By ART CULLEN
The nature of our civic discourse, such as it is: I was honored recently to join Storm Lake natives Elizabeth Perrill and Ryan Hartwig in a Zoom session for the University of North Carolina-Greensboro on community engagement in The City Beautiful. At which I got bombed.
During our conversation about the documentary movie “Storm Lake” an unregistered participant interrupted twice to make the most vile false accusation against me. I had never heard of this person. At first, I was stunned. The morning after, I was angry.
Then I learned of this thing called the “Zoom Bomb.”
Unaccountable speakers invade city council meetings, school board sessions and legislative hearings to make outrageous racist remarks, to broadcast child pornography and to smear public figures like teachers and principals. And country editors.
It just happened in Des Moines at the city council meeting, in virtual small-town Iowa school board gatherings, at the legislature, in Massachusetts and New York. The Zoom bomb is dropped and the bomber vanishes. In 2020 the FBI said it was investigating 240 such incidents as the pandemic shifted our public forums to virtual.
People have made all sorts of claims about Hillary Clinton while they hide behind their computer screens. This is how this stuff gets started. Wild, absurd allegations are made and expand virally, and somehow take on a grain of truth among the unwitting.
If you cite the lunacy that passes for “debate” — like the Jan. 6 insurrection or the truckers plugging up the auto industry by blockading Ottawa and Windsor, or the banality of the Iowa Senate Republican caucus — you start rising on Q’s wacky radar. They will say anything to whittle you down to sawdust, and repeat it until they believe it.
It was Joe McCarthy’s M.O. And the John Birchers’. And Trump’s. It’s spread all over Iowa like chicken litter on a thaw.
This is how you lose a democracy. This is how you divide people through fear and rot. This is how you try to destroy people for your political ends.
I have sinned so much that I can only hope St. Peter has lost track. But the things these folks are saying are beyond the pale even in my fetid imagination, enough to make Hillary Clinton a sympathetic character to me.
The things I note are true: The Iowa Senate is a boar’s nest, and the receipt is a huge settlement paid out by the taxpayers to sexually harassed staff. It is true that Sen. Jake Chapman wants to ban books, and that Sen. Chuck Grassley is not the same conservative who ran in the mold of HR Gross way back in 1959.
What the bombers are saying in Zoom attacks is offensive and false. They get away with it, and plant seeds of confusion even among victims who know better.
It makes me want for Hillary Clinton to persist, when I used to wish she would fade from the stage. We should all persist for the facts, and what is true.
That is not the nature of our public square, which is being terrorized by people behind virtual masks who shirk accountability.
We have to reclaim that space by knocking down the lies, and by counting on institutional processes that vet fact from fiction. That is what Ryan Hartwig and I had hoped to talk about. Then I got bombed in an attempted character assassination. It messed up what otherwise could have been a moment of illumination about how Storm Lake manages to get along without operating at the lowest common denominator.
I enjoy the give-and-take of debate — here is how a flat tax will work versus a progressive state income tax. I can handle the occasional ad hominem slam — that I am just a limp snowflake who blows it out both ears. What is going on now is different. It is malignant to our public spirit. It seeks to take speakers out of the debate when facts are not on their adversary’s side. To hell with the facts, kneecap them.
The attack on the Capitol flows directly from same mentality to undermine our free and informed democratic process. If you can’t beat Hillary Clinton with the power of your ideas, then you defame her by ascribing your own sins to her. I don’t know what motivated the bomber in my Zoom session last week, but it certainly didn’t come from the light of truth. When you give up on the truth, this Republic cannot long stand.
Art Cullen won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, was broadcast in November 2021 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.
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