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Postmodernism predicted our post-truth hellscape. Everyone still hates it.

I was watching CNN’s Reliable Sources a couple of weeks ago and was struck by an exchange between host Brian Stelter and Andrew Marantz, author of Antisocial, a new book about online extremism.

They were discussing the false narratives surrounding President Trump and why they’re so difficult to cut through. As long as Trump has a right-wing media ecosystem to spin and protect and lie for him, the argument went, it’s just not clear that the “facts” matter all that much.

“People focus on the underlying facts,” Marantz told Stelter, “but the underlying facts are not the things that matter in terms of narrative-shaping … narrative-shaping happens on Fox News, in Congress, on the internet.”

That facts don’t seem to matter anymore is hardly a new observation. But it’s all the more urgent now, as we trudge into an impeachment process that will almost certainly lead to an unsatisfying conclusion in which no one version of the truth is likely to come out and be held by the public. In the 21st-century media ecosystem, “alternative facts” — as Kellyanne Conway’s famous formulation goes — can reign supreme, or at the very least blot out the truth.

But what really struck me about Stelter and Marantz’s conversation is how its insights about the death of facts and the profusion of narratives sprouted from a philosophical movement that began almost four decades ago but has since been blamed for the nihilism of the Trump era.

That movement is called “postmodernism,” and its legacy, while mixed, is very much worth revisiting. Postmodernism isn’t any one thing. It refers to a host of ideas and literary movements and even architectural styles. But what its critics fixate on is its purported attack on the idea of capital-T truth. Some key postmodern thinkers reveled in the idea’s destabilizing power and opened the door to questioning the very notion of objective knowledge. To hear critics tell it, the postmoderns created the post-truth future.

There is some truth to the critique. A version of postmodernism that questioned objective truth and promoted relativism was fashionable, even celebrated, in the academy in the 1980s and 1990s. But did the scribblings of obscure French philosophers really impel us into the age of Trump?

More likely, the changes that brought us that world were already underway when Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition — the book that coined the term — dropped in 1979. Forty years later, it’s more useful and accurate to view Lyotard and his fellow postmoderns’ work as a diagnosis of a world that was then already being fractured by mass media and technology.

Postmodernism didn’t set us on our path toward information dystopia. At its core, it identified a crisis that was brewing in its time — and that has reached a boil in our benighted present.

Postmodernism and its discontents

Postmodernism has been a favorite scapegoat for our ills for decades now. The conventional critique of postmodernism is that it’s nihilistic, a knock that you hear from critics on the left and the right.

In the Trump era, the critique has deepened — not just nihilistic, critics say, but the source of our era’s woes. Liberals like the former chief book critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, argue that postmodernism spilled out of the academy and seeped into the broader culture, devaluing the very concept of objectivity. She lays the fact-averse both-sideism of the Trump age at the feet of postmodernism, which she believes cemented the idea that no “perspective” can be privileged over another.

The psychologist and pop-philosopher Jordan Peterson believes postmodernism’s obsession with marginalization and cultural appropriation kicked off our current political correctness “crisis.” As he describes it in a blog post, postmodernism was the brainchild of a handful of leftist academics in the ’70s and ’80s who argued that “since there are an innumerable number of ways in which the world can be interpreted and perceived … no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derived.”

For Peterson, postmodernism’s skepticism of capital-T truth unleashed the menace of identity politics and placed race and identity at the center of the struggle for power. There are a few problems with that logic, but if you buy Peterson’s premise, then his conclusion more or less follows.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now, has expressed what is probably the most common complaint about postmodernism. He thinks of it as a progressive phantasm that has destroyed the liberal arts. “The humanities,” he says, “have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness.”

On Pinker’s view, postmodernism threatens the progress of science (by questioning the possibility of objective truth) and is also a poison pill for liberal democracies because it replaces the pursuit of shared truth with a leftist culture war over power and identity.

These sorts of takes — and there are enough to fill a library — are all united in their hostility to a school of philosophy they consider gleefully anti-truth.

What postmodernism is — and what it isn’t

Responding to critics of postmodernism can be exhausting because it’s never clear what they mean by the term — or, in many cases, because they’re attacking a cartoon version of it.

As Aaron Hanlon, an English professor at Colby College, explained last year in an excellent Washington Post column, postmodernism is “a contested series of assertions by many different people from several disciplines, hardly a monolithic philosophy.” And many philosophers widely considered “postmodern” rejected the label, preferring terms like “post-structuralist” instead.

But the postmodernism most people have in mind has its roots in a school of French philosophy that emerged in the 1970s.

The basic idea, popularized by Lyotard’s 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, was that we had reached the end of what he called “meta-narratives.” That meant there was no longer any single dominant account of the world, like historical Marxism or really any theory that attempted to explain human life in terms of absolute universal values.

It’s not so much that these accounts previously explained the world and then suddenly they didn’t; his point was that the world had become too fragmented and pluralistic to support anything like a moral or social consensus. None of our stories about history and justice — and for Lyotard, all ideologies were stories — could make any claim to superiority over the others.

Lyotard’s book is the first genuine work of postmodernism and probably still the clearest and most relevant. Lyotard — and I can’t stress this point enough — wasn’t saying that objective truth was impossible; instead, he argued that what passes for truth in postindustrial society is often a reflection of who holds power, and to forget that is to risk being manipulated.

He was making this claim against the backdrop of a society that lacked the basis for a common project. We were, instead, an atomized “consumer society” defined almost exclusively by commercial interests. At the same time, the institutions charged with discovering and disseminating truth — the government, media, the academy — were increasingly beholden to capital.

Lyotard believed that capitalism and technological changes resulted in the “mercantilization” of knowledge, which is a fancy way of saying that knowledge had become a commodity to be bought and sold like anything else. All of this, he insisted, would be intensified by the digital revolution (though he preferred the phrase “computerization”). He even suggested that in the future the great battle would be over who gets to control information.

Lyotard was too pessimistic about the reliability of science under capitalism, but his book isn’t — in any sense — a rejection of truth. His book was a warning, not a celebration. It wasn’t a call to nihilism or defense of relativism. He was identifying a crisis that was already underway. And his argument was less about the possibility of truth and more about how what we take to be true is often a reflection of unseen cultural and economic forces.

One of the reasons postmodernism has gotten such a bad rap is that other theorists — like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, all French philosophers writing before and after Lyotard — took the movement in a different, more relativistic direction. And the writing itself became more dense and indecipherable.

Over time, as Hanlon told me, thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Judith Butler, the celebrated American philosopher, emerged as the faces of postmodernism and “stole the show from Lyotard’s diagnosis and distorted the legacy of that book.”

We’re drowning in content

The postmodern writer who took Lyotard’s work seriously and pushed it into the digital age is Jean Baudrillard, another French academic. Baudrillard began his career studying the impact of consumerism on everyday life. Like Lyotard, he believed postmodernity was defined in large measure by “consumer society.” He also shared Lyotard’s view that new media technologies would become a massively disruptive force that would “scramble” our grand narratives.

