There was a time when a headline was supposed to describe the story. Today’s liberal media has decided it should replace the story.
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Case in point: the Drudge Report recently ran the all-caps banner “ROVE: REPUBLICAN PARTY BEING TAKEN OVER BY ‘NAZIS’…” It never prints Donald Trump’s name, and it doesn’t need to. If the Republican Party has been taken over by Nazis, the man who leads that party is in the dock. The banner is built to produce exactly that inference.
Click through and the trick is obvious. Karl Rove called Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying livestreamer, a Nazi. He did not say that about Trump or about any Republican on the November ballot. It was a specific charge against a fringe player that Drudge sold as a verdict on the party, and therefore on Trump. This deflects from the fringe elements of the Socialist majority of Democrat Party. They use smoke and mirrors to hide their Marxist core. In contrast, Republicans don’t need to hide what they really stand for.
Unfortunately, people frequently judge a book by its cover, a.k.a. headlines. A Penn State study of 35 million Facebook posts found that about 75 percent of link shares happened without the sharer ever clicking, and that political content was shared unread more often than unbiased objective content. The reader absorbs the headline, concludes the GOP is a Nazi party, and moves on, perhaps all the way to a Democratic ballot in November.
Readers who do click through learn what Rove actually said. Speaking onstage at the Texas Tribune Festival, he warned that his party is being “infiltrated by people like Bo French,” the Railroad Commission candidate Rove had already called a bigot. Rove said he did not help build a conservative party “to see it taken over by a bunch of bigots.” He also argued that John Cornyn would have locked up the Senate race.
Rove’s warning was serious, and it was about the party. But a warning about infiltration by bigots, with one named Nazi among them, is not a finding that Nazis have taken over the Republican Party. Still less is it a charge against its president. The headline made that leap for him. The M.O. of the Democrat propaganda machine is to point the finger to indict their opponent with their own ideological crimes. Lest we forget, the Democrat Party was home to the KKK and the new KKK: Marxist ANTIFA.
Drudge is not alone. Salon: “GOP has a ‘Nazi’ problem, Karl Rove says.” Same trick, different letterhead. This is not sloppiness. It is a production line with three stations.
First comes substitution. Rove’s “bigots” become “Nazis,” his warning becomes a fact, and the one man he named disappears into the institution. You cannot fact-check a vanishing act if you never see the original quote. Difficult to prove what’s not there. It’s creating a strawman and making him disappear.
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Third comes laundering. A left-leaning alt-weekly, the San Antonio Current, opened its story by reporting that Rove said his party is being taken over by “Nazis.” Then, a few paragraphs down, it printed the quotes showing he said no such thing. Liberal sites copied the frame. Drudge, whose audience still includes millions who think they are getting the story the networks won’t tell, reprinted it in capital letters. By the time it reaches Facebook, talk-radio teasers, and group texts, the fine print is gone: Karl Rove, Bush’s architect, “said the GOP is Nazis.” Mission accomplished.
The method is older than this week. “Kids in cages” without the Obama-era photos. “Very fine people” without the rest of the sentence. “Bloodbath” as a threat of political violence rather than an auto-industry forecast. “Dictator on day one” as a confession rather than a jab about the border and energy. Each time, the headline does the work, and millions treat the headline as the article.
Drudge’s own decline belongs to the same story. The site that once punched through a media blockade, and that amplified Trump in 2016 when the respectable press would not, now harvests a conservative audience with the old brand and feeds it the frames the left already runs. In 2020, Tucker Carlson said Drudge had become “firmly a man of the progressive left.” That was less an insult than a description of the business model. Sheer emotional propaganda rules the day with Democrats, appealing to emotions, not the mind.
None of this requires pretending Fuentes is a normal Republican. He is not. French’s post about South Asian students at a UT game was ugly, and Rove is entitled to vote against him. Conservatives can police their own fringe without borrowing the left’s favorite word for everyone to the right of the editorial board. When “Nazi” means Fuentes on Monday and the Republican Party on Tuesday, it is no longer a description. It is a solvent that dissolves every distinction until only the smear is left.
The midterms are less than four weeks away, and the country is again being told that one of its two governing parties is a moral emergency. The evidence this time is a Bush-era consultant using a grave word about a Holocaust denier, rewritten as an indictment of Republican voters and their president. That is not journalism. It is bait-and-switch. The click is the bait. The party is the switch. And the reader who never got past the capital letters is the one who got switched.
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Image: LBJ Presidential Library