Hofstadter, R paranoid

9/20 neglected/too narrow?

anti-commie? satanic pedophiles? blk thugs will move into burbs, antifa sets fire to loot in Oregon, thugs on a plane

aha shock jocks beck limbaugh have to constantly amp up dosage b/c we get acclimated/ ___

FB live caputo no filter

uber1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-4217

12 21 an salon

the TV was talking to me. I was in the midst of a delusion that the news anchors on CNN were operatives of a shadow government run by the Clintons. Every time I crossed the living room of my father's dingy basement apartment, their heads followed me and the news anchors interrogated me about my role in the Russia investigation. I believed "Russia investigation" was really code for a global conspiracy to enslave humanity through mind control. President Donald Trump and the Republicans were secretly working to overturn this shadow government and end the deep state programs. Targets of torture like me would be set free.

I turned the channel to FOX News. They repeated over and over that Hilary Clinton was a criminal. Even though I was a Democrat and had voted for Bill Clinton twice, I mailed in the form to join the Republican Party. Then I faxed evidence to the Russian consulate and sent a letter to the CIA offering to cooperate in the investigation.

What I didn't know I was that I was in the advanced stages of untreated paranoid schizophrenia. I was experiencing a psychotic break from reality.

It all seemed so real.

When I was eventually treated, my psychiatrist explained to me, "With paranoid schizophrenia it's just like "The Bourne Identity" — there are people for you, people against you, and somebody always has to be the villain."

I know what you're thinking — thank God they have medication for these people.Now, I wonder, is the average American so different from me? Are we all susceptible to paranoid thoughts, conspiratorial thinking and bias when executive function in the frontal lobes and our ability to reason are disabled by fear?

Terrified by a global pandemic, there are people who believe Bill Gates is an evil mastermind who engineered the coronavirus, with plans to depopulate and microchip the world's population, while profiting in the process. Antivaxxers refuse to take a vaccine they think will alter the structure of human DNA. Our brains seek to impose order. Conspiracy theories can provide answers to people who feel overwhelmed. But ideally the frontal lobes should step in to challenge strange thoughts by asking the question: Is what I am perceiving based in reality?

Dr. Oliver Freudenreich, Co-Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychosis Program, states that there is no generally agreed-upon definition on what constitutes a delusion. From a psychiatric or biological perspective, delusions are driven by excessive amounts of the neurotransmitter dopamine. There is a biological basis to them, and treatment can correct this abnormality. A person with such delusions (e.g., somebody with schizophrenia) is expected to respond to being treated with an antipsychotic medication which blocks dopamine. In other words, one can take a pill and think rationally.

However, many people can't do that if their delusional thinking is part of a worldview that is more an ideology. According to Dr. Freudenreich, when people create their own insular groups — where delusional ideas are never corrected, but simply bounce around in an echo chamber — it is much harder to fight those types of delusions.

Policy divides are now often framed as a battle between good and evil.The most obvious consequence of overheated partisan rhetoric is that someone with an untreated psychiatric illness can go on to commit an act of violence against a person or group that they believe is a perpetrator of their suffering. This is rare. More common is the normal person who goes down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and finds a world that makes sense to them.

On January 6th, 2021, incited by President Trump and believing the election had been stolen, a mob attacked the Capital building. Some in the crowd showed up for the "Storm," which is a QAnon conspiracy theory that posits that Trump was planning mass arrests of a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles and coup plotters, headed by Hilary Clinton and George Soros. Capitol police described the scene as being like fighting a medieval battle.

Social dynamics can propagate conspiracy-based thinking that mimics biologically triggered delusions. But there is no medication that will stop mass violence fueled by conspiracies.

I was a forty-six-year-old filmmaker when I suddenly began to have paranoid thoughts that people were following me. When I lost my day job due to bizarre behavior, I lost my excellent health insurance. I was dumped into America's broken mental health care system that offers substandard psychiatric care to patients on Medicaid, while spending vast amounts of taxpayer money. Misdiagnosed and neglected at the county hospital, I got sicker and sicker … until the TV started talking to me.

Years of my life are now gone. I try not to be bitter that I ended up unemployed, bankrupt and almost homeless, when all I needed was proper medical care. Every day I am grateful that I didn't wind up living on the streets or locked up in prison, like so many people with schizophrenia.

It's easy to mock people who think Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in them with the coronavirus vaccine. But it's much harder to separate conspiracy theorists' larger existential fears from our own. We're approaching the second year of a global pandemic, which is causing mass anxiety and depression. The internet routinely displays images of future roads in major cities as gushing rivers due to climate change. Billions of fish were boiled in the American Northwest and Canada during an unprecedented heatwave this summer. If someone's mind starts spinning with their wildest fears and finds solace in a conspiracy theory, can you really blame them?

Television is a powerful medium. CNN and FOX News repeat the same headlines, the same phrases, over and over in the same news day. Back then, these read to my unhinged mind as coded speech; to the unsuspecting public, it is more akin to propaganda. When I was psychotic, I thought a shadow government had a ministry of propaganda and they colluded across networks. I worry about living in a country where the two major political parties are always at war, unable to get anything done, and the public is fed a delusional world by networks and social media companies competing for viewers.