But Baudrillard became singularly focused on media. He published arguably his most famous book, Simulacra and Simulation, in 1981, in which he explored the consequences of living in a heavily mediated world. The individual, he argued, had become submerged in content, symbols, and ads — and we can now add misinformation and clickbait to that list.

Baudrillard was one of the first postmodern philosophers to sound the alarm about the political implications of these transformations. Like a lot of postmoderns, he emerged out of the Marxist tradition. But he quickly realized that, in the late Cold War era, political resistance was getting harder and harder. Citizens were shape-shifting into consumers and actively participating in their own marginalization.

It’s crucial to remember that Baudrillard was thinking all of this through with Lyotard’s argument about the end of meta-narratives in the background. In Baudrillard’s mind, the triumph of liberal democracy, and the collapse of the Soviet model had paved the way for sterile consumerist politics. The future, he warned, would be shaped by markets and brands and an oversaturated media landscape.

For postmoderns like Baudrillard, television and now the internet immersed people in their own private realities. The constant battle for our attention means that we can experience whatever version of reality we prefer, whenever we prefer. Even worse, because media platforms are competing to win audiences, the incentives will always push them in the direction of catering to our worst impulses. After a while, we’re just awash in self-curated content.

Baudrillard popularized the world “simulacra” to describe the unreality this puts us in. Twitter, as Jonathan Chait recently suggested, is a kind of simulacrum. Spend enough time on it and your picture of reality becomes predictably warped. The content you consume is easily mistaken for the real world.

Baudrillard warned, almost three decades ago, that representations had become their own reality — far more real than actual reality. And that was before Twitter or Facebook were even conceivable.

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The American postmodernist, Frederic Jameson, made very similar arguments in his 1991 book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism. Jameson, like Baudrillard, thought we were witnessing the rise of a “mass culture” in which media and capitalism color our experience of reality. Jameson was thinking less about “narratives” and more about how market ideology flattened culture and obliterated distinctions between high and low art. But he echoed Baudrillard’s warnings about the loss of a shared reality.

Thinkers like Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Jameson hold up pretty well, but there’s no denying the relativistic outgrowths of postmodernism. Many postmoderns held that truth was socially constructed, though not all of them argued that all truth claims were valid. But some of them did go that far.

This is the part of the critique of postmodernism that can be hard to rebut. As Michael Lynch, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut told me, postmodernism had its strengths and weaknesses. “Its crucial insight is that power in all its dark forms is what often determines what passes for truth in our culture and ignoring that makes you vulnerable to manipulation,” Lynch says.

But the big error, Lynch added, “is to infer from this that truth itself was determined by those in power. That collapses what passes for truth with truth itself, which is just a mistake, both politically and logically.”

Lynch, of course, is right. Some of the postmoderns took this initial insight from Lyotard — that power often dictates what we take to be true — and extended it to mean that there is no truth as such.

In other words, postmodernism, like any body of thought, is shot through with bad ideas, absurd claims, and shoddy thinkers. But if we look past the excesses and focus on the things it got right, it actually explains quite a lot about what we’re living through.

Moreover, any argument that says postmodernism “killed truth” implies that a small cadre of (mostly French) theorists writing obscure books and journal articles somehow transformed the world. If the world has changed, it has more to do structural changes in the information space — namely the explosion of digital technology — than with the works of Derrida or Foucault or any other writer.

Why all of this matters today

Postmodernism doesn’t explain everything about our current moment, but it absolutely explains some of it — like, for example, the “narratives” problem Stelter and Marantz lamented on CNN.

For the postmoderns, discrete facts weren’t all that valuable to most people. What really mattered were the narratives we relied on to make sense of all those facts. Think of narratives as a device for connecting the dots, a way of mapping our experience of the world. This process of connecting the dots has never been immune from bias or distortion.

The postmoderns made a simple point: Technology and globalization were making the world infinitely more complicated and that meant more information to process, more dots to connect. And one way to manage this chaos is to lean more and more on narratives that strip the world of its complexity — and often reinforce our biases at the same time.

In that sense, it’s not exactly new that people are constructing fact-free narratives about the world around them. What is new, and what the postmoderns were warning about decades ago, is the volume of narratives and the proliferation of media technologies designed to flood our consciousnesses with as much content as possible. This has changed the game and, to borrow Lyotard’s phrase, “scrambled” our perceptions of reality.

The best postmodern thinkers, in other words, anticipated where we were heading as a society. They could see how innovations in technology, capitalism, and media were distorting our shared sense of truth. And none of them — not even the most pessimistic — could’ve imagined the epistemic anarchy unleashed by Facebook or YouTube algorithms.

We’re now, as philosopher Thomas De Zengotita told me, “the authors of our own universes.” We’ve combined the puerility of televisual culture with the self-centeredness of digital culture. The result is the total triumph of the mediated self, where everyone can create, perform, and affirm their identity and their truth and the marketplace will oblige them at every step.

“And this whole technology thing,” De Zengotita wrote in 2005, “is only just getting started.” The media technologies that define our worlds are getting more sophisticated and more immersive every day. All of which is to say, the crisis signaled by postmodernity will only deepen.

But there is some value in at least understanding how we got here and why we can’t go back.

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Democratic presidential candidate US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) participates in a Presidential Candidates Forum at the NAACP 110th National Convention on July 24, 2019, in Detroit, Michigan.  | Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

A per-employee fee is more popular than a payroll or income tax.

Elizabeth Warren wants to finance a single-payer health care system by, in part, requiring employers to take their current per-employee spending on health insurance and kick it over to the government instead.

This helps her achieve her desired talking point that the plan does not involve an increase in taxes on the middle class. But it’s also a highly unusual program design that you don’t really see in foreign health care systems. And as her plan acknowledges, it wouldn’t really be sustainable over the long run to have different employers facing sharply different health care costs when their employees are all getting the same health care regardless.

Bernie Sanders, who has not released a similarly detailed financing scheme, has criticized this idea and instead touts an employer-side payroll tax and an income tax hike (with an exemption for low-wage workers) as better financing mechanisms.

Somewhat contrary to the main public image of the two New England progressives, Sanders’s idea here seems more technocratically sound while Warren has basically chosen to fulfill a talking point at the expense of sound program design. On the other hand, you can’t change the health care system unless you win the election first. And new polling conducted by YouGov Blue on behalf of Data for Progress confirms that with her preferred pay-for, Medicare-for-all polls better than if you use alternate tax ideas.

Three options for financing Medicare-for-all

YouGov asked registered voters three different versions of a basically similar question, trying to probe public opinion about the trade-off between replacing private health spending with taxes.

The main setup of the question went like this: “In some versions of a Medicare-for-all system that have been proposed recently, all Americans would be added to a government-run health insurance plan. This would eliminate all out-of-pocket costs such as co-pays and deductibles, and would eliminate all monthly premiums. These would instead be paid in the form of taxes. The money you pay to health insurance companies would go to the government, and the average American’s take-home pay would not decrease.”

Then they asked, “Would you [support or oppose] replacing out-of-pocket costs, co-pays, and deductibles with taxes if the tax plan included …” followed by one of three different possible options:

• … A tax on employers that requires them to pay for health care for every employee
• … A tax on individuals earning more than $29,000 a year
• … A fee paid by employers to the Medicare system for each employee they employ

The polling is decent but not amazing on all three possible answers, with the employer fee clearly garnering more support and less opposition than the employee-side tax, and the income tax option leaving a very large share of the population undecided.

The appeal of the employer fee is that by design it guarantees that nobody’s nominal costs rise. Sanders, and especially his more vociferous advocates like Matt Bruenig, counter that in the long run proportional taxes of the kind Sanders is proposing will be more favorable to the majority of the population since they raise more money from high-income people.

Indeed, it is probably true that if you could walk everyone through the math on this and — critically — get them to believe that legal tax incidence matters less than economic tax incidence, they would come around to Sanders’s point of view. But at the moment, the per-worker fee seems uniformly more popular.

The employer fee is somewhat more popular with most groups

Looking at party ID, the payroll tax option garners two percentage points higher support from Democrats but is slightly lower with Republicans, independents, and those identifying as “other.”

The payroll tax is less supported by both men and women, less supported by African Americans and whites (though slightly more supported by Hispanics), and less supported by all educational categories except “some college.”

None of these differences are particularly large, reflecting the fact that the topline polling gap between these options is modest.

Poll numbers obviously don’t change the fact that a payroll tax would probably be more financially advantageous for most people. But in a world where even if the 2020 election goes extremely well for Democrats there is extremely little chance of a full-blown Medicare-for-all plan being enacted, all these proposals are campaign props more than real policy blueprints. And Warren has narrowly succeeded in crafting the prop she needs — something consonant with her “plans” schtick (which Sanders’s purposeful vagueness would not be) that also polls well.

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The ultimate spin-machine challenge. | Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Can the right-wing machine hold the base in an alternate reality long enough to get through the next election?

Back in 2017, I wrote a piece speculating that the Mueller hearings might bring America’s epistemic crisis to a head. That crisis involves Americans’ growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality. We have sorted ourselves into polarized factions living in different worlds, not just of values, but of facts. Communication between them is increasingly difficult.

I wondered what might happen if Mueller offered clear, incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt. Would the right wing be able to prevent its members from ever finding out? What if the truth was revealed but it had no power, no effect at all, because half the country had been walled off from it? What if there is no longer any evidentiary standard that can overcome our polarization?

As it happened, the hearings didn’t play out that way. Mueller’s report and testimony were oddly oblique and muted, with notable omissions. It proved relatively easy for the president and his supplicant media to dismiss the whole thing as a dud.

Now we may experience the stress test that Mueller never produced: whether the right can shield itself from plain facts in plain sight.

Unlike Mueller’s report, the story behind the impeachment case is relatively simple: Congress approved military aid for Ukraine, but Trump withheld it as part of a sustained campaign to pressure Ukraine into launching an investigation of his political rival Joe Biden’s family. There’s a record of him doing it. There are multiple credible witnesses to the phone call and larger campaign. Several Trump allies and administration officials have admitted to it on camera. Trump himself admitted to it on the White House lawn.

It’s just very, very obvious that he did it. It’s very obvious he and his associates don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. And it’s very obvious there is something wrong with it. Holding US foreign policy hostage to personal political favors is straightforward abuse of power, precisely the sort of thing the Founders had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution.

It’s a clearly impeachable pattern of action, documented and attested to by multiple witnesses, confessed to multiple times, in violation of longstanding political precedent and a moral consensus that was, until 2016, universal. Compared to Mueller, that is a much more difficult test of the right’s ability to obscure, distract, and polarize.

Right now, the right’s messaging machine is sputtering a bit, cycling through defenses — it didn’t happen, Trump’s not competent enough to do it, it was a failed quid pro quo so it doesn’t count, he did it but it’s not impeachable — that contradict one another from day to day.

Can the machine successfully hold the right-wing base in an alternate reality and throw up enough fog to keep the general public at bay for long enough to get through the next election? It seems challenging, given the facts on record, but this is just the sort of challenge the machine was built for.

Let’s quickly review how we got here.

The rise of tribal epistemology

Earlier in 2017, I told the story of Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that has to do with knowing and coming to know things — what counts as true, what counts as evidence, how we accumulate knowledge, and the like. It’s where you find schools of thought like skepticism (we can’t truly know anything) and realism (the universe contains observer-independent facts we can come to know).

Tribal epistemology, as I see it, is when tribalism comes to systematically subordinate epistemological principles.

Javier Zarracina for Vox

Perhaps the easiest way to explain is by way of analogy with tribal morality, which people are more familiar with. Tribal morality is what happens when tribal interests come to subordinate moral principles.

Moral principles are generally, by their nature, cosmopolitan. They are meant to apply across tribal lines, to be “transpartisan.” Take, for instance, the principle “it is wrong to torture.” Interpreted as a principle, it is meant to apply to everyone. Anyone, from any group or nation, who tortures anyone else, from any group or nation, is doing something wrong.

But under tribal morality, principles are subsumed under tribal membership. It becomes, “it is wrong for them to torture us.” It is okay for us to torture them, because our tribe is Good and thus whatever actions we take to prosecute the interests of the tribe are Good. They, however, are Bad, so they are subject to the rules. (Readers of a certain age may recall the US having just this debate in the mid-2000s.)

Tribal epistemology happens when tribal interests subsume transpartisan epistemological principles, like standards of evidence, internal coherence, and defeasibility. “Good for our tribe” becomes the primary determinant of what is true; “part of our tribe” becomes the primary determinant of who to trust.

A circular logic, which has become quite familiar in the impeachment affair, emerges: Anyone who says anything contrary to the tribe marks themselves as an enemy of the tribe (cough *deep state* cough); enemies of the tribe cannot but trusted, so their testimony or evidence can be ignored. Thus, by definition, nothing that questions the tribal narrative can be trusted.

A decades-long effort on the right has resulted in a parallel set of institutions meant to encourage tribal epistemology. They mimic mainstream media, think tanks, and the academy, but without the restraint of transpartisan principles. They are designed to advance the interests of the right, to tell stories and produce facts that support the tribe. That is the ur-goal; the rhetoric and formalisms of critical thinking are retrofit around it.

