Why Are There So Many Pandemic Deniers On The Right?

Okay, someone had to ask it so it might as well be me. Why is it that so many people on the right are skeptical about the whole idea that the country is facing a deadly pandemic?

For the record, I’m on the right myself. I’m a lifelong conservative-libertarian (small “l”) and, up until 2016, I was a lifelong Republican as well. I follow and talk with people on both sides of the political spectrum and in my journeys around the interwebs over the past few weeks, it has seemed to me that most of the people who could be called “pandemic deniers” fall into one of two groups: small factions of either Trump supporters or Libertarians.

Before I go further, I’ll stipulate that most Trump supporters and Libertarians take the pandemic seriously. The deniers are subcategories of these two groups. In my experience, I haven’t found any liberals who question the reality of the Coronavirus pandemic but there are probably some out there somewhere.

The Republican skeptics that I have run into online who deny the reality and/or the severity of the pandemic seem to be almost exclusively ardent Trump supporters on social media. Reluctant Trump voters seem to be among the majority that are taking the pandemic and the social distancing strategy seriously.

Among the Libertarians, it also seems to be an internet minority who take a skeptical position. This isn’t libertarians like Justin Amash or the Cato Institute staff. These are people who fantasize online about a “boogaloo” (also called “the big igloo”) in which they rise up against the government.

The two groups have different rationales for denying the pandemic. The Trump supporters believe that it is a plot to make Donald Trump look bad and cost him the election, either by crashing the economy or by making him seem to be an inadequate leader. The Libertarian skeptics believe that it is a plot to take away freedoms, possibly by imposing martial law.

The skeptical attitudes can run the gamut but go farther than mere disagreement with how the stimulus was handled. Some believe that the entire pandemic is a hoax. Others believe that it is real but that the danger is exaggerated. Some still say it is no worse than the flu. Others question the social distancing strategy and theorize that more people will die from the economic downturn than would be killed by the virus.

The two groups overlap in a few areas. One of these is a belief in conspiracy theories. While your results may vary, the people that I see questioning the pandemic are often the same people who think that Hillary Clinton is a mass murdering pedophile or that Barack Obama was going to declare martial law in the Southwest under the guise of the Jade Helm military exercise.

Another commonality is a distrust in the mainstream media. While much of the media (not all of it) is left-leaning, that doesn’t mean that it is always wrong. Sometimes even the leftist media is right. Quite often, the alternative conservative media is wrong. A recent relevant example is Rush Limbaugh who said that Coronavirus was nothing more than the “common cold” and attacked medical experts as part of the Deep State.

For many in these groups, there is a sort of reverse confirmation bias in which anything the media says is not to be believed simply because the media said it. This sort of attitude was seen among the Trump supporters of 2016 who supported Trump largely because the media and the Democrats opposed him, reasoning that, since he had the right enemies, that was good enough for them.

Part of the problem of denial in recent weeks was due to Donald Trump’s waffling. When the president worried last week that the cure might be worse than the disease, it was followed by a wave of Trump supporters arguing that the damage to the economy was not worth the lives that would be saved by social distancing.

The other question is why the left is not jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon when it could appeal to partisan illogic that it would be Donald Trump, their political adversary, who would be likely to use a Trojan horse pandemic to seize authoritarian power. Liberals would argue that they are more in tune with science, but the leftist assault on biological gender shows that argument to be partly true at best.

Instead, my theory is that it is a matter of leadership. Democratic thought leaders are united in the idea that the pandemic is a serious threat. Where we do see conspiracy thinking among the left is the belief that the Trump Administration is steering medical supplies to friendly administrations and holding them back from blue states.

Now that President Trump has extended the social distancing guidelines through April 30, it will be interesting to see whether these skeptics follow the president’s lead or remain fixed on how good the economy might have been if we had just let a couple of million people die. After all, some argue, many had health problems and probably would have died anyway.

