Republicans Have Mastered the Art of False Equivalency
Even ‘sensible Republicans’ like Nancy Macy use both-sides-ism to misinform their base. Most of the time, the media goes along.
A few years before the Trump era, I found myself drinking a beer and watching television with an older male relative who happens to be white. Everyone else was gone shopping, so it was just the two of us.
We’ve always had a cordial relationship, so we engaged in the usual small talk as we watched cable news. At some point, a news story popped up that mentioned the southern border and immigration.
As soon as I heard it, I tensed up. I had a strong suspicion my television companion was a Republican. I noticed his reaction to the story and could tell he had something to say. After a few seconds, he could no longer hold his thoughts. “I just don’t want them coming here voting illegally,” he said to no one in particular.
According to a University of Oxford study, fifty-five percent of all junk or ‘fake news traffic on Twitter can be linked to Trump supporters.
When I saw the immigration story on television, I mentally began weighing potential responses, the type of mental calculations common in family settings when politics or religion arises. Finally, I decided on what I hoped was a safe response.
“How would they be able to come here and vote?” I asked, trying to make my comment as non-threatening as possible. As he thought about my question, I decided to continue.
“What I mean is, they’d have to register to vote and to do that, they’d need a fake birth certificate and maybe a fake social security card,” I asked. “Why would somebody that is here illegally want to do all that?” My relative pondered for a few seconds before saying, “Huh. I guess I hadn’t thought of that.”
Our exchange illustrates how folks with conservative leanings buy into misleading narratives. For example, according to a University of Oxford study, fifty-five percent of all junk or ‘fake news traffic on Twitter can be linked to Trump supporters. For three months in 2018, researchers with the university’s Computational Propaganda Research Project scrutinized the habits of 13,477 politically active US Twitter users and 47,719 public Facebook pages. This is what the study found, as reported in the Huffington Post:
The study linked a full 55 percent of all junk news traffic on Twitter to the “Trump Support” group. “On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters shares the widest range of known junk news sources and circulates more junk news than all the other groups put together,” the authors noted.
For comparison, the “Democratic Party” and “Progressive Movement” groups together accounted for 1 percent of junk news traffic on Twitter, according to the study.
And on Facebook, the study found that “extreme hard right pages — distinct from Republican pages — share the widest range of known junk news sources and circulate more junk news than all the other audiences put together.” The “Hard Conservative” group accounted for 58 percent of junk news traffic on Facebook. (The “Democratic Party” group accounted for 12 percent.)
One reason the flood of misinformation targeting the Republican base succeeds is that it is constantly regurgitated and amplified, not just by extremists such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar but by so-called ‘sensible’ Republicans. An example is Republicans’ skilled use of both sides-ism.
Earlier this month, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle interviewed Republican House member Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of the few Republicans brave enough to venture beyond the safety of Fox News, OANN, and NewsMax.
The interview was relatively uneventful until Ruhle brought up the January 6th insurrection. Rather than acknowledge the GOP’s role in instigating the event, Mace immediately responded with a false equivalency, comparing Antifa ideology to the Capital attack:
MACE: “We had a hearing a couple weeks ago with the FBI and I learned that we don’t track cases of violence of Antifa, right? I mean, there’s lots of violence, domestic terrorism and foreign terrorism in this country.”
RUHLE: “But Antifa is this sort of abstract boogeyman word that we keep hearing on the other side. You can clearly see…”
MACE: “I don’t think it is.”
RUHLE: “What specific event are you talking about that you believe Antifa committed that should be investigated? Because I can tell you January 6th, we all saw it. We know it. What event you are talking about?”
Instead of providing a specific incident of Antifa-related violence to back up her claim, Mace compares the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to the attack on the US Capital, which was responsible for the first disruption of the peaceful transfer of power in U.S. history (emphasis mine).
MACE: “Yeah, 100 percent. But we’ve all seen the cities that have been destroyed by violence and by rioting in my own district in Charleston, South Carolina, in May of 2020. We had riots that destroyed millions of dollars of businesses down King Street in Charleston. We’ve seen it in cities across the country. We want to make sure that all violence is held to the same standard…
I’ve read about Antifa and them organizing these kind of events, so I don’t want to say it’s a boogeyman. I mean, there were, I guess, symbolism that they use. That symbolism was used on my house when it was spray-painted this summer. This is the thing that, you know, violence in this country shouldn’t be partisan, shouldn’t be Left or Right.”
There is so much to unpack here. When pressed to discuss the January 6th insurrection, Mace immediately raises the specter of Antifa, which, while a potential area of concern, is not a defined group or an organization, according to FBI Director Chris Wray. Mace’s vandalized sidewalk, while unfortunate, is hardly equivalent to an attack on the nation’s Capital.
