Facebook Journal: Two Truths

Editor’s note: in light of reader requests, my ongoing fear of Facebook censorship and the fact that I happened to be doing a massive website re-org on New Years Day in 2020, I’ve decided to back-post some old offsite writing and links to such. While I’m pretty sure the demand for these essays isn’t exactly staggering, several new readers have expressed a wish to find “all of my work” in one space. Frankly, I’m not sure that’s even possible anymore due to social media bannings, but I figured I’d give it a go until I got bored. If this produces an unwanted notice in your inbox, please forgive me in advance – I’ve only got so much back catalogue to post here.

This article in particular originally appeared as a Facebook Journal on February 1st, 2018.

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Although I despise their work, I am often jealous of the out-sized (and largely assumed) influence of celebrity opinion writers like Jonathan Chait or Tom Friedman in light of their unquestionably threadbare analysis. While I’m prepared to concede that stretching out one witty, urbane and even quasi-thoughtful observation into a four hundred page $30 hardcover by hiding your gleaming nugget inside multiple, completely falsified “real life interactions with the common man” *is* a skill – I’m not sure it’s a particularly rare one; every grandfather I know is easily as qualified a bullshitter as Friedman for example. With that having been noted, if I had one observation to offer the world in my own theoretical coffee table hardcover, it would be this:

As someone who now studies American media from outside of the US media bubble, one of the most alarming developments I’ve seen emerge is the metaphorically violent division of mainstream US society into two warring, wholly insular tribes largely delineated by where they get their news from; the Fox News Tribe and the MSNBC Tribe.

The current high priest of the Fox News Tribe is meathead professional liar Sean Hannity. In response to the rise of American fascism that preceded the election of Donald Trump, Hannity’s flock has moved so far right while openly embracing bigotry, that they’ve become indistinguishable from reactionaries and neo-confederates. If you’re a member of the Fox News Tribe you likely believe that Trump’s racism is a feature, not a bug, that George Soros is secretly trying to undermine American society by donating money to dozens of milquetoast liberal causes and that former President Obama was a Kenyan-born, Muslim socialist.

The current high priestess of the MSNBC Tribe is former journalist turned Democratic Party PR flack Rachel Maddow; a woman who has gleefully lead her own following into an objectively McCarthyist, new cold war spy novel designed to ensure nobody important gets fired for losing to an assclown fascist reality TV show host after the 2016 US election. If you’re a member of the MSNBC tribe you probably believe the Obama presidency featured no major scandals despite the fact that the former President himself admits that letting his State Department crater Libya was a tragic mistake, that Vladimir Putin is directly controlling the Trump administration with a piss tape and that there’s still a tiny chance Hillary Clinton could become president after Robert Mueller inevitably indicts everyone Trump has ever known for treason.

It will of course surprise no one who has been observing American political discourse over the past few years to learn that the Fox News Tribe believes that everything on MSNBC is fake news and the MSNBC Tribe is equally certain that the Fox News tribe is ruthlessly lying. You might be tempted at this point to assume the problem here is simply one of cloistered myopia, but awkwardly enough, they’re both right – the other one *is* in fact lying and therein lies the rub.

An Un-Civil War & Two Worldviews Collide

Mainstream American society is now under the spell of two completely separate truths and hindered by the fact that neither one of these truths actually resembles reality; the Fox News and MSNBC world views have in effect become articles of a new kind of political “faith” that bears a resemblance to traditional US political tribalism, but has unquestionably moved to a new, terrifying level of unyielding political encampment. There can be no “bipartisan compromise” here because compromising between two lies simply produces another lie; in the words of Buffalo Springfield – “nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong.”
This situation is incredibly dangerous because the absence of an objectively recognizable truth to compare against a given new public narrative effectively erodes the public ability to resist future lies. In this kind of environment, it becomes frighteningly possible to believe hateful, dangerous ideas that would otherwise be rejected out of hand as false when compared against known/accepted reality. This is how you end up convincing the citizens of a prosperous western democracy that all of their problems both real and imagined will not go away unless they murder all the Jewish people in Europe – for example.

Now of course, not every single American neatly fits into one of these two categories, but this division is important nonetheless because virtually all of the influential figures in our media and a large percentage of active voters do in fact fall into one of these two tribes. Furthermore, these establishment credentials also effectively ensure that anyone who is telling the truth will be immediately marginalized for disagreeing with either demonstrably false narrative; indeed, social relevance in media circles now depends on how ardently one can adhere to either one of these fractured worldviews, each complete with its own “facts” “history” and “truths.” This situation goes far beyond the classic “liberal” and “conservative” divide in American politics and while much of the corporate media is undoubtedly just chasing the almighty dollar, these dueling charades have already had devastating real world consequences. One need look no further than the rising incidents of white supremacist terrorism in America, or the fact that whistleblower Reality Winner risked going to prison to “expose” intelligence documents that don’t actually prove Russia “hacked the election,” to find evidence that this is more than just a jolly round of partisan political jousting. Some have compared this encampment phenomenon to the time that lead up to the American Civil War but even that analogy falls apart on close inspection – after all, the South was lying about racial superiority and the North was objectively correct to believe slavery was immoral and must be abolished if the nation hoped to survive.

This is, to my mind as a student of history, a completely new and utterly terrifying phenomenon in American society and I find myself paralyzed by the possibility that either of these “truths” may someday soon win the battle to settle “reality” on their particular foundation of lies.