Big Lies Matter

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, August 09, 2022

 

One of the most damaging legacies of the Trump era is that much of the Republican Party — and a tragically large share of the conservative movement that sustains it — has come to believe, mistakenly, that bullsh** is the path to power.

 

The thing is, it isn’t. It is easy to play make-believe with willing marks in an age of hermetically sealed social-media echo-chamber discourse, but actually lying successfully to people who aren’t already inclined to play along is pretty hard — and expensive, both in economic and reputational terms.

 

The actual political record of the Trump coalition should show the weakness of the bullsh** strategy. Donald Trump and his personality-cult politics managed to win one election, defeating a singularly toxic, corrupt, exhausted, used-up Hillary Rodham Clinton, a previously failed candidate so inept and feckless that she seemed to have forgotten the most elementary basics of politics, like how to go out and ask for votes. What followed that Pyrrhic victory was a rout of historic proportions: The inept Trump team failed to get any major legislation through Congress on the president’s hallmark issues during the time when Republicans controlled both houses, and then Republicans proceeded to lose control of the House and the Senate before handing the presidency over to the Democrats — a reverse trifecta not seen since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Trump himself became one of only ten elected presidents to seek a second term and lose — underperforming his immediate predecessors Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, along with such figures as Richard Nixon (reelected in a 49-state landslide in 1972) and Woodrow Wilson. The Republican Party is in disarray, positioned to forfeit: a Senate race in Pennsylvania to a hobbled stroke victim after nominating Mehmet Oz, a television quack and Turkish citizen who did not live in the state before seeking the office; the Pennsylvania governor’s race, after letting Democrat money help kook-fringe conspiracy nuts nominate a kook-fringe conspiracy nut as the GOP candidate; a Georgia Senate seat after nominating crackpot celebrity Herschel Walker, who seems to have more children than Rehoboam. In Arizona, Republicans have nominated conspiracy kooks for governor, the Senate, secretary of state, and attorney general. The scene in Michigan is much the same.

 

It is not certain, or even likely, that all of these candidates will lose — it is certain that they all deserve to lose.

 

It is also certain that Republicans are not getting what they say they want out of politics right now when it comes to policy outcomes, but instead they seem to be satisfied with the childish politics of catharsis. And, really, that is where Republicans are: If Liz Cheney had served in the Ronald Reagan cabinet, she would have been one of its most conservative members if not its most conservative member; she’s on the outs with Republicans, who prefer the Jewish-space-lasers doofus from Georgia and the Colorado cretin who insists that January 6 was the new 1776.

 

Joe Biden is president, Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House, Chuck Schumer is the Senate majority leader, and Donald Trump still can’t get a Twitter account. So much for so much winning.

 

But it’s a tough time for liars, kooks, and misfits outside of elected office, too.

 

Alex Jones, the risible conspiracy entrepreneur, will have to pay the families of the dead from the Sandy Hook massacre some tens of millions of dollars after losing a defamation case brought in response to his claiming that the event was staged and that the dead children and survivors were “crisis actors,” performers brought in to create a fictitious crime scene as a pretext for attacking Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Jones is a frothing phony, of course; 99.44 percent cynical profiteer with only a touch of genuine kook in him. He isn’t stupid or crazy, but his audience is, and he knows it, and made a good living from that stupidity and craziness, for a while.

 

But that sort of thing is not limited to the Alex Joneses of the world. Julie Kelly of American Greatness claims that January 6 also was put on by “crisis actors,” and claims that former police officer Michael Fanone of the D.C. Metropolitan Police is one such “crisis actor.” American Greatness is crap — if Breitbart is contemptible dumb people writing dumb stuff, American Greatness is contemptuous smart people writing dumb stuff — but it is not Alex Jones–style fringe crap: That imbecilic outlet is the journalistic home of such conservative worthies as my friend and New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, former National Review writer Victor Davis Hanson, that dopey Michael Anton creep, etc. Kelly’s conspiracy kookery is indistinguishable from Alex Jones’s, but she has been a regular on Tucker Carlson’s show and other Fox News programs.

 

Alex Jones’s company filed for bankruptcy in July. It should have filed for moral bankruptcy years ago, along with a large section of the so-called conservative media.

 

Things like this unwind slowly, but they do unwind. One America News Network has been dumped by DirectTV and Verizon, its only remaining major carriers. (“Because these wings are no longer wings to fly / But merely vans to beat the air.”) Whatever diminished form it takes as it limps on will still be subject to ongoing defamation litigation by Dominion, the voting-systems company that was the target of an insane right-media smear campaign following Donald Trump’s ignominious defeat in 2020, a lawsuit in which billions of dollars are being sought from Fox News, ONAN, and Newsmax, three grimy propaganda operations that will not let the facts stand in the way of their sycophancy. Another voting-technology company, Smartmatic, is seeking similar damages for similar reasons. As with the kooks Republicans have nominated as candidates, it is not certain, or even likely, that all of these liars and shills will lose the lawsuits filed against them, but it is certain that they deserve to lose. The classical criteria for a libel claim are that an assertion must be: (1) false (2) defamatory (3) made with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. “Reckless disregard for the truth” is a prerequisite for working at those outlets.

 

Lying is free — until it isn’t. Then, it gets expensive, indeed.

 

Again, it’s hard times all around: Cleta Mitchell, who is such an anti-establishment outsider that she literally wrote the book on being a Washington lobbyist, got dumped by Foley & Lardner, revealing the previously unplumbed depth of what it takes to embarrass a Washington law firm of that kind; Lou Dobbs is fun-employed; Peter Navarro was indicted and frog-marched on contempt charges; Steve Bannon was indicted, and his kook fanboy civil-war pre-enactors are all the way off their meds; Sidney Powell has been left twisting in the wind; John Eastman currently is being fitted by his erstwhile allies for a pair of bespoke cement wingtips.

 

The perplexing thing I hear from conservative “realists” and Republican Party types is that we old-fashioned non-insane conservatives have to learn to live with the kooks and cultists and liars because they are our ticket to power. I am reminded of George Orwell’s pithy response upon being told by a true-believing Stalinist that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet:

 

“Where’s the omelet?”

 

As every good con artist knows, the mark always participates in his own con. The psychology behind that is obvious enough if you have been around long enough: The elderly widow or widower cherishes the illusion of the young suitor’s love more than the money and the jewelry that is going to go missing; the charlatan faith-healer and the lottery ticket are really the same product — a moment’s relief from despair — at different price points; the insecure philistine cares more about being able to say that his car once belonged to Jon Voight than he cares about the truth of things. At some level, these people who have convinced themselves that they are part of a patriotic revolution must understand that all they really are is a way of ensuring that Sean Hannity never has to fly commercial, that Chris Ruddy can fill up his kiddie pool with Macallan Lalique Cire Perdue for Labor Day weekend, and that nobody ever figures out that Donald Trump Jr. has spent the last ten years walking around with change for a dollar in his hand trying to figure out how to lace up a pair of penny loafers.

 

In the meantime, Biden et al. are shoveling money out of the Treasury door as fast as their arthritic old shoulders will allow while Republicans are listening to Marjorie Taylor Greene explain the hidden message in “Jews in Space.” Because there’s no dignity in it but it still beats the hell out of teaching Crossfit classes in Shitheel, Georgia.

 

The rich get richer, and the stupid stay poor.