Welcome to Fake News 2.0
Tell lies and post through it.
It’s Super Bowl weekend! I’m back after taking an unplanned week off from the newsletter while not feeling well. The important thing is, I recovered in time for the Royal Rumble.
1. An incredibly stupid news cycle
The past decade has been incredibly stupid. Yet, somehow, this week stands out as one of the stupidest weeks of our stupid era.
We just had a two-day news cycle in which conservatives noticed USAID spent money on Politico Pro, jumped to the wrong conclusions and went off to the races.
Conservative attacks on the embattled U.S. Agency for International Development landed on an unexpected target Wednesday when Elon Musk, right-wing influencers, elected Republicans and the White House zeroed in on subscription money that federal government agencies paid for Politico Pro and other specialty subscription publications aimed at corporations and government entities.
By the afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced during the daily press briefing that she had been “made aware that USAID has funded media outlets like Politico. I can confirm that more than $8 million that has gone to subsidizing subscriptions will no longer be happening.”
In fact, records from USAspending.gov show Politico payments totaling only $44,000 from USAID during fiscal years 2023 and 2024.
Here’s a key piece:
Last year, Republicans and committee offices paid for Politico’s products including $9,060 from the Office of the Speaker of the House, $84,000 from the House Committee on Agriculture, and $58,000 from the House Committee on Energy, according to government records.
In total, 38 Republicans in the House spent over $300,000 on Politico subscriptions in the first nine months of 2024, and committees led by Republicans expensed almost $500,000 of Politico subscriptions in the same time period, a Washington Post analysis shows.
Naturally, when Republicans realized their own office-holders were spending money on Politico Pro in exchange for a legitimate business service, they walked back their criticism and acknowledged their misunderstanding.
Oh, sorry, no, that’s not what happened.
Instead, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted: “NEWS FLASH: No one trusts media funded by the deep state!!”
Yes, Politico Pro is funded by the deep state … and also by Boebert.
Boebert’s office has an active Politico Pro subscription that cost $7,150. Nonetheless, Boebert ignored all the people pointing this out and “falsely claimed in an oversight hearing that Politico was laying people off because it had been cut off from USAID funds,” per WaPo.
Welcome to Fake News 2.0.
The new playbook for conservatives:
Post a blatantly false assertion. It can be borne of genuine misunderstanding or ill intentions. Doesn’t matter.
Ignore everyone who proves the assertion wrong.
Post through it and let the tribe embrace your manufactured scandal.
It is 100% the case that USAID and many other government offices, including those run by Republicans, purchased Politico Pro subscriptions in exchange for a service. Yet, here’s conservative Indianapolis radio host Tony Katz carrying water for his tribe:
“Millions went to Politico from USAID and other govt organizations for a ‘subscription,’” he posted to X. “We don’t believe that was in good faith. We do not believe @politico.”
What does he believe? He doesn’t say.
He doesn’t have to. Rumors of wrongdoing are all conservatives need. What comes next is predictable: Rational people attempt to correct the error. People like Katz hold their ground. The rational people’s heads explode. Conservatives point and say, “Ha! Look at the hysterical libs!”
Checkmate.
I don’t know what the effective counter-strategy is when the political party in power deploys willful, gleeful lies with the confidence that everyone on their side has agreed on an emotional level to accept lies as essential truths in the culture war.
Those of us dedicated to living in reality need to understand the terms of this rigged game, though, and also realize that fact-checking fake scandals is a fool’s errand. Ask yourself: Why are members of a supposedly ascendant political party so eager to debase themselves in public over legitimate Politico Pro subscriptions?
It seems like they might consider those conversations more advantageous than talking about the real-life, observable effects of President Trump’s actions.
2. Kindness will win
Elon Musk is rehiring Marko Elez, a DOGE employee who was found by The Wall Street Journal to have said some pretty racist things last year.
Here are examples:
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
“Normalize Indian hate.”
See? Pretty racist. Again, all these comments were made last year.
I don’t know where the anti-woke, anti-DEI movement is heading, but I have a prediction: A political movement that harbors explicit racism will not prevail in the long run.
Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I’ll make a more crude, yet similar, observation: People like being around other people who are kind. People do not like being around jerks. The MAGA movement is of, and for, jerks.
Call it woke, or whatever else you want, but saying racist things is bad and I am confident we will eventually agree on that as a society again.
3. What I wrote
I published four columns since my last newsletter:
4. What I read
Kevin Erdmann on why investor-owned housing is good, actually, and we shouldn’t legislate them out of existence:
The typical young family with, say, a 720 credit score can’t buy a home today. We won’t build more apartments as a substitute. I recently watched a large apartment building get blocked in the Phoenix area, and one of the big complaints was that if they allowed it, families would live there. This all happens quite explicitly. In every case, the obstructors just imagine that someone, somewhere, will be allowed to build something.
The sponsors of these bills think the same thing. If we ban corporations, surely there is some mysterious figure on the sidelines who will build the new homes instead.
No! They won’t! The rest of them have already been banned! About a million homes are built for the portion of Americans still allowed to buy them. Another 500,000 apartments are built for tenants. That’s not enough! It’s not nearly enough!
So, where is that family going to live? They aren’t allowed to buy a home, live in a new apartment, and now, potentially, they won’t be able to rent a single-family home.
None of those are personal choices. They all should be very easy and normal things for a family with a 720 credit score in 2025 America to do. But government at all levels blocks it. On the margin, that next new 720 score family has to live somewhere. Where?!
Ross Douthat on his favorite argument for the existence of God:
Suppose that as a child you developed a private language to use with your siblings or your friends — a simple set of codes, slightly more sophisticated than pig Latin, with the eminently practical purpose of enabling private communication that grown-ups wouldn’t understand. Let that stand for the survival-driven tool kit of our primeval ancestors.
Now suppose that much later in life you discovered that this childish system enabled members of your circle of friends to read and understand a set of ancient texts, as complex as Shakespeare and Aristotle put together, that contained all the secrets of Mayan astronomy, Greek philosophy and Egyptian mysticism, and that you happened to discover hidden in the attic of your childhood home.
Would you just assume, “Well, I was a bright kid and putting one over on grown-ups really builds linguistic skills; no wonder I was able to read the Ancient Book of Esoteric Knowledge that just happened to be hanging around in my vicinity”?
Or would you accept the more obvious conclusion — that you and your friends were characters in a larger story and that the book was in some sense placed there for you?
5. The best, most terrifying show
My wife and I recently caught up through season 3 of the TV show “From” on MGM+ (a streaming channel with which I was previously unfamiliar).
This show is haunting me in (I think) the best possible ways.
“From” creates a universe with many similarities to “Lost” (the lead actor, Harold Perrineau, is a “Lost” alum) — a group of people stuck seemingly at random in a place they didn’t travel to on purpose and can’t figure out how to leave. Chaos ensues.
It is a horror show, probably the most terrifying I’ve ever seen, and it is not for everyone. It was genuinely difficult to sleep some nights after watching it. But, if you can deal with that genre and if you enjoyed “Lost” at its best, there’s a good chance you’ll dig “From.”
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I wish I shared your optimism on where this MAGA stuff all lands