Writing in the socialist journal Jacobin, a Mr. Savage mocked “today’s liberals” whose “default approach to combating the Right is to fact-check the Right.” Savage insists facts are stupid things outside of “narratives.” He urges liberals to stop worrying about the Right’s “malign information system.” There’s no point in calling our lies or exposing traitors or following the money. What liberals must do is ape conservatives’ “willingness to embrace populist storytelling.” No doubt Savage believes in History (and means to be on the left side of it), but his pitch for radical fabulism seems incredibly impertinent now.
Perhaps Savage had second thoughts last Tuesday about uses of fact if he watched Representatives in the People’s House deploy the historical record to face down Bill Barr. (All hail Swalwell and Neguse!) Or maybe there was some kind of reckoning later that day if he saw the President run from the podium after a reporter pointed out the witch doctor Trump had commended (“spectacular”) believed in “demon seed” as well as chloroquine.
Savage’s junk-the-facts rap is pitched to his review of former Obama campaign operative David Plouffe’s new book, A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump. Savage savages Plouffe’s advice that anti-Trump forces should engage citizens on the other side, fact-checking misinformation and exposing straight up lies that pollute the Trumpist sphere. It’s true Plouffe’s message isn’t new. His call for Democrats to cultivate democratic dialogue echoes one his candidate made back in 2008 when fear that America might have its first black president led to an explosion of rumor-mongering about “who sent Obama?”
Back in that day, I tried to act on Obama’s injunction to fight rumor-mongers on the right. In 2008, I used to argue—1 on 100—at a website frequented by conservatives, many of whom had military backgrounds. I ran into plenty of proto-birthers who thought Obama’s father was Malcolm X or Farrakhan. More sophisticated fantasts locked on Frank Marshall Davis – an African American ex-CP Party member who settled in Hawaii. I couldn’t clean their clocks, but when conspiracy-mongers turned to Obama’s life in NYC on Morningside Heights in the late 70s, I had some local dope to offer since they were in my neighborhood (and time span). My 2008 discourse with right-wingers started with fact-checking but it didn’t end there.
A few years ago, I recall printing out about 1000 pages of my back and forths with those red state anti-statists. (When I think of that stack, I’m still ashamed about how little argufying I did for Hillary.) Doubt that Q&A changed a single vote. But I don’t believe our conversation was pointless. It was surely one of my richest experiences of democracy as conjoint communication (to lift Dewey’s phrase). God knows I learned a lot about America and my own biases. And I believe I might’ve moved a few of my respondents to be less fearful of Obama, damping down their white panic for a stretch.
As months wore on, though, I got under the skin of the guy who ran the site. He eventually stopped posting my comments, without telling his “Belmont Club” he’d banned me as I hadn’t done anything egregious except disagree persistently with him and his crew.
I flashed on that banning when a Trumpist cousin unfriended me last week on Facebook after I fact-checked a rumor she’d spread about Al Sharpton. My cousin asserted she hated the Rev—“The Most Racist Man in America” per another Facebook meme—because he’d been paid $24,000 for his speech at George Floyd’s funeral. Not true, though it wouldn’t be quite right to add…of course. Whoever came up with that lie—Russian bot? Domestic info warrior?—was pretty clever. The story is awful, but it’s also not entirely implausible given Sharpton’s complex moral history as a public actor (and the slightly dicey finances of his National Action Network). Internet fact-checkers set out to trace the origin of the rumor:
Verbatim or near-verbatim copies of this message — “Al Sharpton was paid $24,000 to speak at George Floyd’s funeral” — have been shared by dozens of users on Facebook and Twitter. The earliest posting of this message that we could find was shared on June 13, a few days after Floyd’s funeral service, by Brian Benedetto. That post had been shared more than 69,000 times:
However, none of the posts that we examined offered any evidence to support the claim. These posts weren’t accompanied by links to news articles, quotes, TV interviews, financial records, or any other evidence to prove this accusation. It seems that this claim was simply conjured up out of thin air.
Snopes’ fact-checkers go on to note:
This type of post, a piece of text overlaid on a bright background, is frequently used to share unfounded claims, which are repeated over and over until some people become convinced that they are true.
My Republican relatives tend to be at the mercy of such posts. One uncle DMs me when he’s in fearful mode due to misinformation about Soros or Covid or Sharia-in-America.[1] I’ve tried to speak to him about the “malign information system” that’s getting him twisted. After I’ve done my civic duty as an online fact-checker, I’ve urged him to check his sources and try on a real newspaper. No luck so far, but at least he hasn’t been put off by my straight talk. My guess is he tends to feel relieved to find out there’s no truth to the latest meme that’s breaking up his mind. I’m afraid, though, that cousin who unfriended me last month didn’t find my fact-checking to be a calmative. And, on the real side, I was being more, ah, proactive—not to say, aggressive—with her. My cousin wasn’t in the habit of direct messaging me, implicitly asking for a clue. She knew what she knew and wasn’t up for disconfirmation. I didn’t mean to be rude or unfriendly, but when I fact-checked political posts on her Facebook page, I was implicitly invading her ideological safe space.
