All-You-Can-Eat Bad Faith

your brain is getting very sleepy

A stupid trend is emerging in the coverage of campaign discourse.

By now you’ve probably seen footage of Tucker Carlson interviewing Mike Pence in Iowa, a discussion that produced a memorable exchange regarding Ukraine. Politico would like you to know that it was a kind of hypnosis routine, a mental hijacking in which Carlson tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president.

The former Fox News host, reports the all-seeing Sally Goldenberg, “primarily used his perch to press candidates on issues of importance to him: namely, the United States’ role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.” As the United States sends cluster munitions to Ukraine and calls up thousands of reservists for “combat-ready” service in Eastern Europe, a journalist is asking political leaders about Ukraine only because it’s a quirky itch his ego needs to scratch — a selfish personal cause, pursued for whatever odd reason. Here’s Goldenberg’s eighth paragraph, and compare it to what you saw with your own eyes:

Carlson — a fierce Trump defender who later soured on the ex-president — challenged, interrupted and contradicted the soft-spoken Pence at nearly every turn. As a result, the devout Christian candidate faced hostility and jeers at a summit that would have once provided him with a friendly audience.

The hostility and jeers were inorganic and manufactured; they didn’t happen because the audience didn’t like Pence or his answers, but as a result of the performative maneuvering of an interviewer who challenged and contradicted him. It’s simply not possible that the audience actually didn’t like Pence or his answer; rather, journalism’s David Blaine pulled a “hey, do you wanna see some magic?” on them, whisking them away into a world of illusion. Tucker Carlson entered a thousand helpless brains and drove a Pence-loving audience away like a bus. The story goes on the say that “establishment Republicans expressed dismay,” accusing Carlson of “pro-Kremlin misinfo.” They don’t have to write these stories any more — they can just cut and paste from all the previous versions.

This is a template for all future campaign coverage: Voters were accidentally hypnotized today into wrongfully [fill in blank] after [select: Tucker Carlson / Donald Trump] challenged and contradicted more responsible leaders.

Elsewhere at Politico, the reliably irritating Virginia Heffernan delivers a masterpiece of bad faith, strawmanning, and malicious mindreading — “The Crisis Over American Manhood Is Really Code for Something Else” — revealing that elite right-wing hucksters like Josh Hawley are tricking the dirty proles into thinking there’s something wrong with their manliness. Every paragraph of this thing is museum-worthy propaganda, but let’s not.

Instead, as a single example of the way a malicious writer invents the story she wishes to tell when reality fails to serve her needs, consider just one example. Heffernan attends — virtually, she says, streaming it through a computer screen — the “Stronger Men’s Conference in Springfield, Missouri.” Here’s her second paragraph, presenting something she’ll describe in her third paragraph as an example of “camp machismo signaling”:

To a crowd that looked all-male, Pastor Levi Lusko, a former porn addict, unfurled a highly disturbing sermon on how much he loves sex. He cited an old lyric by T-Pain and Flo Rida to explain Eve’s allure to Adam: Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur.

So Pastor Levi Lusko is a chest-thumping macho cartoon, you see, who mostly gives sermons so he can rant about how much he loves smashin’ chicks. Now: Here’s a discussion about sex with Pastor Levi Lusko:

If you don’t want to watch all of that, the description of the video on YouTube says the discussion is about “the challenges Christian families face in today’s oversexualized culture,” and the way “sex has become so casual and meaningless that people are trading away their future health, emotions, family, satisfaction and faith for momentary pleasure.” In that context, Lusko “offers encouragement and hope to people who have been wounded and hurt by past sexual sin.”

So much “camp machismo signaling.” When you look at the thing Virginia Heffernan pretends to describe, you see what she’s doing.

But finally, Heffernan performs the same maneuver that shows up elsewhere as Politico describes Carlson’s interview with Pence: It’s all a scam, a fake. Hawley speaks on the theme of manhood; in Heffernan’s description, “Hawley committed to the bit.” He was doing a bit, like a stand-up comedian. Big conclusion on Hawley’s act:

Why doesn’t Hawley take his pitch to elites? He didn’t respond to a request for an interview on the topic, but perhaps it’s because men without college educations are much more imperiled by mental illness, addiction and suicidality than college-educated men. They’re less contented. They’re less employed. And, for Hawley, that means they’re a riper political target — more easily sold on far-right memes and “woke”-bashing flexes as a way to cure what ails them.

He’s pitching, and he has a ripe target. He’s running a con, and wounded working-class men make a good mark. Inside his mind, inside his soul, he doesn’t believe any of it; it’s all just a cheap game, a carnival trick. Heffernan knows this entirely because she has decided to feel like it’s true. Argue otherwise, if you’d like, with quotes from her essay showing the evidence she used to construct this argument, and let me just say before you try that act of evidence-mining that LOL.

Every discussion, anywhere to the right of The Narrative, is going to be treated this way: a trick, a game, a con, a scam, inauthentic, a maneuver. I doubt very much it’ll work, but we’re about to go through a year and a half of constant and highly theatrical eye-rolling about any point of view that the media-academia-political class blob finds inconvenient to discuss. “Hawley committed to the bit.” Derision, dismissal, diminishment, deflection. Prepare to be bored by it, and drive through it like it isn’t there. Yes, all of life is high school.