Thomas Klikauer for BuzzFlash: Manufacturing Right-Wing Violence
June 22, 2022
By Thomas Klikauer
One of the most illuminating examples of how to manufacture right-wing mob violence came on the 6th January 2021, when a right-wing mob hyped up by Trump attacked the Capitol in Washington, DC. Trump's supporters sought to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They attacked the joint session of Congress assembled to count electoral votes formalizing Biden’s victory.
The Capitol was locked down. Five people died. Many people were injured, including 138 police officers. Perhaps a little unknown fact to many: four police officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.
In any intellectual examination of how right-wing violence is manufactured, one might look back to the year 1964 and the warning in Hofstadter’s seminal essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter argued that paranoid conspiracy fantasies are a key ingredient to right-wing violence. And indeed, Trump fancies conspiracy theories, or better, conspiratorial hallucinations. These range from from birther to the stolen election. Yet, his conspiracy theories are not theories. They are conspiracy fantasies at best.
As we know from recent experiences, conspiracy fantasies are made up of a handful of key components, such as unsubstantiated exaggerations, suspiciousness and paranoia, and fantasies that construct some sort of believable and even plausible narrative. Yet, almost sixty years after Hofstadter, right-wing conspiracy fantasies continue to shape politics – perhaps even more so today than sixty years ago. Current right-wing conspiracy fantasies are based on three – rather baseless – claims:
1. Firstly, there is Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election, stolen by the Democrats. Secondly, there is QAnon’s crypto-manic hallucination that Democratic Party officials were running a sex-trafficking ring for pedophiles. Today, we know this falsehood as Pizzagate.
2. Besides the more obvious madness of phantasms like secret vampire organizations and satanic Hollywood elites, it gets more serious with delusions of a so-called deep state. This conspiracy fantasy claims there is a clandestine network of actors inside three core entities: a) the US federal government; b) high-level finance; and c) top industry – they are everywhere! These three secret outfits operate a hidden government. It carries connotations to the often-mentioned grand master conspiratorial organization: the Illuminati. The deep state exercises its decisive power within the elected government.
3. Finally, there are unsupported postulations that the Covid-19 pandemic (Covid19) was caused by the 5G cell phone towers. In another version of right-wing conspiracy fantasies, the Covid-19 pandemic was – supposedly – concocted via a “secret” Chinese biological weapons laboratory.
What all these conspiracy fantasies have in common is that they set a few people [those who know] against the vast mass of people who are presented as those who do not know. In other words, they believe that some sort of secrecy – insider-vs.-outsider – is a key to understanding conspiracy fantasies. In turn, the “insider-vs.-outsider” ideology protects the right-wing conspiracy inventors. Almost automatically, all those who critique their conspiracy fantasies are attacked for being part of the conspiracy. Unlike the “outsiders” who critique the conspiracy fantasies, only the “insiders” know the real truth.
In terms of deceptive rhetoric, this method shields conspiracy fantasies by shifting the emphasis away from the fallacies of their conspiracy fantasies and moving the person into the center. It attacks the person – not the issue at hand. It accuses the person while diverting attention away from the issue. Yet, this little trick remains one of the most effective rhetorical tools ever invented. Worse, it actually works – perhaps ever since the Roman orator Cicero two thousand years ago.
Unknown to Cicero and two thousand years after his death, the rhetorical trickery of those propagating conspiracy fantasies has become turbo-charged to stratospheric levels. With the rise of new forms of media – such as cable news at first and then, more importantly, online digital media – conspiracy fantasies can be published daily on so-called social media – virtually cost-free and read by millions.
As a consequence, mass discourse in many countries is more and more manipulated by what can best be called the mainstreaming of conspiracy fantasies. The rise of online media marked an entirely new period in the history of writing and publishing. It has fundamentally altered what German philosopher Habermas calls the public sphere.
Yet, this is also the time when what used to be called “the truth” has been – at least to some extent – replaced by misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy fantasies. This can be spiced up with either corporate or right-wing propaganda – now called public relations – or (ideally) both: a successful mixture of right-wing and corporate propaganda. This is the moment when Adorno’s mass deception flourishes.
Increasingly, such conspiracy fantasies with the capability of manufacturing mob violence have become one of the key hegemonic weapons for a Trump-defined Republican party. This is employed against other parties and even against sections of their own party.