My sense I should risk making her feel (even more) defensive may have been amped up after I got through to one of her friends. This woman from Tennessee—a Blue Lives Matter booster (whose son is “4th generation police”)—joined our Facebook colloquies after my cousin posted this meme (which proved to be less than prophetic): “I have not unfriended anyone because they share posts that hold different views than mine. Who can share this!” The Tennessee woman averred she “could debate all day about politics, and with respect if we have different opinions, but say one thing about all cops and I’m done.” That’s where our back and forths began. Near the top I shared videos of cops cheering their brutal brothers in Buffalo and Philly. (I asked her to focus on the face of one Officer Bologna–who’d been arraigned after he was caught on a viral video battering a protester–as he exited a Philly court house: “You can see he knows he’s guilty and wonders why he’s being cheered for having gotten his jollies by giving some college kid a beating. A furtive fascist.”)[2] I didn’t pull punches and she kept standing by the Blue Wall. We were kind of stuck until I linked her to Radley Balko’s great investigative report on policing in St. Louis’s collar counties where municpalities profited from poverty. Balko exposed the unspeakable regime underlying what went down in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown—a regime in which cops served as revenue men in racist Missouri townships. My interlocutor in Tennessee got nuances in the piece I missed since she knew from inside how policing is supposed to work. I don’t like the term “woke” as it deflects attention from the time (and struggle) it takes for most people to change their way of thinking. But an older phrase—“blow your mind”—seems apt when it comes to evoking what happened when that Tennessee woman faced up to Balko’s facts: “Great article. Really appalling. Horrific actually.” You can almost see her mind in that moment going over the Blue Wall.
My cousin would not be moved. (I doubt she read that Balko piece though the link was at her fingertips.) A couple weeks on, after I called attention to the lie she’d passed on about Sharpton, she canceled me. This weekend she broke with another relative who was provoked by her rant on Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis:
Former President Obama go to hell you disgust me for making a Eulogy for Rep. John Lewis go f**king political just so you can make your mouth cater to the left. My heart and prayers go out to the Lewis family for how he disgraced his memory by a rah-rah of slamming President Trump. You are inciting trouble and took away the beauty of the man who fought so strongly for peace…
That other (soon-to-be-canceled) relative addressed my cousin lovingly—“I adore you”—but went on to say how this post missed the point: “[Obama] was honoring [his mentor and brother-in-arms] by NOT stopping all that they’d fought to achieve.”
No doubt Obama was keeping faith with Lewis. And I’d cite his speech as the sort of “populist story-telling” I can get behind. (Pace Mr. Savage.) I’ll allow, though, Obama himself got a little tricky with his facts when it came to the 1964 Voting Rights Act:
…one of the crowning achievements of our democracy. It’s why John crossed that bridge, why he spilled that blood. And by the way, it was the result of Democrat and Republican efforts. President Bush, who spoke here earlier, and his father, signed its renewal when they were in office.
Obama slipped an inconvenient fact here. George H.W. Bush voted against passage of the original Voting Rights Act. Born to privilege in Connecticut, Bush I moved to Texas where he became a Congressman and his no vote presaged the GOP’s Southern Strategy which has shaped the party since the 1960s. Obama’s instinct to find the good in American life is almost always defensible. It wasn’t the time or place to criticize Bush I and/or legacy Republicanism. But as someone who’s had to contest Facebook memes claiming black Americans are mad to vote for Democrats rather than for the Party of Lincoln, his tact made this fact-bound Obama-boy wince.
Notes
1 My relative was scared last spring by a video purporting to be from the site of a construction project funded by West Virginia taxpayer money for the purpose of housing 321 Syrian refugees. The video also claimed this was being done at the expense of “regular” Americans who, the man on the site explained, were being pushed into “substandard housing.” He asserted that the area he was standing in would be a “sharia zone,” and no non-Muslims would be allowed to enter.
My uncle identified with the twittering believers in the video:
“Wow Unbelievable! Scary, who authorized this? BHO?#NotMe”
“What this guy is saying is frightening, it makes me feel like we’ve already lost the battle. How long can we hang on to our America.
We all need to #WakeUp now&smell the coffee”
“Yuge #DemExit don’t just #WalkAway #RunAway pic.twitter.com/4PDCHfbsdf”
“— KAGTrump Ewegot🚂🇺🇸⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@GregNorberg) March 6, 2019”
Fact checkers at Snopes covered all angles when they exposed this rumor:
Several factual problems exist with assertions in this video. Chief among them is the fact that this video shows the Littlepage Terrace housing project, a low-income, housing tax-credit property allocated through the West Virginia Housing Development Fund, which houses zero Syrian refugees and many “regular” Americans…
Another significant oversight in the tweeted narrative is that the entire state of West Virginia has taken in far less than 321 Syrian refugees in total. In 2016, the year the United States took in the largest number of Syrian refugees, West Virginia resettled only five of them in their state. On 1 February 2017, the Trump Administration announced Executive Order 13769, commonly referred to as the “travel ban,” which indefinitely suspended the admission of Syrian refugees to the United States. In 2017, West Virginia took in 13 refugees, but these individuals were not necessarily Syrian.
It is true that Littlepage was torn down and rebuilt, but that decision had nothing to do with refugee housing. Instead, the renovations aimed to “reduce crime and revitalize the area,” as reported by West Virginia’s WCHS television station in 2016:
“The Charleston-Kanawha Housing Authority is now on the last phase of revitalizing three housing projects. Similar to Orchard Manor and Washington Manor, Littlepage Terrace will be demolished and rebuilt as two-story town homes. … This housing project was built nearly 80 years ago with no air conditioning and poor visibility. Now it is simply not a secure living space. … The goal for these new developments is to reduce crime and revitalize the area.”
2https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/cops-salute-philadelphia-officer-assaulted-protester