This Is Why American Democracy Is on the Brink
When an Assassination Attempt on the Speaker of the House Barely Makes the News, Something’s Very Wrong
It was even more shocking and disturbing, in a way, than what happened the night before. Yesterday, there was an assassination attempt on the Speaker of the House. Her husband was attacked by a far-right extremist wielding a hammer, and underwent brain surgery. And today? American media failed to cover it properly.
If you opened the Washington Post or New York Times, the stories were below the fold. If you were just scanning the top stories, you wouldn’t even know that there’d been an assassination attempt on a major political figure, on the eve of a crucial election.
I put that in italics because even given America’s abject state, that is a gross, scandalous failure. It beggars belief that media wouldn’t cover a story like this properly, because of course, it should be the biggest one. So. Let’s note the deafening silence here first, and then discuss it a little bit, the meaning and implications of such a failure.
I’m going to put the central question very simply.
Why wasn’t the top headline in every newspaper and media outlet in America “Assassination attempt on Speaker of the House?” How could it really be anything else? And why is it that even when the story was covered, in the meagre ways it was, that wasn’t the headline at all — but stuff like “Pelosi’s Husband Attacked” was?
That isn’t the truth. The truth isn’t that Pelosi’s husband was “attacked.” This wasn’t a random mugging, or a street fight, or someone’s dog nipping at his heels. It was a) a politically motivated fanatic b) radicalized by the GOP c) its Big Lies in particular, from the election was stolen to Covid is a hoax and all the rest of them d) looking for the Speaker of the House, not her husband e) likely in order to kill her.
That is an assassination attempt. Not an “attack.” The way this story is being covered is dismal — and it tells us, too, why America still struggles with fascism even at this juncture, its democracy under threat.
After all, if the media won’t write the headline, “Assassination attempt on Speaker of the House” — and won’t put it at the top of the coverage, either — then, really, how can democracy survive? If violence of this kind — political, extreme, fanatical, targeted — is minimized, how can democracy survive?
This failure isn’t just about “the media,” which takes a lot of flak these days. It’s about the consequences, really. It’s about a general atmosphere of complacency. It can’t happen here. How does that attitude come to be?
If I was to ignore a certain subject, day after day, then my silence would also speak volumes. American media’s like that. There are certain words, phrases, angles, truths, it chooses to avoid, over and over again. And that sets cues. Cues which let fascism flourish.
Even in “third world countries,” this would have been the top story. Imagine if a left-wing fanatic had broken into some GOP leader’s house, and tried to kill them, beating their spouse with a hammer. Don’t you think that story would get top billing? So what’s going on here, exactly? Why does American media fail like this?
This is what happens when you won’t tell simple truths. There are three consequences. One, Big Lies flourish. Two, fanatics like fascists can set the terms. And three, society slowly loses it bearings, its norms, its sense of normalcy. And all that has happened in America. Let’s take those points one by one.
Remember when you and I used to warn that a coup attempt was coming? And then it happened. And even after it did, media called it a “riot.” It was left to the Jan 6th to establish the fact that it was a coup attempt, the culmination of a sophisticated plan. American media still won’t use those words, largely, though. So what “was” Jan 6th? Well, now it’s up for debate.
Because in America, institutions don’t establish truths the way that they should — and that leaves reality perpetually up for “debate,” even when facts are, well, facts. It’s all the more possible to say Jan 6th was a “riot” or an “outburst” or what have you — not a coup attempt, which is the fact of the matter, because media is trying to please “both sides.” And in doing so, truth dies a swift and sure death.
But truth is a fundamental value of democracy. Without it, the entire project begins to fall apart. Words cease to have meanings. As Orwell warned us, history gets rewritten. Events that happened are forgotten. The memory hole swallows up lessons to be learned, and the vicious cycle of regress takes hold. Truth matters, my friends.
And truth, sadly, exists. The American media believes that it’s job isn’t to establish truths. Its job is merely to hew a fine balance between what one side says, and the other shouts. It hopes that middle ground is “the truth.” But it isn’t. We all know that. Just because the idiots and lunatics and fanatics among us insist that the earth is flat and your blood makes you pure it doesn’t make it true. Truth is empirical, verifiable, real. Not just in physics, but in social affairs, too.
And when we don’t defend the truth, what happens? Big Lies flourish.
Why is it that Big Lies are so prevalent now? It isn’t just the noxious effects of social media, though they certainly play a role. It’s also because, as a precedent cause, media refuses to establish basic truths, and really drive them home. Was the election stolen? It’s one thing to cover the fact that there’s no evidence of voter fraud — and the media does that. But it’s another to say that “insisting an election was stolen when it didn’t go your way is textbook authoritarianism.” To cover that fact every day, and talk to people who’ve lived and studied it. That part’s what American media fails at, abjectly. And because it failed at that part, the process of radicalization goes on and on.
It’s not enough to debunk lies. That’s not the same thing as establishing Great Truths. American media doesn’t understand this, so let me continue my example. Debunking a Big Lie is to say there’s no evidence of voter fraud. So what? The fanatics will just keep on looking, or invent some. But to establish a Great Truth is a higher matter entirely: it’s to say that looking for voter fraud where none exists is abnormal, anti-democratic, authoritarian in itself.
