Not Just the Facts

Steven Bannon, Keeping it Fair and Balanced

By Finbarr Curtis

While Steven Bannon has problems with Muslims, he does seem to be cool with worshiping Satan, the Lord of Darkness. In an interview soon after the GOP's electoral triumph, Trump's chief strategist described his political worldview: 

"Darkness is good," says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. "Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they" — I believe by "they" he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster — "get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

While Satanists might take offense at their being lumped in with Trump supporters, Bannon's interest in power for its own sake and his willingness to toss aside concerns about good and evil might tell us something about his approach to publishing. His Breitbart.com's penchant for fabricating news stories has made it one of the most visible examples of the internet medium in a era labeled "post-truth." From Bannon's perspective, his site provides a conservative alternative to liberal media. Rather than pretend to be nonpartisan, Bannon accepts that all news is biased and that the difference between his site and mainstream media like The New York Times or The Washington Post is that Breitbart happens to be conservative and the Times and Post happen to be liberal.

When Trump supporters decide that mainstream news organizations are full of liberal lies, they are capable of believing a lot of things. In response, websites like politifact evaluate whether various claims correspond to the real world, an exercise known as "fact checking."

I believe that fact checking is valuable, but I think that fact checkers are doing something different from what they think they are doing. For one thing, there are no bigger fans of facts than Trump supporters. This might sound like an odd claim after Kellyanne Conway's touting of "alternative facts." What I mean by saying that Trump supporters are fact obsessed is that they subscribe to a common sense literalist view of language that presumes that facts are self-evident certainties. One of the biggest contributors to the post-truth dispensation is not a devaluation of facts, but an all-too-fervent faith in facts understood as self-contained, self-evident pieces of information that exist outside of social contexts or human interpretations. This leads to the uncritical consumption of information as well as the refusal to do the work that goes into thinking and the dismissal of the perspectives of people who do such work. When I accept the reality of global warming or evolution, this is not because I am convinced by the facts. Rather, I trust the work that scientists do. I share their conviction that rigorous processes of verification and falsification are useful in evaluating knowledge about the world.

The Trump Campaign Is Not Taking Place

Jean Baudrillard/Donald J. Trump

By Kerry Mitchell

I have replaced "simulacrum" with "Trump campaign" in the following: "The Trump campaign is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The Trump campaign is true." Ecclesiastes

By this I mean not, of course, that the Trump campaign is speaking the truth, but that the truth of his campaign—what his campaign is—is true: it is what it is. And what it is is nothing. There is no campaign. There is only Trump.

The absence of a conventional campaign was the subject of a recent MSNBC exposé that wondered whether the Donald could triumph while lacking a proverbial "ground game":

Donald Trump is a candidate without a campaign – and it’s becoming a serious problem. Republicans working to elect Trump describe a bare-bones effort debilitated by infighting, a lack of staff to carry out basic functions, minimal coordination with allies and a message that’s prisoner to Trump’s momentary whims. "Bottom line, you can hire all the top people in the world, but to what end? Trump does what he wants,” a source close to the campaign said.

For Trump supporters, the MSNBC report can be dismissed as a hit piece, a takedown. The article argues largely that Trump’s is a lousy version of a campaign, just as some suggest that Trump is a lousy version of a leader (but without the original, what can you do?). But there are threads within the article and other media that are much more threatening than disapproval, which is easily celebrated or dismissed depending on one’s leanings. These threads suggest not that Trump is being a bad leader, but that he is not being a leader at all. He is just being him. This suggestion is so much more threatening than disapproval as it removes the foundation upon which both approval and disapproval rest. Without such foundation political statements do not so much speak truth or falsehood as flash images that affirm or negate. Such statements are immune to argument, gaining their strength from the sense of confidence, joy, and invincibility with which they are asserted. If Trump has no campaign, if Trump is not a leader but just Trump, then the attacks on him will simply affirm this reality, breaking the feedback loop of claim and counterclaim and coming back again and again to the negation.