As for Scottie Nell Hughes, we don’t really know what she is up to these days, but at least she used to be a journalist, news anchor and political commentator for the Russian-government propaganda channel RT, where she would promote various pieces of Russian-backed misinformation – such as the died suddenly anti-vaccine conspiracy theory – until at least the American branch of RT folded in 2022. Prior to that she had enjoyed a stint for CNN as their (admittedly mostly dull) resident MAGA clown to defend Trump’s antics for CNN’s 2016 presidential election coverage, and she has been news director of the Tea Party News Network.
Hughes is perhaps most famous for her assertion, in relation to the “alternative facts” commotion in 2016 and in response to “people that say facts are facts”, that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.” Now, you might hear that statement as hyperbolic irony lamenting the current media situation, but that doesn’t seem to be how Hughes intended it: Trump’s lies “among a large part of the population, are truth”, whereas “those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up”. In other words, Hughes was profoundly confused about the rather fundamental distinction between something being a fact and people believing something to be a fact, between belief and reality. And yes, we’ve seen people with academic degrees being confused by that distinction, too (fans of Bruno Latour: we’re looking at you); it’s still a distinction so basic that failure to grasp it makes you an idiot. Her discussion of women in the army doesn’t exactly affect our verdict.
Diagnosis: Idiot. Yes, this is old stuff but it is still idiotic enough to pull it up again.
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