Moreover, the symbology Mace attributed to “Antifa” was more closely associated with the anarchist movement. The Antifa movement is a separate far-left and anti-fascist, while anarchism advocates for the removal of the government.
Her assertion that we should hold all violence to the same standard is a clever attempt to equate the BLM protests with the violence on January 6th; however, the data indicates that the two events are far from equivalent.
According to the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), a public access database that tracks protest activity in the US, from May 2020 to June 2021, the period of the BLM protests, 94% of protests had no protester arrests, 98.6% resulted in no injuries to police, and over 96% of protests during the period had no property damage.
In other words, the 2020 anti-racism protests in the aggregate were largely peaceful, versus Capital attacks, which resulted in millions of dollars in damages and numerous deaths.
You may have noticed former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s reputational rehabilitation tour, done under the guise of a book tour. Most of Christie’s television interviews were softball-filled affairs — until he ran into Nicole Wallace, host of MSNBC’s Deadline: White House.
Christie’s forthcoming book, ostensibly a tome reprimanding truth deniers and conspiracy theorists, attacks the mainstream media but somehow fails to mention Fox News. During the Wallace interview, Christie downplays domestic violent extremism tied to white supremacy (emphasis mine):
WALLACE: Do you agree with Christopher Wray who says that domestic violent extremism is now the gravest threat to the homeland?
CHRISTIE: I don’t know if Chris still thinks that…
WALLACE: He testified to that in September [2020]…
[CROSSTALK]
CHRISTIE: I haven’t spoken to Chris, I don’t know if he still thinks that, but what I do think is it’s definitely a big threat to the country.
WALLACE: What’s bigger? What could be bigger?
CHRISTIE: Look, I think that…yeah look, I think that what’s happening in Afghanistan now and what the results of that could, be um, could become an even bigger threat and we’ll see and I don’t know whether Chris, after the disaster of Afghanistan whether Chris’s opinion is still the same because that’s pretty fresh, um, but there’s no doubt that violence inside and we saw this happen not only surrounding the election of 2020 on january 6th but we saw it in places like portland and seattle New York Chicago…uh…Philadelphia and other places.
WALLACE: So Chris Wray’s testimony though…I just want to be clear about what he’s testified to and I take…if you don’t agree with him you don’t agree with him, but what he testified to was and I believe the quote is ‘it is the greatest threat to the homeland’ and within that bucket that by far the largest group is white supremacy. So…so white supremacists did not threaten Portland and New York what are you…
CHRISTIE: No I’m…I’m expanding on what Chris said.
WALLACE: Do you agree or not that white supremacist inspired domestic violent extremism is the greatest threat to the homeland?
CHRISTIE: I don’t know that I agree it’s the greatest threat is what I’m saying to you but there’s no question that it is a threat and I agree with Chris in that regard and I think there’s lots of other threats that we have to be concerned about as well and I think whenever we label something the greatest threat to the extent that when you do that you exclude looking at the other ones or minimize looking at the other ones that’s not good for the safety and security of the american people either.
After raising Afghanistan as potentially the greatest threat to the homeland (as opposed to violent white supremacists), Christie trots out Antifa, using the same both-sides argument used by Nancy Mace (emphasis mine):
CHRISTIE: I believe as i wrote in the book like Ronald Reagan did with the John Birch Society he said…’they may support me but I don’t support them’ um and and Ronald Reagan made it very clear that he didn’t stand for that. I think that’s the way we have to deal with any of these extremist groups on the right and the left.
WALLACE: Who are the extremist groups on the left?
CHRISTIE: Oh listen, Antifa is clearly…
WALLACE: [FBI Director] Christopher Ray in the same testimony in September [2020] said they’re not an organization…
CHRISTIE: Well look I disagree with Chris on that, um, and I think there are extremist groups on the left and the right in this country and any serious political candidate for national office if supported by an extremist group that advocates violence whether it’s going all the way back to the ku klux klan or to any of the groups that we have today…”
Chris Christie is certainly entitled to his opinion. But as far as I am aware, he has no access to classified intelligence. And yet, in the interview Christie disagrees with conclusions of threat assessments outlined by both the FBI and Homeland Security with no data to back up his assertions. This is intellectually dishonest at best.
But unfortunately, in American politics, especially on the right, honesty is in short supply. Time and again, rather than accept responsibility for their Party’s descent into fascism and authoritarianism, Republicans consistently engage in the false equivalency of both-sides-ism.
Lately, a few mainstream media pundits have pushed back on Republicans, calling out their hypocrisy. Unfortunately, their efforts have little chance of breaking through the closed bubble of conservative misinformation and reaching the Republican base.
