Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America

by Dan Pfeiffer

The lesson from the 2020 election is that the long-running Republican war on the truth is over and the Republicans have won.

Most Americans didn’t even know such a war was happening. Many still don’t know it took place. Over a period of decades, the Republican Party built up a massive propaganda and disinformation apparatus that allows them to dominate politics despite representing a shrinking share of the electorate. This “MAGA megaphone” is embodied by Fox News and powered by Facebook and gives the GOP the power to bend reality.

If you put aside the fact that this dimwit had the ability then to blow up a country with nuclear weapons, his statements during this briefing are truly funny. In that moment, we were allowed to watch President Homer Simpson’s pea brain at work in real time. If bleach kills COVID-19 outside the body, why not put bleach inside the body? Boom! Problem solved.

Poll taxes, voter ID laws, threats of violence, and a scarcity of polling places and voting machines are all part of the playbook.

In addition to being wrong on the facts, the GOP is on the wrong side of public opinion on nearly every issue of consequence.

Modern Republicanism is based on the embrace of one Big Lie after another: climate change isn’t real, supply-side economics works, immigrants are dangerous, Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States—the list goes on and on, and it

is easy to recite because these lies were pounded into the American consciousness for decades. Large portions of the populace and the majority of Republicans still believe them.

A National Public Radio analysis found that people who lived in counties where Trump won at least 60 percent of the vote in 2020 died from COVID-19 disease at a rate more than two and a half times greater than those in counties who voted for Joe Biden. The more pro-Trump the county, the higher the death rate.

The true heir to the legacy of Scaife, though, is Robert Mercer, the reclusive white supremacist and hedge fund billionaire. To say Mercer is a mysterious figure in Republican politics would be an understatement. Despite his being one of the most successful hedge fund executives on Wall Street and one of the biggest funders of right-wing causes, few people know his name. Mercer is famously media shy, and according to the Wall Street Journal, he once told a coworker that he preferred cats to humans.9 If Scaife was newspapers and Murdoch was television, then Mercer was the one who took right-wing disinformation into the digital age.

“The site played a key role in undermining Hillary Clinton; by tracking which negative stories about her got the most clicks and ‘likes,’ the editors helped identify which story lines and phrases were the most potent weapons against her. Breitbart News has been a remarkable success: according to ComScore, a company that measures online traffic, the site attracted 19.2 million unique visitors in October.”

The Daily Caller, a less successful, equally bigoted version of

Breitbart, was started by the infamous Tucker Carlson prior to his becoming the belle of the resurgent white nationalist ball. However, Carlson was able to create the website only because Foster Friess, a wealthy Wall Street investor and Republican mega-donor, gave him three million dollars in start-up capital. To give you a sense of Friess’s less-than-progressive mind-set, he spent millions to elect Rick Santorum, a homophobic bigot famous for retrograde thinking.17

During an interview on MSNBC about President Obama’s decision to include coverage for contraception in the Affordable Care Act, Friess said, “this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s so—it’s such—inexpensive, you know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contracep...

Friess, who died in 2021, had a huge financial stake in preventing a transition from fossil fuels to a green economy. Therefore, the Daily Caller stands at the forefront of publishing specious research to cast doubt on the existence of climate change.

Like Breitbart, the Daily Caller played a significant role in helping Trump get elected. Trump once referred to climate change as a “Chinese hoax,” and one of his first acts as president was to walk away from the Paris Climate Accords—a boon for people, like Foster Friess, who profit off the destruction of the planet.

From a business perspective, Ben Shapiro’s media empire, which includes the Daily Wire, a Facebook-based troll farm masquerading as a news site, might be the most successful. Shapiro is a former Breitbart editor and media darling who grew to fame debating liberals on college campuses.

To put a finer point on it, the New York Times, as well as the Washington Post, went into a partnership with the chairman and the chief funder of Breitbart. The close relationship between GAI and Breitbart was evident, and Schweizer’s connections to the racist rag were not made public when the agreement was struck.

Zev Chafets, a writer known for favorable profiles of conservative figures, to pen a countering biography to beat Sherman’s to

If you want to run a propaganda operation disguised as a news organization, make sure to hire reporters who share your mission (Brit Hume), who are too weak or too dumb to stand up to you (John Roberts), or too money-hungry to rock the boat (Bret Baier).

Jake Tapper, then a White House correspondent for ABC News, confronted Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, during the daily briefing: “It’s escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations ‘not a news organization’ and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one?”

A sister organization? A right-wing propaganda network run by Republican operatives with little to no standards was being defended by the very people Fox had been created to undermine. And when the White House tried to exclude Fox from a series of interviews with a Treasury Department official being conducted with a shared camera, the rest of the networks refused to do the interview.

The New York Times would never go into a partnership with the RNC (or the DNC) on a major story about a presidential candidate, but it did so with Breitbart—even though Breitbart’s ideological agenda is as clear as the RNC’s.13 The editor of the Post would never challenge his reporters to pay more attention to a political party’s messaging, but a purely political operation dressed up in journalist’s clothing14 is granted immediate credibility and influence.

With the loss of local news, an information and accountability vacuum was created and is now being ruthlessly exploited by the right wing to further dominate politics. Local news is now the latest and most dangerous front in the Republican war on truth.

Trump’s post stayed up in violation of the company’s own rules and against the wishes of a lot of Facebook employees. Facebook made it clear that violating its own standards against hate speech was a price worth paying to maintain peace with the Right.

This is Big Tech’s version of the balance-over-accuracy fallacy that has bedeviled the mainstream media. Time and again, Facebook chose not poking the bear over adhering to its own content-moderation policies, ensuring that the platform remained a toxic cesspool of right-wing misinformation and racist agitprop.

the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. But one outlet on the list stood out like a sore thumb: Breitbart. Yes, Facebook had included in its program of trusted media whose content it would promote to its billions of users a website that described itself as the “platform for the alt-right.” In

evidence of how seriously it took solving its 2016 problems—it would be forced to sanction a lot of right-wing media. Once again, Kaplan reportedly stepped in and made the strikes disappear, thus allowing these odious outlets to continue pushing their dangerous lies on the platform.

Sandy Hook massacre, which resulted in the deaths of twenty schoolchildren, was a hoax. Over the years, Jones continued directing abuse at the victims’ grieving parents. Despite obvious rule violations, Zuckerberg resisted removing Jones. Kara

But advertising on Facebook and other social media platforms is very different. Facebook has reams of data about you. The pages you have liked and commented on, whom you follow, what links you’ve clicked, and so on. But it is also tracking you all over the internet and on your phone. It knows more about you than your family. Facebook takes all this data and uses artificial intelligence to make alarmingly precise predictions about what you are interested in. It then sells this data to the highest bidder for the opportunity to target you with ads based on that information.

In other words, Facebook was allowing Trump and others to use its massive troves of data to target disinformation at the people with the greatest propensity to believe it. While Zuckerberg offered dishonest bromides about free speech and crocodile tears about censorship of Big Tech, he was simultaneously announcing a new policy of weaponizing disinformation for profit.

The Trump campaign took Facebook’s policy as the green light that Facebook had intended it to be. Not long after, the campaign launched a multimillion-dollar barrage of false advertising that claimed that then-Vice President Biden had offered Ukraine a billion dollars in exchange for ...

The ad was patently false. Trump’s campaign knew the ad was false, and they knew Facebook wou...

To show the absurdity of Facebook’s policy, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign cleverly purchased ads on the platform that falsely claimed Zuckerberg and Facebook had endorsed Trump’s reelection. Facebook was...

The pure dishonest audacity of Zuckerberg’s Georgetown speech was notable as well. Without batting an eyelid, he completely rewrote history, claiming, with zero evidence, that Facebook had been born out of his heretof...

