Combatting Disinformation

Barbara McQuade's New Book

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I just finished reading Barbara McQuade’s book Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. McQuade, a former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Eastern Michigan, law professor at the University of Michigan, MSNBC contributor, and legal commentator on all sorts of podcasts, explores the dangers of disinformation and the ways it confounds our small-d democratic commitments.

She considers the appeal of disinformation for authoritarian movements, the role of social media algorithms to shape our field of awareness, the downstream impacts of disinformation on public safety, the concerns over electoral or governmental legitimacy, and the erosion of the rule of law. The last two chapters raise potential solutions (unfortunately hard to implement in our current political environment) and a reminder that we’ve been before and found our way through.

For political junkies like me, her examples are familiar. Many of them have occurred within the last eight years. They are extremely well referenced. Rather than restarting her footnotes when beginning a new chapter, she keeps a running tally. Her final footnote is #1717.

Her legal background is evident in her writing style. I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks back that I love reading court cases and have learned that I can skip the parentheticals listing prior decisions without losing readability. That’s the style McQuade uses. She makes a general point and then spends a few paragraphs documenting instances that illumine the general point.

In her final chapter, she calls for us to isolate fact from opinion.¹ She suggests that we resist being motivated by fear. She wants us to demand “leaders who speak the truth.” Her final section begins like this:

But leaders in a democracy, of course, are simply a reflection of the voters who elect them all of us. In a time when we spend inordinate amounts of time and money on spectator sports, movies, and reality television shows, it can be argued that we get the leaders we deserve. In a democracy, a government of the people, we need responsible leadership not just from our elected officials but from our citizenry. We the people need to recognize that the use of disinformation as a weapon to exercise political power is a threat to democracy, and we must work to abolish it. We must use our voting power to insist on leaders who use facts to solve problems instead of lies to divide us. Voters must accept reasonable compromise from our leaders rather than demanding ideological purity at any cost. We can hold candidates and leaders accountable by refusing to elect or reelect those who knowingly perpetuate false claims and engage in deliberately divisive rhetoric. We should call out those who stand with any political party over country, who allow political ends to justify unscrupulous means. We should condemn leaders who glorify violence and bigotry. If we do not, we will be opening the door wider to greedy hucksters and power-hungry opportunists. (289)

Last week, we got a great illustration of the power of disinformation as well as how to push back against it. Alabama Senator Katie Britt was asked to provide the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union address. Speaking from her kitchen table, she says that she and her husband had just watched the SOTU. She begins by stating that “Under [Biden’s] administration, families are worse off, our communities are less safe, and our nation is less secure.” She shifts to autobiography, describing how she swept the floor at her dad’s business and is now in the Senate. She fails to acknowledge her time as a state level politician or chief of staff for Senator Shelby who recommended her as his replacement.

After talking about how our families are hurting, she shifts here attention to the Southern Border. The news focus on her remarks centered on a heart-wrenching story she told of a woman she’d met at a border event in January who told of being sex trafficked as a twelve-year old. From that story she pivots quickly, saying “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

This story blew up because independent journalist Jonathan Katz was paying attention to the attempted misdirection. With just a little research, he identified the woman who told the story, found that she had claimed that the horrific events happened during the George W. Bush administration, and that they didn’t happen at the Southern Border. Since then, the woman herself explained that she’d been held by a pimp and not drug cartels.

In her defense, Senator Britt explains that she never said that this was a recent occurrence or that it happened at the border or that it happened during this administration.² This is where Britt’s response intersects with McQuade’s book. She didn’t have to say those things were true. She just put disparate ideas in proximity and hoped that viewers would would draw her intended conclusion.

Much has been made of her over-the-top performance with over-eagerness and abrupt changes of moods. It was easy fodder for Saturday Night Live. Scarlett Johansson played Senator Britt in the cold open. In fact, as a means of illustrating the role of disinformation, the picture above is Johansson, not Britt. Just like Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin in 2008, people will remember Johansson’s image of Britt more than they will remember what Britt actually said.

While the SNL skit was well done, it can easily distract us from the more important disinformation attempts in that Republican response. The Britt speech wasn’t pre-recorded. She ways that she and husband Wesley had “just watched” the speech. She did acknowledge that Biden had responded to MTG’s heckling about the death of Laken Riley, so she saw that part.³

But here’s the bigger issue of disinformation. As happens every year, this was supposed to be the response to the SOTU. But it didn’t respond at all. There was no consideration of what Biden had said, how he articulated the country’s needs or threats. There was no recognition of what happened to the Border Bill that Britt helped negotiate, the Biden said would make a big difference at the border, and that Senator Lankford affirmed.

I wouldn’t expect the response of the out-party to the State of the Union to be nothing but accolades for the incumbent president. But it’s not too much to ask that occasionally they focus on their policy differences. Maybe they prefer more wall first and changes to the asylum process later. That’s a reasonable (though short-sighted position). Even that would be an improvement over the distortion and misdirection we are currently subject to.

That brings me back to McQuade’s quote. If voters⁴ excuse “their politicians” who combine a string of talking points to attack the opposing party and fail to hold them accountable for truth-telling, we all suffer. It feeds the polarization already confronting us, leaves us incapable of solving problems, and furthers small-d democratic possibilities.

1. She refers to the popular Daniel Patrick Moynihan quote “You’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.” earlier in the book.

2. Given what we know about human trafficing, it would likely not take much research to find similar stories occurring between January 2017 and January 2021.

3. Of course, it could have been an ad lib from her prepared remarks.

4. As well as the media — I worry that all the attention on the sex trafficking story will leave the rest of the distortions and fact-free claims to get by unexamined.