Republicans don’t try to solve problems anymore. All they offer is fake outrage.

Social media apps | Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Social media comes in many flavors. Facebook is about the life you want, Instagram is about the life you wish you could afford and X is about how much life sucks.

But the most bonkers site, hands down, is Nextdoor. It’s supposedly a way to connect with your neighbors, but it’s basically just a stream of nonsensical paranoia from folks you’d never want to wave to from your front porch.

Sometimes it’s harmlessly amusing (although how many times can you really complain about people failing to pick up after their dogs?) But most posts read like they’re from folks who do nothing but listen to true crime podcasts and believe anyone walking down the block is a potential murder suspect, usually with a dash of casual racism or classism thrown in.

Overall, Nextdoor paints a picture of my town that I don’t even recognize. And that’s the way so many of us feel listening to whatever fake outrage of the day that burbles up in right-wing media.

Because we can’t have nice things, even the most joyful events, like the Summer Olympics in Paris, get bogged down in divisive disinformation efforts. First, conservative influencers and politicians were incensed by the French being, well, French in the opulent, avant-garde opening ceremony they derided for being too LGBTQ+-friendly and mocking Christianity.

Then things veered from absurd to disturbing when many on the right spread the false story that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was trans, which her father felt the need to debunk with documentation. (This never should have passed the smell test, as Algeria criminalizes being LGBTQ+).

Khelif, who went on to earn a gold medal, has endured near-constant online abuse, with GOP leaders like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) posting misinformation to prop up trans sports bans they favor.

In a testament to how far lies can travel, even the Boston Globe ran a blatantly false headline about Khelif for which it had to issue a lengthy correction.

Sometimes GOP officials go apoplectic over real issues while inventing their own reality (like your great-uncle’s Facebook posts). They claim the economy is in shambles ( it’s not ), crime is soaring ( it’s no t) or illegal immigrants do nothing but go on bloody crime sprees ( they don’t ).

It’s little wonder that Republicans rarely bother offering any policy solutions anymore — and when they do, like U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) did with a border security bill earlier this year, they take on friendly fire for doing their jobs, because that could hurt the GOP’s electoral chances.

More often than not, Republicans simply argue that we must elect Donald Trump president again so he “ alone can fix it ” (the “it” can be anything) as he promised during his first failed term.

Trump has proven himself to be the undisputed king of misinformation, telling over 30,000 lies as president — a truly staggering number. One of his standbys is lying about crowd size, so seeing Vice President Kamala Harris draw 15,000 in a Detroit Metro Airport hanger last week has clearly gotten underneath his skin.

At a press conference Thursday, Trump insisted that his Jan. 6, 2021, speech — which preceded the bloody insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — attracted a bigger audience than Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminal “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

“I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not, we had more.”

In reality, Trump’s crowd was estimated at 53,000, about one-fifth of the 250,000 who attended King’s address.

When we in the media do our jobs and correct lies and misinformation, many Republicans, of course, bleat that fact checks are fake news. One, er, innovative idea came from state Rep. Matt Maddock (R-Milford), who WDIV-TV described as “no stranger to conspiracy theories and lies about both the election and pandemic.”

It seems that repeatedly being called out by reporters hurt Maddock’s feelings, so in 2021, he sponsored a bill that would have forced fact-checkers to register with the state and could have been subject to hefty fines of $1,000 a day. Fact-checkers also would have had to insure themselves with $1 million fidelity bonds and anyone could sue them over “any wrongful conduct that is a violation of the laws of this state.”

“My legislation will put fact checkers on notice: Don’t be wrong, don’t be sloppy, and you better be right,” he declared at the time.

Maddock’s stunt didn’t go anywhere — but neither did his penchant for getting things completely and embarrassingly wrong.

Nextdoor paints a picture of my town that I don’t even recognize. And that’s the way so many of us feel listening to whatever fake outrage of the day that burbles up in right-wing media.

– Susan J. Demas

This spring, the lawmaker made national headlines for a paranoid, Nextdoor-style tweet warning : “Happening right now. Three busses [sic] just loaded up with illegal invaders at Detroit Metro. Anyone have any idea where they’re headed with their police escort?”

The buses were actually for the Gonzaga University basketball team arriving to play in the NCAA’s Sweet 16 at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit.

Even after Maddock became a national laughingstock — he even got his very own Politifact entry (earning a Pants on Fire! rating) — the MAGA Republican indignantly doubled down, posting: “We know this is happening. 100,000’s of illegals are pouring into our country. We know it’s happening in Michigan. Our own governor is offering money to take them in! Since we can’t trust the #FakeNews to investigate, citizens will. The process of investigating these issues takes time.”

That time could have been better spent crafting actual policy solutions for what virtually everyone concedes is a broken immigration system. But that takes real work.

Meanwhile, as Maddock embarked on his investigation — no doubt modeled on the MyPillow Guy’s rigorous methods seeking to prove Trump really won the 2020 election (which has left him broke ) — a bevy of new faux controversies had already been born.

And the cynical cycle continues.

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