Fake News, Real Policy

Need to justify your solution? Make up the problem!

The last installment covered how right-wing politicians and media outlets act like they are being attacked by the left wing in order to justify their own attacks in “response” to the fabricated slight. The reaction to Trump’s conviction encapsulates this perfectly: With no evidence that the justice system was rigged, right wing politicians vowed to rig it in the future against Democrats.

There will be another aspect to this act of fabrication if the right wing returns to power: They will use fake news to create fake problems that call for real right-wing policies to solve them.

Trump Says Crime Statistics are Fake News

Donald Trump, and most right-wing politicians, go to great lengths to come across as “tough on crime” and the “law and order” candidate. They do this by waxing poetic about how much crime there is so that people feel unsafe so that they will back the candidate’s criminal justice policies.

This is one of the clearest examples of the Completed Breitbart Doctrine at play. They want to enact right-wing policies. They do that by creating a culture of fear. And they do that by skewing voters’ reality about crime.

This isn’t anything new.

The development, though, is in just how brazen the right wing has become in its skewing of reality, how entitled they have become to have their alternate reality taken seriously, and how completely they’ve closed themselves off from the real world.

Just look at the recent interview that Trump did with TIME Magazine. During it, Trump was presented with the recently-released statistics gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which indicate that crime has dropped in the past couple of years. Now, these stats aren’t perfect — they only include reported crimes. Worse, they are brought to the FBI by local law enforcement agencies and, in 2021, the FBI changed how these agencies made their reports and some agencies struggled with it. However, the stats are generally accepted as reliable and have been collected for decades, so they’ve often been used to monitor trends about crime in the U.S.

But Trump didn’t attack the stats on their merits. As expected, he just called the numbers “fake news” and “fudged”:

Violent crime is going down throughout the country. There…