Beyond Bias Conservative Media Documentary Form and The Politics of Hysteria Scott Krzych Full Chapter

Beyond Bias: Conservative Media,
Documentary Form, and the Politics of

Hysteria Scott Krzych
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/beyond-bias-conservative-media-documentary-form-a
nd-the-politics-of-hysteria-scott-krzych/
Beyond Bias
Beyond Bias
Conservative Media, Documentary Form,
and the Politics of Hysteria
S C O T T K R Z YC H
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Krzych, Scott, author.
Title: Beyond bias : conservative media, documentary form, and the politics
of hysteria / Scott Krzych.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020040184 (print) | LCCN 2020040185 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197551219 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197551226 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780197551240 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Political aspects—United States. |
Conservatism in motion pictures—United States. |
Documentary films—United States—History and criticism. |
Communication in politics—United States.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.P6 K79 2021 (print) |
LCC PN1995.9.P6 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/0973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040184
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040185
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197551219.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Kala
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
PA RT I D E M O C R AC Y, M E D IA , P SYC HOA NA LYSI S

Introduction: Political Hysteria and the Traumatic Insights of
Conservative Media 3
1. Hysterical Bias and Democratic Representations 29
PA RT I I P O L I T IC S , D O C UM E N TA RY F O R M , A N D
H YST E R IC A L D I S C O U R SE
2. Biased Beliefs: Common Sense, Creativity, and Creationism 57
3. Policing with Noise: Lacan, Rancière, and Documentary
Participation 93
4. Economies of Inattention: Privacy, Publicity, and the
Interests of Observation 141
5. Paradigmatic Politics: Stock Footage and the Hysterical Archive 188
Conclusion: Post-Truth and Other Biases 221
Notes 227
Bibliography 245
Index 251
Acknowledgments
Writing an acknowledgments section is not a genre that comes easily to me.

The difficulty offering these acknowledgments is not due to a lack of emo-
tional or intellectual support; on the contrary, I am deeply grateful to the
names that follow for their many contributions to my personal and profes-
sional life over the past decade or so in which I worked on this book. It may
be the case, though, that some of the people I mention may be surprised to
see themselves identified here, perhaps not immediately recognizing how or
when they contributed to the writing of this book, but contribute they did, in
ways small and large.
I presented an early draft of my chapter on anti-Obama documentaries
at the University of Toronto, at the joint invitation of the Cinema Studies
Institute and the Department of Visual Studies. I am deeply grateful to Brian
Price and Meghan Sutherland for arranging this visit, as well as to the grad-
uate students there for their insightful comments and questions.
I first began to write about and present on hysterical discourse and con-
servative political media at the World Picture conference (then at Oklahoma
State University). In many ways, the rigorous and rewarding milieu of the
annual World Picture conference has been my intellectual home. Many
thanks to Brian Price, John David Rhodes, and Meghan Sutherland for
maintaining the conference and its associated journal over the years. Thanks
also to many of the World Picture “regulars” whose work and collegiality
has proven to be inspirational for me—at the conference, in the journal, and
beyond—including Scott Durham, Eugenie Brinkema, Kal Heck, Adam
Cottrel, Alessandra Raengo, Scott Richmond, and James Cahill. And though
this book has no direct connection to my dissertation, many of my initial
questions about conservative media emerged first on my horizon while
I completed my doctorate at Oklahoma State University, where, in addition
to my dissertation committee, I benefited deeply from relevant seminars and
conversations with Robert Mayer, Edward Jones, and Carol Mason.
Recently, and more specific to my interests in psychoanalytic theory, I have
found another intellectual home at the LACK conference. Many thanks to the
“central committee” of Jennifer Friedlander, Henry Krips, Hilary Neroni, and
x Acknowledgments
Todd McGowan for welcoming me into the fold, especially their willingness
to share with me the responsibility for co-organizing the first two iterations
of the conference in Colorado Springs. Among many others at LACK whose
work has informed my own, directly or indirectly, special thanks to Hugh
Manon, Jason Landrum, Anna Kornbluh, Brian Wall, Matthew Flisfeder, Tad
Delay, Russell Sbriglia, Joseph Scalia, and Derek Hook.
The entirety of this book was written at my home institution of Colorado
College. Undoubtedly, I have found it challenging, at times, to persist in re-
search and writing while also balancing the teaching and advising load
associated with a residential liberal arts college, not to mention our unusu-
ally intense teaching style on the “block plan.” Nevertheless, I am grateful
to so many colleagues at the College, across many different departments
and disciplines. Susan Ashley, Barry Sarchett, Kathy Guiffre, and the fac-
ulty members of the Psychoanalytic Minor and psychoanalytic salon
(Marcia Dobson, John Riker, Jonathan Lee) have been welcome mentors.
Conversations over coffee (or the occasional whiskey) with Bill Davis, Ryan
Bañagale, Jared Richman, Corina McKendry, Ryan Platt, Heidi R. Lewis,
Naomi Wood, Jessie Dubreuil, Corinne Scheiner, Christian Sorace, and Steve
Hayward have been enlivening. And heartfelt thanks to the faculty and staff
of the Film and Media Studies Program—Dylan Nelson, Baran Germen, Ji
Soo Yim, Robert Mahaffie, Sophie Capp, and Kai Cintorino—who make it a
pleasure to walk into the Cornerstone Arts Center on any given day.
Though his name has already appeared above, I simply would not be where
I am today without the sustained support, friendship, and inspiration that
comes from knowing Brian Price.
My parents, John and Debbie, perhaps contributed to this book in more
ways than any of us would care to admit (though I believe I just did admit it).
Rex and Vicki likewise provide a perfect counter-narrative to the negative
stereotypes about in-laws (and Rex is perhaps even more enthusiastic to see
this book in print than I am). Thanks also to Trent Lewis and Eric Stolp, who
each have listened to more comments of mine about psychoanalytic theory
and conservative media than they ever intended or asked to hear.
Cooper, Ireland, Channing, and Madi keep me in hysterics, in the best
possible sense of the term.
I would be lost without Kala, who knows better than anyone else how much
beauty, love, and care can be generated from the messiest of circumstances.
This book is humbly dedicated to her. Here’s to many more interrupted
mornings, afternoons, and evenings; we never seem able to complete a single
Acknowledgments xi
conversation, but perhaps that only provides further reason to carry on

indefinitely.
Chapter 5 first appeared in an earlier form as “Beyond Bias: Stock Imagery
and Paradigmatic Politics in Citizens United Documentaries,” Jump Cut 57
(Fall 2016), and my warm appreciation to the late Chuck Kleinhans (as well
as the other Jump Cut editors) for his enthusiastic support of this project in
general. Thanks also to Zahi Zalloua for including my first attempt to con-
sider the hysterical reactions to Michael Moore (see Chapter 3) in a special
issue of The Compartist on psychoanalysis and enjoyment: “The Price of
Knowledge: Hysterical Dicourse in Anti-Michael Moore Documentaries,”
The Comparatist 39 (2015): 80-100. Finally, and though it tackles different
theoretical concerns, my first consideration of fundamentalism and cre-
ationist documentaries (Chapter 2) appeared in World Picture: “Kino Ex
Nihilo,” World Picture 2 (Autumn 2008).
Beyond Bias
PART I
DE MO C R AC Y, M E DIA ,
P SYC HOA NA LYSI S
Introduction
Political Hysteria and the Traumatic Insights
of Conservative Media
Conservative media is confusing. Especially for those individuals who do not