In most cases, believing conspiracy theories over the media stories is relatively harmless, but that isn’t the case during a pandemic. At this point in our history, believing fake news won’t just make you look like an idiot, it might get people killed.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Drunk Pelosi Video Is a Fake

If you happen to see a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stammering through a press conference as you make your rounds through social media, be aware that the video is a fake. The video of Pelosi at a press conference was altered to make it appear as though the speaker was stammering and repeating herself. Accompanying descriptions often claim that she was intoxicated when she gave the remarks.

None other than Fox News is on record with a description of the fake news video’s origins. Fox reports that the three-minute clip was from a speech yesterday at the Center for American Progress in which Pelosi described President Trump’s angry exit from a meeting with Democrats about infrastructure. Per Fox, the video was uploaded to Facebook on a page called “Politics WatchDog.” At press time, the video is still posted on the page and has 2.4 million views. Similar videos have been removed from YouTube and Twitter.

Fox cites the Washington Post, saying that the video was apparently “slowed down to 75 percent from the original speed and that her pitch was also manipulated in order to present her under the influence.”

“It is striking that such a simple manipulation can be so effective and believable to some,” Berkeley computer science and digital forensics expert Hany Farid told the CNN. “While I think that deep-fake technology poses a real threat, this type of low-tech fake shows that there is a larger threat of misinformation campaigns -- too many of us are willing to believe the worst in people that we disagree with.”

A separate fact-check article by Politifact notes that unaltered audio is available from C-SPAN and is noticeably different than the audio accompanying the video, which has “more slurred and lisping than the one on C-SPAN.”

The original altered video posted to Facebook is captioned, “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on President Trump walking out infrastructure meeting: ‘It was very, very, very strange.’” The clip closes with Pelosi saying that the meeting with Trump was very strange.

In a subsequent post, Politics WatchDog seemed to acknowledge that the video was fake, saying, “Just for the record [sic] we never claimed that Speaker Pelosi was drunk. We can’t control what the people in the comments think. It’s a free country. For your information [sic] we are not a conservative news outlet.”

The fake nature of the page is also apparent by a poll that the group posted which asks, “Should the Pelosi video be taking [sic] down?” Legitimate news sites rarely leave obvious grammatical errors uncorrected.

A spokesman for Pelosi told CNN, “We're not going to comment on this sexist trash.”

Yesterday, President Trump tweeted a different video of Pelosi that had also been altered under the caption “PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE.” This video, which was originally aired on Fox News’ “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” strings together a series of the speaker’s flubs in a speech. Although altered through selective editing, this video does not appear to be digitally manipulated.

While I am no fan of Speaker Pelosi and don’t agree with her policy prescriptions, I do value truth over blatant lies, even when they are about the opposition. The “drunk Pelosi” video is an example of the worst inclinations of the right-wing media. The fact that some conservatives and Republicans actually believe that the video is authentic is a far worse reflection on the right than the doctored video is on Mrs. Pelosi.

Fake news remains a real problem, as do blatantly false attempts at character assassination on both sides. Remember, kids, when surfing the internet, if it seems too stupid to be true, it probably is. However, in this day and age, you should probably check the source just to be sure.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Democrat Bill Would Outlaw Fake Election News

It seems that President Trump regularly makes the news for his rhetorical attacks on the freedom of press and journalists. Now some Democrats, apparently eager to prove that they are ambivalent about the First Amendment as well, want to criminalize certain types of speech about elections.

The Huffington Post reports that Democrat Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Ben Cardin (Md.), Doug Jones (Ala.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.). plan to introduce legislation that would make it a federal crime to knowingly spread false information about voter registration and qualifications or the time and place of elections. Democratic Reps. A. Donald McEachin (Va.) and Jerry Nadler (N.Y.) will introduce companion legislation in the House.

“Misinformation campaigns intended only to suppress the vote and disenfranchise Missourians are crimes that run counter to our democratic values, and the punishment for those actions should fit the crime,” Sen. McCaskill said in a statement.

