The News: Disinformation Ouroboros

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Bullshit

There is such a thing as disinformation. There’s the conscious, programmatic work of spreading deliberate lies with clear instrumental intent, whether that is to throw into doubt a specific threatening truth or to create a structure of feeling defined by confusion, mistrust, and disconnection.

There is also what I’ve called information pollution, the churning out of vast seas of text and speech intended to crowd out a lonely item of dangerous evidence the way a single well-made product gets buried on a supermarket shelf by badly-made crap that a big company pays the retailer to display prominently.

And there’s misinformation and rumor, semi-falsehoods that stick in the minds of particular communities and groups without any authorial genesis or instrumental purpose, often because that misinformation sits on top of something real and tangible in the experience of those who believe. Rumors don’t create a novel falsehood because of their cunning narrativity, they affirm what’s bred in the bones, what’s already known and felt. A rumor that contradicts what you already believe and know bounces off of you like bullets off Superman.

Misinformation is life. People in my professional world often think that more education can solve misinformation. I don’t think that’s so. You might even regard that as one of our own forms of misinformation. It’s a truth we believe in prior to having any empirical evidence to that effect. Vernacular epistemologies stick to their home sociologies like tar. Information—in this case, “education”—that comes from a different sociological location is like water on that veneer, it just flows right off of it.

Disinformation, on the other hand? I think something can be done about that, because disinformation is a highly weaponized form of what Harry Frankfurt described as “bullshit”. As the blurb on Frankfurt’s book says, bullshitters “quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant”, and they are conscious and agentive in doing so. You can fight back against disinformation. You can call people on it.

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So here is me fighting back against an especially pernicious case of disinformation that purports to itself be opposed to disinformation. This week in the New York Times, James Kirchick purports to explain “how lying became disinformation” and somewhere along the way comes to the conclusion that Kamala Harris is also a liar just like Donald Trump, engaged in a cynical mischaracterization of Trump’s statement at a press conference about Charlottesville in August 2017 that there were “fine people on both sides”.

Kirchick does not directly explain why it is that Kamala Harris’ statement is a “cynical mischaracterization” of Trump’s 2017 statements, instead linking to a Substack post by Sam Harris that you have to subscribe to a 7-day free trial and provide credit card information in order to view, which is something that I think should be disallowed by a major newspaper publishing opinion writing. If you cite something as proof of your analysis, your readers should be able to see the citation. Or you should have to do the work yourself in your own essay.

Far from being a “cynical mischaracterization”, Kamala Harris’ interpretation of Trump’s phrasing is in fact a reasonable interpretation of its meaning.

Let’s look at the actual words but also the full context in which they were uttered. Because both Sam Harris and James Kirchick here are doing what masterful disinformation bullshitters do, which is a kind of purposefully stupid literalism in pursuing textual interpretation, isolating a single phrase from the context in which it was uttered and all the other words it was in association with.

First, when Trump gave the press conference at which he made his “fine people on both sides” remark, it followed after several days of national public reaction to events in Charlottesville. Let’s recall the basic timeline of those events to establish the context.

First, while the scheduled, announced rally for August 12th 2017 had as one of its goals to protest the possible removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, it was explicitly and expressly organized as a rally for the far right—for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, etc., not as a general protest by people living in and near Charlottesville who were against the possible removal of the statue.

Another part of the relevant context: removals of Confederate monuments in 2016 and 2017 were significantly motivated by the July 2015 mass shooting of Black churchgoers by an avowed white supremacist, Dylann Roof. Meaning that the sides on this issue already had some very powerful valences before Charlottesville.

So what happened in Charlottesville? The “Unite the Right” protesters had a permit to march on August 12th and counter-protesters were assembling to march against them on the same day without a permit. However, the night before, August 11th, a group of the “Unite the Right” protesters (estimates of how many varied widely between 60 to more than 200) staged an unplanned and unsanctioned march through the campus of the University of Virginia, carrying torches and shouting explicitly white supremacist and anti-semitic slogans. This group encircled a much smaller group of counterprotesters, students at UVA, and attacked them, until Virginia State Police arrived to break it up.

On the 12th, the Unite the Right participants and counterprotesters began assembling early in the morning. By the time the march was scheduled to start at 11am there had already been numerous clashes between the groups, leading the governor to declare a state of emergency and the police to revoke the permit. That afternoon, around 1:45pm, one of the Unite the Right protesters drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, resulting in the death of Heather Heyer.

So what did Trump have to say about this series of events?

At 1:19 on the 12th, shortly before Heather Heyer was killed, Trump issued a short tweet: “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!”.

I’m going to deal with each of these statements by trying to connect words and context before we arrive at the “fine people” statement that Kirchick focuses on.

In the overall context of Trump’s corpus of tweets, this one at least can be reasonably said to be both tonally and substantively at odds with much of what he wrote on social media between 2015-2024 as well as his statements in speeches, press conferences and rallies. It reflects sentiments that he has rarely voiced—uniting against hate, coming together as one—in a more ‘typical’ sort of politician’s language.

What do literary scholars or historians do when they have a large corpus by a single author that occasionally seems tonally or substantively at odds with the rest of what they have said? For one, we look for evidence that an editor, associate or subordinate wrote those words on behalf of the ostensible author. Barring that, we consider whether there was a specific context that might have warranted a mode of expression different from the author’s norms. Finally, we think about whether that person “contained multitudes”, e.g., that we are seeing signs of some genuine contradiction or uncertainty.

In Trump’s case, there’s at least some documentary evidence to suggest that a small minority of his tweets between 2016-2020 were authored by members of staff, an impression which is intensified by the fact that such tweets were typically written during 8-6pm working hours and were not infrequently contradicted by more typical Trump-like messages posted later at night or in the early morning hours.

Still, let’s suppose that this tweet is the first evidence of Trump’s position on what he then knew about events in Charlottesville and white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups generally.

What did he say next? About 2 hours after the death of Heather Heyer on August 12th, at a bill-signing ceremony, Trump said the following:

“The hate and division must stop. And must stop right now. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.”

Rather bafflingly, Trump added,

It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.

Hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. First off, this poses a bit of a puzzle: many? There were protesters and there were counter-protesters. Many is more than two. What might Trump have meant? Here again the totality of Trump’s considerable corpus helps provide one interpretation, which is that Trump uses modifiers, referents and possessives vaguely in this fashion in the same way that 11th graders writing essays for social studies do, which is to cover an underlying lack of specific knowledge. Alternatively, Trump could have meant to specify with considerable precision that there were four or more distinctive ideological factions present in Charlottesville who each had distinctive propensities or forms of hatred, bigotry and violence associated with their faction. If James Kirchick and Sam Harris want to claim that, the onus is on them to provide evidence beyond public statements that this was the thinking behind Trump’s words, because that kind of specificity is wildly inconsistent with Trump’s record as a speaker.

Moreover, whether that’s what Trump meant or not, it is fundamentally false as a characterization of Charlottesville on August 11th and 12th 2017. The people who carried torches across UVA’s campus on the 11th shouted overtly hateful and racist slogans and attacked a very small group of counterprotesters who offered no provocation. There was no confusion about this in the reportage the next day, so we cannot indemnify Trump by saying he did not know that this had happened. The news coverage about events on the morning of the 12th suggested that at least two “sides” were engaged in provocation and aggression but there is a fundamental difference between the side committed to white supremacy and fascism on one hand and the side committed to opposing white supremacy and fascism on the other. That is where Trump’s false equivalency was rooted, and where Kirchick and Sam Harris reinforcing his false equivalency blossoms into disinforming bullshit. Trump’s “many sides” was a pointed refusal to recognize a difference, a difference that was further confirmed at 1:45pm when a Unite the Right partisan drove a car into a crowd with murderous intent. Notably, the record of legal investigations, commission reports and court proceedings in the wake of Charlottesville have upheld that difference: the Unite the Right participants were in the case of almost every incident on the 12th the aggressors, and many went with the intent to attack counter-protesters, whereas the counter-protesters for the most part mobilized to defend their own people from such attacks.

As for what “it” is, you can either argue that Trump meant to reference deep patterns of structural violence in American history—which generally aren’t considered to have even-handedly applied to “many sides”—or that this was more of his “here’s a pronoun with no referent so you can’t say that I said what you think I said”.

On Sunday August 13th, White House representatives and spokespeople sought to clarify that Trump had specifically meant the neo-Nazis, fascists and white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville.

