Late Saturday night, I was authoritatively informed via email that President Biden hadn’t bothered to show up at Dover Air Force Base to honor the 13 slain U.S. soldiers brought home from Afghanistan. My correspondent told me, “Have you heard the latest about Biden? Our heroic service people came back to American soil today – but the decrepit old fossil decided not to attend!”
My well-tuned troll antennae began to buzz. Probably because I could’ve sworn that the caskets weren’t scheduled to arrive until Sunday morning.
Sure enough, on social media, a Saturday night tweet from a California Republican congressional candidate popped up: “Our heroes were returned to American soil and Dover AFB today” – “today” being Saturday – but “nobody from the Biden White House attended.” I saw lots of retweets; reportedly, there were thousands. Meanwhile, a Republican consultant (notice I am not dignifying these people by name) broke a breathless scoop: “BREAKING. The Biden White House had no representative, including the President, First Lady, or Vice President, attend the return” of the slain soldiers. And the co-founder of something called Students for Trump – who has 940,000 followers – recycled the big news, lamenting that “not even the President of the United States” had seen fit to attend the dignified transfer ceremony. This student (apparently a grad of Trump University) decreed: “Remember every moment of this.”
Problem is, there was nothing to remember because the “moment” didn’t exist.
They posted these lies before the military plane had even landed at Dover.
It’s not a revelation, of course, that liars use social media to spew sewage into credulous minds. Nine years ago, I wrote: “The beauty of social media is that no evidence is necessary. There’s no need to know anything. Typing trumps thinking.” What provoked me in 2012 was a tweetstorm, ginned up by one of Karl Rove’s outfits, that mocked President Obama’s Commerce secretary for hitting two cars after supposedly driving drunk; it turned out, after actual evidence was gathered, that the Commerce Secretary, while driving, had suffered a seizure.
How quaint smears like that seem in retrospect. That ’12 tweetstorm at least had a scintilla of truth: the Commerce secretary was driving a car, and he had hit other cars. But what we’re seeing now – because twitching fingers and addled minds cannot stay idle; because the fantastical has been normalized – is a hate-fueled hostility to reality itself.
We see it with the vaccine disinformation. We see it with the right-wing response to Jan. 6, which requires the denial of what was obvious to one’s eyes and ears. We see it with the toxic fiction of a “stolen election” (new from GOP House member Madison Cawthorn: “If our election systems continue to be rigged, continue to be stolen, then it’s gonna lead to one place, and that’s bloodshed”). I have to wonder whether this nation can survive as a fragile democracy if so many millions have taken leave of their cognitive faculties.
Nothing happened at Dover on Saturday. Everything happened on Sunday. The military plane landed around 8 a.m. Sunday, Biden landed at 8:40, and the dignified transfer didn’t happen until 11:04 am.
Some of the liars were humbled enough to delete their original tweets, but at least one of them (the Republican consultant) insisted that Biden hadn’t planned to go to Dover “according to the current White House schedule” – apparently failing to realize, or choosing not to know, that presidents’ public schedules rarely include all of their planned movements. Obama, and Trump as well, trekked to Dover without signaling it in advance on the public schedule. But in the case of Biden, anyone paying any attention to the news (the real news) knew well in advance that he’d be going to Dover.
But, of course, non-fiction nuances don’t matter a whit to those who want fake info that confirms their preexisting hatreds. As a scientific study published three years ago concluded, after tracking people’s responses to social media, that fakery spreads “significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”
How quaint it was back in 2012 – long before today’s alt-fact pandemic – that Karl Rove’s political shop actually announced, after it learned of the Commerce Secretary’s seizure, that it “regretted” its drunk-driving tweet, and had been posted “before facts known.” Today’s liars not only don’t wait for facts, they simply concoct their own. The Dover episode reminds us, yet again, that a nation unable to reach consensus on what’s real is truly a nation in crisis.