People with paranoid schizophrenia see patterns that don't actually exist. Just like conspiracy theorists, they are constantly scanning the news for pieces of information to connect the dots about unseen forces controlling events. Both groups believe they are being persecuted by others. I had grandiose beliefs that I was at the center of every news story on TV. My mind was looking to cast a villain to account for the symptoms of a brain disease. The media handed me a culprit to blame. [q or trump sent me]

Dr. Anthony Fauci has complained about the extraordinary divisiveness surrounding the public health crisis created by the pandemic. The current battle is over masks and vaccines. FOX News paints the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy that has invented domestic enemies, such as the unvaccinated, to desperately cling to power. News anchors across CNN repeat the phrase "viral blizzard" to warn the public and scare the unvaccinated about the new variant. Fear mongering is psychologically destabilizing to the most normal person. But this media environment can be toxic to someone with an untreated psychiatric illness. I wish politicians and their media allies would stop contributing to the collective unraveling of the American mind.

trms: long shadows on his ceiling coming for him? stated that serving trump had taken physical and mental toll?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/senator-demands-hhs-official-michael-caputo-be-fired-for-unhinged-sedition-tirade/

no lnx twt

Senator demands HHS official Michael Caputo be fired for unhinged ‘sedition’ tirade

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 15, 2020

Sen. Patty Murray late Monday night demanded the immediate firing of Michael Caputo, the top communications official at the Health and Human Services Department, after the former Trump campaign aide over the weekend launched into an unhinged tirade accusing CDC scientists of “sedition” against the president and urging White House supporters to “buy ammunition” in preparation for a post-election conflict.

During a Facebook live session Sunday that has since been removed from the social media platform along with his entire personal account, Caputo baselessly claimed that “there are hit squads being trained all over this country” to prevent President Donald Trump reelection. Without a shred of evidence, Caputo also accused the CDC of forming a “resistance unit” to harm the president even at the cost of worsening the Covid-19 pandemic.

CDC scientists “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” to decide “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next,” Caputo said, according to the New York Times. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.”

“When Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” said Caputo. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.” [refers to oregon guy shot in Wa]

Following Caputo’s rant, Murray—the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee—called on HHS Secretary Alex Azar to fire the communications official, who has also reportedly been attempting to alter the CDC’s weekly coronavirus reports behind the scenes despite his complete lack of medical experience.

“As the leader of our nation’s health department during a pandemic that has claimed more than 190,000 American lives, Secretary Azar has a basic responsibility to ensure our public health experts are able to do their jobs, our Covid-19 response is not undermined by misinformation or conspiracy theories, and the data used to inform our efforts is free of political interference,” the Washington Democrat said in a statement late Monday.

“It is clear Secretary Azar cannot meet his basic responsibilities while allowing Michael A. Caputo, a yes-man for President Trump with no scientific expertise who publicly attacked CDC scientists and privately interfered with key CDC reports, to continue serving in such an influential role,” Murray continued. “If Secretary Azar believes his responsibility is to the American public and not to President Trump, he should demand Mr. Caputo’s resignation today.”

As Caputo’s rant drew national news coverage and condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and other critics, HHS issued a statement to CBS News backing Caputo, calling him “a critical, integral part of the president’s coronavirus response, leading on public messaging as Americans need public health information to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic.”

In a segment Monday evening, MSNBC‘s Chris Hayes called Caputo “a dangerous crank who is undermining science and raving about delusional conspiracy theories.”

“This guy isn’t just pushing this nonsense—this disgusting, paranoid, dangerous nonsense—from his government perch,” Hayes said. “He is in fact actively working to manipulate what the CDC tells the public about the pandemic in what is arguably the single most important public health publication in the world.”

Watch:

no lnx

What is QAnon? Inside the conspiracy theory that just won’t die

Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon August 19, 2019

If you follow the squeaks and squawks of far-right conspiracy theorists, you have almost certainly encountered QAnon believers — individuals who follow the oft-debunked predictions of an anonymous man who calls himself “Q” and claims to know the sinister truth about how the world works.

To better understand the QAnon conspiracy theory, Salon spoke with Travis View, the host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, who has written about the group extensively for the Washington Post.

What does QAnon believe?

“QAnon is based upon the idea that there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything,” View told Salon. “They control politicians, and they control the media. They control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence, essentially. And they would have continued ruling the world, were it not for the election of President Donald Trump.”

“Now, Donald Trump in this conspiracy theory knows all about this evil cabal’s wrongdoing. But one of the reasons that Donald Trump was elected was to put an end to them, basically. And now we would be ignorant of this behind-the-scenes battle of Donald Trump and the U.S. military — that everyone backs him and the evil cabal — were it not for ‘Q.’ And what ‘Q’ is — is basically a poster on 4chan, who later moved to 8chan, who reveals details about this secret behind-the-scenes battle, and also secrets about what the cabal is doing and also the mass sort of upcoming arrest events through these posts.”

What is “The Storm?”

As Vox’s Jane Coaston wrote in March, followers of QAnon believe that there is an imminent event known as “‘The Storm,’ during which all of Trump’s enemies, including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and others, would be arrested and executed for being murderous child-eating pedophiles.” In November 2017, Coaston pointed out that QAnon had predicted that John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, would be arrested and that the military would take control, followed by riots being orchestrated to prevent more senior officials from also being arrested.

“‘The Storm’ is basically when tens of thousands of people, including Hillary Clinton and James Comey, and [John] Brennan, and maybe even Hollywood celebrities, and other high-level politicians and journalists even, are going to be arrested, and rounded up and possibly even sent to Guantanamo Bay,” View told Salon. “Or be subjected to basically military tribunals, where they will be tried for their heinous crimes. And that’s sort of like the outline.”

Who is ‘Q?’

As View put it, “We have some indication of who ‘Q’ might have been, but there isn’t really any sort of solid evidence right now connecting someone to ‘Q.'” At the very least, it does not seem likely that any old person could pretend to be ‘Q.’

“On 4chan and 8chan, these are image boards,” View said. “There aren’t really like webs or forums. And how image boards work is that you can’t create an account. You can’t register an account that’s yours. But what you can do is — you can create what they call a trip code. And this is sort of like a string of characters that’s connected to a particular password that only you know . . . For someone to post as ‘Q,’ they would first need to know ‘Q’s’ trip code or password. And so that’s basically it: There’s a method for identifying yourself basically on these image boards.”

“Now, in ‘Q’s’ case is kind of complicated, because the trip code has changed a few times, because the trip code was leaked or hacked for whatever reason. But, yeah, that’s basically how image boards work. You can sort of identify yourself as sort of someone who posts two or more times with this trip code.”

Is there any truth to what QAnon believes?

