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Alice wouldn't recognize America's real-life tea party, which could hardly get madder (or so I say now). Instead of the Queen of Hearts " you know, the character in Alice in Wonderland who ordered the decapitation of the Mad Hatter " you'd have to start with". hmmm, how would you even decide when the choices include Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Doug Mastriano, Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and" well, why even go on? You get it, don't you? In fact, you couldn't live in this country and not "get it" anymore.
Just for a moment " yes, right now " imagine that Walker, Oz, and Masters have actually made it into the U.S. Senate, that Sanders (and believe me, I don't mean the all-too-sane Bernie), Lake, and Mastriano are the governors of Arkansas, Arizona, and Pennsylvania " and I haven't even begun to mention potentially crucial state positions like Matthew DePerno as the Michigan attorney general or Jim Marchant (Nevada) and Kristina Karamo (Michigan) becoming secretaries of state, leaving them in possible control of future election ballot counts; and, mind you, all of the above is just to start down a list of the crew of Mad Hatters (or do I mean Mad Haters?) running for key posts in the increasingly (dis)United States of America.
Honestly, if you had told me about all this back in the days before computers, the Internet, or social media, when only birds tweeted and having your face in a book meant reading one, I would have laughed you out of the room. And I haven't even mentioned something that once would have been beyond laughable and has, of course, already happened: the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. In fact, the only reason I can even imagine what it means to be a political reporter in this country today is because I know TomDispatch regular Andy Kroll, author of the new book on a country adrift in a universe of rumors, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy. Now, let him fill you in on what a total laggard the truth is in the world of American politics in 2022. Tom
Your Factoids Against Mine
In a World of Speed, Will the Courts Go Down?
By Andy Kroll
For about a week in the summer of 2018, I caught an early-morning train from Washington, D.C., to the Albert V. Bryan federal courthouse in the suburb of Alexandria. Located a short drive from George Washington's estate at Mount Vernon, that courthouse serves the Eastern District of Virginia. It has played host to a wide variety of closely watched cases, from terrorism trials and inscrutable cybersecurity matters to the government's prosecution of whistleblowers Daniel Hale and Chelsea Manning.
The defendant whose trial I was covering was Paul Manafort, who had been the chairman of Donald Trump's first presidential campaign. The special investigation led by former FBI director Robert Mueller probing Russian interference in the 2016 election had led to Manafort's indictment on multiple charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and other financial crimes. He denied the allegations and decided to take his chances at trial, putting his future in the hands of 12 northern Virginia jurors.
The Eastern District " EDVA, as it's better known " is notorious for its old-school rules. Unlike most legal venues, reporters and members of the public aren't allowed to bring electronics of any kind into that courthouse. There are no lockers or storage units on-site. Each morning, I waited in line (along with half of the D.C. press corps) inside a small cafe' across from the courthouse to pay $10 to store my phone and laptop underneath the cash register. Bereft of my devices, I was left to cover the Manafort case the way a reporter would have in the 1960s " with pen and paper, scrawling notes on a pad on my knee and later spending as much time deciphering those jottings as I did writing up the day's events.
I'll never forget the experience of covering that trial. Joining me in the courtroom gallery most days were a dozen or so self-described "trial tourists," people who had taken a day off from work to sit in on the case. A few silver-haired retirees had traveled from other states to hear expert witnesses testify about Manafort's money-laundering operation or his taste in lavish ostrich-skin coats and luxury real estate. But what stays with me most is the way that all the usual noise, chatter, tweets, and din of this bizarre American moment seemed to stop at the courthouse doors. Stepping into Room 900, I felt like some celestial being had pressed the "Mute" button on the outside world.
The jury would ultimately convict Manafort on eight counts of financial fraud. Afterward, one juror, a Donald Trump supporter, told Fox News that she had wanted to find Manafort innocent, "but he wasn't. That's the part of a juror," she explained, "you have to have due diligence and deliberate and look at the evidence and come up with an informed and intelligent decision, which I did."
I remember her comments because they seemed to confirm what I had observed covering the case " in that courtroom, it didn't matter whose tweet got the most "likes" or whose video tallied the most views. It felt, strangely enough, like a refuge from the modern mania of social media and Trumpism, an old-fashioned bastion of facts, rationality, and truth.
My mind flashed back to Paul Manafort as I watched the two recent trials of Alex Jones, the prominent conspiracy theorist and founder of the website Infowars. He faced lawsuits in Texas and Connecticut filed by parents whose children had died in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones had spent years spreading cruel lies about that mass killing, calling it a "hoax" and a "false flag" operation, while also accusing those parents of being "crisis actors" whose children were never actually killed.
In both cases, a judge had already ruled against Jones; the question before the two juries was how much he should pay to those Sandy Hook families. In the end, they would together award the families more than $1 billion in damages " money that Jones promptly claimed he didn't have and couldn't pay. The Jones trials also marked one of the few times that he faced any sort of accountability for his years of conspiracy theories. Unlike on his show or on social media, in court he couldn't say whatever he wanted regardless of whether it was true. "You believe everything you say is true, but it isn't," Judge Maya Guerra Gamble admonished him. "That is what we're doing here"Things must actually be true when you say them."
The Loudest Voice in the Room
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