Dangerous Zealots and Masters of Misinformation
Part Three of GIMME SOME TRUTH, WONDER WOMAN - The United States of 2021 in Multipart Disharmony
Let’s leave Donald John Trump to one side for a moment. Yes, please let’s – he is after all “the former guy”.
But what about his zealous Trumpian followers? Like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, American Guard and QAnonsters.
And what about the money that has supported their cause? For while violent mobs have helped to take the USA to the brink of civil war, they wouldn’t have got there without support from some deep-pocketed people.
People like Jeffrey Steven Yass, who gave tens of millions of dollars to hardline Republican groups supporting Trump’s effort to invalidate his presidential re-election failure.
Like Richard Ellis Uihlein, the right-wing billionaire chief executive of the Uline shipping company, who has been the major donor to The Club for Growth anti-tax group and contributed millions to a group in the ‘Stop the Steal’ coalition.
Or Carrie Campbell Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which contributed millions to the Republican Attorneys General Association whose fundraising arm sent robocalls encouraging Trumpians to march on the Capitol on 6 January.
It’s good to see the new administration of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr getting on with the job of bringing the USA back from the brink. But the zealous Trumpians are still around, revving each other up in their social media silos.
They still have their flags, their symbols and their tropes. And their ideas still have a frightening hold on the Republican Party.
QAnon is the subject of a new six-part documentary series Into the Storm.
And now the QAnonsters are flocking to a new group, the Sabmyk Network, which has tens of thousands of new members joining from around the world every day.
This week the British anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate has unmasked a German art dealer Sebastian Bieniek as Sabmyk’s leader.
Meanwhile in the USA the zealots still have their plots for a new civil war. Some of them say it’s already begun.
On his Sipsey Street Irregulars blogsite one of the founders of the Three Percenters, Michael Brian Vanderboegh, quotes another bogger who proclaimed in 2009 that American politics is now “just dress rehearsal for civil war.”
If the zealots can’t win power at the ballot box then they appear willing to take it by force. “We are the storm,” they say.
Looking at the voting records of the ‘Stop the Steal’ rioters who have been charged following their storming of the Capitol on 6 January, around 10% of them didn’t themselves vote in 2020.
But their resentment of the ‘Liberal elite’ is compounded by their ongoing, echo-chambered belief in the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from them.
Trump’s legal claims about mass voter fraud have been rejected by the relevant local election officials and by judges of varying political persuasions, including many Trump appointees.
But zealots tend not to be open to the kind of impartiality and reasonableness that election officials and judges are meant to use.
If they can believe that the 2020 election was stolen – and that Trump was actually the winner – then they can believe that they were patriotically protecting democracy when they stormed the Capitol.
I'm a fan of the Letters from an American daily Substack newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson, who is a professor of American history at Boston College. It has been very useful in my research for this Gimme Some Truth, Wonder Woman multipart thing.
Here's what Heather had to say last week about the stolen election narrative:
“The danger of the Big Lie – the false idea that Trump actually won the 2020 election – was always that it would convince Trump supporters to fight for him not because they thought they would be fighting to overturn the US government, but because they thought they would be defending it.
If, indeed, the election were stolen from the former president by the radical socialists of whom he warned, it would be the part of heroism to rally to protect our system.”
So ‘Stop the Steal’ was – and still is – a very effective rallying cry.
Elmer Stewart “Stand now or kneel forever” Rhodes is the army veteran and disbarred lawyer who founded the Oath Keepers. He sees the Biden administration as an occupying enemy force, against which armed patriots will “rise up”.
Rhodes had this to say 24 days after the storming of the Capitol:
“You gotta to declare everything that comes out of King Biden's mouth as illegitimate, and null and void from inception, because he is not a legitimate president.”
Together with his Trumpians the ‘former guy’ also clings to the stolen election fantasy. It is vital for his fragile self-belief and also for his reputation among his followers for always winning.
I expect that neither he nor many of them will ever acknowledge that it is fantasy. To do so would be challenging for them.
Knowing the necessity and the power of the fantasy Trump continues to perpetuate it. "I think we won substantially," he says.