“The interesting thing about QAnon is that there’s always at least this tiny hint of truth to it,” View said. “I’ve talked about sometimes they’re sort of right, maybe in a very broad general sense, but their specific particular claims are always insane and far, far detached from reality. In the case of secret pedophile rings, I mean, you don’t have to look very far to see that kind of thing actually happens. I’m talking about the massive sort of scandal in the Catholic Church. For example, there’s a case in Philadelphia, which is horrendous, of many young people who were molested by people in the Catholic Church. And it was sort of covered up, and has gone on and served several cities all over the world. Very, very tragic.”

“And, of course, there’s the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who was a billionaire who may have molested dozens of girls, and then basically got a sweetheart deal from the government and is a free man now. So there’s that reason — is that they often have a sense that, ‘Well, if this kind of thing is going on and is being covered up, then perhaps the cover-up is bigger than anyone thinks.'”

This point cannot be discounted: From Hollywood to the corridors of power, there are indeed secret pedophile rings that exist. That does not mean, however, that any crackpot who claims to have discovered one should be automatically taken seriously.

5. Why do people believe this nonsense?

To answer that question, let us turn to “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the classic American political essay by historian Richard Hofstadter. Originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, Hofstadter dissected what causes people to subscribe to conspiracy theories. His argument was based not on a psychological diagnosis but rather on a particular style that tends to appeal to people regardless of whether it has any objective merit:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse…

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-appears-delusional-modern-day-gop-led-way

Trump’s tenuous relationship with the truth has always been somewhat of a mystery, and it has often been difficult to tell whether the president is truly delusional or simply the biggest con man on the planet.

Since he announced his presidential candidacy more than two years ago, Trump has peddled conspiracy theories and falsehoods to the public like a false prophet selling hope, displaying an almost pathological disregard for the truth. As a result, many critics have assumed that he is a liar who deliberately and knowingly deceives the public. Others have contemplated whether he truly believes some of the nonsense that come out of his mouth, thus challenging the notion that he is consciously lying.

Both of these scenarios are disturbing in their own way — and, of course, they are not mutually exclusive. Trump may be a true believer one day and a liar the next; a credulous crackpot in one tweet, and a con artist in another.

Last week, however, the New York Times and the Washington Post published separate articles that suggest the president actually believes in his own BS most of the time, and that he has come to live in his own warped version of reality (call it “Trumptopia”). The coinciding reports, published on the same day, both portray the president as an increasingly deranged man who decides what is true and what is false (i.e., “fake news”), regardless of the evidence. According to both articles, the president has even come to question certain things that he had previously acknowledged as true, including the "Access Hollywood" tape in which he is heard bragging to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women. “We don’t think that was my voice,” Trump reportedly said to a Republican senator in January — a claim he has repeated in private since.

“Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality,” the New York Times reporters write. “Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.”

Some of these conspiracy theories, according to the Times, include the "birther" conspiracy about former President Barack Obama (which Trump has publicly disavowed) and the discredited theory that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton last year because of widespread voter fraud. The president’s friends “did not bother denying that the president was creating an alternative version of events,” the Times reports. “One Republican lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Trump’s false statements had become familiar to people over time.”

The Washington Post article is no less disturbing, and the reporters note that even “when presented with irrefutable evidence, Trump finds a way to question unflattering facts.” Whether it’s his defeat in the popular vote, Robert Mueller's probe into possible Russian campaign collusion or Obama’s birth certificate, Trump doesn’t let concrete facts get in the way of his alternative reality. Peter Wehner, a conservative writer who served in the three previous Republican administrations, told the Post that the president “creates his own reality and lives in his own reality and tries to bend reality around himself and his own deep narcissistic needs.” What makes this especially troubling is the fact that Trump is surrounded by enablers who have simply come to accept his delusional worldview as a kind of harmless idiosyncrasy.

These reports seem to confirm that Trump is often a true believer in the conspiracy theories and falsehoods that he spreads. This is not to say that the president isn’t a liar, which he almost certainly is, but that he has been a bullshit artist for so long that he has come to believe in much of his own bullshit. When one builds his entire career on fabrications and “truthful hyperbole” — a euphemism coined by Trump himself — it is not surprising that he eventually comes to believe the hype (especially when surrounded by sycophants who would gladly bend the knee and call him “Your Majesty” upon request).

It is slightly more surprising that a deluded conspiracy theorist like Trump could vanquish numerous Republican opponents and then win the general election without facing any repercussions for his repeated transgressions against the truth. But it shouldn’t be. The GOP was the party of “alternative facts” long before it became the party of Trump, and conspiracy theorists took over the conservative movement long before Trump launched his campaign. Trump’s meteoric rise wouldn’t have been possible without a longstanding tradition of bullshit and paranoia on the right.

Right-wingers have historically been more susceptible to conspiracy theories and paranoia than liberals and leftists. When the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964, it was Trump’s antecedents in the John Birch Society who were espousing elaborate conspiracy theories about the communist takeover of the government. One explanation for this excessive paranoia is the fact that conservatives are driven more by fear than their liberal counterparts. This has been demonstrated by various peer-reviewed studies over the years, including those conducted by Yale psychology professor John Bargh, who found that inducing “feelings of complete physical safety” in conservatives made them more likely to express liberal viewpoints.

Even though some on the left have become increasingly paranoid and hysterical since last year’s election, right-wingers remain the leading purveyors of conspiratorial nonsense in the age of Trump. This is partly due to the president’s inability to get anything passed by Congress, coupled with the endless scandals that have plagued his administration. Failing to accomplish even a fraction of what he promised, the president and his defenders deny reality and blame their problems on evil conspirators, whether that means "deep state" agents, the “fake news” media or the globalist elite. In his essay on the paranoid style, Hofstadter observed that paranoids have hopelessly unrealistic goals and, because these goals are unattainable, “failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.”

