Georgia governor Brian Kemp, responding to calls from fellow party members to use a new state law to call a session of impeachment to remove DA Fani Willis, firmly stated that he thought such a move would be unconstitutional, putting the kibosh on their plans. This has mightily angered several GOP operatives, both within the state of Georgia as well as more broadly nationwide.
Georgia, it seems, was meant to be where Republicans made an about-turn in their effort to repudiate the legal mess that Donald Trump now finds himself in. In fact, the RICO case that Willis has launched threatens to do real damage to the GOP, providing a template for cases against local officials that could be used by other DAs and state attorneys general investigating Trump’s broad fake electors scheme.
This firewall action by Kemp earned him a tweet by none other than hatchet man and known dirty trickster Roger Stone.
Aldous J Pennyfarthing posted about this political dustup as well as this tweet, and I encourage you to read his diary. The tweet, however, struck me because it is so brief and because it is so stark. It’s a piece of propaganda that deserves close examination.
The comment I left in AJP’s diary dealt with the mechanics of Stone’s message:
I never want to believe it, but now I do.
This is a strange turn of phrase, not only in content but also in terms of grammar. This is notable, for as much as I dislike Stone he’s obviously cultured enough to know how to sculpt his sentences, especially in a text medium.
It’s a subjunctive morphed into the continuous present: I never want, but now I do (want).
The structure of the propaganda I see is: 1) Tell the audience something that’s been anathema to them for quite some time, perhaps longstanding. 2) Immediately try to neutralize that sense of anathema so that the information has a better chance of getting through.
Indeed, the sentence could be a very generic sentence made specifically to lower incredulity. When accompanying propaganda / false claims / conspiracy theories, this type of direct intervention of belief formation should be like sugar helping medicine go down.
I mainly say this because of the nature of the verb tense. From all appearances, Stone wants this belief he's offering to be accepted and to continue on being accepted into the future, indefinitely, by the intended audience.
(The aspect of incredulity with regards to opinion formation is discussed here.)
I mention incredulity because for decades it’s been recognized as one of the elements of opinion formation that must be taken into account if one is in the opinion-making business and is trying to move the needle on some issue.
Incredulity is the measure of balk, basically. The more unbelievable or outlandish a statement is, the more incredulity will be produced. Incongruous statements that go against prevailing wisdom are due to create more incredulity.
Osgood and Tannenbaum, writing in 1955, used the example of Eisenhower to make their point: The headline “Eisenhower condemns communism” would likely not generate any incredulity, whereas one stating that he had invited communists for a friendly dinner would lead readers to say to themselves, “That can’t be true” — even if the story were 100% true. It’s just too outside of their existing frame of reference.
So here Stone is trying to tamp down on incredulity. He doesn’t refute the previous GOP line of Kemp’s integrity: he just says, “I switch my belief.” If he’s successful with his propaganda attempt, then he won't ever need to explicitly refute that previous line. Insinuation and innuendo will do all the work.
But notice also Stone’s choice of verb: to want. This is a verb of desire, of acquisition. This idea of want goes straight to the heart of authoritarianism. At base, they want space, land, “elbow room” — they want the ability to grab and take, to appropriate. And these authoritarians who have the overwhelming sense of deprivation (whether or not that sense matches material reality) are primed to want, so as to salve their wounds.
So Stone speaks to them in that language. That he’s doing so in the context of belief in a rumor is noteworthy. Rumor, a form of word of mouth, has its own momentum; just as word of mouth is the most persuasive and effective form of advertising, rumor relies on the same mechanisms to achieve its speed of dissemination and force of appeal.
But Stone knows he has to neutralize the party line from before. Before, the GOP boilerplate was that Stacey Abrams’ claims of election malfeasance against Brian Kemp held no water, that she was griping over sour grapes. Now, though, it’s to Stone & Co.’s best interest to change that common understanding among the GOP electorate. He’s poisoning the well, yes, he’s fouling the nest. As Kemp has shown he won’t play ball, to Stone Kemp’s made himself into fair game. So Stone is determined to use language to directly tinker with the minds of the electorate.
Remember those party-line defenses we made on Kemp’s behalf, three years ago? Stone asks. Disregard them. Identify with the ‘I’ in my sentence: I never want to believe it, but now I do want to believe. In this way, those three years evaporate. Time is immaterial, all by the magic of words.
And this timelessness is itself a feature of nationalism, the eternal, scripted forever of the fundamentalist unfolding in an equally eternal but linear present. The spectre of empty time unveils itself, a blank clock face.
One presenter, commenting on the concept of nationalism, spoke of “empty time”:
[Benedict] Anderson also presents the concept of homogeneous empty time, borrowed from the ideas of Walter Benjamin, which replaced the idea of simultaneity-along-time which referred to the medieval conception of time as situating events in the past, present, and future simultaneously.
→Homogeneous empty time suggests that a nation can be imagined as a unit, moving through time.
Homogeneous empty time is the kind of time measured by clocks and calendars, so in homogeneous empty time, every moment of time is equivalent and empty.
Why is it called homogeneous? Because one day or minute or hour is treated equivalent to any other.
It is this concept that allows a rewriting of the past, because there’s only one eternal moment; and if today someone is an enemy, that permits an erasure and a filling in, a new understanding. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. The GOP has always been at war with Kemp.