Angelo Carusone on MSNBC: Since Tucker Carlson's ouster from Fox, the right-wing media echo chamber is a “chorus without a conductor”
Carusone also discusses right-wing attempts to dissuade voters of color from voting in 2024
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From the July 29, 2023, edition of MSNBC's American Voices
MICHAEL STEELE (GUEST HOST): New charges filed in the classified documents case against Donald Trump, with two possible indictments looming on both the state and federal levels. Predictably, the disinformation machine is in overdrive this week. Former president went on his knockoff Twitter and told his followers not to listen to legitimate news sources reporting that he's about to be indicted in Jack Smith's election interference probe; he calls it all, of course, fake news. He also says he did nothing wrong and that, you know, that he's – if he's further indicted, the country will be further destroyed. Could Trump's solid decade of peddling disinformation and conspiracies come back to bite him in these investigations? Well, Rick Wilson is here back with me to talk about it. And joining us, Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters. All right. So Rick, walk, you know, you guys at Lincoln Project have done a phenomenal job of cataloging Donald Trump on so many levels. So walk us through some of Trump's history of disinformation and give us a sense of even if it's possible, not only to be shocked at this point by what Trump is saying, but what how should we inoculate ourselves so that we can actually get on the right side of preserving democracy?
RICK WILSON (GUEST): Well, the basic rule, Michael, is that if Donald Trump is speaking, reading, writing, has the body language of any kind that communicates a message, it's a lie. He lives in a bubble of pure fantasy, pure delusion. And he relies on a vast disinformation machine that is at a scale that no one in the center or the left, you know, can rival. There's nothing like it. Every one of his lies gets amplified by Fox, by Newsmax, by OAN, and by a whole cluster and constellation of people that are out there who are deeply invested in perpetuating a series of lies, scams, flimflams, and tricks to try to retain power or to regain power. And so I think that you have to fundamentally understand that Donald Trump is a lie himself. Everything about him is false. It's contrived and constructed. And so, you know, the people that live in that beautiful delusion, you know, sometimes we get to shatter it by showing who Trump really is. And folks like Angelo do a great job of breaking down, you know, the point by point by point technical details of the context and the content of the lies.
STEELE: So, yeah. Angelo, and that's that's so important what you guys are doing. In fact, when you stop and think about it, here we are, $800 million dollars later and Fox is now once again jumped on Trump's bandwagon, amplifying his misleading claims about the indictment and the GOP presidential race. Do you have a sense and if you do, can you share with us what's it going to take to sort of stop this destructive impact and influence that they're having and how institutions, like media institutions like Fox, play such a negative role in perpetuating the very thing that Rick and so many folks out there are trying to fight up against.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): I think that's the question for our politics, for our society, for what governs whether or not our democracy remains stable. And, you know, for the last few decades, there's very little that could be done. You'd have to basically smash the entire ecosystem as a whole. You'd have to get rid of the lead steer. In that case, it was Fox News, the crown jewel. But the thing that I want to point out now is and because Rick referenced it before, when he was talking about this megaphone, sort of the right-wing echo chamber, it's not just that they have this massive media apparatus. It's that they they are they have an echo chamber. They can actually take that message and then amplify it so that it reverberates beyond just the people that live inside their bubble, but really radically distorts reality. But this is a very unique moment. 2022 was the first election in 25 years, a quarter century, where Rush Limbaugh was not the single largest get-out-the-vote operation in the country.
When Tucker Carlson left Fox News, you had for the first time a significant drop off in Fox News ratings. More than 30% of their audience is gone. And they have not returned. So their destructive power has actually been greatly diminished. And right now, that larger right-wing media apparatus and that echo chamber is sort of a chorus without a conductor.
And so to your question, the thing that really is important in this moment is to make sure that they continue to fight with each other, that those fractures and cracks actually become massive gaps where so much of that infighting just leads to noise because you can't operationalize noise. The echo chamber is powerful and we're sort of seeing that play out so far with how they're dealing with Trump in the past, they would have had a full-throated narrative that was not just an absolute defense of and an application of his lie, but an attack. Right now, they're just ignoring it. And the very little bit they're saying is not much at all, to be honest.
STEELE: So, Rick, in light of what we just heard, I want to take you to Earth three. We've just blown right past Earth two, because we've got Republicans like Ron DeSantis out there suggesting that Robert F Kennedy, Jr., a Democrat, should join their cabinets should they become president. Now, RFK Jr. has taken heat for embracing COVID conspiracies and a whole lot more. What's – what's the game here? I mean, the fact that these folks are leaning into Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his bucket of crazy to me smells really smelly.
WILSON: He's like an entire fetid ocean of crazy. This is – this is something that Ron DeSantis is giving away the game. They understand that they need to activate the crazier and crazier edges and fringes of the Republican Party. When you and I were in the Republican Party, you – we both knew there were 15, 20% of the crazies that were out there, and we tried to keep them under control. Now, those people comprise a majority of the party and they are not in control of anybody except Donald Trump. And so RFK Jr represents this very powerful thread inside the Republican and conservative world these days where they believe in conspiracy theories. They believe there's a deep state. They think Bill Gates wants 5G chips in your brain from the vaccines, all the lunacy and insanity, and all the crazy stuff. So DeSantis embracing RFK JR was very much on brand for somebody who's desperately trying to find a foothold in the mountain of complete insanity and lunacy that defines the base of the Republican Party.
STEELE: You know, Angelo, one other aspect of this that's sort of defining where this election is going is as what analysts are coming up who are expecting a lot of folks, a lot of these MAGA people and others out there will disseminate that misinformation and in a way that it targets voters of colors as we get closer to the 2024 election. What do you think or what do you know is being done to mitigate against that? How do we guard against more erosion at the ballot box through misinformation?
CARUSONE: I think that's a real threat because the strategy right now is, you know, they can try to convert some voters, but they're not really trying to convert any voters of color. What they're trying to do is neutralize them and to sort of suppress their participation. And that narrative is playing out not just at the top level that, you know, the right-wing media apparatus that people pay attention to but one layer beneath it. So if you look at these YouTube streams that have a million, 2 million viewers that are, you know, between the ages of 20 and 30. If you look at once a week or even twice a week, they will have on a guest of color who will claim to formerly be a Democrat who voted for Joe Biden to say, you know what, I'm just not going to do it this cycle. Yeah, I really hate Republicans. But the only way for me to sort of exercise any power is not to vote in 2024. So that's going to be the major threat. And we just have to make sure people know that it's that it's important that their participation matters.
STEELE: Participation matters, folks. So you got to take it to the voting box, right? You got to be there. Rick Wilson, my man. Thanks for hanging with me and having a little fun. Angelo Carusone, thank you as well.