“Even partial success,” he writes, “leaves [the paranoid] with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”

new book

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-july-20-2017/

07.20.17 - 10:00AM

Letters and Politics – July 20, 2017

:{LETTERS AND POLITICS:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

"The Paranoid Style in American Politics"^[1] is an essay by American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964; it served as the title essay of a book by the author in the same year.

Published soon after Senator Barry Goldwater had won the Republican presidential nomination over the more moderate Nelson A. Rockefeller, Hofstadter's article explores the influence of conspiracy theory and "movements of suspicious discontent" throughout American history.

Background

The essay was adapted from a Herbert Spencer Lecture that Hofstadter delivered at Oxford University on November 21, 1963. An abridged version was first published in the November 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine, and was published as the titular essay in the book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (1964).^[2] The essay was originally presented when the conservatives, led by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater (1909–1998), were on the verge of taking control of the Republican Party.^[1]

Historical themes

Recurring paranoia in American politics

In developing the subject, Hofstadter initially establishes that his use of the phrase "paranoid style" was a borrowing from the clinical psychiatric term "paranoid" to describe a political personality, and acknowledges that the term is pejorative.^[1] Psychological projection is essential to the paranoid style of U.S. politics.^[1]

Historical applications

Historians have also applied the paranoid category to other political movements, such as the conservative Constitutional Union Party of 1860.^[3] Hofstadter's approach was later applied to the rise of new right-wing groups, including the Christian Right and the Patriot Movement ^[4][5]

Aspects of Hofstadter's thesis have been challenged by Samuel DeCanio's 2013 article "Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver," ^[6] which argues that instead of being a paranoid delusion, the Populists' position regarding bankers' use of bribes to influence 19th century monetary policy was largely correct. DeCanio offers evidence that the Coinage Act of 1873, legislation that eliminated bimetallism and which the Populists' denounced as the "Crime of 73," was influenced by bribes that William Ralston, president of The Bank of California, paid to Henry Linderman, director of the Philadelphia Mint. DeCanio's article includes a copy of the actual check Ralston used to pay Linderman, indicating the Populists' claims were far more accurate than Hofstadter ever suspected.

Legacy

In a 2007 article in Harper's, Scott Horton wrote that "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" was "one of the most important and most influential articles published in the 155 year history of the magazine."^[7]

Laura Miller writes in Salon.com that "'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' reads like a playbook for the career of Glenn Beck, right down to the paranoid's 'quality of pedantry' and 'heroic strivings for 'evidence'..."^[8]

Trivia

2012 the husband-and-wife duo of Elizabeth Nelson and Timothy Bracy formed a Washington, D.C.-based garage rock band named The Paranoid Style.

References

Hofstadter, Richard (November 1964). "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Harper's Magazine. Retrieved November 27, 2012.
Hofstadter, Richard (2008). "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books. p. xi. ISBN 9780307388445.
Mering, John (1978). "The Constitutional Union Campaign of 1860: An Example of the Paranoid Style". Mid America. 60 (2): 95–106.
D. J., Mulloy (2004). "Approaching extremism: theoretical perspectives on the far right in American history". American Extremism: History, Politics and the Militia Movement. pp. 17–34. ISBN 978-0-415-32674-2.
Kamiya, Gary (December 5, 2011). "The Infantile Style in American Politics". Salon. Retrieved 2016-08-19.
"Studies in American Political Development". journals.cambridge.org. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved August 2, 2016.
Horton, Scott (August 16, 2007). "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Harper's Magazine.

Miller, Laura (September 15, 2010). "The paranoid style in American punditry". Salon. Retrieved February 1, 2011.

External links

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Harper's Magazine, November 1964

Categories:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/opinion/campaign-stops/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics-is-back.html

no link

Most prediction models, including the one put together by The Times, foresee a Hillary Clinton win, but recent polls show her lead diminishing. As Nate Silver wrote on the 538 website on Sept. 6:

The clearest pattern is simply that Trump has regained ground since Clinton’s post-convention peak.

With the odds now favoring a narrow Clinton victory, what would the ramifications be after Nov. 8 if she beats Trump by three or fewer percentage points?

First and foremost, the anticipation of such a defeat has released in the Trump camp what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described in 1964 as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

:{The paranoia of the Trump campaign has found expression in the accusation that the Republican establishment in the primaries and now Hillary Clinton and her allies in the general election are committed to rigging the vote to prevent Trump’s rightful accession to the White House.

This has been on Trump’s mind for quite a while. On April 11, in the midst of the primary battle, Trump told “Fox and Friends”:

I won South Carolina. I won it by a landslide, like a massive landslide, and now they’re trying to pick off those delegates one by one. That’s not the way democracy is supposed to work}:. And you know, they offer them trips. They offer them all sorts of things. And you’re allowed to do that. And you’re allowed to offer trips and you can buy all these votes. What kind of a system is this? Now, I’m an outsider and I came into the system. And I’m winning the votes by millions of votes. But the system is rigged. It’s crooked.

:{With the nomination in hand, Trump declared in his convention acceptance speech:

Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.}:

I am hardly alone in recognizing Hofstadter’s relevance today. Conor Lynch returned to Hofstadter this summer in Salon, for example.

It’s easy to see why. Hofstadter describes the paranoid style as

made up of certain preoccupations andfantasies: the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary.

Trump’s strongest supporters do in fact feel abominably persecuted. They are unlikely to fade away gracefully.}:

Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver, emailed me his thoughts:

A narrow Trump loss could be problematic in that some significant percentage of Republican activists would believe Trump’s claims that the electoral system was rigged against him.

“This is a potentially dangerous outcome for the country,” Masket added.

Masket is not the only one worrying that the legitimacy of the election — and potentially of future elections — could be compromised.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute warned that if the outcome is a close win for Hillary Clinton:

It will reinforce the view among Trump populists that the election was stolen and he was stabbed in the back, which will make the task of party leaders that much harder, while creating further delegitimization of the process.

At a rally in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 1, Trump told the crowd, “I’m afraid the election’s gonna be rigged, I have to be honest.” Roger Stone, a Trump confidant, shared his own thinking with Milo Yiannopoulos of BreitbartNews on July 29:

I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly.

Stone’s advice was that Trump should say,

I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.}:

The Trump-Stone message is resonating.

In early August, a Bloomberg poll asked voters, “When it comes to the presidential election, is it your sense the election will or will not be rigged?” The poll found that 56 percent of Trump supporters believed the election would be rigged. Among all voters, 34 percent predicted a rigged election; 60 percent rejected the notion.

Further complicating the situation, The Washington Post reported on Sept. 5 that

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are probing what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions.

Masket believes that a spreading suspicion among Trump supporters that the election outcome was fixed could have severe repercussions after Nov. 8:

Part of the reason that our nation has been relatively free of political violence is that losers of contests have nearly always accepted their loss and opposed the victor through legitimate means, such as challenging them in future elections or working against their agenda in Congress. The 2000 election was very close and obviously very controversial, but Al Gore nonetheless conceded after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Were Trump and his supporters to continue to argue that the election had been stolen from them, it would mean that they reject nonviolent solutions to political differences. It could jeopardize future elections, undermine the legitimacy of the federal government, and create an environment in which political violence becomes more likely.

While clearly on the fringes of politics, the so called alt-right — white nationalists and hard-line opponents of immigration who oppose multiculturalism and defend a particular vision of Western values — has become an influential force in politics.

Since the start of the Trump campaign, alt-right groups have been attracting members and they have strengthened their ties to the Republican Party.

Trump “has sparked an insurgency, and I don’t think it’s going to go away,” Don Black, a founder of the white nationalist website Stormfront, told Politico in December:

He’s certainly creating a movement that will continue independently of him even if he does fold at some point.

Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown and a co-author of “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform,” points to the problems a narrow Trump loss could pose for the Republican Party:

If Trump continues to be a focal point for alt-right ideas, those voters will demand a voice, either in the Republican Party or outside it. Can the conservative and mainstream Republicans unite effectively and keep the alt-right from steering the party?

The conviction that Democrats and the Washington establishment will rig the election in Clinton’s favor is by no means limited to the alt-right. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, have both promoted the idea.

“There’s a long tradition on the part of Democratic machines of trying to steal elections,” Gingrich told Sean Hannity on “Fox News” on Aug. 2:

I mean, if you assume that she is a crook, as he says, if you assume that she lies, as he says, why would you expect her to have an honest election?

“This is a rigged system,” Giulianideclared on July 24 on the Fox show “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo,” “and Hillary and Kaine are right in the middle of the Washington insider rigged system.”

On Aug. 26, Ann Coulter, the conservative firebrand, told Politico “Any close election will be stolen by the Democrats.”

Before he was fired, Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, warned that federal officials could not be trusted to prevent voter fraud:

Frankly, we think that the situation in the country — just like with the Democratic National Committee’s primaries — is a situation where if you’re relying on the Justice Department to ensure the security of the elections, we have to be worried.

In an exhaustive 2007 study of voter fraud, the Brennan Center at N.Y.U. Law School concluded that individual attempts to cast multiple votes, to register using a false name or other methods to vote more than once are so rare as to be inconsequential.

In the New Jersey election in 2004, 3,611,691 votes were cast and there were “eight substantiated cases of individuals knowingly casting invalid votes,” Justin Levitt, the study’s author, who is now deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, wrote. He calculated that illegal votes amounted to 0.0004 percent of the total.

As could be expected, the Brennan study has done little or nothing to tamp down accusations of election fraud from the alt-right, and indeed from Trump himself.

Fifty-two years ago, writing in the year of the Johnson-Goldwater election, Hofstadter proved remarkably prescient: The right wing, he argued,

feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.

Should Trump fail to eke out a victory, his already deeply suspicious supporters are likely to double down on allegations that they have been cheated out of what is rightfully theirs. As Hofstadter put it:

In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.

:{Hofstadter wrote that at a time when polarization was a minor factor in politics. The confrontation of irreconcilably opposed interests is far more hostile today, which Hofstadter foresaw with such focused intensity that it is worth quoting him at length:

The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him — and in any case he resists enlightenment.}:

The author, most recently, of “The Age Of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics” and a contributing opinion writer.

salon

In a recently published essay, a noted professor of American History at Columbia University investigates the rise of Donald Trump and his highly paranoid approach to politics, along with the long history of similarly paranoid political and social movements in the United States:

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” writes the professor. “In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Trump movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Some readers may have already worked out that this essay was not published recently, nor was the author describing the Trump movement. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was written by the renowned historian Richard Hofstadter in 1964 — shortly after Donald Trump had graduated High School — and the Columbia professor was in fact describing the Barry Goldwater movement in the passage above (indeed, the essay was published in November, the month of the 1964 presidential election).

Since Hofstadter wrote this seminal essay, it has been frequently revisited by political commentators and historians to compare and contrast contemporary and historical political movements that are prone to what he calls the “paranoid style” — but it seems especially pertinent in 2016, the year of Donald Trump. Although the paranoid style is always with us, it tends to wax and wane in relevance, lapsing into long periods of obscurity on the fringes of the political spectrum (left and right) and coming back when least expected.

When Hofstadter wrote his essay, it was a particularly paranoid time for America; in the midst of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement and just one year removed from the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Barry Goldwater waswhile the John Birch Society’s founder Robert Welch was claiming that President Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” The previous decade had also seen the rise and fall of McCarthyism, which was likely fresh in the mind of Hofstadter, who had been a member of the Young Communist League in his youth.

Of course, there were numerous movements that had employed the paranoid style long before the Cold War. Hofstadter continues:

“In the history of the United States one [finds the paranoid style]… in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.”

Today, the global communist threat is long gone; but the paranoid style is timeless. Since getting involved in politics several years ago, Trump has taken the same paranoid and overwrought approach as leaders of the aforementioned movements. Most notoriously the billionaire celebrity gave credence to ridiculous conspiracy theories about President Obama that are found on fringe right-wing blogs like Infowars.com.

