Teetering on the precipice of the fact-based world, looking into the abyss

 

This country certainly has a way with molding and shaping “reality,” especially at times when it has to take a hard, deep look at itself. The 2017 shooting in a Thornton, CO Walmart—where a white man named Scott Ostrem killed three “random” people who all just happened to be Hispanic—was mentioned in one account of yesterday’s Boulder mass shooting, and indicated that the “motive” of Ostrem is still “unknown.” With all the demonizing and dehumanizing of migrants by both sides of the media divide, I’m sure that there will be those in the media who will still be “befuddled” by the “motives” of another El Paso-type shooter. On the other hand, the media easily reached the conclusion that the Atlanta spa shootings were a “hate crime” against Asians, despite the clear evidence of the mental instability of the shooter who associated his difficulty with remaining “true” to his religious “faith” with his “addiction” to the “massage parlors” that offered “illicit” services on the side, which also happened to be associated in his mind with the people providing those “services.” On the other hand, we may have to wait awhile to find out what Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa’s motives were in yesterday’s Boulder shooting, since it would mean revisiting that “stain on our national conscience.”

But this country of diverse peoples and beliefs seems incapable of actually possessing a “national standard” for what passes as facts, or even what passes for lies. Remember in 2020 when a district judge in New York, Mary Kay Vyskocil, bought the claims of Fox News attorneys that the “general tenor” of Tucker Carlson’s show should be “obvious” to viewers that he is not “stating actual facts,” but “engaging in exaggeration and non-literal commentary.” Well, that may be true for people who do have an appreciation for “actual” facts, but as I have shown several times now in the past few months, I know for a fact that at least one Fox News addict takes everything that is said dead seriously and for “actual fact.” And the events of January 6 haven’t stopped Donald Trump from passing his paranoid election conspiracies as “fact,” or prevented Fox News from continuing to provide Trump and his familiars with a soap box to spread a steady stream of blatant falsehoods and paranoid nativist fantasies.

And speaking of election conspiracies and fabrications, it is now being reported that Sidney Powell, who promised to “release the Kraken” to prove election fraud in Pennsylvania beyond a shadow of the slightest doubt, is now herself employing the claim that “everyone” should have known that those pages and pages of “evidence” were just a gag, mostly just stuff she found on various right-wing conspiracy websites, with a few “affidavits” from crackpots just to make it all seem “credible.” Of course it doesn’t exactly “help” her case that she made no effort at the time to suggest that she was engaging in harmless “theorizing.” Powell is currently facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, and even for someone on the lunatic fringe, Powell has been forced to come face-to-face with the reality that facts do “matter,” and unfortunately she spent months claiming to everyone who listen—including eager Fox News hosts who are just as guilty as she is—that she had the “goods” on “massive” election fraud, and anyone who said otherwise was lying and “defaming” her character.

According to CNN, Powell was only “sharing her ‘opinion’ and that the public could reach ‘their own conclusions’ about whether votes were changed by election machine.” Furthermore, according her defense attorneys, “Given the highly charged and political context of the statements, it is clear that Powell was describing the facts on which she based the lawsuits she filed in support of President Trump.” Now wait just one damn minute here: first she is only expressing an “opinion” that “everyone” should judge as such, but then you turn around and say that her election fraud claims were based on “facts”—or at least the “facts” as Trump saw them? Powell and her attorneys seem to be pushing a narrative that suggests that her “facts” were actually not her own, but that of Trump, which of course seems to follow the line of defense of many of the January 6 insurrectionists. 

Powell and her attorneys seem to want it every which way but credible. Like the Fox News attorneys in the Carlson case, they claim that the “plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements as ‘wild accusations’ and “outlandish claims.’” These denunciations of Powell’s fraud assertions thus support “the defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact.” Oh really? There seems to be an awful lot of “unreasonable” people in this country then. A poll released by the R Street Institute on February 11 revealed that 67 percent of Republican voters still believe that the election was “stolen” from Trump. All those people who stormed the Capitol—of course they believed the claims of Powell and Rudy Giuliani that Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines were “rigged” to alter the vote, as well other mail-in vote “irregularities” that were never demonstrated to be based on any facts. Even recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia were not enough to “convince” Trump, Powell or anyone else in that lunatic orbit of the “awful truth.”

Although Trump “distanced” himself “officially” from Powell’s schemes, he thought well enough of her to consider appointing her as a “special counsel” to investigate alleged election fraud, and you know that Powell was eager and ready to “prove” that she wasn’t the crackpot that people with a mite of common sense were certain she was. How much more “evidence” do we need to show without any shadow of any doubt that Powell knowingly pushed a narrative that she knew full well fell far short of even the minimal standard of evidence in a court of law, yet continued to deliberately defame Dominion and state election officials by making these charges? If Powell is not guilty of knowing and deliberate defamation as she claims, then the law has no purpose to even exist.

But we shouldn’t be at all surprised by any of this. A significant portion of this country is fed a steady diet of paranoid fantasies and conspiracies which they accept as “fact.” The line between “opinion” and “fact” is blurred, and facts are often only what people want them to be. Powell certainly knew this; and it wasn’t like Powell was “new” at this game—she had made numerous appearances on Fox News in prior years engaging in far-right conspiracy claims, and she was a more than willing participant in Trump election fantasies. She and Giuliani pressed their claims as “facts” in dozen of state and federal courts; for that alone they should be disbarred from ever practicing law again. But also we should remember that they were enabled not just by Trump and Fox News, but by millions of people who believed their lies because they wanted to believe them. This is a country teetering on the precipice of the fact-based world, looking into the abyss of a fascist (or Trumpist) future.