The Post cites several examples of election hoaxes from recent elections. Flyers in Maine in 2016 falsely told college students that they had to “pay to change your driver’s license to Lewiston” and “pay to re-register” their vehicles if they wanted to vote locally. The Republican mayor of Mansfield, Ga. posted a message to his Facebook page that read, “Remember the voting days: Republicans vote on Tuesday, 11/8 and Democrats vote on Wednesday, 11/9.”

Of the two examples, the first seems to be a serious attempt at voter suppression while the second is an obvious joke. I’ve heard the same joke in more elections than I can remember and no one ever seemed to take it seriously. It seemed funny when I first heard it about 20 years ago, but now seems as tired as, “That was no lady, that was my wife.”

In either case, the First Amendment defender in me argues that the best reaction to false speech and fake news is not criminalizing speech that we don’t like it, but in countering it with more speech that is good and true. There are ample opportunities for political groups to educate voters on the real election and voter registration rules in their state.

There is also the question of how effective such a “fake speech” law would be. The speech police might snare jokesters like the mayor of Mansfield, but it is less likely that they would catch the anonymous culprits who printed the flyers in Maine. Flyers printed cheaply on a home copier or printer would be hard to trace unless police nabbed someone in the act of handing them out.

When it comes to fake news, the Democrats need to remember that the First Amendment prohibits the government from making any law “abridging the freedom of speech.” It does not include exceptions for fake speech, hate speech or things that people find offensive.

Republicans should remember that the same guarantees apply to the freedom of the press as well. The last thing that proponents of small government should want is for government bureaucrats to determine what is true and what is fake or unfair.

In the end, it is a voter’s responsibility to register and educate themselves on candidates and elections. When there are real and serious attempts to mislead potential voters, these reprehensible acts make it more difficult to exercise the right to vote, but no one ever said that democracy was easy. One of the most difficult aspects of maintaining democracy may be guarding against well-intentioned but poorly thought out laws that erode our basic constitutional rights.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Stephen Miller and Jake Tapper Duke It Out On CNN

The talk of the Sunday political shows is the explosive interview of Stephen Miller by CNN’s Jake Tapper. The heated exchange culminated in Tapper cutting the interview short the and saying that the senior policy advisor for the Trump Administration had “wasted enough of my viewers’ time.”

The interview, on CNN’s State of the Union, centered around the new book, “Fire and Fury,” that contains a number of quotes by Steve Bannon that Miller characterized as “grotesque.” Miller also repeatedly called President Trump a “political genius” who led a “magical” movement.

The interview went off the rails about halfway through the 12-minute video as Miller began attacking Tapper and CNN for their coverage of the Trump Administration. Miller called CNN’s coverage “salacious” and accused Tapper and others of taking “joy [in] trying to stick the knife in” as well as repeatedly calling Tapper “condescending.”

For his part, Tapper accused Miller of playing to the president, at one point saying, “I’m sure he’s watching, and he’s happy you said that.”

When Miller demanded three minutes to make the case for Trump, Tapper responded, “This is my show, and I don’t want to do that.” CNN Editor-at-Large Chris Cillizza defended Tapper’s response in a follow-up article saying, “And the reason is because that's not journalism. The end.”

The bout ended with a technical knockout by Tapper who abruptly cut the interview short after accusing Miller of mounting a “filibuster” that prevented deeper questioning. “I get it. There’s one viewer you care about right now,” Tapper said, “and you’re being obsequious in order to please him. I think I’ve wasted enough of my viewers’ time.” At that point, Tapper shifted to a headline about Jeff Sessions and Miller’s microphone was apparently cut off.  

Both sides seemed to claim victory in the aftermath. President Trump tweeted, “Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration.”

Tapper responded with his own tweet that thanked Twitter followers for “the kind words” and featured a short gif of Tapper. In the gif, a grinning Tapper toasts his fans with a presumably frosty adult beverage. The drink in question? Colt 45.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Fox News Exposes Hidden Bias Of CBS News

Fake news has been a hot topic this year. What the term actually means is different to different people, but a recent puff piece on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray by CBS News falls into that category.

While the piece was not fake in the sense that CBS made up fake information, it was an egregious example of the liberal bias that is prevalent in the mainstream media. Howard Kurtz of Fox News pointed out the shoddy reporting on Fox’s “MediaBuzz” program on Sunday.

In the CBS piece, correspondent Erin Moriarty profiled Cordray, the first director of the agency created in 2010 at the urging of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). In the course of the piece, Moriarty interviewed four law professors who defended Cordray and attacked Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) and his Financial Choice Act that would limit the power of the CPFB.

CBS did present both sides of the issue. Even though it was very sympathetic to Cordray, who Moriarty says “may be the best friend that the consumer has ever had,” she did interview Hensarling as well. So, what is the problem?

The issue is that the four professors interviewed for the piece, Christopher Peterson, Patricia McCoy, Kathleen Engel, and Adam Levitan, were not just random law professors who happened to be fans of the CPFB. In all four cases, the professors had professional relationships with Cordray and his bureau. The professors had either worked directly for the CPFB or had served on its consumer advisory board. CBS did not disclose these relationships in its report.

While it isn’t improper to interview former employees and associates of Cordray, it is improper to not disclose that they had worked for Cordray’s agency. The CBS report left viewers with the impression that the professors were objective, when it fact they were personally involved in the issue.

The internet version of the CBS report contains an “editor’s note” at the end of the article that says, “Some members of the panel of college professors and consumer advocates featured in this report also have previous work experience with or have served on advisory boards for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” The video report did not contain a similar disclosure and on the internet version there was no mention of the fact that the relationships were not disclosed in the original report.

The CBS report can be legitimately called fake news on the basis of its hidden bias. Either CBS failed to do due diligence on the background of all four professors or, more likely, the network chose not to disclose their relationships with Cordray. Either way, it was poor reporting of the sort that feeds the public distrust of the media. 

Originally published on The Resurgent

Infowars Gets Scoop on Trump Speech to Congress

The normalization of “fake news” sites by President Trump continues as Infowars is granted an exclusive look at tomorrow night’s speech by the president. The conspiracy site founded by Alex Jones interrupted its exposés of false flag operations to publish a bulleted list of talking points from President Trump’s upcoming address to Congress. The article notes that “It should be noted this was not a leak, but was given directly to Infowars.”

According to the article, “In Tuesday night’s speech, he [Trump] will lay out an optimistic vision for the country that crosses the traditional lines of party, race and socioeconomic status. It will invite Americans of all backgrounds to come together in the service of a stronger, brighter future for our nation.”

“The President will lay out the concrete steps he has already taken to make the American Dream possible for all of our people,” the unattributed article says. “He will talk about how he wants to work with Congress to pass a bold agenda” including “tax and regulatory reform, making the workplace better for working parents, saving American families from the disaster of Obamacare, making sure every child in America has access to a good education, a great rebuilding of the American military and fulfilling our commitments to our veterans and making sure they have access to the care they need.”

Infowars, whose slogan is “there’s a war for your mind,” is best known for its hard-hitting reporting on issues such as the implementation of martial law in Texas under the guise of the Jade Helm military exercise and the claim that members of the Hillary Clinton campaign were involved in a pedophile ring allegedly run out of a District of Columbia pizzeria. These and many other Infowars stories were completely false.

The preferential treatment of Infowars by the Trump Administration comes as the president is increasingly hostile to the mainstream media. Last week, the Trump Administration blocked a number of outlets that had been critical of Trump from attending a press briefing.  Two days later, the president tweeted that he would not attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a function not missed by any president of either party since 1981 when President Reagan was forced to phone in remarks after he had been shot. At one point, Trump even said of the media, “They are the enemy of the people.”

Trump has also elevated Steve Bannon, the publisher of Breitbart News, to the National Security Council, and granted White House access to the Gateway Pundit, a partisan blog. Both Breitbart and Gateway Pundit are well known for their reporting of hoax stories.

Mr. Trump’s association with hoaxes and conspiracies goes back long before his successful presidential campaign. Trump promoted birther conspiracies about both Barack Obama and Ted Cruz. In 2014, Trump suggested that vaccines cause autism and, in 2016, suggested that the truth is not known about the September 11 attacks. Trump also suggested that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination.

