Nobody is laughing at fake news now

It’s easy to laugh at QAnon and “fake news.”

Easy to say it’s all just a bunch of random, conspiracy-laden theories, that the people who believe them are incels sequestered in their parents’ basements, far out of touch with reality. I’ve made such jokes myself.

But then we must square the guffawing with something like what happened to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband last Friday.

Paul Pelosi, 82, was allegedly attacked by a hammer-wielding 42-year-old QAnon adherent, David DePape, whose mind was a spaghetti dish of weird and outré beliefs. Among them, pizzagate, white genocide and Holocaust denial, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Without a doubt, DePape is a troubled man who needs psychiatric care. Yet while he is an aggressor in this instance, he is also in many ways a victim.

No, he’s not a victim of the Great Replacement or pizzagate or any of the other bizarre ideas he allegedly endorsed across multiple online platforms. Instead, he is a victim of the many individuals who popularize and amplify such theories, who target people like him to pump full of useless information, who then give the rhetorical equivalent of an eyeroll when asked to discredit them.

Both sides of the political spectrum are at fault for twisting and exaggerating news and cultural trends, but the ones who most often radicalize people like David DePape are those on the far-right.

You will find sanitized and slightly more socially acceptable versions of DePape’s beliefs across various right-leaning news networks, talk radio and online sites. You will even find politicians weaponizing these beliefs to drum up votes.

Take, for instance, any number of conservative office holders and candidates who will not say President Biden won the 2020 election. Or who will not commit to the peaceful transfer of power pending the results of next week’s election.

Or the ones like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who condemned the violence against Paul Pelosi, but couldn’t resist the urge to toss in, “but we’re gonna’ send [Nancy Pelosi] back to be with him in California” at the end of his statement, lest he be seen as soft on violence against his political enemies.

Last year, Mark Follman, writing in Mother Jones, noted that the term “stochastic terrorism” can be applied to leaders who use language to provoke action, yet maintain plausible deniability because they never specifically called for violence. Follman applied the term to Donald Trump, who often shrugs off responsibility for criminal actions done in his name. The former president is still at it today, refusing to acknowledge his loss in 2020, wearing a QAnon-related pin, and playing a QAnon anthem (or an anthem-adjacent song − there’s that plausible deniability again) at a rally earlier this year.

All this points, more than ever, to the value of teaching critical thinking skills in schools so that the next generation of Americans is less susceptible to manipulation. However, this is a task that could become more difficult as QAnon-tolerant or -supportive candidates seek to win elections to school boards and tie the hands of teachers and other curriculum experts.

In an essay called “The Art of Persuasion in a Polarized Age” in the Nov. 7/14 Time magazine, Anand Giridharadas notes that we should not blame disinformation victims. Instead, we should help them.

“When our friends and neighbors fall prey to these cons,” Giridharadas writes, “we in the evidence-based world often make the mistake of condemning them as harshly as those who conned them.” Instead, he says, we should try to dig deeper, to get at the root of the complicated feelings they are experiencing in an era of great social, political and demographic change.

Which sounds like a plan, except that there are a lot of potential David DePapes in the world, with far-right media sucking in more and more daily. To say nothing of those who would never dream of taking a hammer to the spouse of an elected official, but who would secretly applaud it, nonetheless. Call them stochastic-terrorism enablers, maybe.

At the bare minimum, perhaps all thinking people could agree not to vote for people who use theories like the ones that sucked in DePape for their own advantage.

Candidates who wink at such lunacy or use it to attract voters have no place in our government. Their ascendency only normalizes beliefs that people of all political persuasions should run from, not laugh at.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Originally published in The Alliance Review on Nov. 2, 2022