These Truths

by Jill Lepore

67.Katharine Q. Seeyle and Ralph Blumenthal, “Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard,” NYT, September 9, 2004; “Bill Clinton’s Vietnam Test,” NYT, February 14, 1992; Steven Eder and Dave Philipps, “Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments,” NYT, August 1, 2016; Marvin Kalb, “The Other War Haunting Obama,” NYT, October 8, 2011.

  68.“War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11 Era,” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project, October 04, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/10/05/war-and-sacrifice-in-the-post-911-era/.

  69.Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2; Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 27.

  70.Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Ross Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), x–xiii.

  71.Quoted in David Roberts, “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology,” Vox, May 19, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology.

  72.For a sample wartime transcript, see “Excuse Us for Taking the War on Terror Seriously,” Rush Limbaugh Show, July 31, 2006, https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2006/07/31/excuse_us_for_taking_the_war_on_terror_seriously/. For a discussion of his Vietnam draft status, see (citing Limbaugh’s biographer), “Rush Limbaugh Avoided the Draft Due to Pilonidal Cyst?,” Snopes, June 17, 2014, https://www.snopes.com/politics/military/limbaugh.asp.

  73.Chafets, Roger Ailes, 96; Alexandra Kitty, Outfoxed (New York: Disinformation, 2005), ch. 7; Daly, Covering America, 418, 419, https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2004/07/14/33-internal-fox-editorial-memos-reviewed-by-mmf/131430.

  74.“Interview with Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard—May 2003,” JournalismJobs.com, October 3, 2003, http://web.archive.org/web/20031003110233/http://www.journalism jobs.com/matt_labash.cfm. And see David Greenberg, “Creating Their Own Reality: The Bush Administration and Expertise in a Polarized Age,” in Zelizer, The Presidency of George W. Bush, 202.

  75.Greenberg, “Creating Their Own Reality,” 210–18.

  76.Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” NYT, October 17, 2004. And see Greenberg: “The Right thus found itself in the Bush years promoting a radical epistemological relativism: the idea that established experts’ claims lacked empirical foundation and represented simply a political choice. In this position, conservatives were espousing a notion resembling that of postmodernism—or at least that strand of postmodernism that denies the possibility of objective truth claims” (“Creating Their Own Reality,” 203–4).

  77.Stephen Colbert, “The Word,” The Colbert Report, 2:40, October 17, 2005. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word---truthiness.

  78.John Ashcroft, “Remarks on the Patriot Act,” Speech, Boise, Idaho, August 25, 2003. https://www.justice.gov/archive/ag/speeches/2003/082503patriotactremarks.htm.

  79.Military Order of November 13, 2001, Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism, Federal Register, November 16, 2001, 66, 222; Jess Bravin, The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 39.

  80.Ashcroft is quoted in Bravin, Terror Courts, 41; on when Rice and Powell learned Bush had signed the order, see pp. 41–44; Military Order of November 13, 2001; Cheney is quoted in Bravin, 47.

  81.Julian Zelizer, “Establishment Conservative: The Presidency of George W. Bush,” in Zelizer, The Presidency of George W. Bush, 1–14.

  82.On Rumsfeld’s early career, see James Mann, “Close-Up: Young Rumsfeld,” Atlantic, November 2003.

  83.Mahvish Khan, My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 55–57; Bravin, Terror Courts, 76. And see Jonathan Hafetz, Habeas Corpus after 9/11: Confronting America’s New Global Detention System (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 28–29.

  84.John Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty to William J. Haynes II, Memorandum re: Applications of Treaties and Laws to al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees, January 9, 2002, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.01.09.pdf; Bravin, Terror Courts, 62–63, 71, 74–75, 76–77; Gonzales, January 24, 2002, quoted in Hafetz, Habeas Corpus, 20. And see Mary L. Dudziak, “A Sword and a Shield: The Uses of Law in the Bush Administration,” in Zelizer, The Presidency of George W. Bush, 39–58.

  85.Hafetz, Habeas Corpus, 21, 23–4, 37–8, 267n56; Donald Rumsfeld, Memorandum to James T. Hill, U.S. Southern Command, April 2003, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/03.04.16.pdf; Scott Shane, “China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo,” NYT, July 2, 2008; Bravin, Terror Courts, 161.

