Paranoia settles firmly in Trump’s Oval Office
Richard Hofstadter famously titled it in the early 1960s heyday of the John Birch Society and the Barry Goldwater campaign, flourishes in today’s industry of paranoid conspiracy theorists on the internet and in other media. But never before has it been brought into the Oval Office by a president, who, judging by a various credible reports, would rather watch hours of Fox News than listen to his own intelligence briefings.
Even more stunning is the broad support Trump has received from other Republicans for his conspiracy theories, as well as the new-age partisan media that Clinton and Nixon did not have.
Referring to the hyping by Republicans of a text message between two FBI employees that referenced a “secret society,” Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked his guest, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., if Republicans “hurt their credibility on real issues of bias when they make such a big deal about secret societies and palace coups.”
Yet, as the liberal website Media Matters reports, Fox aired the phrase “secret society” more than 100 times in the two days after the text message between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page (no relation to this columnist) was revealed on Jan. 22 by Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, on Fox News. After the message was reported likely to be a joke (Gee, do ya think?), almost all references to the phrase “secret society” suddenly disappeared from the news station’s broadcast.
More of us Americans appear to be engaged with the political process than at any time since the Vietnam War. The heightened awareness and engagement on the left that led to Barack Obama’s election, followed by a similar uprising on the right that Trump rallied, have led to record number of candidates in this year’s midterm elections and, according to political and media experts, a renewed sense of civic responsibility.
In other words, the best antidote to paranoid politics is us, the voting public. In our schools and elsewhere, we need to recommit ourselves as a nation to facts, not just our fears.