Talk radio and the birth of Fox News in the 1990s were turning points. They eventually expanded to create an entire, complete-unto-itself conservative information universe. It was capable of cranking out stories and facts (or “facts”) in support of the conservative cause 24 hours a day, steadily shaping the worldview of their white suburban audience around a forever war with The Libs, who are always just on the verge of destroying America.

As I covered in more detail in this post (and this one), over time this led to a steady deterioration in fealty to norms, epistemological and otherwise, to the point that something like 30 percent of the country is now awash in a fantasia of conspiracy theories and just-so stories.

As journalist Alex Pareene wrote in a scathing 2017 piece, the propaganda machine that the right built to keep its base outraged grew out of control and swallowed the GOP. “They’re screwed,” Pareene wrote of conservatives, “because they and their predecessors engineered a perpetual misinformation machine, and then a bunch of people addicted to their product took over the government.”

Now everyone with any power on the right is deep in the bubble, right up to the president himself, who spends a considerable portion of his time watching and tweeting about Fox News. There are no more moderates or responsible Republicans behind the curtain, keeping an eye on the difference between tribal tall tales and reality. Fox natives are running the show, including the federal government.

And Trump, the ultimate tribalist, has made it clear that he doesn’t want to hear any of these half-ass stories about how he did something wrong but it’s not that bad. He demands ultimate loyalty, and to him loyalty means insisting that he did nothing wrong at all.

Following Trump down that path requires ignoring or wishing away mountains of evidence and decades of precedent, opting instead to believe him when he says, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” This is tribal epistemology in its rawest form: It’s us or them, our story or theirs. If you are one of us, you believe our story.

Republicans need to maintain doubt and prevent consensus

As a recent Crooked Media/Change Research poll showed, voter opinions on impeachment are as inflamed and polarized as they are on everything else. Some 91 percent of those polled have strong feelings on impeachment: 94 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents oppose it; 94 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents support it. Meanwhile, “50% of independents and 57% of swing voters support removing Trump from office.”

This is the story of American politics: a narrowly divided nation, with raw numbers on the side of the rising demographics in the left coalition but intensity and outsized political power on the side of the right coalition. Put in more practical terms, the right still has the votes and the cohesion to prevent a Senate impeachment conviction.

On the downslope of a fading, unpopular coalition is not a great place for Republicans to be. It doesn’t augur well for their post-2020 health as a party. But it is enough to get them through the next election, which is about as far ahead as they look these days.

All they need to do is to keep that close partisan split frozen in place. Above all, they need to ensure that nothing breaks through to the masses in the mushy middle, who are mostly disengaged from politics. They need to make sure no clear consensus forms, nothing that might find its way into pop culture, the way the entire nation eventually focused its attention on Nixon’s impeachment.

It’s a kind of magic trick they’re going to try to pull off in full view.

The right has hacked the cognitive biases of voters and reporters

They are working with a few key tools and advantages. The first is a strong tendency, especially among low-information, relatively disengaged voters (and political reporters), to view consensus as a signal of legitimacy. It’s an easy and appealing heuristic: If something is a good idea, it would have at least a few people from both sides supporting it. That’s why “bipartisan” has been such a magic word in US politics this century, even as the reality of bipartisanship has faded.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was very canny in recognizing this tendency and working it it ruthlessly to his advantage. He realized before Obama ever set foot in office that if he could keep Republicans unified in opposition, refusing any cooperation on anything, he could make Obama appear “polarizing.” His great insight, as ruthlessly effective as it was morally bankrupt, was that he could unilaterally deny Obama the ability to be a uniter, a leader, or a deal maker. Through nothing but sheer obstinance, he could make politics into an endless, frustrating, fruitless shitshow, diminishing both parties in voters’ eyes.

This is what Republicans need more than anything on impeachment: for the general public to see it as just another round of partisan squabbling, another illustration of how “Washington” is broken. They need to prevent any hint of bipartisan consensus from emerging.

Tribal epistemology is key to this. Republicans must render partisan not only judgments of right and wrong but judgments of what is and isn’t true or real. They must render facts themselves a matter of controversy that the media reports as a food fight and the public tunes out.

That’s the main reason they are focusing their attacks so intently on process complaints. The investigation itself, the hearings, the whole process must come to be seen as partisan, which will serve as permission for the engaged on the right to attack it, the engaged on the left to embrace it, and the broader public to dismiss it.

Aiding in the effort is the propaganda machine. One of the more notable findings from the aforementioned poll: “89% of Republicans who get most of their impeachment news from Fox oppose the inquiry because they think the allegations aren’t true; 59% of other Republicans say the same.” As I have written before about AOC and the Green New Deal, the right has an ability to convey a partisan message to its base that the left utterly lacks.

As a massive post-election study of online media from Harvard showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. “Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left,” the researchers found. “On the right, prominent media are highly partisan.”

Democrats are still dependent on the mainstream press to convey their messages to the broad public. Many of their consultants and press officers still view their role as managing relationships with mainstream reporters. But the mainstream media, catering to low-information voters and reinforcing their worst prejudices in the process, persists in covering politics precisely through the most cynical lens, as a team sport, competing performances to be narrated like an announcer calling a game.

Meanwhile, the right not only commands the highest rated cable news network and an army of supportive online media outlets, it is out-spending by millions on Facebook, Tik-Tok, 4chan, and 8chan, targeting messages where their audiences are.

Impeachment is make or break time for America’s epistemic health

As Putin and other modern autocrats have realized, in the modern media environment — a chaotic Wild West where traditional gatekeepers are in decline — it is not necessary for a repressive regime to construct its own coherent account of events. There are no broadly respected, nonpartisan referees left to hold it to account for consistency or accuracy. All it needs, to get away with whatever it wants, is for the information environment to be so polluted that no one can figure out what’s true and what isn’t, or what’s really going on.

The recipe is always the same: attack independent media outlets as partisan enemies of the regime and, by proxy, enemies of the people. At the same time, use the media under state control, along with an army of bots, trolls, and shitposters, to inject accusations, lies, and conspiracy theories into the public dialogue.

In an information fog filled with vexed uncertainty, people will either tune out, revert to their tribal affiliations, or both. They will seek a strong leader who offers simple certainties and a clear account of who is to blame for the chaos. Confusion and fear, not deception, are the ultimate goal.

That is precisely the kind of machine the US conservative movement has built: one designed to produce confusion and fear. Trump is its natural leader, the first Republican president to reflect the party’s contemporary core and character, and his impeachment is its ultimate test.

Meanwhile, Democrats are attempting to do something that arguably nothing since the 9/11 attacks has done: unite Americans in a clear understanding of a threat and a clear will to action, in a way that reaches across conventional partisan lines, at least to some extent.

On their side, they have the products of America’s tattered remaining institutional processes and norms: clear evidence, painstakingly laid out in a Constitutionally prescribed process, communicated through mainstream news outlets. The facts are clearer than ever, but those institutions are weaker and social trust, which the right has been concertedly attacking for decades, is at a low ebb.

