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

by Dan Pfeiffer

Politics is no longer a debate about solutions to mutual problems. History, science, and math are no longer seen as immutable truths. They are subject to debate, with no right or wrong answer—like whether LeBron James is better than Michael Jordan.3 People like to say that Democrats and Republicans now live in two separate realities, but that is incorrect. Democrats live in the real world, and Republicans live in a deeply delusional alternative ecosystem.

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.

A universe of alternative information had come to reside on Facebook, on Fox, and in the digital lives of millions of Americans. In that universe, Hillary Clinton was a criminal, Donald Trump was a hero, all immigrants were terrorists, and everyone was coming for the rights and privileges of white Americans.

This book is about how disinformation and propaganda became the dominant Republican political strategy, how it works, what it means, and how Democrats can fight back.

The answer to all of them is the same: the right-wing disinformation machine. This “MAGA megaphone” is the most powerful force in politics. Up until the moment Democrats have an answer to Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA media, we will always be on the losing side.

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.

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.”

The second problem for the Republicans is one of math. They are a minority party in a theoretically majoritarian system. If people are allowed to vote freely, and if all those votes are counted, the Republicans have very little chance to hold on to power. They can either change their positions to be more appealing, or they can try to subvert democracy. Time and again, the Republicans have chosen the latter. As the overwhelmingly white GOP stares down a near future where white people are no longer the majority, the Republicans have become brazenly authoritarian.

Democracy is bad for Republicans. The press is good for democracy. Therefore, the press is bad for Republicans.

projection is easier than self-reflection.

On the surface, MAGA media appears to be a loosely connected, incoherent mishmash of militants, grifters, and attention merchants. The only consistencies appear to be racist agitprop and a sense that Democrats are colluding with an array of nonwhite actors to bring about the fall of (white) civilization.

he uttered perhaps the most honest statement of his presidency: “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.… Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not happening.” This quote is the Rosetta Stone of Republican political strategy. Trump, who has always struggled to distinguish between inside and outside thoughts, admitted out loud what Roger Ailes and his ilk had spent decades trying to achieve under the cover of “fair and balanced” journalism: Don’t trust anyone else. Don’t believe your eyes or your ears. Believe only what we tell you. Indeed, Trump’s statement was a less eloquent version of the famous quote from George Orwell’s 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Planting distrust in institutions is why the Republicans often employ antigovernment rhetoric.

The battle over government is not about the size of government, but the role of government. Republicans want the government to serve as a bulwark against the growing political and economic power of a diversifying America they view as an existential threat to their primarily white, Christian base. The Republican narrative depends on reinforcing lies and fear of the government.

the Right understands that information warfare in the age of Facebook is a game of quantity over quality. So many right-wing digital media outlets have sprung up in recent years. Breitbart (which was where Bannon cut his fangs), the Daily Caller, the Federalist, Gateway Pundit, and dozens of others flood the zone at a furious pace.

The third main goal of the GOP disinformation strategy is as gross and bigoted as it is obvious to anyone who watches Fox News or logs onto Facebook: keep white Americans scared shitless of nonwhite people. View these sources on any given day, and you enter an alternative reality where Latino immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and Black criminals are terrorizing white people in their homes while overly “woke” Hollywood liberals go about erasing American history and calling white kids racist.

have truth-in-advertising laws, but no truth-in-news laws, which seems like a pretty major fucking oversight.

The decision to pour millions into Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Newsmax, and other right-wing sites is an investment in a political outcome. It should be viewed no differently than a contribution to a super PAC or to the Republican Party.

According to an investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy, organizations associated with the wealthy Koch brothers donated at least $8 million to media outlets from 2015 to 2018. Now, $8 million is a lot of money, but it is couch cushion change to these billionaires. This relatively meager investment helped ensure that Donald Trump was elected, it helped Trump survive crisis after crisis and crime after crime, and it paid off more than a thousandfold when the Kochs reaped an estimated $1.4 billion tax break from the law Trump passed in 2018.6 In short, it was among the most successful investments in political history.

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.

“People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.” (Ailes underlined “thinking.”) That is the core of why Ailes was so committed to moving into television “news” as a political strategy.

Nicole Hemmer, a Columbia University research scholar and an expert on conservative media, uses the term objectivity laundering to describe these stealthy efforts to impart partisan messaging under the guise of traditionally objective journalism.

According to documents released by Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager turned whistleblower, the company’s data team was aware of the problem and proposed specific changes to Zuckerberg, who resisted fixing the problem he had created. Zuckerberg has never explained why he did so. The answer may be found in another revelation from the trove of Haugen’s documents. Facebook decided to change its algorithm for the same reason it does anything: money.

There’s an old saying that if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. In the end, Facebook does not a give a shit about you or me. We exist only to serve its actual customers: the advertisers addicted to the data Facebook extracts from our every interaction. The problems with Facebook cannot be fixed because the problem is Facebook.

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.

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 forced to adhere to its own rules and keep the ads up.

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 Trump administration would not impose regulations on the company.

Every user signing up for Facebook agrees to a set of terms and conditions about what can and can’t be posted. 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.

Media that focuses on governmental problems at the expense of government solutions is inherently pro-conservative.

Hiring white conservatives to work alongside white liberals in big-city newsrooms demonstrates a dangerously limited understanding of diversity.

Clinton defeated Trump handily among Americans making less than $50,000 a year. Among voters making more than that, the two candidates ran roughly even. The electorate, however, skews wealthier than the general population. Voters making less than $50,000, whom Clinton won by a proportion of 53 to 41, accounted for only 36 percent of the votes cast, while those making more than $50,000—whom Trump won by a single point—made up 64 percent. The most economically vulnerable Americans voted for Clinton overwhelmingly.… Trump won white voters at every level of class and income. He won workers, he won managers, he won owners, he won robber barons. This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one.

Cruz allegedly ratted out a poker game being played in his dorm to avoid paying what he owed. This is a total non sequitur but also a good reminder that he is an incorrigible asshole.

Winning fake wars and losing real ones is a hallmark of Republican presidents.

During the 2020 campaign, questions about the effectiveness of the Lincoln Project were dismissed by many as ad envy. However, once the campaign was over, a Democratic group released a study that showed that the ads from the Lincoln Project were largely ineffective. In fact, the study found an inverse relationship between efficacy and engagement on Twitter.

First, Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election13 since 1988.

Only one Republican has won the popular vote since the late 1980s.

believed then, and I believe even more now, that political communications is not public relations. It’s not press management. It’s information warfare. And if you want to win a war, you need to be on a war footing. Republicans understand this. Too many Democrats don’t.

Given that Republicans generally run on an agenda of stopping things from happening and that Democrats run on an agenda of doing things, trust matters more to us than it does to them.

“The rules of objective journalism require you to present facts to tell a true story, but the objective-journalism version of events can often obscure the reality of what’s really going on.” He explained to Sullivan that, as he sees it, “The typical practices of putting everything that happens in the context of normal behavior, of giving ‘both sides’ an almost equal say and of describing events in a neutral tone have an overall damaging effect. Put simply: ‘It sanitizes things.’”

The most important change the media can make is to recognize that accuracy and balance are two irreconcilable values. If the goal is to appear balanced or objective, a media outlet will ultimately fail consumers.

At times, pushing for these values would cause the media to side with one party over the other. Most of the time, but not always, that party will be the Democratic Party. Adopting this model would require media outlets to choose accuracy over balance; to stop treating climate change as a subject for debate or Republican efforts to overturn elections as “normal” politics; to call a lie a lie and be explicit about racist appeals and white-supremacist ideology.

The right-wing is waging a war on truth. To win that war, we need to invest in people and organizations committed to fighting that war, not covering it.

The Right-Wing media is an echo chamber, and progressive media is often a debating society. The Right is focused on defeating Democrats. The Left is focused on shaping our party, not beating the other party. If Democrats have any hope of winning the messaging battle, we need to invest in media properties that will take the fight to Republicans and communicate directly with the public on our terms.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a junior member of Congress who has been kicked off her committee, grows in political power by fighting with liberals. Her Twitter feed was a nonstop stream of liberal rage bait. She stalks Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on- and offline in the hope of picking a fight that will garner her attention. In one sense, Greene’s strategy is working. She is a junior member of Congress who sits on no committees. She has barely the political power you do, but her star is rising in the Republican Party. No one should know her, or care about her, but according to a February 2021 Morning Consult poll, Greene’s name ID was nearly as high as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s. Even more disturbingly, after Greene became the focus of attention for her racist, anti-Semitic, unhinged views, her favorable rating among Republican voters increased by 11 points. She hijacked our attention and reaped the rewards. By constantly making fun of Greene for her batty conspiracy theories (Jewish Space Lasers), we are giving her the thing she desires most and deserves least: attention.

A reminder that may not be obvious: amplification on social networks has monetary value. Twitter’s algorithm counts it as engagement[,] even if you shared a tweet to criticize it or mock it[,] and uses that signal to amplify the tweet further. Only RT what you would pay to promote… Do not reply to, retweet, or quote a tweet from a fascist unless you would give them your money. Apparently, some people would rather make that gift than change their behavior online, and I don’t know what to do about that.

At one point, Jon Lovett came up with an inspired answer. Stop trying to convert your MAGA uncle/dad/dentist/coworker/yoga instructor in the moment and, instead, go find two friends who aren’t registered or even planning to vote and get them to vote. You’ll cancel out the MAGA vote and spare yourself an infuriating and exhausting conversation. It’s a brilliant alternative to banging one’s head against a wall.