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The top leaders and bottom-feeders of the Republican Party alike continue, to this moment, to suggest that the hoaxes the party spread in an attempt to erase the electoral votes of entire states, one year ago, are in fact true, and that Donald Trump—a delusional, decompensating incompetent who signaled even months before the election that he would be lying about the election’s results if they went against him—is our legitimate leader, and Joe Biden an illegitimate one.
This is not an anti-democratic coup one year passed. This is an anti-democratic coup that has grown in strength for a full year and counting, and which now has more tools available to erase a future election than they did when the party first attempted it. They have spent a year condemning those who stood in the way of nullifying an election—and rewriting laws so that those people have no say in the matter the next time around.
The results are precisely what Republican Party leaders and anti-democratic Fox News faces wished them to be. Republican voters are, if anything, even more devoted to the party’s anti-election hoaxes than they were before. The party has created a base hostile to the very notion of having elections, if those elections threaten to go against the party’s will. Those around Trump may have failed in convincing Mike Pence to declare that the elections were null and void because Mike Pence personally said so—but the party has succeeded in convincing its own base that overturning elections based on an ever-lying political leader’s personal say-so is worth toppling the nation over.
The press has taken a full year to ease into the notion that attempting to nullify democracy is an anti-democratic position worth calling out as such. We have not yet reached the point where they will believe historians who point out that the collection of ultranationalism, government-promoted propaganda, anti-immigrant and anti-minority fervor, vilification of the press, vilification of expertise, book-burning, and eliminationist rhetoric toward political foes all pin the movement as specifically a fascist one. Such things cannot happen here; it is preposterous to think that such vicious sentiments would be boosted by national heroes or captains of American industry, no matter how many dull and heavy books feature black-and-white photographs of them doing exactly that.
Is the Republican Party acting in a concerted fashion to discredit the legitimacy of elections through the use of known-false propaganda, though? It’s not even in question. And so we’re seeing more, now, of long-lasting pundits like Margaret Sullivan or the (apparently otherwise impotent) New York Times editors taking the profession to task—calling out the press for so brazenly ignoring an anti-democratic plot that experts are unambiguously telling the media that exactly these moves are those by which democracies are dismantled.
What we are not seeing, as top media outlets grapple with their own seeming inability to write about an attack on our government with any sense of alarm or urgency, are editors willing to confront the gutlessness of their own coverage by changing it. The Times editors find many places where blame can be assigned, but not a word of it suggests the paper intends to move forward by privileging propagandists less, or by more sharply separating Republicans who take concrete action to erase democratic rule as anti-democratic rather than merely partisan. Partisan actors may spin events to cast themselves in better light. Propagandists tell flat lies, lies that the press already knows to be lies, so as to erase the ability of citizens to determine what is or is not true.
Rudy Giuliani, as a single example, is not a partisan. Rudy Giuliani and others who have invented now-countless hoaxes out of thin air are attempting to end democracy by stripping away the consent of the governed in favor of authoritarian fraud. Giuliani’s election hoaxes may have been slapped down and mocked by judges throughout the nation, who each noted that he and his fellow election-nullifiers were producing nothing but known-fraudulent bullshit, but the press—the supposed estate devoted to holding the powerful to account—remains utterly indifferent as to whether Giuliani’s faux-legal hoaxes were the acts of a man attempting to erase, outright, one the few sureties of constitutional government on his party’s behalf.
Pick any other of the most prolific hoax promoters, whether they be in Congress or in top party leadership or scruffy, openly anti-election cowards howling in the lowest ranks of the party that now embraces corruption and retaliates against the honest—you can find whatever “news” stories about their promotion of lies you like, and not one of those stories will bother to tell the reader that the specific lies being promoted are being used to radicalize conservative Americans into support for toppling future non-Republican governments. Not one will note that there is a strategy behind the lies—that they are specific lies manufactured—at times by propagandists we can identify—and floated through the Republican Party explicitly to delegitimize past and future elections. It is a means to incite the ignorant into demanding, of their own accord, that we turn over our democracy to those assaulting it.
The problem the press has that the New York Times does not give a damn about but Sullivan appears to is that the political press, indisputably the place where the most dull-minded in all of media have tended to congregate in an eternal stakeless fog of some say and opponents dispute, steadfastly refuses to condemn anti-democratic acts as anti-democratic acts. That is not just a gutless move, but itself an inherently anti-democratic one. In a fight between propagandists lying for the sake of nullifying our elections and those who object, the New York Times, the Post, the cable channels, the network news shows, and the rest of the “political” faux-journalism’s quote-chasers stick their chins out and claim that the conventions of neutrality cannot possibly tolerate siding with one side over the other.
We may learn through the Times or the Post that a powerful figure said a provably false thing. What we will not get, the thing that is being intentionally held back from us from reporters and editors unwilling to take a position on whether attempting to defraud the public is wrong, is a fact-based condemnation of the propagandist as someone who is saying that false thing as an intentional lie meant to damage our democracy by stealing, from Americans, the truth.
This is not something that journalists in other sects of the profession have such trouble with. We do not hear that a convicted murderer with a string of deaths trailing behind him had some good points to make—unless the murders are political, in which case we might. We will not hear a con artist who defrauds seniors out of their life savings being defended as someone merely attempting free up stagnant cash, because such statements would be ludicrous—but a liar who insists, flat-out, that a provably fraudulent claim is reason enough to throw out American votes will have their actions analyzed primarily according to the metric of will this work or will this not work.
This is unsustainable. It is leading only to the obvious outcome: inuring Americans to the very hoaxes crafted to steal democracy away from them. The editors of the nation claim to be confused as to why an attack on the soul of our democracy is not being treated with urgency—but still insist on news pages that refuse to describe the attacks, and the attackers, in those very terms.
There’s the problem. Our democracy is under attack, say both historians and editors alike, but while editors have at least roused themselves into some whinging about it, a year into the attacks, no supposedly “neutral” press outlet has made the editorial decision to support democracy by properly describing, to the public, the steps being taken to erase it.
Which figures still refuse to acknowledge that Trump’s loss was, in fact, both legitimate and unremarkable? Those are the attackers who are pushing their base to accept hoaxes as reason enough to erase the next election’s votes. Which lawmakers are passing vote-encumbering laws premised on “frauds” that provably did not happen? Those are the propagandists who, no longer satisfied with mere partisanship, have instead chosen to lie to the public so as to gain support for actions the public does not support without such lies.
If democracy dies in darkness, then saving it requires turning on the lights. There is no excuse, at this point, for doing otherwise. This goes for Facebook, the Times, the Post, the spineless spin-seeking automatons masquerading as “news” program hosts, the mewling Democrats who fully recognize that January 6 was an attempt, by a violent mob, to kill them rather than turn over power. We can name, very easily, dozens of politicians and shouting voices who are at this moment pushing propagandistic falsehoods so as to bend their supporters into accepting the nullification of future elections that would strip too much power from Republican hands. So name them and describe them as such. It isn’t hard. Such voices are not partisan—if they are spreading hoaxes, they are attacking democracy itself. Note that, in each story. Note that, when refusing to air a segment in which a hoax-promoting guest attempted to spread falsehoods. Note that, when refusing to quote a claim intended specifically to mislead.
Doing otherwise isn’t remaining neutral. It’s being an accomplice. And it’s time to call out the press outlets that are hiding behind a faux neutrality to pose as “democracy agnostic.” A free press does not exist except as democratic appendage. If the news does not contain the truth then it is not news; if it takes no position on whether truth or hoax should win in a fight it cannot possibly claim it is neutral.
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