David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

In opposition is large but stable minority united by unquestioned loyalty to a tribal leader, dedicated to guerrilla information warfare unconstrained by conventional norms of accuracy or consistency, and motivated by an almost eschatological will to power.

If the latter triumphs, if it is able to muddy and distract enough to make impeachment just another Mueller, just more partisan white noise, we will cross a kind of rubicon. It will demonstrate that, to a first approximation, lol nothing matters.

Giphy

Moral consensus will have become impossible. Epistemological consensus will have become impossible. It will show that no amount of evidence is capable of bridging the partisan gap. The epistemic crisis, and its attendant political crisis, will be fully upon us.

Ultimately, communication, and with it survival as a polity, depends on a shared body of facts and assumptions about the world. For decades, the right has been sawing away at the threads that still connect it to mainstream institutions, procedures, and norms of conduct, to the point that it has created a hermetically sealed and impenetrable world of its own.

As congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned in 2012, the GOP as become “a resurgent outlier: ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The machine was primed and waiting for someone like Trump. Now, with his erratic and indefensible conduct, he is accelerating the breach, pushing the right into ever-more cult-like behavior, principles laid aside one after another in service of power.

That is what a tribalist like Trump wants: for communication and compromise across tribal lines to become impossible, so that loyalty becomes the only measure and everything is reduced to pure struggle for dominance. If he makes it through impeachment unscathed, he and the right will have learned once and for all that facts and evidence have no hold on them. Both “sides” have free rein to choose the facts and evidence that suit them. Only power matters.

If the right’s epistemic break becomes final and irreparable, as impeachment threatens, then no matter what happens in the next election, American democracy is in for a long spell of trouble.

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Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke in France, 2019. Handke has been accused of genocide apologism. | ALAIN JOCARD/AFP via Getty Images

And the rest of the week’s best writing on books and related subjects.

Welcome to Vox’s weekly book link roundup, a curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of November 10, 2019.

• At the New Yorker, Nora Caplan-Bricker delves into the way Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Nights became a forerunner of the modern feminist crime novel. I have already seen many people opining that, contra the headline, Dorothy Sayers is absolutely not overlooked, and while that is a fair point, I think we should take any and all excuses to celebrate her regardless:

In the best detective stories, the truth that’s uncovered isn’t limited to the name of the culprit. Mysteries, like works of horror, transmute nebulous fears into tangible dangers. The genre lends itself to exploring anxieties about the unknown and unknowable—shadowy territory that, for Harriet and many of the detectives who’ve followed, includes the contents of their own minds, or the substance of their own personalities.

• There is apparently a library vigilante who believes that the public library system is anti-Trump and who is retaliating by turning around the spines of books written by Trump opponents so that they are shelved backward. The Spokesman-Review has the story.
• The prestigious Bread Loaf writers’ conference is ending a program in which students who attended on scholarship were asked to work as waiters. The New York Times reports:

Rojas Contreras recalled having to perform a song and dance for the other attendees one evening. “At one time it would have been more like a gentle hazing, when the conference was made up mostly of men, mostly of people of means, mostly white,” she said. “When the population changes, when women are waiters, people of color are waiters, queer people are waiters, then it is no longer a light hazing.”

• There was a big dustup this week involving a college student who said she wanted to keep books by the YA novelist Sarah Dessen off her college reading list; the student was then roundly decried by many prominent authors, including Dessen, as belittling books for teen girls. At Jezebel, Emily Alford considers whether or not we are using teen girls as straw men:

The idea that the decision not to include a single YA novel on a single booklist is automatically the work of the patriarchy creates a straw man of the teenage girl, oppressed by college coursework that is not interested in her experiences or her feelings. This teenage girl, regularly conjured up in the name of fighting sexism, is failed by an elitist literary world that denies her the only books she cares to read—young adult novels with characters who look and think like her. But what happens when the teenage girl does not enjoy books that authors insist are written for them? Does that girl’s or young woman’s opinion matter less? Dessen’s book did not give Nelson pleasure. Perhaps Nelson was dismissive in saying the book was written for teenage girls, but the book was, in fact, written for teenage girls.

• At the Guardian, Emmanuel Carrère heads off in search of the Dice Man, the author of a cult novel who claims to make all his choices in life by rolling the dice:

His choices soon become more audacious. Going somewhere he would never go, getting to know people he would otherwise never meet. He pushes his patients to leave their families and jobs, to change their political and sexual orientations. His reputation suffers, but Rhinehart does not care. What he likes, now, is doing the exact opposite of what he would normally do: putting salt in his coffee, jogging in a tuxedo, going to work in shorts, pissing in the flowerpots, walking backward, sleeping under his bed. His wife finds him strange, but he says it is a psychological experiment, and she lets herself be lulled into believing it. Until the day he gets the idea of initiating his children.

• Remember how last month the Nobel Prize for literature went to a genocide apologist? At the Intercept, Peter Maass goes digging to figure out how members of the Nobel committee came to believe in a conspiracy theory about the Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims:

Here’s what shocks me most about this Nobel Prize disaster. It’s not that the Nobel jurors fell for conspiracy theories. That’s terrible enough, of course. The worst is that the elevation of Peter Handke has also raised from the nearly dead a discredited rewrite of history and genocide. We are going back in time.

• We love a tiny traveling bookstore in these roundups. Bonus: This one’s French.
• At Electric Lit, McKayla Coyle has a simple request to make: Please Write More Books About Cryptids.

I am not an expert cryptozoologist and I will not claim to be one. I’m simply a person with a vested, professional interest in mysterious, supernatural creatures that may or may not exist; creatures like Bigfoot, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, etc. These beings are the stuff of legend, but apparently that’s not enough for the literary community. It’s easy to find books about “sexy” supernatural creatures like vampires and witches, but it seems that authors are too good to look down from their ivory towers and into their local woods, where the Flatwoods monster is probably rolling around in its big metal suit, hissing at children and emitting a noxious gas.

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This week in books at Vox, we reviewed Carmen Maria Machado’s haunting new memoir In the Dream House. As always, you can keep up with all of Vox’s book coverage by visiting vox.com/books. Happy reading!

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Homer was deeply apologetic about this whole aspect ratio mess. | 20th Century Fox

Our national nightmare is over.

Everything’s coming up Milhouse! After many websites across the entirety of this great internet of ours — including the one you are reading right now — complained about Disney+ displaying the first 19 and a half seasons of The Simpsons in an aspect ratio that cut out much of the visual information and many of the show’s funniest gags, the service has announced it is adding the episodes in their original aspect ratio.

The change will take place in “early 2020,” according to a statement from Disney.

