is conceivable that Noonan—a regular not only in the Journal but also on NBC News’s Meet the Press—is so ignorant of history that she is unaware that the case she picks first—desegregation of schools—was met with what was proudly called “massive resistance” in the South up to and including one district in Virginia shutting down its entire public school system rather than comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Now, Noonan may just be nuts. There is certainly evidence to support this view. But she has editors and copy editors and other people—researchers, I imagine—who help her produce her columns. Most likely, all of these people have gone to college and are at least minimally familiar with the history of the United States in the second half of the 20th century. So the only explanation for her ridiculous contention is that Peggy feels she has a license to lie. And it doesn’t even matter if her readers know she is lying. That’s the beauty of the bald-faced lie. The truth doesn’t matter. What matters are the politics and in this case, it’s a neat combination of racism and anti-feminism tied together by know-nothingism: a pretty good, albeit partial, description of the contemporary Republican Party. (I’ve no space to get into personal corruption, for example.)
Ditto the stuff about editors, etc., for this ridiculous Ross Douthat (whom I usually defend) column. As for this comically foolish Andrew Sullivan intervention, well, if you’re surprised by it, then bless you, you’ve been lucky enough to have not been paying attention in the very first place.
But back to the demand for lying. The need to lie is understood to be ingrained in contemporary conservative politics. That’s why they are “ecstatic” about Musk’s takeover of Twitter and promise to “open it up.” You see that in this Times story mentioned above about the Department of Homeland Security. Republican lawmakers are engaging in a collective conniption fit over the appointment of Nina Jankowicz, the author of How to Be a Woman Online, to lead an advisory board at the DHS on the threat of disinformation.
“Within hours of the announcement,” the paper reports, “Republican lawmakers began railing against the board as Orwellian, accusing the Biden administration of creating a ‘Ministry of Truth’ to police people’s thoughts. Two professors writing an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal noted that the abbreviation for the new Disinformation Governance Board was only ‘one letter off from K.G.B.,’ the Soviet Union’s security service.”
Let us note, as DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas has done, that this tiny office enjoys “no operational authority or capability and that it would not spy on Americans.” That doesn’t matter. What does matter is, first of all, right-wingers don’t like Jankowicz, who, the Times tells us, “has suggested in her book and in public statements that condescending and misogynistic content online can prelude violence and other unlawful acts offline—the kinds of threat the board was created to monitor.” She “has called for social media companies and law enforcement agencies to take stiffer action against online abuse.” But the right-wingers also don’t like the idea that the board will monitor “disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran, or other adversaries such as transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling organizations.” Republicans love disinformation, especially the kind that comes from Russia and makes its way into Republican presidential campaigns. In fact, they rarely use any other kind.
I guess I need to give a high five to the Times reporters for including this crucial bit of recent historical context. “The department joined the F.B.I. in releasing terrorism bulletins warning that falsehoods about the 2020 election and the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, could embolden domestic extremists.” Trump would likely not have been elected president without the 2016 falsehoods, and he and the party he has under his thumb are now hailing those “domestic extremists” who sought to take over the government and murder his vice president on January 6 (with AIPAC now supporting the Republican congressmen who voted to overturn the election, I cannot help myself from adding).
Republicans know they cannot win without lying. And they know that most of the time, the media will “both sides” their lies to the point where citizens cannot discern what’s true and what’s not (to the degree that they are sufficiently engaged with old-fashioned politics even to care). And so Republicans resist all attempts to address the issue, no matter how vulnerable it leaves the rest of us to violent extremists, both from within and without. It’s actually amazing to me, as I write these words, the degree to which conservatives have become virtually carbon copies of the enemies that so excited them during the Cold War. I haven’t watched this crappy movie for a long time, but if it were being made honestly today, it would be called I Was a Republican … well, the FBI is not allowed to look into this kind of thing either.
We are really screwed.
I saw two shows recently that ought to give hope to those of us who worry about our ability to keep on keeping on as we find ourselves getting on. One was an 85th birthday celebration for my fellow Upper West Sider and onetime CUNY professor Ron Carter. Credited with having played on 2,200 albums, 60 of which he was the leader on, Carter had a lot of friends join him at Carnegie Hall this past Tuesday. (One might ask, “How long has this been going on?” since his friends have been honoring him since 1995.) Tuesday’s show had three iterations, a trio, a quartet, and an octet, the latter featuring six, count ’em, upright basses. One interesting thing about this show was learning just how “big in Japan” Carter is. He’s been given the country’s highest honor and was feted Tuesday night by its ambassador. Here’s the trio doing an NPR Tiny Desk Concert.
The previous week, I caught the queen of New York cabaret, Karen Akers, doing her first solo concert at Birdland, where she did a retrospective of her career of songs by the likes of Edith Piaf and Stephen Sondheim for a show she called “Water Under the Bridge.” Her voice has deepened over the decades and so has her connection to her audience, which could not have responded more enthusiastically. The evening could hardly have felt more intimate or been more moving. Here she is with “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”
