There Are Cracks in the Right Wing Disinformation Wall

Eventually, reality always wins. This election serves as an important lesson in the propaganda wars.

For nearly every election of my lifetime, a key part of the Republican plan to win has been coming up with increasingly wilder ways to scare people about Democrats. And for most of my life, that strategy has worked.

Backed by a national disinformation network consisting of right wing online outlets, Fox News, and the OG operation: AM talk radio, Republicans has managed to build an information environment that is so effective that there are now essentially two completely separate realities amongst the American public.

All of these came to a head when Elon Musk bought Twitter and began amplifying right wing slop across the platform. Those of us who aren't using the platform daily are all noticing how looney everyone on that site are becoming, no matter their political alignment. The site has become one of the primary drivers of the right wing alternate reality upon the masses.

It's these dueling realities that brought us January 6th, wherein a horde of angry Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in what they thought was an earnest defense of democracy after being convinced that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, even when it was blatantly obvious to everyone else that it wasn't.

This is, more or less, how we ended up with vast swaths of anti-vaxxers not believing medical science on vaccines while the rest of us look on in horror as ancient plagues become another every day life experience in America.

This is how we ended up with half the country simply not believing the medical science about trans kids based almost entirely on vibes and the opinions of a handful of crank doctors.

None of this is healthy, and the lack of a mutually agreed upon reality makes it next to impossible to solve big political problems. And that was the point of the GOP disinformation system in the first place. It was designed to get conservatives and conservative adjacent people to live in a state of permanent fear of what may happen should Democrats come to full power nationally.

Just look at how Fox News portrays socialism. On a near daily basis, the network invokes a red scare about any given political issue of the day. Everything from bike lanes, to a national health care system, to being nice to trans people are all portrayed as signs of impending socialist doom.

But somehow the Trump administration taking large government shares of actual companies isn't socialist, despite being the very definition of socialism.

The right has invoked incoherent panic over socialism so often over the years that the attack line has largely lost its fangs. A YouGov Survey commissioned by the extremely conservative Cato Institute last year found that 62% of 18-29 year olds hold a favorable view of socialism, and a third held a favorable view of communism.

The think tank had a predictably normal reaction to these results. "This is shocking given that communism is responsible for 100 million deaths worldwide and is rooted in socialism, the same philosophy that spawned both Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism," wrote Michael Chapman on the Cato blog. "To favor socialism is to flirt with tyranny."

Even this statement is indicative of how disconnected the right is from reality. In an effort to minimize the extremism of their own ideology, the Cato types have falsely convinced thousands of their followers that Hitler and Mussolini, both of whom relentlessly persecuted socialists, are actually socialist and not violently right wing.

If Hitler was a socialist, why are so many young conservatives getting caught worshipping him these days?

But socialism can't be the everything, everywhere, all at once threat for conservative fearmongers. Installing bike lanes in your city is not going to lead to the second coming of Mussolini.