Here’s what else Disney had to say:

We presented “The Simpsons” in 16:9 aspect ratio at launch in order to guarantee visual quality and consistency across all 30 seasons. Over time, Disney+ will roll out new features and additional viewing options. As part of this, in early 2020, Disney+ will make the first 19 seasons (and some episodes from Season 20) of “The Simpsons” available in their original 4:3 aspect ratio, giving subscribers a choice of how they prefer to view the popular series.

Until February 2009’s “Take My Life Please” (the 10th episode of the 20th season), every episode of The Simpsons was formatted for boxy, standard-definition TVs, in an aspect ratio of 4:3 (meaning four units of width to three units of height). But on our modern widescreen TVs, which display images at a 16:9 ratio (16 units of width to nine units of height), 4:3 programs are displayed with black bars on either side of the picture, because it isn’t large enough to fill the entire screen. (For more on aspect ratios, consult this Vox explainer from the halcyon days of 2014.)

However, some viewers feel like they’re not getting “the full picture” if they see those black bars, so many networks that rebroadcast old 4:3 programs alter them to fill a 16:9 ratio by zooming in on the center of the image. This process ends up slicing off the top and bottom of the image. Sometimes, the truncated image that results is not a problem. But in the case of a show like The Simpsons, which contains many, many sight gags, the tops and bottoms of an image can be where some of the best stuff lives.

Observe:

Per Disney’s statement, those of you who (wrongly!) want to watch older episodes of The Simpsons zoomed in to 16:9 will continue to have that option. But Simpsons purists such as myself will have the distinct pleasure of watching these episodes as they were intended: in a strange, boxy shape that doesn’t fill the entirety of our modern TV screens. (Meanwhile, it seems unlikely the Michael Jackson episode from season three will be available on Disney+ anytime soon.)

It’s really true what they say: Simpsons episodes in 4:3 aspect ratio for some — miniature American flags for others!

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Win McNamee/Getty Images

Three State Department officials testify publicly in the impeachment inquiry; Israel and Islamic Jihad in Gaza exchange strikes, despite a ceasefire.

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

Three witnesses, almost 12 hours of testimony

• The impeachment inquiry moved squarely into the public eye this week with the first open hearings, featuring testimony from State Department officials Bill Taylor, George Kent, and Marie Yovanovitch. [CNBC / Kevin Breuninger]
• In his testimony alongside Kent on Wednesday, Taylor furnished one big new piece of information: a phone call on July 26 to US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland in which President Trump was said to ask about “investigations” in Ukraine. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
• Kent also testified about a memo he wrote after learning of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky. [New York Times / Sheryl Gay Stolberg]
• On Friday, Yovanovitch testified about her removal from her position as the ambassador to Ukraine in May as well as a smear campaign against her linked to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. [FiveThirtyEight]
• While Yovanovitch testified to her feelings of dismay and perception of Trump’s discussion of her as a threat, the president tweeted an attack on her — which nearly everyone agreed was a bad idea and might even count as witness tampering. [Washington Post / Rosalind S. Helderman and Rachael Bade]
• The hearings pick back up next week with eight witnesses are on the schedule for public testimony, including Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former special representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, National Security Council senior director for Russia Fiona Hill, and Sondland. [CBS News]
• Despite hours of televised questioning and statements, 81 percent of voters say that the public hearings will have little or no impact on their view of Trump. [Politico / Steven Shepard]

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Dozens dead from Israel airstrike exchange

• Israel conducted a military strike against Islamic Jihad positions in Gaza, in a continuation of fighting despite a ceasefire. [Haaretz]
• Friday, the Israel Defense Forces admitted to launching more raids targeting the group whose top official, Bahaa Abu al-Ata, was killed in a strike on Tuesday. [Al Jazeera]
• Since al-Ata’s death, over 450 rockets have been fired into Israel, according to the IDF. This is the largest rocket attack since May. [Wall Street Journal / Dov Lieber]
• Less than 24 hours after the ceasefire was agreed upon by both the IDF and Islamic Jihad, airstrikes killed over 30 people. Around half of those killed were civilians. [AP News / Josef Federman and Fares Akram]
• “Too often civilians pay the price for political brinkmanship by states and armed group,” said Omar Shakir, country director at Human Rights Watch. Shakir went on the call the attacks “unlawful.” [New York Times]

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Miscellaneous

• Texas State Rep. Alfonso Nevárez stated his intent not to run for reelection; an arrest warrant in his name was issued after being caught on camera dropping an envelope of cocaine. [Dallas Morning News / Lauren McGaughy]
• Taylor Swift’s messy and public battle with her record label continued with a social media post late Thursday. [Vox / Constance Grady]
• Paging Dr. Llama: why these furry South American camelids are becoming increasingly popular in the therapy world. [New York Times / Jennifer A. Kingson]
• Chile’s embattled government announced a plan to hold a constitutional referendum next April. [Reuters / Dave Sherwood]
• A 9-year-old from Belgium is set to graduate from his undergraduate studies, and he already knows what he wants to do when he grows up: create artificial organs after attaining a PhD in engineering and studying medicine. [CNN / Jack Guy]

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Verbatim

“We thought it was important that justice be done for Kateryna Handziuk and for others who fight corruption in Ukraine. It’s not a tabletop exercise there. Lives are in the balance. So we wanted to bring attention to this.” [Former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testifying before Congress about how she was honoring a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist when she got the call to leave Ukraine]

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Watch this: We’re melting the Arctic and reviving deadly germs

A warming planet is thawing some nasty pestilences. [YouTube / Danush Parvaneh, Liz Scheltens, and Christina Thornell]

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Read more

Hurricane Katrina inspired a national pet evacuation policy. The plan could save human lives, too.

Activists want Congress to ban facial recognition. So they scanned lawmakers’ faces.

The global crackdown on parents who refuse vaccines for their kids is on

Disturbing video shows an Arizona sheriff’s deputy body slam a quadruple amputee

Twitter is walking into a minefield with its political ads ban

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Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on November 15, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

One takeaway includes a dramatic, real-time attack by President Trump.

The most dramatic moment of former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s appearance before the House impeachment inquiry on Friday actually happened outside the Congressional chamber.

Just one hour into the hearing, President Donald Trump tweeted an attack against the 33-year career foreign service officer, claiming that everywhere she went “turned bad.” That insult led House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) to characterize the president’s comments as a form of witness intimidation.

But while that episode may have had the most pizzazz, it wasn’t the only important thing that happened during the hearing. If you weren’t able to watch all of it, don’t worry — we’ve got you covered. Here are the four key takeaways from the hearing that you need to know.

1. A dramatic attack from Trump in real-time

The biggest development at the hearing was an unscripted intervention from the president himself — one that spurred Democratic cries of witness intimidation.

But about an hour after the hearing began, Trump couldn’t stop himself from weighing in:

In the tweet itself, Trump (absurdly) suggested that Yovanovitch — who was posted to the US Embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1986 as a young foreign service officer — is to blame for the violence that unfolded in the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

He also mentioned how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “spoke unfavorably” about her during his July 25 phone call with Trump — which is true, though it may have just been an attempt to win Trump’s favor by agreeing with him, as Trump is the one who brought her up, not Zelensky.

