I feel this is important to bring up at this point in time. First, let’s get this out of the way — Trump is a huge liar, asshole, a potential traitor, <insert your description here>. He is as corrupt as he is childishly incompetent. There are so many legitimate questions to be asked about potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia as well as his potentially sketchy business ties. These are all very worthy questions as we all know and they need to be investigated fully.
However, we can’t fall for the same trap that the conservatives did years ago. We can’t start assuming by default that every piece of information that is circulated online and that is damaging to Trump is actually true. We have to remain a reality-based community where legitimate sources are required and the discourse remains grounded on facts and logic, not just hopeful speculation. And by “we” I mean Daily Kos and the mainstream progressive community and the Democratic party in general.
There have always been those prone to conspiracy theories on the left and they will always be around, but I think the current political climate and the legitimate stench of Trump has made things worse. What finally prompted me to write this is this article by Vox from today where it describes an echo chamber it titles as “the Russiasphere”: Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia
A few key excerpts below:
The Russiasphere doesn’t have one unifying, worked-out theory — like “9/11 was an inside job” or “Nazi gas chambers are a hoax.” Instead, it’s more like an attitude — a general sense that Russian influence in the United States is pervasive and undercovered by the mainstream media. Everything that happens in US politics is understood through this lens — especially actions taken by the Trump administration, which is seen as Kremlin-occupied territory.
There are, of course, legitimate issues relating to Trump’s ties to Russia...There are even legitimate reasons to believe that Trump’s campaign worked with Russian hackers to undermine Hillary Clinton….
The Russiasphere’s assertions go way beyond that.
Take Mensch, who is probably the Russiasphere’s most prominent voice. She actually did have one legitimate scoop, reporting in November that the FBI had been granted a warrant to watch email traffic between the Trump Organization and two Russian banks (before anyone else had). Since then, though, her ideas have taken a bit of a turn. In January, she launched a blog — Patribotics — that’s exclusively dedicated to the Trump/Russia scandal. It’s ... a lot.
Below are just a few examples of the conspiracy theories she has fully espoused:
She’s also suggested that Anthony Weiner was brought down as part of a Russian plot to put the Clinton emails back in the news.
We cannot get complacent about this stuff. Yeah, she’s “on our side” and she had one legitimate scoop. I don’t know her and I don’t know her motives and I have no interest in slandering her. She might operate in good faith and just be misguided or she might be looking for attention and clicks etc., who the hell knows. I assume the best and that she’s just misguided in how she takes in information and believes stuff to be true too easily, but I don’t really care because it actually doesn’t matter what I think about her as a person. What matters is that she has consistently shown a lack of judgment and has destroyed her credibility and trust in her analytical thinking skills with her tweets and theories.
She might, just might, be right about something in the future as well regarding Trump and Russia but it doesn’t mean that moving forward we should assume by default that what she says is credible. If something can be true (and almost everything can), it doesn’t mean it’s likely to be true, and in her case the ratio of her being right or wrong is pretty damn bad.
Now, speculation can be entertaining and fun and it’s a way to let off steam in this day and age because basically all progressives deeply dislike Trump (to say the least) and many have a need to vent. If it’s just gossiping or “theorizing” as a form of entertainment, that’s one thing as long as people limit it to that, are consciously aware of that, and don’t actually start believing this stuff by default without any evidence. This matters because we cannot let the “alternative facts” people win and let society fall even deeper into the morass of irrationality and purely tribal politics without a logical foundation. Again, Vox:
Experts on political misinformation worry that the unfounded speculation and paranoia that infect the Russiasphere risk pushing liberals into the same black hole of conspiracy-mongering and fact-free insinuation that conservatives fell into during the Obama years.
The fear is that this pollutes the party itself, derailing and discrediting the legitimate investigation into Russia investigation. It also risks degrading the Democratic Party — helping elevate shameless hucksters who know nothing about policy but are willing to spread misinformation in the service of gaining power. We’ve already seen this story play out on the right, a story that ended in Trump’s election.
Don’t get me wrong. We are still far, far away from going off the deep end like the GOP did years ago. I don’t want to come across as too alarmist and I don’t think the Vox piece is alarmist either. But it does focus our attention to this issue in an important way because we cannot let it snowball from random tweets and blogs to Daily Kos and other more mainstream (and dare I say serious and more legitimate) websites and then finally to party officials and politicians. Not to mention that every voter we lose to the conspiracy hole is a big loss for our cause and society in the long run because once you learn to not trust any actual news because it’s all corporatist or fake or corrupt and you get your “news” mainly from tweets and speculative blogs and in some cases true nut jobs, you’ve lost your ability to assess facts based on their merit and that has long-term consequences.
I hope we keep these things in mind when we move forward. We need to focus on the Russia investigation like we need to keep focusing on AHCA and the disaster policies by the GOP and our alternatives. We need to be deeply skeptical of Trump and his administration because they have conclusively shown that they are shameless about lying. However, that should offer no excuse to have a tendency to believe in pure speculation just because it might be true and it feels good to think that it’s true. There’s way more than enough actual information out there that will keep us busy resisting Trump for a long time without needing to legitimize unsupported speculation or worse.
