Believing crazy shit helps fascists win.
This is a simple article with a basic hypothesis: Donald Trump’s administration has built an effective media manipulation machine that breaks the coherence of reality and trustability of information to a degree that is shocking and devastating. Or, at least, they want to. OR, the media itself has inadvertently built that machine and Trump is the great beneficiary of it.
Either way, in any of those scenarios there is one important takeaway for everyone in the opposition; for liberals, conservatives, media staffers and everyone else opposing his potentially Republic-ending takeover of American government. We must do one simple thing: Focus exclusively on things that have actually, publicly, visibly really happened.
Let me give you two examples.
Example 1: There are rumors flying that Trump yelled at and degraded the Presidents of Mexico and Australia. These rumors are unsourced, like a lot of news stories about Trump have been. In fact, these unsourced and frightening stories have been coming at such a high velocity that Vox wrote an entire piece discussing the unprecedented amount of leaks in the young Trump administration. While it is likely that loyal government staffers who believe in conservatism but fear an unhinged President are going to the press with troubling information to pressure and build opposition to an unstable leader, do you know what else sounds pretty likely to me? A deliberate communications effort to get widely reported a story of a xenophobic strongman that plays very well with the base (he told off Mexico, yeah!), spins the opposition into yet another tiring and distracting frenzy and gives the administration yet another example of a vindictive media using unreliable information to attack along an unverifiable front.
Example 2: During the chaos at American airports last weekend, after the immigrant-and-refugee-banning executive order was issued, we heard — frantically and in real time — everything from planes full of people were being pressured into giving up their green card to U.S. Marshals would refusing to enforce federal court orders. Now, this second charge — the more widely reported of the two — would amount to something of a minor coup, but a coup none the less. This was reported, and widely shared on Twitter, by local journalists and lawyers on scene at airports talking to low-level officials relaying information from their boss. What we didn’t have — and still don’t — is court orders to send in U.S. Marshals or statements of refusal from the Marshals themselves… or a good legal understanding, as a general public, of how U.S. Marshals even work. We simply don’t know if this actually happened. Yet again we went down the path of freaking out about a potential but unverified injustice while the Trump administration pointed and said, look at all these lies, don’t believe them. Their base doesn’t believe it, and every time a major accusation ends up being wrong the persuadable middle becomes less likely to buy in, as well.
So, here’s my point. A lot of terrible stuff really is happening, and the threat level is enormous. However, as many people have rightly noted, fascism and evil thrive off chaos and depend on a public divorced from a trustable, shared set of public facts and reality. We need to reject furthering that chaos or that incoherence. No more anonymous sources about Trump’s temper behind closed doors, or Kushner’s inability to control him. If you can’t get the U.S. Marshal’s on the record or a piece of paper from a judge ordering them to do something in the first place, hold back on reporting it. No more rumors of anti-LGTB executive orders that ultimately don’t exist, wasting energy and proving that, sometimes, Trump is right and the media is out to get him.
When something really happens — when Trump signs an executive order, nominates someone to a position, or when an administration official or government representative from any department actually says or does something destructive, we should show up and we should fight. But, for the sake of undermining the potential threat of fascism and authoritarian chaos, we all have to stop feeding off of every crazy-making story built on rumors, leaks, unsourced reporting and evil thing that are about to happen according to a leaked memo from senior administration sources.
Looking to do your part? One way to get involved is to read the Indivisible Guide, which is written by former congressional staffers and is loaded with best practices for making Congress listen.
