Street Roots • August 18-24, 2017
News
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M.B.: I think that the availability of
information at our fingertips works both
ways, in that you can easily find reliable
accurate information, but you can also easily
find bogus fake information. And
increasingly, there’s been a willful effort to
keep people from telling the difference
between those two. That’s how if you
Google “immigration” and you land on
Breitbart, you’ll get a very different idea of
the facts than if you look at The New York
Times or The Washington Post or reports
from reliable think tanks.
crackpots, in some cases including what Alex
Jones is saying on Info Wars and what Ann
Coulter is ranting and raving about. What do
we gain by learning about the ramblings of
these conspiracy theorists?
Miranda Blue: I think that it’s important
to know that we aren’t just repeating these
things because they’re crazy. You take
someone like Ann Coulter who is kind of a
fringe person and says really offensive,
outrageous things all the time, and that’s
her shtick, and why do we listen to
interviews with her? Because it comes out
that she helped the Trump campaign write
an immigration policy paper. We follow
people who we sense have, or are going to
have, influence, and who should be exposed
by exposing them in their own words.
E.G.: As someone who has been researching
and writing about right-wing extremist
movements for some time, can you describe the
current landscape as it compares to before the
2016 campaign season?
M.B.: There have been some big shifts,
but I think that it’s more similar in ways
that don’t necessarily get attention. For
instance, we do a lot of work following the
religious right, and the religious right has
enormous influence in Trump’s
administration - which can come as a
surprise because Trump did not present
h im se lf as a C hristian-right candidate at all.
But you have religious right leaders invited
to the White House on a regular basis,
praying over Trump, and they made it a very
explicit deal during the campaign that the
Christian right leaders would turn out their
base to elect him and he would give them
their policy priorities: a Supreme Court
justice, Neil Gorsuch, who was hand-picked
by the Federalist Society and the Heritage
Foundation; this recent announcement of a
ban on transgender people serving in the
military was a gift to the religious right; also
going after abortion rights, reinstating the
global gag rule and expanding it. There have
been many policies like that coming out of
the Trump administration.
Then, beyond the religious right, we
really have seen an increase in the stature
of a lot of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim
groups - groups that have been working
behind the scenes a long time but now see
themselves in a position of power. For
instance, Jeff Sessions had been a favorite of
the main anti-immigration groups:
Federation for American Immigration
Reform and their allies. They ve been
working with him for quite a while, and now
they have him in the Justice Department as
attorney general.
Another example is a group called ih e
Remembrance Project, which is a Texas-
based group that whips up stories of actual
Americans citizens who have been killed by
undocumented immigrants. Very genuinely
sad, tragic stories, but their goal is to try
and create the false impression that
undocumented immigrants, as a whole, are
dangerous people. This was a pretty fringe
group that did not have a lot of influence
until Trump came along, and now they re
boasting of their connections to the Trump
administration.
E.G.: There seems to be a lot of Russian ties
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones speaks July 18, 2016, at a Cleveland rally in support of Donald
Trump. Jones, founder of the radio news show InfoWars, has propagated many bogus stories,
including that white supremacists at the Charlottesville, Va., rally last week were left-wing
Jewish actors.
that go beyond the current investigation into
collusion. For example, how American activists
played a role in Russia’s anti-gay laws,
similarities between Putin’s and Trump’s
approaches to media, and even more ties
explored in your colleague Casey Michel’s
report on Right Wing Watch. What do you see
happening with the relationship between the
Kremlin and American right-wing extremists?
And then, finally, you have the “alt-right,
which has been brewing off in the worst
corners of the internet for a while that has
really come into its own in the Trump
administration, and that’s an area that’s
newer for us and that we’re trying to do
more work on - discovering who they are
and what they’re up to.
M.B.: One thing that we’ve been seeing
as this whole drama over the Trump
campaign and Russia unfolds is that a lot of
parts of the American right are already
inclined to not make a big deal of it. But
they are partly unconcerned because there
has been a trend among certain factions of
the right to actually admire Putin and
admire what he’s doing in Russia.
P H O T O B Y L U C A S J A C K S O N /R E U T E R S
E.G.: You already touched on this a little,
but I want to talk more
about the evangelical
imagine that he minds having people telling
him that he was picked by God to save
America.
