Fascism Side Trip: Building an Alternate Reality
This time up: JD Vance and election denialism.
To go along with my ridiculously long definition post, I will be posting examples that fit the discussion of fascism that I laid out.
I will note Stanley’s variables of propaganda and unreality, and provide this quote: “When propaganda succeeds at twisting ideals against themselves and universities are undermined and condemned as sources of bias, reality itself is cast into doubt. We can’t agree on the truth” (57).
Without looking, and within half an hour of that first post, I came across the following.
Vance wants to ignore the past and rewrite what was important. And keep in mind, he is speaking to Trump voters. He, like his running mate, needs to be able to convince their followers that there were serious problems with the election in 2020 and that the real issue is the notion that the scary Big Tech people were censoring Americans. By convincing their followers of this unreality, they make it easier for their followers to reject truth and vote for Trump/Vance.
I will again quote attorney Ben Ginsberg. Ginsberg has a long c.v. full of conservative Republican bona fides, including representing Bush in the 2000 election.
“The evidence to back up the allegations of fraud and elections being unreliable simply does not exist,” Ginsberg said.
[…]
“Donald Trump and his supporters brought 64 cases. They lost 63 of them outright,” Ginsberg explained. The case they won related to a small number of ballots “far from outcome determinative,” he says.
Election deniers have said that they lost in court because the judges weren’t fair.
“Under the rule of law, you have every right to submit your litigation,” Ginsberg said. “But under the rule of law, a conservative principle, a Republican principle for as long as I’ve been practicing election law, you have to accept the rulings of the court.”
I will add the following from Stanley:
“Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with fear and anger” (57).
“Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroyed the information space” (57).
A man is arrested for stabbing random people in his neighborhood. He’s asked why he did it, and he says it’s because he was trying to stop the serial killers in his midst.
That’s the analogy I’ve thought up to describe today’s GOP. They don’t just believe in lies. Everything they claim to stand for is a lie. And not just a lie, but the polar opposite of what it is they claim to believe in. They cry “freedom of speech,” then go on book-banning sprees. They cry “limited government,” then call for militarizing the border and criminalizing abortion. They talk about “protecting women and children from sexual predators,” then cozy up to Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump. They talk about “law and order,” before defending the most corrupt man ever to hold the White House. They talk about “election integrity,” then attempt to throw out votes when the results don’t go the way they wanted.
None of these mantras are real. They’re all code for the things they really care about (such as attacking the rights of LGBT and racial minorities and women) and demonstrably false judged according to their literal meaning. And the way they construct and maintain this unreality is by labeling those they oppose as the enemy so that anything done in the service of stopping them is justified. That’s how a person ends up committing voter fraud to stop voter fraud, or refusing to certify an election in the name of preserving the will of the people, or storming the Capitol to save the Republic.
Just once, I’d like one of Vance’s interviewers to give him the floor and ask him to produce verifiable evidence to back his unreality.
When he was pushing his Haitians BS on Dana Bash at CNN, she asked Vance to provide names of Springfield constituents who had called his office, but there was a lot of cross talk and she let it go. It hasn’t proven enough that no cat eating Haitians have been located, because the phantom constituent accusers haven’t been asked to step forward either. (Except for the one accuser who apologized for her claims.)
When New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro pressed him on the “Did Trump lose?” question during that interview, she never asked him to produce the “independent studies showing the Hunter Biden laptop revelations would have gained Trump millions of votes” or explain the math in terms of actual votes. He got away with not only not answering the Big Lie question, his talking point got to float there unsubstantiated.
By accepting that Vance wouldn’t answer from the outset, Martha Raddatz let Vance again float his unreality without having to back it up. Raddatz thinks it is telling enough that Vance won’t answer, while inferring Vance ought to be ashamed for lying. As Vance is aspiring to be as utterly shameless as his boss, this kind of interview tactic amounts to capitulation.
Now, I’m absolutely sure Trump/Vance supporters are going to reject the truth anyway. But, the reporters don’t have to make it so easy on them. I’d at least like to see them twist a little in the wind when they can’t make their case even in the court of public opinion, let alone a court of law, on what they want to say is the real issue.
NYT: Vance adroitly demonstrates that simple yes/no answers are insufficient at capturing the depth and complexity of the American election system’s results.
@Scott F.: there was a cliip recently of a venezuelan journalist asking steven miller the same question about his sources for crime statistics in Venezuela and would not deviate no matter how much miller tried to equivocate and bluster his way through. For about three minutes plus miller just kept getting more and more flustered until he came across as the screaming twerp he is. That is how these should go, but we all know they won’t.