Lamentable Lessons of the Pelosi Attack

How the reality-based center-right inadvertently runs interference for delusion-mongers (like Donald Trump)

Here I am, back at it, now feeling like I have a cold after having endured a week-long bout of the flu. Progress!

In my brief “Convalescence Continues” post the other day, I mentioned that if I’d felt better over the weekend, I might have written a post about Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in Sunday’s presidential election in Brazil. I’m not going to do that now, because I don’t have enough to say about it. I have so little to say about it, in fact, that I can put it all in this and the following paragraph: I'm glad Bolsonaro lost, but I'm not hugely thrilled about Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s win, because he's far to my left and “Operation Car Wash” was a pretty huge corruption scandal that took place on his watch, even if he was unfairly prosecuted for it.

I’d also add that I'm pleased Bolsonaro hasn't been following Trump's temper-tantrum playbook by crying “election fraud” about his relatively narrow 2-point loss. But the unrest being fomented by some of his supporters around the country is troubling and could get worse, especially if Bolsonaro never explicitly acknowledges his defeat. It's good that the military has so far refused to get involved but bad that a peaceful transition of power in Brazil is a function of what the military does or doesn’t do. Such is life in a country with a history of military coups—which is a very good reason to avoid having one in the first place.

The Pelosi Attack

The subject of my post today is something closer to home. You might notice a mournful tone to what I have to say. That’s a tone I first started adopting in my columns at The Week from time to time during the worst early days of the pandemic, when it felt a little like the social world was breaking down and there was nothing to be done about it. A similar sense of futility informs my analysis today, which goes a long way toward explaining why I’ve gone back to that tone in this post. (I’m sure my still lower-than-normal energy and personal emotional struggles of the past month are contributing to it, too.)

As I’m sure you’re all well aware, a deranged man broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last week, hoping to kidnap her and possibly break her kneecaps. But she wasn’t at home, so the man attacked Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband Paul instead, striking him in the head with a hammer and injuring him badly enough that he required surgery. He remains in intensive care in a San Francisco hospital as I write this on Tuesday afternoon.

I don’t want to overstate the significance of this event. The United States is a violent place. The alleged perpetrator of this deed certainly sounds like he was mentally ill. His motives certainly seem political and aligned with the right, but he wasn’t a member of an extremist militia or a paramilitary group like the Proud Boys. He was apparently some lone guy acting like a lunatic, as so many people in our troubled society so regularly do, often with weaponry far more lethal than a hammer.

Still, there was something noteworthy about how this event—or rather, how response to this event—played out that, I fear, makes it a harbinger of far worse things to come.

Miasmic Politics

When something bad happens in the public life of a healthy society, the normal response, regardless of the political commitments of those involved in the event, is to acknowledge its badness, express condolences for those who suffered as a result of it, and pledge support for the effort to determine how it happened, punish those responsible, and ensure the incident isn’t repeated. This is how the United States, as a healthy society, functioned until quite recently. It’s how some public figures in our society, even otherwise sharply partisan public figures, respond even now.

But such responses can no longer be counted on.

Because some journalists associated with the center-left treated the attack on Paul Pelosi as an expression of increasing political violence emanating from the right, figures on the center-right spent considerable time over the following days hitting back against the charge. I even played a small part in these arguments, since I largely agree with Erick Erickson’s contention, in a 16-tweet-long Twitter thread, that many mainstream journalists are guilty of operating with double standards on these issues. Violence with right-wing motives gets treated as evidence of an ominous trend while violence with left-wing motives gets treated as a fluke with little wider significance.

As I said, I agree that this happens, and I made this point myself on Twitter.

The problem is that while we were having this relatively genteel debate in one corner of social media, in another corner a far more poisonous exchange of ideas was taking place. It started within a few hours of the Pelosi break-in and assault—conspiratorial rumors about how the perpetrator of the attack was actually Paul Pelosi’s gay lover, that a window at the house was broken from the inside, indicating the assailant was invited inside by the ostensible victim, and so forth.

So while, on one level, the reasonable center-right was having a sometimes heated but primarily evidence-based argument about media bias and fairness, the unreasonable right (including the former president of the United States and the new owner of Twitter) was spreading a miasma of lies designed to take the heat off of the right for any complicity in the attack, to blame the violence on the victim, and to turn the entire event into a salacious joke. We know it’s all nonsense, by the way, because it’s contradicted in every respect by the criminal complaint against the alleged assailant, including his own confession.

A Two-Track Feedback Loop

Where, I wonder, is Erickson’s 16-tweet-long Twitter thread about his allies on the right spewing epistemic sludge into the political culture of the country? I don’t mean to single Erickson out for special abuse here. This is a sin of omission rather than one of commission, and he’s far from standing alone. While Never-Trump former Republicans have been doing what they always do, pointing out the latest degradations on the Trumpian right, elected officeholders and conservative writers who want to remain in good standing with their colleagues have stayed quiet.

But not just quiet.

With exquisite timing on Monday afternoon, the right jumped on an investigative story published in The Intercept regarding conversations between Department of Homeland Security officials and executives at social media companies about efforts to police “disinformation.” Ben Shapiro spoke for many on the right in describing this as “perhaps the biggest story of the year” because it provided definitive evidence of attempts by the left to censor the right.

Now, as it was with the issue of left-leaning journalists giving perhaps outsized attention to violence tracible to conservatives, I share some of the right’s concerns about private and public efforts to regulate content online. But where is the acknowledgement among these right-leaning critics that conspiratorial bullshit emanating from others on the right is an actual problem and is, in fact, happening right now when it comes to the attack on Paul Pelosi?

That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, because we all know the answer is that such an acknowledgement is nowhere to be found.

What we end up with, instead, is something like the following two-track feedback loop: A lunatic engages in an act of freelance political violence that’s partially inspired by right-wing conspiracies; the center-left calls out the right for fomenting this violence; the center-right responds by accusing the center-left (with some justice) of double standards; while that debate is going on, the delusion-mongering right floats boatloads of new conspiratorial nonsense, which the center-right ignores; before long, the next lunatic ends up inspired to new violence by the latest pile of epistemic excrement.

I’m not sure this post ended up in the mournful place I expected it to. That must be because I’m still capable of mustering up some anger in response to what we’re seeing on the right. But here’s where the despair comes in: I haven’t got the foggiest idea how to short-circuit this two-track feedback loop. Which means we may well be stuck going round and round, sinking lower and lower with each cycle, with no bottom under our feet.