Yglesias does another one of his "dog with a bone" things. He has a few overweening ideas that he crams everything into. One idea is that Democrats have a bunch of terrible, unpopular ideas and that this is why they don't win as many votes as they would if they just did things that he, Matthew Yglesias, thinks they should.
Now, there are certain issues where he's right. Defund the Police and Open Borders are awful political messaging. Of course, Biden has explicitly called for increased funding for police and we are aggressively detaining people at the border. One of the infuriating trends is that the large number of detentions at the border are seized on by Republicans as examples of Biden not...enforcing the border? How does that work?
The idea that Biden isn't enforcing the border because of all the people we are detaining at the border is misinformation. It's not understanding the cause and effect cycle. You could argue that migrants believe that Trump being out of office would allow them to cross the border with ease, but Biden is actively enforcing the border, so it's their error, not one that Biden is making.
Yglesias is conflating misinformation - mistaken assumptions based on faulty reasoning or incomplete information with disinformation - the willful manipulation of truth and falsehoods.
Paul Campos is one of many to look at a new study that suggests that watching Fox News is not misinformation but active disinformation. The piece he's looking at notes the effect of presenting facts to someone but the cognitive dissonance is so great that they retreat further into their delusions, in this case the idea that the election was stolen from Trump.
However, removing Fox News from someone's viewing diet and making them watch CNN can actually change their positions. Actively saying that migrant caravans are full of MS13 gang members is disinformation. It's being aggressively pushed to make the geriatric Fox News addict clutch their pearls and worry about the CRT that's being fed into their grandkids' veins like heroin. In fact, all that CRT shit is active disinformation.
Put another way, when you read a story about a car theft ring in your neighborhood and conclude that crime is at an all time high, you are engaged with misinformation. Crime is up, but not at an all time high. It feels like crime is exploding, but it's really just a marginal increase. Your perspective skews your view of the facts. When someone says that the Biden Administration is the most corrupt in history because of Hunter Biden's laptop, that is active disinformation. It's provably false - Hunter Biden is not a governmental official - and pushed for a partisan advantage: to negate the very real corruption of the Trump years.
Finally, there is the very real axis of disinformation between Fox, Russia and the Patrimonial League. We know that Russia spread disinformation in both the 2016 Brexit votes and American elections. Disinformation is part of their intelligence operations since forever. As George Kennan noted in 1946, "(Russian) propaganda is inherently negative." It exploits divisions in their opponents and seeks to exacerbate them. A divided enemy is a weak enemy.
What is new is that "conservatives" have embraced this disinformation environment. Trump lied about basically everything and paid no political price for it. Why shouldn't they follow that example? In fact the entire anti-vax movement is built upon active disinformation coupled with popular misinformation. Tell me what Ron DeSantis is doing that is based on a reasoned understanding of objective reality.
When Obama talks about disinformation and Yglesias says this is him just "coping" with why Democrats aren't more popular, he's unwittingly giving an example of exactly what the difference is between being misinformed and disinformed.
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