Vox lays out the bones of what it calls a “deep epistemic breach,” wherein the always-voting base responsible for electing Republicans has gleefully colonized The UpsideDown. They co-exist beside us in a dark, cold, warped realm in which the natural laws upholding reality have no bearing—*at all.* This crisis is
a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening… [a] rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.
In other words, truth is what cynical FAUX-Rubes and Russia-backed shitlords tell them it is.
In this brave new world that
rejects the very idea of neutral, binding arbiters; there is only Us and Them, only a zero-sum contest for resources... the systematic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe,
the orange-stained Tweet-sharting is starting to look strategic, and the White House troll is starting to look a lot less idiot and a lot more savant. Groomed for office for decades by Roy Cohn and Roger Stone in strategic disinformation and “the politics of polarization,” DJT tested the ground with birtherism, and successfully left a plurality of Republican voters, as the Vox article notes, either unsure or firmly convinced that Obama is a Kenyan-born impostor.
The idea now is not just to get the base to digest increasingly violent, inane, twisted garbage without vomiting. It’s to turn them into ravening disinformation-tweakers. It’s to get them to crave lie-driven political sadism like meth, and to cook it up, serve it and sell it themselves.
The both-siderist mainstream media played a key role in letting it get to this point, of course. And now their desperate efforts to re-establish a truth signal, to get back to the facts and “real journalism” is getting lost in the noise their ratings-driven cowardice helped to generate:
As Brian Beutler wrote in a scathing piece recently, the mainstream media has never learned to deal with the right-wing bubble — it has not learned how not to take bad-faith lies seriously.
Part of it is on us, too. For years we have argued with these people on the premise that showing their nonsense to be nonsense would lead to their defeat. But they know instinctively what we have steadfastly refused to see--that their victory isn’t in being right. It’s being openly, proudly, savagely wrong and still remaining more powerful than those in possession of the facts and the truth.
From this (ad)vantage point, Bannon et al. need not badger Republicans into a diversionary parallel investigation into Uranium-One or some other concocted horseshit. They only need the WSJ Editorial page, FOX News, Breibart, Kelly, most radio talk show hosts, and half the GOP in Congress to do what they do daily, and to achieve the same victory they have with climate change: sow enough significant doubt to stymie action:
They may say Mueller is compromised. It’s a Hillary/Deep State plot. There’s nothing wrong with colluding with Russia in this particular way. Dems did it first. All of the above. Whatever. Say the entire right-wing media machine kicks to life and dismisses the whole thing as a scam — and conservatives believe them.
We already know this is the play. We also know the only “facts” GOP politicians will publicly understand are those that will keep the Koch/Mercer cash flowing and that will keep this increasingly brain-fiending, zombified Cult45 horde from hitting them with a primary challenge.
Meanwhile, “principled” Republicans, few and weak-tea, are not standing up and fighting. They’re retreating. They speak out only upon their craven departure, and in safe red districts, cede ground to yet more scum and villainy who will fall upon the bleeding prey that is our democracy.
We may very well be looking at a country with a successfully indicted president who can’t be removed.