  86.Eliza Griswold, “Black Hole; The Other Guantanamo,” TNR, May 7, 2007; “Barack Obama 2003: National Security vs Civil Rights,” YouTube video, 3:08, from an interview televised on the Illinois Channel on November 6, 2003, posted by “IllinoisChannelTV,” June 12, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWeLUPd9vVg; Hafetz, Habeas Corpus, 63.

  87.James T. Patterson, “Transformative Economic Policies: Tax Cutting, Stimuli, and Bailouts,” in Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush, 122; Alan I. Abramowitz, The Polarized Public: Why Our Government Is So Dysfunctional (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2013), 8; Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin, 2007), 4.

  88.Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2013), 8.

  89.Patterson, “Transformative Economic Policies,” 134–35.

  90.“Inauguration Prompts Travel Rush to Washington,” CNN, November 19, 2008; Mary Anne Ostrom, “Obama’s Inauguration: Record Crowd Gathers on Mall to Celebrate ‘Achievement for the Nation,’” San Jose Mercury News, January 20, 2009.

  91.Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009.

  92.Remnick, The Bridge, 207–8, 227, 230.

  93.Maraniss, The Story of Obama, 68, 162, 175–76, 193; State of Hawaii Department of Health, certificate of birth number 151 (4 August 1961), Barack Hussein Obama, II. http://static.politifact.com/files/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf.

  94.Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 85; Remnick, The Bridge, 193–96.

  95.Remnick, The Bridge, 263–65; James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), ch. 1; Barack Obama, “Current Issues in Racism and the Law” (syllabus, University of Chicago Law School, Chicago, IL, 1994), http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/poli tics/2008OBAMA_LAW/Obama_CoursePk.pdf.

  96.Quoted in Remnick, The Bridge, 294.

  97.Remnick, The Bridge, 394; Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, Boston, Massachusetts, July 27, 2004.

  98.Leibovich, This Town, 45.

  99.Barack Obama, “Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party,” Daily Kos, September 30, 2005.

  100.Remnick, The Bridge, 371, 510–13.

  101.Ibid., 458; Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, July 27, 2004.

  102.Jennifer Aaker and Victoria Chang, “Obama and the Power of Social Media and Technology,” European Business Review, May & June 2010.

  103.Frank, Listen, Liberal, 140–41; Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 1.

  104.Hemmer, Messengers of the New Right, 273.

  105.James Baldwin, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” NYT, March 7, 1965.

  106.Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 126.

  107.Elizabeth Kolbert, “Political Outs
ider Coping with Life as an Insider,” NYT, August 18, 1991.

  108.Piketty and Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998”; Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, “Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics 9 (2011): 844; Distribution of family income—Gini index 2014 country comparisons, November 11, 2014, http://www.pho tius.com/rankings/economy/distribution_of_family_income_gini_index_2014_0.html.

  109.Bernard Sanders, The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 20.

  110.Ibid., 1, 19.

  111.Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal, “From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Higher Public Education,” Dissent, Fall 2012, 10–16; Bernie Sanders on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, September 29, 2011.

  112.Leibovich, This Town, 43, 52, 107.

  113.Ibid., 98.

  114.Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, 572 U.S. _ (2014).

  115.Chemerinsky and Gillman, Free Speech on Campus, 97–100.

  116.Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, University of Chicago, 2014, http://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/FOECommitteeRe port.pdf.

  117.Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind, 67.

  118.E. J. Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 2; Frum (in 2012), quoted in Hemmer, Messengers of the Right, 274.

  119.Alana Abramson, “How Donald Trump Perpetuated the ‘Birther’ Movement for Years,” ABC News, September 16, 2016; “Donald Trump ‘Proud’ to Be a Birther,” YouTube video, 5:59, from an interview on The Laura Ingraham Show on September 1, 2016, posted by “Laura Ingraham,” March 30, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqa S9OCoTZs.

  120.Kay, Among the Truthers, xxi.

