The state of discourse, or lack thereof, across the nation has the League of Women Voters concerned enough to take action. Here in Santa Fe County, the local chapter has arranged a free, public screening of Dan Partland’s latest documentary, #UNTRUTH: The Psychology of Trumpism on Thursday.
The film includes mental health experts, conservative politicians, historians and pundits unpacking how disinformation continues to permeate American culture and damage political institutions.
The one-time screening will begin at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 8, at Violet Crown Cinema, 1606 Alcaldesa St. Admission is free, but seating is limited to first come, first served. Local chapters of the National Organization for Women and the League of Women Voters along with members of the grassroots coalition Indivisible will be joined by Partland via Zoom for discussion following the screening.
The League, a nonpartisan organization promoting voter participation and education, decided to show #UNTRUTH to kick off a series of events to help voters recognize disinformation and the damage it causes, Debbie Helper, administrative vice president of the local League, tells SFR.
“When any party is exploiting disinformation to secure and hold power and to destroy our democratic institutions, it is not partisan to resist,” Helper says.
IMDB
Dan Partland
Partland is a veteran producer/director and two-time Emmy winner for Best Nonfiction Series. He’s also twice been nominated twice for Nonfiction Producer of the Year by the Producers Guild of America. #UNTRUTH is his second film about the psychology driving the Make America Great Again movement. The first, #UNFIT, came out in 2020.
Partland spoke with SFR over the phone about why he made the film and the challenges ahead for the country.
Is #Untruth a de facto sequel or an official sequel to #Unfit?
We very much envisioned it as a continuation of what we did with #UNFIT, which was to look at the psychology of Donald Trump. Obviously, that's only one piece of it. Having a would-be authoritarian leader captivate the public is only partly about the man, the other part—the important question, I think—is why society, or at least a large portion of it, are attracted to Donald Trump right now?
That's obviously a big social question, because there's always been guys like Trump. But the question is: Why did, around 2015, the ground become so fertile for an authoritarian voice like his?
The film really tries to wrestle with both the psychology of the electorate in general and the different forces that may be contributing to the rise of authoritarianism here in the United States and around the world.
What's happened to our relationship with the evidence-based approach to defining what's true?
That's a really important question. The film looks at that from a number of different angles. The rise of opinion-based journalism plays a major role. Opinion columns were always an important piece of the journalistic offering, but opinion is becoming a much bigger part of the offering. I think there are different reasons for that but commercial interests drive a lot.
The film really looks at the phenomenon of how opinion-based, journalIsm is used to sort of foment our angers and our frustrations and how that really works commercially.
The version online, which is anger-driven, has become even more powerful. The way you keep audiences engaged is now very clear, regardless of the medium, you keep the audience in a state of peak anger and frustration. We've done this to the point that it’s so inflamed our political conversations that the facts are become beside the point. We just see things through the lens of different negative, hyper-partisan positions. Why we lost touch with that, I think, has a lot to do with social media.
I think it's worthy and important to hear from
regular folks. And people's frustration with elites is well-documented. Elites shouldn't be the only people in the conversation. But I think we've confused the idea of opening the aperture wider and hearing from more diverse voices with the importance of hearing from factual and well-informed voices.
Everyone should be able to join the conversation who is willing to come to it with good-faith arguments. If somebody has done due diligence to understand some empirical evidence for their points, there should be no limits on their speech in that regard. What began as a very democratic approach that anyone online could participate over time has ultimately degraded a lot of the discourse because that format lends itself to
the most outrageous voices, and not necessarily the most prudent fact-based voices.
Does this really just come down to how profitable it is to keep people outraged, and if truth or facts get in the way, they’re just skewed for entertainment purposes?
I think people have confused the fact that bias is common with the idea that there is no one truth. It's important that people are educated to be a literate person in today's society. You have to have an understanding of bias in the media, but there's a difference between points of view that reflect bias and points of view that just deviate from facts. There's been a lot of rhetorical distortions claimed about the First Amendment that have led people to believe that not only can anything be said but that everything that is said is of equal value—and that's that's really not the case.
But I do think it is oversimplifying to just think that the society has been destabilized by this alone. That has its own psychology. Society has been destabilized by the human need to be aroused all the time and aroused by negative things. Happy things, famously, are not what the news is about, right? People are most interested in the threats and the danger, so that really is one part of that psychology. The other part of it that we shouldn't miss is that there really has been ever-escalating rates of change and a lot of real social upheaval in recent years.
What history tells us is when the public is open to authoritarian movements that really does tend to coincide with when changes are coming so quickly that people just inherently feel instability. Authoritarianism is a personality trait, and it's a latent trait within all of us that can be activated by certain conditions in the real world. Conditions that really can activate an authoritarian instinct in all of us. That's really what we are seeing play out, not just in the United States but around the world. The rate of change has become so intense. There is so much social instability, economic instability, social instability, the impending climate apocalypse—all these things have created such an intense level of anxiety that a certain percentage of people feeling that anxiety most intensely are frustrated with the slow mitigating processes of democracy and are more interested in the clear, unambiguous, authoritative action of an executive.
There are also theories that suggest that a lot of it has to do with the nature of a lot of nuclear families. At the center tends to be a very authoritative father who makes the world a little bit simpler and easier by just answering the important questions. These are not open to discussion or debate. There is a leader, and he decides what’s right and what’s wrong, and that's the way we go. There's something restful in that.
How does disinformation and authoritarianism work in tandem?
Disinformation goes hand-in-hand with authoritarianism for the simple reason that disinformation is really a tool of, frankly, malign actors who are interested in undermining the status quo.
If you can confuse the public with disinformation such that they don't know what's true anymore, that has always been to the benefit of an authoritarian for exactly the reasons we discussed, which is anything could be true. You don't know who to believe. You don't know if you can believe the guy on the street or your senator or congressman or college professor or your mechanic or your lawyer—everybody has been impeached. All kinds of expertise has been impeached. All kinds of facts are muddled.
This is really where people give up and end up wanting to let go of the sort of democratic responsibility of making decisions as part of an informed public that votes and feeds their agency to an authority, an authority figure who they trust and believe in because of his gut or his instinct or his intuition, or in the case of Trump, a lot of people believe in his divine providence.
When it becomes frustrating to parse what's true and deal in the real world, people end up not knowing which facts to follow. And following is really important to people. They’re looking for a guiding light in one person whose temperament or whose decision-making, or whose vantage point they really believe in, that's how authoritarians really get mass-tracked.
What should people walk away from the film understanding about MAGA movement?
I think that part of the Trump phenomenon has been really to undermine a lot of our aspirational American values and to view them as naive. Ironically, it’s more the way of the world that the powerful take what they can and the rest of us suffer what we must.
I think there are a lot of people who thought Trump was going to be their champion who are finding that he's maybe their champion in terms of lashing out at the world for things that he doesn't like that they also don't like, but he's not looking out for their well-being.
I think the most important thing that the film is trying to do is engage people to look at what the psychological factors are, because what is going on in the United States and around the world is principally a psychological problem. It's a destabilization driven by anxiety, and I think we have to look at what the sources are for that anxiety if we want to understand how to unwind it.
The League of Women Voters and their partners rented two theaters for the screening and reservations have been brisk. If seating isn't available, the film is also available on streaming services YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Google Play Movies.