Facebook’s origin story has been told nearly as many times as Batman’s, but somehow, this cute little anecdote didn’t make it into the dozens of books written about the company. Nor was it in the Aaron Sorkin film about Facebook, The Social Network. Zuckerberg, who had spoken thousands of times before about how and why he created Facebook, had never once seen fit to divulge this secret. Imagine the ...

It’s also worth noting that journalist Max Chafkin reported in his book The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power that Zuckerberg and Trump cut a deal during a White House dinner attended by Jared Kushner, Thiel, and others. According to Chafkin, Thiel told people that Zuckerberg and Trump agreed that evening that if Facebook didn’t fact-check Trump, the ...

but if there are three people on the face of the planet who do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, they are Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel.25 So, make your own judgment. Whether it was an explicit deal or an implicit one is largely immaterial. Facebook decided to align itself with an authoritarian white nationalist who stood against everything Z...

But before you feel sorry for Zuckerberg and the rest of the people at Facebook, remember that, from Trump’s election to just before his ignominious departure, the company’s stock price more than doubled. Despite making everything worse, becoming one of the least trusted, most hated companies in the world, Facebook prospered—while we suffered. Cool company.

After drawing parallels between the right-wing hate mongers on his platform and the civil rights movement, Zuckerberg went on to say, “We’re at another crossroads. We can continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey toward greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide the cost is simply too great. I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.”

For starters, the First Amendment and Facebook’s content moderation decisions have exactly zero to do with each other. The First Amendment protects Americans from the government. But Facebook is a private company.

There is no constitutional right to post on Facebook, just as there is no constitutional right to be interviewed on Pod Save America5

For example, you can’t sell weapons, post nude photos, or abuse people on Facebook. Hate speech and threats of violence are explicitly prohibited. Despite its recent claims to be free-speech fundamentalists, Facebook takes down such content all the time. But when it comes to powerful people the company doesn’t want to upset, it cites free speech as a way to justify violating its own rules.

During the almost entirely peaceful uprising after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, Trump posted on Facebook, “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Trump’s comment was an allusion to an infamous violent threat from the Miami police chief in the 1960s—and a clear violation of Facebook’s policies. Had this message been posted by anyone other than the president of the United States, it would have been removed instantly. If Facebook’s leaders really cared about free speech, they would care about it for everyone, not just the people who hold the regulatory sword of Damocles over their highly profitable and incredibly sketchy company.

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t fighting for your right to speak; he is fighting for his right to profit off your words. Every post, like, and share is more money in his pocket. Every time you log on, Facebook learns more about you for the express purpose of selling that information to the highest bidder. The platform is a money-making machine—nothing more, nothing less. Frankly, the folks at Facebook would be less annoying if they dropped all the “connecting the world” BS and just embraced the fact they are in it to get really effing rich. I promise you that no one who works at Facebook gives two shits about your constitutional rights.

Just because Facebook didn’t create the problem of polarization doesn’t mean it isn’t making the problem much, much worse.

Clegg is strenuously and unsubtly avoiding this question because Facebook’s own research makes it clear that its platform contributes to growing anger and division in America. The protests at school board meetings over critical race theory? Organized on Facebook. Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines? Spread on Facebook. The Big Lie and the violent assault on the US Capitol? Also Facebook.

The specific allegation from Haugen was that Facebook made a postelection change to its algorithm that elevated election-related conspiracy theories and empowered far-right Facebook groups to plan for the riot.

To be clear, Facebook admits it made this change, and it does not deny the change had this effect. It just thinks it doesn’t deserve the blame.

And TikTok, which in 2021 was the world’s most-visited website, is rife with misinformation on COVID-19 and the 2020 election.6

Facebook resisted banning Alex Jones and his noxious Infowars site, and when it finally did, Zuckerberg was dragged kicking and screaming the whole way. Every other platform permanently banned Trump; Facebook suspended him only temporarily, and many observers fully expect the company to reinstate him if he runs for president again. The documents released by the whistleblower Haugen make clear that Facebook knew what it was doing was detrimental, but it kept doing it anyway.