WELL, THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK. Conspiracy theories: a great American tradition.
Americans love to believe completely nutty things, just as long as they require the implicit premise that political enemies are corrupt and evil, and preferably pedophiles as well. This is not some horrid innovation inflicted on America by the Tangerine Tyrant. It’s a constant. In most cases, Americans don’t even believe the conspiracies they nominally endorse. Thinking that Hugo Chavez bribed the governor of Georgia or that Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster is a form of stylized political self-expression more than it’s a theory anyone would be their life on being true.
But NPR’s own reporting on Wednesday demonstrates another reason so many Americans like to believe conspiracy theories: Because they’ve grown used to nominal authorities being untrustworthy. NPR’s leading example of ‘misinformation’ that American’s have come to believe in 2020 is that ‘the majority of protests that occurred this summer were violent’.
Well, Cockburn wonders, how might they have come to believe that? Could have been that there was rioting and looting in Minneapolis, St Paul, Chicago, Washington, New York, Dallas, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Bakersfield, Boston, Columbus, Portland, Seattle, Des Moines, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Louisville, Kenosha, Phoenix, San Jose, Sacramento, and even Green Bay? Could it have been CNN attempting sleights of hand about ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ protests? Could it have been highly-paid New York Times reporters blatantly cheering on violence?
Nope, NPR is sweeping all that aside, and calling Americans conspiracy-obsessed dodderheads for not buying into the press’s preferred statistical distortions. Behind the belief that violent riots were violent, the next bit of ‘misinformation’ NPR singles out is believing the coronavirus came from a lab in China. Is that true? Probably not. But nobody actually knows where the virus is from, and China has actively suppressed investigation of the matter from the very beginning.
NPR isn’t fighting misinformation; it is labeling a party line as objective truth and dismissing everything outside as misinformation or a conspiracy theory. Cockburn has a daring prediction to make: the more the press resembles ideological propaganda, the more ordinary people will simply decide to believe whatever they want.
Of course, Americans have believed in various conspiracy theories since the nation’s founding in 1619 (to borrow from a recent big media conspiracy theory), I mean 1776. As the late Tom Wolfe told an interviewer once about the Kennedy assassination:
I’ll never forget working on the [New York] Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy’s death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there’s nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick’s. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president’s assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.
After indulging in every conspiracy theory they could imagine during the Trump era, the Victorian gentleman will be returning in about three weeks time, to form the palace guard of His Fraudulency, a fossilized man seeming to date from the Victorian era.