The White House as a Factory of Lies

The truth was the biggest loser of the American elections. And it can get worse.

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Exactly five years ago, I wrote a column on Saturday titled “Resistance to the Facts. Word of the year in 2016 ». And my truth was not the “Post-truth” named Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictatorships. But I don’t pretend to be prophetic. me before not how much nonsense the future should bring.

By 2020 it didn’t just give us a deadly pandemic. It was the year in which disinformation spread like a virus among large sectors of the population.

And then I don’t mean the resurgence of political identity that filled the debate surfaces with the most damning and critical claims about everything from the origins of slavery to the comedians’ views of Africans.

I mean the strangest deception at the opposite end of the Great Political Division. Millions of Americans, and probably tens of thousands of Norwegians, enter the new year convinced that the forces of evil on the left stole the electoral victory from Donald Trump.

Stop theft

Conspiracy theories are nothing new. No prejudice, tribal mentality, wishful thinking and the confirmation trap. But now 3 out of 4 Republicans believe in widespread electoral fraud. And the origin of the theory is the incumbent president himself.

It has been an obvious strategy for a long time. Back in April, Trump began questioning the validity of mail-in ballots. Before Election Day, he had tweeted 70 times that the election was rigged.

He urged his supporters to vote the old-fashioned way, despite the crown infection, knowing that mail-in votes would be counted last and would go primarily to Biden. Although there were still millions of votes to be counted, he declared himself the winner and demanded that the counting be stopped. At least in the states where he led. It was a premeditated attempt to steal the election.

But trumpeters live in a backward country. “Stop The Steal” became the motto. And it still has. Trump has lost 59 of 60 lawsuits, without being heard on the fraud charge, not even by Republican judges. But that doesn’t help. The political leader of the United States, the most powerful nation in the world and our main ally, denies having lost a valid democratic election.

Alternate truth, department of Norway

Trumpists of all countries share the denial. I’ve even had Facebook threads bombarded with links to Trump friends The Epoch Times, including a widely shared “documentary,” which claims that Dominion’s voting system is owned by “Communist China.” And we who think it came from Venezuela!

But it’s not just on social media that you come across fanatical Trump advocates who take fact-checking and criticism lightly. Hans Rustad is the editor-in-chief of the Document.no website. According to Redaktørplakaten, as a member of the Norwegian Publishers Association, it will promote “open, honest and truth-seeking journalism.”

But both before and after the US elections, he has tirelessly and enthusiastically made undocumented accusations from the White House and the dubious right-wing American media. “Sydney Powell exudes a seriousness and professional integrity that impresses many,” he wrote of Trump’s lawyers’ response to Comic Ali, following the gang’s craziest press conference, stating: “After this press conference, Biden can wait a long time to get approved. “

Thus speaks the Blessed One in faith, from his alternate reality.

A one-man magic factory

But, in reality, one is very suspicious. Mistrust of the media, academia, government and institutions is greater than Trump’s, and is linked to a deep social division in the United States. Trump is a symptom, not a cause, it is said.

But Trump is the fuel for the fire, a one-man magic factory that has cynically exploited the poisoned climate of debate.

For those who do not remember: Trump began his political career by making large sectors of the American interpreter believe that Obama could have been born in Kenya. Since then, he has lied and bullied on a daily basis. In the words of author Jonathan Rauch, we have witnessed “a systematic attack, from on high, on our collective ability to distinguish the true from the false.”

Trump continued the attack on Christmas Eve itself: CHOOSING TO DECEIVE IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY. IT IS A FACT! ” And he shared a well-produced propaganda video in which the facts were presented as disinformation and vice versa. Completely online with 1984. But Orwell could not conceive of a decentralized and privatized mass distribution of half-truths, based on sophisticated algorithms, click-bait economics, and echo chambers.

And what good is a website if it just “blends in” with everything else? It only confirms the message: “The big media censor the truth”. The correction of facts can strengthen misconceptions in ideological groups, according to research. A recent study of Twitter’s warnings against Trump shows that they further polarize Americans.

Both parts equally bad?

But what about the propaganda of those who hate Trump? As Sam Harris has pointed out, there is good reason to criticize “MSM” (Mainstream Media) for their bias. Radical Democrats like the “AOC” dislike him. To warn against the awakening movement and loathe Antifa. But nothing on the left can match the insanity of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy ring.

In October, Trump relayed a story related to QAnon that Osama bin Laden is alive. Biden and Obama killed a stunt double and shot down a helicopter carrying US special forces to cover up the bluff.

It’s like Biden claiming that the CIA invented the coronavirus to kill poor black people. But he doesn’t feed those sick thoughts and he doesn’t scatter hazardous waste from the corners of the internet.

That is the difference between the loser and the winner of the election. And it is monumental. Then you affirm that “both parties are equally bad”, you yourself are part of the problem: An emerging disinformation society without common references to reality. No agreement on what we do not agree, except that we are enemies.