Just as Eisenhower was an agent of the communist conspiracy, Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who sympathizes with radical Islamists. And this is hardly the only conspiracy theory that Trump has sold to a credulous public. The Republican nominee has claimed global warming is a myth created by the Chinese, implied that Obama never attended Columbia University, entertained the idea that the late Justice Scalia was murdered, declared that thousands of Muslim-Americans were cheering in New Jersey on 9/11, asserted that the Mexican government deliberately sends “the bad ones” to America (i.e. Rapists and criminals) — it goes on and on. (Though Trump hasn’t personally promoted the “white genocide” conspiracy theory — which posits that the white race is being deliberately wiped out through cultural assimilation — his most ardent supporters on social media come from within this community).

With Trump, there is always a plot, and every conceivable problem — whether it be social, economic, political — can be traced back to a cunning and calculated group of conspirators who want to destroy America and its culture. Paramount to the paranoid style are its enemies. And today, it is no longer the communists or the Catholics, but the Muslims, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the PC liberal media, and so on. Trump has single-handily restored the paranoid style to the mainstream (on the right, at least); giving credibility to wacky conspiracy theories from the bowels of the blogosphere and creating an angry and fanatical movement that will permeate American politics for the years to come.

(Some will correctly point out that the paranoid style has been making a steady comeback since the election of President Obama, as demonstrated by the Tea Party movement and figures like Glenn Beck, who embraced bizarre conspiracy theories as well; but Trump is the culmination of this revival — the pinnacle of paranoid politics and American idiocy).

As with all paranoid style politicians, Trump is a demagogue and a charlatan; he lies incessantly (even when he’s not peddling conspiracy theories) and exploits the worst prejudices and impulses of the populace. Though still unlikely to win in November, Trump has brought to the mainstream a kind of politics that will undoubtedly dumb down the already vapid discourse in America; and if it isn’t curbed by the ever-shrinking moderate and conservative factions in the GOP, it could also end up mainstreaming authoritarianism.

Conor Lynch

2011 gabby g

In the wake of the Tucson shootings, there’s been plenty of instant political punditry — about the need to tone down inflammatory political rhetoric, about whether anyone should be able to walk into a store and buy a semiautomatic Glock with 31 rounds, about whether toxic right-wing rhetoric pumps polluted water into the ocean in which apparently unhinged people like the accused Tucson shooter Jared Loughner swim. Most of it has a modicum of truth, yet most of it is oddly predictable and superficial.

Now that a few days have passed since the Arizona shootings, perhaps it’s time to place the analysis of political violence in America in a broader historical perspective. A good place to start is with historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay, “*The Paranoid Style in American Politics*“which is standard reading in many college courses.

Here’s how Hofstadter describes the Paranoid Style:

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse...He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”

Although Hofstadter was writing partly in response to 1950s McCarthyism, to JFK’s assassination, and to the 1960s version of conservative wingnuts like the John Birch Society, Hofstadter notes that “the paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life”. He traces the Paranoid Style in American politics back to the late 1700’s, including movements which saw a treasonous conspiracy against America by secret Illuminati in the late 18th century and by secret Masons in the early 19th century, by Catholic immigrants taking orders from a foreign Pope in the mid 19th century, and by McCarthyite fears of an UnAmerican communist conspiracy at the highest levels of government in the 20th century.

While, historically, Hofstadter did not view the Paranoid Style as the sole province of the right, he saw a unique manifestation of it in contemporary right-wing movements:

“The modern right wing...feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. “

Flash forward nearly 50 years — Doesn’t this description have an ominous resonance with the beliefs of the Republican right, the Tea Party, and their political and media spokespeople like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sharron Angle, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin?

Michele Bachmann: ‘’We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months (since Obama’s election) and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves.’’

Mark Williams, national spokesman for the Tea Party Express: ‘’[Obama is an] Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.’’

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), member of the House Tea Party Caucus: ‘’He (“Obama”) has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity.’’

These paranoid denunciations of the absolute evil of their political opponents often merges with calls — either implicit or explicit — for violence to eliminate them:

Sharron Angle: ‘’I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.’’

Glenn Beck: “I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I should kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could.”

Ann Coulter: “My only regret with Tim McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times building.”

G. Gordon Liddy (on how to kill law enforcement officers): “...head shots, they are wearing body armor, head shots... or shoot for the groin”.

Dick Heller, the plaintiff in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects the right of individuals to own guns: “We the people,’ armed, are TRULY what the Writers of the Constitution intended for us to be in Art. 1, Sec. 8, para. 15, and that is the CITIZEN MILITIA. If suicide terrorists DO attact our city, ARMED CITIZENS could be the First to counter these hostilities in our individual neighborhoods.”

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence lists21 armed attacks on innocent people by right-wing vigilantes since 2008, including:

July 27, 2008 — Jim Adkisson shoots and kills two people at a progressive church in Knoxville, Tennessee, wounding two. Adkisson calls it “a symbolic killing” because he really ‘wanted to kill...every Democrat in the Senate & House’ but was unable to gain access to them.

April 4, 2009 — Neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski shoots and kills three police officers in Pittsburgh. His friend Edward Perkovic tells reporters that Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on its way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Perkovic also commented that Poplawski carried out the shooting because “if anyone tried to take his firearms, he was gonna’ stand by what his forefathers told him to do.”

May 31, 2009 — Scott P. Roeder shoots and kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. The FBI lists Roeder as a member of the Montana Freemen, a radical anti-government group.

June 10, 2009 — James W. von Brunn walks into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and shoots and kills a security guard. Von Brunn believed that Western civilization was going to be replaced with a “ONE WORLD ILLUMINATI GOVERNMENT” that would “confiscate private weapons” in order to accomplish its goals.

