An accelerating fake news cycle

We used to have the news cycle. Now we have gone full postmodern with the fake news cycle. At the close of the past week, all of a sudden there was a rash of news articles in the mainstream media originating from reporting in Buzzfeed to the effect that President Donald Trump had suborned perjury by instructing his lawyer to lie to Congress in his Congressional testimony. They leapt from the report to the implied consequences to anticipating full blown impeachment in the space of the death rattle of a discredited media.

Fortunately, most of us in the real world have been trained to follow the 48 hour rule. The more compelling the claim, the less likely it is to be true. Wait 48 hours before relying on compelling news because it is most likely to be untrue. As has proven to be the case with the Buzzfeed reporting. It appears that it was manufactured news.

Just as the edifice of that reporting crumbled away, news reports emerged of young Catholic teens harassing a Native American veteran which drove the media and social media into a frenzy of rage. Even longstanding skeptics of news reporting let go their discipline and indulged in condemnation in what appeared to be the worst kind of bigotry.

I commented on this in Manufactured stunts presented as real news. My first focus has been on how technology makes misreporting that much easier but how technology has also made it much easier to crowdsource the pursuit of truth. It appears that major misreporting is getting revealed at a faster and faster rate. Not through the self-policing of the media of its own reputation but by citizens on the ground at such events.

By Monday morning it appears that everyone is acknowledging that the Covington Catholic School story was a manufactured stunt by two different left-wing provocation groups to fulfill their bigoted stereotypes of young white men. An effort completely subverted by the high school students behaving in a respectful, though bewildered, fashion. The students did everything right and displayed a level of maturity we would expect from the best adults in the face of prolonged (an hour and a half) bigotry and provocation from the nominal adults of the Black Hebrew Israelis and a group of Native Americans.

They demonstrated respect, tolerance, refusal to be baited, support for gay rights, rejection of racial taunts of their black classmates, etc.

Neo, in Reporting on each other: the Covington boys, the Native American, and the smart phone vs. the telescreen takes note of something else which I had failed to focus on. The left has become an anti-Catholic movement.

Several things made the Covington story absolutely irresistible to the left. The kids were white (most of them; not all, but the featured ones were). They were male. Some were wearing MAGA hats. They were Catholic. And they were returning from an anti-abortion rally. They were supposedly (according to Phillips, although nowhere in any video has any corroboration surfaced for his claim) chanting that we should build the wall. A perfect storm of terribleness on the part of the teens, right?

These boys weren’t accused of drunken rape, like Brett Kavanaugh and his teen Catholic school buddies. But what we are seeing is exactly the same venomous desire to brand and discredit them as nasty soulless thugs, and from similar motives: anti-white, anti-right, anti-male, anti-Catholic, anti-religion, anti-Trump.

Covington Catholic School, Kavanaugh, and the Knights of Columbus are all recent flash points in this sea change, heralding a reversal of tolerance. It does appear that the Democratic Party, if we are to believe the example set by Senators Hirono, Harris, Feinstein, as well their base, have become the anti-Catholic Party.

Combine that with the two year enduring support demonstrated until recently, for the anti-semitic positions of the leadership of The Women's March, the anti-semitic screeds of House Representative Ilhan Omar and House Representative Rashida Tlaib, widespread defense of Louis Farrakhan, and widespread support for the BDS movement and it also appears that the Democratic base has also become anti-semitic.

These are just instances off the top of my head. Odd, though, that it suggests that there is some implied Congressional Democratic division of labor: the Senate will lead the anti-Catholicism and the House will lead the anti-Semitism.

Given its history, I would have thought Democratic leaders would have more care about appearing to be the anti-Catholic, anti-semitic party.

It also prompts an interesting question. You combine the emerging anti-semitism with anti-Catholicism and then meld that with the longstanding anti-white positions and anti-male positions and it suggests a fairly targeted and narrow demographic base of support. A very selective appeal.

From a numbers perspective it does not sound like a particularly compelling proposition. Anti-male - you lose 50% of the electorate. Anti-white - you lose 60% of what is left, leaving you 30% of the electorate. Anti-Catholic - you lose another 50% of what is left, leaving you 15% of the electorate. Anti-semitic - you lose another couple of percent leaving 13% of the electorate. That seems a surprisingly narrow natural base for national victories.

For forty years Democrats commanded Congress with only occasional and exceptional interruptions and were equal contenders for the presidency. It is no wonder that the Republicans have been so resurgent. It is no testament to their electoral competency when they continue to lose to such a rising tide of bigotry and hate.

Which in turn resurrects Will Rogers's old comment though in the reverse. He used to say "I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat." It is not that the Republicans are in disarray but they are an exceptionally wide tent compared to their past and to the Democrats of today. The Republican std(X) on any point of philosophy or policy is much greater than that for Democrats.

It is worth keeping in mind one of Rogers other truisms, lest any become so despondent of our Mandarin class from both parties.

No party is as bad as its state and national leaders.

Or, one might add, as its activist base.

And thank goodness for that.