MADNESS: Blue America spots the LIES!

THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2024

The joy of fighting words: Perhaps surprisingly, there aren't a whole lot of "fighting words" in the verses of The Iliad.

Within the modern American legal context, what the heck are "fighting words?" The leading authority on the concept offers the following thumbnail:

Fighting words

Fighting words are spoken words directed to the person of the hearer which would have a tendency to cause acts of violence by the person to whom, individually, the remark is addressed. The term fighting words describes words that when uttered inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.

The "fighting words doctrine," in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. It held that "insulting or 'fighting words', those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" are among the "well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem."

Such automatically "insulting" terms are remarkably rare in The Iliad, an ancient poem of war. As we've noted, the lengthy, fictional siege of Troy was a war between two different civilizations, with the Achaeans (Argives, Myceneans, Greeks) venturing to Asia Minor to try to get "Helen, radiance of women" back.

For those present at the scene, there was little question which side you were on—which side you wanted to win. There was little need to stir up partisan juices.

Helen, radiance of women, was now living with her second husband inside the towering walls of Troy. The Achaeans wanted her back. 

As far as we know, the Trojans are never shown considering any such action. And so it came.

(In a somewhat similar way, our only slightly more modern nation starts next week with the trial of a former president concerning Stormy Daniels, our nation's most famous "porn star." 

(That president is accused of having consensual intercourse with Daniels on one lone occasion, back in 2006, ten years before he ran for the office. Perhaps somewhat comically, Blue America's pundits agree to refer to this one alleged event as "an affair."

(In what strikes us as a constant embarrassment, Blue America's major pundits go on TV and say that voters needed to know about that allegation before they could know how to vote in November 2016.

(Such pundits operate under a hard tribal law—they repeat the term "porn star" as frequently as possible, Would voters have needed to know if the former president stood accused of having consensual relations, on one occasion ten years before, with a corporate accountant? 

(Presumably, many fewer would care. It was all about the control of women back when men fought on the plains outside Troy. Given the tiny parameters of our limited human minds, it works in somewhat similar ways in the modern context now. Just watch Gutfeld! any night if you want to see a more aggressive, even stupider form of the gender political rollback by the underfed modern humans who want the ancient order retained, or watch Eyes Wide Shut again.)

(It's still all about who's zoomin' who inside our small human brains.)

Back to the fighting words! The Achaeans wanted Helen back. Troy's King Priam loved his daughter-in-law of ten years, and the Trojans wanted to keep her.

Everyone knew the siege would continue until one side or the other won. There was no need to stir tribal hatreds. People knew which side they were on.

In our modern pair of Americas, the laws of war are different. Members of the two Americas live on the same streets in the same towns and show up for the same jobs. When the martial spirit flares, we need to find ways to heighten the eternal human desire to split ourselves into angry tribes so we can march off to a brutal war.

And so the fighting words come out, as one did, just yesterday, in the Washington Post. We refer to the start of this analysis piece by Kessler at al., in which a Rubicon seems to have been crossed:

Which Trump lies stick? Republicans believe some falsehoods more than they did six years ago, our poll finds.

Fictions, misleading claims, wild exaggerations, lies—former president Donald Trump dispenses untruths of one variant or another relentlessly. The falsehoods range from the inconsequential, like the crowd size at his inauguration, to the democracy-shaking, like the “stolen” 2020 election.

With Trump barreling toward November, when Americans will have a chance to choose him to lead the nation again, The Washington Post Fact Checker sought to get a sense of the staying power of his lies—whether people are more or less likely to believe them over time and which lies prove the stickiest—as well as measure the value Americans place in a president’s honesty, however they define it.

Midway through Trump’s presidency, in 2018, we documented through a poll that most Americans, including Republicans, did not believe many of his most repeated claims.

A fresh Washington Post-Schar School poll shows that remains largely the case, with an average of 28 percent of Americans believing Trump’s false claims tested in the poll.

But Trump has made significant inroads in convincing Republicans that his lies are the truth. That applies to election integrity especially—the basis of Trump’s “big lie.”

"Even more significant, Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself," the three authors write as they continue. At that point, their use of the terms of everyday language has become almost wholly incoherent.

The headline spoke about Donald Trump's "falsehoods." In the body of the piece, the language quickly turned to "lies," then moved back to "untruths." 

Falsehoods, untruths, false claims—and lies! It's as we noted yesterday:

For Glenn Kessler's Washington Post, that seems to mean that a Rubicon has finally been crossed. And yes—terms like "lying" and "lies" function as a species of fighting word within the modern political context.

Were we omniscient like the great god Zeus, how many of Donald J. Trump's (many) "false claims" would qualify as "lies?" It isn't easy to know such things, no matter how tempting it may be to pretend that "falsehoods," "untruths" and "lies" are all the same kettle of fish.

Over the centuries—over the millennia—speakers of the world's many languages developed the semantic distinctions which let them speak in a more intelligent way about the real events which really take place in the real human world. 

Today, the Post had decided to pleasure its readers with the promiscuous use of a specialized term—a term which provokes the kind of reaction, within a political discourse, which is recognized under constitutional law with respect to the insults delivered by "fighting words."

Instead of "using our words" to report what we actually know, we turn to this fighting word. It's a deeply childish turn of mind—but it helps us create the onset to war between our Red and Blue Americas, a pathway no one needed to take back when a conglomeration of angry white males fought on the plains outside Troy.

At the Post, they're no longer "using their words" as carefully as they did in the past. Instead, they seem to have decided to offer a form of pleasure to their audience, 

The term "honesty" plays the same role in that childish opening passage—a passage to which Kessler has apparently agreed. 

How often is Donald Trump being "dishonest" when he makes some sort of false statement? Once again, it's quite hard to say. 

