Democracy’s Last(?) Stand
Even at road’s end, if the “problem” is the First Amendment, so too is the solution.
After interviewing various MAGA types involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol for her documentary The Insurrectionist Next Door, Alexandra Pelosi—yes, Nancy’s daughter—asserted, “They’re not bad people, but they have a different social media feed than you and I.”
It would be easy to blame social media for the nation’s unmistakable creep toward the authoritarianism I’ve long warned of in HUSTLER, particularly amid the rise and fall and attempted rise again of Donald Trump.
The prolific ravings of far-right zealots helped fuel the most threatening assault on the U.S. government and democracy since the Civil War. But the use of mass media to proliferate dangerous, albeit Constitutionally protected, speech that results in violence and lurches toward populist insurrectionism has actually been a problem for decades.
Jeffrey Toobin is the author of Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. According to Toobin, the man who killed 168 people in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was inspired by a book “about a right-wing rebellion against the federal government” that he’d read in his teens.
