The Denigration of First Amendment Freedoms and a Proposal to Combat Conservative Disinformation

“I don’t think a tough question is disrespectful.” The words of Helen Thomas, the notoriously pointed deconstructionist of presidential spin, ring very true in the aftermath of Jim Acosta’s functional banishment from the White House. For those who don’t recall Thomas’ verbal battles with presidents past, she’s truly a marvel to watch in action. When Acosta refused to bow down to Trump Wednesday, the persistence of Thomas came to mind. Particularly, it is the way in which she tried to catch presidents and press secretaries in binds that would force them to squirm in a lie or retreat in defeat.

Where previous presidents, at least in our present mediated age, have been conciliatory and cordial with the White House Press Corps, Trump has been nothing but belligerent. His performance Wednesday among the worst. It is of particular note for a president who demands civility out of athletes protesting in opposition to targeted violence by police, who dithers on responding to a white supremacist rally only to pander with a fallaciously misrepresentative statement about “both sides”, and who constantly berates Twitter with accusations of a globalist cabal against him.

For anyone who values the First Amendment freedoms of the Constitution, Trump is a demagogue who threatens them in totality. His Muslim ban effectively targeted persons on a false equivocation of faith with terrorism and was consistently struck down until a broader immigration ban was permitted. His push for the NFL to take direct action against players in protest crossed a line in using presidential authority to directly silence individual citizens by threatening to take their livelihoods. The president’s continued assault and mockery of citizen opposition to his policies and rhetoric, and a long track record of battery against journalism (culminating in Wednesday’s conference) belies a banal disrespect to any questioning of is self-asserted magnanimity.

The long association of quelling, silencing, and crushing dissent by totalitarian governments is well known. While the Constitution defends the Enlightenment ideals of free speech, Trump has diminished the authoritarian iron fist with a vicious smear campaign allowing faith in the media to erode through the ethos of his office and words alone. The White House’s egregiously falsifiable claim of aggression on the part of Acosta is almost Stalinesque in its retconning of fact.

To quote Joseph Goebbels, “The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.”

While Trump is certainly the standard bearer of the GOP’s present inculcation of lies, half-truth, slander, and spin on the American people, he is but an inheritor of a system built to spread falsehood. Conservative strategy is to misinform and distort. Websites like Breitbart, Drudge Report, InfoWars, and CR-TV among others are platforms to obfuscate reality and bring viewers into a perception beholden to the interests of movement conservatives. Media theory abounds with evidence of this effect, however the words of Marshall McLuhan still speak most poetically of how this manipulation manifests:

The simple fact conservatives aren’t fuming at the mistreatment of Acosta, let alone the GOP’s other varied and sundry lies, is strong evidence they have been instilled to take them as fact. The integrity of competing sources of information is regularly attacked and disparaged by pundits, authors, and political figures within the conservative movement. Disinformation is far from new, but in the a la carte media system of the present day, lies spread faster than they can be refuted.

Among left-leaning individuals like myself, there is a deeply ingrained belief that facts can destroy lies, myth, and spin. This appeal to rationality is haphazardly misplaced, as I have previously discussed. While I adore the Socratic strategy of interrogating interlocutors through spellbinding logic and thoughtful argumentation, anyone who has engaged with a Trumpist acolyte or alt-right troll for any period of time knows facts don’t slow them down. They misdirect, lie, and strawman their way through any reasoned argument with the stubborn force of a Missouri mule.

What Trump has done is attach himself into a broader narrative structure which sidelines traditional argumentative theory by telling stories that appeal to the values conditioned into heavy users of conservative media. I’ve spent the last decade studying this media hydra and am convinced the only way to combat it is to better understand how it works and why. Traditional rationality doesn’t explain how Acosta can perform his duty as a member of the Fifth Estate and be painted as the aggressor when Trump denigrates reporter after reporter for 90 minutes. What does explain this phenomenon is the narrativistic rationality outlined by Walter Fisher as an expansion and compliment to Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic model, which in turn was greatly influenced by the performative sociology of Erving Goffman.

These theorists, among others, are where I intend to spend the vast majority of my focus over the next several weeks as I elaborate, enlighten, and hopefully help disseminate a better understanding of how to break the stranglehold of narrative abuse perpetuated by the GOP, as well as a means to further our individual interactions with media and influence more broadly. While my focus will be conservative and revanchist rhetorical abuses, the pragmatics of my forthcoming work has broad implications for many philosophical endeavors and interests. However, the status quo as demonstrated a clear and present danger in not only American politics, but the wider discursive fabric of our global society.

It is only by understanding how narrative rationality “massages” our ontological and epistemic approaches to truth that we can combat their unwarranted influence over us. In turn, we can additionally use these tactics to foster a better narrative which earnestly leads us to a freer and nobler understanding of the philosophical purpose of discourse. We must not only ask tough questions to challenge bad ideas. We must learn to propagate good ones in compelling ways.

Reason alone will not save us from the tyrants.