MAGA Radicals Got a Major Disinformation Reporting Center Shut Down for Exactly the Terrifying Reason You Might Expect. Here’s What to Do About It.
America is in the ultra-nihilistic “post-politics” phase of its MAGA-driven disassembly, devolution, degradation, and dissolution—and unless you’re an accelerationist hoping for civil war, that’s bad.
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Introduction
The economy is doing extremely well. That’s a fact. No, really—it is irrefutable.
Yet most Americans, even as they report their own finances significantly improving, say the economy is almost certainly horrible for everyone else and overall—which it isn’t.
This false consciousness could cost President Joe Biden the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The only protection facts and good sense have against that outcome is that Americans (at least at one point) stood a chance of seeing the fact that the economy is doing well reported so often that it once seemed possible to cut through the wall of disinformation now being pumped out by the 2024 Trump campaign, the RNC, OANN, Newsmax, Fox News, RSBN, and hundreds of far-right-wing talk-radio shows and podcasts. In theory, proper media saturation of the truth, and proper attention to the truth by the American voting-age population, could have staved off the advance of disinformation and convinced the average voter that what’s actually happening is really happening.
Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happened.
The problem is that major media is doing less to report the reality of the American economy right now than it has in any of our lifetimes, almost certainly because of a dangerous feedback loop:
If Americans think the economy is doing poorly, then
whether or not it is, major media reporting otherwise is likely to anger rather than illuminate them (because we live in a time when we want the news to coddle our emotions rather than inform us), and
major media is already struggling financially and can’t afford to anger its viewership, so
it does not so much misreport the state of the economy as (a) wildly under-report it (both in terms of the number of reports it publishes and the comprehensiveness of each report), and (b) feels compelled to occasionally publish op-eds that use “weasel words”, incomplete data, false conclusions, and misleading framings to downplay the actually fairly strong economy we’re all living in right now.
To be sure, inflation and high interest rates remain a problem, but according to economists this economy must be seen as a generally good and improving one in terms of (for instance) employment levels and many other indicators, and even inflation is now “cooling” to a surprising degree.
So with major media broadly writ (exceptions noted) failing to do its duty—not its duty to Joe Biden or this economy, but to the very viewers it aims to please—reality’s best recourse in recent months has been to a small cadre of disinformation reporting centers at some of the nation’s top universities, for instance Harvard University and Stanford University.
These centers are nonpartisan academic entities that simply report on where most disinformation is coming from and how it’s now moving through our culture—and since right now it is the MAGA Party that requires wall-to-wall disinformation to convince voters to deny the education of their own senses—for instance, by believing that the economy is doing poorly when it’s not, or that Joe Biden convicted Donald Trump of 34 felonies rather than a jury of his own peers—it has been essential for the MAGA establishment to try to shut down these nonpartisan centers whenever possible.
And they’re winning.