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

by Dan Pfeiffer

Republicans and Democrats no longer consume the same media. We no longer agree on a set of objective facts. The very idea of a “fact” is now questioned. For many Republicans, math and science are to be questioned and, ultimately, dismissed if they run counter to partisan ideology. Truth is in the eye of the beholder. Information bubbles exist. Radicalization happens online. People start watching a few videos about a topic of interest, and a few months later, they storm the US Capitol or try to convince family and friends to avoid submitting to one of Bill Gates’s mind-control experiments via the COVID-19 vaccine.

There were three parts to Trump’s 2020 disinformation strategy: 1. Make the pandemic disappear; 2. Set the stage for the Big Lie; and 3. Depress turnout among Black and Latino voters.

group called Cubanos por Donald Trump shared a photo of Biden kneeling while surrounded by people in native Haitian attire. The caption read, “Who wants a commander in chief that kneels before foreign leaders?” Except, Biden wasn’t in Haiti. He was in Miami, at the Haitian Cultural Center, and he was kneeling to pay tribute to George Floyd and the fight against structural racism. The Trump campaign ran an ad in the Miami media market that juxtaposed quotes from Biden with those from socialist leaders like Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela that ended with the very subtle tagline “Biden = Socialism.” A false Spanish-language ad from the Trump campaign, targeted at Florida’s Venezuelan American population, claimed that Venezuela’s socialist rulers were backing Biden’s election. According to ProPublica, the ad was watched more than one hundred thousand times on YouTube in the eight days before the election. These views of this faux-explosive revelation only increased with the organic sharing that occurred on Facebook, WhatsApp, and in family group chats. Carinés Moncada, a host on a popular Spanish-language Florida radio station, asserted that one of the cofounders of Black Lives Matter practiced ‘Brujería’ or witchcraft and that “whoever votes for Biden, unfortunately, is supporting that.” This absurd but powerful claim was taken directly from Punch, a right-wing news website known for pushing conspiracy theories.

this quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt is worth repeating, because it explains why the Republicans spend so much time waging war against the press: “Freedom of conscience, of education, of speech, of assembly are among the very fundamentals of democracy and all of them would be nullified should freedom of the press ever be successfully challenged.”

Republicanism suffers from a terminal diagnosis. The GOP represents a rapidly shrinking minority of Americans.

During the campaign, Romney said or did everything on this list: Stated he liked “being able to fire people.” Got into a heated argument with a fairgoer about whether corporations were people. Rolled out a tax policy that gave multimillionaires like him a huge tax cut while raising taxes on the middle class. Argued that Obama should have let the US auto industry go bankrupt, which would have cost tens of thousands of jobs in the industrial Midwest. Chose as his vice president Paul Ryan, a man so committed to privatizing Medicare that he named a Medicare privatization plan after himself.

The Washington Post compiled an incredible list of soon-to-be vaccine skeptics praising the vaccine under Trump: In December, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) praised the Trump administration’s “brilliant” Operation Warp Speed for helping expedite the development of coronavirus vaccines. Since then, Johnson has inflated the number of adverse reactions and deaths linked to the vaccines. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), a former White House physician, told Fox News in November that he would get vaccinated to contribute to herd immunity. By July, Jackson was warning Fox viewers that “this is still an experimental vaccine being used under an emergency use authorization.” In March, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) praised former president Donald Trump for saving lives with the coronavirus vaccines. By July, Greene was telling Americans not to get vaccinated.

These are just a few examples of what happened when Fox News turned on the Bigot Spigot in the Obama years: Something called the New Black Panthers scandal emerged. The short version of this absurdity is that on Election Day 2008, two members of a fringe organization known as the New Black Panther Party stood outside one polling place in Philadelphia. These two people, one of them carrying a billy club, allegedly shouted racial epithets. Reports of this incident dominated right-wing radio, the Drudge Report, and Fox News. The very conservative Bush administration Department of Justice responded to this furor by opening an inquiry during its last weeks in office and then promptly tossed the hot potato into Obama’s lap. The Right went out of its way to make this singular incident part of a larger conspiracy and tie Barack Obama and Eric Holder, the first Black attorney general in the history of the country, to these individuals. There were congressional inquiries. A former Bush administration lawyer wrote a book about the whole case, and Andrew Breitbart, the conservative provocateur who founded the eponymous website, relentlessly promoted photographs that showed Obama at an event with one of the two New Black Panthers. What event was it? A small meeting? A dinner party? A pickup basketball game? Nope. A 2007 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, that featured tens of thousands of people. And because what’s old is new, the Republicans played the New Black Panthers card again...

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. Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were at the center of Trump’s rise. For years, they were Steve Bannon’s chief patrons. According to some reports, the Mercers helped connect Bannon and Trump. They gave boatloads of money to Trump’s campaigns and to outside groups supporting him. The Mercers were also major investors in Cambridge Analytica, the controversial Trump campaign data firm that stole data from tens of millions of Facebook users. But beyond all the fund-raising and connections, the Mercers’ biggest contribution to Trump’s victory had little to do with Trump. In 2011, after a meeting with Bannon and Andrew Breitbart, the Mercers agreed to invest ten million dollars in Breitbart, the alt-right news outlet. The Mercers’ check came with one contingency: Bannon must join the board of the publication. Within a year, Andrew Breitbart had passed away, and Bannon was running the show. Under Bannon...

In 2018, Rebekah Mercer was a founding investor in Parler, a social media network built in response to conservative complaints about Big Tech censorship. In short, Parler is the place you go after you get kicked off Twitter. Want to abuse people on social media? Go to Parler. Want to spout racist propaganda? Go to Parler. Is Facebook not enough of an angry, toxic cesspool for you? Go to Parler. Wanna self-identify as a white supremacist or an anti-Semite? Parler has your back! Think of Parler as the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars, but with a high percentage of neo-Nazis. Nearly every Republican politician and MAGA media person of consequence is on Parler.

Except for a handful of reporters and Democrats monitoring these sites for professional purposes, there are only die-hard MAGA voters on Gettr and Parler. But—and this is the point Democrats too often miss—preaching to the choir is the point. Fox, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and the rest are all part of a billionaire-funded effort to create a hermetically sealed (dis)information bubble. The goal is to control the flow of information to their voters.

There is no hope for the old model of local news to bounce back. Anyone who tells you otherwise is arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If you want to blame someone for this, blame Al Gore for inventing the internet. And if that seems unfair, blame technological innovation.

Most of the viewers who choose to watch Fox News do so because of its right-wing perspective. They seek out information that validates their existing worldview and explicitly avoid information that threatens that worldview. The vast majority of people who tune in to Sinclair broadcasting, however, have no idea their station is owned by far-right ideologues. They are sitting down to watch the news, learn about their community, maybe see what the weather is going to be like, and without knowing it, they are exposed to a bunch of right-wing talking points.

Facebook posts by Breitbart received nearly three times as many shares as the official pages of every Democratic senator combined. Conservative comedian and professional troll Terrence K. Williams averaged twice as many interactions per Facebook post in August as Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee.

After Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, accused her former employer of being complicit in the January 6 insurrection, Clegg called the allegation “ludicrous” and claimed that individuals, not Facebook, were responsible for what happened in Washington that day. 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.

Ultimately, I am arguing for Democrats to employ a more aggressive and direct form of communication with our voters. Our story, on our terms, told through our channels—everything from using the progressive media, to distributing content created by campaigns and politicians, and to doing more advertising.