The delusional news bubble and those who inhabit it

 By Hal Brown

Bonus: Links to websites I read

A couple of days ago I posted a blog with the title "The news bubble they live in vs. the bubble we live in."  I made a similar illustration to the one I made for this blog meant to depict the news bubble that viewers of Fox News and consumers of other far-right media reside in. 

It is encircled by a wall. It isn't exactly impermeable. It's made of some kind of amazing rubber that only allows certain news through while other news bounces off.

The simple dictionary definition of a delusion is "a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, occurring especially in mental conditions." This is outdated because of the part about mental conditions. While delusions are symptoms of some severe mental disorders the large majority of people that believe the outright lies and major distortions of the truth served up by the far-right media are not mentally ill as defined here:

Paranoia involves intense anxious or fearful feelings and thoughts often related to persecution, threat, or conspiracy. Paranoia can occur with many mental health conditions but is most often present in psychotic disorders. Paranoid thoughts can become delusions when irrational thoughts and beliefs become so fixed that nothing can convince a person that what they think or feel is not true. When a person has paranoia or delusions, but no other symptoms (like hearing or seeing things that aren't there), they might have what is called a delusional disorder. Because only thoughts are impacted, a person with delusional disorder can usually work and function in everyday life, however, their lives may be limited and isolated as a result of their delusions.

Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true. These beliefs may seem outlandish and impossible (bizarre) or fit within the realm of what is possible (non-bizarre). Symptoms must last for one month or longer in order for someone to be diagnosed with a delusional disorder. 

Reference

The key phrase in the dictionary definition above is despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. This presents a conundrum for a diagnostician such as myself. There is contradictory evidence readily available for anyone who wants to see it. It seems impossible that anyone misses it even if they immerse themselves in a media news bubble. 

We see people interviewed at Trump rallies. Jordon Kepler does many of these on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Here's a segment of him discussing a special he did (MSNBC). He is really providing an important service by giving us insights into how these people think.

Kepler is non-judgmental. He could be a clinician. Instead of having his patients come to him he goes to them. They are easy to find among the attendees at Trump rallies. They identify themselves by what they wear.

He presents the truth to them and allows his, dare I call them patients or subjects, to respond and they do often at great length. They are unwavering in their convictions. What they say is delusional but they don't seem, at least to me, to be otherwise behaving as if they are mentally ill. It may be that they suffer from a kind of permanent brain fog and were first infected by Donald Trump.

I don't think the people who hold these beliefs, whether those from QAnon or "merely" believe the lie that the election was stolen or J6 was just a bunch of tourists in the US Capitol, can be put on a simple bell curve from being psychotic to being willfully ignorant. It is more complex than that. We have to factor in intellectual capacity since some of these people may have a very low IQ. We also have to consider their peer group. If each and every person they interact with believes these lies there's nobody to say "yeah, but" and go on to present factual reporting.

Here are several examples to add to those in my blog below, those in the far-right media bubble will never see news about this, as reported in Raw Story:

Fox News sees its own viewers as 'uninformed simpletons': former right-wing operative

This is the top of the website story on HUFFPOST but how many MAGAs will read it?

Do you think Tucker Carlson is going to report on this?

Jan. 6 rioters trashed a GOP senator's office, and he hasn't acknowledged it

This Paul Waldman opinion essay requires a subscription to read so my hunch is that you can count on zero fingers the number of MAGAs who will read it:

Thank you, Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson

His conclusion:

Let’s summarize what the McCarthy-Carlson collaboration produced. First, it put Jan. 6 back on the top of the news agenda, reminding everyone of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his 2020 defeat, the violent reaction of his radical supporters and the craven response of Republican politicians who fed deranged conspiracy theories to their base to save their own political skins.

More important, it created an opportunity to revisit the actual events of that day. Some people watched Carlson’s fantasy depiction of Jan. 6 as a peaceful protest where Trump supporters strolled into the Capitol and took selfies while “milling around.” But a much larger audience likely saw multiple news reports on TV, newspapers and the internet in which both journalists and Republican leaders reiterated the ugly truth about that day’s attack on democracy.

The episode has also further discredited Fox News as it reels from extraordinary revelations showing network executives and personalities privately acknowledging in emails and texts that claims of a stolen election were preposterous even as they amplified those claims on the air. It’s long been argued that Fox News is in no real sense a news organization but is instead a propaganda machine that advances the interests of the Republican Party. That’s never been more clear than it is today.

McCarthy probably thought it was shrewd to give Carlson access to the surveillance footage. Instead, his decision helped reinforce an accurate understanding of Jan. 6, undermined the status of the right’s most important media outlet and reminded the electorate of the rotten core at the heart of the GOP. It’s quite an accomplishment.

On the lighter side, something else the MAGA morons won't read, is the hilarious column by Alexandra Petri in today's Washington Post

Opinion Tucker Carlson has proof the dinosaurs were not killed by a meteorite

Excerpts:

Here are hundreds — indeed, thousands of hours of dinosaurs walking around, browsing through foliage. The occasional T. rex attack. Not a meteorite in sight. Nor, I should add, a meteor, as these so-called scientists would have you call the same object when it’s burning up in the atmosphere. Two names for the same thing? Seems fishy to me. And speaking of fishy, here is a plesiosaurus. You will notice that it is just swimming around, definitely not extinct. This is what the mainstream media doesn’t want you to see. Pretty clear proof that this so-called meteorite is vastly overblown. If this meteorite really did hit, then why do I have so much footage of dinosaurs just walking around, eating leaves and, frankly, boring me to tears?

….

Next, we will observe footage that reveals Abraham Lincoln was mostly not assassinated — I have almost an hour of footage of him enjoying a theater performance without incident! And footage showing that for the overwhelming majority of his life, Elvis was alive. Next, lots of footage of the Hindenburg flying without a single problem! Makes you wonder who stood to gain by painting it as a disaster! We will be following this with footage of people eating lead paint and going “Mm, delicious!” and ... absolutely nothing happening to them, as far as we can tell! Here is someone jumping out of a building using a MyPillow as a parachute and — it seems to be working, for the part of the footage that matters! 

Also, here is some footage of people counting ballots — when they were counting, Donald Trump was ahead, and I think that says it all.

How many Fox News viewers even subscribe to The Washington Post which features this?

This is the blog from the other day comparing the two news bubbles:

It's like a segment of the population is wearing hearing aides and eye glasses that filter out everything they don't want to hear or see.   Call it living in a bubble. There is a major difference between the news "bubbles" we live in. Ours has a permeable membrane. The boundary of the bubbles they are ensconced in is rigid.

"Never again" must mean never again. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

 ☞ Bonus: List of links I use

I originally wrote this for Daily Kos Jan. 2, 2021 four days before Trump incited a mob to try to overturn the election. 

Recent photo of Auschwitz 

By Hal Brown

Since Donald Trump began to run for president the number of articles and books describing Donald Trump’s mental impairments and how dangerous a “case” he was has become industrial in scale. Once he is out of office the psychoanalysis of Trump becomes mostly irrelevant and will be fodder for historians and political scientists.

The presidency of Trump has exposed critical dangerous truths about our society. One is how mentally sick a large segment of our population is. Many people are paranoid and delusional, the members of QAnon are just the most visible. Lin Wood (who is too crazy even for the GOP), who seems to believe he is the Second Coming of Christ, is an extreme example of someone who ought to be committed for treatment. The deep bigotry of millions of Americans including the racist rot in parts of the law enforcement community has been exposed. The appalling ignorance and gullibility of millions of Americans has demonstrated that our primary and secondary education systems have failed at their jobs of teaching young people to be curious and to think critically. These are just examples.

This is not what I want to address here. What I want to focus on is that a phenomenon like Trumpism never gains a foothold in the United States again.

We need to understand how those people who aren’t paranoid and delusional, but those who harbor racist beliefs, those who are afraid of those they consider to be a threat to their dominance, and importantly also those we can call simply ordinary people, can be indifferent to the suffering of others, and sometimes be influenced and empowered to take violent action by a Machiavellian autocrat like Trump. We have to use that knowledge to prevent it from happening again.

The phenomenon of what happened to American society with Trump moving us towards being a fascist country has been addressed in numerous articles and several books published in the past four years.

The subject is hardly new. Historians and political theorists like Hannah Arendt, who is considered one of the most important 20th Century political thinkers, warned us of how countries succumb to fascism and other forms of totalitarianism. The very title of one of her most famous books Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil suggests it could have been written not about Trump but about many members of what has come to be referred to as a cult. (Read: What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil? which describes why her book about Eichmann is controversial.)

Another book conveys a dire warning about what we have to fear in the future from members of the Trump cult. The book known more by the title than the name of the author, Daniel Goldhagen, is Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 

The titles of these two books added together tell us that 1) evil people can be banal and 2) ordinary people can execute the evil dictates of their leaders or turn a blind eye to them.

The slogan or phrase “never again”  has been widely used to refer to The Holocaust. The sentiment is extremely important even though since it has been universally applied there have been horrific genocides since the end of World War II.

