Spencer Watson critiques conservative movements’ embrace of "unreality"—a narrative dismissing climate science as anti-jobs, COVID-19 as a liberal hoax, and gun control as totalitarianism while marginalizing immigrants and LGBTQ+ groups, like Kelowna’s misgendering of a nine-year-old. He ties this to 2004’s "reality-based community" jab by Karl Rove and Holocaust denial, arguing the strategy undermines core conservative values by ignoring evidence. Without addressing these contradictions, Watson warns, electoral success remains unattainable. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And it's just me this time around.
I have an extra special message today.
Something that's been brewing in my mind for a while and finally percolated over the last few days.
For a long time now, I've been fairly disillusioned about politics in general.
None of the parties or politicians particularly thrill me.
I've told myself that I'm just being overly cynical, and that is undoubtedly part of it.
But there's another level to this.
We have a reality problem in our society right now, and our politics is getting sucked into it.
Unreality is a set of untruths that relate to each other and work to form a cohesive narrative for the mind.
An unreality fits over the top of an existing part of reality and facilitates the ability to ignore a portion of actual reality.
How one tells the difference between unreality and actual reality comes down to critical thinking skills and the quality of information available.
In the 14th century, when the only information available about the shape of the earth was that it was flat and held up by four pillars, one could understand a belief in the unreality portrayed therein.
However, this understanding wears thin as information about the actual shape of the earth becomes more readily available.
Conservatism, as a set of political ideas, is currently the home and natural habitat of unreality.
Whenever conservatives want something to be different about the world, their go-to move is not to take action to create the difference they would like to see in the world, but rather to define it out of existence.
Conservatism used to be talked about as being more practical than liberalism, and about getting actual things accomplished.
But this hasn't been true for some time.
The idea that reality can be pushed into position and swayed by manipulation of media and the electorate is not new, but it's also not particularly old.
In 2004, the following conversation was relayed by American journalist Ron Zusskind about a conversation with a White House aide that's widely believed to have been Karl Rove.
As Ron Zusskin related, the aide said that guys like me were in what we call the reality-based community, which he defined as people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.
That's not the way the world really works anymore.
We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
While you're studying that reality judiciously, as you will, we'll act again, creating other realities, which you can study too.
And that's how things will sort out.
We are history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
So how successful was Karl Rove in his attempts to hijack the message to create an unreality which obeyed his whims as a political operative?
Let's have a look and find out.
Conservatives think of themselves as the champions of the economy.
It's an idea that's meant to go hand in hand with the idea that a conservatism takes a more practical approach and has realistic goals.
At least, that's what they'll say if you ever ask a conservative why they consider themselves to be conservative rather than liberal.
The old rhetoric from decades ago is trotted out anew.
Conservatives take the responsibility and have realistic goals and solutions, while liberals have their heads in the clouds and never get anything accomplished.
In politics, we look at the goals we want to achieve and then attempt to highlight the things that we calculate will bring about those goals.
When a group of people want to be the champions of the economy, then nothing can be allowed to get in the way of that.
A robust economy is a central pillar to the conservative mind, at least in its modern-day incarnation in Western society.
So then, what do we see as this relates to reality and reality denial?
First up is climate change.
Doing anything at all about climate change will directly negatively affect the economy.
Therefore, climate change has got to go.
If we want the economy to be robust and efficient and to be all of the good adjectives, then we must not react at all to climate change.
If climate change could be far more disastrous than an economic downturn, then it has to be imaginary.
It has to be dreamed up by some mysterious other set of people that obviously can't be trusted because they don't have the best interests of the people in mind.
Best interests, in this case, is synonymous with jobs.
Climate change, therefore, becomes relegated to the denial pile.
So what else might negatively impact the economic golden egg?
Maybe a pandemic involving a novel virus?
No problem at all.
Hew a host of talking heads that are willing to tell the public any number of blatant lies about the excesses of liberal politicians who care not for the health of the economy, but rather are assisting in a shutdown to achieve some nefarious agenda that is never fully defined.