On August 14th, Trump made a prepared statement read verbatim off a teleprompter—another relatively atypical mode of speech for him during his Presidency and usually a sign of his staff attempting to enforce message discipline. At this event, he said,

Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

This seems pretty definitive, doesn’t it? Perhaps Kirchick and Sam Harris think this settles the question of what Trump really believed about Charlottesville and his more general views. But historians and literary critics—as well as non-disinforming, non-bullshit political commentators—know that one statement does not a stable ethical position make. That’s the whole point of reading in context. Richard Nixon maintained in a number of statements that he hadn’t interfered with the investigation of Watergate, but nobody would look back on that now and say, “See? He didn’t do that” or even “He didn’t know he was interfering.”. Because there’s a tape of him plainly interfering and understanding that he was interfering.

We now come to the longer press conference that Kirchick is quoting Sam Harris about in which Trump says “fine people on both sides”, in which he substantially undoes the work that his surrogates and his formal statement tried to do on the 13th and 14th. To wit,

If you reported it accurately, you would say that the neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville. Excuse me. They didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis. You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group -- excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

So first off, whatever Kirchick and Sam Harris think Trump means to say here, it is factually wrong. The “Unite the Right” rally was expressly organized by and for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists and so on. They were attaching themselves to the defense of Confederate monuments, but the rally was organized to showcase their larger ideologies and to push them towards a coalition. There may have been a small number of people on the streets on Saturday August 12 who were just there about the statue of Robert E. Lee and were confused about who all these other people were. But this is a banal statement about any political gathering, that there are people in the midst of the main groupings who aren’t really associated with any of them, perhaps even a few who qualify as “very fine” in the mind of Donald J. Trump. I once joined a march of students at the University of Zimbabwe until a Zimbabwean soldier pointed a rifle at me and told me to turn around, but you wouldn’t have wanted to say “The march included white American graduate students as well as Zimbabwean college students”.

We now have multiple instances of Trump insisting on moral equivalency between both sides and insisting that neo-Nazism and white supremacy was not the substantial or driving majority ideology of the people gathered to protest there.

Moreover, Trump made a forceful point of saying that the people who were there just to protest taking down the statue in his view had a point, that he wanted to legitimate that particular political argument. In none of his statements in August 2017 did he show specific sympathy for or interest in what any counter-protesters might have thought or been motivated by, other than saying some of them were “very fine people”.

So here we have Trump’s words and his words alone are sufficient cause to offer the interpretation that Kamala Harris did, which is that Trump meant to say that some white nationalists are “very fine people”, and meant to say that what happened in Charlottesville was equally the fault of non-fine people on both sides. Which was disinformation when Trump suggested it and it’s bullshit when Kirchick and Sam Harris suggest that wasn’t disinformation on Trump’s part.

Here is where context shifts us even further in that direction. There is first the context of August 11-16 2017 in which most public commentators said what Trump avoided saying: that the violence in Charlottesville was instigated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis and that the protesters who received a permit to demonstrate were a network of far-right organizations, not a mix of “very fine people” who just wanted the statue to remain and very not-fine extremists. These public commentators included corporate executives, Trump’s own National Security advisor, and members of Trump’s own party, most notably John McCain. On August 15, when asked about this relative unanimity about the blame for Charlottesville and the nature of the Unite the Right rally, Trump doesn’t engage in an explanation of why he’s right and they’re not, he says the following:

1. “I waited to say anything because I wanted to get all the facts.” (That’s a lengthy opener to the August 15 press conference.) Coming from Trump, this is sheer fucking nonsense and if Kirchick and Sam Harris want to read that literally, then they should give me a call, because I happen to be the owner of the Brooklyn Bridge and I am willing to sell it cheap to them. Reading Trump’s relative reluctance to say what almost everybody else was saying is a classic case of where the absence is evidence, where silence has meaning.

2. When McCain’s statement is mentioned, Trump replies “Senator McCain, you mean the one that voted against Obamacare? You mean Senator McCain who voted against us getting good healthcare?” He had roughly as generous a reply to the corporate executives who quit his task force to protest his reluctance to address Charlottesville head-on. He’s saying “Whomever disagrees with me on this does so just to bust my ass, not because they think I’m wrong on principle or facts.” When he hears McCain’s definition of the alt-right, Trump says “Well, what about the alt-left?”

Context. Donald Trump was for three days the only major political leader in the United States unwilling to say in plain, simple language, “White supremacy and neo-Nazism is bad, and that’s what provoked what happened in Charlottesville”. The only time he said it clearly was reading from a teleprompter, and he undid that statement the next day in his press conference.