share the ideological assumptions or ideals common to contemporary po-
litical conservativism, it may appear immediately bewildering, beyond our
capacity for comprehension, to imagine that anyone could believe or take
seriously the specious claims that regularly circulate and go unchallenged
in conservative media. But when I say that conservative media is confusing,
I actually have a different claim in mind. Even when taken on its own terms,
the presentational style of conservative media appears at odds with compre-
hension. Indeed, I will claim that not only does much of contemporary polit-
ical conservatism and conservative rhetoric in the United States demonstrate
a resistance to the careful or coherent elaboration of its own privileged terms
and concepts; more perversely, the guiding political imaginary of conserva-
tive media, and the rhetoric it so often employs, requires incomprehension
in order to maintain and perpetuate itself. Hysterical political discourse, as
I will term it, invites its intended audience into a perpetual state of confusion,
deploying the incomprehensible scenes it regularly stages to perpetuate fear,
anxiety, and a general sense of discomfort about democracy as such.
Consider, for instance, how it felt for many viewers to watch Donald
Trump share a debate stage with Hilary Clinton in 2016. Here was a rela-
tively unsuccessful businessman, whose riches were mostly the product of
inheritance, who had repeatedly declared bankruptcy over the past decades
and thus struggled to acquire investment loans from domestic banks, and
who was nevertheless rebranded as an unmatched business expert and real
estate tycoon on The Apprentice, thereby becoming a household name for
many Americans under the notoriously false pretenses of reality TV, while
also gaining favor among politically conservative audiences when he pro-
moted racist birther conspiracies about Barack Obama on Fox News and
other outlets. Despite all of this, nevertheless, here he was, sharing a stage
Beyond Bias. Scott Krzych, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197551219.003.0001
4 Democracy, Media, Psychoanalysis
with a former US senator and secretary of state. Even if we did not neces-
sarily share Clinton’s politics, and even if some would have preferred to see
Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee, the juxtaposition of Clinton
and Trump—intelligence and experience, on the one hand, versus bluster
and bravado, on the other—was a tableau difficult to comprehend. For many
viewers, not to mention journalists and historians who would attempt to
make sense of Trump’s eventual electoral victory after the fact, the scene did
not square with existing frameworks of political common sense. It wasn’t just
confusing; it was incomprehensible. Keeping in mind this peculiar mise en
scène, as well as the epistemological rupture it produced for many viewers,
this is precisely the kind of affective turmoil that I have in mind when I point
to the confusion incited by conservative political media.
On a day-to-day basis, through numerous outlets and platforms, con-
servative political media seeks to produce a similar sense of disbelief and
anxiety-laden incomprehension among its viewers. But in contrast to the
relatively unprecedented case of Trump and the epistemic breakdown that
his election engendered for many on the Left, conservative media manages
to produce its brand of political bewilderment in response to the existence
of virtually every political opponent, every progressive policy proposal, and
almost any piece of information or “alternative fact” that might begin to chal-
lenge or contradict its prized ideological assumptions.
As I will explain through my examination of conservative media—
specifically through close readings and case studies of feature-length con-
servative documentaries—there exists a common set of rhetorical conceits,
spectacular gestures, modes and movements of displacement, and other
tropes on which conservative speakers, spin doctors, and filmmakers reg-
ularly rely in order to serve their ideological ends and reproduce the kind
of perpetual confusion I have begun to identify. Indeed, a common set of
aesthetic gestures appear consistently across the wide range of media objects
I consider. This includes a reliance on moralistic provocations, which offer
pop-psychological speculations about the hidden motivations behind the
agendas of their political opponents, thereby reducing complex political is-
sues into seemingly simple decisions between good or evil, at least if their
claims are to be believed; presentational aesthetics, or what I also refer to as
presentation without representation, in which conservative speakers offer
so many opinionated voices, excuses, justifications, tangents, “alternative
facts,” and, most importantly, the formal mimicry of their opponents’ ex-
pressive styles, thereby performing what appear to be timely engagements
Introduction 5
in the political topics of the day, but in a manner that, through such exces-
sive presentations, subtracts from the exchange almost all relevant, substan-
tive, political content; and, finally, an economy of inattention in which, like
an aesthetic correlative of neoliberalism, the entire political performance
presumes a frictionless world of exchange in which conservative political
talking points circulate in the “marketplace” of ideas and achieve their truth
effects, not based on any demonstrable relation between the talking points
and the historical world, but rather on their capacity to maintain brand loy-
alty among their intended political consumers.
For instance, the feature-length film Generation Zero (2010), directed by
former Trump advisor and executive chairman for Breitbart.com, Steven
Bannon, offers a novel explanation for the 2008 financial collapse. Along the
way, the documentary manages to exemplify each of the rhetorical categories
I have introduced. The documentary makes almost no mention of the histor-
ical causes of the crisis (i.e., subprime mortgages, complex derivatives, credit
default swaps, deregulation of the financial markets, etc.). Rather, Bannon’s
film makes a more abstract and moralistic suggestion: that bankers on Wall
Street were the inheritors of the 1960s and the decade’s “debased” values, in-
cluding an unfettered reliance on “big government” or the “nanny State,” which
prompted bankers eventually to take excessive risks in the early twenty-first
century because they believed that that they would be bailed out for any of
their substantive mistakes. The film’s suggestions, as I term them, are not ex-
actly arguments. Indeed, if its central claims sound unlikely—if not impos-
sible to prove—then this is exactly the formal gesture of hysterical discourse
that I find to be predominant across a wide range of related documentaries
and other conservative media examined in Beyond Bias. In this particular
case, by revamping the Right’s long-standing contempt for the sociopolitical
ruptures marked by the 1960s, Generation Zero draws upon an existing set of
grievances. These grievances provide the necessary justification for the docu-
mentary to reproduce archival footage that depicts a predictable assortment
of antagonists (including hippies, the Black Panthers, and feminists marching
in the streets) collected and repackaged for a new situation. Faced with an ec-
onomic crisis in 2008 that might otherwise invalidate, or at least raise doubts
about, the Right’s wholesale commitment to neoliberalism and “free market”
capitalism, Generation Zero responds by displacing the economic and political
issues at hand. Even on its own terms, the supposed links suggested between
1968 and 2008 are difficult to comprehend precisely because the suggestions
offered by the film never amount to an actual argument—something went
wrong in the 1960s and produced the crisis in 2008, and the documentary
leaves it mostly to the viewer’s imagination to fill in the rather sizeable gap in
the historical timeline, a gap whose inexplicability provides the very means by
which Generation Zero presumes to suggest a nefarious, but always amorphous
and ambiguous, explanation for the global financial collapse. More important
than the confusing historical timeline on which it relies, however, is the re-
course the documentary makes to the 1960s, a “historicizing” gesture which
provides an aesthetic alibi for the archival images it culls from the decade, pro-
viding Generation Zero with the “look” or the “feel” of a conventional compila-
tion documentary, despite the vacuous quality of its claims and the irrelevance,
ultimately, of the archival footage it collects. Thus, the 2008 recession and the
complex succession of events leading to the crisis are portrayed as matters re-
ducible to moral abstraction, pop-psychological speculation, and a dichotomy
of “us versus them” (the moralist provocation); the absence of detailed histori-
ography in favor of talking points already familiar to conservative audiences
leaves those audiences grossly misinformed about the subject matter while si-
multaneously recycling a laundry list of preferred villains for further mockery
(economy of inattention); and the culminating media object traverses seam-
lessly through scenes of talking-head interviews and archival footage, thereby
providing Generation Wealth with the semblance of sober documentary form
(presentational aesthetics).
From an outsider’s perspective, many of these rhetorical maneuvers will
appear to be highly manipulative and mendacious, often relying on “evi-
dence” and so-called expertise that is, in fact, fabricated out of thin air, in-
dicative of what we could rightly deem as propaganda in its purest form.
However, it is perhaps worth noting, immediately, that I prefer to avoid the
label of propaganda throughout the majority of this book. On the contrary, as
I will claim, conservative hysterical discourse, at its most effective, presents
to its audiences—puts its audience in touch with—the traumatic underbelly
of democratic antagonism, and in this manner hysterical discourse uses the
bare facts and (often) accurate realities of political difference for manipu-
lative ends. Simply put, there is almost always a significant and substantive
element of truth locatable within even the most outlandish claims offered
throughout the conservative films and videos I survey. Oftentimes, such
traumatic insights manifest in the documentaries, in some manner or an-
other, as an emphasis on the stark reality of political difference—namely, that
there are political antagonists whose values are at odds with conservative
ideals, that such groups or individuals are vying for democratic power, and
Introduction 7
that these opponents could very well succeed in their pursuits. Accordingly,
many of the most basic claims and assumptions on which conservative media
rely share much in common—difficult as it may be to admit—with the polit-
ical ontologies of some of the academic Left’s most prominent contemporary
thinkers. Beyond Bias takes seriously the aesthetic gestures of conservative
media, rather than dismissing such media out of hand or labeling it as mere
propaganda. Indeed, through close and serious attention to the aesthetic-
political forms of conservative media, we may recognize more clearly the af-
fective dimension of democratic antagonism such media works to engage,
foment, and weaponize for its particular ideological ends. In the following
section, I consider briefly some of the affinities between conservative polit-
ical discourse and certain key concepts in political theory.
Democratic Paradoxes
Consider, for instance, Chantal Mouffe’s explanation of what she terms the
democratic paradox. Liberal democracies coordinate an inevitable intersec-
tion of two irreconcilable paradigms: liberalism and democratic rule. As
Mouffe writes, “On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the
rule of law, the defense of human rights and the respect of individual liberty;
on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality,
identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty.”1 At its
antagonistic core, then, liberal democracy manifests a conception of poli-
tics and society that privileges the rights, not to mention the preferences, of
the individual, while it also submits to the intermittent political decisions of
the majority, which may very well infringe upon an individual’s particular
desires or proclivities. In many instances, this conflict may not necessarily
take the explicit form of a paradox or of an event in which the conflict be-
tween my desire and the desires of others reaches an impasse of traumatic,
anxiety-inducing proportions. Sometimes my preferred political candidate
loses an election; sometimes our elected officials pass legislation based upon
sociopolitical ideals at odds with my own; and sometimes, oftentimes, I can
accept these momentary losses as a regrettable, but not unassimilable, fea-
ture of my participation in a democratic society. On other occasions, how-
ever, the conflict between individual ideals and democratic rule produces a
more distressing outcome, and the democratic paradox, as Mouffe conceives
it, becomes more immediately palpable. Consider, for instance, the topic of
abortion. Many conservatives honestly and strenuously believe that, from

the moment of conception, a fetus should be treated no differently than a
fully grown human being and its rights, accordingly, should therefore take
precedence and priority over a woman’s own agency. For anti-abortionists,
the United States has engaged in what they describe as a sustained genocide
of the unborn since Roe vs. Wade; such individuals find themselves identified
as citizens of a State whose majority democratic opinion and governing laws
are therefore radically at odds with their deeply held beliefs. Indeed, the ide-
ological conflict over abortion, for many on the Right, rises to an existential
crisis of such dire proportions as to justify, at times, violence by “pro-lifers”
against abortion providers, and, more recently, the passage of draconian laws
in conservative legislatures that render abortion effectively inaccessible in
many states, even while the Supreme Court (at least as of the writing of this
book) decision in support of abortion rights remains settled law.2 And just as
anti-abortionists cannot abide the contradiction of their shared citizenship
with those who support a woman’s right to choose, many on the Left cannot
fathom the ideological priorities of “pro-lifers” who nevertheless support
capital punishment, endless international wars, the caging of migrant chil-
dren, and so on. To Mouffe’s point, such particular examples of political im-
passe merely demonstrate, in the heightened fervor of the intransigent moral
positions staked out by both sides, a more basic and fundamental feature of
liberal democracy; namely, that such conflicts are an inevitable outcome of
political difference. Indeed, in Mouffe’s strong argument, such “difference is a
precondition for the existence of any identity.”3
The task of democratic debate, for Mouffe, “is not to eliminate passions
or to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational con-
sensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to ‘sublimate’ those passions by
mobilizing them toward democratic designs, by creating collective forms
of identification around democratic objectives.”4 And it is precisely on this
ground, I claim, that conservative media stakes its positions, in a manner
directly at odds with Mouffe’s own counsel that we translate the inevitable
passions of political difference into productive forms of democratic disa-
greement. Conservative hysterical discourse inhibits political sublimation at
all costs, as we will see. Indeed, the particular cases of conservative political
media addressed in Beyond Bias concern examples where reactionary rhet-
oric is deployed in a fashion to invite and sustain cases of political impasse
similar to the intransigent debate over abortion and to use such ideolog-
ical deadlocks as a means to forestall substantive debate or political change.
Introduction 9
Put otherwise, political impasse, rather than an occasional or inevitable

byproduct of democratic antagonism, functions as a privileged barricade
erected by conservative political discourse as a means to forestall change or
progress, to reduce political disagreement to endless and fruitless arguments
(for argument’s sake), and ultimately to transform the political realm into
a sphere composed of an endless array of talking heads and opinionated
voices who speak not in service of a concrete or coherent agenda but rather to
drown out all other voices.
In this light, we may notice how the moral provocations deployed by
conservative media amplify the inevitable antagonisms at the core of lib-
eral democracy, not in order to win a debate or to identify enemies that
must be vanquished, but rather to depoliticize contingent political issues,
transforming virtually any democratic exchange into a sign of irreconcilable
moral differences. Thus, when conservative filmmakers denigrate the films of
Michael Moore as the product of Moore’s hubris and his desire for fame and
fortune (Chapter 3), or when conservative filmmakers similarly claim that
Barack Obama’s “anti-American” policies demonstrate his unconscious alle-
giance to his father’s anti-colonialist attitudes (Chapter 4), such speculations
rely on a hermeneutics of suspicion that simplifies the specific agendas of
particular political opponents, transforming their opponents’ arguments
into signifiers of generic, but nevertheless threatening, difference or oth-
erness. In the process, conservative hysteria avoids taking a decisive posi-
tion on any of the particular ideas or policies pursued by their opponents.
Instead, the particularity of the others’ political position is reduced to further
“proof ” of irreconcilable difference—Hollywood elites out of touch with the
values of “real America,” radical socialists intent to undo the “free market,”
and so on. In other words, even in areas where we might anticipate the possi-
bility of agreement or compromise—as in the collective responses necessary
to deal with global warming or global pandemics—conservative hysterical
discourse remains intent to “expose” the signs of a democratic paradox lying
underneath, even where we may least expect to find it.
The morally provocative speculations and taunts typical of contemporary
right-wing media not only reduce virtually all contingent cases of demo-
cratic disagreement into matters of binary difference. The spectacular aes-
thetics on which such media regularly rely tends to privilege quantity (of its
opinionated voices) over quality (of their particular claims). Thus, the rhe-
torical appeals and formal aesthetics of conservative hysterical discourse
likewise share affinities with what Jodi Dean has described more generally
as communicative capitalism—the denigration of symbolic authority and

the proliferation of opinionated voices in the era of neoliberalism and dig-
ital media. For Dean, the proliferation of opinions expressed on a seemingly
endless number of online and cable outlets inhibits our capacity for demo-
cratic debate:
Contestations today rarely employ common terms, points of reference, or

demarcated frontiers. In our highly mediated communications environ-
ments we confront instead a multiplication of resistances and assertions
so extensive as to hinder the formation of strong counterhegemonies. The
proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communica-
tive access and opportunity result in a deadlocked democracy incapable of
serving as a form for political change.5
Given the structural form of “our highly mediated communications envir-

onments” and its allowance for an almost exponential increase in the array
of opinions and voices who participate in acts of political expression, we risk
becoming collectively lost in the morass—so much political entertainment,
easy enough to consume in the convenience of our homes, but at the cost of
substantive political engagement. For Dean, neoliberalism refashions politics
and political representation in the guises of consumer advertising and brand
loyalty, perpetuating the logics of marketing and public relations that divide
political constituencies into so many niche groups who share no common
points of reference and who likewise express their democratic “opinions,”
so called, through private acts of commodity consumption. Moreover, by
flooding the political “marketplace” with so many divergent and competing
voices, it becomes all the more difficult for populist countermovements to
organize or emerge as a result.6
But it is here that Beyond Bias carves out an area of concern distinct from
the one addressed by Dean. For instance, Dean is at pains to demonstrate
that we have by no means entered a postpolitical era. As she notes, the organ-
ized Right in the United States proactively pursues a wide range of political
strategies, including the pursuit of numerous fronts in the “culture war” in
which “every issue is made to stand for something beyond itself, an indica-
tion of weakness or resolve, a sign of support for us or them,” as in the case of
the annual “War on Christmas” fought vigorously by Fox News pundits from
the comfort of their soundstages, which I discuss more later.7 By contrast,
this book concerns an alternative mode of conservative political discourse,
Introduction 11
one that is profoundly depoliticizing in the manner by which it provides a

