Altercation: Lonely Are the Brave (Also the Sane)

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Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

Rep. Denver Riggleman spoke with a reporter in his office in Washington, February 26, 2020.

This Times story about “One Republican’s Lonely Fight Against a Flood of Disinformation” by Jeremy Peters is quite good. First, it’s inspirational. Here, after all, was Denver Riggleman, a freshman Republican (and former Air Force intelligence officer) speaking on the floor of the House about QAnon: “Will we stand up and condemn a dangerous, dehumanizing and convoluted conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has assessed with high confidence is very likely to motivate some domestic extremists?” Riggleman had already lost his G.O.P. primary race for re-election, of course, but not for this. His sin, rather, was officiating at a gay wedding. Now he is engaged in a crusade against what the Times calls “radicalism within the G.O.P.” but what I would call “mass insanity coupled with cynical dishonesty”—which explains how a recent poll from Suffolk University and USA Today could have found that “58 percent of Trump voters wrongly believed the storming of the Capitol was mostly inspired by far-left radicals associated with antifa and involved only a few Trump supporters.” Aside from that one “radicalism” euphemism, the Peters piece’s portrayal of the Republican Party is accurate, and the efforts of one of its genuinely conservative members to address this—and put himself and his life, alas, on the line—is heartening; inspirational, even. What would be nice would be if the truths were reflected everywhere in the paper, instead of forever pretending that Republicans are on the level when they spout their lies, conspiracy theories, and racist dog whistles.

THIS OTHER PIECE, HOWEVER, on FiveThirtyEight purports to explain “Why Being ‘Anti-Media’ Is Now Part of the GOP Identity” and explains: “Part of this is because Republicans are often more vocal in their criticism of the media and have long perceived it as having a liberal bias. But now they are also more likely to say that being ‘anti-media’ is part of their political identity, and this is likely driving the staggering gap in media trust that we are seeing.” Note that nowhere in this piece does its author note that by being “anti-media,” the GOP is being anti-truth, even anti-reality. It’s just a thing one can choose to be, like a Deadhead or a fan of cubism or Willa Cather. But in this case, anyway, the media, as Marshall McLuhan did not say, is the messenger. Reality, to the degree it can be represented, is the message.

I took a look at these two studies, linked below, which the author of the FiveThirtyEight piece references. One compares left and right when weighing “the consequences of online partisan media.” It is interesting as an academic exercise, but irrelevant in the real world. When you look at the size and reach of the right-wing media and that of the progressive media, they are, for practical purposes, incomparable. This is, incredible as it may seem, even truer on social media than print and broadcast. (Kudos, alas, for not treating the mainstream media as the “progressive” alternative to Fox et al., as is so frequently the case with the “so-called liberal media” when discussed elsewhere.)

In the second study, we find that the general public ranks PBS and NPR highest of all news sources when it comes to trustworthiness, while Fox comes in at number eight, below ABC for some reason, but above every other network as well as USA Today. In the study, Breitbart is seen as slightly more reliable than Vox or Mother Jones. What does this mean? For starters, that lying, conspiratorial crap has the same or greater value in the American “marketplace of ideas” as actual facts, and that we need to start treating public-opinion data as infected by this, and Rupert Murdoch and all Fox employees as the equivalent of the moral and intellectual contaminants.

There seems to be some confusion as to whether to take notice or make mockery of the fact that the eminent University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has announced his conclusion that most of the people who took part in the murderous January 6 assault and attempted coup “were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.” They were not, alas, motivated by economic insecurity.

Well, yes, we knew this. We could tell from the “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts and presence of so many people with KKK-style backgrounds. We knew it when the media were promoting the same nonsense in the so-called “Tea Party.” We knew it about Pat Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns. I wrote in Lying in State that “In reality, Tea Partiers were far more motivated by fear and anger over the belief that ‘real Americans’—meaning white conservative Christians like themselves—were losing the country to the kind of people who made up Obama’s victorious coalition. Their concern, as enunciated by the conservative pundit and early advocate of what would become Trumpism, Pat Buchanan, was the transformation of the United States into a ‘multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual “universal nation” whose avatar is Barack Obama,’ and how to stop it.” (I footnoted Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s 2016 study The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism for its research into the former.) So I see that Mr. Pape, who has made a career of studying international terrorism, has come to the conclusion in the Times that “If all of this is really rooted in the politics of social change, then we have to realize that it’s not going to be solved—or solved alone—by law enforcement agencies. This is political violence, not just ordinary criminal violence, and it is going to require both additional information and a strategic approach.”

This is all to the good. In the past, Pape’s research on suicide bombers led him to what the Times called “a remarkable discovery: Most of the bombers were secular, not religious, and had killed themselves not out of zealotry, but rather in response to military occupations.” We knew that, too. But if the job of the careful scholar is to provide evidence for or against whatever it is we think we already “know,” then let’s salute Professor Pape for breaking through the usual wall of contempt that smug smarty-pants reporters tend to have for such scholarship and move on to “What now?”

This Week in Cancel Culture

• Florida GOP pushes bill that would allow college students “to record classroom lectures without a professor’s consent … to use in preparation of a civil or criminal case against a higher-education institution.” (Miami Herald)

• A bipartisan group of House legislators reintroduced a bill on Monday calling for a State Department assessment of lesson plans created by the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). (Jewish Insider)

• Top court allows minister to withhold Israel Prize over BDS accusations. (Note: Professor Oded Goldreich supports only boycotting Israeli universities located in the occupied West Bank, not Israel proper.) (Haaretz)

• Also, congrats to those San Francisco schools that have decided to keep the names of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington now that the damage has already been done and they have given Tucker and Laura Ingraham their thousands of hours of whining about silly liberals. (New York Times)

I don’t know that I can blame this on the internet, but a lot of silly people got excited this week about a comically foolish op-ed published by NBC News that attacked Paul Simon for not being Bob Dylan. In the olden days, that probably would never have been published. It would have been rejected for its transparent idiocy. But idiocy, if it’s the right kind, is today’s clickbait, and outrage-inspired clicks bring just as much advertising revenue as clever and life-affirming ones. So NBC published it (and I am not linking to it), even though no intelligent person, much less a competent editor, could likely defend it. I am, instead, linking to this fascinating interview that Simon gave to Dick Cavett in which he explained the creative process that led to the writing of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” This somehow led me down a rabbit hole that landed me in Lou Reedville below. I hope some readers enjoy it as much as I did.

Sweet Jane: An Altercation Tutorial

• Here is Lou Reed doing “Sweet Jane” in 1973 at the Academy of Music and at the Olympia Theater in Paris, sort of, at the same time.

• Here’s Lou doing it in 1984 at the Capitol Theater.

• Here is Lou explaining the song’s secret chord to Elvis Costello.

• And here are the Cowboy Junkies doing it on The Tonight Show in 1989.

• Here’s the official Cowboy Junkies “Sweet Jane” video that I guess came out around the same time.

• Here, again, are the same Cowboy Junkies doing it somewhere in Canada in 2015.

• Here is Margo Timmons talking about doing the song on something called “Behind the Vinyl.”

• And OMG, here is Miley Cyrus doing it on MTV in October of last year.