In the last 24 hours of the Trump presidency, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell finally declared Donald Trump to be a liar who fed conspiracy theories to the mob which stormed Capitol Hill on January 6. He also raised the role of other “powerful people”.
McConnell didn’t name them but they are likely to include infamous Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone and the off-the-charts radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that a mass shooting at the Sandy Hook school in 2012 was a hoax.
Stone and Jones both addressed a pro-Trump rally in Washington on January 5, the day before Trump told his followers to go to the Capitol. Stone’s message was that the president’s enemies wanted “nothing less than the heist of the 2020 election”.
Stone has been a key promoter of the lie that the election was stolen from the Republican Party by voter fraud. And it’s nothing new. He launched a “stop the steal” website before the 2016 election, seeking donations on the basis that: “If this election is close, they will steal it.” Repeated ad nauseam and spread through social media, that lie is believed by about 35% of Americans, mostly Republican voters.
Stone has been a fixture in Republican politics dating back to the Nixon years. As a junior operative he was implicated in the Watergate scandal. He has the face of disgraced president Richard Nixon tattooed on his back.
He’s specialised in disinformation as a political strategy and in the US it has found a willing public. “Stop the steal” is but the latest in a long line of political lies which Americans have been prepared to believe, albeit that disinformation is weaponised by the algorithms of social media as never before.
In 2003 — after the September 11, 2001, attacks — US opinion polls showed that 49% of Americans were prepared to believe Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, was directly involved in planning and financing the attacks, even though there was no evidence. Belief in this lie peaked at the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq after a sustained campaign from George W. Bush.
When it comes to the “birther” conspiracy which questioned the bona fides of then president Barack Obama’s US citizenship, a 2010 poll found that 25% of Americans believed Obama was “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”. A subsequent CNN poll found that 16% had doubts Obama was born in the US, and a further 11% were certain he was not.
By mid 2016, when Trump had rekindled the birther conspiracy, 41% of Republicans disagreed that Obama was born in the US and 31% neither agreed nor disagreed, according to an NBC poll.
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, by July last year one-third of Americans did not believe the official death toll — even as infections and hospitalisations surged to a new high, an Ipsos poll found.
In the latest survey of trust in the US election results — published yesterday by US research company Morning Consult — only 36% of Republican voters believed the 2020 election was free and fair. While still low, the figure is 14% higher than from the previous week.
It found 65% of all voters say the 2020 election was free and fair, but there was a sharp partisan divide: 91% Democrats and 36% Republican.
As the US enters a new phase, the damage done by Trump and his co-conspirators as well as the Murdoch-owned media is stark.
According to the Morning Consult survey, among those who believe the election was fraudulent, Trump and Fox News are the most commonly cited sources of information propping up that view: 55% of Republicans who believe there was widespread fraud in the election say Trump is one of the sources that lead them to that conclusion, and 45% say the same about Fox News — the highest levels of 17 sources tested.
Capitalising on the gullible, it seems, is good for business. How to unwind it is a whole other question.
Seems to me David Hardaker misses out on exploring the reasons Americans are so gullible and prone to believe manifest falsehoods. Their brainwashing from an early age, akin to North Korea’s, the compulsory daily salute to the flag and the widely fostered belief in America’s superiority has to account for some of their brain deadness. Along with a woefully inadequate and inequitable education system. The horror is that, as Rundle says, Trump is only one stage in the deterioration this background makes inevitable. You can’t gleefully foster brainwashing without reaping unfortunate consequences.
Hollywood is a major cause of the mass ignorance that exists in the USA, plus of course the endless bullshit and hypocrisy that spews from the happy clappers.
Oh, I really can’t see how Hollywood can be blamed for this. That is just a sensationally long bow.
Fair enough, but there is also the profound influence of religion, which is a very big deal for most Americans. Being raised from birth to accept articles of faith with no regard for empirical evidence, or better still to believe despite empirical evidence, must have consequences.
Good point but it is by no means ‘simply’ the religious. I have witnessed your latter remark more times (and from the supposedly educated) more times than I care to recall. It is a country of “excess”.
Perhaps if they weren’t so obsessed with making money and showbiz, they would be less brain dead.
A bully nation of dumb and dumbers, since world war 2 America has invaded or regime changed and bombed and starved millions of people from many countries with their endless wars for economic and resources gain, all in the name of the mighty dollar but in the finish, the greedy capitalists running their economic agenda have also pushed millions of Americans into poverty as well and they are simply too stupid to see it, hoist by their own petard, over 300 million looking for someone to blame when all the fools need do is look in the nearest mirror.
I opposed Australia’s involvement in the war in Viet Nam and after I retired I worked there for almost a decade as a volunteer with AusAID. I loved the people and the country and read up on its history, including of the times and events during the war.
Just last week I read two articles in Australian msm about Viet Nam and both referred to SHOCK! HORROR! its communist government.
USA – leader of the free world? democratic? knows what’s best for other countries? criticises PRC? They do, indeed, need a mirror.
What would you expect if 25% of US law graduates think Judge Judy sits on the Supreme Court.
It’s a shame she doesn’t. Judy Sheindlin is not a fan of Trump.
Gullible American evangeliKKKals not a Christian amongst them.
Yes, interesting that Roger Stone came up with the three word slogan, Stop the Steal, before the 2016 election. It possibly suggests that Trump and his followers, were seeing that campaign, more as a money making stunt, rather than a genuine presidential run? Who knows?
And while we’re on three word slogans and Roger Stone, a number of reports over the years, have stated that he was the one who came up with Drain the Swamp. Which is grimly ironic, when you consider the background of Stone. While many people know, that he first started his dodgy electoral practices, as a student in the Nixon era, what many people are less aware of, is that for many years, he had his own Washington lobbying firm. Offhand, I can’t remember the name of the firm, but they were notorious; even by Republican insider standards. This was largely because their clients included a number of dictators, such as, Mabuto of Zaire. The clients also included American arms manufacturers. So, Stone and co, would lobby for military assistance packages to supply the oppressive regimes with armaments, and those orders would be filled by Stone’s American corporate clients.
Which is possibly not the resumè, of someone who cares deeply about ridding Washington of self-serving hangers on. But I suspect that it does give a bit of a hint, at the level of sincerity behind the Drain the Swamp slogan.