When Words Have No Meaning

The purpose of impeaching President Biden is to ensure that words like "impeachment" have no power anymore.

Propaganda: The language of democratic ideals takes on corrupted, opposite meanings. Corrupt politicians run anti corruption campaigns; freedom of speech campaigns are used to suppress speech. — Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

I got a question in my Substack office hours last week, asking why Republicans in the House were moving forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. What is the point, the person asked, when there are almost certainly not enough votes to impeach, let alone convict? My answer was that attempting to analyze this effort as an attempt to actually impeach Biden completely misses the point. The purpose of the entire production is to keep the word “impeachment” buzzing around in connection with President Biden: After all, if there are impeachment proceedings against him, then who cares if Trump was impeached twice? Everyone gets impeached, big deal! The stigma of impeachment gets neutralized or, at the very least, attaches to both prospective presidential candidates, making them equally tainted.

In other words, the instigation of the impeachment process is simply propaganda — the outcome is irrelevant. Yale professor Jason Stanley writes that “political propaganda uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people against otherwise objectionable ends.” Impeachment, a check and balance designed to curb executive overreach, is intended to be a constitutional guardrail for our democracy. In the Biden case, however, the virtual ideal of “checks and balances” is instead being used for political theater.

So how do we tell the difference between a real impeachment and a sham impeachment? Stanley explains that the difference lies in discerning the purpose behind the effort:

The undemocratic intent behind fascist propaganda is key. Fascist states focus on dismantling the rule of law with the goal of replacing it with the dictates of individual rulers or party bosses. It is standard in fascist politics for harsh criticisms of an independent judiciary to occur in the form of accusations of bias, a form of corruption, critiques that are then used to replace independent judges with ones who will cynically employ the law as a means to protect the interests of the ruling party….In the name of rooting out corruption and supposed bias, fascist politicians attack and diminish the institutions that might otherwise check their power.

The intent to upend, rather than uphold, the rule of law is revealed in several aspects of the current impeachment effort that were not present in the prior impeachments of Donald Trump. For one thing, House speaker Kevin McCarthy did not put the impeachment inquiry to a full vote — a procedural move which would have underscored the democratic intention underlying the inquiry, if there were one. Another giveaway is that the “accusation” — that Biden, as Vice President, engaged in “influence peddling” while he was Vice President — lacks specificity or any articulable facts or credible witnesses supporting them.

In fact, the accusation against President Biden itself is a classic example of the kind of fascist propaganda described by Stanley. The central allegation is a bribery claim from Biden’s tenure as Vice President. Specifically, Republicans in support of impeachment allege that in 2015 and 2016, Biden withheld $1 billion in aid to pressure Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, Victor Shokin, in order to stop an investigation Shokin was conducting into Burisma, a Ukrainian company in which Hunter Biden served on the board. In other words, Biden was allegedly engaged in corruption.

The problem is that at the time aid was withheld from Ukraine — which, by the by, was an open, official policy — Shokin wasn’t investigating Burisma; he had investigated the company prior to Hunter getting on the board. More importantly, the reason the U.S. (along with several other E.U. countries, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) called for his ouster, was because Shokin wasn’t investigating corruption enough. But “masking corruption under the guise of anticorruption is a hallmark strategy in fascist propaganda,” according to Stanley:

Corruption, to the fascist political, is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order.

We see this clearly in the Biden accusation, which uses an attempt to enforce official U.S. policy intended to incentivize a country receiving U.S. aid to be more aggressive in investigating corruption as itself evidence of corruption. Presumably, in the eye of the Republicans now impeaching Biden, Ukraine should have kept in place a corrupt prosecutor, in contravention of the international standards to which Ukraine was being held at the time.

If the Burisma allegation sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been the go-to conspiracy theory since Trump impeachment 1.0. The corruption claim was the central reason Trump wanted Zelensky to “announce” an investigation into the Bidens on CNN — a request which I have explained for my Substack course (and at the time it happened) was itself a propaganda operation. It’s also the anchor allegation in the Hunter Biden Laptop scandal, which I dove into in this piece (which I explain was also, at its root, a propaganda operation). Basically, while a lot of innuendo from Hunter’s business dealings have been tacked on to the central theory in the attempt to give it more legs, it’s still basically a Mean Girls meme and someone needs to tell Kevin McCarthy to stop trying to make Burisma happen.

Once you start paying attention to the language being used and their contexts, it’s easy to see the pattern of words and their meanings being turned upside down in order to confuse and disorient the public — what philosophy professor Teresa Marques calls “meaning perversions.” For example, criminal charges brought against a prospective presidential candidate as a result of lawful investigations, citizen grand juries, and due process are now “election interference.” So is the FBI’s attempt to work with social media companies to be vigilant about foreign influence campaigns around election time. (Strangely, it was not election interference when the presidential candidate being investigated was Hillary Clinton…then it was not only completely legit, but not aggressive enough.) Of course, actual election interference by a hostile foreign adversary is just a “hoax.” Are you starting to see how this works?

Using traditional journalistic and analytical norms to look at things like the Biden impeachment only on the merits mistakenly takes as the premise that the end goal is an outcome of the process. It isn’t. Literally no one supporting impeaching Biden cares about the outcome, or the process. The impeachment is a tactic, and more specifically a political propaganda tactic, and needs to be seen through that lens. Doing otherwise only helps further the propaganda operation, and the people running it.