Another important phase or aphorism comes from George Santayana which is used in one or another form:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

• This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants:
  • Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
  • Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
  • Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
  • Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
  • Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

Some countries have managed to correct the wrongs of the past without bloody revolutions including of course Germany, and at another level, South Africa. In another category, colonial powers like England not only eliminated their ruling aristocracy but gave their colonies self-rule. An example of a country that remedied the wrongs of their aristocracy with a bloody revolution is Russia and look what they ended up replacing it with. They demonstrate that not remembering the wrongs of the past isn’t enough. A country has to replace the old ways with something better.

There is a consensus among Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans that had Trump been reelected our county would have been in grave danger of becoming an authoritarian and totalitarian state. See, for example: Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans (subtitled “It’s not how we think of our fellow-citizens, but no matter who wins in November, the impulse will be very much alive in the country. What do they want?”) written by an expert on fascism from Politico before the election.

The matter of prosecution of those involved in crimes up to and including Donald Trump is a topic for another discussion. It is certainly related to the recovery from our national sickness. Even if Trump and his enablers manage to live like royalty in the future and are immune from having their transgressions weighed fairly on the Scales of Justice and aren’t punished appropriately, this isn’t all that important in the greater scheme of things.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has some excellent ideas about a forming a kind of truth commission: Why we can't just "move on": We need accountability for Donald Trump's misdeeds. He writes mostly about climate change denial but his points go further:

To address corruption within agencies of government, the oversight powers of Congress are particularly well adapted. A special committee of Congress, with its own staff and robust investigative powers, would be most effective. A government that serves the people must have the strength to resist special interest influence; members of Congress would be particularly adept at restoring the resilience of government against such influence. 

A special committee provides a single repository for evidence and testimony, and could without hindrance investigate schemes that crossed agency and committee jurisdictions. The committee's findings and recommendations would go to the public, the administration and the regular standing committees of Congress; case referrals could go to inspectors general, licensing bodies or the Department of Justice, as needed. With an investigative committee on the job, regular standing committees would be free to pursue long-overdue legislative efforts without the burden of this urgent but additional work. 

……………

Whether the goal at the end of the day is truth and reconciliation, procedural and institutional reform, or justice and accountability for misdeeds, investigations will be essential. Separate investigative bodies assigned to these tasks will leave regular agencies and committees free to begin the urgent business of governing, and move us forward. 

I think forming such a committee is a good idea. 

I also think two things are very important.  Congress needs to pass enforceable laws with meaningful consequences for breaking them about things including but not limited to immigration, emoluments, White House appointments of unqualified people to various departments like Defense, the limits of executive authority, campaign finance, whistle blower protection, fair elections (voter suppression), and police reform. Equally important is educating the public about how closely the country came to no longer being a democracy. If accomplished we stand a chance of assuring that this never happens again.

The news bubble they live in vs. the bubble we live in

 By Hal Brown

Bonus: Links to websites I read

It's like a segment of the population is wearing hearing aides and eye glasses that filter out everything they don't want to hear or see.   Call it living in a bubble. There is a major difference between the news "bubbles" we live in. Ours has a permeable membrane. The boundary of the bubbles they are ensconced in is rigid.

I'm not even going to address the Dominion lawsuit in particular here. Fox News isn't even covering it. This is from Raw Story:

What has been revealed about the abject cynicism about how Murdoch and his minions manipulated their audience for money comes from what the lawsuit has revealed. 

Those of us who follow the news on MSNBC, CNN, Raw Story, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media that don't lie are well aware of what Fox News is.

Just this morning on MSNBC:

Fox News viewers don't read articles like this in Politico:

Or like this from CNN Business:

You can probably count on the fingers of your hands the number of people who are regular Fox News viewers who will read these articles today:

My hunch is that FoxNew viewers think a salon is a place where cowboys used to drink and cavort with prostitutes.

Click above to read

Here's another from Salon:

Fox News caught editing out Trump’s brag that he would have let Putin “take over” parts of Ukraine

"I could’ve made a deal to take over something, there are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly"

How many Tucker Carlson fans will read this? 

Do I hear silence?

Of course all of the above articles require that one have an inclination to get their news by reading and having the ability to actually read at above a sixth grade level. I totally forgot I wrote this in Daily Kos until I did a Web search and found this blog:

Fox News is now guided not just by having popular personalities, all news networks do, but it is dependent on having hosts who hysterically promote lies. 

It may be instructive to look at the actual Fox News building in New York City and see how it has changed over time so their "stars" are now featured on the exterior.

Related:

About one-fifth of Democrats and Republicans get political news in a kind of media bubble

Are You Trapped in a News Bubble?

The news filtered to you might leave out important things you need to know. But how can you tell?

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Addendum:

Thanks to loyal readers and new readers on my blog after readership languished between 700 and 800 a week for months it has finally broken the 1000 readers per week mark: