Nothing The Right Freaks Out About Is Real
None Of It. No, Not Even That.
Every day it feels like conservatives are up in arms about something. Not just mildly perturbed, but rage that would rank at 25 on a 1 to 10 scale. They are mad about it and it is always the fault of liberals.
Pick a so-called controversy, any controversy. “Obama phones.” Critical race theory. Drag queen story hour. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The Green New Deal. Genderless potato head toys. Migrant caravans. Cities burned down by Antifa. M&M’s that aren’t sexy enough. M&M’s in a lesbian relationship. Transgender M&M’s.
It goes on and on and on, never ending. At any given moment you can tune in to Fox News or a Republican making an impassioned speech on the floor of the House or Senate and you would see the outrage pouring from every orifice.
But none of it is real. Not a single, solitary moment of it. It is completely fake and made up to the point where the actual words are the only real thing, but the underlying situation is a mere flight of fancy.
The right loves fakery and being performatively angry about fakery. In some instances, the leaders of the right — elected officials, media pundits and the like — are well aware that the scenarios they are fuming about are false. And in most cases I believe that the average conservative supporter is unaware they are being lied to and earnestly believes these are real issues to be mad about.
To this day conservative voters will tell you with a straight face that Bill Clinton hung x-rated Christmas ornaments at the White House (lie), that Barack Obama used the IRS to persecute conservatives (lie), that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for banning meat (lie), or that Hillary Clinton issued a “stand down order” in Benghazi (lie).
But these lies also present a very real problem for liberals and how liberals earnestly approach these kinds of issues. The liberal mind is optimistic and it believes that in most situations that earnest sharing of facts and data can do the work of convincing someone who believes in a false reality. Liberals believe those in the dark need to have their hands held and shown the light, then they can truly embrace reality.
This does not work and it is ultimately a waste of time that doesn’t pay off on most occasions. The vast majority of conservatives don’t process data to debunk these falsehoods the way a computer chip processes input. Instead to their ears it sounds like the garbled nonsense of the teachers from a Charlie Brown cartoon, with the added benefit of emanating from a source — a liberal — that they have been trained to always be suspicious of.
You can show a dyed-in-the-wool conservative news reports and government fact sheets that prove, for instance, that the story surrounding “Obama phones” was made up by the right to cast aspersions on poor Black people. The program, which began before Obama was even president, was about helping poor people get back on their feet with access to phones to assist in things like getting jobs and housing. But it won’t matter. They saw one viral clip that circulated around the right accompanied by decades of racism about Black people and government handouts combined with seething rage and animus towards Obama for the twin sins of being a Democrat who won an election while also being Black.
It won’t matter. They believe what they want to believe and the world of conservatism is oriented around keeping them eternally mad on a nonstop diet of lies. Liberals cannot help this, no matter how earnest and patient they are in explaining reality.
For liberals, this feels wrong. We pride ourselves on the ability to process data and challenge our own assumptions. Generally liberals understand that if data debunks their emotions, no matter how uncomfortable, that they have to ultimately give in to reality. We can’t live in a dream world even if it feels better than reality.
After 2016, liberalism grudgingly accepted that Donald Trump was president and there was no movement lasting years after the election that called for the results to be overturned. By contrast, Trump himself still regularly calls for this invented scenario to become reality and there are millions of Republicans who share this country with us all who endorse his twisted world view.
The two mindsets are not alike. There isn’t a world of liberal politicians and media entities who constantly throw fakery at an audience dying to be outraged about made up things. Liberals get blinding mad at real things like a nation awash in gun violence, the planet heating up and causing violent natural disasters, or the loss of abortion access for millions of women. Real things.
The right thrives on fakery and we must move to acceptance of this fact. It isn’t coming back to reality and it hasn’t been there for over six decades. Their brains are stimulated by the constant bombardment of invented realities offered to them every day. Before one outrage has begun to fade (gay M&M’s!) another one comes along to supplant it (caravans of migrants surging to the border). It all sticks in their minds and their leaders conveniently tell them the bad things will go away if they turn out to vote for Republicans and against Democrats.
This is not a cycle that an application of logic can break. Focus instead on reality and people who believe in and are open to the real world and the real outrages that exist within it, doing harm to millions of people in America and around the world. Life is too short to be consumed with the right’s fakery and fantasy.
Leaving them to stew in their own made-up juices doesn’t feel right and it goes against the liberal compulsion to help someone in distress, but it is for the best. Let them drown in their outrage and instead focus on a real path to address real problems.
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— Oliver
Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Twitter @owillis/Mastodon: @owillis@mastodon.online
Exclusive Kal-El Photo
Sometimes Kal rests his head on my chest and sighs, and I legitimately feel that the gears are seriously turning in that little Weiner dog brain of his.
Thank you for writing this! As a long-time White boomer organizer (who was raised in white evangelical culture) I am SO tired of hearing old white people talk about the need to "reach out" to old white conservative voters and trying to understand them and bring them along. No, our goal, is to reach out to Black, brown and younger voters; listen to them and elect candidates who represent them. Let the right stew in their fantasies is the correct response. Thanks for saying it.
On the rare occasions when they do accept that one of the stories pushed by the right-wing outrage machine is wrong, they'll shrug and say "well, it sounded like something a liberal would do" and move on to the next.