deflective screen—or deflecting shield—against any and all calls for progres-
sive political change. Thus, Beyond Bias addresses another side of the conser-
vative “echo chamber” different from the one identified by Dean. While the
more proactive side of the contemporary Republican Party and right-wing
networks work vigorously to purse their agenda (i.e., destroying the social
safety net, increasing military budgets, limiting access to abortion, undoing
environmental regulations, etc.), another side of conservative media deploys
a depoliticizing mode of hysterical discourse, which defends against progres-
sive ideals and claims through its contagious spread of noise and confusion,
producing in combination a highly efficient political resonance machine re-
sistant to change or compromise.
Thus, even when well-meaning journalists, historians, or cultural critics
attempt to debunk the false claims that circulate in the conservative “echo
chamber,” or when media watchdogs archive the seemingly endless arrays
of lies and mischaracterizations offered on conservative platforms on a daily
basis, such critical reactions risk falling into a fundamental trap: they apply
standards of judgment or common sense that are simply irrelevant to the
political ends that such spectacular political speech is intended to achieve.
One of the most pervasive strategies demonstrated by conservative political
media, then, is the effective use it makes of incoherence, along with a seem-
ingly endless cacophony of contradictory opinions, which arise to drown out
the voices of political opponents, or what I will describe as policing the polit-
ical with noise. Here, of course, I have in mind Jacques Rancière’s account of
political aesthetics. For Rancière, the “police” describes not the particular,
uniformed officers employed by the State to maintain law and order—though
there is certainly a family resemblance, a structural affinity, between such
individuals and the act of aesthetic policing Rancière has in mind. Rather,
the act of aesthetic policing works in such a way as to maintain the sociopo-
litical status quo; the police respond in a depoliticizing manner to claims that
allege a political wrong or which argue on behalf of change; the response of
the police, then, is to assert that such claims have no viable place, no need to
be heard, and are nothing more than the incoherent noise of those who do
not deserve to speak (“the part who have no part”). Examples of aesthetic-
political policing, as Rancière originally intends the term, are easy enough to
identify on both sides of the political spectrum.8 Rancière conceives of noise,
then, as what remains or becomes of political expression when it is effec-
tively prevented from gaining a foothold in “proper” precincts of democratic
exchange, as when protestors are derided by the establishment for lacking a

coherent plan, or, even more specifically, when a progressive agenda like the
Green New Deal is derided as utopian nonsense. By contrast, conservative
hysterical media often relies on noise as its preferred starting (and ending)
point. Especially when political success may hinge on resistance to the emer-
gence of broad political consensus—say, the collective action required to
address climate change—the proliferation of nonsense or noise provides a
cynically effective aesthetic device in service of the status quo.
Though often dismissed simply as propaganda, niche political entertain-
ment, or even partisan nonsense, conservative media actually addresses
many issues at the core of political theory, even if the intentions of con-
servative political discourse are more pragmatic or cynical than theoret-
ical. By using the spectacle of debate to delay substantive disagreement, by
constantly drawing viewers’ attention in so many directions as to muddy
the political waters, and by mimicking the forms of conventional political
representation for the purpose of sociopolitical stasis, if not regression, the
economy of inattention and presentational aesthetics of conservative media
likely appears confusing or bewildering for those who encounter it from the
outside: common sense cannot explain the phenomena of much contem-
porary conservative discourse precisely because conservative media often
finds political refuge through the dismantling or short-circuiting of existing
regimes of common sense. Hysterical conservative media neither seeks to
reclaim some ideal, political state from the past, nor does it propose to insti-
tute an agenda that would lead to its vision of a better future. Rather, hyster-
ical media invites, perpetuates, and reproduces political impasse and endless
antagonism, in which the trauma of political difference predominates and
thereby ensures the repetition of spectacular debate as a substitute for sub-
stantive disagreement.
Finally, at least as it concerns the broader dimensions of political theory
relevant to this book’s arguments, we might notice how conservative dis-
course routinely positions itself and its political allies in the role of the victim.
Any indication of the existence of alternative political perspectives appears to
justify, for conservative media and its prominent speakers, an all-out call to
arms. Yet, strangely, such calls to action rarely amount to sustained political
activism other than symbolic protests or, cynically, the further consumption
of resonant conservative media. In Chapter 1, I engage in a more thorough
consideration of the archive of psychoanalytic theory to explain why I iden-
tify these features of conservative rhetoric specifically as hysterical. For now,
Introduction 13
however, I simply intend to emphasize the affective turmoil that conservative

media invites, and how such mediations perpetuate an incoherent epistemo-
logical chasm in which its intended audience may fall into a void somewhere
between conventional democracy and a more radical populism. Indeed,
when conservative political discourse makes recourse to hysterical spectacle,
as it often does, the outcome is one that invites a traumatic impasse caught
between conventional democratic representation and populist emergence.
By taking seriously the strategies, appeals, and aesthetic gestures of conser-
vative political discourse, then, we may notice some of the concrete ways in
which conservative media appears to understand and employ—even if only
implicitly or unconsciously—its own illuminating, though certainly trou-
bling, political ontology.
For the purposes of clarity, we might linger a bit longer with the example
of the 2008 financial crisis and the manner by which any reckoning with the
event as a crisis was avoided in the conservative documentary Generation
Zero, indicative of the way conservative hysterical discourse will deny a crisis
when it emerges and, conversely, manufacture crises where they arguably do
not exist. In Bannon’s reactionary response to the Great Recession, as I have
claimed, the contingent features of the historical event are transformed into
a generic morality tale: radicals from the 1960s infected Wall Street with
their misguided reliance on the federal government to bail out their exces-
sive financial speculations, the documentary claims. Notice how this inter-
pretation of 2008 forecloses on any democratic response to the crisis; that
is, no consideration is given for how existing regimes of governmental over-
sight or regulation might be pursued as a reaction to the crisis or as means to
avoid further devastation to domestic and international economies. In other
words, the problem diagnosed by Generation Zero is not one that allows for
any viable solution; any democratic response to the event is barred in ad-
vance due to the manner by which the crisis is represented as a moral, rather
than a political, problem.
To argue, as I do, that hysterical political discourse inhabits and perpetuates
a rift between democratic and populist responses to the political, of course,
requires some further elaboration concerning the relation between democ-
racy and populism more generally. Here, I have in mind Ernesto Laclau’s
important theoretical intervention in this regard, particularly the manner
by which he takes seriously populist movements as profound illustrations,
rather than departures from, the antagonist core of liberal democracy.
For Laclau, as he contends in On Populist Reason, populism demonstrates
pointedly the hegemonic field of relations that constitute democratic govern-

ance; namely, the contingent associations of political actors whose demands
(for change) offered against the establishment serve to produce new modes
of collective belonging; the embrace of the affective, rather than simply a log-
ical or bureaucratic, dimension of political rhetoric; and the creative con-
struction of new modes of representation necessary to propose substantive
change. Thus, while Laclau’s theory of populism concerns an analysis of the
“nature and logics of the formation of collective identities,” we will find, per-
haps unsurprisingly, that hysterical discourse works at cross-purpose, to op-
pose at all costs the emergence of collective identities and to draw political
cover from the impossibility of collective action, democratic engagement, or
populist uprising that it works effectively to avoid through its emphasis on
confusion and incomprehension.9
For the purposes of this introduction, I will simply attend to the
distinctions Laclau draws between democratic and populist demands.
According to Laclau, a democratic demand is one that pursues a particular,
limited change while grounding the legitimacy of its request within the nor-
mative structures of an established political order. Such a democratic de-
mand “can be accommodated within an expanding hegemonic formation”
and requires no fundamental change to the political structure as it exists.10
Or, in the case of 2008, the Dodd-Frank Act eventually passed by Congress,
we might say, amounted to a conventional democratic response to the crisis.
Indeed, the fact that the legislation was deemed by many conservatives to be
an example of federal overreach, while progressives decried the Act as too
limited in its meager regulations of the banking industry, seems to exemplify
how this particular issue was framed or rendered legible according to ex-
isting regimes of democratic sensibility. As Laclau makes clear, for any con-
flict that remains ensconced within the terms of democratic common sense,
the outcome may be undetermined, but the vocabulary necessary in order for
the debate to proceed is given in advance. Democratic debates, we might say,
occur in the context of a political and rhetorical landscape in which common
sense remains a relatively stable and consistent point of reference regardless
of any participants’ particular political affiliation.
However, in the case of Generation Zero, there is no proper democratic
response available to address the diagnosis the documentary makes of the
moral etiology behind the economic crisis. In other words, the problem the
documentary presumes to address is without a viable cure. And the economy
of inattention on which the film relies likewise encourages viewers to remain
Introduction 15
in the dark about the complex financial structures that led to the housing
bubble and its eventual rupture. If the film does not coordinate a democratic
demand, then does it encourage a populist uprising? My answer to this ques-
tion is an unqualified no, but first we should consider further, if only briefly,
Laclau’s account of populism.
In political situations leading to a populist demand, in contrast to dem-
ocratic conventionality, the common ground between political opponents
encounters a more fundamental rupture, such that “a lack, a gap . . . has
emerged in the harmonious continuity of the social.”11 Laclau con-
tinues: “There is a fullness of the community which is missing. This is deci-
sive: the construction of the ‘people’ will be the attempt to give a name to that
absent fullness.”12 In Laclau’s conception of a populist demand, then, a cer-
tain series of political complaints emerge in such a manner that the demands
cannot be met according to a redistribution of existing resources. Rather, the
demands, by their very nature, require a fundamental reorganization of the
political landscape itself:
The meaning of such demands is determined largely by their differential

positions within the symbolic framework of society, and it is only their
frustration that presents them in a new light. But if there is a very exten-
sive series of social demands which are not met, it is that very symbolic
framework which starts to disintegrate. In that case, however, the popular
demands are less and less sustained by a pre-existing differential frame-
work: they have, to a large extent, to construct a new one.13
In this light, we might say that Dodd-Frank offered a democratic com-

promise in reaction to 2008, in which the established structures of the US
economy remained almost completely unchanged. A populist demand in
response to 2008, by contrast, would function more radically; whatever its
particular manner of expression, it would likely involve a more comprehen-
sive reorientation of the relationship between the federal government and
financial institutions—such as demands on the Left to “break up” the big
banks. According to political common sense, of course, such an act to dis-
solve the largest and most powerful financial institutions was unthinkable.
What would remain of our economy in the aftermath? What would it look
like? The inability to answer such questions with anything more than hypo-
thetical speculation is indicative of kind of radical reorientation provoked by
a properly populist demand. In other words, even when a populist demand
addresses a contingent and singular political issue, the terms of the demand
are of such ontological significance or scope that only a radical revision to
the existing political apparatus could possibly meet the demand’s implicit
requirements.
Again, in the case of Generation Zero, the documentary concludes
with an endorsement of the conservative Tea Party movement as a sup-
posed act of populist uprising. However, given the moral provocations on
which the documentary rests its claims, there is no proper antagonist to
whom the film or its allies may level their demands. Or the nature of the
complaints is such that they merely substitute one particular opponent for
another, generic one. Simply put, Generation Zero coordinates its stereo-
typical denigration of 1960s “radicals” to claim that any policies pursued
by Obama in the early years of his administration, while the economy was
in collapse, evidenced an underhanded attempt by the president to undo
capitalism in favor of socialism and thereby bring to fruition the “anti-
American” ideals of the civil rights era. In other words, the documentary
claims the existence of a problem it cannot prove, because the nature of its
diagnosis is strictly speculative, and then proposes no substantive change
to the existing state of political affairs because it imagines its present
antagonist (Obama) to be simply the reincarnation of an already long-
existing one (1960s radicalism).
For my immediate purposes, I want to emphasize the affective discom-
fort or trauma that tends to emerge upon the onset of a populist demand, or
how populism in Laclau’s account demonstrates a widespread coalescence of
political interests in response to a rupture in more traditional forms of dem-
ocratic representation. In cases of political antagonism in which the nature
of the specific conflict offers no obvious path for hegemonic negotiation ac-
cording to existing terms of exchange, Laclau describes such experiences, var-
iously, as a “chasm,” a “conceptual hiatus,” a “breakdown,” a “deficit in being,”
and a “radical anomie.” Such representational failures occur, for Laclau,
when social or political antagonisms become so intransigent as to challenge
established modes of political representation. Objectivity or common sense,
normatively conceived, fail to describe the populist situation, and thus a pop-
ular demand responds to this rupture by attempting to “add to the sequence
a link that the objective explanation is unable to provide.”14 Seen from the
outside, a popular demand may appear incoherent if not contradictory, espe-
cially because it is the very nature of a populist demand to challenge political
common sense as such.
Introduction 17
In the chasm between democratic common sense and populist contin-

gency, then, is precisely where I claim we may locate hysterical political
discourse. Hysterical discourse courts and reproduces the impasse or the
rupture or the chasm that occurs between democratic common sense and
populist emergence. In other words, Laclau locates an experience of affec-
tive turmoil at the very core of political becoming, a “conceptual hiatus”
in which democratic disagreements find themselves caught in an endless
loop that cannot be resolved absent a fundamental reorientation of the
political landscape at large—and it is precisely this moment of epistemo-
logical, ideological, and affective breakdown that conservative hysterical
discourse weaponizes as a means for anti-democratic impasse without end.
Like so-called climate change skeptics who do not deny entirely the reality
of a warming planet, but who also do not accept any proposals for substan-
tive political action, and who call for further research or more discussion or
more time to consider the potential “unintended consequences” of a deci-
sive and collective response to the crisis, the very perpetuation of the crisis
and the inability to bring the debate to an end, either through democratic
compromise or populist change, serves the ultimately cynical ends of the
hysterical (non)position. By populating the democratic landscape with an
endless array of voices, options, opinions, and countervailing claims, hys-
terical discourse thereby manifests the formal appearance of political debate
but does so in bad faith, refusing to offer a discrete or definable argument,
and likewise refusing to take one singular, defendable position among a
range of others. Thus, by performing the form of debate, absent its actual
political content, the conservative spectacle remains above the political fray,
seemingly untouched by the contingencies and sometimes harsh realities of
democratic antagonism, and at an almost complete remove from interac-
tion with the opponents it deems morally unworthy of its respect or consid-
eration in the first place.
Hysterical Contagion
My approach to conservative political discourse, as I have begun to explain,

complicates our response to political media that may appear at first glance
to demonstrate textbook examples of propaganda, fearmongering, rhe-
torical manipulation, or bias. Instead, I am interested in the ways in which
conservative media invites and reproduces a “conceptual hiatus” that leaves
its intended audience caught in an affective impasse that falls between the
cracks of democratic negotiation and populist change. Moreover, as I explain
in Chapter 1, and throughout this book, the aesthetics forms by which con-
servative media accomplishes its depoliticizing gestures are drawn directly
from the contemporary landscape of journalistic reportage and more con-
ventional documentary forms; the formal parodies garner for conservative
discourse an aesthetic semblance of sobriety and seriousness at odds with
its demonstrable cases of epistemic ignorance, moral belligerence, and
anti-democratic fervor. Indeed, it is precisely the lack of care by which con-
servative media justifies or evidences its claims, combined with the dire
seriousness by which it breathlessly identifies crises of nearly existential
proportions, that leads me to label such discourse hysterical.
I will have much more to say in the following chapter about the struc-
ture of hysterical discourse. For the moment, I will simply note how hys-
teria marks both an epistemological and affective trauma that results, most
basically and simply, from a subject’s experience of a lived contradiction.
Hysterical discourse responds to a breakdown in common sense, when lan-
guage or other conventional modes of representation fail the individual or
group in question, even while the situation compels those involved to speak
on nevertheless, often leading to the kind of excessive displays or spectacles
long associated with hysterical performance. Hysterical discourse, in other
words, speaks in absence of a language adequate to the situation it neverthe-
less seeks to name or describe—similar to Rancière account of noise. And
as I have already begun to suggest via the brief consideration of Laclau’s po-
litical ontology, the affective chasm that may emerge between democratic
and populist demands identifies a representational void similar in kind,
I claim, to the psychic experience of the hysterical variety. One lesson we
may derive from this discussion, then, concerns the trans-subjective pos-
sibility of hysterical rupture or breakdown. Simply put, and as I will argue
throughout this book, hysteria may be understood as a common and polit-
ically unaffiliated reaction to democratic antagonism. Though Beyond Bias
concerns the particular manners and forms by which contemporary con-
servative documentaries and other conservative political media weaponize
hysterical discourse for their own ideological ends, I do not claim that hys-
teria is a phenomenon peculiar to conservativism. On the contrary, as I have
noted already with my comments about the Left’s reaction to the election
of Trump, and as the following discussion of hysterical reactions by pro-
gressives to Fox News and its annual reporting on the “War on Christmas,”
Introduction 19
hysteria and hysterical discourse may, on occasion, spread comprehensively

across the political landscape.
Consider the annual “War on Christmas” covered breathlessly by hosts
on Fox News. According to the conservative commentators and pundits who
regularly appear on the notoriously reactionary cable-news network, the
Christian tradition in the United States is under threat of erasure by secular
multiculturalists who are intent to subtract from the winter solstice anything
but the most generic signifiers of holiday cheer. Recognizable conservative
commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, among many others, have
lamented the practice of retail employees who wish their customers “Happy
Holidays,” which for the commentators evidences an unforgivable sub-
stitute for “Merry Christmas.” In other words, the subtraction of “Christ-”
from “Christmas” serves as evidence of multiculturalism and political cor-
rectness working to erase Christian values and religious prominence in the
public sphere. Hosts of the early-morning program Fox and Friends likewise
criticized Starbucks, not for refusing to recognize the Christmas holiday as
such, but for failing to represent the signifiers of the season explicitly enough
to allay the hosts’ projected fears of rampant political correctness, as when,
in 2015, the corporate coffee behemoth unveiled minimally decorated cups,
colored “only” in (the traditional Christmas colors of) red and green, but
lacked any other conventional Christmas symbols.
For liberally minded media watchdogs, the “War on Christmas” is a man-
ufactured crisis employed by conservative media to perpetuate a false sense
of victimhood, at the least, if not a cynical ploy to keep viewers attentively
and profitably glued to their screens. Consider the equally breathless critique
of the critique: a critical response to the “War on Christmas” offered by a
commentator on Media Matters for America (mediamatters.org), a site that
offers daily monitoring of conservative media’s worst offenders:
For 15 years, cable news Don Quixotes have battled these windmills, re-
joicing in their victories and basking in their acts of bravery while warning
their audiences to remain vigilant. Imaginary culture war issues like the
War on Christmas make for good politics, as the people arguing that these
are real issues can at any time simply dust off their hands, declare victory,
and pat themselves on the back for a job well done . . . Deep down, they must
know that there’s no actual “war” on Christmas, but it makes for good poli-
tics. Rather than having to address issues actually facing Americans—such
as health care, the economy, and climate change—the fake battles in the fake
War on Christmas give right-wing media a convenient way to manufacture

divisions between the left and the right. The bombardment of misinfor-
mation playing up imaginary (or wildly overblown) examples of political
correctness run amok are intended to scare and create a seeming sense of
partisanship even on issues that are agreed upon nearly universally.15
The response captured here is typical of mainstream journalistic responses

to conservative political media. Yet notice how the response itself falls
into its own manner of contradiction. The author admits that the “War on
Christmas” is “good politics,” no matter how specious the claims on which
it rests, at least for those who deploy the spectacle in service of their own
ideological agenda; at the same time, the author likewise demonstrates an
essentialist attachment to common sense as a supposedly stable ground upon
which we may judge this overt act of politicization as “imaginary” or “fake.”
Simply put, the author cannot seem to decide whether the problem encoun-
tered here is one of epistemology or morality. If “deep down,” the conserva-
tive speakers behind such jeremiads “must know” that what they are doing is
wrong, or fabricated, or manipulative, then their version of politics remains
at odds with common sense (“issues that are agreed upon nearly univer-
sally”); according to this perspective, such political opponents are therefore
morally suspect and unworthy of further engagement. At the same time, the
author recognizes that the entire spectacle, even if fake or imaginary, may be
politically effective; thus, the commentary seems to recognize the profound
hegemonic stakes in this front of the “culture war” even as it dismisses the
spectacular quality of Fox’s political aesthetics. Simply put, it seems that the
liberal critique of conservative media stumbles into a conceptual hiatus in
which the speaker is both entirely confident in their ideological position and,
simultaneously, unable to express their claims in a coherent form.
Despite the fact that the “War on Christmas” is often dismissed as an ex-
ample of right-wing “hysteria”—a conventional use of the term directly at
odds with how I conceive of hysterical discourse throughout this book—this
particular example illustrates a different problem. In this case and many
others like it, Fox News and other conservative outlets are engaged in a per-
sistent deployment of political rhetoric to galvanize their audiences around
a divisive cultural issue. The “War on Christmas,” in other words, is actively
politicizing and bears no relation to hysterical discourse—though it cer-
tainly seems capable of eliciting a hysterical reaction. Where conservative
media makes use of a divisive issue, or constructs one of their own making,
Introduction 21
the liberal response reveals a fundamental breakdown, a self-division, or

an experience of bias (as in an oblique cut) at its very core: unable to make
sense of this seemingly pure act of politicization and searching for universal
terms grounded in common sense that would explain (away) this moment
of political difference as mere noise, the response cannot comprehend what
it sees and thus it denies the brute reality of antagonism it encounters even
as it encounters it. The conservative rhetoric, in its astute appeals to the
hegemonic order, attempts to remake common sense to suit its ideological
agenda. The liberal response devolves into an incomprehensible complaint
or protest, attempting to maintain, or reclaim, the moral and epistemolog-
ical high ground at the very moment that the political landscape has demon-
strated itself to lack any firm foundation whatsoever.
The self-contradictory and incoherent response to the “War on Christmas”
is indicative of what I describe throughout Beyond Bias as a hysterical com-
plaint, similar to the affective chasm Laclau locates between democratic
demands and populist protests. When faced with the undeniable existence of
a political opponent with whom I share no common ground, whose world-
view is diametrically opposed to my own, whose ideology and discourse
seem immune to any attempt I might make to bring it to reason, and whose
networks of political affiliation are vast and influential enough that they could
very well exert their political will over my own, then my capacity for coherent
self-expression may begin to degenerate. Words fail me, yet the crisis is of
such significance, so pressing, that I speak on nevertheless, even if incoher-
ently. Though this book concerns the manner and forms by which conser-
vative media marshals such hysterical moments of incoherence for political
effect, I mean to make clear, from the start, that hysteria has no particular
political affiliations. The epistemological impasses and affective ruptures that
arise in reaction to one’s encounter with the democratic paradox is an under-
lying potentiality of contemporary political life, regardless of how one votes
and regardless of one’s particular political identifications.
Yet, if the “War on Christmas,” or “pro-life” hypocrisies, or the election
of Trump to the presidency stand as a few examples in which some on the
Left have felt the onset of hysterical breakdown, the landscape of conserva-
tive political media that concerns me in Beyond Bias demonstrates a more
radical aesthetic form. The hysterical complaint, as I have noted, emerges in
reaction to an act of political reactivation that likely catches us off guard, and
it is reasonable to expect the emergence of such occasional disruptions as an
inevitable byproduct of liberal democracy and its inherent antagonisms. In
contrast to the relatively singular and passing experience of complaint that

registers a conceptual hiatus or affective experience of contradiction, con-
servative media consistently engages in what I describe, after Jacques Lacan,
as hysterical discourse. In hysterical discourse, a momentary affective break-
down or a singular act of incoherent protest transforms into a perpetual
reproduction of a crisis in (political) representation. Hysterical political dis-
course sustains and reproduces noise as a defensive maneuver or mechanism
that drowns out other voices, resists change or compromise, and substitutes
a parody of democratic engagement for the real thing. Unlike the contin-
gent complaint, which struggles to articulate the incomprehensible scene of
political difference it encounters and perhaps devolves into an expression of
inarticulate noise, hysterical discourse marshals noise as its preferred meth-
odology to police the aesthetic dimension of political representation.
Forms of Bias
To this point, I have geared my comments primarily toward the relations and
resonances this book draws between hysterical discourse and prominent
political ontologies on the academic Left. As much as Beyond Bias seeks to
offer a new reading of political media, which links together relevant strains
of psychoanalytic and political theory, this book is equally invested in the
field of documentary studies. In Chapters 2 through 5, I offer close readings
of a wide variety of conservative documentary films and videos, and these
chapters likewise put the examples of conservative media in direct conversa-
tion with their more conventional documentary counterparts. Since I argue
that hysterical political discourse activates its depoliticizing gestures through
the parody and mimicry of its political opponents, a comprehensive study
of conservative documentary requires attention to the more conventional
documentary forms that the films and videos regularly cite, parody, and
magnify to more extreme or radical lengths. More than simply a means of
contextualization, however, the case studies and comparisons I offer dem-
onstrate, in many instances, how conservative media manages to recognize
and exacerbate problems of political representation contained, but that are
often unexpressed or underthematized, in their more conventional docu-
mentary counterparts. Thus, much like Laclau’s treatment of populism, not
as an excessive departure from democracy normalcy, but rather as a spec-
tacular mode of political engagement that helps to reveal the affective and
Introduction 23
contingent features of democracy more generally, conservative political