February 18, 2010 — Joseph Stack of Austin, Texas, flies a single-engine plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, killing one and wounding 13. In a suicide note, Stack lays out his grievances with the federal tax agency, stating, “The law ‘requires’ a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not ‘duress’ than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is ... Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”

Of course most right-wing Republicans and Tea Party supporters don’t engage in acts of violence. But their political views often reflect the Paranoid Style described by Hofstadter in which they see their very way of life as under attack by liberal elites and in which their political opponents are not only wrong but illegitimate and must be destroyed. As Ed Kilgore writes,

“To put it bluntly, it has become common on the Right to treat conservative policy prescriptions as exempt from the normal procedures of democracy because they reflect the preferences of God, the Founding Fathers, or Real Americans. Indeed, the essence of the Tea Party Movement, which dominates the GOP from top to bottom, is the belief that by advancing such quotidian centrist policies as a managed-competition health care system or amarket-based cap-and-trade device,Democrats are not simply wrong, but are violating permanent and never-to-be-amended guarantees of low taxes, small government, and laissez-faire capitalism. That point of view helps explain the spluttering rage of people like Glenn Beck and his most devoted fans, who really do seem to believe their ‘fundamental liberties’ include the right to enrich themselves limitlessly and to be exempt from any collective responsibilities, and that mildly redistributive and exceptionally traditional practices like progressive taxation or unemployment insurance represent a totalitarianism that must resisted by any means necessary.”

The Paranoid Style in American politics tends to become most virulent during periods of rapid social change and economic crisis when significant portions of the population feel their way of life threatened and do not see any way in which conventional politics will protect them. That’s certainly true of the present post-Wall Street bust era. In coming years, we’re likely to see a new normal of low economic growth, high unemployment, lower incomes for much of the middle and working class, greater economic inequality, more political gridlock, and even greater control of the political system by corporations.

Under these circumstances, in the absence of a significant progressive populist movement to channel legitimate popular anger towards meaningful solutions to our nation’s problems as a viable alternative to the timid corporatism of the Obama administration and many Democratic office-holders, right-wing movements which reflect the Paranoid style in American politics are likely to grow and flourish in coming years.

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THE BLOG 07/23/2010 11:36 pm ET | Updated May 25, 2011

Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?

By Peter Dreier , Christopher R. Martin

Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart’s job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.

Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the “paranoid style” of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.

Breitbart is part of the “paranoid style” conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade. Breitbart was a featured speaker at the Tea Party conference in Nashville in February and is a frequent guest on Fox News and right-wing TV and radio talk shows. His websites are propaganda vehicles for building a political movement. Unlike Fox News, he doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced.” What much of America learned this week is that Andrew Breitbart is unfair and unbalanced.

What’s distressing is not that Breitbart does his job, but that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, including the Obama Administration, take him seriously. The recent dust-up over the firing of federal Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, fueled by a doctored video on Breitbart’s website, is only the latest example of this.}:

Since he began his website operation, Breitbart has sought to inject himself and his blogger network into the political debate. Sometimes he succeeds in getting wider attention, outside the right-wing silo, for the manufactured scandals he tries to provoke.

Breitbart’s public visibility has peaked twice, according to an analysis of stories on the Lexis/Nexis database.

His first brush with fame occurred in September 2009, after he sponsored two young right-wing video activists — Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe — who visited 10 ACORN offices with a hidden video camera, claiming they were a prostitute and her friend, and tried to entrap the group’s staff into giving them advice about buying a home to use for their prostitution ring. They recorded their stunt and selectively edited the tapes for release, later splicing in video footage of O’Keefe dressed up in an outlandish pimp costume (hat, sunglasses, fur coat, and walking stick) with racist overtones.

In fact, O’Keefe actually wore a dress shirt and slacks and identified himself as a student or friend of the young woman who was trying to protect her. Although O’Keefe’s costume change was exposed months ago, the image has been imprinted in the media’s mind. On Thursday, for example, the Associated Press story about Breitbart referred to O’Keefe and Giles as “actors posing as a prostitute and her pimp.”

Breitbart not only defended the duo’s actions but said that O’Keefe “is already well on his way to being one of the great journalists” and that he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Breitbart has refused to release the original, unedited videos to any of the organizations investigating the ACORN controversy.

By the second week of September 2009, the ACORN videos became a national story. The videos were posted on Breitbart’s website, then quickly became the top story on the Glenn Beck Show, the rest of Fox News, conservative talk radio (including Rush Limbaugh and his local counterparts), and CNN’s Lou Dobbs Show. The controversy proved irresistible for the mainstream news media, which reported the story and broadcast clips of the videos many times. These video attacks compounded ACORN’s problems, having been the victim of another manufactured scandal before and during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Karl Rove, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican establishment falsely accused ACORN of “voter fraud.”

The videos led many of ACORN’s supporters to abandon the community organizing group. Soon after the video scandal surfaced in the mainstream media, the U.S. House of Representatives (including many Democrats who had worked with ACORN in the past) voted to de-fund the organization. In reality, less than 10 percent of ACORN’s budget came from federal grants. But the symbolism of Congress’ action was more important than the money itself. Congress’ action provoked ACORN’s cautious foundation funders to drop the group like a hot potato.

Within a few months, ACORN had been exonerated of wrongdoing by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, the Attorney General of California, and a federal judge, who ruled that the law barring the group’s receipt of federal funds was unconstitutional. By then, however, it was too late. In April, ACORN laid off its entire staff and closed its offices in over 100 cities. (Meanwhile, last January O’Keefe was arrested for breaking into Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office in another “gotcha” attempt,; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service).

(Full disclosure: We were a target of Breitbart’s smear tactics after we published a study last year revealing the distorted media coverage of the manufactured ACORN controversy. An updated and expanded version of that study will be published in a few weeks in the fall issue of Perspectives on Politics, a journal sponsored by the American Political Science Association).

Now Breitbart is back in the news as a result of another manufactured controversy, this one regarding Shirley Sherrod. He’s gotten even more media attention for this episode than he did for his ACORN shenanigans. But the current firestorm has many of the same elements as the phony ACORN scandal that he cooked up last year.

