Serious pollution of the information stream

Following links on the internet can take one to out of the way places. I came across the website for Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank supporting progressive causes. They have an online magazine The Public Eye. I’ve now read one article. That article is a review of the book Spectres of Fascism, a series of essays edited by Samir Gandesha. Matthew Lyons wrote the review. Short version: a few of the essays are excellent, the rest seem to leave basic questions unanswered. One of the better essays is by Gandesha. It’s titled A Composite of King Kong and a Suburban Barber. Lyons discussed one point of Gandesha’s essay on how to make people more welcome of an authoritarian ruler. Stress the people’s sense of individual responsibility for their own success. At the same time depress the wages so that success is harder to achieve. Yes, there is a contradiction here. When the people show their guilt, frustration, and anger the ruler offers scapegoats. My summary of how to do this: Emphasize bootstraps. Depress wages. Offer scapegoats. All of those sound like GOP talking points from the last 20-40 years. David Neiwert of Daily Kos discussed the difference between conspiracy and conspiracy theory. He mentions it now because researchers have created an artificial intelligence tool to tell the difference. The tool could be used on social media. Even so, Neiwert explained the difference is already well known. He described it in his book Red Pill, Blue Pill and summarized it for this post. A few years ago there was Bridgegate. At the time Chris Christie was governor Of New Jersey. Members of his staff closed off highway lanes leading up to the George Washington Bridge into New York City, causing huge traffic backups. They did this as political payback against the mayor of the town right at the bridge. A conspiracy has these traits: * It is of narrow scope, to achieve only one or two things. * It is of a short duration of time. The longer it takes the more chance it goes awry. * It is a product of a tiny number of people. The more people involved the greater chance of exposure and the greater chance a person won’t do their part. Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory that went something like this – Hillary Clinton, it claimed, was running a massive child pornography ring from the basement of a pizza restaurant. A man, well armed, went to the restaurant to liberate the supposed kids. A conspiracy theory has these traits: * It is complex, trying to create an all-encompassing worldview. It tries to explain everything. * It usually focuses on a massive plot to enslave, murder, or oppress large numbers of people. * It exists for a long time, in some cases for hundreds of years. * It involves large numbers of people, usually from high positions in the government. * Its long term success is credited to dupes in the media. Neiwert explained in his Red Pill, Blue Pill book that conspiracy theories are a danger to democracy because

they represent serious pollution of the information stream. Democracies rely on robust debate, but that “marketplace of ideas” cannot function if the debate is founded on falsehoods, smears, and the wild speculations that all combine to take the place of established facts in any discourse with conspiracy theorists.

As I was writing all that I got to be thinking of the actual crimes behind the QAnon theory. I had written about this as part of summarizing a Gaslit Nation podcast. The theory is there is a pedophile crime ring supplying underage children to top government officials in several countries. The QAnon theory claims the nasty guy will liberate these children. The ring is real and was run by Jeffrey Epstein. The nasty guy wasn’t the liberator but a customer of the ring. The ring now serves as blackmail – do what I want or I’ll say you were a customer. It seems many in our political leadership are under this threat. So, it has existed for a long time, certainly more than a decade; it oppresses a large number of people; and it involves a large number of people from high positions in the government. Does it not fit the conspiracy theory mold because of actual crimes? Meteor Blades, as part of his Night Owl column for Kos, quoted Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams. She wrote that 1,500 attorneys call for sanctions against the nasty guy’s campaign legal team for all his lawsuits against the election results. He’s lost over 50 of them. The suits have been so lacking in evidence they are transparently filed in bad faith. That’s one strike against them. Another is all these suits are part of a campaign to undermine public confidence in the election and thus subvert democracy. A third is all these lawyers have ethical rules, and have taken an oath, to uphold the rule of law. Yes, sanctions are appropriate. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that the nasty guy called Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia to demand there be a special session of the Georgia Legislature to throw out the election and appoint electors for the nasty guy. Kemp turned him down. Sumner listed three amazing things about this call and others like it. * The pure openness and audacity of the nasty guy’s move to crush democracy. * Given that very few GOP senators have acknowledged the nasty guy’s loss it is amazing no GOP governor or legislature has followed that lead. * How much damage the nasty guy is doing in a short time to the Republican Party. He’s told GOP voters in Georgia their own GOP state government can’t be trusted. He’s annoyed half the infrastructure to support the runoff election. And more. Georgia Logothetis, in her pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post:

The Republican Party [voter] is being conditioned to lose faith in the fundamental act of any successful democracy: voting in a free and fair election.

The nasty guy held a rally in Georgia, supposedly to boost the prospects of the GOP candidates in the senate runoff election, but actually to pretend he won the election and to rail against a country that refuses to see his win. Aaron Rupar quoted him:

We're all victims. Everybody here. All these thousands of people here tonight. They're all victims. Every one of you.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

Here Trump is watering the seeds of a new myth of nationalist victimhood. Very dangerous. Others include the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” myth after the US Civil War and the “Stab-In-The-Back” legend about the Weimar Republic in Germany.

McElrath tweeted this next bit after that rally. She has talked about malignant narcissists (as in the nasty guy) and about the Discard phase of a relationship when the abuser rejects those who rejected him.

The most dangerous time in a relationship with a malignant narcissist is during and after Discard. Similarly and relatedly, people leaving abusive intimate relationships are more likely to be killed when they try to leave than at any other time. Similarly and relatedly, authoritarians are at their most dangerous to the people over whom they have power when they feel cornered.

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed that after the 9/11 attacks a bipartisan commission was created to figure out what had gone wrong and make policy recommendations so it didn’t happen again. Dartagnan then discussed an article in The Atlantic in which William Haseltine and John Allen of the Brookings Institution say America Needs a COVID-19 Reckoning. It does, agrees Dartagnan, but not the kind Haseltine and Allen suggest. The reason is they suggest a bipartisan commission. A bipartisan commission is great when the problem is structural failures of the government. It can recommend how to fix that structure. But a bipartisan commission won’t work when the problem is political. When the nasty guy’s choices to not protect us from the virus were political and the GOP’s choices to back him and not pass needed relief programs were also political, then it would also be a political choice to thwart a bipartisan commission. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, has a three minute video on why one should wear a mask while in public. Virologist Ian Mackay of Brisbane Australia created a diagram of pandemic defense, using slices of Swiss cheese to help his explanation. No single intervention is perfect, but several together do quite well.