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A Modern Generation of American Storytellers

The MAGA Fabricators

“The modern media cycle drives stories faster than sound research, science and peer review time lines can validate them.” 

Retired Pentagon physicist, Sean M. Kirkpatrick.

There’s no question that waves of political fabrications move between left and right extremes, but with the very recent advent of social media as increasingly the predominant source of information, one political faction has risen to dominate that medium. Trump’s MAGA base. Born of television and marketing, Donald Trump, the master of the outrageous, became a social media manipulator above the rest. With the overwhelming majority of SuperPac spends – released from truth and normalcy by Citizens United vs FEC by the Supreme Court in 2010 – veering populist and MAGA agendas exploded. The Dems barely squeezed by Trump in 2018 and 2020, generating numbers far better than they should have earned, largely because MAGA veered too far into the realm of obvious egregious fabrication to sustain a clear victory.

As numbers of working-class Americans have defected to MAGA world, feeling left behind – willing to embrace easy-to-believe policies of blame against dramatically identifiable people vs abstract realities such as globalization, the pandemic, Wall Street financial machinations or technology/AI – have played dramatically into the dark, deep state MAGA narrative. Easy to attack “DEI” minorities and “job-stealing criminal” immigrants with spoon-fed conspiracies, notwithstanding clear evidence to the contrary. Dark and hopeless vs light and optimistic?

The immutability of Trump’s evangelical base, triggering deep psychological reactions based on stress and fear, settled in, nonetheless. The coming election has become a contest of “everybody else.” The Biden candidacy, mired in the old campaign formulas exacerbated by his age, self-destructed. With a relatively short fuse, a younger, more invigorated Democratic Party is now using the same social media strategy trying to turn the tide in their favor.

But there remains one huge casualty entrenched on the political battlefield: truth. The era of mythology, “alternative facts,” conspiracy theory and out-and-out lying were the new American way. Call it hyperbole, storytelling parables to make a point or utter fabrication, lying had been legitimized into the mainstream, and deep fake technology plus foreign campaigns of mis- and dis-information infected a new pandemic into the American body politic.

One of my favorite columnists, LA Times writer, Michael Hiltzik, made some interesting observations in his September 22nd piece: “Trained as a physicist, Sean M. Kirkpatrick has spent most of his career in government, much of it as an intelligence and technology expert for various Pentagon agencies, culminating in an 18-month stint as the government’s lead investigator of UFOs.

“It was in that latter position — as the first director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, that Kirkpatrick came face to face with the tide of misinformation and disinformation infecting America’s public discourse on scientific matters… ‘After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena,’ Kirkpatrick wrote in a Scientific American op-ed in January, shortly after his December retirement from AARO, he and his team were overwhelmed by a ‘whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same,’ producing ‘a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims.’

“Kirkpatrick’s observations would be familiar to scientists examining the origins of COVID, a field in which the overwhelming weight of the evidence undermines a partisan theory positing a leak from a Chinese laboratory; or the rise in anti-vaccine claims; or even those examining the false assertion by the Trump/Vance campaign of Haitian immigrants stealing and eating household pets… ‘In my case,’ Kirkpatrick told me a few days ago, ‘I’ve been accused of lying to the American people.’..

“He further revealed to the Guardian [UK] that he had experienced efforts of UFO true believers to ‘threaten my wife and daughter , and try to break into our online accounts — far more than I ever had as the deputy director of intelligence [of U.S. Strategic Command]. I didn’t have China and Russia trying to get on me as much as these people are.’

“That would also be familiar to other scientists on the front lines of such inquiries. Scientists whose work has validated the theory that the virus causing COVID-19 reached humans via the wildlife trade in southeast Asia have been hauled before a House committee to be shrieked at by the likes of Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and to be accused of taking bribes and, yes, lying to the public. Vaccine advocates have been physically confronted and even assaulted by anti-vaxxers.”

Post-assassination attempts, NY Times writer Katherine Miller railed against the normalization of political violence in the modern era (September 6th article): “In the past five years, a man walked into the House speaker’s home with a hammer and assaulted her husband; a young man upset about the Supreme Court’s direction turned up in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighborhood with a gun; a man showed up at a district office of Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia with a baseball bat looking for him and attacked two staff members; this year, someone lit the door of Bernie Sanders’s Vermont office on fire with seven staff members inside.

“The list goes on up to and including the many things that happened on Jan. 6, and the threats and harassment politicians, election officials and workers, judges and other public officials faced after Mr. Trump refused to concede the election and attacked political and legal efforts to hold him to account. This also leaves aside less targeted violence, like the carjacking attempt that took place near Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home.

“Things can feel alarmingly precarious: What kept the shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice from turning into something much worse was the presence of Representative Steve Scalise, who suffered some of the worst injuries but also had an armed Capitol Police security detail who returned fire. Near Justice Kavanaugh’s home, the unwell young man with a gun never followed through, because his sister talked him into calling 911 on himself. Part of what made the attack on Paul Pelosi — which Mr. Trump has told jokes about — particularly harrowing is that Ms. Pelosi’s armed security detail was not there because she wasn’t there.”

Indeed, there are growing factions, very much reflected in the January 6, 2021 violent MAGA attack on the US Capitol and the polices charged to protect it (officially rationalized as “legitimate political discourse” by the Republican Party), that a Trump loss in November will trigger ultra-violence across the land. There are parallel threats from a much smaller faction from the left if Trump wins. Are we listening, America?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as I watch this malignancy of political violence redefine my country, I have repeatedly asked, “who are we as Americans?”… and I am still waiting for a cogent answer.