In our reading of the Post's analysis piece, its reporters have a hard enough time discerning when some of Trump's statements are actually false without providing themselves the pleasure of deciding what may have been going on inside his mind—a mind which 37 medical health professionals have said, in a major best-selling book, may be in the grip of a (severe) mental illness.

When is Donald Trump "lying?" Kessler and his colleagues don't exactly know. But the assertion that someone is lying tends to end all political discourse. It acts as a fighting word within the political context.

So, of course, does the claim that members of the other tribe are racist, misogynist, bigoted (and on and on and on). We'll postpone till tomorrow this recent attempt by the PBS NewsHour to come to terms with those ubiquitous fighting words—to tell us Where Those Wild Things Are. For today, let's look at the instinct to trigger modern political war, as that instinct was put on display in some of the comments to Kevin Drum's recent post about NPR.

Like Kevin, we almost never listen to NPR. We have no pre-existing view as to how its journalism currently works.

When Uri Berliner published an essay accusing the org of a type of political bias, we didn't have much to go on. But at one somewhat comical point, Berliner authored this claim:

BERLINER (4/9/24): For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking. 

I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!” 

[...]

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None. 

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star. 

Stating the obvious, we have no way of knowing if any of those statements are accurate. We don't know if Berliner's reported census created an 87-0 count. Assuming that's what actually happened, we can't verify Berliner's account of staff reaction inside the D.C. headquarters. 

For the record, Berliner says, early on, that he himself "eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly." 

We can't verify those claims either, but they may seem to suggest that Berliner himself was one of the NPR 87—though some commenters to Kevin's post aggressively pushed back against any such thought, name-calling Berliner as an obvious right-wing hack as they bowed to the ancient impulse to create a state of war between the Very Good People (Us) and the Very Bad.

This war will be, and is, an internal war within a pre-existing nation state. It's being promoted inside Red America, and inside Blue America too.

Some commenters inside Drum's post were eager to use even harsher fighting words against their fellow commenters. We refer to insults coming from the edges of Blue America in ways which are every bit as stupid as the garbage peddled on Gutfeld! each night, possibly even more so.

We humans are not "the rational animal," except in limited contexts. We long for division into tribes. Also, we know what we know, even when we may not exactly know it.

This comment came from a good, decent person early on in the Comments wars:

COMMENTER: I largely quit listening to NPR years ago. Two much "both sides do it" and a serious lack of insightful reporting. It took them four years to use the L-word (LIE!) in describing Trump's claims. They reported Trump's claim that he would be meeting with union workers in Detroit when he was actually meeting with paid actors at a non-union plant. From their reporting it is clear they view Biden's age as a greater existential threat than Trump’s dictatorial ambitions. Like the NYT, their inevitable lead is "How does this hurt Jor Biden."

The commenter—a good, decent person—seems to have longed for a type of moral certainty and for a clear moral division. He wanted to hear the term LIE. "Flatly false, repeated misstatement" simply wouldn't do.

Concerning the way NPR "reported Trump's claim that he would be meeting with union workers in Detroit when he was actually meeting with paid actors at a non-union plant," here's the transcript from Morning Edition on the morning after the visit, whose location had been shrouded in mystery during the previous week:

GONYEA (9/28/23): The event was at a small automotive supplier, a factory in Macomb County that's half-hour north of the city or so. Trump did not talk about the [Republican Party] debate at all. He said he was there with a vision for a revival of American nationalism. He accused President Biden of killing the auto industry. He promised to put tariffs in place to protect that industry.

It's notable, Steve, that he came here with a message for UAW members who are on strike, and this was a non-union shop. And over and over, he returned to the ongoing transition to electric vehicles, saying it would be such a failure, that it would completely wipe out the industry. This is where he mentioned the strike:

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

INSKEEP: OK. You mentioned the United Auto Workers who are on strike. He referred to striking workers. Were they listening?

GONYEA: The room was full, maybe 500 people or so—a rough guess. There were UAW members there. They stood on risers in the front on either side of the stage. Still, they were nowhere near the majority in the room—maybe 1 in 5 or so.

No reporting can ever be perfect. Our recollections can be faulty or limited too. When our brains instruct us to move toward a state of war, we may be inclined to remember the reporting we didn't especially like. We ourselves have sometimes "remembered" reporting which never took place at all! 

(That's why we try to check.)

Do our brains instruct us to move toward war? Fighting words help us do that! They make us feel moral and good, and they bring discourse to a halt.

Early in the feature film Gone With The Wind, the silly, cavorting Southern boys are trying to impress Miss Scarlett on the staircase outside Tara. Miss Scarlett was their Helen of Troy. (Their "21-year-old intern," to adopt a bungled but thrilling formulation our journalists ran with for years.)

Boldly, they tell Miss Scarlett what they plan to do to "the Yankees." Midway through the film, the camera pulls back from many acres of land in Atlanta, where many acres of Southern boys are stretched out on litters.

Their fighting words felt good at the time. Now they were dying or dead.

That one good and decent person wanted to hear the word LIES. Other comments to Kevin's post are actively poisonous—and ugly and deeply stupid. We're speaking here of poisonous comments which are delivered from Blue America's side of the aisle.

We'll offer an example or two tomorrow, reminding you that the human brain is still inclined to march off to war, even all these thousands of years after the death and dying which took place on the plains outside Troy.

Our brains instruct us to create two warring sides. Fighting words make us feel very good, and they help us accomplish that task!

Did Trump have sex one time in 2006! Inquiring minds need to know!

Could this all be a form of madness? As always, you decide!

Tomorrow: PBS spots the racists

This afternoon: Ingraham spots Biden's "lies"