So What Are We Going to Do About These Bullsh*tters Spreading Bullsh*t?

From Esquire

Matt Schlapp's storied career began, or at least got a telling boost, from his participation in the Brooks Brothers Riot. You can see him in the photos! The mob of Republican operatives, cosplaying as Concerned Citizens, was tasked with disrupting the 2000 recount in Miami-Dade County long enough for the general Florida recount to be abandoned. In that respect, it was a success that led to further victories like the Iraq War, though it did spare us the ignominy of having a nerd president. It was also a harbinger of the conservative movement's increasingly anti-democratic tendencies, which culminated, of course, with the Republican Party's broad rejection of the 2020 election results on the basis that their preferred candidate did not win re-election as president.

That's not what they say, of course. They keep saying there was fraud, or that many Americans are concerned about election irregularities, which is true, but mostly because Republicans have spent months darkly suggesting there were irregularities. The reality is that Donald Trump and his allies went to court more than 60 times—both state courts and federal courts, some overseen by judges Trump himself appointed—and lost all but one case. In the process, they repeatedly failed to produce any real evidence of widespread fraud, certainly none that changed the outcome of any election. In some cases, folks like Rudy Giuliani would admit they weren't even alleging widespread fraud. But the shadowy innuendo continues to this day, as the aforementioned Matt Schlapp demonstrated on Chris Cuomo's CNN show Monday evening.

It takes a considerable shame deficit to keep pushing The Big Lie even after it fueled a violent insurrection at the nation's Capitol, but that's what you get when you host a conservative luminary on television these days. If someone who calls themselves a conservative doesn't like what went down with the whole Trump thing, the polls indicate they have no constituency and no influence within the Republican Party. If you book a Trump booster, they are necessarily going to have to lie and obfuscate and operate in extreme bad faith. How else are they going to make their points? It is simply a fact that the people who tried to overturn the last election had dozens of opportunities to present evidence the election was STOLEN! in court and failed to do so, resulting in dozens of Ls. So Schlapp must necessarily spin this crap about how The Evidence Is Just Around the Corner, and just because they lost all those court cases doesn't mean their cases were bad. Maybe you might lose one case despite making better arguments on the merits. But 60?

Which raises the question of whether Chris Cuomo and CNN should be booking Schlapp at all. The main rationale here was probably to press him on some of the programming decisions his American Conservative Union has made with regard to CPAC, the annual conference the ACU hosts to roll out the newest flavors of right-wing horse shit. (When I attended way back in 2017, the festivities included a presentation from an organization that maintains pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is actually good for the planet.) But Schlapp was also inevitably going to peddle some Big Lie-flavored crap in his appearance. After all, it's not just Trumpian gospel, but also now serves as the pretense for Republican state legislatures to pass voter-suppression laws. It is now a plank of the Republican platform that the election was stolen, so we need a voting crackdown, which will almost certainly disproportionately impact Certain People.

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This was all over The Sunday Shows this weekend, as Republican bigwigs accepted invitations with a grin, then spouted The Big Lie before millions of viewers. Similar shamelessness was on display at the hearings Tuesday looking into the events of January 6, in which Senator Ron Johnson appeared to suggest the mob was made up of a significant number of people who were not actually Trump supporters. This is an unhinged conspiracy theory. Also, Josh Hawley, one of the primary promoters of The Big Lie leading up to the insurrection—he even gave the good folks in the mob a fist pump on the day—suggested someone else "has no business leading any security review to the events of January 6."

But is the solution not to invite them on at all, and leave them to spread this crap unencumbered in the right-wing fever swamps of Fox News and beyond? It's hard to say. At the very least, the interviewer should come highly prepared to rebut the bullshit talking points in real time. The harsh reality of television is that it is an ideal platform to spread misinformation and a non-ideal vehicle for correcting it. But as the Cuomo exhibition demonstrates, the obligation to leave viewers better informed on the issues that will affect their lives—and a violent assault on the American democratic process affects every American's life—can often come a distant second to generating the spectacle of conflict. That's what drives ratings, and what drove much of the early coverage of one Donald Trump back in the days when CNN would air footage of his empty podium before a rally. Cuomo was looking for the clashing and clanging of this swordfight to be picked up elsewhere, hoping it would have a knock-on effect for his show's ratings. On the first point, he succeeded. But as he and his brother demonstrated earlier in this pandemic year, good TV doesn't always make for the informative kind.

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