E.G.: There appears to be a multifaceted
effort to replace the mainstream media with a
combination of extreme right and state-
sponsored media, for example Breitbart,
increasingly Fox News and, most recently,
Trump’s own selfpropagating news channel
broadcast out o f Trump
Tower. Where do you see
influence on Trump.
" In c r e a s in g ly , th e re 's Been a
This morning you
w i l l f u l e ffo r t to ke e p p e o p le
published an article
fro m t e llin g th e d iffe re n c e
about how the mega
b e tw e en th o se tw© (fa k e news
church pastor Robert
Jeffress gave Trump
a n d r e a lity ) , T h a t's h o w If
God’s permission to take y o n G oogle 'Im m ig r a tio n '
out North Korea.
a n d y o n la n d o n B r e itb a rt,
Are you seeing that
some of these evangelical y © n 'll g e t a w r y d iffe r e n t
Id e a o f th e fa c ts th a n I f y o n
leaders - are they
lo o k a t T he New T o rh T im e s
exploiting his
narcissistic tendencies,
o r T h e W a s h in g to n Post o r
or do you think they
re p o rts fro m r e lia b le th in k
really believe God has
ta n k s ,"
sent him to push
M1RAMDA BLUB,
through their policies?
E D IT O R ,
M.B.: It’s hard to
see into somebody’s
heart, but I think it’s a
combination of both. I’m not going to say
that these people don’t believe what they’re
saying about God sending Trump, but I
think that part of that genuine belief comes
from this idea that was propagated (during)
the Obama administration that the United
States was persecuting Christians, and
Trump caught on to that during his
campaign. He told the religious right, “You
won’t be persecuted anymore in America.
You can say Merry Christmas.” So we’re
seeing a lot of religious right leaders saying,
“The Trump administration may not be
perfect, but it’s given us a reprieve. Hillary
Clinton would have doomed Christianity in
America forever, but Trump has given us
some breathing room to rebuild the church
and rebuild our influence.”
I also think they’ve realized that Trump is
very susceptible to flattery. And I can’t
this effort heading?
M.B.: I think I have
my head a little bit in
the sand about this
because it’s one of the
more troubling trends
happening in politics as
a whole. I think that it’s
been a long time
coming, as the right-
wing media has
consistently said that
the mainstream media
is telling lies, and
people have been
siloed into hearing the
news from people that
R IG H T W IN G W A T C H
they already agree
with. The rise of fake
news and Trump
blurring the line between what is fake news
and what is reality has really exploded this
dynamic. I wish I could say that is not the
direction things are heading in, but
Breitbart is now living in its own universe. If
you visit Breitbart, you’re in an entirely
different news universe than if you visit The
New York Times, and Breitbart is able to
shape people’s opinions in ways that are
favorable to the Trump administration and
favorable to some of his most toxic policies,
and that’s a really disturbing trend. I don’t
know where it goes.
E.G.: In an age of Google, with all the
information we need at our fingertips, how
would you explain the willful suspension of
disbelief that’s required to continue to take
Trump at his word, or to continue to believe
whatever Alex Jones or Glenn Beck say when
they go on these tirades?
W hen Putin w as launching h is crackdown
o n L G B T p e o p le , w e sa w a c tiv is ts in t h e
American religious right cheering him on.
Brian Brown, who’s the head of the National
Organization for Marriage, traveled to
Russia to speak in front of the duma in
support of a law that would restrict
adoptions to LGBT people. There was
support from people in the (American)
religious right for this anti-LGBT crackdown
without looking at what Putin was using that
crackdown as propaganda for - or without
minding.
There is this idea in parts of the right
that Putin was this macho Christian leader
that Obama wasn’t, and that idea stuck
around. So it’s been interesting to watch
this Trump story play out with that dynamic
in the background.
E.G.: Coming from a place of looking at
money in politics in the past, where do you
think we’re seeing some connections between
corporate influence and money to be made and
some of these right-wing extremist agendas?
Immigration reform efforts and private
prisons, for example.
M.B.: That’s a great example. The private
prisons have been working behind the
scenes for a long time to stop criminal
justice reform and stop policies that cut
down on the incarceration of undocumented
immigrants. The Session’s Justice
Department is a great boon for them, and
he is, in a lot of ways, stopping the progress
that we were seeing on criminal justice
reform.
I think that one under-recognized story is
the traditional corporate players - the Koch
brothers, the Chamber of Commerce and
their think tank allies have a friend in the
White House. Trump’s White House is
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