documentaries often provide helpful insight into the ethical dilemmas, epis-
temological roadblocks, and representational quandaries that often arise for
more traditional documentary filmmakers, especially for filmmakers inter-
ested in nonfictional representations of the political sphere.
Before turning to the narrower case studies, however, Chapter 1,
“Hysterical Bias and Democratic Representations,” offers a general over-
view of the short history of conservative political documentary, and likewise
offers a more thorough explanation of the relation, developed throughout
the remainder of the book, between political media and the psychoanalytic
conception of hysteria and hysterical discourse. In addition to surveying key
texts in the psychoanalytic canon concerning the etiology and reproduction
of hysterical discourse, I distinguish between two particular forms of hys-
terical trauma. The first, which I refer to as the hysterial complaint, marks
the moment in which an individual or group experiences an irreconcilable
contradiction in their lived experience. Such complaints, when they emerge,
attempt to speak through the trauma even as such speech lacks a mode of
representation adequate to the social breakdown as it has occurred; the hys-
terical complaint can be a productive mode of protests, as many feminist
thinkers in the late twentieth century argued, and hysterical complaints may
also mark the start of a fruitful path toward psychic change, as a diverse group
of analysts—including Juliet Mitchel, Jacques Lacan, Christopher Bollas,
and many others—have claimed from their particular, disciplinary vantage
points. As I further argue, hysterical discourse, in contrast to the more contin-
gent and singular chasm of the hysterical complaint, magnifies the affective
trauma of the complaint for more cynical ends, as a means to forestall change
and to keep the hysterical subject at a significant remove from its perceived
competitors even as the hysteric’s discourse appears to engage in sustained
dialogue.
After the more theoretically inclined Introduction and Chapter 1, the re-
maining chapters further develop my account of hysterical political aesthetics
and documentary form. In Chapter 2, “Biased Beliefs: Common Sense,
Creativity, and Creationism” I consider documentaries that have attempted
to expose the lives and social institutions of religious fundamentalists in
the United States. In such films as Blood in the Face (James Ridgeway, Kevin
Rafferty, Anne Bohlen, 1991), Hell House (George Ratliff, 2001), and Jesus
Camp (Heidi Ewing, Jannat Gargi, 2006), among others, filmmakers have
struggled to represent their subject matter objectively without also losing the
critical framework necessary to avoid the mere dissemination of the biased

religious views they record and eventually project on-screen. How does one
document fundamentalism objectively without also becoming a means for
the very spread of the fundamentalist’s message? If documentary filmmakers
rely too heavily on their own biases to frame the subject matter, then they
risk trading one ideology for another, as they well know; yet to simply re-
produce on-screen the viewpoints of religious fanatics, without commen-
tary or criticism, may result in documentary films that serve the interests of
the same subjects they originally intended to expose; documentaries about
evangelical Christianity may become just one additional means for evan-
gelizing the “unsaved,” for instance. Religious fundamentalism, as we typi-
cally understand it, presumes no difference between belief and experience;
the bias of fundamentalism, so called, privileges intuition over evidence.
Fundamentalism presumes the existence of an internal, metaphysical con-
science by which God guides us to the truth, and thus the rhetorical appeal
of fundamentalism, offered to outsiders, compels their listeners to accept
the “truth” expressed by a presumed inner conscience—You should know
better. By contrast, the secular response, especially as it is offered as a retort
to religious bias, tends to operate in a mode of ideological exposure—You
know not what you are doing. However, as I demonstrate, many documentary
filmmakers have struggled to document fanaticism without succumbing to
knee-jerk moralizations of their own. In other words, the gesture of ideo-
logical exposure (You know not what you are doing) encounters an internal
split in the regime of “common sense” on which they claim to rely. When
proponents of secular common sense presume to judge fanatics for their
epistemological failures, such judgments too often include a moral condem-
nation despite themselves (You should know better) and thereby succumb to
their own version of secular fundamentalism. By expanding the reach of the
term fundamentalism to include even those authors, critics, and filmmakers
who vociferously attack modern-day belief and religious fanaticism, we may
better understand the constitutive features of common sense, fantasy, and
creativity as they intersect in the political domain, as well as the hysterical
complaints into which they fall when common sense fails them. In the case
of explicitly conservative documentaries— specifically, films and videos
that seek to spread an evangelical belief in Christianity in general and crea-
tionism in particular—we encounter the hystericiziation of common sense,
I claim. That is, if the critique of religious fundamentalism risks a fall into
a fundamentalism of another, secular kind, then conservative media, as
Introduction 25
I show, further hystericizes and magnifies this constitutive bias or split at the
core of any claim to common sense. Magnifying this hysterical impasse, cre-
ationist films deploy the forms of common sense—scientific methodology, in
particular—without investing fully or identifying completely with the terms
of secular discourse they mimic, thereby using the forms of common sense to
produce a hysterical taunt devoid of content—I know you are, but what am I?
As we will find, the questions posed by hysterical conservative media are not
intended to initiate serious discussion, disagreement, or debate. Instead, the
challenges posed by creationists to the established science behind Darwinian
evolution promote a false image of compromise that papers over the rift be-
tween religious fundamentalism and secular common sense. By falsifying
debate and dressing themselves in the garb of reasonable interlocutors—if
not actual scientists—compromise is offered as a spectacle that erodes the
terms of disagreement and deftly inserts fanatical belief into the public do-
main as if it was no different, in kind, from scientific empiricism. Religious
fundamentalism, in its hysterical mode, thereby seeks to evolve common
sense in terms amenable to its ideological ends, even as and especially when
it seeks to deny the existence of (biological) evolution.
Chapter 3, “Policing with Noise: Lacan, Rancière, and Documentary
Participation,” looks to the discourse theory of Jacques Lacan and the polit-
ical theory of Jacques Rancière to further interrogate the conservative simu-
lacrum of political debate. Michael Moore’s early documentaries produced
waves of criticism from across the political spectrum, as critics expressed
concern, and sometimes shock, in response to Moore’s flamboyant flouting
of documentary conventions. Although some of the criticism levelled against
Moore was reasonable, my readings of Roger & Me (1989) and Bowling for
Columbine (2002) take a different tack. In their most productive moments,
I argue, Moore’s ironic performances lure his interlocutors into a defense of
untenable political ideas and positions; the corresponding nonsense of the
latter’s political speech demonstrates the bias or noise (in Rancière sense of
the term) constitutive of the very status quo that Moore seeks to upend. In
other words, Moore deploys his obvious ideological biases, not for the pro-
duction of objective knowledge, but to hystericize his political opponents,
demonstrating their incapacity to render their claims in objective or reason-
able terms. In response, numerous conservative documentaries emerged, of-
fering what appear to be painstaking rebuttals of Moore’s precedent films.
But whereas Moore relies on irony to provoke contradictions in the speech
of his opponents, the conservative films pathologize Moore as an individual,
speculating about his “real” intentions and motivations. By mimicking

Moore’s form as the very means to dismiss his political arguments, the con-
servative films appropriate the hysterical complaints that drive Moore’s docu-
mentaries, but do so in the manner of hysterical discourse, which thereby
divests the debate of its political content. Through the strictly formal debates
in which they engage, conservative documentaries produce aesthetic noise as
a spectacular means to drown out Moore’s own political agenda.
The avoidance of spectacle was a key point of emphasis for filmmakers
working in the observational mode of direct cinema. Chapter 4, “Economies
of Inattention: Privacy, Publicity, and the Interests of Observation,” considers
such conventional documentaries as Primary (Robert Drew, 1960),
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (Robert Drew, 1963), The War
Room (Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, 1993), and Feed (Kevin Rafferty
and James Ridgeway, 1992), films that take viewers behind the scenes of presi-
dencies and presidential political campaigns. The observational films eschew
voice-over narration, interviews, and other conventional modes of argumen-
tation typical of precedent documentary forms. The filmmakers’ absent ed-
itorial voice thereby leaves room for viewers to decide for themselves how
they will interpret the recorded images. Thus, at first glance, direct cinema
seems to share little in common with the unhinged, racist, conspiracy theo-
ries found throughout the cycle of anti-Obama documentaries central to the
chapter. However, as I argue, both cycles of films—direct cinema and the hys-
terical anti-Obama documentaries—rely on related economies of attention,
both of which invite viewers to heed the bare distinction between privacy
and publicity. In direct cinema, observational cameras move, effortlessly,
through the backrooms of power, deconstructing the distinctions between
the private and the public. Direct cinema thereby illustrates effectively Sianne
Ngai’s aesthetic category of the interesting: the encounter with a difference
or a distinction for which we lack an explanatory concept. In observational
cinema, the interesting at once invites our attention to difference and avoids
predetermined categories that might render those differences explicable
in advance. The anti-Obama films, relatedly, hystericize the “interesting”
features of Obama’s “nefarious” past, his relationships with so-called radicals,
and the racial markers that, for the films, demonstrate his threatening fig-
uration as Other. The conservative films thereby find endless reasons to be
suspicious of Obama, even while the films withhold any context, evidence,
or argumentation that might bring their “investigations” to a comprehen-
sive conclusion. Rather, the films construct irresolvable problems; by leaving
Introduction 27
any solutions in doubt, and projecting this undecidability onto Obama’s very
body and being, the documentaries combine hysterical discourse with racist
tropologies.
Chapter 5, “Paradigmatic Politics: Stock Footage and the Hysterical
Archive,” offers close examination of several films distributed by the Citizens
United production company. Most infamously, in 2008, Citizens United
released Hillary: The Movie (Alan Peterson), a political “attack advertise-
ment” that masqueraded as a documentary film. The film prompted the
court case by which “Citizens United” would eventually enter the cultural
and political lexicon: a conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled
in favor of the production company and, in the process, ushered in a new
era of corporate spending on political campaigns. With this landmark de-
cision in mind, I consider “corporate speech” and other examples of neo-
liberal aesthetics as they are deployed across the Citizens United library of
films, especially the films’ excess reliance on stock footage, which the docu-
mentaries use as a substitute for archival images. The stock footage, I claim,
functions as an aesthetic correlative for neoliberalism in the era of commu-
nicative capitalism. The generic, paradigmatic images are paired with talking
points offered by political speakers, as if the former validates the latter, de-
spite the fact that both modes of presentation bear no direct relationship to
the referents they invoke. By contrast, the compilation documentary Atomic
Café (Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, 1982) appropriates
US propaganda films from the Cold War and promotes a pedagogical ca-
pacity for audiences to recognize the difference between past and present,
between what the image shows and what the argument behind the image
intends through the act of showing. Citizens United relies, instead, on a neo-
liberal logic in which political argumentation, rather than a claim on histor-
ical reality, functions according to the model of commodity advertising. Like
other hysterical forms encountered throughout Beyond Bias, stock footage
performs the appearance of archival referentiality but is devoid of content.
It thereby populates the pseudodocumentaries with suggestive imagery that
provides the films with the appearance of referentiality. The simulacrum of
more conventional documentary forms and strategies provides the hysterical
films with the flexible tools by which to dismiss or erase from view any and
all political alternatives, avoiding a substantive debate through the very per-
formance of debate.
Common modes of hysterical attack and performance persist across
each cycle of films I examine throughout the chapters of Beyond Bias. These
strategies include the creative mimicry of common sense and other, more
mainstream modes of argumentation (Chapter 2); the dissemination of so
many excess “facts” and “alternatives” as to drown out with noise a political
opponent, even at the risk of rendering their own political arguments in-
coherent as a result (Chapter 3); the excess attention and energy drawn to
unverifiable speculations that emphasize “interesting” surface appearances
at the cost of in-depth analysis (Chapter 4); and the affective reiteration of
talking points that only appear to link with the empirical world because
the documentaries themselves never supply anything but generic, stock
arguments in service of their political agenda (Chapter 5). Finally, in the
Conclusion, I offer some friendly critiques of authors and critics who have
deemed our era to be “post-truth,” offering my account of hysterical political
discourse as a more useful theoretical framework by which to interrogate our
contemporary landscape of political mediation.
1
Hysterical Bias and
Democratic Representations
The history of conservative political documentary is neither long nor dis-

