Trump, Russia and the war on truth

We are at war.

It is not a battlefield war, though battlefield wars may come of it.

{mosads}It is not simply a war of words, though one side may be happy to characterize it as such.

It is a war against truth itself; a shock and awe campaign of falsities that seeks to undermine institutions, play on fears and prejudices, and obscure reality for political gain.

We have many enemies in this war: the alt-right, political opportunists, foreign subversives, profiteers, corporate lobbyists — all of them seeking the same ends by the same means: to promote their own interests by taking advantage of ignorance, distrust and a poorly educated electorate.

Social media has allowed these agents of distortion to sow distrust in reliable news outlets while simultaneously disseminating disinformation on an unprecedented scale.

Fake news now contends with real news. In fact, fake news often bests real news in terms of viewership. Google’s algorithm is abused to give popular, but unreliable sites equal credence with actual journalistic ones. Facebook and Twitter are used as engines of dissemblage, while an inept television media that should be illuminating truths instead suffers from Shiny Ball Syndrome, wherein they follow the biggest spectacle and seek to moderate between sides rather than to enlighten.

Downtrodden workers, overworked and underappreciated, are kept ignorant by exhaustion and complacency. They comprise a large segment of an uninformed electorate, the product of an inadequate educational system that continues to promote unprepared children and graduate students who often don’t know the bare minimum about history, civics, science or mathematics, and haven’t developed the logistical capabilities to differentiate fact from fiction or form basic, cohesive arguments.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American 15 and over spends two hours and 49 minutes watching TV every day and only 19 minutes reading for leisure. We spend more than twice as much time on Facebook (40 minutes a day) than on reading. For kids ages 15 to 19, it’s even worse: On the weekend, they average eight minutes of reading per day, compared to well over an hour using the internet or playing video games.

As practically any historian can tell you, ignorance is the mother of disaster; complacency is the father.

We now know that the CIA has concluded that Russia intentionally interfered in the U.S. election. Its conclusion is consistent with that of two separate, nongovernmental teams of analysts. With Russian President Vladimir Putin seeking to increase his influence throughout Europe, Asia and the Arctic, the prospect of his interference in our electoral system is frightening enough.

But Russia was not alone: As noted by The New York Times, there were also many lone or small business profiteers who were able to take advantage of the tendency of Americans to plunge into headlines without plunging into substance.

These culprits, along with conspiracy and hate sites that delight in fake news, such as Infowars or Breitbart, relied heavily on one thing: American gullibility. Basically, they bet on our inability to question, and they met with tremendous success.

President-elect Donald Trump did that as well. His entire campaign banked on the ignorance of the American people. He made promises he knew he couldn’t keep, stoked anger based on racism and bigotry, and told big lie after big lie. He knew that the key to convincing people to follow him was to first get them to question reliable sources. And it worked.

Bigly.

Recently, while out dining with my family, I overheard a conversation between our waitress and another customer. They were discussing the election and, being me, I could not help but butt in.

I very quickly discovered that the waitress had based her pro-Trump vote on a mixture of somewhat true, highly exaggerated,and completely false claims about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. She proceeded to tell me, for instance, that Clinton was “making millions” off the Clinton Foundation and that she wanted to “let anyone” into the country.

Though receptive in the end, she was somewhat dubious when I explained to her the facts that contradicted her wholly swallowed conspiracy theories and clung to her dislike of the former secretary of State even after practically everything she had based her animosity on was proven to be untrue.

After all, emotions need not be moored to reason and, once set afloat, are often difficult to bring back into port.

Do I blame the amicable, yet uninformed waitress for her ignorance?

Yes, of course; it would be insincere to insist otherwise — something far too many liberals are wont to do in the wake of the election, fearful that they will be seen as punching down on the “little guy” by simply being honest.

But I also blame the purveyors of the malicious misinformation that fed her and others like her lies that pleased them. Some were “useful idiots” (as the Russian expression goes), who were simply negligent in spreading falsities. But others were nothing but nefarious actors set on destroying Clinton and undermining the integrity of our republican system.

Now these same agents of disinformation are banking that the American people will continue to be duped; that we’ll believe that there was no undermining of the election by Russia, WikiLeaks, the FBI and immoral opportunists.

They are counting on us to be so obsessed with Facebook likes, iPhones, Twitter messages, and who won the latest “Dancing with the Stars” that we won’t notice that our republic has largely been stolen out from under us.

They have played on our own fears, prejudices and ignorance in order to divide us, and they have crowned the biggest dissembler of all as our next president.

Yes, we are indeed in a war against truth, and truth is losing.

Rosenfeld is an educator and historian who has done work for Scribner, Macmillan and Newsweek and contributes frequently to The Hill.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.