That’s the part that American institutions fail at. And so an attitude of complacency is bred. Deliberately manufactured would be a better way to put it. Let me give you an example of that, too.
It was just a few short days ago that the New York Times ran a fawning profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s the kind of fanatic who’s said Nancy Pelosi should be executed for treason. And now an assassination attempt really happened.
Maybe you see the problem here.
There is a direct link here. To cover fanatics and extremists and bigots as if they’re great intellectuals — they did it with every kind of noxious Trumpist, from Bannon to neighborhood fascists — is to legitimize violence and hate.
And that is what is really going on here.
The poor beleaguered American media doesn’t know it, I think, but they are legitimizing violence and hate. They think they’re not — they think they’re doing a wonderful job. But the fact is that violence and hate are spreading precisely because they’re not doing nearly a good enough job. What they don’t cover gives a certain kind of license — hey, I guess it’s OK to be that kind of person. How they allow fascism to cover itself with the gloss of fawning profiles is another way this happens. And the way that Great Truths go by the wayside in the search for “balance” between two “sides” is the connecting factor.
You might think that’s harsh. But. When you don’t write headlines like “Assassination attempt on Speaker of the House”…what are you really doing? You’re legitimizing violence and hate. You’re saying this was an “attack” — implying something random, anomalous, could have happened to anyone, wrong time, wrong place, maybe even provoked. You’re not providing accurate context, accurate information, even an accurate description. And in precisely that way, violence and hate spread.
Let’s take the simplest example. Use of the N-word spiked after everyone’s least favorite billionaire took over Twitter. What is that, precisely? Read the American media, and you’d think it was “free speech.” But racial slurs are not “free speech.” Nor is any of this about “free speech.” Racial slurs are hate, and “free speech” is about government interference, not your so-called right to hate someone.
Hate is a real thing, a real problem, but you wouldn’t know it from reading American media. You wouldn’t know that much of the rest of the world bans hate speech precisely because it has consequences. It manifests in violence. Hate is the intent to hurt someone, to do harm them, and in that sense, it is a form of violence itself, because it begs and calls for the real thing. If I use the N-word, it’s not just a word. It’s a set of intentions about subjugation and domination, a context of violence that goes right down to enslavement and murder.
That is why we don’t say that word. Because as normal people, we ‘re morally repulsed by the idea of hurting others in this way.
So when media equate these two things — free speech and hate speech — it’s committing so many errors the mind boggles. An intellectual error, a sophomoric one: nobody’s “free speech” was ever at risk on Twitter, in precisely the same say that you can’t start hurling abuse at someone in a shopping mall, or risk being swiftly ejected. A moral error: free speech is about self-expression, but hate is a form of violence. And a political error: those of us against hate, and for “free speech” aren’t “two sides.” Limiting hate expands freedom, for obvious reasons, and nobody has absolute freedom in a shopping mall or in a public square or on Twitter, and if you think they do, go ahead and think about the many ways you’d call the cops on someone if they’d crossed certain lines. So many errors. Obvious ones.
Why do they keep making them?
The reason, ultimately, is that they’re afraid. They don’t want to deal with the mess of being shouted at and insulted and threatened by the fascists. They think of intimidation as “complaints.” But these are two different things, too. It’s not a legitimate complaint if some crackpot says “the N-word is free speech! I can say it anywhere I want! My kids should be able to say it at school!!” It’s intimidation. And yet the media is easily cowed by this sort of thing in America, which is sad to see.
Let me conclude with one final sad, disturbing example.
To this day, most of America’s mainstream media is reluctant to use the word fascism. Except in one consistently repeated case. To warn the average reader that this isn’t fascism. When it comes to saying it isn’t fascism, the American media’s comfortable using the term. But when it comes to warning that it is, well — then the word can’t be said. Even now. At this juncture. That’s ridiculous, absurd — and more than that, it’s a dead giveaway of where this all ends.
It ends in a bias for the fascists. Because people who believe in democracy and those who don’t are very different. We’re not out there threatening to kill anyone or shouting abuse at anyone or hating anyone or intending to harm anyone. But the fascist side is.
This is the fundamental difference, and American media still doesn’t seem to grasp it. Only one side consistently insists on hate, violence, harm, and brutality. Did you see Nancy Pelosi threatening to kill Marjorie Taylor Greene? Do you see much of anybody on the side of democracy harassing, intimidating, threatening violence? So when we equate these two sides, we’re making a tremendous mistake. One side is violent, and the other isn’t. And that being the case, they’ll try to intimidate us, and they’ll probably succeed, too, because we’re licensing them to do it.
None of this is good enough. Even in poor countries, the headline would have read: “Fascist attempts to assassinate Speaker of the House.” Or maybe: “Assassination attempt on Speaker sparked by growing fascist violence.” I could go on. Those are even truer levels of truth. And that is how you take the power out of Big Lies. You have to call them by their true name. Or else, because nothing happened, they just grow, from poison into catastrophe.
Umair
October 2022
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