The Right-Wing Infosphere: You're Soaking In It

Their machine is so effective that even liberals don't realize it's warping their views.

A lot of people have gone after New York Times columnist Ezra Klein for the way he responded to Charlie Kirk’s murder, first in a column headlined “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” and then in a podcast interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though it has been a few days (and part of the Pundit’s Imperative is to only talk about things that have occurred in the last 48 hours or so), I do think this discussion is a worthwhile one to continue, because the aftermath of the Kirk murder has shed light on so many different important features of contemporary politics.

The impulses Klein displays are extremely common, and while well-intentioned, derive from a failure to see that the political environment that surrounds us didn’t just occur naturally. It was built, to a large degree by Republicans who continue to shape and reshape it every day. Yet in an incredible irony, many liberals continue to believe that even within that built environment, Democrats are the only ones who have agency or a responsibility for their choices.

Let me start with something Klein said on the podcast: “I’ve been obsessing, for a piece I’ve been writing, about the Hillary Clinton ‘deplorables’ comment.” He then plays the clip, and goes on to say that it reflected an unwillingness on the left to engage with their opponents, which he contrasts with Charlie Kirk’s willingness to debate liberals, even if Kirk was “opportunistic” in how he did it.

As many have pointed out, there was nothing noble or elevated about Kirk’s “debates” on college campuses. They were staged beat-downs created for social media, in which Kirk would take advantage of students who weren’t as adept at that kind of rhetorical combat as he was, for the purpose of creating “Charlie Kirk OWNS dumb lib!” videos (Klein’s own paper did a good analysis of Kirk’s techniques). But here’s what really matters about this:

We’re still talking about Hillary Clinton’s frigging “deplorables” comment nine years later?

Oh yes we are. And why is that? Why does it loom so large? Why is Ezra Klein, one of the most influential voices in mainstream media, still “obsessed” with it?

It isn’t because it was just so incredibly revealing, so meaningful, so earth-shatteringly important that everyone stood up and shouted “We will never forget this word she spoke!” Presidential candidates say lots of things; Clinton gave hundreds of speeches that year. In fact, in a great many of them she did precisely what Klein and so many other people think she never did: She labored to reach out to the people who weren’t voting for her and hadn’t voted for Democrats in a while. She went to Republican areas, and talked to skeptical voters, and expressed her desire to be a president for everyone. In fact, even in that very speech, right after the “deplorables” thing, she went on to say that many Trump supporters were people she wanted to reach out to, and explained with a great deal of empathy why they felt the country had let them down.

So why does nobody remember that, but everyone still remembers “deplorables” and takes it as the sum total of what she believed about people who weren’t voting for her? Because the right-wing media told us to.

They repeated it thousands of times, and they never stopped. They told their version of that story on their TV networks and their radio shows and their websites and their podcasts. Republican elected officials repeated it, over and over again. And it wasn’t just them — political reporters who had loathed Clinton for years (a whole other story) told everyone how important “deplorables” was. And today, all these years later, even a liberal like Ezra Klein thinks it represents something real and true and important about what Clinton believed and what all Democrats believe.

When a prominent Democrat says something that can be taken to reinforce the age-old “Elitist liberals look down on you!” narrative, the right-wing media swings into action, creating an unceasing din of manufactured outrage, and it almost always works. Al Gore said he invented the internet! Barack Obama said “they cling to guns and religion”! Hillary Clinton said we’re going to put coal companies out of business! You remember them all, because you were told to remember them.

How many times have you heard some centrist Democrat say “My party needs to stop focusing on trans issues or defunding the police, and start talking about kitchen-table issues”? But why exactly do so many people think Democrats are constantly talking about those things, when they absolutely are not? It’s because that’s what Republicans criticize Democrats about, and claim Democrats are talking about. “Defund the police” is a perfect example: It was something almost no Democratic elected official ever embraced, yet everyone seemed to think it was a core Democratic position. Why? Because that’s what Republicans said — again, thousands and thousands of times — to the point where many people just assumed that’s what Democrats believed and were talking about.