And for his Senate impeachment trial in February 2021 Trump managed at the last moment to find a legal team who were willing to perpetuate the stolen election fantasy on his behalf.
In the trial his attorney Michael Thomas van der Veen tried to inhabit the fantasy by referring to an “inexplicable dramatic drop in Georgia’s ballot rejection rates”.
It’s become a matter of debate – and the vanity of Mr van der Veen – whether he came up with his own wording or was reading from a script prepared by long-time Trump advisors. But there is no question that the claim about Georgia ballot rejection rates is absolute bollocks.
Here’s the truth:
“The number of absentee ballot rejections for signature issues increased approximately 350% in the November 2020 election in Georgia from the 2018 election, about the same rate of increase as the total number of absentee ballots accepted. The rejection rate for absentee ballots with missing or non-matching signatures in the 2020 General Election was 0.15%, the same rejection rate for signature issues as the 2018 General Election.”
Compulsive liars, however, can’t resist. And if they look like getting caught lying then they seek – often with success – to undermine the fact-checking process.
It’s easy to defend the stolen election myth, for which there is zero evidence, if like Senator Randal Howard Paul you claim “there are two sides to everything”.
That kind of truth-relativist two-siderism throws everything into doubt. Whatever the evidence shows or fails to show, it’s all ‘fake news’.
It’s a popular strategy, perfectly formed for the age of social media. It deflects attention from lying – in this case Trump’s lying – and portrays real facts as just points of view.
It’s a sad sign of our times that Tortoise Media, a fast-growing news platform in the UK, has called one of its series of ThinkIn online events ‘The Battle for Truth’.
The battle is surely on!
The truths targeted by Trump and his mates – the truths to be discredited – are the ones pointed out by the people they call the ‘radical left Liberal elite’.
Their wholescale attack on anything said by Liberals is a conservative political strategy with a strong pedigree.
When I was growing up middle-class Liberals like me were derided in the predominantly conservative press as ‘champagne socialists’. And ‘reds under the bed’ was a well-established catchcry that was used to marginalise Progressives.
The ongoing goal of the strategy is to nurture and mainstream a regressive idea. In its current cultural form the idea is that the world needs saving – at any cost – from ‘woke, politically correct, culture cancelling Progressives’, aka the deep state swamp dwellers.
We used to call regressive ideas like that ‘backlash’. We believed they would go away as new enlightened generations came along. To be honest I still have some faith in that ongoing process of progress from one generation to the next. As a parent I’m privileged to witness it.
But the current backlash has been so successfully nurtured in the USA that it has grown into an explosive cause with mobs of ‘revolutionaries’ prepared to fight for it.
Dialogue and debate have been replaced by blind ‘heroism’ for the cause. Troops are recruited by the revolutionaries’ media channels, including TV channels and social media, to ‘save’ America.
It’s a disturbing echo of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, who believed that Germany – and the world - needed saving from Jewish people.
That’s me and my family – the descendants of ‘watcher to the sick’ Simon Jacobs who I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
My family wouldn’t be here if the forerunners of the QAnonsters had achieved their goal of a ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. My father came frighteningly close to being one of the six million Jews they murdered.
A week before my father was born in 1919 my grandfather John Jacobs, who was Simon Jacobs’s great-grandson, changed his surname by deed poll to Jay.
If my grandfather hadn’t made that change then I would in theory have been the son of Alec Jacobs.
Except that I probably wouldn’t have been – at all.
Because it would have been Alec Jacobs who was captured when the British surrendered after their five-day defence of Calais in May 1940.
And it would have been Alec Jacobs, easily identifiable by his surname as a Jew, who was forced to march across Europe and spend five harrowing years as a prisoner-of-war.
Or not.
Alec Jacobs would most likely have been murdered sometime after he was captured. But he was Alec Jay and he survived, thanks in no small part to the solidarity of his ‘muckers’, which was what he called his fellow POWs.
After the war Alec married my mother and they co-created my sister, my brother and me. We grew up with a father who had post-traumatic stress. As his children we have inherited some of it. And so on down the line until, hopefully, the PTS peters out.
