Epidemic of error, disinformation infection
A persistent and pernicious infection is tearing through America as the new year dawns. But it’s not called delta or omicron. It’s not caused by a virus. And it cannot be prevented by wearing a mask or standing 6 feet away from the next customer at the grocery.
This plague is an epidemic of error, an infection of information — or rather, disinformation — and it’s not spread casually or accidentally. It’s being transmitted deliberately and cynically. And it’s crippling our ability to confront two lethal threats to our national health: one medical, the other political.
The first threat comes from the rapidly mutating COVID-19 virus and the adamant refusal of a militant minority to get vaccinated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 62% of all Americans and 73% of adults are fully inoculated, and the biggest reason for the resistance is a shadowy conspiracy of confusion that turns reality on its head.
Vaccines are dangerous, goes their mendacious message, when the exact opposite is true. Avoiding a jab is far riskier than getting one. As President Biden put it recently, “Almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.”
Yes, Donald Trump pushed hard for the development of those vaccines, and has even urged his followers to get immunized, but he still bears a huge responsibility for this miasma of misinformation.
For months, he fostered the falsehoods that the virus would disappear with the changing seasons, that quack cures could work, that medical experts couldn’t be trusted. No wonder his own followers booed him recently when he promoted vaccinations. And no wonder the resistance to scientific evidence falls heavily along partisan lines.
“Republicans make up an increasingly disproportionate share of those who remain unvaccinated, and political partisanship is a stronger predictor of whether someone is vaccinated than demographic factors such as age, race, level of education or insurance status,” reports KFF, an authoritative science news service. “These results suggest substantial challenges for any efforts to further increase vaccine uptake among U.S. adults.”
The second threat from the plague of propaganda is political: the Big Lie that the election of 2020 was rigged by the Democrats
and stolen from Trump. He continues to perpetuate his deceit at every opportunity, and his followers have embraced it enthusiastically.
In the latest Washington
Post poll, 58% of Republicans say Biden was “not legitimately elected,” while 62% maintain — with no proof of any kind — that there is “solid evidence” to support Trump’s cries of fraud. “There’s a very sophisticated infrastructure of disinformation by design — including both right-wing TV and social media rabbit holes — so if people want to live in this narrative, they can, very happily,” writes CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a dissident Republican who has broken with Trump, says of that infrastructure, “The thing that’s most concerning is that it has endured in the face of all evidence. I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.”
The implications of this insanity are enormous. It leads more than half of Republicans to tell CBS that the violent insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol last Jan. 6 were “defending freedom.” And it justifies a concerted effort by Republican state legislatures across the country to weaken the safeguards that prevented Trump and his followers from perverting the democratic process a year ago. Election officials who believe in the rule of law are being replaced by toadies who believe in the rule of Trump.
Distributing the disease of disinformation is nothing new for Trump. He entered public life telling a lie: that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. During his campaign, and then from the White House, he became a super-spreader of untruths while trying to undermine and discredit every individual or institution that tried to hold him accountable — from journalists, judges, intelligence analysts, scientific advisers and — ultimately — his own attorney general and vice president.
He became the Lord of the Lies, leading Rep. Liz Cheney, the conservative Republican from Wyoming, to warn on Twitter: “The Republican Party has to make a choice. We can either be loyal to our Constitution or loyal to Donald Trump, but we cannot be both.”
Democracy can only function if it bases decision-making on a common set of facts, a shared understanding of reality. The epidemic of error is already eroding the foundation of that system.
In Byron York’s opinion piece, with the headline, “Falling faith in democracy is not a new thing,” which was published in the Record-Bee last week, York tries to paint a simple picture in which the democrats had begun to lose faith in democracy after Clinton lost in 2016, while the Republicans are now losing faith in democracy since Trump lost in 2020.
