Within the last couple of days I read a news blurb quoting Newt Gingrich as saying on Fox News that the Biden administration is the most corrupt of any American administration in history. The source was credible and I believe he said it. What I find unusual about that is that it is not exactly news. Back in the early nineties, Gingrich and his political action committee GOPAC put out training material for GOP candidates to “talk like Newt”. That material urged these candidates to speak of Democrats with terms that included “traitor”, ‘liberal”, “anti-child”, “anti-flag”. “betray”, “bizarre”, ”incompetent”, “pathetic”, “”self-serving”, “lie”, “steal” and “disgrace”. Newt did not adjure his trainees to actually find any factual basis for using these adjectives on any Democratic opponent. He was, and is today, quite satisfied to use the slander without basis in fact or truth. It was then and is part of Newt’s position currently that there is no limit to how you slander your opponents. No matter how much you lie about them or falsely accuse them of outrageous activities that is justified in order to always keep the GOP in power. He is, by his own actions and words, a vicious and evil man. Thus, he could, with a straight face, call the Biden administration the most corrupt in history. That the Biden administration is no such thing is of no consequence to Newt. What is puzzling is that Fox News believes that the bloviations and lies of this long discredited crackpot have any interest or effect today. Newt left Congress under a cloud, having been found guilty of ethics violations. Fox must be desperate to dredge up this crap.
However, seeing a report of Newt’s latest lies just causes me to wonder how a large proportion of the American citizenry can believe the fact-free junk that passes among us as “truth” or “news” today. On this blog I have received an earnest and well-meaning comment from a Trump backer concerning why he, as a reasonably thoughtful and decent person, could believe well of Trump. I mean in no way to disparage him. He responded to my invitation to such as he to explain the appeal of Trump and very kindly obliged me. His response and my reply are on the blog and can be reviewed now or at leisure. What I learned from him (although, let me say I did not get “his” name, so maybe “he” is a “she”) is that he (for ease of usage) thinks well of Trump because he has a list of allegedly good things Trump did or said. As to all of it, the facts do not bear Trump out as they almost never do. Herein lies the conundrum. Not only do reasonable and decent Americans overlook the fact that Trump is simply lying, they are willing admit he is “no saint”, thus showing they are aware at least to some degree that the man is a sociopath, a liar and a thief who is vindictive and totally self-centered. It does not faze them although I feel sure they would not tolerate such conduct in anyone else. What I find especially concerning however, is that so many millions of citizens and political leaders are willing to suspend disbelief of other, more dangerous lies, such as the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. That contention has been disproven over and over again. Those who cling to it like the My Pillow guy Lindell claim to have evidence. I say put up or shut up. If he has it, present it to the authorities, put in a court proceeding or otherwise put the facts where your mouth is. Just at 50 lawsuits in state and federal courts trying to prove “the steal” have been dismissed for lack of evidence. I am interested in “facts”, the “truth” or “evidence”. Maybe it is my past as a trial lawyer, but I know what happens in a court if you don’t have that. Not only do you lose your case, but if you as a lawyer falsely claim in a court proceeding that you have facts which you know you don’t have, you, the lawyer, are in deep trouble. That is why so many of Trump’s lawyers are in trouble.
What is scarier to me is that so many wholly ridiculous and fantastic ideas are beginning to be believed by larger and larger proportions of the public. I don’t just mean the utter crap that can be found on Breitbart News, but the even worse junk in groups like QAnon. QAnon would not bother me quite so much if Trump were not now playing up to them. Even Trump cannot really believe that Democrats control a hidden “deep state” when he was in charge of the whole government and never found any such thing. Worse yet, even he cannot believe that Democratic office holders and citizens are all pedophiles and cannibals. Yet there are those who actually do believe it or that JFK is going to be reincarnated in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, as hundreds of them apparently did believe last year as they sat there in Dallas waiting for it to happen. It beggars the imagination what the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers really believed as they assaulted our capitol. We know, however that similar “militias exist all over America, all believing that the American government is their enemy and ready to take up arms against it, all based on fact free ideas.
Why? What drives otherwise well-meaning Americans to believe things they should know without further evidence are not and cannot be true? Is it that they believe because they really, really want it to be true in order to support their prejudices, whatever those may be? We all know in our personal lives that just because we want to be rich or beautiful or famous or smarter than Einstein that the hard facts of life for us are that (for most of us) it ain’t true?, We can’t make it true by wanting it and if we start trying to spend those riches we wish we had or getting a science job based on our actual ability, we will come to a very unfortunate outcome. We know that! Why then, do we think that in the greater world, things will come out well because, despite the obvious facts, we want them to come out that way? I suspect it is because the unfortunate results in the greater world do not intrude into our personal space immediately and if they do eventually trickle down to us, we can deny the obvious causation e.g. we voted for bums.
That will do it for today. There will be much more in this vein as time goes on and I cannot restrain the urge to rant. May we all dedicate ourselves to divining, as the ancient TV detective used to say, “the facts, just the facts”. Then we can speak to one another on a level playing field.
Cliff