America’s Internal Bleeding

Despite zero supporting evidence, about 40% of voters (according to a Quinnipiac University poll) – mostly Trump supporting Republicans – believe that the election was rigged and that Joe Biden somehow stole the vote to become President. Trump followers cheered as the President threatened to overrule government bureaucracies filled with PhDs and MDs to impose his personal and woefully uneducated vision of the cure, prevention, severity and treatment of COVID-19. As a veritable font of unending political, medical and scientific inaccuracies, the President became the “Great Legitimizer” of groundless assertions and toxic conspiracy theories that have ripped at the foundations of our democracy.

Russia, the hacker of our government files and the spreader of election disinformation, is Trump’s buddy, and if anything goes wrong, these days Trump assumes China did it. His advisors have suggested that the election might be reversed by the imposition of martial law, forcing the military to implement a do-over election (the military has said they have no power to do that), asking both GOP state and federally dominated legislatures to ignore electors elected in favor of Biden to force the victory to Trump, although Trump was over 7 million popular votes and 74 electoral votes behind Biden.

Reality tells us that human beings tend to believe information infused with the following variables: whether it is the first information on the subject they receive, when it is repeated frequently, when it comes from a source they respect (e.g., the President of the United States) and when they believe that the proof to the contrary is either unreliable or inadequate. There is also resentment among a once well-paid blue-collar constituency facing permanent job loss by reason of obsolescence, while doctors, lawyer, professors, government experts, financiers and corporate executives seem to be cleaning up (even if many of those “elites” are also in peril). Thus, the credibility of those “elites” is inadequate to negate the disinformation of passionate conspiracy theorists.

It’s bad enough with disinformation from domestic racist extremists becoming mainstream-acceptable (thank you, Mr Trump) – and white supremacy and political domination are very much at the heart of so many of these conspiracy theories – but our enemies (particularly Russia with some contributions from China and Iran) are absolutely delighted. They are quietly ready to turn the First Amendment against us. They have and they do!

Unfortunately, to most of the rest of the world, the last few years have generated a rising opinion that the United States is not only in precipitous decline at every level, but it is unraveling by reason of polarization with irreconcilable differences. And as bad as those toxic democracy-destroying conspiracy theories, denigration of science and political reality might be from the inside, those conspiracy theories are increasingly the way foreigners are viewing the United States. 

For immigrants to this country with roots with their families elsewhere, those toxic messages are increasingly finding traction that is emanating from foreign contamination. Overseas families, hearing and believing those conspiracy theories in local reportage and social media communications, are thrusting those false premises as gospel truth back to their American relatives. This only serves to add credibility to those forces seeking to undermine the United States and its elections. 

Writing for the December 20th New York Times, Cathy Park Hong tells us: “While it’s well established that fake news is spiraling out of control, we must pay attention to the disinformation rapidly hatching in nonwhite immigrant communities as well. Asian-Americans are the fastest growing electorate in the nation and are becoming a powerful voter bloc as more and more live in swing states. Polls have so far shown that Asian-Americans voted for Mr. Biden by a smaller margin than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016, a rightward trend that Christine Chen, executive director of the nonpartisan civic organization APIAVote, said could be partly because of an influx of disinformation. With the upcoming U.S. Senate elections in Georgia, Democrats cannot afford much slippage…

“Right-wing conspiracy theories have infiltrated Asian and Latino communities through social media platforms like WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, KakaoTalk and YouTube. Organizers say that older immigrants who don’t consume mainstream English-language media can be more susceptible to disinformation about American politics. ‘Disinformation is really hard to track because it isn’t just contained in the continental U.S. but being lobbied from friends and family from, let’s say, Colombia,’ María Teresa Kumar, chief executive of Voto Latino, said. ‘Democrats don’t understand how deep it is.’

“Nonwhite voters are the Democratic Party’s base, but the party has ignored them, assuming that the Republican Party’s racist and nativist politics would be enough to mobilize them. An APIAVote survey conducted this past summer found that half of Asian-Americans had not been contacted by either party. This is typical. Asian-Americans have historically been left out of voter outreach efforts because they make up just under 6 percent of the nation and cluster in blue coastal states. Trying to engage an atomized demographic that speaks dozens of different languages can also pose a challenge to political organizers.

“Asian-Americans and Latinos both comprise dozens of different nationalities, making it difficult to draw broad conclusions about their voting patterns. But anti-communism has traditionally been part of the Republican Party’s appeal to older immigrants, and disinformation that paints the Democratic Party’s platform as socialist has reinforced that appeal, especially among some older Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese immigrants who fear anything left-of-center teeters too close to the Chinese Communist Party. Right-wing groups have also used WhatsApp and WeChat to smear the goals of Black Lives Matter, warning that mass riots were to occur on Election Day, to deter Asian and Latino immigrants from going out to vote.

“It’s nearly impossible to chase down all the disinformation scattered across the globe. It’s spread by former Trump aides, foreign governments and a Falun Gong-backed media empire determined to take down the Chinese government. Steve Bannon partnered with the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui to plant bogus stories of hidden business dealings by the Biden family in China, which then went viral among the Chinese diaspora. Nguyen Dinh Thang, president of the civil society organization Boat People SOS, has noticed many Vietnamese-language Facebook pages, some with tens of thousands of followers, spreading falsehoods about the U.S. elections to Vietnamese nationals and immigrants.”

Corruption and manipulation by powerful elites is a way of life for many in select Asian and Latin American nations. They do not trust their power elites or their governments, so they are particularly vulnerable to rumors and reports that suggest something massive and untoward is rippling beneath the surface of what they can see. But with so many of these falsehoods now legitimized by none other than the President of the United States, an outsider who challenged the nation’s elites with fake populist pablum, these foreign relatives feeling perfectly comfortable telling their US relatives the “truth.” If there is one overriding threat to the sustainability of Western-style democracy, it is how deeply false narratives have seeped in to replace that “truth,” and nowhere more than the United States under the aegis of Donald Trump.

I’m Peter Dekom, and all roads to reunifying the United States and reinvigorating democratic representation everywhere rest with the ability to contain and negate the tsunami of conspiracy theories and fake news.