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The War on Truth

As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, one reason the Russian misinformation campaign was successful was that our country’s natural defenses had been worn down over several years by powerful interests that sought to make it harder for Americans to distinguish between truth and lies. If you feel like it’s gotten tougher to separate out fringe voices from credible journalists, especially online, or you find yourself arguing more and more with people over what should be knowable facts, you’re not going crazy. There has been a concerted effort to discredit mainstream sources of information, create an echo chamber to amplify fringe conspiracy theories, and undermine Americans’ grasp of objective truth. The McClatchy news service says federal investigators are looking into whether there were direct links between the Russian propaganda war and right-wing organizations such as Breitbart and InfoWars. But even if no direct ties ever come to light, we need to understand how the right-wing war on truth opened the door to the Russian attack.

After the election, a former conservative talk radio host in Wisconsin named Charlie Sykes came forward to explain how this worked. For years, he said, right-wing media and politicians conditioned their supporters to distrust anything they heard from the mainstream media, while pushing paranoid conspiracy theories from people such as Alex Jones and Trump himself—the chief promoter of the racist “birther” lie. “The price turned out to be far higher than I imagined,” Sykes said. “The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize” the mainstream media and “essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information.” This was useful for Trump when he became a candidate, because it helped him both deflect negative stories from mainstream sources and find a receptive audience for false attacks against me. It did the same for the Russians. And Trump has kept at it in the White House. “All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself,” Sykes said. He quoted Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster and Putin opponent who said, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes probably did more than anyone else to make all this possible. For years, Fox News has been the most powerful and prominent platform for the right-wing war on truth. Ailes, a former advisor to Richard Nixon, built Fox by demonizing and delegitimizing mainstream media that tried to adhere to traditional standards of objectivity and accuracy. Fox gave a giant megaphone to voices claiming climate change was fake science, the falling unemployment rate was phony math, and you couldn’t trust Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Ailes and Fox were so successful in polarizing the audience that by 2016, most liberals and conservatives got their news from distinctly different sources and no longer shared a common set of facts.

During the Obama years, the Breitbart News Network, backed by Robert and Rebekah Mercer and led by their advisor Steve Bannon, who is now Trump’s top strategist, emerged to give Fox a run for its money. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.” To give you a flavor, here are a few memorable Breitbart headlines:

BIRTH CONTROL MAKES WOMEN UNATTRACTIVE AND CRAZY

THERE’S NO HIRING BIAS AGAINST WOMEN IN TECH, THEY JUST SUCK AT INTERVIEWS

GLOBAL TEMPERATURES PLUNGE. ICY SILENCE FROM CLIMATE ALARMISTS

NAACP JOINS SOROS ARMY PLOTTING DC DISRUPTIONS, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, MASS ARRESTS

HOIST IT HIGH AND PROUD: THE CONFEDERATE FLAG PROCLAIMS A GLORIOUS HERITAGE

FACT CHECK: WERE OBAMA AND HILLARY FOUNDERS OF ISIS? YOU BET

This would be funny if it wasn’t so scary. This kind of garbage “conditioned” Americans, to use Charlie Sykes’s word, to accept the Russian propaganda that flooded our country in 2016.

Robert Mercer is a key figure to understand. A computer scientist, Mercer made billions of dollars by applying complex algorithms and data analysis to the financial markets. The hedge fund he helps run, Renaissance Technologies, is wildly successful. By all accounts, Mercer is an extreme antigovernment right-winger. A profile in the New Yorker quoted one former Renaissance colleague as saying Mercer is “happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.” The New Yorker also reported that another former high-level Renaissance Technologies employee said Mercer hates Bill and me and once accused us of being part of a secret CIA drug-running scheme and of murdering our opponents. If you think these accusations sound batty, you’re right. And this man is now one of the most powerful people in America.

Breitbart is only one of the organizations Mercer and his family control. Another is Cambridge Analytica, which has gained notoriety for using Facebook data to target voters for clients such as Trump. It’s hard to separate reality from hype when it comes to Cambridge Analytica’s track record, but it seems like a mistake to underestimate Mercer. As the New Yorker put it, “Having revolutionized the use of data on Wall Street,” he “was eager to accomplish the same feat in the political realm.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with using big data and microtargeting—every campaign does it, including mine. The problem would come if the data were obtained or used improperly. After reports were published raising questions about whether Cambridge Analytica played a role in Brexit, British authorities are now investigating the company’s alleged role with Leave.eu and whether Cambridge’s techniques violated British and European privacy laws (which Cambridge denies).

Mercer is not alone. The Koch brothers, who run the second-largest privately held company in America, with extensive oil and gas holdings, have also invested huge sums of money, which has eroded the public’s grasp on reality and advanced their ideological agenda. For example, they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars to fund a network of think tanks, foundations, and advocacy organizations to promote the false science of climate change denial and their agenda. We can expect more of that as the Kochs prepare to spend whatever it takes to consolidate their hold on state governments and expand their power in Washington.

And let’s not forget Donald Trump himself. It took a little while for Mercer, the Kochs, and Fox News to realize that Trump could help take their war on truth to the next level, but their eventual support for his candidacy was invaluable. In many ways, Trump is the embodiment of everything they had been working toward, and the perfect Trojan horse for Putin. The journalist Masha Gessen, who covers Putin extensively, has observed: “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”