On Friday, in the middle of the night, a 42-year-old man broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Where is Nancy?” David DePape yelled. His intended target was in Washington, DC, but her husband, Paul Pelosi, was home. Pelosi managed to get into the bathroom and call 911. The police arrived at 2:27 a.m., in time to witness DePape assaulting the 82-year-old Pelosi with a hammer. DePape is said to have also had a second hammer, along with a roll of tape, white rope, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties. His plan, he reportedly told authorities, was to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage; he’d let her go if she told “the truth,” and break her kneecaps if she “lied.”
The reality of what happened seems clear: A man consumed by conspiracy theories, ranging from the 2020 election to Covid vaccines, targeted the female speaker of the House, a political figure who had been long demonized by the right. It looks like violent rhetoric, alongside rampant misinformation, led to actual violence. But on a corner of the internet—the right-wing echo chamber—the most rational explanation for events was quickly drowned out by wild and reckless claims. And there’s potential for the conspiracies swirling in that chamber to get an even bigger audience now that Elon Musk is running Twitter.
On Sunday morning, around 8:15 a.m., Musk responded to one of Hillary Clinton’s tweets by sharing a story from the Santa Monica Observer, a site “notorious for publishing false news,” as the Los Angeles Times has described it. The story Musk shared, according to The Washington Post, “unspooled a lurid tale about nudists and a tryst gone terribly wrong” and “speculated about Pelosi’s medical condition and the security at the home he shares with the House speaker in San Francisco’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood.”
Such is the trajectory of information today: The world’s richest man, using a global communications platform he just bought for $44 billion, promotes a story featuring baseless claims to his more than 112 million followers. Musk wasn’t alone in muddying the waters around the Pelosi assault, with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas using Twitter to cast doubt on the motivation for the attack, thus entering the murky post-truth zone where the GOP base operates in its own alternate reality. (Meanwhile, DePape faces several state charges, including attempted murder, residential burglary, and assault with a deadly weapon, to which he’s pleaded not guilty. He’s also facing federal charges, including attempted kidnapping, to which he has not yet entered a plea in court.)
Perhaps it was NBC’s Ben Collins who said it best earlier this week: “Reality can’t even exist anymore because it cannot catch up to lies on the internet.”
Many Republican candidates running for the office this midterm cycle have embraced this post-truth ethos, with the majority of those on the ballot this Tuesday having denied or questioned Joe Biden’s victory two years ago. For Republican candidates, it seems, there’s increasingly no incentive to tell the truth.
Take a recent Senate debate in Ohio, where this post-truthfulness was on full display. “We are running for the United States Senate,” Representative Tim Ryan, the Democratic candidate, said onstage. “This is the highest office you could get in this country except for president. And he’s running around backing these extremists. The most extreme people in the country. A guy who denied Sandy Hook. He’s like, ‘No, he’s credible.’”
J.D. Vance, Ryan’s Trump-backed Republican opponent, shot back: “This is a complete fabrication. I never said that.” To which Ryan responded, “You’re on tape, man. It’ll be like 30 minutes, and we’re all going to know you’re lying.”
Not only is there video of Vance defending Alex Jones, but there’s also a tweet: “Alex Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow. One of them is censored by the regime. The other promoted by it.” But it doesn’t matter in a post-truth party because Vance’s supporters will believe what he tells them and not what is actually true. Trump may have primed the pump for all this with his relentless attacks on the mainstream media, giving Republicans a better chance at skirting accountability this cycle.
Perhaps the most absurd case of Republicans operating in a post-truth environment is the lie about kitty litter being provided to children who identify as cats. The kitty litter story seems to have gained traction at a Michigan Midland Public Schools board of education meeting when an attendee suggested there were kids identifying as cats (furries) and that these furries were given litter boxes to use in the bathrooms. The story was quickly debunked by Michael E. Sharrow, the superintendent of Midland Public Schools. But in the post-truth ecosystem, what’s true doesn’t necessarily matter if you get enough people to believe the lie.
The kitty litter story has been popular on the stump this year, with NBC News finding at least 20 conservative candidates and elected officials having pushed it. At a campaign event on October 27, Republican Don Bolduc, who’s running for the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire, shared the bogus story, saying, “And get this, get this, they’re putting litter boxes, right? Litter boxes for that…. These are the same people that are concerned about spreading germs. Yet they let children lick themselves and then touch everything. And they’re starting to lick each other.”
None of this is true, all of it has been debunked, but does it matter if a critical mass of voters believes it? New Hampshire could provide a test case, as Bolduc, who has also pushed 2020 election lies, is now running neck and neck with incumbent Senator Maggie Hassan.
This shift into unreality will ripple out in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways. DePape hoped that the House speaker being “wheeled into Congress” would serve as a warning. This is the kind of unreality that cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote about in his 1981 treatise, Simulacra and Simulation: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” We are swimming in a sea of content, but it’s being rejected by a segment of the population because it just doesn’t fit into their reality. In a post-truth world, everything, including fact, becomes subject to opinion. Kids aren’t identifying as cats and Paul Pelosi wasn’t having some kind of love affair with David DePape. Sometimes, actually, most of the time, the most obvious answer is correct.
Molly Jong-Fast
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