My brother John has written about our father in his book Facing Fearful Odds.
I came to live in Aotearoa in 1992. Soon after that I changed my surname by deed poll to its ancestral version, Jacobs.
I don’t want to hide my identity as a Jew. I want to wear it with pride. My father had to hide his Jewishness in order to survive. I hope that neither I nor my descendants will ever have to do that.
I happily live in a country where the only antisemitism I tend to encounter is either subtle or unconscious; it’s not murderous.
But Aotearoa is not immune to murderous racism. That was shown shockingly to the world on 15 March 2019 when an extreme right-wing terrorist opened fire on people in two Christchurch mosques.
What did the ‘former guy’ think about that? Does he care about the post-traumatic stress that the terrorist will have induced among multiple generations of his multiple victims?
Given his buddyness with the likes of the QAnonsters and the Proud Boys I guess it’s hardly surprising that Trump’s USA was not one of the 48 countries to sign up to the Christchurch Call initiative.
It just wasn’t in his political interests to join a global effort to stymie the kind of extremist online media content that promotes and follows race-hate murder.
This year it has been pleasing, however, to hear the views of Kathryn Hufschmid and James Rupert Jacob Murdoch, the youngest son of Keith Rupert Murdoch (whose birthday I share) and a senior figure of the Murdoch media empire until 2020.
This is what Kathryn and James said in a joint statement they issued in the period following the storming of the Capitol on 6 January:
I expect it took courage to break with the family media empire, so I want to be supportive of Kathryn and James.
I just wish they had explicitly named Murdoch media, such as Fox News, as ‘enablers’. They could have acknowledged the leading role Murdoch media has played in our ‘post-truth’ era.
Fox News host Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson recently said of the QAnonsters “they're all kind of gentle people, waving American flags.”
These “gentle people” want mass public executions of Democrats. And they're blatantly antisemitic.
It must have been tempting for Kathryn and James to be explicit about lies such as those propagated by Murdoch media stars like Tucker Carlson.
But family loyalty is a powerful and important thing, not least for families like the Murdochs and the Trumps. So the Hufschmid-Murdoch critique of lying media was aimed at a generalised target: “many media property owners”.
That could refer to a number of media owners.
As well as the Murdoch media empire it could certainly refer to Infowars, which has made millions from the conspiracy theories of its owner Alexander Emric Jones.
Infowars – now that’s a catchy name. Information warfare, aka propaganda, is something George Orwell observed in the 1930s and 40s.
In Orwell’s classic dystopian cautionary tale Nineteen Eighty-Four the role of the Ministry of Truth is to tell government lies.
Government lies are what Trumpians call ‘alternative facts’, which they purvey to counter actual facts, which they call ‘fake news’. And that takes me back to Wonder Woman.
I’m yet to find any statement by the people behind Wonder Woman 1984 explicitly linking it to Orwell’s book, yet the film clearly references the book while at the same time commenting on the world in which we now live.
It’s not just that both the film and the book are champions of Truth with a big T. The direct reference is to the role of media, specifically television – ‘telescreens’ in the book – in manipulating and controlling people.
Media can serve other purposes than manipulating and controlling people. As a film maker, like many others, I’ve sought to use media to provide information and to promote justice and sustainability. It can be done. It is done - by individuals and organisations I honour and revere.
Nineteen Eighty-Four and Wonder Woman 1984 portray what happens when media are controlled by the likes of Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson.
Wherever you are in the world I expect you can easily substitute the names in that list with powerful and manipulative conservative figures in your own country. And I hope that you can also name some media individuals and organisations who, openly or from ‘underground’, are fighting back.
Wonder Woman is on the side of those who are fighting back.
Finally and yes, self-indulgently, I can’t resist one more picture of my dad. He looks so much happier in this one than in the photo on his POW registration card.
I miss you, dear man.
Part Four Next Week: BROTHERS AND SISTERS – Starring lies, violence and greed
Thanks Sharva. I hope you like this week's instalment too. It came out earlier today at https://davidjacobs.substack.com
Very interesting