Fake News, Real Policy
Need to justify your solution? Make up the problem!
The last installment covered how right-wing politicians and media outlets act like they are being attacked by the left wing in order to justify their own attacks in “response” to the fabricated slight. The reaction to Trump’s conviction encapsulates this perfectly: With no evidence that the justice system was rigged, right wing politicians vowed to rig it in the future against Democrats.
There will be another aspect to this act of fabrication if the right wing returns to power: They will use fake news to create fake problems that call for real right-wing policies to solve them.
Trump Says Crime Statistics are Fake News
Donald Trump, and most right-wing politicians, go to great lengths to come across as “tough on crime” and the “law and order” candidate. They do this by waxing poetic about how much crime there is so that people feel unsafe so that they will back the candidate’s criminal justice policies.
This is one of the clearest examples of the Completed Breitbart Doctrine at play. They want to enact right-wing policies. They do that by creating a culture of fear. And they do that by skewing voters’ reality about crime.
This isn’t anything new.
The development, though, is in just how brazen the right wing has become in its skewing of reality, how entitled they have become to have their alternate reality taken seriously, and how completely they’ve closed themselves off from the real world.
Just look at the recent interview that Trump did with TIME Magazine. During it, Trump was presented with the recently-released statistics gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which indicate that crime has dropped in the past couple of years. Now, these stats aren’t perfect – they only include reported crimes. Worse, they are brought to the FBI by local law enforcement agencies and, in 2021, the FBI changed how these agencies made their reports and some agencies struggled with it. However, the stats are generally accepted as reliable and have been collected for decades, so they’ve often been used to monitor trends about crime in the U.S.
But Trump didn’t attack the stats on their merits. As expected, he just called the numbers “fake news” and “fudged”:
Violent crime is going down throughout the country. There was a 6% drop in—
Trump: I don't believe it.
You don’t believe that?
Trump: Yeah, they’re fake numbers.
You think so?
Trump: Well it came out last night. The FBI gave fake numbers.
I didn't see that, but the FBI said that there was a 13% drop [in homicides] in 2023.
Trump: I don’t believe it. No, it’s a lie. It’s fake news.
Sir, these numbers are collected by state and local police departments across the country. Most of them support you. Are they wrong?
Trump: Yeah. Last night. Well, maybe, maybe not. The FBI fudged the numbers and other people fudged numbers. There is no way that crime went down over the last year. There's no way because you have migrant crime. Are they adding migrant crime? Or do they consider that a different form of crime?
So these local police departments are wrong?
Trump: I don't believe it's from the local police. What I saw was the FBI was giving false numbers.
No evidence that the numbers are “fudged,” “fake,” “false,” or “lies.” They just didn’t fit into the right wing narrative so they had to go.
And with what flippant ease they went!
It’s important to note: The accuracy of the FBI’s statistics aren’t even an issue, here. They could, in reality, be found to be horrifically flawed after they are studied and picked apart. After all, the reporting system changed in 2021. That might actually be what’s behind the decline; we just don’t know.
But that doesn’t matter to Trump and the Right Wing Alternative Reality.
All that matters is that the numbers didn’t line up with the Right Wing Universe. That is the reason why they are thrown away, and no other reasons are offered, and no other reasons are needed.
Without an Objective Reality, Any Policy Can Be Justified
Obviously, Trump isn’t going to change his tune on crime just because some data indicates that it’s out of touch with reality. He’ll just toss the data and the right wing media ecosystem will nod vigorously and parrot his baseless claims that the stats are fake. Some of the talking heads in the media might add some details that undermine the FBI’s credibility or create some doubts by explaining how the data collection went differently this time.
I’d be surprised if they bothered, though. When data is flawed because you say it is, why would you bother going through the tedious process of proving it?
The problem is that the Right Wing Alternative Reality is not just pushing Republican policies on crime. It is also behind:
The draconian and disturbing approach to immigration, which is based on the idea that migrant crime is rampant, which has been debunked
The usual economic policies of deregulation and lowering taxes for the wealthy, which is based on the idea that the economy is bad, which is false
The rejection of antidiscrimination in schools, which is based on the idea that teaching middle and high schoolers about sexual orientation and gender identity will make them gay or trans, for which there is no evidence
But the problem goes deeper than that. It isn’t just Republican politicians who are cancelling reality in order to advance the right wing agenda. You can count on politicians bending the facts or lying to stir up voters.
It’s the Republican judges that those politicians crammed into the federal judiciary that are cancelling reality in order to advance the right wing agenda.
The next installment will cover how those judges, including those on the Supreme Court of the United States, a full third of whom were appointed by Trump, are overturning decades of precedent to enact right wing policies by getting creative with the facts of the cases before them.
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