Forest of lies

There is an industry built on profiting off your fears. The product: nonstop narratives of looming futures in which political strife and economic upheaval grow rampant in a forest of lies. This industry’s titans use nihilism to drive hope from the hopeful—even the Christian hopeful—and cash in on fears over what is to come.

Conservatives have no problem recognizing how, for example, CNN and MSNBC deceive their audiences with such content. But they struggle to see how their favorite influencers and commentators on the right are molding conservatives into consumers of hopelessness.

I’m a former Democrat. One of the reasons I became an independent was because I woke up to how far our mass media are willing to go to make their audiences emotionally sick. Now that my eyes are open, I am watching conservatives swim in the slow boil of nihilism narratives—unaware of how they’re being cooked for dollars.

Conservative media have evolved, giving rise to a plethora of independent media that now compete against legacy outlets like Fox News. And yet, as on the left, many of these outlets deploy unhealthy strategies for gaining and keeping an audience: They tap in to conservatives’ suspicion of liberal malfeasance and amplify it with selective reporting. This creates a feedback loop in which, just as on the left, a base of like-minded citizens hears what they already believe. This reinforces their desire to return to their media abusers to be poisoned again and again.

One infamous example: Fox News spent more than two years promoting the theory that rigged Dominion voting systems lay at the heart of the alleged theft of the 2020 presidential election. If true, this was the political story of the century. But Dominion sued Fox for defamation, and Judge Eric M. Davis ordered the release of internal network communications that revealed even Fox personnel did not believe the stolen-election narrative network anchors were reinforcing for their audience day after day.

In a summary judgment, Judge Davis found that none of the statements Fox made about Dominion were true. Then in April 2023, on the eve of a trial meant to determine whether Fox had acted with malice, the network settled, agreeing to pay Dominion $787.5 million.

Often, parties settle lawsuits because litigating would be more costly than just getting it over with. In this case, though, one has to wonder whether litigating would actually have cost three-quarters of a billion dollars—the largest media defamation settlement in U.S. history—or if Fox employees willfully distorted the facts.

One may yet believe Election 2020 was indeed stolen, via either a complex, organized scheme or a patchwork of lesser yet effective cheats. Still, the Dominion case stands as an example in which commercialization of a juicy narrative trumped truth at a conservative news outlet.

Another example: The deep state. It makes great journalistic theater to convince conservatives they’re the victims of a “deep state” they can’t fully identify, that works in secret, and that controls everything. In this narrative, victory on many fronts is within reach … if only it weren’t being stolen by nefarious bureaucrats riding paper tigers.

This is not to say entrenched partisan bureaucrats aren’t a problem. But they’re also not some kind of all-powerful Big Brother, as the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Deep State initiative is showing by using the administrative state’s own processes against it.

The conservative nihilism industry can consume even the optimism of Christians, but they too are being chewed up for clicks and scarred with pessimism. The root of this media strategy is victimhood, and conservatives are being served a palatable underdog blend that is indistinguishable from that offered by the political left in that it serves mainly to confirm their biases.

As someone who’s been exposed to purple rhetoric from both the political left and right, I’ve noticed we are all being encouraged to catastrophize, fear enemies who may not exist, and trust those who have economic incentives to exploit our political biases.

Anyone who tells you there is no hope, while also holding out a hand for compensation, does not have the best intentions for your heart. A suggestion: Set aside partisan nihilism and embrace healthy skepticism. Truth still exists in the forest of lies.

—Adam B. Coleman is the author of  Black Victim to Black Victor and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing