Stanley Holditch
Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is the new face of the Republican party. Coming into the House along with Donald Trump, Gaetz has proved one of Trump’s most loyal attack dogs. His use of a gas mask to make light of the coronavirus outbreak crystallizes what the Republican party has become under Trump.
Gaetz represents the westernmost section of Florida’s panhandle, and came into the House in 2016 after deciding not to run for his father’s state senate seat. Since coming into the house Gaetz has sought to position himself as Trump’s strongman, and is now under investigation from the Florida bar for witness intimidation against Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer. He filed an ethics complaint against Pelosi for her State of the Union stunt. Gaetz tends to feint and withdraw, apologizing for his tweet meant to intimidate Cohen, and similarly claiming that his gasmask stunt was not mocking the coronavirus and its victims. Ironically enough, Gaetz is now in self-quarantine after coming in contact with a person confirmed for coronavirus at CPAC.
Gaetz himself is uninteresting an unimportant. We have seen stooges like him from both deep-red and deep-blue precincts before and he will pass as a footnote in American history at best. He is to be taken no more seriously than crystal-whisperer Marianne Wilson. But he is a perfect icon for what one-half of the American political establishment has become.
Stephen Miller’s Model for Success
Perhaps no member of Trump’s team has had more staying power and more influence, while getting the least amount of spotlight, than Stephen Miller. Miller was politically awakened by a book written by Wayne LaPierre, and before Trump worked for Jeff Sessions and Michelle Bachmann. Miller has finely honed troll tactics as a means of political ascension. He wrote an editorial for his high school paper that Ossama Bin Laden would feel at home at his high school, and told Latino students to speak only English.
Stephen Miller forged a path for the Matt Gaetz’s of the world, and his disposition for taking aggressive positions unpopular with the left has created a success model. Aggressive trolling is the M.O. of the entire Trump movement, and conservative voters have shown, thus far, to be fully engaged with this long-term. Miller’s background, going back to high school, of deliberately enflaming liberals raises some questions of whether he is a disciple or influencer of Trump.
It does make sense that the generation that has grown up with the Internet would mold the tactics of trolldom into a weaponized form of propaganda. But Gaetz’s gas mask stunt is more than just a desire to make a name for oneself simply by the projection of a complete lack of compassion bordering on cruelty. It also necessarily rests upon the rejection of not only science but any objective rendering of fact.
The Single Source of Truth
We don’t arrive at Gaetz wearing a gas mask to mock a pandemic while voting for the funding package to combat it purely out of meanness. It does require a complete lack of human compassion to mock people who have died and are currently dying from a disease, but it also requires the deeply ingrained belief that any information coming from the scientific community or the media is justifiably suspect.
The roots of this go way back of course, and spread across the entire political spectrum. For every climate-change denying Republican we have an Anti-vaxxer Democract. The problem started with the perversion of “fairness” in the news media. As media outlets became increasingly affiliated with one of the two parties, a show of “fairness” was required to fend off the rightful accusations that their journalistic integrity was questionable. This led to a cheap trick employed by all networks, branded as “presenting both sides of the argument.” Soon news shows were flooded with truly poor ideas, ones that had little to no intellectual merit but which presented an opposing view to those that did have merit. This practice began the lowering of the bar in terms of what got presented as legitimate opinion.
It also presented opportunity for denying science. Just because something was readily accepted by the scientific community as a solid theory or truth, that no longer meant that we did not have to also hear from someone on the “other side” of the issue, which was usually someone not from a scientific background with a dubious argument. This helped oil companies pay for dissenting opinions on climate science which in turn provided cover for politicians to take no meaningful action on climate change.
When entire communities began allowing vaccinations to be optional based on belief, usually rooted in such persuasive arguments like not being able to pronounce the ingredients in a vaccine, science as a standard of a reasonably educated and logical society was already on very shaky ground. If the argument sounds familiar it should: it is the exact argument being used in the latest commercial from Whole Foods.
This widespread rejection of science has a necessary counterpart: the widespread distrust of established sources of information.
Pizzagate and the Death of Fact
We should all know by now that consuming news through Google, Facebook, or other social media platforms leads to a highly curated set of information. Essentially, our own actions (clicks, reading time, bounce rate, etc) create this curated set and therefore we all essentially have our own separate and distinct sets of information. This leads to people with different leanings having wholly distinct and separate sets of facts.
An absence of agreement about what constitutes actual fact (EG imagine an argument between one person using MSNBC as a source and one using Fox News) creates a fact vacuum that is filled with just about anything, and conspiracy theories have filled the void.
The good ones start with a kernel of truth. Prior to 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Frum and other neocons signed a document called “The Project for a New American Century” which specifically called out the need for a “Pearl Harbor type event” in order to jump-start the Military Industrial Complex and project American military superiority in the post Cold War era. This is objective fact. They signed it, it’s out there for anyone to look up, and none of them to my knowledge deny it.
This of course gave rise to multiple theories that the signatories, all in offices of power under George W Bush, either made or allowed 9/11 to happen to achieve their ends. Their open desires for something just like 9/11 make it an easy jump.
The rejection of science along with the rejection of objective fact, and the troll ethos that anyone disagreeing with you is an enemy to be beaten into submission rather than a person to persuade, have created a perfect petri dish for the birth of theories like Q-Anon, which was the driving theory behind the Pizzagate incident.
For those who don’t remember, a man who was a believer in Q-Anon was eventually persuaded that John Podesta and Hillary Clinton were running an elicit, Satanic, child-sex trafficking ring out of a pizza restaurant in DC owned by Podesta. The ring depicted in these theories claims the Clintons, the Obamas, and many other left political elites as members. Edgar Maddison Welch took an AR-15 into the restaurant to “free the children” and is now serving 4 years in prison.
When one has completely rejected science and all established media sources, a conspiracy theory about a satanic pedophile ring run out of a pizza restaurant is every bit as legitimate a thought that “big pharma” is trying to force mind control drugs on you, or that anything that you have trouble pronouncing is bad for you.
Gaetz as Poster-Boy
When Matt Gaetz donned his gas mask, he donned all the latest trappings of the Republican party — a rejection of the science and scientists who are telling us this is a pandemic and really nothing like the flu; a rejection of the media reporting on the story as “fake news”; a rejection of compassion that would normally be afforded to people suffering; and most of all a full embrace of the troll behavior that has propelled Stephen Miller and President Trump to positions of previously unimaginably high standing.
What is different about the current crisis is there are no dogmatic or poorly thought-out arguments to a dead body, as Gaetz found out the day after he donned his mask.
