How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  CHAPTER 8

  THE POST-TRUTH POLITICS OF THE RIGHT

  THE EXPLOSION OF FABRICATED stories—and the credulous Trump supporters who believed and forwarded them—probably did not flip the election. But their role in the campaign was a leading indicator of the shape of our new post-truth media/political world.

  “Honestly,” Paul Horner, one of the creators of fake news, told the Washington Post after the election, “people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore—I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.”1

  The problem was especially acute on the Right. “I think Trump is in the White House because of me,” Horner confessed. “His followers don’t fact-check anything—they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.”

  So when, three days before the presidential election, another fake news site posted “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead,” the story would also go viral, getting 560,000 shares on Facebook alone. The story had been posted on a website called the Denver Guardian, a source devoted to disseminating anti-Clinton fake news.* Similar bogus stories were shared millions of times during the campaign.

  But this didn’t happen in a vacuum: such stories fit easily into the new ecosystem of the Right’s alternative reality. To some observers, this new post-truth culture seemed to draw its inspiration from the Russian approach to “truth” and its active use of dezinformatsiya (disinformation) to build political support or discredit critics. Journalist Peter Pomerantsev, who has written a book about Putin’s Russia entitled, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, quoted a political adviser saying of the regime, “Now no one even tries proving ‘the truth.’ You can just say anything. Create realities.”2 Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with the process when he tweeted, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”3

  Kasparov grasps that the real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, ask, “What is truth?” and not wait for an answer. In such a world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth, a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society.4

  But in American politics, the process has been radically decentralized. As Trump slouched toward the nomination, he was backed by a conservative media that had successfully created an Alt Reality bubble around his candidacy. When Trump claimed that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the attacks on 9/11, for instance, callers to my show lined up to provide supporting evidence, the only source of which was an echo chamber of partisan bloggers.

  Indeed, what we learned was that the walls are down, the gatekeepers dismissed, the norms and standards of journalism and fact-based discourse trashed. In the alternative reality bubble of the conservative media, fake news—and a candidate who daily made demonstrably false statements—could spread like a noxious weed. But then again, so could Breitbart News, Alex Jones, and Sean Hannity and their legions of internet trolls who found out they could drive the political narrative, regardless of the fact-checkers or other recognizable measures of reality.

  Indeed, the new Alt Reality media’s proficiency at deflecting negative information and shaping a counternarrative was on full display after the election when it effectively hijacked the term “fake news.” Rather than seeing it as a canary in the coal mine, Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times, “Conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself … have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.”5 Having delegitimized much of the mainstream media, the Right had effectively also delegitimized the notion of “fake news.” As Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler observed, “People seem to confuse reporting mistakes by established news organizations with obviously fraudulent news produced by Macedonian teenagers.”6

  A WORD ABOUT POLITIFACT

  No account of the fall of the fact-checkers would be complete without a discussion of the self-inflicted wounds of the gatekeepers of truth. As members of the media have discovered, credibility is a fragile commodity—particularly when it comes to judgments about what is credible. While many of the leading fact-checking operations—including Annenberg’s FactCheck.org and the Washington Post’s Kessler—do a creditable job, PolitiFact has routinely undermined its own trustworthiness. “When it first began,” one Republican government official told me, “we all took it very seriously. When we got an inquiry, we dropped everything; it was all hands on deck. After a while, we stopped paying attention. It had become a joke. Nobody gives a shit anymore.”*

  “Tendentious PolitiFact ratings are a classic genre of bad journalism,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized, noting its long record of cherry-picking facts, tortured logic, and double standards.7 Rather than carefully protecting its status as a neutral and trusted arbiter of truth, PolitiFact effectively set its own pants on fire. In 2008, PolitiFact rated Barack Obama’s statement “If you like your health care, you can keep it” as “True.” The next year it downgraded the problem to “Half True,” and finally in 2013 labeled the statement the “Lie of the Year.”†

  Matt Shapiro, a data analyst for the Paradox Project, ran the numbers on PolitiFact; assigning a point value to the ratings 0 for True and 5 for “Pants on Fire,” Shapiro found that Democrats had an average rating of 1.8—somewhere between “Mostly True” and “Half True.” Republicans, on the other hand, had an average rating of 2.6, somewhere between “Half True” and “Mostly False.” Some of the numbers were skewed by Trump’s egregious track record of fabulism, but the pattern seemed to hold even when he was removed from the mix. The most frequent rating for a Republican who was not Donald Trump was still “mostly false,” and often employed its customary convoluted logics to reach many of the verdicts.8