Or maybe you prefer to believe that the virus itself doesn't even exist.
Also available as a regular menu item in the restaurant of reality denial.
COVID-19 was first spotted in China.
Haven't they always wanted to interrupt the capitalist machine in the West?
Maybe they created the virus to tank our economy.
Or perhaps you're a conservative who believes that COVID is a real virus.
That's no problem.
Unreality has you covered.
In your specific case, COVID is just a flu, and all those messy shutdowns, small business closings, and needless restrictions are merely an overreaction from a liberal mindset that's either too weak to handle a simple flu or is actively trying to break businesses to accomplish some undefined part of the woke agenda.
As an additional piece of political theater, we have online influencers who will say that the act of wearing a mask is a sign that you've given in to the fear and that you have, therefore, given up some part of your will to the government overlords.
All of these variations are available for anyone who wishes to put COVID aside for the sake of the economy and continued access to a robust job market.
So what's next then?
The U.S. Constitution has several amendments, and one of the most widely discussed is the second of them.
The conservative movement in the U.S. is the self-declared champion of the right to own guns.
This isn't exactly what the Second Amendment says, and interpreting it this narrowly also leaves out a few things that isn't any kind of problem for unreality.
Simply ignore the parts that don't apply to the thing you want to make manifest in the world.
Ignore all actual gun violence that would otherwise be a deterrent to increased gun availability.
In some cases, openly claim that these acts didn't happen at all.
Because why not?
Some people will quickly point out that I'm from Canada, so what does such a thing have to do with me?
We don't have any such thing as the Second Amendment in Canada, right?
I'm curious to hear from people in Britain and Australia and New Zealand about whether this is as true in their English-speaking democracies as it is here.
Canadians aren't U.S. citizens, but many feel like they deserve everything that is available to U.S. citizens.
This is just as true for microwaves and home computers as it is for gun ownership.
Canadians want everything that the U.S. has.
We don't want Montana.
We want mountains that are as beautiful as those in Montana.
We don't want California.
We want to show the world British Columbia, our version of California.
We don't want New York City.
We want Toronto to be as large, as populous, as multicultural, and as everything else we deem important as New York City.
We want professional sports teams and a movie-making industry and a competent military service.
We want a seat of the G8, or is it G7 now?
I can never keep up.
We want a Starbucks on every third corner and an outlet mall in every city.
Such is the effectiveness of the American nationalistic public relations machine that it has triggered an envy in Canadians.
Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, we want to be as important as the U.S. in all things.
If anyone listening to this is from any other English-speaking democracies or non-English-speaking democracies for all I care, please reach out to me and tell me if this is just as true in your country as it is here.
And so it is with access to guns.
All the same arguments used for proliferating gun access in the US are exported via TV shows, movies, and now the internet straight to Canadian households.
It's no wonder that people here sometimes get confused about which sets of laws and restrictions apply in Canada versus the US.
And the conservative movement in Canada has picked up on the free boost it gets from adopting the NRA-backed position on gun ownership.
They will tell you all the same things you can hear in the US.
You'll hear that gun control efforts haven't helped stop crime, when, in fact, they have.
You'll also hear that guns in the hands of more people would produce a reluctance to commit crimes, when, in actuality, it would increase the overall level of violence of crime.
You'll hear that guns are your right, and that you should vote against anyone who attempts to restrict access to them.
And the most pernicious unreality of all, gun restriction is only done because the government fears violent insurrection by the people.
A disarmed populace is easier to control.
Agreeing to be disarmed is a sign of compliance to whatever set of ideas the government has in mind.
And you already live in a totalitarian state, and choosing to be unarmed and docile is akin to being complicit with that totalitarian state that will soon remove all of your other rights.
All of these lies are readily available to ordinary Canadians if they only wish to engage with them.
They are an unreality that can be taken on board a human mind as reality if you don't want to be a sheep.
So what other unreal notions are emanating from the conservative community?
How about elections?
If you don't like the outcome of an election, you can say that your guy won anyway.
The other side rigged it to make your chosen leader lose because they are out to get you or they have some nefarious and nonsensical, wily, coyote-like plan to manifest calamity or destroy the country.
Entire movies have been created to sell this idea.
2000 Mules is a movie that poses as a documentary about a fictional way in which the 2020 U.S. election was supposedly fixed for Biden against Trump.
I want to give a special shout out to Paola Poot, known as at Poot Deboo, P-O-O-T-D-I-B-O-U, on Twitter.
Paola works tirelessly to debunk and push back against this movie specifically, and has done a magnificent job of collecting all the various bits of disinformation found in 2000 Mules, as well as the current state of all the lawsuits related to the same.
The January 6th insurrection was an effort to force the world to accept Donald Trump as president when Joe Biden had rightfully won that election.
Many people have attempted to support Donald Trump's false claims of a fixed election in 2020 and paid the price for it.
Fox News paid $800 million to electronic voting machine manufacturer Dominion for organizing an effort to create an unreality that Dominion voting machines had changed votes to support a Joe Biden victory.
Tucker Carlson lost his job in the offing due to being the most visible and enthusiastic mouthpiece for this effort, though it wasn't the only unreality effort are taken by Tucker.
He also produced a series of stories to create a false narrative about January 6th that attempted to support the lie that the insurrectionists who entered the Capitol building were peaceful and were waved past barricades and into doorways by police.
Just in case anyone is still confused by this issue, the Twitter count known as at Angry Fleas has done an amazing job of showing side-by-side video evidence showing not only the truth, but also how the Tucker Carlson pieces were deceptively edited to support a lie.
An entire unreality.
So that's it, right?
Just climate, pandemics, gun violence, and elections.
I can already hear a chorus of naysayers saying, that's all you've got then?
Just these four little things?
Hold on a second.
We should talk about some human rights issues now.
Whenever a group is being pushed to the margins so as to be used as a political prop to vilify an opposing political idea, it's inevitably the right side of the political spectrum doing the marginalizing.
Immigrants who in many respects would understand many conservative talking points are often at the forefront of an ugly otherising that is both racist and completely unnecessary.
Who else gets otherized in the manufacture of political wedge issues?
Everyone who's different, of course.
Sexuality, gender identity, race.
We've had more talk about bathrooms in the past 12 months than we've had for the 20 years prior.
Bathrooms aren't made unsafe by allowing transgender people to enter the one that fits their gender expression.
They're doing the same thing everyone is doing in there.
They have been for a very long time already.
Attempting to put a spotlight on this for political sport is crass and unbecoming of a serious political movement.
Last year, a nine-year-old girl at a track and field meet in Kelowna, British Columbia was accused of being a boy.
The accuser actually demanded that she prove her gender.
In that specific case, it wasn't the trans community that was a threat to a child.
It was political rhetoric espoused by conservatives that put a child's embarrassment ahead of common sense.
To date, we have consistently failed to find trans people who pose a threat to children, despite that being one of the most disgust political wedges in the upcoming election.
It's easier to create unreal stories about people who are different.
That's why this ugly political tactic so often works.
But it's also why we have to work harder to stop it.
Allowing homosexual people to marry does not degrade the experience of marriage for anyone else.
Allowing trans people to express themselves as their chosen gender doesn't harm anyone either.
Pushing a set of political beliefs that necessarily carves the population up and serves only the desired selection of the population is not a useful basis for governing society.
Either have a plan that includes all of us or give up on making a plan for any of us.
And before I leave the field of human rights, I think we need to be reminded that it's the conservatives in every Western country that attempt to deny access to abortions.
Anti-abortion movements like to claim the higher ground, but are often blinded by the idea that they're saving children.
Denying abortions very often puts the life of the unborn fetus ahead of the life of the mother.
