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Yesterday, a prominent South Carolina legislator by the name of J. Todd Rutherford — a Democrat — insinuated a causal link between Fox News and the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston:
His description of Fox News is wildly inaccurate and slanderous. I doubt that he’s ever actually watched the channel. Most likely, he’s simply reflecting what, in his political/ideological circles, “everybody knows.” In any case, I’m unaware of even the slightest evidence suggesting that the murderer ever watched Fox News.
This sort of thing has a long and shameful history. Certain commentators publicly and expressly suggested a connection, for example, between Rush Limbaugh and the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, that killed several people and grievously wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords (only to have it turn out that the shooter was an apolitical loon). And it has long been contended by some — from the very start — that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the result of a right-wing conspiracy, even though Lee Harvey Oswald was actually a Communist. And so forth.
I was unaware of Mr. Rutherford’s statement until I caught it on Bill O’Reily’s show last night. (Yes, I do watch Bill O’Reilly, perhaps two or three times a month.)
The O’Reilly/Rutherford interview started off quite well, even touchingly. Mr. Rutherford was a friend of the Democratic state senator and pastor who was leading that Bible study session the other night and was killed by that young racist punk. He paid tribute to his friend, and, I thought significantly, mentioned the mourning and the very human responses of both Democratic and Republican state legislators.
O’Reilly then raised the matter of his earlier remarks about Fox News (explaining later that, assuming that Mr. Rutherford’s intemperate comments reflected his grief and anger, he had wanted to provide an opportunity for the man to “walk them back”). But Mr. Rutherford doubled down on what he had said, even becoming quite self-righteous about them.
I confess that I was shocked.
I thought that Mr. Rutherford would take the opportunity to be gracious, but he didn’t. He actually became somewhat angry.
Reflecting about it afterwards, though, it occurred to me that the dogma — common in certain circles on the Left — that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, and the like are hateful, racist, vicious, etc., is almost exactly analogous to the dogma — common in certain circles online and elsewhere — that I’m hateful, racist, vicious, etc. There’s no real evidence to support such claims in either case, and they’re flatly false. But they’re devoutly held, and they flourish in some quarters as basic articles of faith. “Everybody knows” that they’re true.
(If anything were to persuade me to accept Richard Dawkins’s notion of a “meme,” it might be such false beliefs.)
I was reminded, too, of a little essay by the Anglo-American commentator Charles C. W. Cooke that was brought to my attention the other day by Stephen Smoot:
“Aldous Huxley and the Mendacious Memes of the Internet Age”
He said that it reminded him of some of my online critics — and I can certainly see why it did.
Disagreement is one thing. I’m all for it. I do it, regularly. (That’s why this blog is called Sic et Non, “yes and no.”) But demonizing those with whom one disagrees, effectively claiming that disagreement must be a product of moral depravity? That’s quite a different thing, and it’s entirely reprehensible.
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