Fake News Is a Crazy Bitch
Trump Republicans Are Gaslighting Democrats in the Ugly Breakup of America’s Right and Left
Early in the third season of the NBC show Parks & Recreation, lovable douchebag-wannabe Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) delivers a bitterly true line about breaking up. “Luckily,” he says, “when you’re the guy, you just tell people she’s crazy.”
Beyond the relatively polite company of network television, often the woman in question is referred to as a “bitch.” As in “bitches be crazy.” As in #crazybitch. It’s what we call the “crazy bitch” defense, and there’s no better way to stop questions, pivot a conversation, and dismiss the possibility that women are people and men are sometimes responsible for problems. The guy and his buddies are swiftly onto the next thing. She was crazy. Nothing more to know. Case closed. Shut her down!
Was she crazy? Maybe, maybe not. But honest reflection takes time and an open mind, minds don’t open easily, and it’s such a bummer when reality turns out to be less than a hundred percent on our side. The bitter truth is not that the girl is crazy, it’s that too often the boy gets off the hook by saying that she is.
In spite of science disproving the theory that hysteria is a women’s disease caused by wandering uteruses, in spite of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s yellow wallpaper and Hillary Clinton’s better qualifications for the job, in spite of the fact that we — we English speakers, not we crazy women — have a name for it when men try to make women think they’re crazy, the crazy bitch defense has been picking up steam.
In fact, as we are not the first to notice, gaslighting translates to news, politics, and social commentary. Now we can crazy-bitch stories, facts, and anything we don’t agree with in two easy moves: say or imply the source is crazy, then what they’re trying to tell you is clearly “fake news.”
Science doesn’t support what seems obvious to you? Worse, journalists are reporting that scientists are saying something like the opposite of what you and your best friends, your parents and grandparents have always thought to be true? Scientists and journalists are liberals. Liberals are crazy. It must be fake news.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a classic of American literature, about a woman made sicker by her doctor-husband’s “cure”? Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a feminist hero because she observed certain ways that the society she lived in was problematic for women? Cultural elites are crazy. Feminists are crazy. Fiction isn’t real. Fake news!
Three million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump? Hillary voters are liberals! Liberals are crazy! Hillary Clinton is a liberal and a woman — crazy bitch! (Twitter searches, even as of this writing, reliably result in Hillary being chief among those millions of women daily tagged #crazybitch.) The specific reasons why a majority of Americans preferred Hillary Clinton and don’t approve of Donald Trump? They’re all fake news!
It’s tempting for those in power to dismiss the reality of those who serve them and the system that keeps them in power. Too tempting, apparently. Throughout history, whenever it has felt threatened, the patriarchy has said “she’s a crazy bitch” (or “she’s a witch” or whatever version of “she’s out to get me” was trending at the time) to squirm away from the burden of listening, understanding, and more equitably sharing the pie — perhaps even feeling bad about not doing so before. Of course, women’s experiences aren’t the only inconvenient truths. For the rest, there’s this new term: “fake news.”
So, while bitches continue to be crazy, fake news is the new crazy bitch. And who else would we have to thank for this innovative leap in usage than our sexual assault-denying president himself? (Bonus question: Nineteen women come forward with credible stories of Donald Trump’s sexual misconduct? Answer: They’re crazy! Fake news!)
Like “crazy bitch,” “fake news” ends conversations. “Fake news” counters facts. “Fake news” makes us feel right, and “fake news” believes we’ve been wronged. (“Unfair!”) “Fake news” is there for us when we don’t agree, when we’re not sure, when things are complicated, when the facts are scary or unprofitable or detrimental to our careers. “Fake news” takes the bad news and makes it go away. “Fake news” says the entire body of thinking, feeling, work, and truth of people we don’t understand is a crazy bitch not worth understanding.
“Fake news” says it’s not us, it’s them.
Is it us? Is it them? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it is us and them. Which is to say all of us. Which is not to say there’s no difference between propaganda and fact. Or between Donald Trump and Tom Haverford, for that matter. Tom Haverford is lovable and funny because, though he tries, he keeps failing at being a douchebag. He listens and learns from the smart, sane people around him, some of whom, incidentally, are women. He concedes the possibility that he might sometimes be wrong. (Spoiler:) And because he’s humble and brave enough to change, by the show’s last season a very cool character who had broken up with him earlier gives him a big second chance.
Personally, we want to live in a world where the crazy bitch/fake news defense is just a joke on TV, not the dangerous, lazy, self-serving tactic it is in real life these days. We want to live in a country of good faith and common ground. We want you to stop calling us crazy and the things we care about fake, so we can give this relationship — America — another chance.
But if you keep calling painstakingly researched facts, rationally argued ideas, and time tested principles “crazy” and “fake” instead of taking them seriously, there will be no us. There will be no united states. To paraphrase a popular breakup song, we will never ever ever be getting back together.
Is that really what you want?
