An outgrowth of misinformation: After then-President Donald Trump falsely told his supporters the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him, a mob rioted at the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn election results. (Photo: Alex Kent)

After spending a few days in Washington, D.C., recently for an editors conference, I found myself with a few hours before my plane back to Nashville and decided to go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The museum opened in early 1993; two decades later, it was still packed, and that’s a good thing. The phrases “never forget”? and “what you do matters” are posted in multiple places around the museum, a reminder of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany’s regime and a caution to be alert for signs a government might be proceeding down a similar authoritarian path.

It’s a hushed and sobering place, befitting of the subject matter, which takes the visitor on a journey through Adolf Hitler’s rise to chancellor of Germany in 1933 through the discovery by Allied troops of Nazi concentration camps in 1945, with exhibits about the insidiousness of Nazi propaganda sandwiched in between.

While I was viewing wall-sized photos of the November 1938 pogrom, the wave of state-sponsored anti-semitic violence — sometimes called the Night of Broken Glass — during which Nazi soldiers burned synagogues and trashed Jewish-owned businesses, I found myself standing next to a group of men about my age.

One wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat, the kind popularized by former President Donald Trump. Another wore a shirt emblazoned with the words, “Let’s Go Brandon!,” a phrase used by the right as code for an obscene phrase telling President Joe Biden what he can do with himself.

I speak often of the importance of writing truth, no matter who says it, and no matter who we, as journalists, anger with our words. Yet, I didn’t push back forcefully enough when I heard clear and blatant misinformation.

It’s likely I wouldn’t have pursued a conversation had I not heard a colleague address the corrosive role of disinformation and misinformation in American politics. A 40-year veteran journalist, she told my fellow editors and me that she feels America’s democracy is at risk. Never, she said, could she remember a time of so much distrust and acrimony. Journalists must reach out beyond the usual media echo chambers to cover the 2024 election, she told us.

I wanted to find out what made these guys tick.

“What brings you guys here today?” I asked the man standing next to me, a 56-year-old from Las Vegas. He told me his crew was a group of high school friends who reunited once a year. Pointing to his friend wearing the red hat, he said, “His grandmother is Polish. She survived the Holocaust.”

He went on to say three of their party of five had served in the military, him as a 22-year veteran of the Navy. They love America, he told me. Two of them have gay sons and, he told me, he would beat the hell out of anyone who harassed them for their sexual orientation. And then, as we chatted, he gestured to the wall of photos of a Nazi book burning.

“Democrats are trying to do this,” he said. “They want our country to be like this.”

I took in a breath. “Well,” I said. “You know a lot of people think Republicans are behaving like this.”

As we continued to talk, he told me the United Nations is promoting sex between adults and children as part of an international agenda of perversion — a stunningly false claim that’s been debunked by the Associated Press and Reuters, among other respected and legitimate news sources. Yet, he was convinced the rumor was true.

With a knot now in my stomach, I declined his invitation to join him and his friends for a cocktail and let them go on their way, finding my way back to the lobby, where I sat for a while, thinking.

Should I have caught up with him to explain how wrong he was? I could have shown him the many stories disproving his beliefs about the U.N. I could have presented him with mountains of information and news stories, including from the Lookout, about how one party is targeting LGBTQ+ Americans, and it’s not the Democratic Party.

I could have asked him how he would feel if one of his gay friends was forced to wear a pink triangle, as the Nazis required of LGBTQ+ Germans, and argued that any slippage of rights — the Tennessee Legislature has filed bill after bill to assault the rights of LGBTQ+ people — sets a dangerous precedent for our future.

Maybe I should have asked him how much he knows about organizations like Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group that has advocated for the elimination of books from schools that include topics on racial justice — including one about Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. — and LGBTQ+ people.

Did he know that the German government repealed in 2022 a Nazi-era law banning physicians from discussing abortion with patients, just months before the U.S. Supreme Court reversed 50-year-old federal protections for abortion, triggering a ban on abortions in Tennessee? In states with laws that criminalize anyone who “aids” or “abets” a woman seeking an abortion, physicians won’t even discuss abortion for fear of being prosecuted.

In the weeks since the museum encounter, I find my mind going back to it. How could someone be swayed by misinformation that seems so clearly false to me? He is one of thousands, maybe millions, in our country who have been exploited to believe the worst of fellow Americans.

I failed that day. I speak often of the importance of writing truth, no matter who says it, and no matter who we, as journalists, anger with our words. Yet, I didn’t push back forcefully enough. A small incident, yes — but I failed to correct my museum companion. Maybe I could have left a seed of doubt that he would return to later, much as my thoughts returned to our conversation. Maybe my words would have led him to ask questions.

I hope to do better next time. I hope we all will.

Before I left, I stopped in the museum gift shop to look for gifts to bring home to my Lookout colleagues, selecting bound notebooks with an important message emblazoned on the front:

“What you do matters.”

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: [email protected]. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.

