Disinfo Monsters

It Came From the Silo ....

This week from our tent on the microplastic-soaked edge of a Trump Freedom City : a peek at what lives inside the American media eco-system’s dark places we call silos. 

First, I need to tell a story about how I first learned about silos. 

In the weeks before Republicans nominated Trump in Cleveland, everyone expected violence. Neo nazi freaks like Milo Yiannopolous , were still new and shocking to us. Proud Boys were sucker-punching antifa in the streets. Trump was baiting brown people and women, urging his supporters to “knock the crap out of” protesters.

I heard about an organization called Truckers for Trump. The truckers were promising to convoy across the nation and park their rigs in a big circle around the convention center as a kind of protective wall for their candidate.

I thought I could write a good story if I rode into Cleveland on one of these big rigs, flying the MAGA flag. With a little Facebook research, I identified a founder of Truckers for Trump. But for various reasons, I never got around to connecting with her until it was too late to buy a plane ticket. So we met on the phone.

The Trucker for Trump was pleasant, coherent and friendly on the phone. She lived in suburban California, and told me she was an evangelical Christian, mother of a grade school child and had worked as an executive assistant. Then she veered off the median. Obama was going to institute martial law before the election, in order to deny Trump the presidency. And, Obama was going to throw conservative Christians like her into “FEMA camps.” She’d learned about this on Facebook and at church.Fearing arrest and incarceration in a FEMA camp, she had a year prior, taken her child out of school, sold the family house, and moved into her husband’s truck, so that when the crackdown came, they’d be together.

I tried to explain why I thought Obama probably wasn’t going to do all that, but she wasn’t having any of it. I, a political journalist, couldn’t possibly know better than her Facebook and church connections. All I could think about was that if I had boarded the truck in California and learned about this as we headed east, my head would have exploded before we reached the Nevada line, with three days of cross continental trek ahead.

We agreed to meet in Ohio. I picked up some DIY riot gear -  a bike helmet and goggles from Dick’s Sporting Goods, which fortunately, I never had to use - and flew east over the Midwestern Big Ag grid. We met at a diner. They were a warm and earnest couple. Life hadn’t been easy for them. The trucker had health and major dental problems that he couldn’t afford to fix. Money was short. But they were doing okay. At least they were together - Obama would have to throw them into the same FEMA camp.

They showed me their rig, a huge cab remodeled into a room with rugs and bunk beds. They, their child and a large dog had lived in it for a year. It hadn’t been easy but they were pleased about homeschooling their child that way. How many elementary schools offer weekly cross-country field trips?

Seven years on, this story is not unusual. Swathes of America are in the grip of paranoid conspiracy theories. Q Anon has morphed into mainstream politics. Voters have sent true believers to Congress. The situation has lost its capacity to shock, but it should not. Look, and remember.

“We Need to Talk About Steve”

Steve Bannon. Uncanny resemblance to a werewolf, possibly suffers from lycanthropy. Self-described revolutionary whose chief contribution to American democracy has been to, as he put it  “flood the zone with shit.” A king of disinformation.

I met Bannon at a CPAC more than a decade ago, where he had organized a whine-session on Hollywood’s mistreatment of conservatives. He had produced a movie about Reagan, but the industry had failed to recognize his genius. Hollywood failure is a driving force among the conservative media men. James Carville once observed that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people - but some right wingers are bitter about their exile from the cool crowd. Rightwing podcaster and social media star Ben Shapiro is a failed screenwriter, Breitbart founder Andrew Breitbart and former NRA shill Dana Loesch were also Hollywood washouts.

As writer Robert Skvarla recently pointed out, “To prevent fascism from spreading we must create a new Works Progress Administration for theater kids and wannabe celebrities.”

Bannon’s communications method - flooding the zone with shit - found a natural practitioner in Trump, who put it into practice from the day he encouraged Americans to believe his inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s, despite photographic evidence otherwise. Disconnecting the public from agreed upon fact was a Republican project at least as far back as W and the strategy of scorning the “reality based community” to cement the corporate right’s alliance with evangelicals who give Big Daddy in the Sky the last word on everything.

To visualize the end game in a truly shit-flooded zone, read “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia” by Peter Pomerantsev. In Russia, no one believes anything they read or hear, so everything is possible: weird cults and holy warriors proliferate, and government propaganda gurus disseminate conspiracy theories. The book was published in 2014, an era when such a scenario was utterly impossible to imagine playing out in America.

Nothing is true.

You only have to scroll Twitter or Facebook, or eavesdrop on any conversation in a bar in American today to hear that sentiment. One day your neighbor was mowing his lawn and selling insurance and the next day he and his whole family believe Democrats get energy from drinking juvenile blood and Trump is Jesus. A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth ties its shoes, wrote Mark Twain. Now a House Speaker’s spouse can be beaten with a hammer inside their home by a deranged political conspiracist and half the country will soon be whispering that it was a gay lovers’ spat.

It might be true.

People are saying.

The original Disinformation Creature, the late Dark Prince of office sexual deviance, was Roger Ailes. The conservative political strategist founded Fox News for Rupert Murdoch.  Ailes’ media model was Rush Limbaugh, then an opioid addict making millions picking the scab of American racism and sexism.

Of course, Fox became a nest of sexual abusers, some of whose victims eventually accused Ole Rog of gross sexual harassment and forced him out. Murdochs shelled out at least $90 million to settle suits involving the main Foxy men - Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Shine - but it is believed the company and its insurers paid $200 million. Money well spent, apparently: Fox is America’s most-watched cable outlet and the nation’s chief disinformation purveyor.

Ailes belonged to a claque of pudgy, flaccid, white old bulls whose hypocrisy and general disgustingness can be viewed here and here and here. Before shuffling off the mortal coil they spawned the species that populate today’s disinformation silos.

Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity make millions carrying the Ailes ethos onward. The lesser Sons of Ailes - Bannon, Jack Posobiec, Ben Shapiro - are making bank as the toxic male Kardashians of politics. The grift on low information Americans is lucrative. The Murdoch family will never run out of money, no matter how many Dominion lawsuits come at them. Bannon’s collection plate for the big beautiful border wall got him a federal indictment - mooted by a Trump pardon.

It only takes a drop of ink to color a bottle of water.

Do these nodes of mis- and disinformation give a rat’s ass if people like Trump Truckers made life decisions based on bullshit about FEMA camps? Do they care about wrecking the fabric of democracy, a system that depends on trust among citizens and an agreed-upon set of facts?

These are men who were born to develop strip malls with inherited money or to operate MMA gyms in those strip malls.  Sean Hannity should be detailing cars in Joey Buttafuoco’s garage in Ronkonkoma, but he’s chauffeured in a black luxury sedan and choppers in from the Hamptons.  The House that Ailes built and its spawn on the unregulated tech bro “libertarian” platforms flood the zone with shit, hourly, daily. They are the voices of profound influence in American society.

Have a look, ladies and gents.