Member Newsletter
Along with seven or eight other papers, which tend to be in swing or swingish states, I subscribe to The Cleveland Plain Dealer. So I get various emails from them. And one is an email that comes from their editor, Chris Quinn. I glance at these occasionally but they normally deal with local issues or issues about the paper that are more for local residents. But one came Saturday that grabbed my attention. The headline was “There aren’t two sides to facts” and, as Quinn explains, it’s an answer to Trump supporters who complain that the paper judges Trump and Biden by two separate standards.
Reading the piece, which you can see here, Quinn seemed genuinely pained to write it. He describes setting different drafts aside half a dozen times, not wanting to alienate paying readers or offend readers who are making good faith criticisms, even if they’re ones he doesn’t agree with. These read to me as more than just perfunctory throat clearing. I think he meant it.
Then he makes his case. And it’s these two paragraphs I want to share with you …
The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.
This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.
This is a well put version of something many of us have either thought or said, or in some cases written. It takes more to write this in an Ohio paper than one in New York or California. Cleveland is a major metro. And metros are almost always blue-voting. But still. There’s no doubt he’s speaking here to a substantial part of his paper’s readership.
I’m not going to spend time analyzing his general point or affirming my agreement. You know what I’d say. It speaks for itself.
The part that resonates with me is “You saw it.” That’s key to me and a lot of people disagree with me about it. We talk a lot about disinformation and media bubbles and low information voters. Those are very important. They’re a key feature of our current media and political environment. But when it comes to things like The Big Lie and the insurrection I think the great majority of Republicans and Trump supporters know Trump lost the 2020 election. Even more so about the insurrection.
As Quinn says, we all saw it. It’s important to really slow down and absorb that. We all saw it. His bridge analogy brings that home. A lot of the apparatus of the right wing media infrastructure is about creating a permissioning structure and set of alternative arguments to say that it doesn’t matter. But what about BLM? What about the mules? What about what about …
You get the idea.
This is really about giving people the respect of treating them like adults.
I saw it. You saw it. We know what we saw.
The issue here isn’t heuristic or cognitive. It’s about the creation of ideational tricks that allow you to say that what you know doesn’t matter, or perhaps better to say that what you know doesn’t have to get in the way of what you want.
Sometimes I’ll tell people this and they’ll tell me: “Josh, you need to spend more time with Trump supporters.” My take on this is based on my understanding of U.S. politics and human nature. But actually I have another life that’s filled with lots of Trump supporters and no one knows my background or what I do for a living. There I’m just another middle aged white guy. It hasn’t changed my opinion about this at all. It’s actually strengthened it.
This may not change the big picture of where we are as a country politically. People have gotten really, really committed to the architecture of bullshit about why what we saw doesn’t matter. But it’s accurate. And it’s grounding. A lot of the right wing media apparatus amounts to a kind of vast social gaslighting. Did you really not see it? Do you need me to show you again?
As Quinn says, I saw it. You saw it. You know that.