Hank Kalet

A starving child with cystic fibrosis, one of thousands of starving children in Gaza, is suddenly cast by the right as proof that famine is being overblown.

An undocumented Dominican is accused of slashing a police officer — and used as evidence that “criminal aliens” are running rampant, fueling crime waves in so-called sanctuary cities.

A singular (so far) “bad” jobs report, rather than being viewed as a warning, is recast as nefarious, “cooked books” designed to make the president look bad.

Three separate and, seemingly, unrelated news items from late July and early August. Three cases, however, that are intimately connected — because of what they say about how we process facts and especially how the conspiratorial right uses and misuses information as it crafts narratives designed to prop up President Donald Trump.

In each case, a single “fact” wielded as a cudgel, a weapon to make a case that the broad array of evidence tells us cannot be made. The famine in Gaza — and its roots in the Israeli war on Palestinians in the strip — is undeniable. Immigrants, as dozens of studies show, commit far fewer crimes than American-born citizens. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has widespread trust among both the political and academic classes.

But the identification of a single outlier or single piece of information — what is called “cherry-picking” — can be powerful when it is used to support already agreed-upon rightwing talking points. It is what the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu) describes as “an informal fallacy,” or an error “of reasoning that cannot easily be expressed in our standard system of formal logic.”

Cherry-picking — otherwise known as “Suppressed Evidence” — is “intentionally failing to use information suspected of being relevant and significant,” using nominally relevant but tangential information, or purposefully (or inadvertently) suppressing anything that might contradict the story being told.

Cherry-picking works on an emotional level, at least partly because we are all susceptible to “confirmation bias,” or the “favouring or focusing on information that confirms your existing beliefs and preconceptions.”

This kind of bias grows, apparently, from an evolutionary need, according to the Farnham Street blog (https://fs.blog/confirmation-bias/).

“Our use of this cognitive shortcut is understandable. Evaluating evidence (especially when it is complicated or unclear) requires a great deal of mental energy. Our brains prefer to take shortcuts. This saves the time needed to make decisions, especially when we’re under pressure.”

The complications of the modern world, however, have created a different set of challenges. Because “our minds are unequipped to handle the modern world,” and “we are constantly receiving new information and have to make numerous complex choices each day,” we “have a natural tendency to take shortcuts.” These shortcuts leave us struggling. It is simpler and easier to strip the context from the data and plug it into what we already believe.

This, as The Decision Lab (https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/confirmation-bias) writes “can have troubling implications.”

“The more we become entrenched in our preconceptions, the greater influence confirmation bias has on our behavior and, consequently, the people we choose to surround ourselves with. We can trap ourselves in a sort-of echo-chamber, and without being challenged, the biased thoughts prevail.”

This matters because it leaves larger and larger swathes of the public vulnerable to the various forms propaganda that find our echo chambers fertile grounds for growth. The Republican Party for most of my adult life has engaged in this kind of activity, attacking the legitimate press, defining reality to suit its aims. The Reagan and first Bush White Houses were obsessed with image, which was not unusual for presidents. George W. Bush’s post-9/11 presidency added a new twist — as reported by Ron Suskind:

Bush always acted out of certainty, and was suspicious of critical views. In a 2004 story for The New York Times Magazine, he quoted (a then-unnamed) Karl Rove dismissing “‘the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’”

Rove went on to describe something that should sound familiar to anyone following today’s political climate, one in which the United States and a narrowly define set of Trump allies act as if above all norms. “We create our own reality.”

“Creating our own reality” is another way of saying facts are fungible, and that logic doesn’t hold. It is a precondition for a propaganda state, one that Jason Stanley describes in “How Propaganda Works.” The use of fallacies to create an impression of logical unity, loaded and stereotyping language, and framing ideas to fit a pre-existing narrative are not about rational discourse. These techniques are about control of storytelling, about raw power.

These techniques stories told by the political classes, especially on the right, and by their supporters in the oligarchy, have nothing to do with making lives better. They are about division and greed, and they are the hallmark of the second Trump presidency. Trump is constantly harping on crime despite it being at historically low levels; blaming immigrants for his fictional crime wave, despite studies demonstrating the fallacy; ignoring economic data he doesn’t like and firing or suing critics rather than address the criticism. His supporters, who get their news from only a few, select and biases sources, then repeat his lies over and over until they develop a veneer of truth.

In Gaza, this means finding ways to shift the blame for famine and genocide onto the people dying — including young children.

In the United States, it is why we now have what are essentially concentration camps and mass round ups of immigrants, attacks on the press and academia, and a complacent public that should know better.

Hank Kalet is a journalist in New Jersey and lecturer of journalism at Rutgers and is a member of the executive committee of Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union. Email grassroots@comcast.net. His blog, Channel Surfing, is at www.kaletblog.com. Twitter, @newspoet41; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet.