Right Wing Noise Damages Democracy, Again

This very short editorial from the New York Times is worth reading. Miller observes that black activism against crime is “impossible to miss,” and yet we frequently hear claims like Giuliani’s that blacks do not think black lives matter because they do not do anything about black-on-black crime.  

As Miller puts it: “Claims like Mr. Giuliani’s aren’t just offensive or misplaced — they’re demonstrably wrong.” 

Miller explains that the “enormous anti-crime activist network in black communities” remains hidden in plain sight because these communities lack the resources needed to influence public or private sector leaders, their activism is local and rarely connected to large national organizations, and as a result the pragmatic work at the local level gets distorted or overlooked because it does not fit into the state and national elite story lines which only allow activists to be either pro- or anti-police.

Miller concludes that “There is nothing contradictory about worrying that friends or family members might be killed by someone in the neighborhood, and also being concerned that they might get killed by the police.

Grass-roots organizations in black communities lead the efforts to make their streets safe. We need to get rid of the offensive falsehood that black people don’t care about crime, and help create the reforms they’ve long demanded.”

Moves like Giuliani’s are what Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt might call Bullshit—less about being true or false and all about being phony and fake, about misrepresenting the entire situation in order to mislead and confuse others so they will think & talk & act in ways that advance your interests. 

We see the same move when elites blast Muslim moderates for not speaking out against terrorism, despite the fact that there is lots of evidence that they do exactly this and that conservative Christian leaders rarely do the same in response to acts of terror perpetrated by white male Christians (or the current bigotry driven falsehoods dominating the Trump campaign message). 

The fact that the claim us untrue is less important than that claim’s like this and Giuliani's on Black Lives Matter are misleading by design.  Giuliani, like Trump, does not care if anyone fact-checks him. His objective is to create the impression that there are two sides to the refusal to recognize the disparate impact police violence has on young black men and their communities. 

The goal of the Giuliani’s in making statements like this, statements that are then broadcast endlessly on Fox News as if they provided the other side that makes Fox ‘fair and balanced,’ is to sow doubt and create a phony ‘balance’ between two sides of a story that do not exist, in place of the actual two sides: how to balance law and order, safety and freedom, government and liberty, etc.

He wants to distract and confuse, to make it more difficult for citizens to hold the police accountable, to advance a particular far-right perspective on politics that suggests the only problem with race is that blacks keep bringing it up and about democratic decision making to pre-empt efforts to expand the scope of these conflicts with government action.