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Talk of the so-called Covenant School “manifesto” is a red herring: a distraction floated by Tennessee conservative lawmakers as an excuse for their failure to take any meaningful action on gun reform.

A red herring is either a “dried, smoked fish,” per the Oxford dictionary or “an unimportant fact, idea, event, etc. that takes people’s attention away from the important ones,” as this case is.

Last month, 64 members of the House Republican Caucus sent a letter to Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake: “As you know, Goveror Bill Lee has called upon the General Assembly to consider public safety legislation in response to these events in an extraordinary special session scheduled for Aug. 21,” said the letter. “In order for this special session to be successful, it is paramount we understand the behavior and motives of the Covenant School perpetrator.”

There’s an excellent argument to be made that documents obtained from shooter Audrey Hale should be open to the public. The Tennessee Public Records Act grants residents of Tennessee the right to inspect public records, but Metro Police is asserting its law enforcment privilege to keep the collected documents sealed.

Law enforcement privilege is typically used in cases in which investigation is ongoing. But police killed Hale, who appeared to be acting alone, at the site of the March 27 shooting.

Now, The Tennessean, Nashville’s Gannett-owned daily paper of record, has filed suit against Metro Nashville and the police department for the right of viewing the Hale documents. Among other points, the suit takes aim at the parents of Covenant students who are attempting to intervene and keep the documents sealed.

It can be correct that the public, including the legislature, has the legal right to view the Covenant papers — though the ethics of publicizing them is arguable. But timing of the release should be no factor in when lawmakers can discuss gun safety.

Hale was allegedly transgender, sometimes using the name “Audrey Hale” on social media and at others, “Aidan Hale.”

Could it be the question of Hale’s gender that has conservatives so interested in seeing the so-called “manifesto”? Law enforcement sources have described Hale’s diary as having detailed diagrams of Covenant and comments about methods of other mass shooters, but nothing indicates gender was a factor in the shooting.

But Tennessee’s GOP lawmakers have doubtless convinced themselves that gender is why Hale shot and killed six people. Would it not be easier if pro-gun conservatives could prove to themselves that guns are no problem in society, but that the threat instead lies with transgender people?

After all, the state legislature has had “hold my beer” moments over LGBTQ rights for seven or eight years now. Each year, Tennessee leads the nation in the number of laws unfriendly to LGBTQ people that are passed while continuing to loosen up gun laws.

Special animus of late has been directed towards trans people, with a disgraceful array of leading Tennessee Republicans — U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, state Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, and Sens. Ed Jackson, Dawn White and Janice Bowling — headlining an October anti-trans rally attended by white nationalist members of the Proud Boys.

It’s undeniable that America has a gun sickness. Seldom does a week pass — a week! — that a mass killing doesn’t disrupt life. And Tennessee has had its fair share. The Covenant shooting was the third shooting with mass casualties in five years.

Even as lawmakers claim they can take no action until parsing Hale’s suicide note and diary, the pitch of public concern has been turned up, and Tennesseeans are clamoring for serious gun policy reform. Stalling techniques may not work any longer, as the spring protests showed. Rep. Justin J. Pearson, D-Memphis, has already said he expects school walkouts and “civil disobedience” during the special session.

The thousands of mothers who held hands to form a human chain, starting at Vanderbilt University Medical Center — where Covenant shooting victims were taken — stretching to the Capitol? They seem serious. Voices for a Safer Tennessee, the group behind the event, has achieved nonprofit status and announced that members will be advocating in advance of the session for extreme orders of protection, safe gun storage laws and for closing loopholes in the background check process.

And to many parents, as well as schoolchildren, Hale’s motives aren’t important. Six people are dead and prioritizing that legislators read Hale’s materials before deliberating on gun laws won’t bring them back.

Even were the writings found to be full of vitriol towards Covenant School and Covenant Church about reaction to the shooter’s gender, as some have postulated, why should that slow the work of the General Assembly?

If Metro doesn’t release the documents before the Aug. 21 start of session, you will see Republican lawmakers flat refusing to do their job. And if I were betting woman, I’d bet they wouldn’t mind having this excuse.

What if the documents are opened and they don’t turn out to be very interesting? Supposed they are filled with trivia, an obsession with weapons, for example? Would that change how our lawmakers would do their jobs?

Call me cynical, but I’d wager good money that no matter how fast a court might rule that Metro must unseal the Hale documents and no matter what the writing within might contain, no meaningful gun policy reform will pass: lawmakers are too wed to the NRA’s party line and too afraid of primary challengers even farther out the right wing who could make incumbents look weak on guns.

Our lawmakers have proven unwilling to hear their constituents, despite ample proof Tennessans support new gun laws. No, they’d rather distract you by casting out possibly false information and speculation about how a deranged shooter could have been motivated by their gender — based on nothing.

That’s a red herring, folks — the second definition. And like the smoked fish of the first definition, it’s beginning to smell.