Trump also noted that “it is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.” That is true: As Yovanovitch herself affirmed numerous times over the course of her testimony, US ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president.

But it can also be newsworthy if the president removes an ambassador because he’s been duped by a campaign of lies being pushed by corrupt foreign officials — which is what Yovanovitch’s defenders (and Yovanovitch herself) believe happened.

In any case, Trump’s tweet provided the opportunity for Democrats to read it out to Yovanovitch for the first time on live television — and to ask for her response.

Asked by Schiff about Trump’s claim that everywhere she went “turned bad,” Yovanovitch said, “I don’t think I have such power,” adding that she thinks she and her colleagues have “demonstrably made things better.”

Schiff followed up: “The president in real-time is attacking you. What effect do you think that has on other witnesses’ willingness to come forward and expose wrongdoing?”

“Well, it’s very intimidating,” Yovanovitch said. “The effect is to be intimidating.”

“Some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously,” Schiff said in response — apparently alluding to the possibility that Trump’s behavior could be mentioned in a future article of impeachment.

Even Fox News commentators Bret Baier and Chris Wallace and on-air guest Ken Starr thought Trump’s tweet was a mistake.

2. Yovanovitch laid out her narrative of how the smear campaign against her went down

As Yovanovitch herself pointed out in her opening statement, she was no longer in her post by the time the key events Democrats are investigating actually took place — namely, Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Zelensky by withholding a White House meeting and eventually military aid.

Instead, her fate is a prologue of sorts to that saga. As the US ambassador to Ukraine, Yovanovitch was highly respected among her colleagues. But she ran afoul of two powerful people: Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine’s prosecutor general (under the country’s previous administration) Yuri Lutsenko.

Lutsenko began spreading what Yovanovitch says was a completely fabricated story about her: that she gave him a list of people she didn’t want him to prosecute. (Lutsenko has since recanted that story.) Rumors also spread that Yovanovitch was a Trump critic who was bad-mouthing the president in private. The purpose of these rumors seems to have been to push her out of the ambassadorship.

Soon, top Trump allies like Giuliani and Fox News talk-show host Sean Hannity were openly attacking Yovanovitch. The president’s son Don Jr. also tweeted an article about calls to remove her, writing that the US needs “less of these jokers as ambassadors.” (Asked about that, Yovanovitch said that she’d believed at the time that “if the president’s son is saying this” it “would be very hard to continue in my position and have authority in Ukraine.”)

Then, in late April — just three days after Zelensky won the election — Yovanovitch got a call from a State Department official who told her to leave Ukraine on the next plane. The deputy secretary of state later explained to her that Trump had decided Yovanovitch had to go — and the haste was due to fear Trump would attack her in a public tweet.

Alex Wong-Pool/AFP/Getty Images

So Yovanovitch was out. But when Trump spoke to Zelensky during their now-infamous phone call on July 25, her name came up.

“The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news, and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news, so I just wanted to let you know that,” Trump said, according to a reconstructed call readout released by the White House. Later, he added: “Well, she’s going to go through some things.”

Yovanovitch testified that she didn’t learn what Trump had said about her until September, when the White House released the call summary document publicly. But, she said, she was “shocked,” “appalled,” and “devastated” to learn what he’d said about her on that call.

The point of all of this, it seems, was to push out Yovanovitch because she wouldn’t have been helpful to Giuliani’s machinations. And once she was gone, the plot to pressure Zelensky’s administration could proceed in earnest.

3. Yovanovitch says Trump and his allies’ actions may have actually encouraged corruption in Ukraine, not helped curb it

Trump and his Republican allies insist that Trump’s interest in having Ukraine investigate Burisma and the Bidens had nothing to do with improving his own personal political fortunes, but rather was a virtuous campaign to address endemic corruption in the country.

But Yovanovitch tore a giant hole in that line of defense when she assessed that these actions may have actually made its corruption problem worse.

That stunning comment came under questioning from Rep. Danny Heck (D-WA). “What does this mean to Ukraine when the US engages in this kind of behavior?” he asked. “What does that mean to them and their struggling efforts to become a robust democracy?”

“I think when we engage in questionable activity, that raises a question. It emboldens those who are corrupt who don’t want to see Ukraine become a democracy, free-market economy, a part of Europe,” she replied. “That is not a security interest.”

“I think Ukraine looks to us for the power of our example,” she said.

4. Republicans were more comfortable attacking Schiff than Yovanovitch

The GOP members of the committee mostly held back from directly attacking Yovanovitch — perhaps believing that would come off poorly. Instead, they directed their belligerence toward Schiff.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) disparaged Schiff’s “duplicity” and “abuse of power.” Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) requested that a litany of news articles in which Schiff was quoted saying the whistleblower would testify be submitted into the Congressional record. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told Schiff that the GOP’s indulgence of him ran out “a long time ago.”

When questioning Yovanovitch, though, the GOP members tended to emphasize their respect for her service to the country — and to attempt to make implications that they thought would be helpful to Trump, rather than to outright attack her.

For instance, they stressed her lack of knowledge about the key events at the heart of the inquiry, which unfolded after her departure. And they hammered the point that, as president, Trump was within his rights to have her removed from her post.

Yovanovitch said that was entirely true — that “the president has the right to withdraw an ambassador at any time, for any reason.” But, she added, “What I do wonder is why it was necessary to smear my reputation falsely.”

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Stefanik questions Yovanovitch on Friday. | Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

Rep. Elise Stefanik is accusing the House intel chair of treating Republicans unfairly, but all he did was try to enforce the rules.

At one point during Friday’s impeachment hearing with former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) shut down Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). He did so not to silence her, but because she was violating the rules the House approved to guide the impeachment hearing.

Nonetheless, within a matter of minutes, right-wing media, with an assist from Stefanik, spun the incident into a story into one about Schiff wronging the only Republican woman partaking in the impeachment hearing — a narrative that quickly made its way to President Donald Trump.

The impeachment inquiry rules specify that both Democrats and Republicans have 45-minute blocks of time during which the chair or ranking member and their counsels can ask witnesses questions. Other members are not allowed to ask questions during that time, but do have individual five-minute questioning periods afterward.

Nonetheless, when the Republican 45-minute block began, intelligence committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-CA) almost immediately tried to delegate his time to Stefanik. Schiff quickly stepped in to point out that Republicans were violating the rules.

“Under the House Resolution 660, you’re not allowed to yield time except to minority counsel,” Schiff said.

“You’re gagging the young lady from New York?” Nunes replied, indignantly.

“This is the fifth time you have interrupted duly-elected members of Congress,” Stefanik interjected, before the hearing proceeded with Republican counsel Steve Castor asking questions.

