On MSNBC’s ReidOut, Angelo Carusone details how right-wing media entrenched baseless conspiracy theories in “standard Republican Party orthodoxy”
Carusone: “You're actually taking that alternative reality, and in many cases the nightmare scenario, and you're using your power and positions of power in government to make it a reality, even though it's totally disconnected from fact”
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From the December 16, 2024, edition of MSNBC's The ReidOut
JOY REID (HOST): So where -- I mean, that is the kind of society we're in, Angelo. What does it mean -- particularly from a media point of view, that's what you follow and study -- when the people now that are going to run the government believe conspiracy theories and push them as well?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERES PRESIDENT): I mean, it's like getting gasoline to the fire. I mean, one of the things that Trump did in '16, again in '20, and it really just became fully operationalized in 2024, and now it's part and parcel with the entire Republican Party is that they built and organized power on what used to be considered the fringes. And one of the ways that you do that is you pluck ideas and narratives from the fringes, you turn them into a story, you validate them by giving them air time and oxygen and legitimacy and the imprimatur of a national figure campaigning and organizing around it. And then, once you're in positions of power, you start to then take actions or use official mechanisms to then stamp those as legitimate.
And so that's how you get something -- you know, there's whacky things like birds aren't real and that kind of stuff that are rising. But then you get examples of this playing out in real time. So, you go from the "great replacement" theory, a really racist, fringe idea decades ago that Jews and Democrats were importing people from other countries in order to sort of dilute the white population and entrench themselves political power permanently -- that was relegated to the fringes. But when you start to get people that are now going to be in positions of power, on their rise up taking it, validating it, organizing it, talking about it, now it's just -- now that's standard Republican Party orthodoxy.
So, what does it mean? Everything gets worse, because you're no longer just using an alternative reality to sort of win the news cycle day to day. You're actually taking that alternative reality, and in many cases the nightmare scenario, and you're using your power and the positions of power in government to make it a reality, even though it's totally disconnected from fact. And that's the part that's so disturbing about this is that it's about to get worse.
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REID: And it's so lucrative. I mean, they do it because it makes money, right? They had to pay out $787 million to Dominion Voting because they fueled the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen and that led in part to an insurrection in our Capitol. People literally broke the law and smashed into the Capitol because they deeply believed that the election was being stolen, Angelo. I mean, there are real world consequences here, including to Fox, but their shareholders paid that. It didn't hurt them personally, right?
And it's so lucrative. Alex Jones became a multimillionaire, pushing things like the Sandy Hook conspiracy and 9/11 conspiracies. But those things couldn't actually exist if people had a fundamental trust in the government. And let's just be honest, sometimes the government does lie. George W. Bush administration literally did lie to get us into a war. Look at trust in government. You can see the dips, and this is just trust in government. Look how it's declined, Angelo. It has really declined. The Iraq War did it, the Vietnam War, the lies there. There are reasons to sometimes distrust the government, right? But now we're going to have a government where the incoming president was found by The Washington Post to have lied, 3 -- 4,000 times. But now he's in charge of the whole apparatus.
CARUSONE: Yeah. I mean, this is the part that I find really disturbing. As you noted, one, it's really profitable. Two, they've also taken down some of the safeguards. And David was sort of referencing this before. One of the things -- as you noted in your monologue -- this has always been a part of America. We've always had these fringey ideas, these conspiracies. It's a little spicy, in some ways, it adds a little flavor. What was different in the past is that they weren't connected. You had all these disconnected conspiracists that had very, very small audiences. One of the things that technology and social media has done, it has connected otherwise disconnected audiences. It's supercharged these ideas. It's found individuals are likely to be receptive to it and then pushed it directly to those. And the effect of that is not only to spread it, but to make it extremely profitable.
So, when that Chinese spy balloon went across America a while ago, the right-wing media was selling prepper kits like crazy after that. So not only did they have an incentive to push it for political reasons, but they had really intense financial reasons to do it. And now we're living in an environment over the last year -- and you've seen this play out in the lead-up to Trump coming into office -- where you attack the social media platforms and you neuter them. So that not only are they not only enforcing the existing rules that they had, but they're actually enabling the proliferation of these conspiracies by eliminating a whole bunch of safeguards that were there in the first place to sort of slow down the spread of these lies in the first place.