First, Breitbart posted a highly doctored video on his website that was intended to put its target (both African Americans — hardly a coincidence) in the worst possible light. Then the right-wing echo chamber — including Fox News and the conservative blogosphere — picked up Breitbart’s ball and ran with it. Next, the mainstream media — the daily newspapers and the TV networks — took the false accusations at face value and repeated them without bothering to verify and fact-check, acting more like stenographers than reporters. Finally, liberal groups like the NAACP and liberal politicians (in this case, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House), wary of any controversy, jumped the gun and distanced themselves from the target of Breitbart’s attacks — by firing Sherrod before she even had an opportunity to explain or they bothered to investigate the accusations.

Unlike the manufactured ACORN controversy, Breitbart’s deception in the Sherrod “scandal” was uncovered quickly. A few media outlets, including CNN, dug a bit deeper, interviewed Sherrod, talked to the white farmers that Sherrod helped, reviewed the entire videotape of her speech to the NAACP in Georgia, and disclosed what should have been apparent from the beginning — that what Sherrod actually said had no relationship to what Breitbart claimed she said. This led the White House, Vilsack, the NAACP and others to offer apologies and led Vilsack to offer Sherrod another job with the Department of Agriculture.

There are thousands of right-wing websites and bloggers, but so far Breitbart is the most successful, having mastered — indeed, having helped create — the new rules of political combat made possible by the internet and cable TV.

Breitbart has not only drawn attention to his manufactured scandals but also to himself. Time magazine, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, and other publications have published profiles of Breitbart. These profiles could hardly be called fawning or even admiring. He comes across as an obnoxious, self-centered bully. But the profiles are nevertheless respectful, in the sense that they recognize his entrepreneurial skill and his take-no-prisoners attitude.

Both the right-wing echo chamber and the mainstream media don’t quite know how to categorize Breitbart and what he does. The Philadelphia Daily News called him a “rising conservative media figure.” The Washington Post called him a “conservative activist” and an “internet entrepreneur.” NPR described him as a “conservative online news entrepreneur.” The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called him a “blogger,” while Newsday and the New Republic called him a “conservative blogger.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal called him an “online muckraker and journalist.” Sean Hannity, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABC’s “Good Morning America” labeled him a “publisher.”

Regardless of what he’s called, the Sherrod story is a good example of Breitbart’s skill at what academics call “agenda-setting” and “framing”.A week ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of Shirley Sherrod. Now, she’s practically a household name. And many people who might not recognize her name at least know something of the story. In the past few days, almost every major news outlet has published or broadcast something about this story. That’s the art of agenda-setting.

Americans not only know who Sherrod is, they already have an opinion about her, because they’ve been told that she’s a black federal employee who used her position to discriminate against whites. That’s the art of framing. Within a matter of hours, that frame burned through the media like prairie fire.

This process is easily verified by an examination of Lexis-Nexis. Among daily newspapers, the conservative Washington Times has been the most likely to report Breitbart’s propaganda over the past few years, followed by the Wall Street Journal. Among magazines, the conservative National Review, followed by the right-wing American Spectator, have given Breitbart a megaphone. Among TV networks, Fox News has been Breitbart’s best customer, followed by CNN.

Only after his smears are reported in the right-wing echo chamber do the mainstream media outlets pick it up, where it reaches a much wider audience. The mainstream media are mesmerized by the Tea Party and controversies that it and its political allies have stoked. In bending over backwards to cover the right wing — and downplay comparable activities by liberal and progressive activists — the reporters and editors have lost sight of the journalists’ responsibilities not only to fact-check and verify, but also to provide context.

By now it is clear what Breitbart is selling. But the real question is why the mainstream media and Democratic politicians bought it. Breitbart is a con artist, but con artists succeed if consumers don’t know they are being conned — or don’t care.

Given Breitbart’s track record, why does anyone — reporters and editors, foundations, advocacy groups, and elected officials — take him seriously? Or why not at least treat him like an arm of the Tea Party, as a political activist, and a propagandist, not as a source of credible information?

Of course, Breitbart has offered no apology and is still trying to defend and justify his actions. Perhaps this most recent brouhaha will destroy Breitbart’s credibility with the mainstream media and even with his right-wing colleagues at Fox News and elsewhere, who were embarrassed by the Sherrod mishap.

But it isn’t only the mainstream media that needs to do some soul-searching. It is also the Obama Administration and, more broadly, liberal Democrats and liberal advocacy groups and foundations, who were too quick to distance themselves from ACORN and now Sherrod.

Clearly the Obama administration over-reacted, fearful, as a high-level official put it, of having the Sherrod story show up on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show. Why they are so intimidated by Beck and his ilk is a mystery. Their followers, and those who identify with the Tea Party, represent no more than 15 percent of all voters. Moreover, very few of Beck’s (or Limbaugh’s) devotees would even consider voting for a Democrat. After all, they think Obama is a Marxist, a Muslim, and a foreigner. This is not a constituency that Obama and the Democrats are going to win over by appearing to be bipartisan or middle-of-the-road.

And if Obama and his inner circle are worried that Breitbart’s and Beck’s poison will spread from their base among right-wing zealots and start influencing “independent” and “swing” voters — and thus help sway close elections toward Republican candidates — then the best way to prevent that from happening is to fight back, and challenge their lies and distortions, not run away and hide, or capitulate, as they did by firing Van Jones, abandoning ACORN, and firing Shirley Sherrod.

Breitbart’s credibility may or may not survive the Sherrod controversy. But what’s important is whether responsible journalists — as well as the Obama administration, the Democrats, and liberals and progressives — learn some lessons from this episode.

Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College. Christopher Martin teaches communications at the University of Northern Iowa.

Follow Peter Dreier on Twitter: www.twitter.com/peterdreier

Peter Dreier

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College

Christopher R. Martin

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