For years, the conspiracy blogs have tainted the reputation of the conservative movement and even served to divide the Republican Party between those who disagree with the left on policy grounds and those who believe that the left is controlled a secret cabal of murdering elites who, by the way, also control the Republican leadership. Now it seems that these purveyors of radical conspiracy theories are more acceptable to the new administration than real news organizations who are critical of the president.

The move to normalize the conspiracy sites is a transparent attempt by President Trump to bypass the mainstream media and take his message directly to his base. As Trump’s war with the press continues, it is likely that favored treatment of sketchy sites will continue as well.

Such actions will limit the ability of Republicans to appeal to moderate and independent voters and have policy proposals treated seriously. President Trump’s normalization and affirmation of these alternative media outlets does not bode well for the mainstream conservatives of the Republican Party.

Originally published on The Resurgent

NOTE: After this article was published, we learned that the information published by Infowars was not exclusive and had been sent to many media outlets. 

Liberal fake news doesn't excuse conservative fake news

News and media (Sollok29/Wikimedia)

Two of the big concerns of many conservatives about Donald Trump were that he would drag the party to the left on policy issues and that he would drag it into the gutter with his behavior. Trump’s proposals for an economic stimulus and more government spending have arguably moved the party toward the position of Keynesian liberalism. The response of many in the party to attacks on fake news sites fulfill the prediction about the corruption of Republican morality.

Articles on conservative sites have popped up all over the internet citing examples of fake news from mainstream media organizations. The examples are numerous and most of them are true. From Brian Williams who was fired for exaggerating his Iraq War reporting at NBC to Dan Rather who was fired for airing a “fake but accurate” report about George W. Bush’s national guard service to Hillary Clinton’s claim that she came under sniper fire in Yugoslavia to reports that Michael Brown was killed while his hands were up, bad reporting has been a frequent problem for even large news organizations.

The problem is that many conservatives seem to take the attitude that since liberal reporters don’t care about truth and accuracy, why should we? This is a bad response that does nothing to curb the publishing of fake news on either the right or left. Instead, it merely cheers on conservative bloggers in a race to the bottom where neither side can be trusted.

A better attitude would to follow your mother’s advice instead of following the mainstream media’s bad example. Who hasn’t been asked by their parents, in response to the juvenile defense that someone else did it too, “If so-and-so jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”

Put bluntly, the mistakes and faults of others don’t give us an excuse to make the same mistakes. If we criticize the mainstream media for lackadaisical fact-checking and then write and spread stories like last year’s claim that Barack Obama was planning to implement martial law in Texas under the cover of the Jade Helm exercise, that doesn’t make us equal with the liberals who peddle lies. It makes us hypocrites.

An equally appropriate aphorism is that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” It’s impossible to fight lying liberals when conservatives are also lying. To fight lies requires credibility, which many conservative sites lack thanks to stories with no basis in fact like those about Jade Helm or Obama’s birth certificate.

If conservatives want to have the moral authority to criticize fake and erroneous reporting from mainstream outlets, they first have to clean up their own house. There are plenty of good, objective news sites that report from a conservative viewpoint without stooping to dishonesty and constant outrage stories. The Wall Street Journal is notably conservative and one of the best newspapers in the country. If you care about politics and current events, the subscription is well worth the few cents that it costs per day.

I’m proud to say that The Resurgent is also a dependable site. While not a “hard news” site, The Resurgent is a conservative outlet that steers clear of the liberal-outrage-of-the-day brand of journalism. At The Resurgent, we strive to present an accurate look at politics from a conservative viewpoint. We aren’t in the business of manufacturing clickbait. And, unlike the Wall Street Journal, The Resurgent is totally free, although we do accept donations to help defray our costs.

So be skeptical with what you read and forward. Fact check for yourself. Don’t spread false stories. When we put an end to the lies on conservative sites, we’ll be in a better position to attack liberal lies.