tinguished. The conservative documentary “tradition,” such as it is, emerged
on the media landscape most vociferously in reaction to the early cinematic
successes of Michael Moore (Roger & Me, 1989; Bowling for Columbine,
2002) and has grown in number and distribution ever since. A brief survey
of conservative political films reveals a rapid-response media machine in-
tent to erase from the public’s view any progressive political perspectives that
may threaten the idealized vision of America that conservatism so regularly
and adamantly works to uphold. Typically, a popular or politically incisive
documentary will spur a timely conservative reaction. After Fahrenheit 9/11
(Michael Moore, 2004) criticized George W. Bush and his administration’s
“war on terror,” FarhenHype 9/11 (Alan Peterson, 2004), rather than
defending Bush outright, focused its energy to attack Moore personally,
raising doubts about the director’s motives and cinematic techniques. After
An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006) popularized the science
of climate change, An Inconsistent Truth (Shayne Edwards, 2012) emerged
in response, depicting global warming as a hoax perpetrated to serve Al
Gore’s own economic interests in renewable energy. In response to Gasland’s
(Josh Fox, 2010) exposé about the natural gas industry and its development
of hydraulic fracturing, Fracknation (Phelim McAleer, Magdalena Segeid,
and Ann McElhinney, 2013) endorsed “fracking” as both economically
beneficial and environmentally friendly. Like many of the feature-length
conservative documentaries examined in this book, FarhenHype 9/11, An
Inconsistent Truth, and Fracknation reduce complex political issues to ad ho-
minem attacks leveled against their opponents. Conservative documentaries
regularly hedge their bets in this manner, reducing any and all political is-
sues to a baseline of moral authority; if the source of a political idea can be
discredited, then no further consideration or discussion is required, the films
suggest. Boiled down to their most basic rhetorical appeals, the conservative
Beyond Bias. Scott Krzych, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197551219.003.0002
documentaries examined in Beyond Bias promote a full-throated endorse-

ment of the status quo and likewise attempt to return viewers to a semblance
of “business as usual,” having dispensed with any and all offending naysayers
(like Moore and Gore, among other rival celebrities of the political Left) who,
according to the films, have unnecessarily troubled the calm political waters
with their misguided, or ill-intentioned, or otherwise untrustworthy declar-
ations that something in society is broken and needs fixing. Like the epony-
mous charlatan in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) who, even when
his ruse has been discovered, tells his skeptical audience to “pay no atten-
tion to the man behind the curtain,” the reactionary documentaries consid-
ered here similarly work to obscure, confuse, or otherwise efface the political
demands proposed by their progressive documentary counterparts and
other opponents, as if to say: Everything is fine. There is nothing to see here.
Yet we may already notice a complication inherent to this rhetorical
strategy. Even as conservative documentaries attempt to dismiss political
messages by attacking their messengers, such repudiation does not extend
to the formal devices and techniques of their progressive opponents, from
whom they regularly borrow, if not plagiarize. That is to say, if the conserva-
tive films seek the erasure of their opponents’ political ideas, then their formal
modes of address bely a more ambivalent gesture through their attempts to
craft political messages in styles reminiscent of their enemies. Most immedi-
ately, the displays of titular mimicry—FarenHype for Fahrenheit, Inconsistent
for Inconvenient, and so on—extract from their political antagonists the sem-
blance of relevancy and contemporaneity otherwise lacking in the ideolog-
ical orthodoxies the films espouse. Or the conservative response offered to
the progressive call simulates a responsiveness, even an attentiveness to de-
tail, missing from the films’ otherwise callous refusal to consider carefully or
take seriously any of the political claims they so immediately and compre-
hensively dismiss as unworthy of the time or attention they nevertheless de-
vote to them. The reactionary rhetoric thereby absorbs “the ideas and tactics
of the very revolution or reform it opposes,” as Corey Robin has noticed in
his own account of right-wing discourse more generally.1 For my purposes,
I find the acts of parody to provide the conservative films with an aura of
timeliness at odds with their jeremiads in the name of “traditional values.”
The aesthetic devices, moreover, lend to conservative media the appearance
of earnestness or good faith, as if they are engaging in substantial democratic
debate, in contrast to their knee-jerk dismissals of opposing viewpoints, re-
liance on opinion and innuendo in the place of expertise or facts, and what
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Franchise Law to the Volksraad and the Burghers. With regard
to the conditions of the Government of the South African
Republic: First, as regards intervention; Her Majesty's
Government hope that the fulfilment of the promises made and
the just treatment of the Uitlanders in future will render
unnecessary any further intervention on their behalf, but Her
Majesty's Government cannot of course debar themselves from
their rights under the Conventions nor divest themselves of
the ordinary obligations of a civilized Power to protect its
subjects in a foreign country from injustice. Secondly, with
regard to suzerainty Her Majesty's Government would refer the
Government of the South African Republic to the second
paragraph of my despatch of 13th July. Thirdly, Her Majesty's
Government agree to a discussion of the form and scope of a
Tribunal of Arbitration from which foreigners and foreign
influence are excluded. Such a discussion, which will be of
the highest importance to the future relations of the two
countries, should be carried on between the President and
yourself, and for this purpose it appears to be necessary that
a further Conference, which Her Majesty's Government suggest
should be held at Cape Town, should be at once arranged. Her
Majesty's Government also desire to remind the Government of
the South African Republic that there are other matters of
difference between the two Governments which will not be
settled by the grant of political representation to the
Uitlanders, and which are not proper subjects for reference to
arbitration. It is necessary that these should be settled
concurrently with the questions now under discussion, and they
will form, with the question of arbitration, proper subjects
for consideration at the proposed Conference."
On the 2d of September the Boer government replied to this at

length, stating that it considered the proposal made in its
note of August 19 to have lapsed; again objecting to a joint
inquiry relative to the practical working of the Franchise
Law, but adding: "If they [the Government] can be of
assistance to Her Majesty's Government with any information or
explanation they are always ready to furnish this; though it
appears to it that the findings of a unilateral Commission,
especially when arrived at before the working of the law has
been duly tested, would be premature and thus probably of
little value."
Meantime, on the 31st of August, Sir Alfred Milner had

telegraphed to Mr. Chamberlain: "I am receiving
representations from many quarters to urge Her Majesty's
Government to terminate the state of suspense. Hitherto I have
hesitated to address you on the subject, lest Her Majesty's
Government should think me impatient. But I feel bound to let
you know that I am satisfied, from inquiries made in various
reliable quarters that the distress is now really serious. The
most severe suffering is at Johannesburg. Business there is at
a standstill; many traders have become insolvent; and others
are only kept on their legs by the leniency of their
creditors. Even the mines, which have been less affected
hitherto, are now suffering owing to the withdrawal of
workmen, both European and native. The crisis also affects the
trading centres in the Colony. In spite of this, the purport
of all the representations made to me is to urge prompt and
decided action; not to deprecate further interference on the
part of Her Majesty's Government. British South Africa is
prepared for extreme measures, and is ready to suffer much in
order to see the vindication of British authority. It is
prolongation of the negotiations, endless and indecisive of
result, that is dreaded."
{490}
On the 8th of September, the High Commissioner was instructed

by Mr. Chamberlain to communicate the following to the
government of the Transvaal:
"Her Majesty's Government are still prepared to accept the

offer made in paragraphs 1, 2, and 3 of the note of the 19th
August taken by themselves, provided that the inquiry which
Her Majesty's Government have proposed, whether joint—as Her
Majesty's Government originally suggested—or unilateral, shows
that the new scheme of representation will not be encumbered
by conditions which will nullify the intention to give
substantial and immediate representation to the Uitlanders. In
this connection Her Majesty's Government assume that, as
stated to the British Agent, the new members of the Raad will
be permitted to use their own language. The acceptance of
these terms by the Government of the South African Republic
would at once remove the tension between the two Governments,
and would in all probability render unnecessary any further
intervention on the part of Her Majesty's Government to secure
the redress of grievances which the Uitlanders would
themselves be able to bring to the notice of the Executive and
the Raad."
In a lengthy response to this by State Secretary Reitz,

September 16, the following are the essential paragraphs:
"However earnestly this Government also desires to find an
immediate and satisfactory course by which existing tension
should be brought to an end, it feels itself quite unable, as
desired, to recommend or propose to South African Republic
Volksraad and people the part of its proposal contained in
paragraphs 1, 2, and 3 of its note 19th August, omitting the
conditions on the acceptance of which alone the offer was
based, but declares itself always still prepared to abide by
its acceptance of the invitation [of] Her Majesty's Government
to get a Joint Commission composed as intimated in its note of
2nd September. It considers that if conditions are contained
in the existing franchise law which has been passed, and in
the scheme of representation, which might tend to frustrate
object contemplated, that it will attract the attention of the
Commission, and thus be brought to the knowledge of this
Government. This Government has noticed with surprise the
assertion that it had intimated to British Agent that the new
members to be chosen for South African Republic Volksraad
should be allowed to use their own language. If it is thereby
intended that this Government would have agreed that any other
than the language of the country would have been used in the
deliberations of the Volksraad, it wishes to deny same in the
strongest manner."
Practically the discussion was ended by a despatch from the

British Colonial Secretary, September 22d, in which he said;
"Her Majesty's Government have on more than one occasion
repeated their assurances that they have no desire to
interfere in any way with independence of South African
Republic, provided that the conditions on which it was granted
are honourably observed in the spirit and in the letter, and
they have offered as part of a general settlement to give a
complete guarantee against any attack upon that independence,
either from within any part of the British dominions or from
the territory of a foreign State. They have not asserted any
rights of interference in the internal affairs of the Republic
other than those which are derived from the Conventions
between the two countries or which belong to every
neighbouring Government (and especially to one which has a
largely predominant interest in the adjacent territories) for
the protection of its subjects and of its adjoining
possessions." Referring to his despatch of September 8, the
Secretary concluded: "The refusal of the Government of the
South African Republic to entertain the offer thus made,
coming as it does at the end of nearly four months of
protracted negotiations, themselves the climax of an agitation
extending over a period of more than five years, makes it
useless to further pursue a discussion on the lines hitherto
followed, and Her Majesty's Government are now compelled to
consider the situation afresh, and to formulate their own
proposals for a final settlement of the issues which have been
created in South Africa by the policy constantly followed for
many years by the Government of the South African Republic.
They will communicate to you the result of their deliberations
in a later despatch."
Great Britain, Papers by Command:
1899, C. 9518, 9521, 9530.
SOUTH AFRICA: Orange Free State: A. D. 1899 (September-October).

The Free State makes common cause with
the South African Republic.
On the 27th of September, President Steyn communicated to the

British High Commissioner a resolution adopted that day by the
Orange Free State Volksraad, instructing the government to
continue efforts for peaceful settlement of differences
between the South African Republic and Great Britain, but
concluding with the declaration that "if a war is now begun or
occasioned by Her Majesty's Government against South African
Republic, this would morally be a war against the whole of
white population of South Africa and would in its results be
calamitous and criminal, and further, that Orange Free State
will honestly and faithfully observe its obligations towards
South African Republic arising out of the political alliance
between the two Republics whatever may happen."
On the 11th of October, the High Commissioner communicated to

President Steyn the ultimatum that he received from the South
African Republic, and asked: "In view of Resolution of
Volksraad of Orange Free State communicated to me in Your
Honour's telegram of 27th September I have the honour to
request that I may be informed at Your Honour's earliest
possible convenience whether this action on the part of the
South African Republic has Your Honour's concurrence and
support." The reply of the Orange Free State President was as
follows:
"The high handed and unjustifiable policy and conduct of Her

Majesty's Government in interfering in and dictating in the
purely internal affairs of South African Republic,
constituting a flagrant breach of the Convention of London,
1884, accompanied at first by preparations, and latterly
followed by active commencement of hostilities against that
Republic, which no friendly and well-intentioned efforts on
our part could induce Her Majesty's Government to abandon,
constitute such an undoubted and unjust attack on the
independence of the South African Republic that no other
course is left to this State than honourably to abide by its
Conventional Agreements entered into with that Republic. On
behalf of this Government, therefore, I beg to notify that,
compelled thereto by the action of Her Majesty's Government,
they intend to carry out the instructions of the Volksraad as
set forth in the last part of the Resolution referred to by
Your Excellency."