  121.Sykes, How the Right Lost its Mind, 111–13; Alexander Zaitchik, “Meet Alex Jones,” Rolling Stone, March 2, 2011; Kurt Nimmo, “New Obama Birth Certificate Is a Forgery,” Infowars, April 28, 2011, https://www.infowars.com/new-obama-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/; Lymari Morales, “Obama’s Birth Certificate Convinces Some, but Not All, Skeptics,” Gallup, May 13, 2011, http://www.gallup.com/poll/147530/obama-birth-certificate-convinces-not-skeptics.aspx.

  122.Judd Legum, “What Everyone Should Know About Trayvon Martin (1995–2012),” ThinkProgress, March 18, 2012; “Timeline of Events in Trayvon Martin Case,” CNN, April 11, 2012; “Timeline: The Trayvon Martin Shooting,” Orlando Sentinel, March 26, 2012.

  123.Karen Farkas, “Chardon High School Video Shows Students Being Shot in Cafeteria,” Cleveland.com, February 27, 2012, http://www.cleveland.com/chardon-shooting/index.ssf/2012/02/chardon_high_school_video_show.html.

  124.On ownership, see the 2007 Small Arms Survey (smallarmssurvey.org), which is conducted by an organization in Geneva, and is comparative; the most useful appendix of that report is http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2007/en/Small-Arms-Survey-2007-Chapter-02-annexe-4-EN.pdf. Some of that year’s survey is reported in Laura MacInnis, “U.S. Most Armed Country,” Reuters, August 28, 2007. The Small Arms Survey reports the sources of its estimates at http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2007/en/Small-Arms-Sur vey-2007-Chapter-02-annexe-3-EN.pdf. For some slightly older but useful data, see Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 1997). On the involvement of guns in murders, see, for example, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_07.html. And see my discussion of the U.S. homicide rate in The Story of America, ch. 20.

  125.District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008); Henry Martin, “Changing of the Guard,” American Rifleman, September 2011, 94–97; Ronald Kessler, “David Keene Takes Over the NRA,” Newsmax, March 28, 2011; David Keene, interview with the author, March 30, 2012.

  126.Laura Johnston, “Chardon High School Emergency Plan Prepared Community for Shooting Tragedy,” Cleveland.com, February 27, 2012, http://www.cleveland.com/chardon-shooting/index.ssf/2012/02/chardon_community_prepared_for.html.

  127.Cora Currier, “23 Other States Have ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws, Too,” Atlantic, March 22, 2012.

  128.Krissah Thompson and Scott Wilson, “Obama on Trayvon Martin: ‘If I Had a Son, He’d Look Like Trayvon,” Washington Post, March 23, 2012.

  129.John Hoeffel, “Woman at Gun Range Event Tells Santorum to ‘Pretend It’s Obama,’” Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2012.

  130.“New Claims Cast Trayvon Martin as the Aggressor,” Fox News, March 27, 2012, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/03/27/new-claims-cast-trayvon-martin-as-aggres sor/?intcmp=obinsite.

  131.Jay Barmann, “Police Recover Gun Believed Used in Oakland Shooting Spree; Goh’s Alleged Target Revealed,” SFist, April 6, 2012, http://sfist.com/2012/04/06/police_recover_gun_believed_used_in.php; Olivia Katrandjian, “Two Men Arrested, Facebook Clues in Tulsa Shooting Spree,” ABC News, April 8, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/US/tulsa-oklahoma-men-arrested-shooting-spree/story?id=16096391#.T4HAY5j1Lgo; “2 Mississippi College Students Killed in Separate Shootings over Weekend,” Fox News, March 26, 2012, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/03/26/2-mississippi-college-stu dents-killed-in-separate-shoot ings-over-weekend/?intcmp=obinsite.

  132.James Rainey, “Sorting out Truth from Fiction in the Trayvon Martin Case,” Detroit Free Press, April 7, 2012; Lucy Madison, “Gingrich: Everyone in the World Should Have Right to a Gun,” CBS News, April 13, 2012; “Blitzer and Trump Go at It Over Trump’s Birther Claims,” CNN, May 29, 2012.

  133.Barack Obama, Speech, Sandy Hook Prayer Vigil, Newtown, CT, December 16, 2012.

  134.Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016).

  135.House Budget Committee, “The Path to Prosperity,” March 20, 2012, http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/pathtoprosperity2013.pdf; Thomas L. Hungerford, Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2012), 1; Jonathan Weisman, “Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest,” NYT, November 1, 2012.

