Yes, George Washington had a pet T-Rex./Image: Courtesy of Amazon.
Greetings, Alt-reading lovers! It’s a chilly, overcast day here outside the Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) offices–even an inch of snow on the ground. The perfect weather for getting a fire going in the SYRW library’s fireplace, donning some warm clothes, and pouring a snifter of brandy to peruse the many fascinating titles therein. As Thomas Carlyle said, “In books lies the soul of the universe entire.” This is especially fortuitous for us on the right wing, as we seem to have misplaced our souls. Oh, the things you misplace as you age! Now then, let’s see, what bound compendium of insight are you taking a gander today? Oh! Ididot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free! One of our favorites!
We’d like to review three of the main points Pierce’s book makes, summarized by him and excerpted in quotes below, briefly riff on them,, and then add a couple of our own.
Related: How three products-for-sale con bring home to your kids that you value guns over them.
There’s No Business Like Sales-Business
“Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. The willingness of a lot of people to be seduced by some argument we put forth has to give it some credence, doesn’t it? Let’s take, for example, the completely baseless, actually opposite-of-true idea that the FBI and the Department of Justice employ countless policial partisans with a bone to pick with President Donald Trump and that they have no interest in simply getting to the truth of a matter, laid forth in flimsy non-detail on a continuous loop on Fox News these days. That networks hammering away at this point has brought on board the anti-Mueller train lawmakers, conservative pundits, and average citizens, They’re tweeting, Facebook-sharing, and forwarding via email the idea that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the nature of Trump and his presidential campaign to Russia in regards to the 2016 election and beyond is nothing more than a witch hunt.
Gimme a Hive Mind High-FIve
“Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.”
Again, those of us on the right of the political spectrum, like us here at SYRW and you, our dear readers, we say, “You got that right, Chuckie!”
The Internet has introduced us, thankfully for those of us who hate “elitism” and the pesky idea, in the past, that people who claimed to be experts on any given topic needed editors, expert peers, and people with a deep knowledge of the subject they claimed to be experts on, to vouch for the validity of listening to what they had to say. No more, thanks to the Internet. If you can throw up a website, upload a YouTube video, or record a podcast, you take on the impression of “expert.
We at SYRW, given our right-wing nut job-iness, make copious use of the idea of Hive Mind. This concept holds that the adherence to an opinion by a large (though that’s a relative word) group of people can give that opinion some of its persuasive power. And, as Pierce points out in the above quote from our Reading for today, if people really, really, really feel strongly about something, like Pizzagate, for example, then that lends it added, powerful credence.
Turn Up the Volume, Would Ya’?
“Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.”
Enter Fox News. We would be surprised if that network has not bought stock in Halls throat lozenges, given the ear-blistering volume at which its pundits speak, their lack of self-awareness, and giant heads egging them on in their vociferous pursuits. It’s not just the volume that we so love about our dear network, is it, readers? Now it’s the gaudy–loud–graphics–the silently screaming chyron racing by with breaking news at all times below.
And: Three right-wing revivals of classic stage plays are set for summer debuts in D.C.
Then there’s the AV of social media uploads, video sharing websites, and all manner of “information”-disseminating apps, which often play automatically whether we like it or not when we’re online.
Linguist Herbert Paul Grice developed three maxims of language use that enable communication between humans. One of them is the Maxim of Quality, “where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence,” according to sas.upenn.edu.
Despite the Era of Trump, when the truth is simply what anyone wants to believe, human language still functions based on this maxim (and Grice’s others). It then becomes not so hard to see why it takes very little to get people on board with a loudly-delivered opinion. We might think, “Why would Tomi Lahren says this if it weren’t true.” Sadly, there are lots of reasons.
Rinse and Repeat
Another rhetorical strategy the right has recently borrowed from the advertising industry is the idea that what the human mind initially perceives as a, it can eventually accept as true. This is through simple, dogged repetition of the lie. Hence, when Jeanine Pirro first tells us Obama still hasn’t provided proof that he was born in the United States, we might initially not believe her, because Obama has done so, and she’s lying. But Pirro’s repeated spouting of this lie becomes believed by the mind.
Love at First Read
Not the least among the reasons we count Pierce’s book among our favorite here in the Readings Department of SYRW is that the right in the U.S. is exclusively responsible, by our estimation, for making idiocy a laudatory attribute for people to cultivate. This is how and why we advance conspiracy theories, fail to provide logical support for our arguments, and use appeals to the most basic of human instincts to keep people on our side in our cultural war against the Liberal Left!
As Pierce writes, “If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right, that’s because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and succeeded very well.
Also: Trump Team members write Percent Poems about themselves.
Until next time, then, readers, go forth and be uninformed–but vocal about it!
We at Spread Your Right Wings generally don’t like people, the Internet, or interacting with people on the Internet. Seek out someone—in person—to talk to and laugh with about this article. Check back with us as we continue to mock the right wing. Follow us on Twitter at @worstaltlife join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @worstaltlife. If you simply must get in touch with us, DM us through our Facebook group. Also, please, please see the disclaimer in our About section.
© 2018 Akbar Khan