1899, C.—9530, pages 38 and 67.
{491}
SOUTH AFRICA: The Transvaal and Orange Free State:

A. D. 1899 (September-October).
Preparations for war.
Troops massed on both sides of the frontiers.
Remonstrances of Orange Free State.
The Boer Ultimatum.
Before the controversy between Boer and Briton had reached the
stage represented above, both sides were facing the prospect
of war, both were bringing forces to the frontier, and each
was declaring that the other had been first to take that
threatening step. Which of them did first begin movements that
bore a look of menace seems difficult to learn from official
reports. On the 19th of September, the British High
Commissioner gave notice to the President of the Orange Free
State that "it has been deemed advisable by the Imperial
military authorities to send detachments of the troops
ordinarily stationed at Cape Town to assist in securing the
line of communication between the Colony and the British
territories lying to the north of it"; and "as this force, or
a portion of it, may be stationed near the borders of the
Orange Free State," he wished the burghers of that State to
understand that the movement was in no way directed against
them. Eight days later, President Steyn, of the Orange Free
State, addressed a long despatch to the High Commissioner,
remonstrating against the whole procedure of the British
government in its dealing with the South African Republic, and
alluding to the "enormous and ever increasing military
preparations of the British government." On the 2d of October
he announced to the Commissioner that he had "deemed it
advisable, in order to allay the intense excitement and unrest
amongst our burghers, arising from the totally undefended state
of our border, in the presence of a continued increase and
movement of troops on two sides of this State, to call up our
burghers, to satisfy them that due precaution had been taken."
The High Commissioner replied on the 3d: "Your Honour must be
perfectly well aware that all the movements of British troops
which have taken place in this country since the beginning of
present troubles, which have been necessitated by the natural
alarm of the inhabitants in exposed districts, are not
comparable in magnitude with the massing of armed forces by
government of South African Republic on the borders of Natal."
Some days previous to this, on the 29th of September,
Secretary Chamberlain had cabled from London to Sir Alfred
Milner: "Inform President of Orange Free State that what he
describes as the enormous and ever-increasing military
preparations of Great Britain have been forced upon Her
Majesty's Government by the policy of the South African
Republic, which has transformed the Transvaal into a permanent
armed camp, threatening the peace of the whole of South Africa
and the position of Great Britain as the paramount State."
On the 9th of October the High Commissioner received another

telegram from the President of the Orange Free State, of which
he cabled the substance to London as follows: "He demurs to
statement that military preparations of Her Majesty's
Government have been necessitated by conversion of South
African Republic into an armed camp. Her Majesty's Government
must be entirely misinformed and it would be regrettable if,
through such misunderstanding, present state of extreme
tension were allowed to continue. Though Her Majesty's
Government may regard precautions taken by South African
Republic after Jameson Raid as excessive, Government of South
African Republic cannot be blamed for adopting them, in view
of large Uitlander population constantly being stirred up,
through hostile press, to treason and rebellion by persons and
organizations financially or politically interested in
overthrowing the Government. Arming of Burghers not intended
for any purpose of aggression against Her Majesty's dominions.
People of South African Republic have, since shortly after
Jameson Raid, been practically as fully armed as now, yet have
never committed any act of aggression. It was not till Her
Majesty's Government, with evident intention of enforcing
their views on South African Republic in purely internal
matters, had greatly augmented their forces and moved them
nearer to borders that a single Burgher was called up for the
purpose, as be firmly believed, of defending country and
independence. If this natural assumption erroneous, not too
late to rectify misunderstanding by mutual agreement to
withdraw forces on both sides and undertaking by Her Majesty's
Government to stop further increase of troops."
But, in reality, it was already too late; for, on the same day
on which the above message was telegraphed from Bloemfontein,
the government of the South African Republic had presented to
the British Agent at Pretoria a note which ended the
possibility of peace. After reviewing the issue between the
two governments, the note concluded with a peremptory
ultimatum, as follows: "Her Majesty's unlawful intervention in
the internal affairs of this Republic in conflict with the
Convention of London, 1884, caused by the extraordinary
strengthening of troops in the neighbourhood of the borders of
this Republic, has thus caused an intolerable condition of
things to arise whereto this Government feels itself obliged,
in the interest not only of this Republic but also [?] of all
South Africa, to make an end as soon as possible, and feels
itself called upon and obliged to press earnestly and with
emphasis for an immediate termination of this state of things
and to request Her Majesty's Government to give it the
assurance
(a) That all points of mutual difference shall be regulated by
the friendly course of arbitration or by whatever amicable way
may be agreed upon by this Government with Her Majesty's
Government.
(b) That the troops on the borders of this Republic shall be
instantly withdrawn.
(c) That all reinforcements of troops which have arrived in
South Africa since the 1st June, 1899, shall be removed from
South Africa within a reasonable time, to be agreed upon with
this Government, and with a mutual assurance and guarantee on
the part of this Government that no attack upon or hostilities
against any portion of the possessions of the British Government
shall be made by the Republic during further negotiations
within a period of time to be subsequently agreed upon between
the Governments, and this Government will, on compliance
therewith, be prepared to withdraw the armed Burghers of this
Republic from the borders.
{492}
(d) That Her Majesty's troops which are now on the high seas
shall not be landed in any port of South Africa. This
Government must press for an immediate and affirmative answer
to these four questions, and earnestly requests Her Majesty's
Government to return such an answer before or upon Wednesday
the 11th October, 1899, not later than 5 o'clock p. m., and it
desires further to add that in the event of unexpectedly no
satisfactory answer being received by it within that interval
[it] will with great regret be compelled to regard the action
of Her Majesty's Government as a formal declaration of war,
and will not hold itself responsible for the consequences
thereof, and that in the event of any further movements of
troops taking place within the above-mentioned time in the
nearer directions of our borders this Government will be
compelled to regard that also as a formal declaration of war."
To this ultimatum the British government gave its reply, in a

despatch from Mr. Chamberlain to Sir Alfred Milner, October
10, as follows: "Her Majesty's Government have received with
great regret the peremptory demands of the Government of the
South African Republic conveyed in your telegram of 9th
October, Number 3. You will inform the Government of the South
African Republic, in reply, that the conditions demanded by
the Government of the South African Republic are such as Her
Majesty's Government deem it impossible to discuss."
Great Britain,
Papers by Command: 1899, C.—9530.
Efforts which were being made at the time in Holland to assist

the Boer Republic in pacific negotiations with Great Britain
were suddenly frustrated by this action. A year later (in
November, 1900) it was stated in the States General at The
Hague that "in the autumn of 1899 the Netherlands Government
offered in London its good offices for the resumption of
negotiations with the Transvaal, but these efforts had no
result in consequence of the sudden ultimatum of the Transvaal
and the commencement of hostilities by the armies of the
Republics, actions which surprised the Netherlands Government.
When once the war had broken out any effort in the direction of
intervention would have been useless, as was shown by the
peremptory refusal given by Great Britain to the offer of the
United States."
An Englishman who was in the country at the time gives the

following account of the Boer preparation for war: "In the
towns the feeling was strongly against war; in the country
districts war was popular, as the farmers had not the
slightest doubt they would be able to carry out their threat
of 'driving the English into the sea.' … Skilled artillerymen
were finding their way into the country towards the end of
August last [1899]. The Boers themselves did not put much
faith in their artillery, but they were reassured by the
officers who told them that they would yet learn to respect
its usefulness and efficiency—a prophecy which to our cost has
been more than fulfilled. … General Joubert was always ready
and willing, at any time, to inspect and test new guns or
military necessaries, and no expense was spared to make the
Transvaal burgher army a first-class fighting-machine. …
Surprise has been expressed at the inaccurate statements made
by colonials as to the fighting strength of the Boers. They
had not allowed for the enormous increase of population. From
an absolutely reliable source the writer ascertained in
September last that they could put in the field between 50 and
60 thousand men, made up as follows: Transvaal burghers,
22,000; resident foreigners, etc., 10,000; Free Staters,
16,000; colonists who would cross the border and join, 6,000;
total, 54,000. … As soon as war seemed likely, no time was
lost in perfecting the military arrangements. Before Great
Britain had thought of mobilizing a soldier, the Boer
emissaries were again scouring the colonies of Natal and the
Cape, sounding the farmers as to what part they were prepared
to take in the coming conflict. … While people at home were
wondering what the next move would be, the Boers were ready to
answer the question. Towards the middle of September all
preparations were completed, the Government had laid in large
quantities of supplies (mainly of flour, Boer meal, and tinned
foods), which they anticipated would tide them over twelve to
eighteen months, and by that time, if they had not beaten the
British, they relied on foreign intervention. They had also
received large sums of money from Europe, and some additional
supplies of arms and ammunition. Ammunition was distributed in
large quantities throughout the country, each burgher
receiving a sealed packet in addition to his ordinary supply.
The last batch of the Mauser rides was distributed, and the
mobilization scheme finally arranged, by which, on a given
word being telegraphed to the different centres, the first
Republican army corps would be mobilized within twenty-four
hours. This actually took place. … The British Government
could hardly fail to be aware of the fact that the Transvaal
was in earnest this time. A visit to the country districts
towards the end of August, about the time when the Boer
Executive themselves sounded the country through their private
agencies, would have revealed the fact that the people were
not only perfectly willing to go to war, but that they
absolutely wished for it. As one Boer put it to the writer:
'We look on fighting the English as a picnic. In some of the
Kaffir wars we had a little trouble, but in the Vryheids
Oorlog (the Boer War of 1881) we simply potted the Rooineks as
they streamed across the veld in their red jackets, without
the slightest danger to ourselves.' They had the utmost
contempt for Tommy Atkins and his leaders, many of them
bragging that the only thing that deterred them from
advocating war instanter was the thought that they would have
to kill so many of the soldiers, with whom individually they
said there was no quarrel. With such a state of things, which
should have been perfectly clear to the Intelligence
Department (and through it to the War Office) in
London—because no resident with eyes to see could be deceived
in the matter—we allowed the present war to find us
unprepared!"
J. Scoble and H. H. Abercrombie,

The Rise and Fall of Krugerism,
chapter 16 (New York: F. A. Stokes Co.).
The Boer Republics and the Surroundings.
{493}
SOUTH AFRICA: The Field of War: A. D. 1899 (October-November).

The Boer advance.
Invasion of Cape Colony and Natal.
The invaders joined by Dutch farmers of the colony.
The British unprepared.
Investment of Kimberley and Mafeking.
In a despatch dated January 16, 1900, Sir Alfred Milner gave

particulars of the first advance of the Boer forces from the
Orange Free State into Cape Colony, and of the extent to which
they were joined by Dutch farmers in districts south of Orange
River. He wrote: "The portion of the Colony with which I
propose to deal is that which lies south of the Orange River.
The districts north of that river have been so completely cut
off, and our accounts of what has been, and is, going on there
are so scanty and imperfect, that the history of their
defection cannot yet be written. I shall content myself with
quoting an extract from a report upon the state of affairs in
that region by a gentleman lately resident in Vryburg, which
undoubtedly fairly expresses the truth so far as he has been
in a position to observe it:—'All the farmers in the Vryburg,
Kuruman, and Taungs districts,' he says, 'have joined the
Boers, and I do not believe that you will find ten loyal
British subjects among the Dutch community in the whole of
Bechuanaland.' … The districts invaded by the enemy south of
the Orange River are:—Colesberg, Albert, Aliwal North,
Wodehouse, and Barkly East. It was on the 12th October that
the enemy committed the first act of war and of invasion near
Vryburg, on the western border, but it was not till more than
a month later, namely, the 14th November, that they occupied
Colesberg. Apparently they were waiting for reinforcements,
for when they actually did cross the frontier they were 1,100
strong. Whatever the cause of their delay, it was not due to
any discouragement from the people of Colesberg. The small
British garrison then in the country being engaged elsewhere,
and the district being entirely unguarded save by a few
policemen, people from there continually visited the river to
communicate with the enemy. The Chief Constable reports that
when he left the town 300 Colesberg farmers had already joined
the enemy, and that 400 more were expected from the adjoining
district of Philipstown. … On the 16th November General
Grobler, the Boer Commandant, addressed the following telegram
to Bloemfontein:—'Colesberg was occupied by me without
opposition. … I was very well pleased with the conduct of the
Afrikanders. We were everywhere welcomed.' … Eastwards along
the border the tide of insurrection ran strong. In the closing
days of October a Boer force assembled at Bethulie Bridge, which
was guarded only by a handful of police. As the days passed
and the alarm grew, the Cape police force was withdrawn from
Burghersdorp, which lies south of Bethulie, down the line to
Stormberg, while, in their turn, the Imperial forces abandoned
the important position of Stormberg, and retired on
Queenstown, thus leaving the district clear for the invaders.
That they did not immediately advance was certainly not owing
to any fear of resistance at Burghersdorp, the inhabitants of
which fraternised with the commando stationed on the river,
continually passing to and fro. Finally, on the 14th November,
the date of the occupation of Colesberg, the advance was made,
and on the following morning a body of 500 Boers occupied the
town. … According to the despatch of the Boer Commandant,
dated 16th November, Burghersdorp was occupied 'amidst cheers
from the Afrikanders,' and 'the Colonial burghers are very
glad to meet us.' Commandeering at once began throughout the
district of Albert, and a Burghersdorp resident estimated that
about 1,000 farmers were prepared to join at the date of his
leaving the place. …
"Within a space of less than three weeks from the occupation

