Conservative Jackson County voters deserve a strong voice. This new website isn’t it | Opinion
Jackson County Republicans have a new monthly online bulletin, geared toward — in its own words — the “right-leaning voter.” The Blue Township Newsletter at jacomonews.org aims to appeal to conservative readers and recruit them to run for local offices.
That’s exactly what anyone wanting to influence our politics should do, regardless of party. However, democracy demands a shared set of facts and reality to function properly — and this site trades in the deception, hyperbole and scorched-earth enemy bashing that have made the state of discourse at the national level so exhausting in recent years.
“You are probably sick of politics in our country right now,” the site’s intro says. So far, so good. But then just a few lines later: “We are looking for great America First Candidates who feel called to run for office to rescue our city, our schools and our country from socialist ideology.”
Here, let’s give the floor to Jackson County’s favorite son, Harry S. Truman: “Socialism — sometimes ‘creeping’ and sometimes ‘galloping’ — is the slogan and patented trademark of the special interest lobbies,” he told a rally in 1952. “Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.” The power grid, Social Security, farm subsidies, bank deposit insurance, labor unions: “Socialism is their name for anything that helps all the people,” said Truman.
This first edition of Blue Township is all in against the “destructive concept of equality” — gasp, equality — that “is the basis of socialism.” It warns darkly: “Our children are being indoctrinated and destroyed by socialist schools and by the Left’s sexual agenda.”
The newsletter, which says it is “supported by and created by local citizen-journalists,” urges its readers: “Stop listening to and watching the big corporate media. (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, Kansas City Star) They blatantly lie to their viewers, and have been caught many times. Several of their reporters have been fired for their lies.”
Hold on right there: No Kansas City Star reporter in modern history has been fired for lies in reporting. What’s more, the demises of the relatively few mainstream journalists who have lost their jobs for a deliberate pattern of falsifying information — The New York Times’ Jayson Blair, The New Republic’s Stephen Glass — have been big, mainstream news themselves, trumpeted loudly in their own publications.
And if the site’s allegations were accurate, and lying journalists have been caught and fired “many times” — wouldn’t that be evidence those newsrooms were standing up for the truth?
So-called “election fraud” is another big deal in Blue Township. “Free, fair, and transparent elections are a thing of the past in many states,” it pants. “Some right-leaning voters have no idea of the long list of corrupt means the Democrats are using to win elections.”
In fact, contrary to the Big Lie pushed by Donald Trump and his allies on the hard right, state and local officials ran what experts say was the most secure election ever in 2020. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab was among many state GOP officials to say so. Republicans had a strong showing up and down the ballot — they just lost the White House.
The newsletter is right that we must protect the integrity of our electoral system. But the idea that ballot tampering is real and widespread is false. Orchestrated election fraud is extremely rare. And some of the most common allegations, such as voter impersonation, almost never happen.
According to the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, most examples that politicians and their supporters allege as fraud are simply human error by voters or administrators.
The tropes of Trumpworld ooze from every pore of the newsletter, from its proclamation that “the Climate Change religion is a hoax,” to championing conservative Christian prayer in government meetings, to promoting a bizarre commentary by disgraced QAnon booster Michael Flynn, to its slogan “Truth sounds like hate to those who hate the truth,” or to attacks on our election system from the Gateway Pundit, a blatantly fake news site based in St. Louis that is, distressingly, among the most-visited conservative pages on the internet.
It’s good for people to take their civic responsibility seriously and get involved with local politics. After all, county-level laws touch our day-to-day lives more directly than Washington’s. But there are countless better arguments for a conservative approach to governance than the claptrap woven throughout the Blue Township Newsletter. If Jackson County Republicans want to buttress their already considerable strengths, they would be smart to use the outlet to tout the best and brightest ideas from the right, not to double down on the misinformation and disinformation that already litter our social media feeds.
Dishonest debate in the marketplace of ideas doesn’t make America better. A foundation built on falsehood and exaggeration can help a political party for only so long, until it collapses under the weight of the delusion. Lies can never support a strong, democratic future. Conservative Jackson County voters deserve much better.