hate, misinformation, and you

Okay, so I’m finally feeling an irrepressible need to weigh in on the whole Van Jones thing.  Mostly cause I got a bunch of hostile/abusive twitter comments from a bunch of people I don’t even know. This (1) pissed me off something awful, and (2) made me realize that this is how it happens.  This is how they hounded out Van Jones – the most mainstream environmental justice leader in the country, this is how they’re taking over our national dialogue, this is how they’re going to tear down everything that I believe in and leave me living in a soot-stained land full of people dying of poverty and preventable disease.

I wasn’t even going to write a response to this after Josh Russell wrote such an excellent piece, not to mention the extensive coverage over at It’s Getting Hot in Here. But anger makes me stupid, and distracts me from all those other things I ought to be doing. People, it’s time we take a stand.

First, try reading this Gawker piece about Jones’ resignation and the “right-wing information delivery process”. Be sure to watch the ‘assholes’ video – put together to scare conservatives, mind you – if you haven’t seen it before, and be sure to pay particular attention if you are a Jew, a woman, a black person, or know the racial connotations of the word ‘uppity’.

And for both his activism and his charm he was rewarded with a White House job with the Council on Environmental Quality. He was tasked with making sure stimulus money for green jobs actually went to green jobs. And he’s a great person to have in this administration—he is a genuine environmentalist and the only special interest he’s beholden to is poor people. He is the sort of person we were all praying Obama would bring with him to DC, instead of Larry Summers.

No shit.

To understand why and how he’s being demonized, we have to look at the way information and misinformation makes it way from crazy blogs to crazy pundits to crazy citizens to, suddenly, the non-crazy regular media.

The “why” is simple: he is a genuine left-wing liberal with a White House job. He is black. He used to be radical, and probably still has radical sympathies (you know, caring about poor black people and all that). He is, in other words, fucking terrifying, if you frame his story right.

To understand how this fundamentally decent human being has been painted as the next best thing to Stalin, please take the time to read the whole article, maybe with a cup of tea and a breath mint because it will make you a little bit vomity in your mouth.

Here’s the thing: the information delivery process of the left will never be as effective, as cutting, as devastating, as the right’s.  This is why: WE DON’T LIE. This is the problem. (Let’s set aside the whole race-baiting issue, I can’t even deal with that right now.) They win because they lie, and people aren’t smart enough to see it.  Or rather, I think the vast majority are smart enough to see it, but have been so effectively trained not to ask questions, that it becomes impossible for them to find their own truth, and they rely on freaky-eyed McCarthyesque zealot lunatics like Glenn Beck to do it for them.

I don’t know how to counteract the lying.  Trying to have an intelligent conversation with people who think communists are hiding under the bed (and in the government! oh noes!) and genuinely believe that the Drug Czar is part of some Russkie plot… is probably a lot like having a conversation with a die hard 9/11 Truther. Funny, probably, interesting, maybe, but also a waste of time.  The trick, I guess, is to find the people who are happy to ask questions, who really want to know what’s going on, but have so far been too sleepy to do it.  People on the left, proud liberals, those who want peace and justice and think that no-one should have to die because they cannot afford healthcare, or go bankrupt because they are sick, in other words, the YOU of my subject line, it is time to get up and do something.  We can counteract hate and division and bigotry with tolerance, we can counteract lies with truth.  And patience, probably.  The bad guys won this battle, yes, it’s true.  But the war of ideas – the struggle to heal our country – is so far from over.  And we’re going to fucking win.