POLITICS

Republicans Have Mastered of the Art of False Equivalency

Even so-called ‘sensible Republicans’ use both-sides-ism to misinform their base. And most of the time, the media goes along.

A few years before the Trump era, I found myself drinking a beer and watching television with an older male relative who happens to be white. Everyone else was gone shopping, so it was just the two of us. We’ve always had a cordial relationship, so we engaged in the usual small talk as we watched cable news.

At some point, a news story popped up that mentioned the southern border and immigration. As soon as I heard it, I tensed up. I had a pretty strong suspicion my television companion was a Republican. I noticed his reaction to the story and could tell he had something to say. After a few seconds, he could no longer hold his thoughts.

“I just don’t want them coming here voting illegally,” he said to no one in particular.

The moment I saw the immigration story on television, I mentally began the ‘what if’ scenarios common in family settings when politics or religion arises. In this case, I decided it was safe to respond. “How would they be able to come here and vote?” I asked, trying to make my comment as non-threatening as possible. As he thought about my question, I decided to continue.

“What I mean is, they’d have to register to vote and to do that, they’d need a fake birth certificate and maybe a fake social security card. Why would somebody that is here illegally want to do all that?” My relative pondered for a few seconds before saying, “Huh. I guess I hadn’t thought of that.”

I think the story illustrates the way folks with conservative leanings buy into misleading narratives.

For example, according to a University of Oxford study, 55 percent of all junk or ‘fake news’ traffic on Twitter can be linked to Trump supporters. For three months in 2018, researchers with the university’s Computational Propaganda Research Project scrutinized the habits of 13,477 politically active US Twitter users and 47,719 public Facebook pages. This is what the study found, as reported in the Huffington Post: