Editorial,
The Week in Review – Analysis, Commentary, Opinion
12.10.2016
The
Fifth Week of Trump – Cognitive Dissonance
I just ended a long
trying exchange on Facebook with an old friend of mine, someone I have known
since childhood, by blocking him.
The exchange began with
my friend suggesting that there was no merit behind claims being reported today
in Newspapers across the country, that Russia had engaged in a long campaign to
subvert the American electoral process, through the dissemination of
propaganda, so-called “fake-news”, activities which we would normally call
disinformation.
The Washington Post
reported, and the story has been carried by newspapers around the country, the
New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune among them, that the
consensus of United States intelligence services has concluded that Russia
sought to influence the election, and cast doubt on the outcomes, not just as a
means of sewing chaos, but for the purpose of helping to elect Donald Trump.
All twelve of our
intelligence gathering agencies concurred with this conclusion. Leaders in
congress were informed prior to the election, and several members (not all) of
the republican delegation objected to sharing this information in a bi-partisan
release.
Lacking fulsome bi-partisan
support, President Obama held onto the information and did not make any
disclosures.
Donald Trump won.
Donald Trump won in the
electoral college, but Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million. The disinformation
campaign worked enough at the margins of the key swing states, and in key
precincts within those states to give Donald Trump the victory.
The disinformation has
not stopped.
Donald Trump and his
surrogates have continued to spew outrageous claims. Donald Trump has suggested
that won the popular vote as well, because, he asserts, that millions of people
voted who were not citizens or legally eligible to vote.
This is a lie.
Donald Trump has been
president-elect for four weeks and he has only sat in on four of the
presidential daily intelligence briefings, a primary duty of the president in fulfillment
of his national security obligations. He is dismissive of it. He does not have
time for it.
Concurrently he continues
to assert that the national intelligence agencies who have provided the report
on Russia’s involvement in the election are wrong. He says that are all wrong,
all twelve agencies, Donald Trump and his surrogates fallaciously assert that
these are the same people who provided the country with false information on
weapons of mass destruction, which false reports were the precursor to the 2004
invasion of Iraq.
These are not the same
people. These are career intelligence officers working across the wide spectrum
of our intelligence services. The people who provided the false reports on WMD’s
in Iraq were political appointees led by Vice President Dick Cheney, and CIA Director
George Tennant, who manipulated the intelligence for political purposes. Donald’s
Trumps refusal to accept, and attempts to discredit the reports on the election
amount to the same thing, a politically motivated falsification of the data.
My friend, who is not a Donald
Trump supporter, nevertheless picked up the Donald Trump line on this. The
disinformation game is working full tilt in the American zeitgeist. My friend,
who is ardently left-wing, spends a good amount of his time in the far left corners
of the information web, and defends leftist conspiracies as readily as Donald Trump
and his supporters defend theirs.
They have found common
cause in their mutual defense of their private news sources and their attack on
anything coming from the mainstream that might challenge them.
The diatribe my friend
launched on me went straight to a defense of Russia, a defense of Bashar Assad
of Syria, a defense of the Russian Invasion of the Crimea. A denial that Russia
is involved in a campaign of Aggression in eastern Ukraine. He was fully co-opted
into these positions out of a felt need to protect the integrity of his world
view, which means the need to defend his use of private news sources.
For as long as I can
remember the observation has been made with ironic mirth that if you go left
far enough you are right. Extremists and fundamentalists on either side of the
political spectrum find common cause at the furthest ends.
The cognitive dissonance
is this, the main stream media, The Washington Post, The New York Times etc…
they challenge the mal informed perspective of those on the fringes, therefore
they cannot be trusted by those on the fringes. If they tell you that Russia
has invaded Ukraine, they are lying, if they tell you that Russia successfully
intervened the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump they are lying.
This is the world we have
landed in, not just a world that is post-factual, but a world in which wide
swaths of the people are openly hostile to facts.
After many unsuccessful attempts
to respond to my friend, only to be dismissed, and after many expressions of my
exasperation with him, by openly calling him out as a liar and an apologist,
and some other pointed and patronizing comments made by me.
I had to block him, not
just unfollow him, but block him.
The lunatic fringe.
