In this post-truth era in which we find ourselves, it is somehow refreshing to hear Ohio Senator and Yale-educated, faux hillbilly J.D. Vance say the quiet part out loud.
In an off-the-rails interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance said, regarding the false rumors of pet-gobbling Haitian migrants, that, “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
Heavens to Betsy, there is so much to unpack here, but I am delighted that Vance finally told the truth about the untruths. Facts no longer matter in what passes for political discourse these days. We have known this ever since Vance’s running mate descended down that golden escalator at Trump Tower, dragging all of us with him to the hellish depths of falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
To escape this quicksand of manufactured memes and misinformation will take an effort of vigilance for which the exhausted American populace have no appetite.
One only has to recap the latest Trump-Harris debate to see how a pet-eating lie can bubble up to a major party’s presidential candidate’s passionate defense of said lie in front of more than 67 million viewers. No surprise that in the wake of the debate arose the all-too-predictable threats of violence and intimidation in the supposed pet cemetery city of Springfield, Ohio.
To Trump and his posse, this insult to Haitian migrants (and to Latinos in Aurora, Colorado, and everywhere) was yet another strategic injection of racist hate into the bloodstream of America. His supporters no doubt cheered while Harris and those of us outdated proles who prefer facts — not concepts of facts — shook out collective heads and sighed.
In a project that is probably not good for my mental health, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of trying to understand how we got to the place where, for example, 25 percent of Americans believe that it is “probably” or “definitely” the case that the FBI initiated the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. (A good place to start is The Coming Storm, an excellent series on BBC Sounds.)
That December 2023 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll seems kind of quaint next to a 2021 PRRI poll that found that 15 percent of our nation believes that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
This is QAnon rubbish perpetuated online in the darkest corners of 4chan, 8chan, and elsewhere, where actual, not imagined, pedophiles probably do exist. Spend enough time hunched over your laptop, and the next thing you know you are outing Devil-worshipping, Satanic witches like Hillary Clinton and driving from North Carolina with a loaded long rifle to rescue the captive children held in a basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC. Except the pizza place did not have a basement or any child hostages, and you end up in prison like the insurrectionists of January 6.
Or, with enough time online, you find yourself in Dallas awaiting the arrival of John Kennedy Jr. to save the republic from the cabal of George Soros-controlled puppet masters.
Or you might end up in Charlottesville brandishing tiki torches while shouting, “Jews will not replace us!”
Or you might enter a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and murder nine African Americans who had just welcomed you to their congregation. You killed them because you had been marinated in white supremacy online and you wanted to start a race war.
In a bracing study of the dark web, Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics, author and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve writes, “Employees of social media companies have to decide how much of their work they want to hand over to people who want to subvert democracy. Republicans who abhor racism have to decide whether they’re willing to take personal responsibility to kick fascist infiltrators out of their party. Liberals have to decide whether they’re willing to do anything to make the change they want to see in the world besides post about it online.”
This is wishful thinking.
X is owned by a conspiracy-spreading billionaire Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. He apparently does not mind doing his part to create alternate narratives. The Republican Party is controlled by another billionaire who lies with such frequency that one needs a supercomputer to fact-check him.
As for liberals, they have to realize that truth might not matter anymore. The prevailing narrative does not have to be fact-based. Sadly, in the end, it might be the basest of all “realities” that prevails.