  “PolitiFact often rates statements that are largely true but come from GOP sources as ‘mostly false,’” Shapiro noted, “by focusing on sentence alterations, simple misstatements, fact-checking the wrong fact, and even taking a statement, rewording it, and fact-checking the re-worded statement instead of the original quoted statement.” Again, this cannot be attributed to the Trump effect alone. Shapiro noted that during the 2012 campaign PolitiFact awarded nineteen “Pants on Fire” ratings to Mitt Romney. He put this in some context: from 2007 to 2016 a grand total of twenty-five Democrats combined were assigned the “Pants on Fire” rating. “This seems to indicate Romney wasn’t just a liar, but an insane, raving liar, spewing malicious deceit at every possible opportunity,” wrote Shapiro. “In the mere two years he was in the spotlight as a Republican presidential nominee, Romney somehow managed to rival the falsehoods told by the entire party of Democrats over the course of a decade. Or it is possible that PolitiFact has a slant in their coverage.” In contrast, he noted that based on PolitiFact’s ratings, Hillary Clinton was “the single most honest politician to run for president in the last 10 years.”9

  Similar stories are legion, as PolitiFact writers often changed their standards or invented new ones to fit their agendas. Suffice it to say that by 2015, few conservatives regarded PolitiFact as a credible source, so it was effectively useless in pushing back against fake news at precisely the moment when credible fact-checkers were most needed.

  A STORM OF FAKE NEWS

  In August 2016, one of the hottest stories
on the internet—and on Facebook, in particular—was a story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly: “BREAKING: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out for Backing Hillary.” The story reported that Kelly was “on her way out of Fox News” for being “a closet liberal who actually wants Hillary to win.” The story, which was fake, had more than two hundred thousand “likes,” and was “trending” on Facebook for hours before it was finally removed. The source for the hoax was a website called End the Fed, which trafficked in stories like “What Obama Has to Say About ‘White Folks’ Will Make Your Blood Boil” and “Eric Bolling Exposes New Dirty Tricks Clintons Used to Escape Jail Time and Become Millionaires.”10

  Much of what appeared on social media took a decidedly dark turn. University of Washington Professor Kate Starbird began noticing the proliferation of conspiracy theories that sprang up after mass shootings or terror attacks. After the Boston Marathon bombing, for example, she noticed a surge in social media traffic “than blamed the Navy SEALs for the bombing.” As she delved deeper into the phenomenon, she found that these “strange clusters” were actually part of a network of alternative media sites with a far greater reach than anyone had imagined. “More people are dipping into this stuff than I ever imagined,” Starbird told a Seattle Times columnist.11 Her study, titled, “Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter,” documented more than eighty separate websites devoted to spreading “‘fake news’—alternative narratives of man-made crisis events.”12 Over the course of the 2016 election, some of those sites (notably Alex Jones’s Infowars) began to shape the political narrative and clearly began to influence many voters on the Right.

  One of the most frequently referenced theories in this alternative information universe involved the tragic Sandy Hook shootings, which occurred in 2012. “Though a large portion of those tweets contest or deny that alternative narrative,” Starbird noted, “several utilize Sandy Hook ‘evidence’ to support alternative narratives around more recent events.” She cited tweets that claimed, “Orlando shooting was a hoax. Just like Sandy Hook, Boston Bombing, and San Bernandino. Keep believing Rothschild Zionist news companies.” Other tweets insisted: “More Orlando shooting Hoax-proof—same actors in Sandy hook & Boston Marathon Fake bombing—gun take away agenda.”13

  Many of the stories went viral in a social media ecosystem that was overrun with antiglobalist and pro-Trump narratives. “We found the same stories on multiple domains,” Starbird concluded, “sometimes as exact copies, but also in different forms. This means that an individual using these sites is likely seeing the same messages in different forms and in different places, which may distort their perception of this information as it gives the false appearance of source diversity.”14

