We Have to Admit This is a Problem
Because of Big Tech's decision to start cracking down on Q Anon, the crowd of liberals and moderates who believe the answer to Nazis, white supremacists and their fascistic kin spreading their propaganda is "more speech" are making their arguments about rational discourse being the only way to turn the tide. This is the argument which believes a well reasoned, factually accurate portrayal of the truth and reality would be the best way to combat the spread of the putrid bile fascists feed into the cultural and political debate and discussion.
The underlying assumption of the "more speech" argument is the society is already healthy and well educated, which it should be evident the United States is not. In the current context, with the experience of the last six years (as the most charitable estimate, a less charitable estimate would reveal the U.S. has never been a healthy society by the standards of even the liberalism it claims as its values), this is not at all a healthy and well educated society. This isn't only evidenced by the 40% of Americans who are cheering the continued march of the fascist death cult that is Trumpism, but by a number of other factors. The overall information environment these "debates" and collective discussions happen in are also an important factor in the rationality of the belief we can just defeat fascists by being logical, rational, and explaining reality to the general public in a sincere and confident way.
The political press in the United States is feverishly publishing piece after piece covering all of the minutiae surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop. It's the overwhelming focus of the majority of political press in the United States right now. As of now, everything about the appearance of, and the contents of the laptop is suspect. There is nothing, at this point, which suggests this should be a story of national importance. The available information suggests this is a very poor attempt by Rudy Giuliani to manufacture an "October surprise." All of the currently available information, based on any reasonable and factual assessment, is impossible to see as otherwise. That being the case, it should be up to Giuliani, and whoever else wants this to be a real story, to present some evidence suggesting the proof of their claims to the contrary. Everything about the story they've presented so far has no concrete evidence to support it, and the underlying suppositions in what they're suggesting is evidence require a suspension of some basic understanding of human behavior.
This is a sensational story. It's a story which plays well with the competitive ideas of American politics. It feeds all of the things which help drive click rates. Liberals read about it and boil about the way the clown car that is Trump politics conducts politics. Conservatives read it and boil away about how unfair the "liberal media" are to them by not taking the claims of their fascist figureheads as gospel. The media, liberals and conservatives all then descend into a chattering, incomprehensible chorus of endless accusations, insults, recriminations, justifications, speculation and so on. It's one of those perfect stories for contemporary political media in the United States, in not being a real story at all, which has become the most popular story in the country.
There is another story, which is essentially being eclipsed by this empty void of nonsense. On September 3, 2020, a man named Michael Reinoehl was killed by a task force of US Marshals. Reinoehl was the suspect in a shooting which had taken place in Portland, Oregon. The shooting Reinoehl was suspected of committing left a conservative extremist Trump supporter dead.
On October 14, Donald Trump gave a speech in Greenville, North Carolina. During the speech, he referred to the death of Michael Reinoehl, saying "We sent in the US Marshals, took 15 minutes and it was over... We got him. They knew who he was, they didn’t want to arrest him and 15 minutes that ended" (Emphasis added by me). You can find video of Trump making this statement, behind this link.
On October 13, The New York Times published a piece titled, Straight to Gunshots: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist. The basic summary taken from the article itself, is as follows:
Attorney General William P. Barr trumpeted the operation as a “significant accomplishment” that removed a “violent agitator.” The officers had opened fire, he said, when Mr. Reinoehl “attempted to escape arrest” and “produced a firearm” during the encounter. But a reconstruction of what happened that night, based on the accounts of people who witnessed the confrontation and the preliminary findings of investigators, produces a much different picture — one that raises questions about whether law enforcement officers made any serious attempt to arrest Mr. Reinoehl before killing him.
In interviews with 22 people who were near the scene, all but one said they did not hear officers identify themselves or give any commands before opening fire. In their official statements, not yet made public, the officers offered differing accounts of whether they saw Mr. Reinoehl with a weapon. One told investigators he thought he saw Mr. Reinoehl raise a gun inside the vehicle before the firing began, but two others said they did not.
What this amounts to is a U.S. President publicly claiming he had prior knowledge of or ordered what was an extrajudicial execution of an American citizen, and an independent investigation providing evidence which supports this claim.