of Colesberg, no less than five great districts—those of
Colesberg, Albert, Aliwal North, Barkly East, and
Wodehouse—had gone over without hesitation, and, so to speak,
bodily, to the enemy. Throughout that region the Landdrosts of
the Orange Free State had established their authority, and
everywhere, in the expressive words of a Magistrate, British
loyalists were 'being hunted out of town after town like
sheep.' In the invaded districts, as will be seen from the
above, the method of occupation has always been more or less
the same. The procedure is as follows:-A commando enters, the
Orange Free State flag is hoisted, a meeting is held in the
Court-house or market-place, and a Proclamation is read,
annexing the district. The Commandant then makes a speech, in
which he explains that the people must now obey the Free State
laws generally, though they are at present under martial law.
A local Landdrost is appointed, and loyal subjects are given a
few days or hours in which to quit, or be compelled to serve
against their country. … The number of rebels who have
actually taken up arms and joined the enemy during their
progress throughout the five annexed districts can for the
present only be matter of conjecture. I shall, however, be on
the safe side in reckoning that during November it was a
number not less than the total of the invading commandos, that
is, 2,000, while it is probable that of the invading commandos
themselves a certain proportion were colonists who had crossed
the border before the invasion took place. And the number,
whatever it was, which joined the enemy before and during
November has been increased since. A well-informed refugee
from the Albert district has estimated the total number of
Colonial Boers who have joined the enemy in the invaded
districts south of the Orange River at 3,000 to 4,000. In the
districts north of that river, to which I referred at the
beginning of this despatch, the number can hardly be less.
Adding to these the men who became burghers of the Transvaal
immediately before, or just after, the outbreak of war, with
the view of taking up arms in the struggle, I am forced to the
conclusion that, in round figures, not less than 10,000 of
those now fighting against us in South Africa, and probably
somewhat more, either are, or till quite recently were,
subjects of the Queen."-

Cd. 264, 1900, pages 1-5.
The above relates to movements from the Orange Free State into
Cape Colony, where the most of reinforcement from Afrikander
inhabitants of British soil was to be got. From the Transvaal,
the movement of Boer forces across the frontiers, both
eastward and westward, was equally prompt. Early on the
morning of the 12th they were in Natal, advancing in three
strong columns, under General Joubert, upon Newcastle,
threatening the advance posts of the British at Dundee and
Glencoe (some 40 miles northeast of Ladysmith), where valuable
coal mines claimed defence. At the same time, another Boer
army, under General Cronje, had passed the western border and
was moving upon Mafeking, where Colonel (afterwards General)
Baden-Powell, with an irregular force of about 1,200 men, was
preparing for a siege.
{494}
The inhabitants of the town, including refugees, numbered
about 2,000 whites and 7,000 blacks. A few days later Boer
forces were skirmishing with the defenders of the diamond
mines at Kimberley, where Colonel Kekewich commanded about
1,000 men, and where Cecil Rhodes was among the beleaguered
citizens. The population of Kimberley was 33,000, more than
half blacks. It is plain that the British were wholly
unprepared for so vigorous an opening of hostilities on the
part of the Boers. A military writer in the "London Times,"
discussing the "Lessons of the War," at the end of a year
after its beginning, made the following statements and
comment:—"There was no difficulty in obtaining the fullest
information as to the resources of the Transvaal and the Free
State, and we have been officially informed that 'the armed
strength of the Boers, the number of their guns, with their
character and calibre,' as laid down in the report of the
Director of Intelligence, 'corresponds exactly with our
recently-ascertained knowledge of what the enemy has put into
the field.' Whether or not these reports ever travel from
Queen Anne's gate to Pall-mall seems uncertain, since the
Commander-in-Chief publicly stated that 'We have found that
the enemy … are much more powerful and numerous than we
expected.' The report of the Intelligence Department seems,
therefore, to have been as valueless for practical purposes as
were those transmitted to Paris by Colonel Stoffel prior to
the outbreak of the Franco-German war, and Lord Wolseley was
apparently as little aware of the fighting resources of the
Boers as was Marshal Lebœuf of those of the Germans. When,
early in September, 1899, it became a pressing necessity to
reinforce the troops in South Africa, it was painfully
realized that not a single unit at home was ready to take the
field. One weak battalion and three field batteries, hastily
compounded by wholesale drafting from others, represented the
available contribution from a standing army at home whose
nominal effectives considerably exceeded 100,000. The
reinforcements, totally inadequate to meet the crisis, were
made up by drawing upon India and the colonial garrisons."
London Times, November 22, 1900.
Another writer in "The Times," reviewing, at nearly the same

time, the previous year of the war, gave this account of its
opening circumstances:—"If the organization of the British
Army had permitted the despatch at short notice of 30,000
troops from Great Britain, the whole course of the war would
have been different. It was a prevailing illusion that Mr.
Kruger would yield to diplomatic pressure not backed by
available force, and political expediency, over-riding
military considerations, led to a compromise. It was tardily
decided to bring the forces in South Africa up to a total of
about 22,000 by drawing on India and the colonial garrisons;
mobilization was deferred till October 7. Thus the first
reinforcements arrived barely in time to prevent Natal from
being over-run by the Boers, and the expeditionary force did
not begin to reach Durban [the port of Natal] till after
Ladysmith had been closely invested. … There were advisers of
the Cabinet who held that the military strength of the Boers
was a bubble easily pricked. Thus it was widely believed that
a severe repulse in Northern Natal would suffice to break up
the Boer forces, and, knowing only that a body of 4,000
British troops was assembled at Dundee and another somewhat
larger at Ladysmith, we hastily assumed that these places were
naturally well suited and had been specially prepared for
defence. When, on the 26th, the concentration at Ladysmith was
accomplished, after a painful and a hazardous march, it was
imagined that our forces occupied an intrenched camp, which,
if necessary, could be held with ease. Later it became clear
that Ladysmith was exceedingly ill-adapted for defence, that
it was practically unfortified when invested, and finally
that, if the attacking force had been composed of trained
troops, it must have fallen, in spite of every effort on the
part of the garrison. The occupation of Dundee, it was
discovered, was maintained against the military judgment of
Sir G. White. …
"When at length the army corps and the cavalry division began,
early in November, to arrive in South Africa, we believed that
the bulk of this large force, which was apparently ready to
take the field, would invade the Orange Free State and strike
for Bloemfontein, clearing Cape Colony and inevitably drawing
Boer forces away from the investments of Kimberley and of
Ladysmith. This was another illusion. At least one-half of the
expeditionary force was despatched to Durban and the rest was
frittered away between three separate lines of advance. There
were thus four separate groupings of British troops, spread
over an immense front, and incapable of affording each other
mutual support. Moreover, the Commander-in-Chief being
involved in a difficult campaign in Natal, there was no
responsible head in Cape Colony, where partial chaos soon
supervened. … Faulty as was the strategy which substituted
scattered efforts with insufficient force for a primary
object, that of the Boers was happily even more ill-conceived.
In place of attempting to occupy our troops in Natal and throwing
their main strength into Cape Colony, where a Dutch rising on
a large scale would inevitably have occurred, they also
preferred to fritter away their strength, devoting their main
efforts against Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and
contenting themselves with the occupation of Colesberg and
Stormberg in small force, which, however, was quickly swelled
by local rebels."
London Times,
November 5, 1900.
SOUTH AFRICA: The Field of War: A. D. 1899 (October-December).

The early battles.
British reverses.
Siege of Ladysmith.
The serious fighting of the war began in Natal, as early as

the 20th of October, when three columns of the Boer forces
closed in on the British advance post at Glencoe. The first of
the Boer columns to arrive opened a precipitate attack, and in
the hard battle which ensued (at Talana Hill) the British
could claim the final advantage, though at very heavy cost.
Their commander, General Sir W. Penn Symons, received a mortal
wound and died three days afterwards, kindly cared for and
buried by the enemy, his successor in the command, General
Yule, having found it necessary to retreat from Glencoe and
Dundee to Ladysmith. The Boers were already striking at the
railroad between Glencoe and Ladysmith, and sharp fighting had
taken place on the 21st at Elandslaagte, a station on the line
only seventeen miles from the latter town.
{495}
The Boers, in that encounter, had been driven from the
neighboring hills, but the British had again suffered greatly,
and began to realize the quality of the foe with which they had

Beyond Bias Conservative Media Documentary Form and The Politics of Hysteria Scott Krzych Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beyond Bias Conservative Media Documentary Form and The Politics of Hysteria Scott Krzych Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beyond Bias: Conservative Media,

Documentary Form, and the Politics of

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

PA RT I D E M O C R AC Y, M E D IA , P SYC HOA NA LYSI S

Conclusion: Post-​Truth and Other Biases 221

Writing an acknowledgments section is not a genre that comes easily to me.

conversation, but perhaps that only provides further reason to carry on

Conservative media is confusing. Especially for those individuals who do not

abortion. Many conservatives honestly and strenuously believe that, from

Put otherwise, political impasse, rather than an occasional or inevitable

as communicative capitalism—​the denigration of symbolic authority and

Contestations today rarely employ common terms, points of reference, or

Given the structural form of “our highly mediated communications envir-

one that is profoundly depoliticizing in the manner by which it provides a

exchange, as when protestors are derided by the establishment for lacking a

however, I simply intend to emphasize the affective turmoil that conservative

pointedly the hegemonic field of relations that constitute democratic govern-

The meaning of such demands is determined largely by their differential

In this light, we might say that Dodd-​Frank offered a democratic com-

In the chasm between democratic common sense and populist contin-

My approach to conservative political discourse, as I have begun to explain,

hysteria and hysterical discourse may, on occasion, spread comprehensively

War on Christmas give right-​wing media a convenient way to manufacture

The response captured here is typical of mainstream journalistic responses

the liberal response reveals a fundamental breakdown, a self-​division, or

contrast to the relatively singular and passing experience of complaint that

contingent features of democracy more generally, conservative political

critical framework necessary to avoid the mere dissemination of the biased

speculating about his “real” intentions and motivations. By mimicking

The history of conservative political documentary is neither long nor dis-

documentaries examined in Beyond Bias promote a full-​throated endorse-

On the 2d of September the Boer government replied to this at

Meantime, on the 31st of August, Sir Alfred Milner had

On the 8th of September, the High Commissioner was instructed

"Her Majesty's Government are still prepared to accept the

In a lengthy response to this by State Secretary Reitz,

Practically the discussion was ended by a despatch from the

SOUTH AFRICA: Orange Free State: A. D. 1899 (September-October).

On the 27th of September, President Steyn communicated to the

On the 11th of October, the High Commissioner communicated to

"The high handed and unjustifiable policy and conduct of Her

Great Britain, Papers by Command:

SOUTH AFRICA: The Transvaal and Orange Free State:

On the 9th of October the High Commissioner received another

To this ultimatum the British government gave its reply, in a

Efforts which were being made at the time in Holland to assist

An Englishman who was in the country at the time gives the

J. Scoble and H. H. Abercrombie,

SOUTH AFRICA: The Field of War: A. D. 1899 (October-November).

In a despatch dated January 16, 1900, Sir Alfred Milner gave

"Within a space of less than three weeks from the occupation

Great Britain, Papers by Command:

London Times, November 22, 1900.

Another writer in "The Times," reviewing, at nearly the same

SOUTH AFRICA: The Field of War: A. D. 1899 (October-December).

The serious fighting of the war began in Natal, as early as

You might also like

Conclusion: Post-Truth and Other Biases 221

as communicative capitalism—the denigration of symbolic authority and

In this light, we might say that Dodd-Frank offered a democratic com-

War on Christmas give right-wing media a convenient way to manufacture

the liberal response reveals a fundamental breakdown, a self-division, or

documentaries examined in Beyond Bias promote a full-throated endorse-