In blaming Californians and their governor for the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles, Donald Trump provided a glimpse of the onslaught of disinformation Americans can expect from their next president, Kristen Du Mez said during the latest “Convocation Unscripted” webinar.
Trump recently claimed he could do a better job managing the fires ravaging the city, and falsely accused Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of enacting natural resource policies and other measures that deprived firefighters of enough water to fight the blazes. He also said President Joe Biden failed to fund FEMA — despite Biden’s approval of $29 billion for disaster relief in December.
Kristin Du Mez
Disputing such baseless assertions is becoming more challenging as Trump and his allies escalate deception campaigns in an increasingly chaotic media and social media landscape, said Du Mez, professor of gender, religion and politics at Calvin University in Michigan and author of the bestselling book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
She joined fellow religion and politics experts Diana Butler Bass and Robert P. Jones on the Jan. 10 episode of the webinar connected to “The Convocation” Substack they share with Jemar Tisby, a history professor at Simmons College of Kentucky and author of numerous books including the bestseller The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. Tisby was not present for this episode.
Their discussion covered the lies about the wildfires, the demise of fact-checking and how the recent funeral for President Jimmy Carter was a reminder of the importance of truth in government.
Discerning truth about the wildfires has been complicated by Tesla CEO and Trump ally Elon Musk’s “relentless campaign” to connect the wildfires to California’s progressive diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Du Mez said. An LA County fire official had to explain to the billionaire that low water supplies and pressure are due to the unprecedented demand and scope of firefighting efforts, not DEI.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that Facebook is eliminating independent fact-checking is just another unnerving confirmation that being able to tell truth from untruth on social media and across media outlets will continue to trend downward under the Trump administration, Du Mez said.
“It’s not like we had perfect truth before, but it really does feel like we’ve entered into a whole new dimension.”
“If you just want to glance at the news, what is information and what is propaganda? It feels like nothing is holy anymore. Anything that happens, particularly things that are especially painful in our nation, will immediately be spun. And it’s not like we had perfect truth before, but it really does feel like we’ve entered into a whole new dimension.”
Robert P. Jones
Another of Trump’s lies about the California fires is that they resulted in part from Newsom’s refusal to sign a “water restoration declaration” to send more water from the northern to the southern part of the state, noted Jones, president of Public Religion Research Institute and author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future.
“But there is no such act. He (Trump) put it in a tweet in all capital letters. But it was wholly made up. There’s absolutely no truth to it,” Jones said. CNN confirmed with numerous sources, including Newsom’s office and other state officials the document never existed.
“It’s the triumph of MAGA,” Jones explained. “You have an incoming president who just got ratified, who’s willing to just wholly make things up and thinks it doesn’t matter. People used to not do that or get fact-checked and embarrassed. But now all that matters is to get the initial effect into the atmosphere and then by the time anybody fact checks, it doesn’t matter, the damage is done. And I think that’s going to be one of the more challenging things we have to face coming up.”
“You have an incoming president who just got ratified, who’s willing to just wholly make things up and thinks it doesn’t matter.”
A similar tactic was used successfully in Nazi Germany, where film and other new technologies were used to rush a false narrative into the public square before its falsity could be known or challenged, said Bass, a speaker, writer and former seminary professor whose many books include the bestselling Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence.
“Looking at some of those things when we catch our breath could be helpful, that even though this is a new technology, people have used technology available to them in former times to do very similar things. Eventually those people are defeated, but it took a while,” she said.
Diana Butler Bass
The development may all but end the process of discourse with those with other points of view, Du Mez said. “There is so much propaganda out there and even trying to have the conversation seems to play into the propagandists. They framed the whole thing. They have raised the issues that actually shouldn’t be issues at all.”
Watching President Jimmy Carter’s Jan. 9 funeral provided a welcome alternative to the controversies in Washington, Bass added. “I was looking forward to seeing it, but I didn’t realize how much I needed to see it until I sat there and watched nearly the whole thing.”
Carter was a Baptist and former Georgia governor who served one term in the White House beginning in 1977. He died Dec. 29 at age 100. His funeral service was held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
One of the many moving elements of the event was its focus on how deeply Carter valued truth, she said. “What’s interesting is they spoke to politics in some very interesting ways, ways that I thought were moral and ethical and spiritual.”
Jones said he was struck by the message that Carter was the same man in public that he was at home, and that he was the embodiment of integrity. “There were not two Jimmy Carters. There was one Jimmy Carter. I thought that was really moving.”
And with his devotion to truth, Carter was just what the nation needed after the Watergate scandal, he said. “In many ways it was a crisis of truth, a crisis of confidence in public institutions. And the thing that Carter said over and over during his campaign was, ‘I will never lie to you.’”
Related articles:
The death of truth | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
The (unforgivable?) sins of the white American church | Opinion by Martin Thielen
A peaceful January 6 offers little reassurance about our democracy | Opinion by Robert P. Jones