In Politics, A BS Is Not a College Degree

“Jay Chen invited China into our children’s classroom”   

According to this photoshopped political flyer

Embracing a very large ethnic Vietnamese community, the recently reconfigured 45th Congressional District in California’s Orange County is heavily populated with individuals and their families who escaped violent communist persecution as the Vietnam War ended in the mid-1970s. Anything that smacks of communist or Marxist/Leninist doctrine makes their blood boil, assuring instant fury and condemnation. Current congressperson from the older and now reworked 48th district, Michelle Steel, was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States seeking the American Dream. To put it mildly, Steel is a very conservative, Trump-following, member of Congress facing a Democratic opponent, Jay Chen, in the 45th.

So, when Steel’s campaign distributed a photoshopped flyer (see above) showing her opponent teaching communism and Marxist/Leninism to young public-school children, that message hint a nerve with her constituency. “The flier highlights Chen’s previous vote to support the Confucius Institution, a popular Beijing-backed language and cultural education center, during his time at Hacienda la Puente Unified School District years ago. However, Chen has defended himself by sharing his grandmother’s escape from communist China and his status as a ‘Naval Reserve officer with top-secret security clearance.’… [The] flier’s depiction of Chen is expected to boost Steel’s campaign since many in the AAPI community hold an ingrained opposition to communism due its oppressive history in Asia.

“The strategy of red-baiting, most closely associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare periods, was first brought to the forefront when Republicans sought to undermine President Roosevelt’s New Deal by reframing it. By the end of the 1930s, the New Deal was seen as a form of ‘creeping communism,’ allowing red-baiting to be used to create negative sentiment based on cultural fears of communism.” NextShark.com, September 30th. The dramatic willingness to lie in political contests goes beyond the “Swift-boat” slam against presidential candidate John Kerry in his 2004 loss to George W Bush, which today is mild by comparison.

With about half the GOP candidates running today embracing the “stolen” 2020 election myth, there seems to be new cultural value to lie, lie really big, to win an election. While no one is ever going to find innocence among the Democratic Party when it comes to mendacity, the Trump era issued in a new open season on truth in politics. Lying frequently enough creates “alternative facts” and a new “truth” for political followers. And while the FDA and the FCC hold advertisers of commercial products to a standard of “truth in advertising,” there is zero accountability applied to political campaigns with vastly more serious consequences.

With the 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United vs FEC, the lid on political spending flew out the window. Political action committees exploded, the majority representing GOP values, and money poured into political campaigns like an uncontrolled tsunami. And so much of that money supported out-and-out fabrication. We live in an era of mis- and dis-information, spurred by social media and highly biased “news” telecasters. A misinformed public, almost by definition, produces a distorted political result that can feed on itself until an election is nothing more than a battle of lies. But while all of this is going, especially at the local level, we are losing that once vast array of local newspapers that addressed salient local issues.

Which is why University of San Diego associate professor in communications, Nikki Usher, contributed an OpEd to the October 24th Los Angeles Times on point targeting California politics, where the polarization of mendacity is significantly less than in many parts of the country. She wrote, in part: “That’s why it is crucial that state and federal political advertising regulations be updated to account for the loss of access to information, even as political operatives become more adept at honing misinformation tactics.

“Meaningful participation in a democracy depends on informed citizens, but many voters can’t get the kind of news and information that would enable them to do so. Since 2004, California has lost 24% of its newspapers — and 14 California counties are essentially news deserts: places that have no local news or are severely under-resourced for local news.

“At present, all that current state law generally requires is a disclosure between two and eight seconds long about who paid for the TV or radio ad. If it’s an advocacy group with an innocuous-sounding name (for instance, Citizens for Sanity, which was behind an anti-immigrant ad during a Dodgers-Padres game), such disclosures won’t tell you much.

“Television ads may be particularly problematic because people trust local news more than any other type of journalism, and most [older] Americans still get most of their local news from local TV stations. Viewers might mistakenly believe that their local network news has fact-checked the ads or that the local 6 o’clock news has approved them — giving political misinformation a veneer of legitimacy.

“This makes it even more important for voters to have a clear idea of who is behind the ads they’re seeing. More detailed disclosures could help voters better understand the organizations paying for the ads, and their motivations. Ideally, the same kind of truth-in-advertising requirements for pharmaceutical drugs might one day be applied to political ads too.

“There are changes that state and federal regulatory agencies could make to move in this direction. Currently, all that the Federal Election Commission requires for television ads funded by political action committees is what it calls a ‘disclaimer’ with ‘the name of the political committee, corporation, labor organization, individual or group who paid for the communication.’ But it could also require that the sources of the text, images or footage used in the ad be made available to the public.” Prove it or shut up?

To my mind’s eye, accountability for spreading lies has to have real world consequences. A warning, a quick administrative hearing FCC, and any additional campaign ads from a seriously mendacious candidate should add a warning like this: “This Candidate has Been Found to Use False and Misleading Statements in Campaign Advertising.” Do I see a battle over the First Amendment. Oh yeah, but then again, exactly what voters are choosing when their information is completely or significantly false? If you wonder how civil wars start….

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if democracy is even possible where massive lies carry the weight of truth in political campaigns.