The Age of Disinformation

Introduction: The Age of Disinformation

• Public discourse has always contained lies, but in recent years, the line between fact and fiction has blurred significantly.
• The current crisis is distinct due to the degree and deliberateness of disinformation.
• Donald Trump's political campaigns and presidency contributed significantly to this phenomenon.
• The administration thrived on deceptions, labeling its lies as "alternative facts".
• The Washington Post created a database to track falsehoods from the Trump White House, counting over thirty thousand instances.
• Trump and his aides dismissed corrections as "fake news", and watchdogs and inspector generals who pushed back were ignored or dismissed.

Deadly Consequences of Disinformation

• The administration warred with scientists and medical experts, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• President Trump insisted in February 2020 that coronavirus cases would soon be near zero, but by the time he left office, there were tens of millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
• The Trump administration discredited the 2020 election, leading to a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol.

Factors Contributing to the Crisis

• The conservative media ecosystem, including cable news networks and websites, has amplified right-wing myths.
• These outlets have embraced a "narrowcast" model, targeting specific audiences and amplifying their assumptions rather than emphasizing objective facts.
• Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have further spread disinformation due to the lack of fact-checkers and the tendency to find like-minded partisans.
• As a result, misinformation has heavily influenced debates on various political questions.

Republican Party's Devolution from Truth

• All political parties engage in political spin, but Republicans previously fashioned themselves as realists committed to clear-eyed truths.
• Ronald Reagan presented his conservatism as committed to clear-eyed truths.
• Asks how Republicans became the party of "fairy dust and make believe?"
• During the George W. Bush administration, there was a running battle with experts and the facts they presented.
• By 2008, politicians like Sarah Palin positioned themselves against intellectuals, universities, the media, and other sources of valid information.

Obama Era and the Rise of Conspiracy Theories

• Republicans criticized the Obama administration and crafted fantastical complaints.
• There were conspiracies about "death panels" in the Affordable Care Act.
• Congressman Joe Wilson yelled "You lie!" during a formal address, even after fact-checkers disproved the claim.
• Republicans attacked facts during the 2012 presidential campaign.
• Donald Trump gained traction spreading the "birther" conspiracy.
• The ascendance of the QAnon conspiracy occurred on the far-right fringes.

The War on Truth

• It has unfolded along multiple fronts, including science, medicine, law, public policy, and history.
• George Orwell observed in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future."
• Claims about the past influence what is believed to be possible in the future.
• Clumsy misapplications of history can create catastrophes in public policy.
• Trying to fit a scenario from the past onto one in the present can be disastrous.
• Narratives about the past can distort the present and limit the ability to imagine different futures.

Confederate Monuments and the "Lost Cause"

• Confederate monuments, largely constructed in the early twentieth century, were part of a campaign to promote the Lost Cause.
• The Lost Cause whitewashed slavery and recast traitors as American patriots.
• Efforts to undo the Lost Cause mythos have been portrayed as attempts to "rewrite history."
• The Trump administration made efforts to reshape narratives about the US past a central theme.

Trump Administration's Efforts to Rewrite History

• The White House repeatedly made outlandish claims about its "unprecedented" place in history.
• The President's Advisory 1776 Commission was created to provide a version of history enabling "patriotic education".

Politicization of History

• The "1776 Report" was rushed into print to twist the record, authored without any American historians.
• This report distorted history by comparing supporters of slavery to proponents of "identity politics" and equating progressivism with fascism.
• After Trump left office, Republicans worked to block certain histories and turned critical race theory into a threat.

Historical Controversies

• The 1990's controversy over national history standards, George H. W. Bush's Department of Education and the National Endowment (NEH), seemed to be from a conservative source.
• There were debates over interpretations of facts and the inclusion of diverse perspectives in historical narratives.
• The Smithsonian's plan to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was met with controversies.
• Military and veterans' organizations criticized a forced moral equivalence between the United States and Japan.
• The museum redid the display so there was little or no commentary, even if that meant a lack of interpretation.
• Historians resolved to maintain their public engagement.

Dangers of Unmoored Debates

• Debates reduced to arguing about facts make constructive dialogue impossible.
• Amateur historians write a history that begins with conclusions, working backward to find evidence.
• Partisan authors produce partisan versions of the past, replicating "narrowcasting."
• Arguments are based on "facts" that aren't facts or narratives that misconstrue archives.
• The public is inundated with wild claims about history.
• This is a new front in the campaign to engage and educate the general public about shared history.

Call to Action for Historians

• Carl Becker reminded colleagues that archival research was only the start.
• John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward confronted myths about segregation.
• Scholars challenged legends about US foreign policy during the Vietnam War.
• Social and cultural historians wrote new histories from the bottom up.
• The term revisionist history acknowledges improvements through historical revision.

Today's Historians Fight Misinformation

• Writing op-eds and essays, engaging the public on television, radio, and podcasts, and being active on social media, many historians work to provide corrections to misinformation.
• This volume brings together historians to expand those engagements into fuller essays.
• The essays address pressing distortions of the past in the present.

Focus of the Collection

• Due to debate, a lot of distortions in the collection stem from the deliberate campaign of disinformation by the Political Right
• Focus remains on other issues that have not received attention

Distortion Examples and Bipartisan Myths

• Portraying Democratic programs as failures and presenting the "Reagan Revolution" as a success.
• Framing the free market as wholly good or democratic socialism as wholly bad, also characterizing feminism as a family plot.
• Racial issues and resentments focus on issues that white nationalism has made in Republican Politics
• Denialism has grown despite attempts to confront southern racism incidents
• Past and proof of racism are rewritten to retrofit a rationale

The Importance of Objective Truth

• Bipartisan myths have been stubborn.
• The persistent belief in American exceptionalism is expressed generally and also in the particulars, as in claims that America has never been an empire.
• Some false pasts are about vanishing Native Americans
• American exceptionalism should not undergird similar claims.
• These claims are embraced across the political spectrum
• Myths do not become true through widespread acceptance
• Erroneous information is wrong no matter where it is held
• The collection's scope and new legends created can be addressed by some of the most prominent US Historians

The lesson explores the rise and impact of disinformation, particularly during Donald Trump's presidency. It highlights the administration's reliance on falsehoods and the dismissal of fact-checkers. The lesson also covers the dangerous consequences of disinformation, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.