Fake News, Real Escalation
On the right, the attacks don't even have to happen
The last installment ended with a promise to discuss the process of escalation. This is the cyclical conduct between competing societal factions that can spiral out of control as each one retaliates against the other for real or perceived slights. In extreme cases, it can lead to a civil war or even potentially to genocide.
This installment will also talk about baseless escalations, or retaliation against fabricated slights.
You can probably already see where I’m going with this.
The Right Wing: Trump’s Conviction is an Escalation and We Will Meet It
Trump got convicted for falsifying business records to buy a porn star’s silence so her story wouldn’t hurt his presidential campaign. His criminal record means he could be barred from traveling to 37 countries.
The Republican response was to attack the judicial system and expel anyone who wouldn’t because, in the Right Wing Fantasy World, the trial was an escalation by the Democratic Party. In the Right Wing Fantasy World, it is the Democratic Party that is weaponizing the criminal justice system against their political rivals. They don’t have any evidence of this, but they’re not in court, so who cares?
It certainly seems like one of my followers is John Stewart.
Naturally, this evidence-free claim is being used to justify a counter-escalation: Republicans are vowing to use the criminal justice system to prosecute Democrats.
Representative Mike Collins (R-GA): “Time for Red State AGs and DAs to get busy.”
Donald Trump Jr.: “We have to fight fire with fire.”
Right wing stooge Charlie Kirk: “Indict the left, or lose America.”
Senator Tim Scott (R-SC): “This is a justice system that hunts Republicans while protecting Democrats.”
The urgency is based on a fabricated slight: That the left wing is abusing power to solidify its political position by baselessly prosecuting political opponents.
Never mind that, at the moment the right wing declared that the criminal justice system wasn’t investigating Democrats, Hunter Biden’s trail was in opening arguments, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and Representative Henry Cuellar, both of whom are in the middle of corruption trials.
Those facts don’t matter, though.
What matters is the narrative, and that narrative is that the left wing is coming for you so you need to vote for Republicans and donate to their campaigns.
Conflicts and Escalations
I recently read the book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, which was written by a political science professor in the U.S. who focuses her studies on the subject and recently renewed her passport.
A central theme to the book is escalation. When society fractures into factions, and particularly when one of those factions is an ethnic (say, white) or religious (for example, Christian) one with the perception that they are losing their preferred status in society (sound familiar?), what often follows is a series of tit-for-tat situations that can boil over if the faction ever loses hope and comes to believe that anything short of violent action is pointless. The Faction of Grievance perceives something that the other faction is doing as persecution against them and vows to retaliate, which makes the other faction muscle up to protect itself, which makes the Faction of Grievance muscle up even more, and so on.
How each side “muscles up” is limited only to their imagination and the circumstances, but it is exactly what just happened over Trump’s conviction. The right wing is claiming that it’s a result of the left’s “weaponization of the justice system.” They don’t have evidence for this, but it feels right so it’s The Truth to them. And so their response is to escalate things by promising to respond in the same way that they imagine they have just been attacked.
They weren’t attacked in that way, but they feel like they have been, and that’s enough for them to justify their attack.
Now, anything that the Biden administration does to prevent Republicans from abusing the justice system – by, for example, taking steps to ensure that federal government employees cannot be fired for political reasons and replaced by presidential appointees, as Project 2025 promises to do if Trump gets elected – will be perceived as an additional escalation that warrants its own response. And so on and so forth.
Fake News, Real Escalation
But the most insidious part about this whole thing is that how each side muscles up isn’t just limited to imagination and circumstances.
It’s only limited to imagination, now.
Because right wing partisans and the media ecosystem that they rely on for promoting their baseless claims without question is willing to peddle completely fabricated circumstances in order to stir up the MAGA bloc into thinking that “the left” has taken greater and greater control over America. There is no escalation too petty to put in the bullhorn. Even Hunter Biden’s conviction wasn’t good enough for them. In fact, his conviction proves that the Democrats run the Justice Department. They’ve even issued criminal referrals against James and Hunter Biden because the testimony that they gave didn’t feel right to them, so therefore the testimony must have been a lie (remember how Paul Pelosi’s attacker had vowed to get Nancy to confess to corruption and that, “If she lied, I would break her kneecaps”?)
This matters, because it makes the MAGA bloc feel like they are persecuted, feel like America is getting out of control, and feel like they are losing hope for a non-violent answer.
Is civil war on the brink? I don’t think so, and certainly not the full-blown conflict like the Union and the Confederacy. It’s far more likely to take the form of acts of right-wing domestic terrorism, like the attempted abduction of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or successful acts of intimidation like the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville or the “act of self-defense” by Kyle Rittenhouse.
But the more right wing pundits, politicians, hacks, and stooges baselessly claim that the left is escalating things, and the more their media ecosystem promotes those claims, the more pressure the MAGA bloc is going to feel to do something, anything, whatever it takes, to stop it from getting “worse.”
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