It prevents women from adequately managing their pregnancy risks.
It prevents victims of rape from having bodily autonomy.
It prevents women from making appropriate decisions for their bodies and their futures.
And it foists a series of religious values upon people who, in some cases, hold no such values.
All manner of extremely ugly lie has been told in support of anti-abortion narratives, including the lies about post-birth abortions and about women who wait until the eighth month of their pregnancy to terminate on a whim.
People who speak so strongly on this topic suffer from the dishonesty of zealotry, detailed in episode 67 of this podcast.
If you're only listening to this message, you may think that conservatives are the only ones participating in false realities.
This isn't true.
The anti-vaccine movement began as an ideology that leaned to the left.
Since COVID, this has changed.
Anti-vaccine ideas have been pulled into the QAnon slash Trump vortex around which nearly all unreal beliefs now orbit.
It doesn't make any sense for flat earthers to lean in either direction, but we're far more likely to find them among QAnon groups than in left-leaning online discussion spaces.
The 9-11 Truther Movement began as a reaction to the George W. Bush administration.
People like Karl Rove and his unreality ideas mentioned previously were a big reason why that distrust manifested so strongly at that time.
However, since that time, the 9-11 conspiracists have moved away from being about leftist politics and are far more likely to ascribe to the deep state rhetoric pushed in QAnon spaces.
There are unrealities that I've seen form on the left side of the political spectrum.
Most notable are the ideas that Bernie Sanders supporters often push.
It may be worth noting that a lot of people from that camp now support Trump as president.
And I can't close this off without mentioning the great granddad of unreal beliefs, Holocaust denial.
I've seen many different versions of this, and they're all disgusting.
From Auschwitz was a vacation resort, to Himmler was the actual bad guy, and Hitler knew nothing about any genocide.
There is a need to deny that the world's most notorious totalitarian and genocidal dictator actually did the thing he said he was going to do for at least a decade before the war started.
This need to deny is threaded through all of the other conservative unrealities in a way I have yet to untangle.
But it is, nonetheless, absolutely a thing.
If you don't believe me, go see for yourself.
Once you find someone in the anti-vax QAnon or even flat earth spaces, ask them what they believe happened to the Jews in Poland during World War II.
The results may shock you.
In a parallel universe, I would like to be a conservative.
I support a fiscally conservative agenda.
I support realistic approaches to otherwise intractable problems.
In my heart of hearts, I'm a capitalist, and I think a set of real solutions to problems starts with the capabilities that stem from a robust economy.
But I don't live in that parallel universe.
I cannot pretend that ignoring problems is more useful than actually solving them.
The political movement that's supposed to be the embodiment of realistic political choices is captured by unreality in a way that I simply cannot support.
The wagon has become unhitched from the horses that should be pulling it.
More and more often, it's the conservatives who want something, but who feel that they should get it without having to give anything up.
Taxes should be lower, but government-funded service level should remain the same.
Guns should be freely available, but gun violence shouldn't increase.
These are just more unreal fantasies that are spinning freely out of the conservative unreality generator.
I hear a lot of people talk about how they're okay with any or all of the underhanded political tactics of the conservatives because, in their words, it's the only way that conservatives stand a chance in elections.
Think about that one for a moment.
If you're a politician and your political platform isn't supported by enough people to get you elected, then you need to change your political platform.
Claiming that you should be allowed to stand a chance of winning without giving anything up is just another unreality.
It's the political equivalent of claiming that everyone should get a medal just for showing up.
A thing many conservatives claim is disgusting when they see it happen with children, but are apparently okay with when it comes to their political party.
Believing that you don't need to change anything about yourself to endear yourself to the electorate is a fantasy that will continue to put you at a disadvantage.
A problem that you have chosen to ignore rather than solve.
Just like all the individual pieces of your broken ideology.
If anyone has any feedback, comments, or concerns about anything they've heard on this podcast, anything they feel they need to correct me about, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.