It is my view, however, that in 2016 faith in democracy remained strong despite the fact that it was learned that Trump’s campaign had accepted help from the Russian government to defeat Clinton. A vigorous and thorough investigation by former U.S. Attorney General Robert Mueller, a Republican, revealed numerous examples of collusion between the Russian government and Trump’s presidential campaign. Besides that, Mueller also carefully described several instances of Trump committing the federal crime of “Obstruction of Justice” as he vainly attempted to halt or hinder Mueller’s investigation. (Trump, former U.S. Attorney William Barr, York and others, spread the lies that there was no collusion or obstruction of justice, as if they were spreading manure on a bed of “Forget-me-nots.”)
Our nation did not lose faith in democracy in 2016. On the contrary, it was a case of our country defending democracy by “calling out” a president who’d cheated in order to win the election.
In 2020, this same man who’d cheated to win in 2016, was voted out by a large democratic majority that essentially were saying, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
Upon losing the election, Trump exhibited a shameful lack of character and was simply unable to congratulate Biden for his victory which had been won “fair and square.” 60 federal courts heard, and then dismissed, Trump’s pathetic and ironic claims that he’d somehow been cheated and that the election had been stolen from him.
On the anniversary of the mayhem at our nation’s Capitol, which was stirred up by Trump’s recalcitrance, his supporters like York, continue to try to whittle away at their followers’ faith in democracy.
Yet, ever faithful, the Democratic party is working hard to pass the Freedom to Vote Act to ensure that all Americans’ votes will count.
Two recent articles I read recently in the Record Bee have me seeing red. The first one from January 7, concerned the Judge’s ruling against the Middletown resort project. It appeared to be framed in a way to influence readers, starting with the first paragraph. “The ruling comes more than a year after a lawsuit was filed against Lake County by out-of-towners. The use of the term “out-of-towners” when referring to a respected American environmental nonprofit (Center for Biological Diversity) was especially disconcerting. Especially since the development company, Lotusland Investments Holdings Inc. is not only an out-of-town entity, but more likely, an outof-country one. Lotusland has offices in China and San Francisco. Are they based in China? It sure appears that way. I was unable to fully verify my assumption on Google, which only increased suspicions that they are a Chinese Corporation. The article went on to give what seemed to be a fair account of the arguments put forward by both sides. But, if my information is correct, it failed to mention at least one pertinent fact: A letter sent to Lake County from the office of the State Attorney General prior to the vote taken by the Board of Supervisors approving the project. Had they responded to these concerns before they voted to approve the project, who knows what the outcome would have been?
The second article was the Record Bee’s editorial from last Saturday’s edition (January 8) in which Pres. Biden was criticized for not doing more in his first year of office. It undermined his accomplishments by declaring that passage of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act along with the Covid Relief Act were minor achievements: “not nearly enough…”
Give me a break. Pres. Biden has already done more in his first year than Mr. Trump did in his entire term to help regular working people in this country. This editorial appears to be nothing more than a hatchet job on Democrats for their failure, so far, to deliver the Build Back Better legislation as Biden and (most) Democrats hoped to do. It made no mention of our current good employment numbers, instead choosing to concentrate on polls depicting Biden’s 43% approval numbers. It says nothing about the lack of cooperation by any Republican to do anything to help working people. Instead, the GOP eagerly worked with their previous Republican president to deliver for the very richest people in our country by giving them more and bigger tax breaks.
Yes, you are correct. The
“Build Back Better Act” has indeed not yet happened-thanks to a few fake democrats who are beholden to their corporate masters, and the lack of interest by the GOP to do anything meaningful for the majority of Americans.
If our local paper is going to comment on national politics, how about commenting on how the Republican Party is choosing autocracy over democracy by changing laws in numerous states to make voting more difficult while giving themselves the power to change the outcome of elections they do not agree with? Due to these power grabs by the GOP, Democrats have now put voting rights legislation above the Build Back Better Act as their most important issue.
I am so tired of hearing people (many who don’t bother to vote, or even stay informed) say how both parties are the same. They obviously aren’t paying attention. The Republican Party has used propaganda and outright lies to convince many Americans that government doesn’t work for them, and have been doing so since Ronald Reagan began the destruction of the middle-class. The Democratic Party is the opposite. It believes government can and should help make life better for ALL Americans, not just the wealthiest. Democrats still believe in democracy.