Moreover, Klein characterizes the alleged condescension of Democrats toward people who don’t support them as a tactical mistake, making it harder for them to win in many places in the country. But if talking down to large sections of the country is such bad political strategy, why has it worked so well for Donald Trump and Republicans? And why, when Trump pours limitless contempt on racial groups, ethnic groups, and geographic groups, do so few of the center-left media bigshots explain why it’s not just morally repugnant but bad political strategy? It’s at least worth considering.

Why is it that Democrats are told they have to go to places where there are lots of Republicans to listen, and be respectful, and “reach out,” but nobody ever asks “When is Mike Johnson going to go to Brooklyn and really listen to people, instead of just sneering at them?” Democrats supposedly have an obligation to reach out to people who won’t vote for them, but Republicans have no such obligation.

Politics never stops

In his interview with Coates, Klein offers an explanation of why he was so generous to Charlie Kirk right after his killing, to the point of whitewashing who Kirk was, what he believed, and the abhorrent things he said:

One thing for me is that in the immediate hours after somebody is murdered in public, when you see that sort of grief and horror pouring out of the people who loved him — and many people loved him — my instinct then is to just sit with them in their grief.

To say: I can for this moment find some way to grieve with you, to see your friend in some version of the way you saw him.

That’s not my view of the person’s whole legacy, but going to people when they’re grieving like that and saying: Listen, I want to tell you what I really thought of your friend — just feels like not what you do in a community.

To put it another way, Klein is saying that because conservatives were legitimately angry and upset about Kirk’s killing, liberals should have stepped back from politics, for a moment and just treated them like you would someone you know. Don’t try to clarify who Kirk really was, don’t try to use this occasion to say anything about liberalism and conservatism, or the conservative movement, or the kind of hatred Kirk sold, or any of that. If you can’t say anything nice right now, don’t say anything at all. Or rather, find something nice to say about Kirk. You wouldn’t say to someone who had just lost a family member, “I realize you’re mourning your cousin, but he was a real jerk.”

But the problem with telling liberals not to act politically in that moment is that conservatives treated Kirk’s killing as the occasion for a new phase of their own political project from the instant he was killed. Were they sincerely upset? Of course. But they swung into action that very day, strategizing and working to both make him into a saint and use his killing as a weapon against their opponents. They fanned out to the media to lionize him, to blame his killing on “the left,” and to craft a new crackdown on the speech of liberals. They began planning a televised memorial service that the president and members of the cabinet would attend. The vice president of the United States guest-hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House, and instructed people to find anyone saying the wrong thing about Kirk, identify them publicly, and destroy their careers (“call their employer,” he said). And that is precisely what happened.

Given everything we know about him, I’m sure Charlie Kirk would have approved. If it was some other far-right figure who had been killed, he would have been huddling with his fellow conservatives to figure out how to maximize the political advantage they could gain from the murder, and using his platform to milk it for everything it was worth.

Finally, here’s something Klein said near the beginning of his discussion with Coates as he laid out the problem:

In 2016, we lost to Donald Trump the first time — very narrowly. We won the popular vote.

Then in 2020, we almost lost to the Republicans, and began seeing that we were losing a bunch of voters we thought we were fighting for — losing more working class voters, losing on white voters. Something was changing, but we won. OK.

Then in 2024, we really got our asses handed to us, and we let a much more dangerous form of politics fully erupt.

So the 2020 election, which the Democratic nominee won by four and a half points, is really a loss for Democrats. And the 2024 election, which Trump won by one and a half points, was Democrats getting their asses handed to them. Democratic wins are aberrations, somehow not real, while Republican wins are a true expression of the public’s will. When Republicans win, it means Democrats have to change; when Democrats win, it also means Democrats have to change.

There are many reasons why one might come to believe things like this, but the information environment we all swim in plays an absolutely vital role. After hearing it every day, repeated by a hundred conservatives and a dozen political reporters, you come to think that it just makes sense.

This is the power of the right-wing infosphere, to shape not just what conservatives believe, but what lots of liberals believe as well. But submitting to it is a choice. We’re all free to make a different one.

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