There is a school of thought among liberals that believes an educated citizenry is the best defense against despotism. While I don’t have any reason to doubt that, I do think we overstate what we mean by “educated.” It can mean knowing a few things, but it can also mean having a certain set of values, the ability to recognize patterns and the courage to do something about them. We don’t need to fact-check everything. Indeed, we shouldn’t. What we need to do is act morally.

This is what I was thinking about as I was reading about the rightwing reaction to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. A vessel that’s scores of thousands of tons in weight lost power before slamming into a support column, sending parts of the bridge into the bay in a matter of seconds and at least six people (so far) to their deaths. It was a dramatic accident, and a rare one. Literally thousands of similar ships go in and out of America’s ports every year, and this is, if I’m not mistaken, the first one to knock down a bridge in my lifetime*. 

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You don’t need to know much about DEI except that it’s a good-faith effort to make society fairer. Anyone with a sense of decency wouldn’t blink of an eye at that, but rightwingers don’t see fairness as fairness. They see it as theft. So whenever bad things happen, they blame Black people.

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Whenever something like this happens, you can bet – literally, you will win; it’s so predictable – that someone on the furthest fringes of the right will blame it on marginalized people they dislike. If you don’t like gay people, as the late conservative televangelist Pat Robertson did not, then they are to blame for hurricanes and other natural disasters. The solution, according to Roberts (though he never spelled it out explicitly), was for gay people to just go away. Once gone, God would love America again. (Hurricanes will presumably go away, too.)

The lyrics are different, but the song is the same. These days, the rightwing fringe is obsessed with something called DEI (or diversity, equity and inclusion programming). You don’t need to know much about DEI except that it’s a good-faith effort to make society fairer. Anyone with a sense of decency wouldn’t blink of an eye at that, but rightwingers don’t see fairness as fairness. They see it as theft. So whenever bad things happen, they are quick to blame Black people.

That’s what happened. By Tuesday morning, rightwingers, including Republican lawmakers, were blaming the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge on DEI programming, which is to say, on Black people. 

The thinking (if you can call it thinking) is that efforts to make society fairer lower standards, in this case (as far as I can tell) engineering standards, such that bad things will happen. The solution for these rightwingers is the same as for Robertson. If gay people went away, no more hurricanes. If Black people go away, no more bridges will collapse.

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I’m being facetious, but only slightly, and I’m being only slightly facetious for a reason. Two reasons, actually. One, there’s no point in respecting people who care less about bad things happening (and what to do about them) than the fact that bad things justify, to them, why they hate marginalized people. While most people saw the collapse and felt compassion, they saw it and felt a surge of free-floating animus.

The other point? There’s no point in respecting what they say, either. We have a bad habit of getting into a trap with these people. They lie about something, anything – eg, DEI is why the bridge collapsed – and we defend that thing, as if that’s going to stop them. They don’t care about what they say, not enough to avoid sounding stupid, so why should the rest of us care more than they do about what they say? 

We saw this pattern a lot during Trump’s presidency in publications that dedicated resources to fact-checking him. He not only lied. He lied maliciously, wearing out good-faith reporters like the Post’s Glenn Kessler, who chased down, verified or debunked every claim he made. It made no difference. He kept on lying in the name of the people, such that fact-checkers like Glenn Kessler became the people’s enemy.

Kessler is limited to fact-checking, but the rest of us are not. Indeed, we don’t even need to know what DEI is, except that it’s a good-faith effort to make society fairer. All we need to know is how to recognize a malicious pattern – they already hate marginalized people and will exploit accidents, natural disasters, practically any bad thing that has ever happened to justify hating them and disseminating that hate. 

Don’t get me wrong. DEI, and any good-faith effort to make society fairer, is worth defending. But let’s not confuse defense with offense. Let’s not confuse setting the record straight with political victory. 

*Turns out I was mistaken. Editorial Board subscriber KM referred me to this piece recalling the time when bad weather conditions blew a freighter into the Skyway bridge in Tampa Bay in 1980, killing 35.