How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  Or as George Orwell might have said, “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” But Hughes’s comment was, perhaps, unintentionally insightful: for a large portion of the electorate, facts did not matter and therefore they did not particularly care whether (1) their candidate told demonstrable lies, or (2) that much of the news they got on their news feed was fake. That may sound harsh, but the postfactual culture had penetrated deeply into the political culture. Consider two remarks that appeared in the comment section of the website that published Hughes’s “there’s no such things as facts” statement. One user named “Bile Gull” quoted the statement that Trump faced “criticism for saying things that are patently untrue—like his insistence that millions of people voted illegally.” But he flatly rejected that: “Sorry for not buying the garbage that the wise sages in the MSM are presenting as fact.”

  Another commenter, “SnakeBeMe,” took a somewhat more philosophical postfact view: “Truth matters. Fact matters,” he wrote. “But whose truths and whose facts?” He expanded on his point:

  To me it’s like going to an art gallery. People stand around looking at the pictures hanging there, and they see in the art what they need to see, what they want to see.

  This is what truth is. We look at the picture and see what we need to see—what we want to see.

  In other words, truth—even statements that purported to be about actual facts—were inherently subjective. Truth is not out there as something that can be verified, but is merely “what we want to see.” No postmodern decontructionist professor of literature could have put it better.

  More than a decade ago, comedian Stephen Colbert had described what he called “truthiness,” which was not to be confused with traditional understandings of accuracy or actual truth. “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist,” he explained. “It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty.”25

  ROB’S EMAILS

  During the campaign, I had a front-row seat to what was happening. Throughout the year I received emails from listeners forwarding stories like “Australia Voted to Ban Muslims and Liberals Are Pissed,” stories about a Hillary Clinton body double, or reports that Obama had given a speech to the United States in which he said that Americans needed to surrender their freedom as part of a “New World Government.” On a daily basis I would get mass emails, passing on the latest stories about “tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots” that had been discovered in an Ohio warehouse.26 Listeners would often feel compelled to post or pass on articles claiming that Hillary Clinton had said that the gorilla Harambe, who was shot at a Cincinnati zoo, was a victim of “racism,” or that Trump’s name had mysteriously been removed from primary ballots.

  For years, I had tried whenever I could to push back against such hoaxes, often replying with links to fact-checking sites like Snopes.com. But it was hard not to notice that the volume of fake news was rising as the websites proliferated and listeners felt the need to break through what they saw as the mainstream media’s cover-up of the “real” news out there. So, I continued to try to knock down the more egregious examples, but it was becoming more difficult to keep up. There was another problem as well: Increasingly, I noticed that conservatives were no longer willing to accept any information from respected news outlets that were debunking the fake stories.

  Here is how it worked. As I was writing this book, I tweeted out a link to a story about a U.S. Senate hearing on Russian hacking. The story was straightforward and, as far as I could tell (based on reading multiple accounts) quite accurate. But one of my Twitter followers shot back: “And now after 23 years the NYT is a reliable source? [Your] credibility is evaporating by the day.…” Note that he did not object to or take issue with any of the reporting in the story; it was not even clear he had even read the actual article. What he objected to was the source itself. For this follower, nothing, absolutely nothing, from the New York Times was credible.

  During the campaign, I had one loyal listener whom I will call Rob. Virtually on a daily basis, Rob would send emails to his family and friends commenting on the news and highlighting examples of media bias (which were plentiful). But in 2016, he began linking to stories from some of the new sites that trafficked in conspiracy theories. Because I knew Rob to be a good and decent guy (we had actually worked together on a project involving veterans), I gently tried to nudge him back toward the mainstream, without any discernible effect. Instead, he seemed to move rapidly in the opposite direction, unembarrassed even when I pointed out that he was sending out stories that were clearly erroneous.

  In June 2016, he sent me an email, objecting to the fact that during one of my discussions, I had cited an NBC news report. “I never thought I’d hear you referencing NBC information as valid,” he wrote. Probably unwisely, I responded that I found his criticisms ironic since he was now routinely linking to “some of the sketchiest, most frequently discredited websites on earth” and I suggested that “you are better than this.”

  By August, however, Rob had apparently become obsessed with discrediting the parents of a Muslim army officer who had been killed in Iraq. Khzir Khan’s speech at the Democratic National Convention criticizing Trump was an emotional and political highlight of the event, and Trump’s subsequent attacks on the Gold Star parents temporarily hurt him in the polls. Following a now-familiar path, many right-wing sites, including Breitbart, launched a furious attack on Khan, alleging his support for Sharia law and his financial ties to the Clintons. Rob was fired up and began sending around multiple stories attacking Khan and his wife, Ghazala. Many of them were misleading, some of them just offensive, but I found that my attempts to correct the record were futile; there was always another source, another website with a questionable “fact” about the couple.

