This is a reasonably interesting (if slightly long) thread about someone who tried, years ago, to engage with a former friend who was slipping into the Rightist disinformation universe. Similarly, we have a piece on Robert Kennedy, Jr. embracing anti-Semitic frames to talk about Covid.
Is there lunacy on the Left? Sure. Anarchists, for one. Maybe Marianne Williamson. I'm not evens sure RFK qualifies as "on the Left" at this point. But, yes, there are voices - especially when you go REALLY far to the Left - that are engaged in quackery and misinformation. What differentiates the Right from the Left is that this sort of deranged untruthfulness is the standard of discourser.
Paul Campos wrote a piece asking "Can Donald Trump Lie?" This is a point I've been making since 2015. Trump isn't a liar, exactly, because a liar knows what the truth is and violates that understanding. Trump is a bullshitter, who has no use for the truth or lack of it in any form. He says whatever he wants to or thinks will accrue him an advantage in the moment.
The whole Madisonian system of checks and balances, separation of powers relies on a political discourse that has some fundamental basis in facts. It's not and never has been perfect. In fact, that's the point of separating powers. If one side errs terribly, the other side can be a corrective. What we have now, though, is a movement that is fundamentally divorced from objective reality pretty much all the time. Even when they are truth-adjacent about crime or border crossings, they are still wrong enough to warp the discussion.
When Richard Hofstadter wrote The Paranoid Style, he was describing a cyclical movement in American politics that ebbed and flowed but never left. The question is, how do we force this objectively false movement back to the margins?
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