An Alternate Universe

I am an old man. I remember when the John Birch Society was influential. What I said about the John Birch Society and other right wing extremists then is true of the Tea Party and other right wing extremists today. They live in an alternate universe. It is a universe where beliefs are never questioned and all inconvenient facts are either ignored or denied. I will not say the right wing extremists are unfazed by the honest reporting of accurate news stories or other factual information, but they have a traditional tactic for combating facts. They simply circle the wagons and poison all the wells outside of the circle. “You can’t trust anything outside of the circle,” they say. “Scientists and the main stream news media have a liberal bias, don’t you know?”

In the universe of the circled wagons the dialogue is circular; any story that seems to confirm the beliefs and feed the paranoia is passed around and repeated until it is accepted as a fact. Thus we find unprincipled purveyors of ring wing bull, like Andrew Brietbart, dumping crap onto the inter net, and other right wing bloggers spreading that crap like a plague. Profiteers such as Rupert Murdoch are more than happy to serve this crap to gullible viewers who accept it as the truth because they hear it from their friends and see it presented on what is supposed to be a news program.

The latest example of this is the rumor that President Obama’s trip to India will cost two hundred million dollars a day. The rumor was allegedly started by an unknown person in India and was soon being repeated on right wing blogs. Republican nut cases, like Michelle Bachmann, then cited this unconfirmed rumor as proof that President Obama is squandering the government’s money. The most ludicrous lunatic at the Fox disinformation factory, Glen Beck, also presented the rumor as though it were a fact. The babbling heads at Fox, who try to pass themselves off as reporters, never questioned the story. Neither they nor Glen Beck raised any questions about the veracity of the original source, nor did they ask any questions about the supposed use of assets, such as navy ships, that would make the trip so expensive. Since their viewers were more than willing to believe this rumor the babbling heads at Fox News reported it ad nauseum, as if the repetition somehow added some legitimacy to the allegations.

The thing to remember is that the Fox News organization is part of the political right wing’s alternate universe. The rules and standards that apply to journalists outside of the circled wagons have no place in the alternate universe of Fox viewers. In that universe it is a perfectly acceptable for Fox to lift a story from a supermarket tabloid and tell its viewers that it has been reported that the Los Angeles Police Department is squandering millions of dollars on jet packs for its police officers. Fox also thinks it is acceptable to air altered videos and other things from the Blog of Andrew Brietbart even after the previous things from Breitbart’s blog, such as the altered videos that caused Acorn to lose its funding, were proven to be outrageous hoaxes. Fox has no conscience. It is not embarrassed by revelations that many of the stories it presents as news are false. Whether a story is true or false does not matter to Fox if its viewers accept the story as the red meat that sustains the paranoia of their dark world. Fox’s primary goal is to keep those viewers tuning in; they are money in the bank. Most of them will not look outside of the alternate universe to find out the truth anyhow. Even the few viewers who find out that a story is untrue will not criticize Fox for presenting it. Where else are those viewers going to get stories that seem to confirm their erroneous beliefs and fears? Certainly not from any legitimate news organization!

Sustaining whatever influence the right wing extremists have on the real world, however, is not an easy thing to do. When reality asserts itself people of sound mind always reject the alternate universe. The John Birch society was literally laughed into irrelevance. It and its members became such a laughing stock that it was too embarrassing for the Republican Party to continue pandering to them. The same thing will eventually happen to the Tea Party and the right wing extremists who are now enjoying another surge of influence. The problem is that marginalizing them is not the same thing as getting rid of them. They will draw their wagons into a tighter circle, and they will continue to suck gullible recruits into their dark and dangerous world. There will always be a Rush Limbaugh, a Glen Beck, and probably a Fox News making loads of money by feeding their fears and supporting their beliefs.