  136.American Political Science Association and Russell Sage Foundation, American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 2004); Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King, eds., The Unsustainable American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); United Nations, Department of Economic Social Affairs, Inequality Matters: Report of the World Social Situation 2013 (New York: United Nations, 2013); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York: Norton, 2012); “Greatest Dangers in the World,” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, October 16, 2014, http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/10/16/greatest-dangers-in-the-world/.

  137.“I Am Unlimited,” online and television advertisement, Sprint, 2013, https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=C9qxjBlL3ko.

  138.Bijan Stephen, “Social Media Helps Black Lives Matter Fight the Power,” Wired, November 2015; Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds., Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (London: Verso, 2016).

  139.Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003); Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, 798 NE 2d 941 (Mass. 2003).

  140.Brief for Petitioners, Obergefell v. Hodges & Henry v. Hodges, http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/supreme_court_preview/BriefsV5/14-556_pet.auth checkdam.pdf.

  141.Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017), 3–9 and quotation, 219.

  142.Nagle, Kill All Normies, 10. And see Ralph D. Berenger, ed., Social Media Go to War: Rage, Rebellion and Revolution in the Age of Twitter (Spokane, WA: Marquette Books, 2013); Heather Brooke, The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War (London: William Heinemann, 2011), ix.

&n
bsp; 143.Nagle, Kill All Normies, 64.

  144.Adrian Florido, “The White Nationalist Origins of the Term ‘Alt-Right’—and the Debate Around It,” NPR, November 27, 2016; Richard Spencer, “Become Who We Are,” conference remarks, Washington, DC, November 2016; Southern Poverty Law Center, Alt-Right: The White Nationalist’s Alternative to American Conservatism (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016), 4–7; Josh Harkinson, “Meet the White Nationalist Trying to Ride the Trump Train to Lasting Power,” Mother Jones, June 23, 2017.

  145.By 2015, Breitbart was “one of the top 1,000 most popular websites on the Internet, and just outside the top 200 most popular websites in the United States” (Southern Poverty Law Center, Alt-Right, 15). And see Stephen Piggott, “Is Breitbart.com Becoming the Media Arm of the ‘Alt-Right?,” April 28, 2016, https://www.splcenter.org/hate watch/2016/04/28/breitbartcom-becoming-media-arm-alt-right.

  146.Maisha E. Johnson and Nisha Ahuja, “8 Signs Your Yoga Is Culturally Appropriated—and Why It Matters,” everydayfeminism, May 25, 2016, http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/05/yoga-cultural-appropriation/. On the rise of clickbait and listicles, see Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Knopf, 2016), chs. 22 and 26; Nagle, Kill All Normies, 77.

  147.Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 67.

  148.Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School, Campaign for President: The Managers Look at 2016 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 13, 16, 28–29, 59. Hereafter IOP, Campaign for President.

  149.Robert Wurthnow, “In Polls We Trust,” First Things, August 2015; Dan Wagner, Civis Analytics, interview with the author, August 17, 2015; Elizabeth Wilner, “Kantar’s Path to Public Opinion,” Kantar, September 4, 2013, http://us.kantar.com/public-affairs/pol itics/2013/kantars-path-to-public-opinion/.

  150.Cliff Zukin, “What’s the Matter with Polling?,” NYT, June 20, 2015; “Details of Opinion Poll Inquiry Announced,” British Polling Council, May 22, 2015, http://www.britishpollingcouncil.org/details-of-opinion-poll-inquiry-announced/; Doug Rivers, YouGov, interview with the author, August 3, 2015; Scott Horsley, “Changing Polling Metrics to Decide GOP’s Presidential Debate Lineup,” NPR, August 3, 2015; “Election 2015: Inquiry into Opinion Poll Failures,” BBC News, May 8, 2015; “Poll Measures Americans’ Trust in Public Opinion Polls,” C-SPAN.org, September 4, 2013, https://www.c-span.org/video/?314837-1/poll-measures-americans-trust-public-opinion-polls; Mark Blumenthal, “Why the Polls in Greece Got It Wrong,” Huffington Post, July 8, 2015; Oren Liebermann, “Why Were the Israeli Election Polls So Wrong?,” CNN, March 18, 2015.