Inside as well as outside the Republican party, much of this is set to work via stirring up mass paranoia and right-wing rage. Today, these are transmitted via cable TV, talk radio, and – increasingly – through tabloid TV. Tabloid television is a form of tabloid journalism put on a TV screen. Tabloid TV usually incorporates flashy graphics and sensationalized stories; often, there is a heavy emphasis on crime, sex, sports, and so-called celebrity news.
Yet, transmission of this paranoia and rage is decreasing via old-fashioned tabloid newspapers. which are gradually being read less and less. Today, this occurs more and more through right-wing websites and social (read: corporate) media, i.e., Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram.
Of course, manipulation via conspiracy fantasies serves right-wing hegemonic interests through the creation of mass doubt, deception, alienation, general suspicion, and an extremely unhealthy cynicism about democratic institutions. Beyond all that, it reinforces an attitude that democratic institutions and governments no longer function as a means of solving problems.
Worse, attention is diverted away from recognizing that many economic organizations actually benefit the upper-class and the global business elite. It camouflages the fact that – simultaneously – we see rising worker insecurity, record inequalities, and very serious global environmental pathologies.
Key to understanding the 6th January 2021 events is understanding that today we find in almost all advanced countries – members of the OECD and beyond – a new historical period. Today, we have entered a fundamentally new era of capitalism – this is the Epoch of Media Capitalism.
Essential to all this is the rise of digital media that reach far beyond the usual partisan cable media, right-wing talk radio, and conservative/reactionary crypto-news outlets. Digital media allow access to vast numbers of people. Unlike a real newspaper, this occurs without a news editor between author and audience. As a consequence, broadcasting conspiracy fantasies and manufacturing right-wing mob violence has become cheap and terrifyingly efficient.
Right-wing digital media have not replaced Fox News. Instead, right-wing digital media build on the consumption of partisan, tabloid, and conspiratorial media such as Fox News. In other words, digital websites such as InfoWars complement real TV shows such as Fox News. In a way, they turbo-charge them. Both together – right-wing digital media (InfoWars) as well as right-wing commercial TV like Fox – create their misinformation and disinformation.
The distinction between the two is that misinformation is often accidental, unintentional, and not deliberately created. People get things wrong at times. We all make mistakes – even right-wing news outlets such as Fox and InfoWars. Yet, disinformation is entirely different. Disinformation is highly planned, deliberately constructed, and targeted. Perhaps even more important than the distinction between misinformation and malicious disinformation is the fact that right-wing disinformation filters out messages that run contrary to its established partisan ideology.
Much of this is spiced up with a hefty dose of anti-intellectualism, which – historically – has never been separated from the rise of right-wing conspiracy paranoia. Today, this is most prevalent on America’s right – with the Republican Party being in the clear forefront.
Self-evidently, right-wing ideologies continue to play a central role in reinforcing hegemonic power. Unseen to many, right-wing ideology is running its invisible script in the background of political parties, think tanks, lobbying, and media institutions. This remains important for right-wing socialization (first) and right-wing radicalization (second), only to be followed by the – not always inevitable – manufacturing of right-wing mob violence. Besides the entertainment and – at times – very serious violence it can create, the entire ideology-media structure still plays an important role in the maintenance of capitalism.
This is where Chomsky’s concept of mass manipulation as the manufacturing of consent to capitalism meets Adorno’s mass deception. Manipulation and deception are mass manufactured by the corporate media outlets of the capitalist class. This remains a key function, assuring the efficient and problem-free workings of capitalism.
Capitalism’s core ideologies – the free market serves all, competition is good, the market economy will lift all boats (creating wealth), the trickle-down effect, and so on – create and maintain an underlying pro-capitalism atmosphere that allows for the smooth continuation of capitalism in the face of its overwhelming pathologies: global mass poverty, environmental destruction, rising inequality.
It manufactures mass consent in favor of capitalist interests, profit-driven and anti-environmental agendas. Because of the daily played-out charade of a decisive battle of Democrats vs. Republicans, the media circus not only entertains, but also – and most importantly – stabilizes capitalism. In the eternal quest to stabilize capitalism ideologically and not through brute violence and mass surveillance, conspiracy fantasies provide a handy tool.
