Re: <nettime> Stop the Steal

[Flick Harrison <flick@flickharrison.com>]

What seems the most dangerous and mysterious to me is that Trumpism’s instincts for combative messaging and incoherence-as-a-strategy seems to have almost out-performed the focus-group politics developed so painstakingly across the 20th century.  Despite ignoring the experienced election hands, the sober thinking of the party machines, and the broad consensus of elected Republicanism, Trump’s votes were not only way up from 2016, but he was strategically placed to come fairly close to winning in the places where it counts.  This seems like a pretty huge achievement for someone who doesn’t listen to detailed data briefings or really know or care anything about geography or demographics, other than the broad strokes or embracing racism and misogyny.

It’s interesting that he was able to look out across a sea of faces, shout out awful slogans, and read the crowd more effectively than the opinion polls or the experienced party strategists.  His instincts as a board-game player were better than the bean-counters'.

BUT:  The biggest crisis in all this is that the critical media literacy of the last 50 years has been straight-up weaponized by capital and the right.  All the instincts to “follow the money,” “follow the class identity” in the media ecosystem, hammered home by Chomsky and the like, have been turned in on themselves - so that “Big Science” is held criminally responsible for lies - automatic to the fact that they receive money from somewhere to do research, and therefore can be assumed to bend all data to their own selfish ends.  This pollutes the discourse on vaccines, Covid, climate change, hell anything that can be clearly explained by a huge consensus of scientists is instantly suspect by the very fact of its ideological coherence and hegemony.

This isn’t limited to Big Right discourse but is fuelled by Youtube hucksters and scammers of all kinds, polluting everything…  bad education and suspicion of officialdom are twin cancers on progress.  British Columbia, for instance, has discussed universal dentalcare as a progressive goal, but what point is free dental care when there’s mass delusional suspicion of flouride in the water?  The right thinks it’s a form of mind control and the left thinks it’s Big Pharma making money off of polluting our bodies.  So where is the constituency for evidence-based public health?

The number of left anti-vaxxers I’ve encountered lately is indeed disheartening.  A feminist woman I know weaves her critique of the patriarchal medical system seamlessly towards the conclusion that vaccines are a form of assault on women.

The major disrupter of the 2016 US election, Brexit, and anti-populist organizing generally has been “Fake News…” from rogue bloggers all the way up to Fox and OANN….  but even as this concept was catching on in the mainstream, it was immediately weaponized by Trump and his ecosystem as a term for anything critical of him.  It was emblematic of their black belt in discourse judo, taking the most vital idea of the critical discourse moment and utterly flipping it into a right-wing weapon.  How can we tackle the problem of massive disinformation if the terms are constantly hijacked by the very people we’re trying to protect ourselves from.

The right is able to use very broad strokes to argue that all mass media is biased towards the left, using a sort of dolt’s version of critical media theory - if they’re disagreeing with us, there must be sinister structural biases, and because hey presto, we just proved sinister structural bias, therefore everything they say must be a lie.  And so this 1-2 punch creates the motto:  “Everyone who disagrees with us is a liar.”  Ipso Facto.

We can be a little bit cheered by the collapse of the alliance between Trumpism and Fox News - caused by Fox’s sticking to the reality around the election outcome - - but it is too early to trust that this schism will last.

So while we’re struggling to create a movement whose ideology we can be proud of, and which has clear coherent principles, the other side is spending all their time destroying us while marching in lockstep to whatever tune is the most useful at the moment.

On Nov 14, 2020, at 08:06 , Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

Turns out, not only is Stop the Steal a pure creation of Republican operatives, but it DOES go back to the criminally convicted and Trump-pardoned granddaddy of all right-wing goons: Roger Stone, he of the Brooks Brothers Riot, who invented the slogan in 2016 and is pandering it today along with a phalanx of loosely aligned haters:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs/index.html

Those who want to agonize about the role of the Internet in undermining democracy and sparking civil conflict, well, I think you should investigate this. It's ripe for journalistic exposure, activist counter-efforts, and some quantitative social science too.

We're not out of the woods yet.

Brian

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