Last Thursday, I had a distinct sense of panic. Low-grade, granted, but panic all the same. It was two days after the Derek Chauvin verdict had come down. That day, the nation had been on tenterhooks for nearly a month as the trial had commenced and wound down; the verdict seemed a relief to many. Right after the verdict, celebrations broke out in various cities instead. Tuesday seemed like a true victory for the side of social justice.
Thursday, however, from not just the current Republican grandstander, Tucker Carlson, but from several corners of the conservative media chamber the idea emerged that the only reason the jury convicted Chauvin was because the jury felt hostage to some amorphous yet utterly frightening left-wing mob. If Chauvin walks, cities burn. That’s what conservatives took away—totally in bad faith—from Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ statement that if the verdict was not guilty that agitators for justice would need to get even more “confrontational”.
Several conservative media figures and outlets were running with the identical “reason” why the verdict should not be taken at face value. In fact, Chauvin’s conviction, by logical extension, was a miscarriage of justice, because the very threat of leftwing violence—however minuscule—was enough to taint the verdict. (The perception of possible violence is the same as violence, especially where rightwing rhetoric is concerned. Conflation in this particular instance is intentional.)
The frightening thing is that when CBS compared two different polls from last week, they found that the one taken Tuesday through Thursday had conservatives approving of the verdict of guilty by a 3-to-1 ratio among other conservatives. The second poll, however, spanning from Wednesday to Saturday saw approval versus disapproval shrink to a 54%-46% margin. Basically, the power the rightwing media silo swung public opinion among their core audience by 20+ points within a 48-hour window, by the sheer force of repetition of the same talking point. The convergence of agreement among several rightwing pundits made the novel idea appear more salient (if one applies the precepts of confirmation bias).
What would be the advantage of right-wing media outlets deliberately hoodwinking their audience? Might this circumstance amount to an experiment to see how effective propaganda can be? Considering the polls above, the data seem to bear out that public opinion can be swayed within a mere 48 hours. That’s significant. A twenty-point drop in approval of any otherwise neutral position is extraordinary to witness, let alone how even more stunning it would be to manifest that swing into being. We see the power of concentrated, reverberating, monovocal point-talking, especially when it relates to material of the culture wars.
The Chauvin case and the public response to its verdict can be examined more in depth later. But the swing in groundswell opinion among the right truly alarmed me in the alacrity of the tilt. The episode, to me, demanded to be placed alongside the denial among Republicans to acknowledge that Biden won the presidency and that Trump lost the presidency fair and square, as well as the fog of war that has deluded people in the wake of the Trump-fueled insurgency against the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. These three things taken together signaled to me as in a lightning crack exactly how much danger our country faces right now.
The right has taken three very concrete, objectively true things and made them a matter of opinion/culture war/dogma, which means that the people who believe this trio of beliefs as a whole—that justice in the case of Chauvin was miscarried due to outside forces, that the presidential election of 2020 was won through fraud, and that the insurrection was a false flag operation—are living on a completely divorced plane. This unreality comes complete with recognized media figures who reinforce this patchwork of beliefs. Other institutions, such as conservative/fundamental churches, mirror or copy in entirety the rhetoric of these media figures so as to maintain this far-flung, wide-reaching veil that alters the way these audience members perceive their world. They are truly, for all intents and purposes, living parallel in an alternate “reality”, what they see as truth/facts and/or what would rationally extend from perceived principles or philosophies. They rely on faulty logic to reach conclusions derived from unsound premises.
Whatever their mechanism, the fact remains that these actors in the rightwing media ecosphere are helping to lay the cornerstone of some alternate whole-cloth reality. Moreover, they continue to stoke the underlying Big Lie of a stolen election to maintain an anger base in their electorate. To what end? If Republicans are never forced to rescind their claims of a fraudulent 2020 election, if they are allowed to maintain this facade, how will they use this fiction? Is it at all possible to maneuver this (mis)information in order to force a paradigm shift (to determine who wins the historically accepted version of what really happened and how history unfolds into the future from here)? For those who do not share the required dogmatic beliefs, could such a paradigm shift, so forcefully effected, be experienced as anything other than tyranny?
Even if that is not the ultimate goal, the strong-arming of this alternate view of reality upon the broader populace, what then would be?
Might this alternate construction of reality just be the pure consolidation and preservation of power? There’s an old idea that tells us that whoever controls the calendar controls society. Think of it: those who administer the calendar’s prescriptions, our festivals and high holy days, are our cultural gatekeepers. When the Romans changed the calendar, even adding whole swaths of weeks, all of Roman society adopted the changes, even the heathens in the countryside. These hearth dwellers had no choice--their lives had come to be governed by those who had such awesome power as to insert new days into the calendar all across the realm. Likewise, perhaps conservatives who perpetuate today’s trio of false ideas do so in order to exercise such a form of raw power, this ability to shape entire bodies of belief. Perhaps also these actors mean to perform some later legerdemain in order to put their political team on top, then enforce their newly installed paradigm to oppress the rest of us still clinging to the analog truth of lived experience.
I wrote this yesterday in order to try to organize my thoughts. If this still reads somewhat jumbled, I apologize. I even wrestled with whether to post this publicly, especially here, where much of the sentiment I express might be interpreted as being CT. I don’t mean for this to read that way. I feel it’s more speculation, more trying to puzzle out where these actions are leading or are likely to lead. I do not believe these newly minted tenets of the conservative movement (Big Lie, False Flag, Mob Justice) are being adopted scattershot by the Republican power structure. Whether they are building to some cryptic crescendo or standing for these postures reflexively, the result is that in many concrete ways these conservative personalities are crafting a deepfake reality, brick by pixelated brick.
The vague feeling of danger I referenced above reads that way because the last time I had a foreboding feeling like this was during the interregnum, specifically from early December to early January. I was reading article upon article about Trump’s deranged strategy for challenging the vote, reading up on how his lawyers kept trying to delay for time but failed to keep key states from certifying their results, and it was plain to me that Trump supporters were being riled up to advance upon the Capitol. Did I foresee the storming of the Capitol building itself? No, but I certainly deciphered Trump’s tweet about his people coming to D.C. and promising them their time “will be wild!” To me, it seemed Trump hoped the people would get so out of control that he’d have to call out the National Guard, declare martial law, and delay or set aside the certification. Long story short, I feel like a Cassandra, and not for the first time.
33