Conspiracy fantasies pretend to make sense out of a rather confusing and even inhospitable reality while simultaneously offering seemingly plausible solutions to the problems capitalism has created. Right-wing conspiracy fantasies – particularly when leading to mob violence – also appease the feeling of powerlessness fed to the population by corporate media on a daily basis. Yet, embracing right-wing conspiracy fantasies also permits people to portray themselves as being part of a small and rather selective – perhaps even exclusive – in-group that has acquired secret knowledge.
Such right-wing conspiracy fantasy-believing in-groups see themselves as truly in the know about how the world really works. Contrary to the masses who – so the conspiracy fantasy believers think – are manipulated, those who follow right-wing conspiracy fantasies do know, or so they have convinced themselves. In other words, conspiracy fantasies reverse what is actually happening. This works surprisingly well.
Crucial to virtually all right-wing conspiracy fantasies is that they create individuals who see the world in terms of an in-group presented as being threatened and powerful out-groups who are presented as a danger to “our way of life”: Muslims, African-Americans, and perhaps the most lethal of all: the Jews and their world conspiracy.
Yet, accepting right-wing conspiracy fantasies is often associated with pathological, fantastical, and distrustful personalities. These reflect Adorno’s authoritarian personality, showing obedience to authority. They also show paranoid attitudes and distrustful patterns of thinking. This is flanked by a lack of critical thinking, as paranoia, anxiety, anger, and delusion take precedent.
Once drawn into the right-wing orbit, believing in misinformation and disinformation slowly takes over. Regularly, this is cranked up inside echo chambers working as self-reinforcing sound boards while simultaneously filtering out critical knowledge. Echo chambers like online platforms are likely to enable feedback loops that reinforce right-wing partisan and ideological viewpoints of online users.
One key group hooked into echo chambers are members of the infamous QAnon. Trump is a supporter and friend. Trump re-tweeted dozens of QAnon stories prior to his deplatforming by Twitter. Worse, Trump also hosted right-wing QAnon activists in the White House, including lawyer Sidney Powell and retired general Michael Flynn. They cooked up an early plan on how to overturn the 2020 election. Seemingly, Flynn later distant himself from QAnon .
After years of right-wing propaganda, it is perhaps rather unsurprising that a whopping 24% of Americans agree with the statement, the claims made by QAnon are either somewhat or very accurate. Worse, 38% of Republicans agreed with the statement that QAnon is either somewhat or a very good thing for the country.
Most importantly, it was only “after” the 6th January 2021 attack on the Capitol that both Facebook and Twitter deplatformed Trump. Yet, throughout the second half of 2020, right-wing media – Fox News and so-called talk radio “personalities” – broadcasted Trump’s Big Lie propaganda on the so-called anticipated stolen election.
We know now that Fox News’ top personalities were – and some continue to be – behind Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in US electoral integrity. Fox News consumption remains highly linked with feelings that voter fraud is a problem – with mail-in voting being high on the agenda, even though no evidence has been found for systematic voter fraud. It only exists in right-wing hallucinations.
All in all, the ability of right-wing media such as Fox News – turbo-charged by online platforms such as InfoWars – to cultivate and maintain significant support for baseless, ridiculous, outright crazy, xenophobic, and right-wing conspiracy fantasies remains unchanged.
Before right-wing mob violence swings into action, someone with a big megaphone – Fox, InfoWars, right-wing echo-chambers, and so on – always needs to propagate baseless, bizarre, fantastical, and all too often even fanatical, accusations about semi-mythical and shadowy evil elites operating in complete secrecy while planning evil things. Secondly, they – and it is always the unspecific “they” – must be presented as the inventors of a secret conspiracy determined to destroy humanity.
The height of such hallucination is reached by claims about drinking the blood of children and intentionally unleashing killer viruses on the world. Virtually all of this serves to obscure the question of what – if anything – we can do to challenge media capitalism’s continuing domination.
Worse, the power of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy fantasies has only increased in the months before and since the 6th January 2021semi-fascistic coup attempt. Even more severe, the core of the Republican party seems to have moved downwards to reject the basic institutions of democracy. This is yet another ingredient manufacturing right-wing mob violence.
More often than not, right-wing mob violence has the clear goal of destroying democracy. Many will be aware of Goebbels’ statement that,
it will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy,
that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.Follow BuzzFlash on @twitter
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