  In August, I responded to one of Rob’s many emails. I’ll include it here because it gives a sense of my frustration:

  This article is a piece of bigoted bilge. I have no idea what makes you think that this attack on the parents is justified, or why you would send it to me. I know you as a patriotic, decent man who admires and respects truth. But you have fallen deeper and deeper into this dark vortex of alt-right misinformation.

  Please ask yourself: are you willing to give up your principles, your standards, and basic common decency for … Donald Trump.

  Rob responded frankly: “Yes,” he wrote, “I am willing to set aside some principles to defeat Clinton, for a time, for the sake of my country and future generations.…” Choosing Trump “is one helluva lot better than a known anti-American, greedy criminal like Hillary.”*

  EMPOWERING ALT REALITY NEWS MEDIA

  All of this is likely going to get worse.

  At an event shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft announced that his blog “is going to have a White House correspondent position,” bragging that he “had 1 million readers a day coming in. And the reason was because I was telling the truth and the mainstream media was telling the fake fucking news!” Hoft’s audience, which had gathered to “celebrate memeing a president into existence,” responded by chanting “Real news! Real news! Real news!”27

  Irony had already taken a beating during the 2016 campaign, but this was nevertheless an extraordinary moment, given Gateway Pundit’s notorious reputation for pushing bogus narratives and outright hoaxes. In the weeks leading up to the election, the Washington Post noted, Hoft’s website had “regularly published outright false stories that became talking points on the conservative Internet.”28 Media critic Callum Borchers described Hoft as “an appallingly unreliable source of information.… If you have a conspiracy theory or a hoax you want to spread, Hoft is your guy.”29

  There was the time that Gateway Pundit featured the headline “WOW! L
ook at MASSIVE LINE to Trump’s Town Hall Event,” when the picture was actually a picture from the parade following the Cleveland Cavaliers’ NBA Finals victory.30 Or the breathless story in which Gateway Pundit reported that a San Diego high school had canceled “Obama Invite After Discovering His Birth Certificate Was Fake.” Unfortunately for Jim Hoft, the article he cited (and which was widely shared on conservative media) was a satire piece. (Gateway Pundit later removed the post.)31 Gateway Pundit also disseminated a hoax claiming that an organization called Demand Protest was providing paid anti-Trump protesters. He also eagerly forwarded a fake Facebook page that a mass shooter was an Obama fan.32

  In the weeks before the election, Gateway Pundit headlined a story about apparent voter fraud in North Carolina, only to have the story exposed as an internet joke.33 As the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s emails dogged her campaign, Gateway Pundit reported in late October that Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook had deleted all of his tweets because he was “spooked” by an FBI investigation: “MOOK SPOOKED: Hillary Campaign Manager Deletes Twitter Timeline.”34 Fact-checkers quickly debunked the bogus story, with the website Snopes.com referring to Gateway Pundit as “disreputable,” and “factually-challenged.”

  But this did not deter the site from continuing to spread hoaxes about disappearing social media posts. Days before the election, Gateway Pundit falsely reported that “Michelle Obama has scrubbed all references to Hillary Clinton from both of her Twitter accounts” with the headline: “Rats Jump Ship=> Michelle Obama Scrubs Hillary Clinton from Twitter History?” This was a story whose veracity could easily have been checked by anyone who cared about that sort of thing, but it was quickly picked up by conservative commentators. On his radio show, Sean Hannity eagerly picked up on the fake story, exclaiming, “That means they know it’s huge. You know why? Because Obama’s implicated! He’s implicated here, and he’s pissed. You know what his legacy might be? Jail.” When it became apparent the story was a hoax, Hannity was forced to issue a retraction and blamed Gateway Pundit for the error.35

  Despite having been burned by the fake news site, Hannity continued linking to it. In February 2017, Hoft’s site breathlessly reported, “Wikileaks Document Shows John McCain Requested Donations from Russians.” Mimicking a Russian propaganda outlet, Gateway’s post began with the sentence “John McCain is leading a vicious campaign against the Russian government since the November election.”36

  Nevertheless, Hannity retweeted a link that called the decorated veteran a “globalist war criminal,” with the comment, “WOW if True.” But as it turned out, nothing in the story was true. There was no WikiLeaks release and the “request” for campaign money was a report from 2008 about a standard mass fund-raising mailer that had been addressed to “Dear Friend.” Once again, Hannity was forced to apologize for sharing what he admitted was an “inaccurate” story he had gotten from the website.37

  This might not matter all that much, except that Gateway Pundit emerged as a go-to news source for the Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself. One analysis in December 2016 found that Trump had tweeted out links from the site fourteen times during the campaign.38 Even after the election, newly installed White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer continued to tweet out links to Gateway Pundit—which seemed consistent for an administration that has already introduced Americans to the concept of “alternative facts.”39

  Gateway Pundit was not alone. Social media activist Michael Cernovich also enjoyed friendly ties to the Trump White House, despite his reputation for spreading bizarre conspiracy theories such as “pizzagate,” an outlandish story that tried to link members of Hillary’s Clinton’s campaign to a child-sex-trafficking ring operated out of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC. Cernovich, who once said that he had embraced the Alt Right after realizing that “diversity is code for white genocide,” enthusiastically touted the story, which he described as both “worldwide” and “real.”40 The fake news nearly turned deadly when a gunman claiming to “self-investigate” the story fired a shot inside the pizza parlor, Comic Ping Pong, which had been falsely linked to the alleged sex trafficking ring. Days later, Trump fired the son of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn from his transition team for using his Twitter account to spread the “pizzagate” story.41 (Flynn himself was later fired as national security adviser for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition.)

  But Cernovich continued to prosper in Trump World. In April 2017, after was he was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes, White House aide Kellyanne Conway called his appearance a “must-see ratings bonanza” and urged followers to watch the full exchange with CBS anchor Scott Pelley.42 The next day, the president’s son, Donald J. Trump Jr., tweeted out: “Congrats to @Cernovich for breaking the #SusanRice story. In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!”43*

  Others in the Right’s media ecosystem took note, including Fox News, which posted a story headlined: “Pro-Trump blogger Cernovich getting big scoops, mainstream attention.” The article described the new alternative reality: “A year ago, Mike Cernovich was a fringe blogger posting a blend of pro-Trump memes and self-help tips from his home base in Southern California. Today, he’s beating the mainstream media to some of the Trump era’s biggest news stories.”44

  CHAPTER 9

  DRUDGE AND THE POLITICS OF PARANOIA

  SOMETIME IN THE LAST decade, conservative commentator Matt Drudge began linking to a website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. By doing so, he broke down the wall that separated the full-blown cranks from the mainstream conservative media, injecting a toxic worldview into the Right’s bloodstream. The conservative movement never recovered.

  If you want to understand the nature of the Right’s alternative reality, or its vulnerability to “fake news,” you need to start with Jones and Drudge. The Drudge Report consistently ranks as one of the top five media publishers in the country, often drawing more than a billion page views a month.1 Media critic John Ziegler describes Matt Drudge as effectively the “assignment editor” for much of talk radio, many right-leaning websites, and a significant portion of the Fox News channel. “If Drudge wants a certain narrative to gain traction in conservative circles, he has more power to make that happen than anyone else,” he writes. The gravitational pull of the Drudge Report is so powerful, Ziegler notes, “that when it becomes clear what narrative Matt is favoring, a literal ‘market’ is created for stories which fit that storyline so that they might be linked on the Drudge Report.” Conservative media types were also reluctant to cross Drudge. “If … you can’t get your content linked on Drudge,” explains Ziegler, “or appear on Fox News, your career is, at best, stunted and, at worst, over.”2

  Alex Jones is not your garden-variety conspiracy theorist. He is a 9/11 truther, who believes the U.S. government conspired in the attacks to justify the creation of a police state.* On his website, Infowars, Jones has suggested that the government also may have been behind the bombings in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, and at the Boston Marathon, which killed 3. Jones claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing was an inside job and “a total false flag.” He suggested that the Boston Marathon bombing was a “staged event.” The bombers, he said, “are definitely patsies that were set up and they’re manipulating our tribalism that, ‘Hey, the guys from the other tribe bombed us but we got them.’ When the truth is they were young men recruited by globalist intelligence agencies and set up horribly. And they could do it to any of us. We’re all in grave danger.”3

  He has repeatedly suggested that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook was a hoax, calling it “a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey�
�so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit.”4

  Similarly, Jones has told his audiences that the mass murder at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, “was a false flag, mind-control event.” He also believes that the Columbine school shootings were “100 percent false flag.” Ditto for the attacks at a nightclub in Orlando and San Bernardino.5

  Jones also has charged that the government wants to use chemicals to turn people gay: “I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children.” He has frequently referred to women as “tramps,” “whore,” and “bitch.” In 2016, less than a month before the election, he declared that Hillary Clinton was “a frickin’ demon and she stinks and so does Obama.” Even by Jones’s standards his preelection rant was extraordinary.

  I’m never a lesser of two evils person, but with Hillary, there’s not even the same universe. She is an abject, psychopathic, demon from Hell that as soon as she gets into power is going to try to destroy the planet. I’m sure of that, and people around her say she’s so dark now, and so evil, and so possessed that they are having nightmares, they’re freaking out. Folks let me just tell you something, and if media wants to go with this, that’s fine. There are dozens of videos and photos of Obama having flies land on him, indoors, at all times of year, and he’ll be next to a hundred people and no one has flies on them. Hillary, reportedly, I mean, I was told by people around her that they think she’s demon-possessed, okay? I’m just going to go ahead and say it, okay?