  By the end of the campaign, the time lines of social media (especially on the Right) were so clogged with misleading or fabricated stories that a cottage industry of intentionally bogus news sprang up. One practitioner, who went by the Twitter handle MassRafTer, began creating fake stories that were “intentional, immediately obvious disinformation” designed to dupe conservative Trump supporters.15 MassRafTer was responsible, for instance, for creating a document that appeared to be an expense report allegedly showing the Clinton Foundation siphoning money to a variety of high-profile groups and individuals. The payments were listed under the heading “Voter Suppression” and included Sharia Law Center ($30,000), the Black Panthers ($333,400), conservative talk show host Glenn Beck ($109,000), Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol ($10,000), independent conservative presidential candidate Evan McMullin ($12,000), former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers ($42,300), Black Lives Matter ($203,000), ACORN ($89,000), and to the polling firm Public Policy Polling ($75,000). It was clearly and obviously fake, but as the Daily Beast later reported, it was quickly picked up by Trump supporters on social media, at least one Fox News contributor, and a conservative radio host. The fake report created a mini firestorm: “Sharia Law? Glenn Beck? Bill Ayers? Black Lives Matter? ACORN? Public Polling? What exactly is this money being paid out for???” one Trump supporter tweeted.

  MassRafTer was also responsible for a fake internal memo from Public Policy Polling that purported to show the Clinton campaign’s attempts to rig the results. “Your latest poll is unacceptable,” the fake memo declared. “We aren’t paying you $760,000 per month to show a FIVE POINT LEAD. Are you trying to make Trump win? We will be ending our contract with your company unless results improve quickly.” Again, the memo was clearly bogus—and, according to its author, designed to look as absurd as possible. But many readers took the bait, including Donald Trump Jr., who retweeted the story (he later deleted it).16

  Other fake news sites appeared to have a more straightforward and partisan political agenda, but were also pumping out false stories at a staggering pace. An in-depth report in the New York Times Magazine noted that the new websites “have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture.”17 The new sites—with names like Freedom Daily, Right Wing News, Eagle Rising, and Occupy Democrats—occasionally carried legitimate stories, but mixed in among the posts was a heavy dose of misleading information.

  Perhaps most striking of all: multiple studies suggested that fake news sold quite well, sometimes actually better than accurate news. In the new media ecosystem, there was simply no incentive to stick to the facts, and social media tended to reward not only the loudest voices, but also the most dishonest.* A BuzzFeed report concluded that “the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook—far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison.” This was the new normal: “The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear.”18

  WHAT IS TRUTH?

  This raises the question, Why were so many people willing to believe fake news? The answer is deceptively simple—they believed fake news because they wanted to and because it was easy. We might assume that people naturally want to seek out information that is true, but this turns out to be a basic misunderstanding of the human psyche, which feels more comfortable with familiar information, or stories that confirm their biases. Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman refers to this as “cognitive ease,” the process by which we avoid and resist inconvenient facts that might make us have to think harder. It is far easier to bask in a flow of information that tells us that we have been right all along and confirms our view of the world.19

  Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes the power of tribalism in shaping our ideas about truth. “Once people join a political team,” he wrote in The Righteous Mind, “they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult—perhaps impossible—to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside the matrix.”20 In this world, writes political scientist Don Kinder, political opinions become “badges of social membership.”21

  In other words, many voters use information not to discover what is true, but rather to reinforce their relationship to their group or tribe. They use reason to confirm or justify the outcome they want. Studies have shown that hyper-partisans actually got a hit of dopamine when they hear information that supports their positions or their candidates. “And if that is true,” writes Haidt, “then it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid … the partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.”[Emphasis added.]22

  Haidt also cites the work
of fellow social psychologist, Tom Gilovich who studies “the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs.” If we want to believe something, Gilovich says, we ask, “Can I believe it?” and we need only a single piece of evidence, no matter its provenance, so that “we can stop thinking” because we “now have permission to believe” what we wanted to believe. The flip side is that when we are confronted with uncomfortable or unwanted information that we do not want to believe, we ask “Must I believe?” and look for a reason to reject the argument or fact. Again, only a single piece of data is necessary “to unlock the handcuffs of must.”23

  This process of cherry-picking truths seems to lie at the heart of our post-truth political culture and explains one of the more extraordinary (and revealing quotes) from the campaign, when one of Trump’s most visible campaign surrogates declared that there really is no such thing as facts anymore. Scottie Nell Hughes, a frequent talking head on cable television throughout the campaign, was asked after the election to defend Trump’s clearly false statement that millions of votes had been cast illegally. Her response is worth quoting in its entirety:

  Well, I think it’s also an idea of an opinion. And that’s—on one hand, I hear half the media saying that these are lies. But on the other half, there are many people that go, “No, it’s true.” And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts—they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way—it’s kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water.

  Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts … and so Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd—a large part of the population—are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some—amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and that there are no facts to back it up. [Emphasis added.]24