(In case you’re interested, Schiff was right about the rules — members can defer their five-minute questioning block to another lawmaker, but the 45-minute blocks are only for the two parties’ ranking members and their staff. Stefanik had her chance to ask Yovanovitch questions later.)

This might not seem like a big deal in a vacuum. But within minutes, Stefanik posted a tweet characterizing a situation in which Schiff was merely trying to enforce the rules as one where Republicans were being singled out.

Minutes later, Daily Wire staffer Ryan Saavedra posted a tweet framing the incident as one in which “Schiff’s behavior toward Elise Stefanik is appalling.”

“If a Republican did this the media and the Democrat Party would instantly accuse them of being sexist,” he wrote, above video of the exchange.

“If a Republican did this the media and Democratic Party would instantly accused them of being sexist,” he added. (Republicans have been criticized for interrupting Democratic congresswomen in recent years, but typically in cases when they interrupt during a congresswoman’s allotted questioning time.)

A short time later, the Schiff-Stefanik exchange was the top story on Fox News’s webpage, with framing not dissimilar from Saavedra’s tweet.

The story soon found its way onto TV when Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy criticized Schiff’s move to enforce the rules as “a tactical error.” Later, Trump himself got in on the act, retweeting a post from House Republicans that asked, “Why is Chairman Schiff afraid of @RepStefanik?” And during a media availability a short time later, Trump lamented that “they’ve taken away the Republicans’ rights” because “they weren’t able to ask questions.”

The episode illustrates how bad-faith attacks can quickly make their way from Twitter to Fox News to the president’s lips. But it also illustrates how Republicans are struggling to defend Trump’s conduct on the merits. Instead of making a case that Trump was right to oust Yovanovitch earlier this year from her post as US ambassador to Ukraine during a time in which he tried to leverage diplomacy into political favors, they’re attacking the process and suggesting that Schiff is simply a bad dude with partisan motives.

It’s misleading — but it provides a useful way for Republicans to cry foul about impeachment without having to actually defend Trump. For instance, during a media availability after the hearing concluded, Stefanik again characterized Republicans getting called out for running afoul of the rules as “just more of the ridiculous abuse of power that we see from Adam Schiff.”

Stefanik went on to dismiss a question about whether she was troubled by Trump posting tweets that were widely viewed as trying to intimidate Yovanovitch during her testimony, saying “the only people that were limited from asking questions were Republican members because we were muzzled by Adam Schiff.”

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It all happened in a group foster home.

There was screaming, cursing, and a head slammed against the wall. A public defender called it “egregious.” Another called it “horrific.”

In a video that aired Thursday on Tucson’s KOLD news station, a white sheriff’s deputy is seen tackling and wrestling a black teen in foster care. The teen — an amputee with no arms or legs — repeatedly screams at the police officer to get off of him.

The sheriff’s deputy holds the boy in a headlock on the ground and curses in his face before arresting him for disorderly conduct. The deputy then screams at the teenager who was recording the scene, handcuffs him, and slams his head against the wall.

It was an extraordinary amount of violence against two defenseless youths — all in the span of eight minutes. The incident happened in September, but KOLD didn’t get a hold of the footage until this week.

According to KOLD, the Pima County sheriff’s deputy was responding to a call at a Tucson group home about a disruptive teenager. Yet his angry and violent response was striking, especially because the teens seemed to be behaving like, well, teenagers.

The sheriff’s office told KOLD that it is investigating the officer’s conduct, and state prosecutors have since dropped charges against the two youths. The incident is all too similar to other videos that have gone viral, showing police officers use excessive force against black men. But there was something particularly disturbing about watching a deputy mistreat such vulnerable children. As if they hadn’t been through enough.

Children in group homes have already experienced enough trauma

One of the most remarkable things about the latest incident was where it happened: in a group home for boys in foster care. These residential facilities are supposed to be safe places for some of country’s most troubled youths.

More than 23,000 children in the foster care system live in group homes like the one in Tucson. And they are far more likely to have experienced multiple forms of trauma in their short lives, according to research by the Casey Family Programs. For example, 55 percent have been physically abused, 40 percent have been sexually abused, 68 percent have been emotionally abused, and 62 percent have suffered a traumatic loss. A majority have mental health problems or physical disabilities.

Few details about the Tucson teenager have been released to protect his privacy, but KOLD said he was in a group home because he was abandoned by his parents. Little is also known about the group home where the incident took place, and there is no reason to believe there was abuse or neglect by caregivers.

However, reports of abuse and neglect of children in group homes are common. In Illinois, for example, a 2016 investigation by the Chicago Tribune described state taxpayer-funded group homes as “a system where caregivers often failed to provide basic care while regulators cloaked harm and death with secrecy and silence.”

The newspaper uncovered 1,311 cases of documented injuries, hundreds of which were not reported by the Illinois Department of Human Services. Residents were often deprived of food, forced to wear dirty clothing and restrained with duct tape.

The investigation prompted Congress to request and audit of group homes by the US Department of Health and Human Services. In 2018, the agency released its report, which found that children in these settings “often experienced serious injuries and medical conditions that resulted in emergency room visits.” The audits also revealed that 99 percent of those critical injuries were not reported to the appropriate law enforcement or state agencies, as required by law.

Foster children who live in residential facilities are already traumatized and at high-risk of abuse. These are children that need police protection, not mistreatment. Black young people, in particular, are already overexposed to police violence.

Exposure to police violence can have harmful effects on black and brown children

Children of color, like the two teens in Tucson, often have traumatizing encounters with police officers from a young age.

In recent years, a number of media stories have called attention to the ways that black children in particular are exposed to police violence, whether they are directly confronted by police, live in communities where police violence has occurred, or witness excessive force from law enforcement.

And research has shown that adults often see both black boys and girls as older, more deserving of suspicion, and less innocent than white children. This suggests that when it comes to policing incidents where black children are present, authority figures may not see these children as bystanders needing protection. In some cases, black children may instead be seen as suspects themselves, and are denied the presumption of innocence given to other children.

Witnessing police violence also affects their ability to trust officers and very likely shifts how they perceive themselves in many cases.

In April, a Florida sheriff’s deputy was been placed on restricted duty after a video showing him slamming a black teenager’s head into the ground and punching him went viral, fueling calls for the officer to be fired. Deputy Christopher Krickovich and another officer had approached a large group of high school students in a shopping center in Tamarac, and one of the boys was arrested for trespassing, according to a report submitted by the officers. Video footage taken by students at the scene shows the boy in handcuffs and a nearby officer push another boy back. As the boy moves, he is pepper-sprayed in the face. When the teen begins to walk away, the officer pulls him to the ground.

This kind of police aggression is all too similar to the deputy’s response in Tucson. Viral videos like these have done a lot to raise public awareness of the violence that black boys and men deal with on a regular basis. It’s just not enough to stop it from happening again.

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