More context. How do we read the meaning of statements by political actors and public figures? Not just in the context of what they said and when they said it, but in the context of their overall careers, their general track record. If you were a tendentious literalist, you might insist that Woodrow Wilson’s screening of Birth of a Nation at the White House might just about his recognition of D.W. Griffiths’ cinematic talents, but in light of Wilson’s entire career and numerous actions as President, that would be bullshit disinformation, because he had a pattern of racist statements and racist actions. Donald Trump has done a great deal since 2015 to show a sympathic interest in authoritarian, fascist and white supremacist ideas, and he was being advised in 2017 by men whose sympathies in that regard are even better established as a matter of public record, such as Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon.

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What this adds up to in the case of Kirchick’s NYT column is this: he characterizes Kamala Harris’ representation of Trump’s “many fine people” comment as:

1. A lie. “His opponents lie too”, where the first concrete example is the “many fine people” critique of Trump made by Kamala Harris.

2. “An oft-repeated distortion”.

3. “A cynical mischaracterization”.

Kirchick does what disinforming bullshitters often do, which is to try and soften the characterizations on the back half. “Not descending to the level of Mr. Trump” and “Not strictly adhering to the truth”. These are meaningless in the context of Kirchick’s critique (and mirror the structure of Sam Harris’ essay, which starts off by saying that Trump is very bad and a constant liar, but then objects that on this one thing he’s not lying.) If Kamala Harris does not descend to the level of Donald Trump, then why the fuck are we reading an essay that proposes that disinformation is a generalized American phenomenon that is evenly afflicting all political sides and factions? It’s like starting off an essay about gun violence and saying “Dick Cheney accidentally wounding a hunting partner is more or less the same thing as Stephen Paddock killing 60 people and wounding 413 others from the window of his Las Vegas hotel room.” It’s not impossible to insist that they are both manifestations of an underlying structural problem, but you know what? If you could guarantee no more mass shootings, I think we’d all sleep easy and just know better than to go hunting with Dick Cheney. If you’re worried about gun violence, you go after the big problems: the mass shooters, drug-related homicides, male suicides. “Not strictly adhering to the truth” is an even bigger weasel phrase, since Kirchick could find all politicians and public figures since the beginning of time until this very second to be engaged in disinformation by this standard.

The point is that Kirchick doesn’t mean either of those qualifiers: he means to create a sense of equivalency. “Everybody lies”, and hence, lying as a universal issue only admits to universal solutions and is no proper basis for making specific political choices. Say, in a Presidential election. “Everybody lies”, “everybody disinforms”, everybody’s guilty, make your choices for other reasons.

What Kirchick and Sam Harris want to argue is that Trump’s comments in August 2017 have one fixed meaning and can be interpreted in no other way, that to read them otherwise is a distortion, a lie, an exaggeration. This is at least a gross misuse of words like “lie” and “distortion”: almost everything we say can be interpreted in multiple ways, and Kamala Harris’ interpretation is at a minimum arguable, plausible, defensible. More importantly, they mistake where the burden of proof really lies: it is their interpretation that is dubious, exaggerated, at the borderlands of deception. That transference of the burden of proof is characteristic of Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit: the brazen, knowing attempt to create uncertainty about what is true and false, to the point of inverting them with a sneer, and knowing that precisely because language is always open to interpretation, you can always claim that what you said about what was said was a potentially valid truth, a possible way of seeing things, a plausible enough view.

Misinformation resides in our lives, in ourselves. It’s a complicated thing to face or transform. Disinformation is a choice. We can choose not to do it, and we can choose to act aggressively against those who practice it. It’s not universal, or equivalent, or everywhere. I don’t even think it’s everywhere at the New York Times, though the stench of it wafts around most of their analysis of this Presidential election.

Kirchick ends his essay as follows:

“[Trump’s critics] should take heed of the fact that those who righteously decry the disinformation of others are just as capable of peddling disinformation of their own.”

This feels like Judah’s conversation with Clifford at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors: a man confessing to a crime that he is completely at peace with having committed.

Image credit: "Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' Rally (35780274914) crop" by Anthony Crider; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC) is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Image credit: "worm-ouroboros-1" by rezendi is licensed under CC BY 2.0.