“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” — Steve Bannon
Every so often, someone accidentally copies me on a wingnut nonsense post. I’ll use one example, from a former colleague on our little town’s Selectboard. He posted some smirking bullet list of liberal outrages, and sent it to a dozen or twenty people. I recognized right off the bat that a bunch of the points were just nonsense, so I spent the next six hours doing my research to find credible data that demonstrated the fallacy of each of those assertions. Six hours. I then sent it to the guy who sent the message to me, and he replied, “Well, I just thought it was funny.”
He’d spent two minutes reading it, and another minute to build his mailing list to send it out another dozen times. I spent six hours to correct it, and sent my response just to him. And therein you can begin to see what we’re up against.
Fox News defended itself in a 2020 slander case by successfully arguing that “no reasonable viewer” would believe that Tucker Carlson was engaged in factual, literal reporting. “Carlson cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect.”
Rush Limbaugh: “First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.”
Donald Trump: “I play to people’s fantasies… a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”
Judicial review takes time. Accurate research and rebuttal takes time. Outrage and spectacle take no time at all. Just as reflexive statements like “common sense” and “libtards” and “DEI hire” take no time at all. No need to listen when all you have is a megaphone. I just got off the phone with a friend who said, “he’s a bully, and when someone stands up to him, he backs down.” But in the meantime, the administration lays off two thousand people from NOAA. Real lives, whose work has real professional implications for public safety. What they can break in a few hours will take us years to rebuild.
Another friend wrote me a couple of days ago. “When you’re in a street fight, you don’t assume the posture of a boxer. That’s a gentlemen’s game. You pick up a handful of dirt and throw it in your opponent’s eyes. and while they are blinded, you kick them in the balls.” It seems that facts, like the Constitution, are a gentleman’s game, vulnerable to those who walk in with a chainsaw and no moral core. And our playing by the rules just buys them more time.
A few years ago, a colleague asked me to help her learn to teach people to innovate. “Innovate isn’t a verb,” I said. “You only know whether something is an innovation after the fact, when other people start to use it too.”
“So what’s the verb?” she said.
“Reimagining constraints.”
The old-school Democrats, raised in a different era where the rules were generally adhered to, haven’t been particularly effective at dealing with the institutional lawlessness of the GOP as currently configured. (The whole Republican infrastructure is ripe for a RICO prosecution, like any organized-crime gang.)
We’re polite. We believe in procedure, and in letting everyone be heard. And it’s hard for us to go against those established habits. But those are the kinds of invisible constraints that keep us from imagining new paths against lawlessness. It’s time, as our Canadian friends remind us, for “elbows up.”
Herb Childress 