The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
and conduct, although it likely would not have put him over the electoral hump without the flak enabled by the Kremlin’s helping hands.
Conclusion
Thus far, I have proceeded through paired case studies of flak in the electoral arena while flagging, on the fly, features of the flak regime. In the following chapter, I will extend the arc of this introduction by fleshing out flak in further detail, addressing its scope and sub-types while marking flak’s important differences from other concepts (scandal, activism). The upshot of these efforts will be to turn the scrutiny away from flak targets and toward flak merchants and practices, to pull flak out its shadowy origins.
At the same time, the focus in this volume may seem one-sided in suggesting that flak campaigns are associated with the political right. I acknowledge ←18 | 19→the association in this volume—but have no apology to make for it. That is, left-wing flak does exist. A figure such as Walter Palmer—notorious midwestern dentist and killer of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe—can be said to be a subject of left-leaning flak, on the assumption that animal rights is a more left-oriented issue. However, in gazing out onto the world, I am seeing one side of the political spectrum that is taking ownership over the practices of flak along with exhibiting undisguised contempt for fair play that puts political faction (and not country) first. Some of the discourses and actions that I have in mind include Senate Republicans’ refusal to honor lawful precedent in acting on presidential nomination for the Supreme Court in 2016 during Barack H. Obama’s last year on office (Faris, 2018).
The right has also become comfortable in routinely criminalizing its political opponents on flimsy, flak-driven grounds. In this vein, Michael Flynn, one of 2016’s leading campaign rally chanters of the “lock her [Clinton] up” flak mantra, has so far evaded prison time as a felon via plea bargaining. As a former Republican operative, Elise Jordan, observed with disgust, Republican candidates involved in close election races in 2018 lividly screamed fraud at their opponents. With the exception of Martha McSally during her narrow Senate loss in Arizona, Republicans succumbed to the flak reflex to criminalize their opponents when election results were tight, drawing as they did so upon flak tropes that I will elaborate in Chapter 5 (Jordan, 2018).
What I am calling right-wing does not implicate classically conservative traditionalists and communitarians who preserve the rhythms of life through slow, measured change; the kind of people who inhabit the idealized worlds of Norman Rockwell images, although Rockwell’s fictional people can have their real world concomitants. A figure such as John S. McCain III, Republican Party candidate for president in 2008, may fit this bill for his communitarian respect for the nation’s traditions; a flawed politician for whom I, for one, would not vote but who engendered respect even from ideological opponents for “conserving” the nation’s better political practices that include owning up to errors. By the end of his life, it is fair to assess that a conservative such as McCain was an awkward fit in an increasingly right-wing party.
The flak campaigns that I focus on in this book, in one way or another, all come back to a resolute right-wing concern with re-enthroning primitive, illiberal hierarchy. Right-wingers are not conservative, nor concerned with exalting community or gradual reform; explosive and destructive movement is their bag. The flak campaigns that I examine assay, for example, to de-tax and de-regulate capitalism to law-of-the jungle specifications that extend ←19 | 20→the continued authority of pollution industries. Flak is similarly deployed to broadly attack universities that are engines of positive innovations, such as scientific discoveries, as well as enabling social mobility for students. Right-wing flak is also mobilized to denigrate access to the franchise that gives voice via the vote to the masses; votes that are, in turn, a channel of political accountability to the wider public. By contrast, flak memes construct voting as a fount of criminality for the flak strategic objective of culling the voter rolls.
I focus on flak by the political right given that, on each of these significant issues, flak has found a far more comfortable home on that side of the political spectrum. In this view, flak has been weaponized for the rightist objective of sabotaging progress toward equality and reinvigorating hard-core, pre-liberal social stratification.
Notes
1.Flak typically does not engender illegal activity in the United States in large part because speech laws and their interpretation have tended toward a strong version of classical liberalism. Libel is, by design, exceedingly difficult to prove under US law (Campbell, 2003, pp. 545–549). Robust liberalism in speech rights readily enables flak campaigns that may paradoxically channel illiberal ideologies.
2.In my appraisal, the infinitely better candidate in 2016 faced extraordinary obstacles in having her campaign’s communications hacked then leaked. I posit that Clinton’s campaign nevertheless let the public down in failing to drive a stake into an opposing candidate unprecedented in lack of qualifications and fitness for office.
3.Despite extensive document dumps around the Clinton Foundation, it has not been shown to be athwart of any laws; not so the now defunct Trump Foundation and its carnival of vanity and corruption. New York’s Attorney General describes the state’s 2018 lawsuit against Trump Foundation as driven by “a shocking pattern of illegality […] including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more” (Letitia James New York Attorney General, 2018, para. 5).
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