But that doesn’t make these stories into hoaxes. It’s possible to take the position that whatever contacts Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had with Russia weren’t as big a deal as it was being made out to be, or that Trump’s impeachments weren’t justified. The investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was justified, impeachment was something that absolutely happened (twice, even), and as has been established, Trump absolutely did refer to people who attended a 2017 white supremacist rally as “very fine people.” To enter the world of conservative media is to be bombarded with phrases like “the Russia hoax,” “the impeachment hoax,” and “the ‘very fine people’ hoax,” though none of these things actually meet the definition of the word. But in recent years, it seems as though the word has taken on a life of its own - with some thanks to Trump and his right-wing media support system. It’s a term that can be correctly used to describe things like a 2011 image of a shark swimming down a freeway or the 2009 “ Balloon boy” saga. Though dictionary definitions vary slightly from Merriam-Webster to Oxford to Cambridge, it’s generally accepted that the word “hoax” refers to a deliberate attempt to mislead someone through trickery or deception. “Hoax” is not a particularly difficult word to define, which makes the way right-wing media and politicians use it that much more baffling.
While Blake did discuss the role that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight and right-wing blogs like have played in amplifying reality-deficient versions of the Capitol attack, it’s worth taking a deeper look into how right-wing media make these lies effective.
Referring to Trump attorney Bruce Castor’s claims that “Clearly, there was no insurrection,” Blake highlighted the absurdity of such a statement: “When you hear the word ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would have liked to ask: How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?” Ron Johnson (R-WI) in an interview with WISN. “This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” said Sen. Capitol, Republican politicians were already working to edit the historical record, either downplaying the event or buying into implausible conspiracy theories. In a recent article, Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake highlighted this worrying trend in Republican politics. Thanks to the decadeslong push to delegitimize mainstream media outlets and fact-checkers, Schoen would be fine so long as those right-wing outlets had his back. It’s only because he knew he could count on the institutional support of the larger pro-Trump media infrastructure that he was able to confidently make outlandish claims. On its own, Schoen’s argument falls flat and is easily exposed as a lie. These arguments were part of a larger propaganda campaign to declare unflattering aspects of reality as “hoaxes” concocted by political enemies. None of that matters, and that’s thanks in large part to right-wing media’s support for the “hoax-ification” of recent history.
Trump’s comments were on video, and anybody with a few moments of free time can pull up a copy of the transcript and read for themselves. Of course, Trump did say those words, even if he tried to draw a false distinction between the group of white supremacists at the center of the neo-Nazi-attended rally and the people who were there and on the same side as the white supremacists. Schoen’s argument wasn’t new, but it was possibly one of the highest-profile invocations of a conspiracy theory that began in fringe circles of the far-right but had slowly become part of Republican Party canon, the gist of which is a belief that Trump never claimed that there were “very fine people on both sides” during the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. During Trump attorney David Schoen’s February 12 arguments, he accused the Democratic House impeachment managers of selectively editing a video clip to promote what he called “ the Charlottesville lie.”
There was one moment during former President Donald Trump’s most recent impeachment trial that can tell us a lot about the future of the conservative media ecosystem.