CJ Pearson, the 13-year-old conservative social-media star, could use a few good role models, suggested The New Republic’s Brian Beutler in a Monday article. After noting that Pearson has been “revealed as the perpetrator of a number of hoaxes,” Beutler mused that such behavior isn’t surprising given the ideological company the youngster keeps.
“He's coming of age in a movement that often treats reality as subordinate to perception; that will embrace obvious distortions of facts if doing so might move the needle of public opinion,” alleged Beutler, who claimed that some of those factual distortions were found in Carly Fiorina’s statements about the Planned Parenthood videos during the recent Republican presidential debate.
“The fact that so many conservatives are lining up to defend” Fiorina, wrote Beutler, “is indicative of the degree to which conservatism has become a movement defined by affective rage and imagined victimization by mainstream forces…Fiorina’s reputation among conservatives isn’t suffering. Instead, the right’s journalist shit-list is growing longer.”
From Beutler’s piece (bolding added):
CJ Pearson, a black conservative teenager from Georgia, became a sensation on the right this year for denouncing President Barack Obama in homemade YouTube videos…
Late last week, though, the charismatic kid was revealed as the perpetrator of a number of hoaxes, including…engaging in a Twitter fight with a supposedly racist Obama supporter, who turned out to be Pearson's own sockpuppet…
“[H]ere's what the PR folks are saying: say you lied and apologize to avoid backlash,” [Pearson] wrote in a series of tweets. “But, instead, I choose to stand by my word. While the article will be incriminating, all we have in politics is our word and I stand by it.”
Carly Fiorina's mode of deception, and her response to being fact-checked, is nearly identical. The main difference, of course, is that Fiorina is a 61-year-old former corporate executive who’s a top contender to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, while Pearson is still going through puberty. The fact that so many conservatives are lining up to defend her is indicative of the degree to which conservatism has become a movement defined by affective rage and imagined victimization by mainstream forces…
"I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these [Planned Parenthood] tapes," [Fiorina] said. "Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.'"
…[B]asically every factual claim in those two sentences is untrue…
…[L]ike young CJ Pearson, [Fiorina has] cooked up extremely weak post hoc defense, hoping that over time the truth and her twisted version of it will bleed together…
In a way, that the wagons are circling around Fiorina helps explain why Pearson thought his own fabrications might pay off. Recent history is replete with examples of conservatives racing to defend other conservatives caught peddling stories no less fictional than Pearson’s…
…In 2012, conservatives dedicated themselves to the fiction that Obama had refused to call an attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi an act of terrorism, when in fact he had called it terrorism the day after it happened, in the White House Rose Garden. When Mitt Romney repeated the myth at the second presidential debate, CNN moderator Candy Crowley famously embarrassed him by interjecting to set the record straight. To this day, conservatives detest Crowley, and insist that she didn’t give Romney a fair shake by telling the truth…
…Fiorina’s reputation among conservatives isn’t suffering. Instead, the right’s journalist shit-list is growing longer.
Pearson can be forgiven for expecting the conservative media to rush to his aid, rather than orchestrate his demise. He's coming of age in a movement that often treats reality as subordinate to perception; that will embrace obvious distortions of facts if doing so might move the needle of public opinion.