Originally published on the Resurgent

Americans trust the Onion more than Infowars

(https://www.flickr.com/photos/illuminating9_11/3475314018)

 There has been a lot of hubbub over fake news lately. The elevation of Breitbart’s Steve Bannon to White House status and the recent shooting at a Washington pizzeria that was associated with the "pizzagate" conspiracy theory played a role in the current fascination with fake news, but the proliferation of fake news outlets on the internet was bound to cause a stir sooner or later.

I realized several years ago that a lot of the articles that people were posting on Facebook were simply not true. Some were poorly researched or misinterpreted real events, but others were intentionally out to deceive. Some deceptive sites included disclaimers that they were “satire.” Others did not.

Now a new survey by Morning Consult shows that we probably don’t need to be worried too much about fake news. The poll found that Americans have internal BS detectors that are more highly refined than they are generally given credit for.

The survey asked participants to rate 13 popular news organizations, some real and some fake. What the pollsters found out will astound you!

A bipartisan sample rated one notorious fake news site, Alex Jones’ Infowars, as less credible than The Onion, a popular satire site. You heard that right. The conspiracy site, with a recent story headlined “METHODIST CHURCHES CONVERTING TO ‘VIRTUAL MOSQUES’ FOR MUSLIM MIGRANTS,” was deemed to be less believable than a site that carries on its masthead the Latin motto, “Tu stultus es,” which, when translated, means “You’re an idiot.”

The news outlets that were believed to be most credible were ABC, CBS, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and CNN. Each of these outlets was considered credible by more than 60 percent of respondents. Favorability for these outlets cut across party lines, although Democrats rated almost all outlets as more credible than Republicans. Fox News and MSNBC followed, each with 55 percent favorability. NPR scored credible with 51 percent and the Huffington Post with 46 percent.

Bringing up the rear were Steve Bannon’s Breitbart at 19 percent, The Onion at 18 percent and Infowars at 17 percent. The Morning Consult does point out that both Breitbart and Infowars were unfamiliar to almost half of the respondents. In both cases, of the people familiar with the sites, a larger number considered them not credible than credible.

When the results of the survey are broken down along party lines, the results are largely the same. The main change is that Fox News is the most trusted news source among Republicans while it ranks just above The Onion for Democrats. The three major networks and the WSJ rank high among both parties.

The rock bottom rankings for Infowars and Breitbart are richly deserved. While Infowars was a conspiracy site from Day One, Breitbart went from a real conservative news site under Andrew Breitbart to a page that is now known for hysterics about Jade Helm laying the groundwork for martial law and accusing Republicans of colluding with Democrats on “amnesty,” which became the site’s code word for any immigration reform proposal.

Breitbart and Infowars aren’t the only offenders. There is a whole cottage industry of “citizen journalists” who are actively misinterpreting or making up news. At one point, I started compiling a list of fake news sites, but it was impossible to keep pace with new web pages. Among the stories that I have seen are claims that the Affordable Care Act included language to create a secret police force, that Obamacare medical codes showed that Obama was going to bring the guillotine to America as a method of execution, and, of course, last year’s claims that secret tunnels under Wal-Marts were being used as staging areas to prepare for martial law that would keep President Obama in power.

If you are tempted to believe these and other stories floating around the internet, don’t. They were all 100 percent fake.

To avoid being taken in by fake news, work on enhancing your own internal BS detector. Here are a few tips:

1.       If you don’t recognize the site as a real news source, be skeptical. Look carefully, some fake news sites closely mimic the names and pages of real news sources.

2.       If it has a clickbait headline, don’t bother.

3.       When in doubt, look for links to the primary source that the writer used. Most legitimate news sites and blogs will link to their source material. If there is no link, use Google. If you can’t find the real story with Google, it probably doesn’t exist.

4.       Misspelled words, incorrect grammar and inflammatory language are red flags. Legitimate news sites have editors and at least make a pretense of being objective.

The bottom line is to take everything with a grain of salt and learn to fact check for yourself. In the brave new cyber world of Infowars and Breitbart, if it sounds too stupid to be true, it probably is.

Originally published on The Resurgent