The entire stated basis of the U.S. Constitution is to create a nation which operates on the foundation of the rule of law. It is understood to prevent the people of the nation from being subject to the capricious whims of some unaccountable ruler, like say, a king. One of the most important ideas in this attempt to establish a nation based on the rule of law is the court system, that everyone has a right to face their accusers and to have a trial by a jury of their peers. It goes to great lengths, particularly the first ten amendments, to establish the legal framework to prevent government persecution (which by any reasonable consideration would include assassination) of dissenting voices, unpopular opinions, etc.
The evidence of Donald Trump's inability to publicly acknowledge the truth is vast. It's not just a record beginning with his run for office. It goes back some 30 years, to his initial emergence as a public figure in the world of New York business, politics and "high society." This has been one of the realities in American politics for some time now, no matter how outrageous the claim or how demonstrably false it may be, some faction of our political class will rush to defend it if it serves some measure of their grasp on or for power. It's not something new to Trump. It's something Trump understood how to take advantage of. One of the reasons the United States has been so vulnerable to this fascist incursion has been our political media has long been willing to present even the most blatantly false assertions as "one side of the controversy." We can look to climate change as an all too perfect example. Debates about the availability of birth control in preventing abortion are the same.
This being the case, it's not completely beyond understanding for Trump's claims of U.S. Marshal's committing an assassination to be taken with some skepticism. When they're matched with an independent investigation presenting evidence these claims are true, this should be the single most important story in the country.
Again though, beyond Trump, it's become routine for the public to find out law enforcement hasn't presented a factual picture of a deadly encounter. "Ah, well, they do that all the time," is the way we collectively respond. We have just undergone a summer with the most expansive protest movement in U.S. history taking to the streets to demand this would no longer be allowable, much less for it to be the norm. The farce of it all is the degree to which law enforcement blatantly lied about their conduct in response to those protests, and the degree to which the majority of the press ignored this being the process which transforms a demand for justice into a stance oppositional to police being part of the process of justice. In the same newscast or same edition of publication, they can cover the "inconsistencies of police accounts when compared to available video footage" in one article, and in another question the rational foundation of mistrust of police by the same protest movement they are publishing the proof of police lying about their abuse of. It's somewhere between Kafka-esque and Orwellian.
We're living in an information environment where the spurious claims of a political operative are blotting out the evidence of an American president publicly admitting knowledge of or giving direction to federal law enforcement to carry out an extrajudicial execution of someone whose politics the president has publicly claimed to be in opposition to, and very few people seem to notice the cataclysmic statement this makes about our current reality.
What this means is the warnings we've been receiving from experts on fascist exploitation of media and of the norms of liberal democracy have gone unheeded to a degree we don't even recognize when those circumstances we've been warned about have become real. Our inability to recognize this springs from the same illusion which believes this environment is one where rational, factual discussion will prevent the circumstances we are already experiencing from coming to exist at all. We believe we are exceptional. We believe in American Exceptionalism, to a degree it is rendering us incapable of acknowledging the depth of the problems we have, and the degree to which we have deviated from even being able to acknowledge the reality in which we currently exist.
It's an environment where considering this is what has happened, that what amounts to an assassination was carried out with the knowledge or blessing of the president, has to be a hyperbolic idea, akin to considering the vast conspiracy theories extremists have successfully pushed into the mainstream of American politics and culture. For it to be hyperbolic, there has to be a disconnection from the already acknowledged facts that the President's administration has been carrying out the tactics of genocide in both family separation and forced sterilization. American Exceptionalism says the reality this collection of facts points to are impossible, because it would by definition mean America is not exceptional in any of the ways we have prided ourselves on and been miseducated to believe.
The understanding which says the manipulation of media, norms of liberal democracy and political culture by fascists and their extremist brethren can be countered by "more speech" assumes the environment and participants in this speech can discern the urgency between a spurious political ploy, and a fascist announcing a state sanctioned extrajudicial execution. It should be obvious, this is not the environment we live in currently, and probably has not been an environment in which the participants are capable of this discernment for a while.
We have to admit the depth of the problem before we can rationally approach solutions to it. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to suggest we are collectively capable of shaking off the illusion of American Exceptionalism. What we can't bring ourselves to believe is possibly the most potent aid fascists and conservative extremists have is how deeply anchored in the American psyche the belief of our exceptionalism is.
The President has claimed he knew of the plan for federal law enforcement to commit what amounts to the assassination of someone whose political beliefs the President has repeatedly stated are in opposition to is own, and an independent investigation points to it being an assassination. The reasons this isn't the most important story in the country right now are exactly the same reasons we can't rely solely on defeating fascism in the court of public opinion.